The European Commission's new Food and Veterinary Office (FVO) in Co Meath represents a serious threat to the county's €380 million farming sector, according to a former Commission official. The official, Mr Denis Ó Buachalla, is taking legal action against it.
Mr Ó Buachalla, who unsuccessfully appealed to An Bord Pleanála against Meath County Council's decision to grant planning permission for the FVO's office complex at Grange, said its "hosting" of foot-and-mouth virus samples had been ignored.
He said the FVO's functions included ensuring that a significant body of EU law on food safety, animal health, animal welfare and plant health is applied by the member-states as well as countries exporting animals, plants and plant products to the EU.
This covered inspections of veterinary and plant health, contamination of food and animal feed material, food hygiene and irradiation, genetically modified organisms and pesticides in more than 100 countries from its temporary base in Dublin since 1997.
Mr Ó Buachalla said the 1996 decision to relocate the FVO to a Teagasc farm with its own 900-head beef herd had been taken by the then Taoiseach, Mr John Bruton, against the advice of the European Commission.
He said the decision to locate the FVO in Ireland, "in a town to be determined by the Irish Government" had been taken by EU heads of government in 1993. However, this decision was later reversed by Mr Bruton "by insisting that \ be located in his own constituency".
If there was another foot-and-mouth crisis, "the rancher farmers in Mr Bruton's constituency would be the first to seek to shut down the FVO"; otherwise, the Teagasc and surrounding farms "will be defenceless against a foot-and-mouth epidemic".
FVO staff had also alerted the present Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, in 1998 to the "inadvisability" of locating their office in Grange "because of the risks . . . inherent to the nature of our work, which regularly includes visits to areas where animal and plant diseases occur".
In another letter to the Taoiseach in August 1999, the staff claimed this issue had been "suppressed" because of a determination on the part of the Irish authorities to proceed with the €33 million project in spite of warnings.
Had the FVO been installed in Grange at the time of the foot-and-mouth outbreak last year, Mr Ó Buachalla said it "would have had to cease carrying out its inspection operations and it would have been unable to function from this agricultural base".
He said Teagasc had suspended all of its farm visits from Grange during the crisis and that the planning inspector from An Bord Pleanála had not been able to carry out an inspection of the site during the planning process because of the restrictions in force.
According to Mr Ó Buachalla, the risks were "never clearly identified, defined and quantified in light of the operation of the office's surveillance role in conducting inspection missions to and from this intensive agricultural area to member states and third countries".
As a result, "extreme vigilance on an ongoing basis will be required by the Teagasc and the other local farms surrounding the FVO offices to ensure that the foot-and-mouth disease and, indeed, any other plant or animal disease does not spread from the EU office".
