Mr. Tomás Bourke:

The only point I would make on that to the Deputy is that if he is fencing them out from his land, he is probably fencing them into mine. We need to deal with the national population and get them pushed back, as was identified, into their own national environment because at the moment it is us maintaining the national deer population. The hills have been allowed to become overgrown. They are not fools when they get used to the better food and forage. They are down now along the coast in Wicklow. This is a national issue that must be dealt with in a co-ordinated national plan to reduce the numbers.

The Deputy asked the question about the lesions and the length of time. Deputy Danny Healy-Rae had the same point. Unfortunately, if the status of the lesion cannot be identified under histology done within a few days of the sample going into the lab, which is effectively looking at it under the microscope to determine definitively if it is TB or not, then it must go on to culture. The approval of the culture test requires you to get a negative a minimum timeframe of six weeks in the platelet to see does the TB organism grow or not. If it grows you get the positive result a bit earlier, unfortunately. There is work being done on other tests that are quicker. The Department is starting to run some tests to get early recognition. What they can tell you is that you will perhaps be restricted a bit sooner. The difficulty here is, from the point of view of EU animal health law, there are criteria set out and tests identified that you must pass in order to have your trade status established. It is ultimately down to the trade status and that is the frustrating thing. The bigger issue with the lesions is we have a situation in this country - probably forced on us because of the requirements of EU regulations - that every TB outbreak is the same, whether you identify 30 TB reactors in your skin test or a factory lesion that confirms a positive result, you are restricted for a minimum of 120 days.

Yet we know that in this country 85% of herds with a positive factory lesion do not have any more TB reactors. It is not a good indicator of a TB problem on a farm. We have continually pushed the Department to treat those farms differently. If we are putting in tighter controls where there is a lot of TB, we must counterbalance that. We accept that EU approval is required for that but the facts, figures and science are there. We can offset the impact of many of these restrictions if we can move that forward.