Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 18 June 2015

Public Accounts Committee

2013 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 30 - Agriculture, Food and the Marine

10:00 am

Mr. Aidan O'Driscoll:

Where, as was followed in this case, we find something wrong and animals have to be slaughtered, it is at the expense of the farmer. That is the normal way of doing things.

It would have been an option for us to take it over ourselves, assuming we could have got a plant - we could certainly have located a slaughterman at the very minimum - and then undertaken the work in that way ourselves. Would that have been better? Let us assume the legal advice was correct. I cannot second-guess that. It was from our legal affairs division. Given that we would have had to pay significant compensation to the farmer, would that have been a better outcome?