The expert group set up to advise on avian flu control here will meet next week in Dublin as the disease moved a step closer with the discovery of the virus in France.
The French confirmed that a duck found dead near Lyon had the H5-type bird flu and that tests carried out this weekend would probably confirm it was the potentially lethal N1 subtype of the disease.
This H5N1 strain has led to more than 90 deaths in humans in Asia and has been identified in fowl in Greece, Italy, Slovenia and Germany.
Test results are still awaited on H5 virus samples sent by Austria, Hungary and now France to the EU laboratory in Weybridge, England.
France has already asked the EU for permission to vaccinate its poultry and this issue is likely to dominate the meeting of agriculture ministers in Brussels on Monday.
There, the ministers will report on the status in their countries of the disease which has put in danger the €20 billion poultry industry across the EU.
This debate is likely to focus on vaccination of commercial poultry flocks because the EU has rules which ban the import of meat from countries which use vaccination to control disease.
A spokesman for Minister for Agriculture Mary Coughlan, who will attend Monday's meeting in Brussels, said reports that Ireland was considering vaccinating its commercial flocks, were without foundation.
"That will be an issue which will be adjudged by the expert group which the Minister announced on Thursday when it becomes relevant," he said.
"This body, under the chairmanship of Prof Michael Monaghan of UCD includes veterinary, scientific and ornithological expertise from within and outside the department," he said.
The 11-member group was established because of the increased risk of the disease here following its spread to Germany and Italy.
It is modelled and led by Prof Monaghan who advised on all aspects of the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak which was successfully confined to the Cooley peninsula in Co Louth.
In Italy where the H5N1 strain of the flu was identified last Saturday in dead swans, demand for chicken has plummeted by 70 per cent.
The poultry industry here is already experiencing a slight downturn because of the disease and both supermarkets and producer said yesterday that there had been a slight fall in demand for poultry meat despite the fact that properly cooked meat could not give the disease to humans
Most of the victims of H5N1 have been in Asian countries where those who died from it lived in close proximity to fowl or were poultry workers.
As yet, the flu has not been transferred from human to human which could cause a pandemic.