It is less than two months since the Irish beef industry had recovered to a point where the market losses suffered in the last BSE crisis of 1996 had been regained.

The £1.1 billion export industry had fought its way back into a buoyant UK market and had firmly established itself in the French, Italian and Netherlands food chains.

Egypt was our biggest non-EU customer, taking 150,000 tonnes of Irish product, making us the principal supplier to that country. And Irish traders had opened new markets in Indonesia and the Philippines.

This week only the UK and Nordic markets for Irish beef were holding up and our largest non-EU market was Indonesia, which purchased 23,000 tonnes of Irish beef last year. We were shut out of the rest.

The beef factories were gearing up to slaughter for destruction up to 25,000 cattle a week to remove the overhang on the market caused by the dramatic fall in demand in Europe and elsewhere.

Yet, strangely, there was no real sense of panic either in the fields or in the factories where a base price of 90p per lb had been set for animals which were being sent for destruction.

The majority of cattle killed over most of this week were destined for the foodchain and were either under 30 months old or were animals over 30 months which had been tested and found to be BSE free.

Since January 2nd more than 10,000 over-30-month-old cattle destined for the foodchain have been tested for BSE and no positive animals have been found. A further 8,000 under 30 months have also been processed.

Farmers were being paid up to 95p per lb for their beef animals and it was Wednesday last before the first Irish beef factory got around to slaughtering animals for destruction.

The reluctance of the Irish Meat Association members who run the beef processing industry to take on the slaughter for destruction scheme has caused some public confusion.

Overseas customers indicated to some of the factories that they did not want beef from plants where untested animals were also being killed for destruction.

Some of the bigger operators have designated some of their plants for the sole purpose of destruction and one of the factory groups has decided not to become involved at all.

THE destruction of the animals involves them being booked into the plant using a special form from the Department of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development.

The animals are stunned, killed and then eviscerated. The so called specified risk material, the skull, brains, spinal chord and the large intestine, are then removed. The animal is not boned.

The final part of the process involves the carcass being coated in a special dye and put in a skip for removal to the Monery Rendering Plant in Co Cavan.

The new demands from the EU that all over-30-month animals must be either tested or destroyed, has given additional logistical problems to plants slaughtering for beef.

Since the beginning of the year when the requirement became law, animals are being assembled into lots for processing, with the youngest animals being slaughtered in the early part of the day.

The older animals which must be tested, are then slaughtered but the batches have to be held in isolation until the test results on them are returned to the factories.

It is understood that the Department of Agriculture has agreed that if an animal tests BSE positive, the entire production for that batch of animals will be purchased by it and the carcasses destroyed.

The killing lines have to be retooled and the entire area cleaned and disinfected and the area has to be re-inspected again before food production can begin.

There is still some confusion too on the number of animals which are eligible for the slaughter scheme. Early last month the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, said there were 750,000 animals over 30 months old.

However, earlier this week, he said he expected that only 300,000 would be slaughtered for destruction and he urged both the farmers and the meat plants to divert their animals into the beef chain following testing.

Ireland, it would appear, is far ahead of the other European nations on the testing system. We are the first country to put mass testing into place, having had the advantage that the Enfer test was developed in this country.

The greatest difficulty facing the industry now is the problem of disposal of the animals which are being directed towards the destruction scheme.

Already a backlog has built up at some factories but the greatest difficulty has arisen with the destruction of the specified risk materials.

They can only be disposed of at one plant, Monery, in Cavan, which is licensed to process only 1,000 tonnes of specified risk material weekly. It is clear other licences must be issued to other plants.