Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue is being called on to intervene in the implementation of regulations on vet medicines next January.

The incoming changes will see antparasitic medicines require a prescription from a vet before they can be purchased.

The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) is calling on the minister to “radically revise” the regulations, saying that farmers concerns over cost, efficiency and administrative workload are “growing daily and are very well justified”.

“This looks very much like another case of bureaucrats – who have no practical experience if looking after animal health – telling both the farmers who own the animals and the vets who treat them what they are doing wrong.”

ICMSA president Pat McCormack said today (Wednesday, April 5): “I want to be fair to the civil servants who drew up these regulations and I’m going to say that they obviously mean well.

“But the net effect of these new regulations will make it more difficult for farmers to access and assess veterinary medicines in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Surely we should be working towards that end,” he argued.

“There’s a bigger problem here and it’s really high time that the Department of Agriculture understood it.

“The answer to every problem or perceived problem is not to load more form-filling and bureaucracy on the farmers who already have the least time to do it,” the ICMSA president insisted.

He added: “The answer to every perceived problem can’t be to just pass along a financial cost and a bureaucratic obligation to the same group already buckling under financial costs and bureaucratic obligations.

“The minister must demand that this stops being the default answer to every problem that the department wants to address.

“The new regulations will not improve the situation, they are not even neutral. They will actually make it worse and the minister must immediately intervene and ensure that common sense prevails,” McCormack concluded.