Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I accept all of that, but is not the whole point we are discussing that you cannot check all consignments? If somebody were externally reviewing that, apart from the Department and its partners meeting all of their obligations, the fact is that there is a significant amount of product coming in that may potentially be contaminated and may not be picked up. An external risk assessment might therefore say that we need to find a different way of approaching that. It might be quarantining timber, putting it under a steaming process or hitting it with X-rays - whatever would kill an aphid or a beetle. What I am saying is that somebody from outside might decide to come at this process completely differently and say that we cannot risk an infestation of this type in the country because it would be a national disaster for our agricultural sector and, therefore, we will take exceptional measures not called for within the Department's regulatory planning and testing regimes at the moment. That is what a task force might implement. That is what I suggest the Department needs to think about. I am not a member of this committee but I will be writing to the Chair with that suggestion. It happens in other industries, but not in the public sector. In other industries where there are safety issues, external private sector industries operate differently from the way the public sector seems to have to do it. I do not accept for a minute that the Department has covered the base because it has met its requirements under its EU partnerships and all of that. That is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about doing something exceptional to protect this industry in Ireland. We might do something that nobody else is doing because it is effective. What is happening at the moment will be effective until there is an outbreak. If that happens, we will find out all of the flaws in it after the fact. As I said, Boeing aircraft is one of the largest companies in the world. It had a cast-iron case for assessing and certifying its aircraft, and look what happened? Accidents happen and failure happens. We are trying to cut that out as much as possible.