Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)
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I am conscious of time. The bottom line is that the system is not working, and it can be tampered with. If I bought a 13-year-old horse but found out three months later that the horse is actually 22 years old, I would question a system in which that could happen. The system can be tampered with and it is not working. If it is not working, it needs to be fixed. Half of my time is now gone, and I am still on the subject of Horse Sport Ireland, so I need to move on. Hopefully I can come back if there is a second round.

With regard to the Department and Mr. Sheahan, I do not know where to start. I am not a vet or a mortician, but I am a farmer. I have been in abattoirs where cattle and beef carcases were rejected for very minor injuries that may have happened during loading and unloading. As I said, I am not a vet or a mortician, but what happened to those horses, as was seen on screen, would have been very evident on the carcase. I do not know how that did not happen.

I want to provide a quote from the court case in Limerick. We have been warned to be careful here, but this is in the public domain. One of Mr. Sheahan’s colleagues is quoted in the court case in Limerick as saying that the “slaughterhouse documents on the food chain status of the horses were created by Shannonside Foods Ltd. retrospectively after the kill.” I want that to be explained to me. If the paperwork that goes with carcases, horses, microchips and passports are all being done retrospectively, then there is no inspection process here at all. Horses could be killed on a Tuesday, a Monday or a Friday, and they are the carcases that the paperwork is matching up with. How can inspectors or vets oversee this situation? Their own colleague is saying in the court case that the paperwork was done retrospectively. There is therefore absolutely no inspection regime being done here at all. I am not saying this did happen, but there is nothing to say that another batch of horses were not killed the next day and that they are the carcases that matched the paperwork. There is no one checking the paperwork. In a situation where there are cattle - and I have been in abattoirs - there is a stamp on the carcase, there is a year tag, and everything is correlated before the vet or inspector leaves. No paperwork is done retrospectively. Can the Department explain to me how that is being allowed to happen? Can it confirm or deny the reservations and worries I have about the consequences of what could be going on if that was a system that was being allowed to operate?