THE Cabinet decided yesterday to set up a special inter departmental committee to examine the feasibility of building a £30 million national incinerator. It would be used to destroy potentially BSE infected offal from cattle and sheep.
The decision was taken as the British authorities announced that preliminary studies indicated that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) can be passed from infected cows to their calves.
The Minister for Agriculture, Mr Yates, said this had no implications for public health because since last March the Department has been locating and destroying calves from infected cows. All herds in which BSE was found were destroyed as well as herds from which BSE infected cows originated. Animals seized on the Border are also destroyed.
Explaining the need for a national incinerator, Mr Yates said he expected the EU Veterinary Committee to impose a ban on rendering spinal tissue from sheep for the animal food chain.
"This material must be rendered down and destroyed and we have no incinerator. The options open to us are dumping at sea, landfill sites or incinerating this material, and incineration is the most viable option", he said.
The inter departmental committee, drawn from the Departments of Agriculture, Health and the Environment, will report back by September and Mr Yates said he expected an incinerator could be built in 12 or 18 months.
The Minister also said he would be reviewing the rendering industry which converts offal into bone meal, so there would be a dedicated plant to deal with banned offal and other materials to be destroyed.
He was doing this because six of the 135 cases of BSE in the Irish herd had been born since the ban on feeding bonemeal to cattle was imposed in August 1990 and these animals may have been infected by contaminated or stored feed.
Mr Yates said Ireland would continue to lead Europe in controls to protect consumers. The rate of infection, at 135 in a herd of seven million animals since 1989, indicated a very low level.
He said that to date 140 herds had been destroyed because of the disease and said work would continue on putting into place a tracing system for all animals.
He also defended the rising costs of the controls, which are quickly mounting £13.5 million on slaughtering herds, £13 million this year to seal off the Border and a further £30 million for an incinerator.
The beef industry is worth £1.7 billion annually and these controls are necessary to protect that industry and ensure that we can fully satisfy our customers that our beef is free of infection he said.
Mr Yates added that the latest reports from Britain on possible transmission of the disease from cow to calf were not helpful in general, but had wider implications for the UK.
"Because of this news it will be more difficult to roll back the ban on British beef and the export of embryos and calves", he said.
The farm organisations and the Irish Food Board last night came out in support of the controls put in place by the Government. The Irish Farmers' Association said the policies are "totally satisfactory" and the ICMSA said they were "the best in the world".
Mr Michael Duffy, Chief Executive of An Bord Bia, said it was much too early to speculate on what impact the current publicity will have on market demand, but experience would suggest that such publicity can affect the market in the short term. It was also import ant that consumers are fully informed.
It also emerged last night that an Irish study involving 39 calves from infected cows over a five year period found no evidence of maternal transmission.
The last of the animals involved in the experiment were slaughtered and inspected on January 12th, 1995 at Abbotstown Research Centre, Co Dublin, a week after impounded animals were forcibly removed from the station by a gang of men.