Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

No. That would have been informed into the SIU. Under the system we now have in place, with the steering committee and the investigations division, a case would come into the steering committee, unless it was very urgent. Some things might need immediate action. For example, sometimes the Garda might approach us, in which case we need to react on the spot and quite quickly. The head of division would do that and subsequently refer the case to the steering committee.

One of the important changes we have introduced is that the steering committee takes on two core functions. One is to decide what should be investigated by the investigations division, as opposed to other line divisions of the Department. I will come back to this in a moment. The second function is to make a decision about when something should go to prosecution. In the case of a question of whether something should be done by a line division of the Department, investigations are also conducted by our local veterinary structures. This happens all the time. One particular case has received a good deal of publicity. It is relatively recent and is, therefore, in my mind. However, it has nothing to do with the SIU or investigations division. It was conducted by our district veterinary office staff and regional veterinary office staff. They can conduct investigations as well.

The reason the investigations division was set up originally related to angel dust. One of key motivating factors was the recognition that our staff did not generally have the kind of skills needed to ensure, for example, a good chain of evidence and the type of things that gardaí are meticulous about and have experience of. An officer might take a sample. If the case is going to end up in court, not alone does he have to take the sample in the right way and test it in the right way and so on but there must be a meticulous chain of evidence. He must know where the sample was at every moment and so on. He would also need to know clearly what his powers of search are and so on. In the particular circumstances around the angel dust scare, the view was that it would be useful to establish a division that had particular technical expertise in the veterinary area as well as expertise in gathering evidence and working with the Garda.

A number of the cases the committee heard about involved the illegal movement of animals. If one hears of somebody moving animals in a way that is not in accordance with the rules I can understand that to the layman in particular it may not sound that serious, but our animal identification and movement system is the heart and soul of our controls of animal health. Illegal animal movements were at the heart of some of the most costly major outbreaks of disease this country has seen. Animal identification and movement controls are absolutely central to all of this. Some of the cases are connected with a real concern that existed at one point about a good deal of breaching of that going on, so much so that my predecessor's predecessor took the unusual step of writing to the Chief State Solicitor's office, CSSO, identifying this as a significant concern and stating we would need to take strong action in the area to protect our animal identification and movement systems. Some of the cases the committee has heard of directly related to this era. It is some time ago now, and there has been quite a bit of water under the bridge since then.