Mr. Des Morrison:

I will answer Deputy Carthy's questions as best I can. The first point he made is that more funding is going into this area and he mentioned the Committee of Public Accounts, yet there is no reduction in TB. We have seen that is the case in recent years. While more money has been spent in some years, that depends on the number of reactors in any given year and the situation is always fluid. Any farmer knows that if a herd test goes wrong, unfortunately there are reactors. More money may be going in, including for farmers who are paid levies, but there are more hidden costs involved as well, and consequential loss for herd owners. The 4.5% of herd owners who have an outbreak on the farm put enormous effort and time into controlling TB on their farms. If personnel from the Department come out to a farm, the herd owner or keeper must give an enormous amount of time, including paperwork done in the office or at the table, to notify everyone. The Department will go through that with the herd owner. They also then have to look for the source of the infection - the wildlife or wherever the outbreak is coming from. A significant number of hours are required, which is a hidden cost to the restricted herd owner that gives rise to a consequential loss that is never mentioned or acknowledged by anybody.

The badger vaccination programme is going on in many areas and it must be welcomed, as must anything that will control the spread of TB. It is important to note that the badgers that are captured are all tested for TB to see if they are positive or negative. The positive ones are culled and the negative ones vaccinated and released. That approach must be stringently adhered to, as it is a very important issue in the control of TB. If we learned anything from Covid, it was how to reduce the rate of infection. How we reduced infection was to reduce contacts. It is not much different in wildlife. If we do not have a proper wildlife control programme for either deer or badgers, we will have more contact with animals. The contact can be from wildlife to cattle and cattle to wildlife. We must be able to control the contact and the only way to do so is to have a proper wildlife control programme, especially the removal of badgers that test positive for TB when they are captured.

The other point is vaccination for cattle. It has to be remembered and it ought to be borne in mind that we are an exporting nation that exports, give or take, 90% of our produce. Vaccinating our animals would put live exports in great jeopardy and they would stop going to some markets. For the reason of exports alone, it is a non-runner in this country. Live exports are an important element of the trade and they put real competition into the marketplace. We cannot do anything to jeopardise that.

Can we see the country being TB free? No farmer on this side of the table would be sitting here if we did not believe that but I have to put a few caveats on that. We have to find better ways to do this because if we do not do something different, unfortunately, people will be here again in seven years times talking about the same issue. We have to find different ways of controlling the infection and we must do so properly and scientifically. Science is one way that we can do this and it is a way we can prove that we are reducing it. Until we do that we will not be TB free. Our effort has to go into reducing the rate of infection and once we do that the infection will start falling and falling. It has to be properly funded and targeted to achieve a controlled rate of infection, regardless of where it is coming from or what kind of wildlife it is coming from. That is the key to being TB free. I will leave the other questions to my colleagues.