THE GOVERNMENT had no overall strategy to deal with the BSE crisis, the Fianna Fail spokesman on agriculture, Mr Brian Cowen, claimed yesterday.
While he welcomed the setting up of an independent food authority, he said that it had come far too late. The authority should have been established last March, when the latest BSE crisis developed, he maintained.
Mr Cowen described the announcement as a "fire-brigade response" to the political events of last year. "The political composition of the Government is such that they simply respond to each crisis as it happens rather than addressing the real issues systematically", Mr Cowen said.
The Progressive Democrats spokesman on agriculture, Senator John Dardis, said that consumer confidence in Irish food products would not be restored until responsibility for policing the industry was taken away from the Department of Agriculture and entrusted to an entirely independent agency.
"This would mean transferring all veterinary inspection and food inspection functions out of the Department and moving up to 2,000 staff to a new National Food Inspection Service", he said.
Ms Paula Giles, a spokeswoman for the Green Party, said that the new body should report to a Dail committee on food safety. "Handing in reports to the Minister for Health rather than the Minister for Agriculture will merely be one more waltz around the dance-floor", she said.
Mr Donal Murphy, general secretary of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers' Association (ICMSA), advised all sectors of the Irish food industry to give the highest priority to an independent inspectorate which would guarantee every aspect of food production.
Mr Murphy told a meeting, of farmers in Enniscrone, Co Sligo, that they would have to accept that the viability of farming in the immediate future was more likely to be determined by the acceptability of produce to consumers than by the prices charged.
There was no place for the "reckless use" of some substances in the food chain, Mr Murphy said. "The only way of preventing irresponsible actions is through a combination of information and heavy penalties on the wrong-doers", he added.
The Irish Association of Pigmeat Processors said yesterday that the levels of antibiotic residues identified in a consumers survey of pork products were "completely unacceptable". The processing industry, it said, bad introduced additional monitoring procedures to ensure that all pigmeat products were residue-free.