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

The Minister has repeated my worry that societies will act as agents. There should be no agent involved. The Minister should take the leap and have a central registration system. If, with the agreement of the applicant, the Minister wants to pass on the information to the breeding societies for breeding purposes, that is a much better way of doing it.

It is easy to get defensive when one is a Minister. At the beginning, when we started querying the issue, the shutters came down. Like all those involved with administrative systems, the people concerned did not want to recognise that the system was full of holes. I tabled a question within five days and the first reaction of the Department was to put up barriers and say that everything was all right, when it was all wrong. Instead of recognising the major flaws following complaints and promising to do something about it, the Department's replies tried to give the impression the system was fit for purpose. The Department must have known, given that it was in the factories, according to the report, that it was totally unfit for purpose. For that reason, getting the system to examine the system is a very slow way around the problem. The first thing to do is to recognise that the system has a problem. We are all sensitive to criticism and when one criticises the system the first reaction of those involved is always, by the nature of things, to defend it. It is in all of our natures and I am not criticising any particular person.

Part of the problem on the food and horsemeat side is that we do not know whether some of the horsemeat took a circuitous route around Europe and arrived back to food suppliers here. The Minister is saying it did not go directly to food suppliers, but he is not saying it did not travel across half of Europe and come back to our food supply. We know the horse side of this was flawed. When there is a question of whether checks and balances in the system are fit for purpose, it is much better and quicker and creates public confidence if one has the courage to get an outsider to investigate it, rather than asking the organisation with a problem to investigate itself. That is the fundamental lesson the Minister has not learned.

See this speech in context