Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)
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We have been dealing with this for a long time. This is my second term on the agriculture committee. If I had just happened to drop in here today and this was all new to me, I would find it very confusing that one minute we are mentioning local authorities, which house local government, and the next we are referring to the Departments of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and Rural and Community Development. When it comes to the broad spectrum of dog control, licensing and microchipping, can this circle be squared in any way? If someone is not up to speed with this, it is confusing. If someone has an issue, especially from a livestock worrying perspective, even if the dog is captured and it is microchipped, that person has to go round the houses to track down who might own it or who might be responsible, or where to go next. That is if the dog is microchipped or licensed. The majority of dogs out there may not be and probably are not.

How do we get the ordinary man or woman on the street, not to mention those in breeding establishments or large-scale outfits, to deal with this? They will have a dog and there is no onus on them to do it, but they know it should be done. God be with the days when I was a young lad in rural Ireland and a garda would call in to look for a dog licence. That day is long since gone. We will find, 99 times out of 100, that when there is a problem, an issue or an offence such as livestock worrying, it will be the dog that is not microchipped or that is untraceable that will be the offending dog. That is the root of all evil in this debate, as far as I am concerned.

My next question is one I asked a previous witness. It concerns licensing and microchipping for those who are compliant and who go to do it with the best will in the world, but who then down the line may not be responsible or good owners.

The way I put this the last time was that it was like the theory test for a driver's licence. Do the witnesses think there should be a kind of simple, basic, perhaps ten-point, questionnaire for people to fill out as to what they think it would be like, what they would need to do, or the tasks they would need to perform to be what one would consider a responsible dog owner? Do the witnesses think it should be as simple as registering a dog, irrespective of who the person is, what the dog is or how vast or otherwise the person's knowledge of being a dog or other pet owner is?