Fifteen years after the first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy was discovered here, the annual total for cases has risen to an unprecedented level, with almost 250 cases recorded in 2001.
This compares poorly with 2000, which was also the highest on record but generated only 149 confirmed cases of the disease.
For the first few years of the outbreak, fewer than 20 cases a year were found in the national herd but by 1996 when evidence was put forward linking it with nvCJD, numbers began to soar.
Confirmed cases jumped to 74 that year from a total of 16 the year before and have continued to rise in the intervening years.
There is, however, a positive side to the BSE story which has been frequently lost in the telling. The most positive scenario is that Ireland could be rid of the disease in another five years.
BSE was first identified in Britain in 1985 and it is now accepted that it was caused by feeding infected sheep brain to cows when the system of making meat and bonemeal from dead animals changed in the late 1970s.
Instead of rendering the carcases of animals by a long period of high heat treatment, a new system of "zapping" the bodies for a short period was introduced as an energy-saving device.
Once established in the animal food chain, the disease quickly spread and by the early 1990s, 1,000 cases of the disease were being confirmed weekly in Britain.
However, the EU had put regulations into place to protect the consumer, mainly banning the feeding of meat and bonemeal to cattle and the removal of organs in which the disease might be transmitted to humans from carcases.
Despite that, more than 100 people in Britain contracted the deadly variant CJD and died from eating contaminated beef. There has been one case here, in a woman who spent most of her adult life in Britain.
The British authorities were frantically trying to find out why the disease was still spreading in their herd despite the controls and then in 1996 they discovered that the animal food chain continued to be contaminated at milling plants.
The EU had allowed the feeding of meat and bone meal to pigs and poultry to continue and scientists found that the even small quantities of contaminated meat and bone meal left on rollers used to compound cattle feed, could spread the disease in cattle.
The issue was addressed immediately in Britain and Ireland by ordering that plants preparing pig and poultry food could not manufacture cattle feed. The result of that action for Ireland has been that the disease has not been found in any animal born in Ireland after 1996; it is on this basis that scientists here believe the disease could be eradicated this decade.
But where are the additional cases coming from? They are turning up because the authorities here are now actively seeking cases of the disease, something which was not done up until last year.
Since this day last year, all animals over 30 months old destined for the food chain are being tested, as are diseased and injured animals which would not be eaten.
This has increased the numbers considerably but, according to the Department, it has not dramatically increased the number of cases coming forward by passive surveillance, the traditional method of detection.
This year will be a test of that assertion and hopefully will prove that what we have been told by the scientists is accurate.