Dan Neville (Limerick West, Fine Gael)
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Question 303: To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if she will put in place a system that can react properly and carry out immediate post-mortems within hours and not weeks and months, as is the practice, on animals who are suspected of being affected by fall out from industrial plants. [24148/07]

Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)
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A post-mortem diagnostic service, provided by my Department's Laboratory Service, has the capacity to respond rapidly to urgent disease outbreaks involving animal deaths. This involves a comprehensive pathology-based diagnostic service and is available throughout the year to herd and flockowners, in consultation with their veterinary practitioners. In all cases of unexpected on-farm death, immediate arrangements should be made by the herd or flockowner to have the carcase removed to the nearest Regional Veterinary Laboratory for post-mortem examination.

While in many cases post-mortems are undertaken on animals that die on-farm, post-mortems are also carried out in circumstances such as those referred to by the Deputy. Such latter cases generally involve the selection for slaughter of often healthy animals and the transfer of their carcases to one of the Department's laboratories. Once arrangements have been made, through the farmer's private veterinary practitioner, to get the carcase to the laboratory, post-mortems are conducted without delay and there is no question of such post-mortems taking any longer than is absolutely necessary though, depending on the nature of the tests that it may be necessary to run, it may be some time before post-mortem results can be confirmed.