Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)

These beautiful and innocent badgers are being made a scapegoat for industrial farming practices where dairy herd sizes have ballooned. With bigger herds and more intensive farming comes more disease. The Department of agriculture admits that killing badgers is not sustainable in the long term due to its ultimate impact on badger ecology. It knows it does not work to control bovine tuberculosis. Why on earth did it then slaughter more than 7,000 badgers last year, which was the highest number in a decade? Will the Minister of State commit today to end the irrational, State-sanctioned cruelty and biodiversity destruction?

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