The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) will meet with European Commission officials next week to discuss the issue of traceability in horses.
Michael Sheahan, deputy chief veterinary officer with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM), told the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee that the meeting is expected to take place on Wednesday (June 28).
It comes in the wake of a recent RTÉ Investigates programme which exposed evidence of systemic flaws in the traceability of horses and how this was threatening the human food chain across Europe.
Traceability
Sheahan told the committee that he now has “less confidence” in the equine passport system since the programme was aired.
He said that the equine passport system is “under constant review” and has been significantly improved in the past decade which has made producing a fraudulent passport more difficult.
He added that if there is a weakness in the system it is that central databases for horse identification in different countries “don’t talk to each other”, which can create “a loophole”.
“We’ve contacted the European Commission, this is going to take an EU approach,” he said.
Sheahan said that the meeting will bring member states together to see what needs to be done to “close that loophole”.
He said that footage on the RTÉ programme appearing to show a microchip being inserted into a horse came as a “surprise” to the department.
He said that just “sticking a microchip in a horse” would not allow somebody to “beat the system” as it would need to correspond with a passport and be registered on the central database.
“We’re not sure yet how this individual horse beat the system. We have some theories,” he said.
Operations at Ireland’s only horse abattoir, Shannonside Foods were suspended by department following the recent RTÉ Investigates programme.
Sheahan told the committee that the suspension related to traceability issues and not animal welfare.
As a result of the suspension of operations at the plant there is no other facility to slaughter horses in Ireland
“I’m not certain that the department is going to be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat and come up with a solution in the short term to that,” Sheahan said.
Cruelty
The department veterinary officer also said that the footage of cruelty to horses in the RTÉ programme was “horrific” and “one of the most sickening things” he had ever seen.
He noted that the incidents depicted on the programme did not happen in the slaughter plant itself, where standards were “very good”, but in a nearby shed.
Members of the committee were highly critical that department officials had not inspected the shed when animals would have been kept there.
“Looking back at every indicator that we might have looked at, nothing was raising significant red flags to us, particularly the fact that the animals coming into the slaughter plant were in good condition,” he said.
Sheahan was robustly questioned by TDs over the department’s handling of complaints made against the farm adjoining the abattoir in Straffan, Co Kildare.
The committee heard that five animal welfare complaints relating to the farm adjoining the abattoir had been made to the department since 2018.
Fianna Fáil TD James O’Connor noted that five complaints about a single facility “was “highly irregular” and “should raise alarm bells”.
Sheahan said that none of the complaints related to “someone beating horses horrifically”, but were about thin or lame animals.
None of the complaints were upheld and the department investigations “did not find something that merited prosecution or even the serving of a notice”.
Michael Sheahan said that the department has done “a lot of soul searching” following the broadcast of the programme.
“The question has been asked by many people, should we have known what was happening in that shed next door. Could we have known? Were there red flags raised?,” he said.
Sheahan said the department receives around 1,000 animal welfare complaints each year, all of which are investigated but noted that “we can’t be in 130,000 premises”.
He declined to comment on whether horses were moved from lands at the facility without authorisation from the department in recent days.