Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Deputy O'Sullivan's Bill. The Deputy is not asking too much. What it amounts to is Deputy O'Sullivan thinks it is wrong that we tolerate cruelty to animals. The truth is that the vast majority of Irish people do not agree with any kind of cruelty to animals but we are probably not doing enough to address it where it does happen.

The Animal Health and Welfare Act 2013, which came into force in 2014, marked a significant step forward in animal welfare in Ireland. The then Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy Coveney, was certainly praised for his efforts, his openness to amendment, and general patience. A lot of work went into it. At the time, the Minister was criticised for the failure to deal with animal cruelty around hare coursing, digging out foxes, the use of traps, badger culling and fur farms, which Deputy O'Sullivan has already highlighted.

The legislation empowered authorised officers to enter property, examine animals, and even to seize animals or other evidence when appropriate. It enabled authorised officers to deal with issues far more effectively than previously. However, significant problems still exist with the enforcement of the legislation. As Deputy O'Sullivan stated at the time, the proof of the pudding will be in the implementation of codes of practice and the resources provided. We need to see enforcement of the animal welfare laws. If necessary, if this is what it takes, there will have to be more severe punishment from the courts for those convicted of cruelty to animals.

Lack of enforcement is a problem. The ISPCA argued that penalties imposed have not been particularly high and do not serve as a deterrent, and that generally speaking, penalties imposed have been at the lower end of the scale. Enforcement of many aspects of the legislation is dependant on ISPCA inspectors. They have a team of eight uniformed inspectors, who currently cover 17 counties - half of the country is not covered. In 2016, following a submission to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the committee recommended that given the ISPCA's service agreement with the Minister, the society should be given more funding to allow recruitment of enough inspectors to cover the whole of the country. This has not yet to happen.

Similarly, the National Parks and Wildlife Service rangers go to hare coursing events and report on them, but as Deputy O'Sullivan pointed out, there is no monitoring of coursing trials which are organised prior to official hare coursing events to test the performance of the greyhounds and there are live hares used at these events. Animal welfare sanctuary volunteers and managers repeatedly state the legislation has simply not been acted upon. As to the Dog Breeding Establishments Act 2010, the ISPCA has stated that there is a lack of enforcement, guidelines are not being met and there is widespread non-compliance. Animal shelters throughout the country are overworked and underfunded, and are exasperated with the Government's failure to deal with mandatory microchipping.

Deputy O'Sullivan also referred to greyhounds, an issue we have raised here over recent years, especially on the abuse of drugs. Sadly, it is the bigger players that are involved in it. There have been some improvements made but a lot more work still has to be done for us to clean up the sector.

I do not have a lot of time. I will touch on a protest last week against the export of live cattle. I managed a bit of notoriety among the farming sector for even attending it.

Most people actually acknowledge that the travel time on the ships is too long and that it is not natural. We are sending cattle outside of the EU where EU rules, in terms how the cattle are dealt with or killed, do not apply. Is the Government doing anything about this? Surely, even from an economic point of view, we should be processing more animals at home and should stop the export of live cattle. That said, I do understand part of the problem. I know that a lot of the cattle that go abroad come from the dairy herd. Dairy farmers are using Holstein bulls to try to produce heifers for dairy and they end up with a whole lot of bulls that are not attractive to the meat industry here. Has consideration been given, as an alternative, to targeting cows that will produce Holstein heifers for milk through artificial insemination and using the likes of Red Aberdeen Angus bulls with the rest of the herd so that we would actually have a good beef product at the other side? Obviously, there would be a little bit of work involved in that but it is something the Government should consider.

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