Ms Nanci Creedon:

From speaking to a family member of one of the fatalities, I am aware that the dog had already been flagged in a significant way. It had been reported to the dog warden. I may be thinking of another case. There was a case in Wexford where a little boy was very badly mauled by a dog. That dog had been flagged to dog wardens and nothing was done about it. In the case of the family I spoke to, the dog had already killed a pony and another family dog. Perhaps the neighbours and people who knew how dangerous these dogs were did not know the proper place to report it. I have spoken to many dog wardens. They have zero training in how to assess these dogs or in any element of working with dogs professionally. I have spoken to postmen who have no training in bite prevention and similarly to An Garda Síochána, who do not know what to do or how we even start to investigate these cases. I do not know much about the second case. In the third case, of the little baby, we know the dog was initially used for hunting. Again, people knew that this dog was aggressive. The plan was that the dog was always kept outside when the baby was around. The dog managed to get in and kill the baby. If we had proper data, it would be interesting. Maybe if we had proper data then we would see a correlation. There might be a common medical issue with the dogs. We do not know. You can only speculate without the data.