17th January 2001
Dr. McFerret is right - it is very foolish to have Food tagged along with the Department of Agriculture (15/1/01). I have a suggestion for our Taoiseach - if he cannot split the department the least he can do is have a Cabinet reshuffle and put Ministers Liz O'Donnell and Mary Hanafin in charge there.
Peter Dargan, himself a vet and farmer as well as being Chairman of the Consumers Association, said he wished those in that Ministry were people that come from urban constituencies depending on the votes of housewives for their re-election. Liz and Mary are just the women - the voters of South County Dublin and Dunlaoire are not amused by the present BSE disaster.
I have little against any of the Ministers in the Department of Agriculture and Food but, really, how sensible is it to have three men who rely on the votes of farmers in charge there? I say I have little against them deliberately because I certainly think it was an appalling mistake by the Minister in charge of Food Safety, Ned O'Keeffe, to feed MBM fodder to his pigs on a farm where he also has a dairy herd. I am sure many doctors have been asked, as I have, if it is safe to drink milk and eat dairy products. It is hard to assure people that there has been a strict ban on the feeding of such meal to ruminants since 1996 when one has this example of foolish though not illegal behaviour. The inadvertent feeding of infected animal food to cows could too easily take place. One can only speculate what use our competitors on the international beef and pig meat markets have made of this story.
Years ago I remember reading in a medical journal a story of polluted animal food causing human disease. Bags of "meal" which, in fact, were pellets destined to be used to make carpets fire repellent were inadvertently mixed with animal meal somewhere in the northern United States of America. There were deaths from an unknown condition amongst people in Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and adjacent states which was eventually found to be due to drinking the milk from the cows which ate the adulterated fodder. It took quite a bit of medical and veterinary detective work to find the cause of the problem. Mistakes like this can occur only too easily.
The BSE disaster would not have the significance it has if it were not for the probable connection with new variant CJD yet it has never been debated in either Houses of the Oireachtas as a public health issue. We would all be sorry to see cows staggering around and even people's pussies falling under buses but it is the possible development of a fatal neurological condition due to eating infected beef which has made it such a problem all over Europe and probably further afield due to the export of meat and bone meal.
The Minister for Agriculture and Food (but 95% for Agriculture in reality) admitted on the Pat Kenny Show on January 17th that the present slaughter policy is to help the depressed beef trade and not for food safety reasons but from the phone calls to the programme there are many Irish taxpayers less than pleased about the use of their money to destroy perfectly edible food. Not to mind the other uses which could be made of this money!
Dr. Pat Wall of the Food Safety Authority and Pat O'Rourke of the Irish Creamery MSA both promote the slaughter of older cows first. This is not being done and these are really the only animals which might have BSE if the beef farmers have fed their cattle as the law has required since 1996 when the regulations were tightened up. If these cows were gone one could reassure people more easily about eating beef. All we need is to see on the television news a new cow staggering around and someone holding up a newspaper with that day's date the way kidnappers do to show their hostage is alive and that it is not an old picture, for people to lose total confidence again! Why is even the remotest possibility of a BSE animal getting into the food chain being allowed to continue?
The slipshod way the nervous tissue (SRM) material has been disposed of in some plants is bad, too. Personally, I didn't get too excited about whether dorsal root ganglia were removed or not but we know so little about the natural history of BSE and new variant CJD that it is hard to give emphatic answers to any queries. Agriculture Commissioner Filcher's comment that BSE could be spread in ground water was extraordinary in view of the fact that he did not produce evidence for the statement.
There is still bovine tuberculosis in this Republic (but not in Northern Ireland) although we have had a scheme to eradicate it in progress for nearly forty years at great cost. That and the presence of brucellosis in the national herd does little to make the consumer feel we will do any better with the eradication of BSE.
There need be no demotion of the Ministers. The gentlemen in Agriculture and Food can try their hands at International Aid and Children in place of Liz O'Donnell and Mary Hanafin.
Senator Mary Henry, MD
