William Aird (Laois, Fine Gael)
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We are talking about a very small cohort of people. The majority of people look after their dogs well. There are an awful lot of dogs. None of us knows what happens, but some say we come back as animals. I often say to myself if I came back, there are certain people that I would love to be minded by as a dog. There is care and attention taken, but it is a problem when it is not done. We are in limbo at the moment because responsibility for this area has only been handed over to the Department of agriculture. Other members and the witnesses may know about this, but I do not know if the dog wardens, dog pounds and all of that are going to be shifted over to the Department of agriculture. We are going to have a huge problem if that happens because we will have officials from Department of agriculture liaising with the dog warden who is under the offices of Laois County Council. Who will run the pound? We may have a lot of work to do yet to convince the Minister. There is one way this is going to work, and that is to have it all under one umbrella. We will then have huge success.

We can ask the witnesses to come back to the committee again when we have more work done on this. Things are going wrong in two ways at the moment. The first is when a person lets their dog off the lead and the dog sees sheep or cattle and takes off. You would want to have a very good dog. There are people here today with hunting dogs that are well trained. My father had these dogs. If you call a dog that has travelled in the car and has run off, there is not a hope in hell that it will come back to you. That is me being straight. That is what I have seen anyway.

The second issue is that many of the sheep attacks are taking place at night, after dark. I am a farmer. From that point of the view, farmers get up in the morning or someone rings to say there is a problem. All of the damage is done and the dog is gone. That is why all this talk about dog wardens is no good if the damage is done and the dogs are gone. There is no point ringing the council in the morning to say I want the dog warden to come out and look at dead sheep everywhere. It is no good. That is not working. We have to move on from that. The witnesses may have suggestions about what we can do when we put all of these points together.