Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue has rejected criticism of the TB Eradication Programme, following claims it is understaffed and underfunded.
Last week, both the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) and the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers’ Association (ICSA) raised concerns over an apparent lack of funding and human resources for the programme, and called on the minister to reaffirm his commitment to it.
Speaking to Agriland in Shanghai, China, during a trade mission last week, Minister McConalogue said that his department was “looking to see” how staffing for the programme can be increased, and that funding to the programme has increased in recent years.
“We’ve very significantly increased the funding to the TB programme over the last year [or] two years, but unfortunately we’ve seen an increase in relation to the number of reactors.
“We’ve been looking to see how we can increase staffing to make sure that we have appropriate staffing everywhere it’s needed,” the minister said.
He also called for stakeholders to continue working collectively on the issue of TB, through the TB Forum.
“But I think the other thing we need to do, working through the TB Forum, is to make sure that, coming together collectively, we address and look in detail at the issues that are leading to the increase at the moment that we’ve seen, and then work collectively to move to address that,” he said.
“It’s a terrible trauma for every farmer that’s getting affected by TB. It massively undermines the economic situation in their herd and their farming model, and it also significantly contributes to and increases the amount of funding that the state has to bring to fund the TB programme.
The minister added: “I look forward to working further with TB programme to try and make sure we reverse the trends we’ve seen taking all the steps that are necessary, and that we agree collectively to address that.
The minister also addressed the controversial EU-Mercosur Trade Agreement, which has come in for renewed focus with a new European Parliament and, shortly, a new European Commission.
Minister McConalogue told Agriland that Ireland’s position “remains as it was”.
“There has to be equivalence in relation to the standards that are expected of our farmers compared to the imports coming in,” he said.
“We’ve taken a very strong line as a country in relation to environmental standards from the South American countries and one of the key reasons that there hasn’t been agreement at the European level is the insistence that there must be further engagement with the Mercosur countries on those items, and we retain that very strong position as a country,” the minister added.
He said that, while there is a variety of views among other member states, the “predominate view would be very much in line with our own”.