Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

As I pointed out to the Minister previously, the reason the FSAI answers to the Minister for Health is to ensure that agencies not connected with the Department investigate food safety issues. That is the reason it does not answer to the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine. It is a good, valid reason and one the Government agrees with, which is why it retained that structure.

Time and again I have asked questions that relate to the behaviour, control and supervision of the Department. The Minister said this started with one factory. When this came into the public domain, people were telling me immediately that this was a much wider issue and that an issue had arisen regarding control of the slaughter of horses in this country and what was happening to the horsemeat. I did not know whether it was true, but I knew it should have been investigated. We found out last weekend that there is a huge scandal regarding the processing of horsemeat within this State. Control of that rests with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, but the Minister is telling me the Department is independently investigating its own control and supervision of meat imports, the slaughter of horses and the packaging and the export of the product.

We need somebody who is independent of the agencies that are meant to be policing this area - that is, the FSAI and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine - and of the system in general to investigate all of this and examine the controls and supervision that existed and whether there was a response to complaints. The Minister did not answer the question about the number of complaints submitted about the slaughter of horses, when they were received, what he did about it, and all the other relevant details. Despite his attempt to say it is not relevant to the issue, last weekend this became central to it.

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