John Ellis (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail)
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Question 244: To ask the Minister for Agriculture and Food the funding allocated by her Department for co-operation on animal health with Northern Ireland. [16550/05]

Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)
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There is no specific allocation within my Department's budget for co-operation on animal health with Northern Ireland. Activities associated with North-South co-operation relate to the general animal health and welfare, disease control or animal identification policies of the Department and are, therefore, absorbed into the overall budgets for these activities. For example, the two Administrations worked successfully in a co-ordinated manner to address the foot and mouth disease crisis and have since developed co-ordinated contingency arrangements in the event of future outbreaks of FMD. The cost of development of these co-ordinated arrangements has been absorbed in the overall cost of revision of the FMD contingency plan. Similarly, with regard to BSE, testing and results data on BSE surveillance are exchanged as a matter of routine as are the results of BSE reported passive cases. However the associated costs are not identified specifically in the budget for control of BSE.

The programme of work on co-operation and development of a common animal health strategy for the island has been taken forward by a series of working groups at official level, which have met at regular intervals over the past three years. The main achievements to date are the development of a co-ordinated and complementary approach towards import policies and portal controls at points of entry to the island and the convergence of policies on tuberculosis and brucellosis, animal identification and scrapie.

In addition, there has been a significant deepening and strengthening of co-operation, information exchange and ongoing co-ordination between the two Administrations on a variety of issues such as FMD, BSE and cross-Border fraud while the Farm Animal Welfare Advisory Council includes representation from DARD. On cross-Border fraud, the two Administrations have worked together successfully in a number of joint enforcement actions against alleged offenders and ongoing exchanges of expertise and information are taking place.