The Department of Agriculture's elite Special Investigations Unit which halted the illegal use of "angel dust", will investigate the source of the serum thought to have given Ireland its first cases of equine infectious anaemia.
EIA has already killed 15 horses and endangered Ireland's horse industry, which is worth billions annually, along with the 100,000 horses in Ireland, 40,000 of which are thoroughbreds and the remainder sport horses.
Yesterday, Minister for Agriculture and Food Mary Coughlan announced financial measures to assist horse owners whose animals are subject to movement restrictions and consequently must undergo a series of tests for the disease commonly known as "swamp fever".
The blood-based serum thought to have caused the disease here is used to build up the immune system in thoroughbred foals. The inquiry will focus on the source of the serum used to treat the foal which first caught the disease here.
The Minister and her officials were reluctant to say a criminal inquiry was under way, but did confirm that people had been questioned on the source of the serum which may have been contaminated. "It is not yet a criminal investigation but it may be as it is a matter of evidence," she told a press conference at the Royal Dublin Society Grounds where she was paying her first official visit.
"The investigation is being conducted by the SIU and it will decide if there is a criminal aspect to the case. They have quite extensive legal powers and if they find that people have gone beyond the law, they will be prosecuted," she said.
Ms Coughlan said that in the professional veterinarian context, she was happy so far that the initial spread of the disease was contained and under control. Some 18 premises, she said, had been restricted involving 700 horses and over 3,000 tests for the disease had been carried out.
She said restricting and testing horses traced as having been in contact with earlier confirmed cases, was the central element of the department's approach to containing and eradicating the disease.
Because of the level of testing required, she had decided the department would contribute €50 for each veterinarian visit to take blood samples from horses subject to movement restrictions and would also pay the cost of analysing the sample.
She said horses under restriction were subject to different intervals of testing, depending on the degree of risk at which they were assessed. In some cases horses were required to be tested at 10-day intervals for the first 60 days.
The Minister said because Ireland had been open with the authorities in countries such as Britain and France, they had no difficulty letting their horses come to the show and there was close co-operation with the international authorities.