Mr. Michael Sheahan:

I agree with a lot of what the Chair said on reputational damage and all that kind of thing. That goes without saying. What I said in 2021 I said on the basis that I had been in the plant. It is a small plant killing relatively small numbers of horses. What I saw with my own eyes in the plant was an operation with horses in relatively good condition coming in, going into the lairs we supervise. To clarify, the place shown in the footage is not the lairage of the plant. It is a separate shed beside it. I know people will say that is splitting hairs but there is an actual lairage within the plant, the same way there is in every other beef slaughter plant or sheep slaughter plant, which the horses come into on the day of slaughter, that we do supervise, scan the horses and so on. If I had not seen the footage that we saw last week I would not have believed what was happening in the shed next door was happening. Like most members of the committee, I am from a farm. I have been working with animals all my life. I have seen a lot of bad welfare things. A lot of bad welfare stuff crosses my desk as part of my job because with 130,000 farms out there things do go wrong but the welfare cases, even the very bad ones we see, are usually before of unfortunate circumstances where there is someone with mental health problems or addiction problems, say, and animals go for weeks without food or water and you end up with some catastrophes. However, this was different. I have never in my life seen what we saw on the programme, with the gratuitous violence that was being used on those horses. I have never seen it on horses but I have spent my whole life in and out of marts, factories and assembly centres and so on and I have literally never seen it. I have spoken to a lot of people since the programme and I have not met anyone who has seen that kind of behaviour. If it was not for the hidden cameras, I simply would not have believed it was possible that somebody would do that. Maybe I am naïve but I have been around animals, farmers and horse owners and I simply could not believe that somebody would do that. The programme was absolutely shocking. It was an eyeopener.

The Chair asked a few questions. He said that if there was a second microchip, surely that would ring alarm bells. It does. Since about 2016, if there are two microchips in the horse then the carcase goes in the skip. The investigation is still at an early stage but I will outline our understanding of what was happing in the programme where we saw a microchip being inserted into a horse. Every time something new crops up, we try to close that loophole. We had heard rumours that it was possible to order a microchip from say, China, for the sake of argument, to match an existing passport. We had never actually come across such a microchip but, from the programme, that is our only explanation. We saw the footage of a horse having a microchip put into it. Either that horse did not have a microchip or else they have some mechanism of killing that microchip. More than likely, it did not have a microchip, so it had a clean passport. They ordered the microchip to match the clean passport and they put that into the horse and this horse was already recorded on the database. It would appear this is how they beat the system but the investigation is at an early stage. We had some discussion at our meeting with the other countries this morning and that seems to be the consensus on the most likely explanation. That is a new development, that you can order a microchip and ask for a specific number and get a microchip delivered with that specific number to match the existing passport. As my colleague from the HSI said, it has become difficult to damper with the passport because of the holograms and all sorts of things. It is not easy to tamper with the passport. This seems to be the next trick that people have come up with, where they are ordering a microchip from wherever you can get it from. I do not know where they get the microchips but there is obviously some nefarious organisation that you can order them from. The investigation is at an early stage but that is where it looks like it is leading. We will be getting the footage from RTÉ. We do not know if this is a one-off thing or how many horses were involved. I do not know how long their hidden cameras were there. I presume they were there for some months. When we see the footage we will have some idea of how widespread the practice was but we do not know at this stage.