Mr. Michael Sheahan:

I do not know anything about the three ladies the Deputy is talking about so I am at a loss but I can answer the question about the number of complaints and I think I answered it earlier. Since 2018, we had five complaints about the farm next door to the slaughter plant. We had no complaints about the shed where the horror story was happening but we had five complaints about horses in a field on the farm beside the slaughter plant. We did the same with those five complaints as we do with any complaint that comes in to our animal welfare helpline or through email. We sent a veterinary inspector out from the office, which was the Naas office in this case, and in each case they went out and looked at the situation and they did not find something that merited either the serving of a notice or prosecution.

We get a thousand and something complaints and we investigate every single one. The vast majority of the complaints we get are not such that they merit prosecution or follow-up. It can be a lame sheep in a field or cattle on a bare paddock around a circular feeder. It could be something that might cause a member of the public concern but it would not actually reach the bar for constituting a breach of animal welfare legislation. It is not that is not taken seriously but it is only in a small number of cases where we find something when we go out that is actually a significant welfare problem that needs action, prosecution or serving a notice. The animal welfare helpline, which has been in place for about five years, is a fantastic system and we encourage people to use it. It does alert us to problems and without it there would be a certain number of things that we would not have known about over the years. For better or for worse, we did not have any alert that alerted us what was going on in this horror situation beside the plant.