Seanad debates

Thursday, 20 October 2005

Animal Diseases: Statements.

 

12:00 pm

Photo of Brendan RyanBrendan Ryan (Labour)

I rarely say that I will not use the full time available to me. Even when I do so, I rarely keep my promise but on this occasion I may not need the full 15 minutes.

One wonders on occasion if anybody is listening. In his contribution the Minister of State dealt well with the incidence of the H5N1 virus as far as it represented a threat to the health of the bird population and, presumably, commercially. At the end of that part of his contribution, however, he said that the responsibility for preparing for and dealing with any human pandemic that might follow an eventuality rests with the Department of Health and Children and its agencies. Technically, that might be correct but the responsibility lies with the Government.

What many of us in this House wanted to hear was not just the recitation of the altogether correct and justifiable precautions to deal with minimising the risk of the introduction of avian influenza into Ireland, and we would all support the Government in that. It is not the risk of the introduction of avian influenza that is worrying a large section of the public. It is the frightening headlines quoting people who may or may not be experts. We are entitled to expect an assurance or a reassurance from our Government of the validity of some of the forecasts and the competence of the people making them.

Is it true, as some people say, that a possible mutation of this virus could produce a form of influenza that would spread from human to human, which the current virus has not been demonstrated to do? I am not an expert on epidemiology; it is an achievement to be able to pronounce the word but this appears to be the case. I had hoped to hear from the Minister of State, that in the nature of the way viruses develop and mutate it is far more likely than not that at some stage in the immediate future this current virus will mutate into a virus that will be virulent and capable of being transmitted from human to human.

I have learned to have a certain scepticism of experts. Like much of the population, I spent a large part of 1999 being inundated by expert opinions telling me that the world would grind to a halt at midnight in 2000. It turned out to be a wonderful scam by some people in the computer industry to persuade the entire world to renew their computer systems. It made an enormous amount of money for the computer industry, unnecessarily, it now emerges.

What the public needs to know about avian influenza are the real risks. People are extraordinarily able to deal with real threats. Anybody who has observed a community during war, for instance, will talk about the way ordinary people learn to live with a problem once they have come to realise there is one and their capacity to act in a patriotic fashion.

An extraordinary aspect of the outbreak of foot and mouth disease here was the level of patriotism shown by members of the public. My colleague in the Labour Party, Deputy Joe Costello, often talks about a group of old age pensioners in his constituency who traditionally spent a week in the country. It was the highlight of their social life every year. The year of the foot and mouth disease outbreak, however, they decided it would not be right to travel because of the slight risk that they would contribute to spreading the disease. That happened on that scale throughout the country without any external sanction.

What is disappointing about the way this issue is being approached in this House at least is that while what the Minister described is reasonable and commendable, he did not address — I am not aware if anybody has — whether it is possible, probable, likely or certain that this virus will mutate into something that will be more virulent in terms of the way it impacts on humans and will be transmissible among humans in the way common influenza viruses are transmissible. If that is the more likely outcome, and from my causal reading that appears to be the case, what are we doing about that likely outcome in terms of vaccine distribution?

I read in a British newspaper that a strain of influenza has now evolved which is resistant to the vaccine people are relying on. This is layman's stuff. I am scientifically numerate but I am not an epidemiologist or a microbiologist, nor am I a doctor. I have to rely on a reasonable degree of scientific literacy but if the members of the public are to handle this in the way they can handle crises, the one way to create real panic in a country is to give people the impression that they are not being given all the information. It is vital that the best information available to Government is made available to the public now, not in six months time when it is discovered that the Government was aware of certain possibilities but were not disclosed for reasons to do with wanting to avoid panic.

It is not good enough for the Minister — I do not blame him because it is a Government response — to say that the question of preparing for and dealing with any human pandemic that might follow any such possible mutation or genetic change rests with the Department of Health and Children. I do not dispute that but the Department of Health and Children should have given the Minister of State something to say about that. Expecting coherence from the Department of Health and Children is probably being excessively optimistic. That is not the way that Department does its business, regardless of the Minister or senior civil servant in charge. We need coherence but do not have it, which is disappointing.

What is the evaluation of the Government and Department of Health and Children of the likelihood of this disease spreading? What is their evaluation of what can be done, either to prevent it or in response? It must be said truthfully that in comparison with that risk, the unfortunate possible consequences for our bird population, commercial or wild, are trivial. In saying that I do not minimise the importance of wildlife, ecologically or in any other context.

With regard to foot and mouth disease, I am no great enthusiast for the Common Agricultural Policy. Its aspiration is to provide a stable food supply, but we have ended up with gluts and enormous waste. It is supposed to stabilise the living standards of people working in farming, but it is still failing to do that. It did not sustain large numbers of people in rural Ireland. I am very interested in this, since one can never get precise numbers. How many full-time farmers are there in the country in comparison with ten years ago? I speak not of those who have some income from farming, even if it is substantial. What is the number of full-time farmers with no other income from agri-tourism or any of a host of other things, such as a part-time teaching job? How many people make a decent living out of agriculture alone? On that index, the CAP has been of dubious benefit in doing what it is supposed to do. The resources could be used in a variety of other ways to achieve the same objectives without subjecting Irish consumers to excessively high food prices. However, that is only a marginal observation.

The outbreak of foot and mouth disease in a country thousands of miles away and the question of the EU's capacity to respond is a wonderfully apposite example of globalisation, both good and bad. The idea of global free trade was to generate economic growth in countries that had been impoverished and that remained so. There is no doubt that in some ways it has worked like that. However, whether the sort of slash-and-burn agriculture widespread in Brazil is what we want to encourage in the name of global free trade is a serious question.

I have previously raised the issue of the sugar industry and asked whether the sacrifice that would have to be made in this country in opening up our sugar markets would be made simply to make ostentatious Brazilian millionaires even richer or whether it should be linked to some attempt to ensure not only fairness in world trade but fairness in the countries participating in it. There is a long-standing argument regarding a global minimum wage and minimum labour standards, and the same is true of agriculture. There should be minimum standards in all countries from which agricultural products are exported.

I am very sceptical regarding our capacity to monitor matters. I have read the Minister of State's script, in which he states that the EU Food and Veterinary Office can do it. I have not been impressed by the EU's efficiency. It is perhaps the only supranational organisation that has found itself unable to spend its own overseas development aid budget. For several years, the ODA part of the EU's expenditure was unused because officials could not figure out an efficient way to use their own budget. There were reports in successive years of waste and inefficiency.

What has happened in Brazil is not a huge scare story. However, I note from the Minister of State's script that all non-EU beef is supposed to be labelled as such. There seems to be a considerable amount of prima facie evidence assembled by the IFA and other farming organisations that many retail and hospitality outlets are advertising what is termed "Irish beef" and telling people lies, since they are using imported stocks. That is fraud and a breach of EU law. I would like to hear just how vigilantly and through what mechanism our authorities and those of the EU are ensuring that the law is adhered to. If we cannot tell people that we guarantee that we are enforcing the law at home, how can we reassure them that we are doing so thousands of miles away in Brazil? How can we ensure that neither additives nor diseased meat are imported into this country if we cannot convince people that what they are buying is genuinely Irish?

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