The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine has hit back at complaints over “bureaucracy” in dealing with live exports and has paid tribute to the front-line staff involved in facilitating exports during the current Covid-19 situation.
In a statement today, Monday, April 20, the department noted that its staff “has worked both domestically and internationally, to support agriculture through this most difficult of periods”.
“In circumstances where many parts of the economy are necessarily in lockdown, the work that these people do ensures that the regulatory and administrative functions required to keep food processors up and running, to facilitate livestock sales and to keep live exports moving, continues,” the department’s statement noted.
Without this work these activities would cease altogether.
Continuing, the Department of Agriculture said: “Against this background it is extraordinarily disappointing to read some of the commentary over the weekend in relation to the efforts made to facilitate live exports late last week.”
This was in response to claims by the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) that a number of farmers had been complaining about a “lack of cooperation” from a small number of department officials in loading a live export ship last week.
The department said that, while there were “technical issues that led to difficulties on the day in question”, the department’s staff “worked tirelessly, in some cases for 20 hours straight, to resolve them, so that the export could go ahead”.
Of course, there are lessons to be learned, but despite all of the difficulties in this case, the export proceeded on the day intended, thanks to the dedication of the staff involved.
Continuing its riposte, the department said: “In the meantime, it might be useful to reflect on the essential work that these people do.
“It might also be worth reflecting on how farmers are well served by the ‘bureaucracy’ that ensures this vital trade can take place in a manner that ensures that the animal health and welfare requirements, that are quite properly a precondition for it, are correctly regulated.
Without such regulation, any very short-term advantage that might accrue to the very few would be significantly outweighed by the long-term damage to farmers generally.
“The department applauds its frontline staff, who in the midst of this crisis, continue to provide a first-class service to the Irish agri-food sector,” the authority’s statement concluded.