Pádraig O'Sullivan (Cork North-Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming to the House to discuss this issue. On the northside of the Cork city in my constituency we have had a spate of animal welfare issues in recent weeks, many of which have made national headlines. I also raised this issue here last year as a Topical Issue. Last year, we gave over €6 million in funding to charities to police this for us. Despite that investment, on the ground in Cork city we are seeing more and more of these incidents of animals being mistreated and in certain cases ending up dead or abandoned in sites or on the side of the road.

It is really worrying because we are investing more money than we have ever given to these charities but the figures speak for themselves. I will take the Minister of State through a few responses I received to parliamentary questions in last few weeks. Between 2020 and now, only two people have been fined for animal mistreatment, with fines of €5,000 or less. There is a second fine open to the authorities, of up to €250,000, but nobody has been fined to that amount in the last five years. A number of people have been imprisoned for up to three years over various years but we are talking single digits. The same is true for the number of people disqualified from owning animals but there was a spike last year and 27 people are now disqualified from owning animals, not just horses, nationwide. That would indicate to me that the trend definitely is moving in the direction whereby more of these incidents are happening and that mistreatment of animals is becoming more common.

The difficulty is that we rely heavily on animal charities in particular. I must give a shout out to My Lovely Horse Rescue Cork, which does Trojan work. It is expensive to do the job it does. We are often talking thousands of euro to save a horse and nurse it back, care for it or whatever the case may be, and in a worst case scenario often disposing of the carcase or, unfortunately, having to euthanise a horse. Those things are very expensive and taxing on charities. The difficulty I have is that we actually have loads of legislation in this space. An Garda Síochána has powers, the local authorities have powers and the Department of agriculture has powers but all I see in every case that we come across is a failure of all those authorities to actually co-ordinate and to give a co-ordinated response. In the most recent case we had in Glanmire all the parties I have just mentioned were notified that an animal had been abandoned on a private site but over the few days of finger-pointing about whose responsibility it was the animal, unfortunately, died. It was up to the private landowner in that case to dispose of the carcase. The landowner was uncontactable for a while and did not realise the horse was even on his site but it still fell upon him to dispose of the carcase and bear the expense. In all this I wonder where the owner of the horse was. It is difficult for the authorities to identify who the owners are because horses are not chipped. There is a requirement that horses would be microchipped but it is just being blatantly ignored.

I lodged a Private Member's Bill yesterday and I ask that the Dáil give it consideration. Maybe the Minister of State could bring this back to the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy James Browne, and the Minister for agriculture, Deputy Martin Heydon. I ask that a designated official be appointed in each local authority so we do not have a situation where one must go to the Garda, the local authorities or a Department of agriculture official. If somebody is tasked with the job of inspecting licences and ensuring the animals are microchipped then I believe we can get around the kind of mess we have at the moment. I thank the Minister of State.

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