Robert O'Donoghue (Dublin Fingal West, Labour)
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199. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the number of badgers that have been culled to date in 2025; the number that have been vaccinated for bovine TB (bTB); of those culled, the number that tested positive for bTB; if he will provide similar figures for 2024; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [36433/25]

Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael)
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Population control of badgers is a key component of the wildlife programme in the bovine TB programme in areas of high disease incidence and where the source of a TB outbreak is attributed to badgers. My Department's wildlife programme uses both vaccination and culling of badgers where appropriate. I can confirm that the number of badgers culled and vaccinated to date in 2025 is 4424 and 1795 respectively. In comparison the total figures for 2024 were 7319 culled and 3830 vaccinated.

Carrying out a full post mortem on a single badger is a very costly exercise. Therefore, only a subset of the badgers removed are sent for a full post mortem. The badgers removed are generally taken from high incidence areas for M.Bovis. As a result we are biasing the post mortem results in favour of finding positive M.Bovis samples in badgers. So caution should be exercised when interpreting the results.

In 2024 we tested 1946 badgers, and 545 of those were positive for M.Bovis. In 2025 we have received samples from 1704 badgers. However, to date we only have results for 662 badgers. The reason for this is that M.Bovis is a very slow growing bacteria, and it takes considerable time to culture the bacteria in a laboratory environment. Of the 662 samples 212 of those have tested positive.

I will continue to ensure that the wildlife programme throughout the country is supported into the future. However it would be remiss of me to focus solely on one aspect of disease control. The wildlife programme must also run alongside good biosecurity controls, as well reducing the impact of known high risk bovine animals and residual infection.