Ireland may escape bird flu given the migratory patterns of birds travelling to Ireland, the Minister for Agriculture, Mary Coughlan, said in Brussels yesterday.
Following a meeting of EU farm ministers which was dominated by the issue, she said most of the wild birds found to have died from bird flu came from central Europe and would generally not travel to Ireland.
"It is possible we may escape because when you look at the birds that are getting the disease they are nearly all mute swans who are migratory and who are coming from central Europe and we do not have a pattern of migration from central Europe for these type of swans," she said.
"Smaller migratory birds which will be travelling to Ireland soon have not been shown to be the prime carriers of the disease," she added.
"There was an inevitability being felt around the room that the disease was moving towards other EU states," the minister told reporters following the meeting.
She said she had asked the European Commission for flexibility on the issue of having to bring poultry indoors if bird flu was discovered in Ireland.
"We would have quite a lot of people involved in free-range. Under the regulation if you take a bird in for veterinary reasons signed off by the commission, 12 weeks is the maximum time available after which the birds are no longer free-range, and that was why I asked for flexibility on that," she said.
Ms Coughlan said there was also an issue of flock owners having the means to house birds on their holdings.
No decision was made on the issue of vaccination at the council meeting, though France and the Netherlands put forward plans to vaccinate part of their poultry populations. EU public health commissioner Markos Kyprianou said the vaccinations - which provide some immunity to a general flu virus, not specifically H5N1 - were not fully effective as immunisation can take a period of time.
German agriculture minister Horst Seehofer raised the issue of the difficulty of vaccinating millions of birds who would have to be inoculated twice in a three-week period. But he called a longer-term vaccination strategy "fundamentally necessary".
A committee of EU veterinary experts will meet later today and examine the issue of vaccination. If vaccination is agreed upon it would not be mandatory.
Ms Coughlan said the commission signalled it would consider compensation for states whose poultry industry has suffered as a result of bird flu and would allow export refunds.
She said compensation might be due not only for a state infected with bird flu but others whose commercial poultry market has suffered. She said Ireland had not suffered significantly so far from a falling off in poultry sales, but that sales in Italy were down by 70 per cent.
Mr Kyprianou said the union had the measures and legislation for containment and eradication of such diseases.
Meanwhile, at least 11 countries have reported bird flu outbreaks over the past three weeks, an indication that the virus, which has killed at least 92 people in Asia, is spreading faster.
India and Egypt are the latest countries to confirm the presence of the H5N1 strain, which yesterday spread to the German mainland from the Baltic island of Rugen where it was first detected. Malaysia reported its first case of bird flu since November 2004 and Bosnia confirmed its first case of the disease.
Yesterday the World Health Organisation confirmed a death from bird flu in Indonesia, taking the overall toll to 92.
These comprise four in Turkey, 19 in Indonesia, eight in China, four in Cambodia, 14 in Thailand, 42 in Vietnam and one in Iraq.
So far the disease has not spread from human to human.