Mr. Michael Sheahan:

On cattle rustling, the numbers of cattle stolen are relatively small in the grand scheme of things. We are not aware of that being a particular risk factor in any outbreaks.

As regards the cause of the problems in County Monaghan, for a number of years the county was at the national average in terms of the level of disease and then it crept up and after that there was a dramatic increase over a couple of years. We have not attributed it to one particular factor but TB is like that; it is not a disease where there is just one factor such as badgers, deer, quality of testing or whatever else. A number of factors are usually involved. Monaghan has a few issues. The farms there tend to be fragmented. Northern Ireland may also be a factor. There was an embargo for a number of years on recruitment of staff so it is possible that in some of our offices around the country we had fewer staff than we might have liked to deal with issues. We cannot identify one single factor and say that is what caused the graph to go up, no more than with the outbreak in Kerry at the beginning of last year. We will probably never know. All it might take to cause a problem in an area is for one infected animal to be bought in that has passed the test and is not showing signs of the disease and if it goes into a herd and is stressed in some way, it becomes a super shedder and sheds significant volumes of infected bacteria. Accordingly, a large number of cattle in a herd could be infected and they could be sold to neighbouring herds before they are tested.

It is as simple as that. A couple of heavily infected animals that have not been detected in the test can do a lot of damage before we can get on top of the problem. Our experience in Kerry has shown that, even though we were unable to put our finger on the exact cause of the problem, once an intensified programme was put in place, the disease was clamped down on and the graph went down very quickly. We expect that to happen in Monaghan, and I will be very surprised if, this time next year, the graph has not come down very significantly.