PAYMENTS WORTH €35 million have been made by the Department of Agriculture in relation to December’s pig dioxin scare, the joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture was told yesterday.
Department secretary general Tom Moran told the committee that a total of 62 payments had been made: €10 million to primary processors and the remainder to secondary processors and some advance payments to farmers.
During a five-hour examination of the department’s handling of the crisis, Mr Moran defended the actions taken, which involved the total recall of Irish pork products, leading to a shutdown of the industry.
He said that while there were clearly significant financial consequences to the decision to recall all pork and pork products, the damage would have been far more severe and long-lasting if Ireland had allowed contaminated product to remain on the shelves.
“This would have perhaps irretrievably damaged Ireland’s reputation as a producer of safe and quality food, and in our case, Irish pork was back on the shelves within one week,” he said.
Mr Moran revealed that the Dutch had conducted tests on an Irish pig, looking for dioxins on the day – December 6th – when Ireland took the decision to withdraw all product.
He said Japan was still banning Irish pork imports and for that reason, Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith would travel there soon to try to have this situation reversed.
He told the members that 91,000 of the 130,000 pigs which would have to be slaughtered because of the dioxin scare, would be killed by the end of this week.
Work would then begin on the slaughter of the 4,500 cattle caught up in the 21 herds hit by the crisis. He said all animals in the herds would be killed and destroyed.
He said the department was in discussions with the Environmental Protection Agency to use the meat and bonemeal from the rendered-down animals in cement manufacturing here. The rest would have to be exported and incinerated in Germany.
He said he was constrained in what he could say about the ongoing investigation into the source of the contamination as it was the subject of a Garda investigation and might be subject to litigation. Laboratory tests indicated that the source of contamination was the use of “contaminated or inappropriate oil” to fire the burner used for generating heat to dry the bread involved. “The process used direct flame to blow through the feed,” he said.
It also emerged that there are no regulations covering the use of oil to heat food for recycling other than those in the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point, which, he said, was a system but not a regulatory one.
“There has never been a case of dioxin contamination from fuel oil in the EU before and we are now looking at this with the commission,” he said.
But, Mr Moran said, all food business operators along the food chain bore full responsibility for the safety of the food they produced, and this should include certification of fuel from a reputable supplier.
The committee resumes its investigation next Wednesday.