The Department of Agriculture and Food has assured consumers that Irish sheepmeat is safe following a claim by a British BSE expert that there was a "distinct possibility" of BSE being in the British sheep population.
Prof Geoffrey Almond, chairman of the sheep sub-committee of SEAC, the body which advises the British government on BSE, said that the British Ministry of Agriculture had begun a series of experiments to look for the disease in sheep. However, these experiments had not yielded significant results so far.
Only nine sheep had been tested for the disease in Britain, as the tests take two years to conclude and cost £30,000.
If BSE was to be found in sheep, he said, there would be a "national emergency" in Britain and politicians would have to live with the possibility of slaughtering 40 million sheep and banning the sale of sheepmeat.
Prof Almond, speaking on BBC Radio 4's farming programme yesterday morning, said that further research was "a matter of urgency".
His comments were attacked by the president of the National Farmers' Union, Mr Ben Gill, who accused him of spreading "scare stories".
Scientists believe BSE was created in cattle by feeding them bonemeal made from sheep brains which were infected with scrapie, a disease detected in sheep over 200 years ago.
The Department of Agriculture in Dublin said yesterday that Irish sheepmeat was perfectly safe and emphasised that conditions in Ireland were very different from those in Britain.
"At the height of the epidemic of BSE in Britain, there were 1,000 cases of BSE each week. In Ireland, we have had just over 300 cases in our cattle since 1989", a spokesman said. "We have a very low incidence of scrapie in sheep in Ireland. On average, there are 10 cases per year in a population of eight million sheep. In contrast, the UK had 666 cases of the disease in its sheep population of 40 million in 1992.
"At slaughter plants there are controls in place to detect cases where symptoms of scrapie may exist. Any sheep found with these symptoms are destroyed and, in any event, specified risk materials are removed from all sheep over the age of one year."
An Bord Bia, the Irish Food Board, said it was confident that Irish sheepmeat was perfectly safe.
Ireland's sheepmeat exports were worth £150 million last year, when 51,000 tonnes were exported, mainly to France, which purchased 37,000 tonnes.