AS BRITAIN announced it would proceed with its £630 million BSE slaughter scheme of animals over 30 months old, news on Irish beef was encouraging.
Meat plants tendered for 3,114 tonnes of EU intervention beef and this was accepted at a meeting of the EU Beef Management Committee in Brussels.
This will remove 14,000 bullocks from the market and last night it was also learned that beef exporters had applied for EU export licences for 60,000 bullocks and over 5,500 live animals since last week.
For industry sources this indicated that markets for Irish beef were firming and the fact that the factories sought a relatively low intervention tonnage over the next three weeks would appear to confirm that view.
Welcoming the tender announcement, the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Yates, said he expected factories to pass back a fair proportion of their gains from an improving market situation to producers.
In response to statements by Dr Vincent Carroll, acting director of Community Care in Louth, querying the official assurances in Ireland about BSE, the Food Safety Advisory Board repeated there was no scientific evidence to indicate a link between BSE and CJD.
Its chairman, Dr Fergus Hill, pointed out that in clinically infected animals, only four tissues had been identified as having infectivity. These, he said, were the brain the spinal cord, part of the intestine and the retina. More than 50 other tissues from infected animals have been bioassayed, but no infectivity was detected.
In Britain, it was announced that the EU funded slaughter scheme aimed at allaying BSE fears would begin in earnest next week.
A Government spokesman said 18,000 animals in England and Wales would be slaughtered next week and the figure should rise to 22,000 a week by July.
The scheme got off to a shaky start last week when only 3,321 animals were destroyed. Yesterday also, the British government announced it would commission cold store plants for animal parts awaiting rendering.
The British Agriculture Minister, Mr Douglas Hogg, turned down a request from the Labour Party to investigate figures which show that two thirds of cows found with BSE in the first three months of this year were born after the ban on feed containing animal remains came into force in 1988.
Mr Hogg said "I do not see any need to carry out a full investigation."
The government has recently tightened up rules on feed stuffs in a bid to eradicate contaminated supplies.
Speaking in Belfast yesterday, Dr Strang, Labour's spokesman on agriculture said it was "shortsighted" of the government to refuse an investigation.
"An investigation into these younger BSE cases may well reveal a number of animal feed mills who were failing to keep the BSE agent out of animal feed," he said.
"The government are already committed to an additional slaughter programme. Identifying these feed mills and their customers may well allow a more closely targeted selective slaughter policy.