IT MAY be a little too early for the Irish taxpayer to make the assumption that the £500 million saga of ridding Ireland's cattle herds of bovine TB is over following the privatisation of the scheme last year.
Since 1959 millions of pounds have been spent in the drive to make Ireland's herd free of TB and brucellosis, which causes abortion in cows.
But there are encouraging signs since the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Yates, decided to make farmers pay for the compulsory annual TB tests.
The number of animals per thousand failing the tuberculin test has dropped by 0.3 animals to 3 per 1,000 and the herd incidence of the disease has dropped from 6.5 per cent to 5.7 per cent.
The dramatic change in the scheme initiated by Mr Yates caused great disruption not only for the farmers but for the vets, who until last year were paid by the State for tests arranged by the Department, which they carried out on farm animals.
Under the new approach farmers arranged and paid their vets for tests at a cost of up to £14 million each year.
In return the Department reduced. from £28 million to £10 million the levies it extracted from farmers to part pay for the scheme, mainly for compensation to farmers whose animals fail the test.
This week the Department said the national round of testing under the new arrangements had proceeded in a satisfactory way, with the number of tests being carried out reaching a par with previous years.
But perhaps the most interesting piece of information it issued was that in that national round of tests the number of reactor animals showing signs of infection was 3.0 per 1,000 tests, compared to 3.3 animals per 1,000 tests in 1995.
An interim report on the 1996 testing programme drawn up recently showed the national herd consists of just fewer than 150,000 individual herds in which there are 7.43 million animals.
By the end of the year, 97 per cent of herds had at least one test and there had been a total of 170,000 herd tests carried out, reflecting follow up work on herds where reactors were found.
At animal level 9.57 million tests were completed, including 337,000 private tests, according to the report.
At herd level, the programme identified 8,561 new outbreaks, or 5.7 per cent of the herds tested. And at animal level the testing identified 29,072 reactor cattle.
The interim report identified Monaghan as the county with the greatest problem. It has the highest rate of reactor cattle per 1,000 at 8.3 animals. Monaghan has 4,885 herds on which 5,012 herd tests were carried out. At the end of the year it had 346 herds restricted because of the disease, with 2,561 reactor animals being found.
Wicklow East with 1461 herds - has the second highest rate of failure per 1,900 tests with 6.3 per cent of animals going down. At the end of the year 109 of the 1,461 herds were restricted.
Louth has the third highest rate of reactors with 5.1 per cent per 1,000 animals failing the test, and 120 of its 1,733 herds were restricted at the end of the year.