Sir, - Even a just war - and the current struggle against foot-and-mouth has evoked warlike terminology - has its casualties. Wars take longer to finish than originally intended and usually end up with far greater losses than originally envisaged. It is appropriate to question what we are striving to protect and what the end result may be while the issue is still fresh in our minds.
Total agri-food, drinks and tobacco exports are valued at £5 billion. A portion of our agrifood exports - live animals and raw beef, sheep and pigmeat, valued at £1.5 billion - is under threat from foot-and-mouth disease. The production of these animals is subsidised. Processed food may be heat-treated to kill the virus.
Meanwhile, the tourism industry, which attracts no production subsidies, has incurred losses of £225 million to date. it is forecast that this will rise to at least £600 million. Investment in improved product and additional services will inevitably be put on hold and consequential losses will arise in other sectors. Bord Failte, which is doing a superb job in very difficult circumstances, is compelled to spend additional millions to bolster flagging visitor numbers.
It is difficult to make sense of these figures. This is not made any easier on reflecting that, of the live animals residing in the very countryside we protect, 20,000 a week are destined for a short trip to a local abattoir. These carefully sequestered foot-and-mouth-free animals, are slaughtered, sprayed with green paint, and rendered into bonemeal, which is stored for incineration abroad. To date, the cost of this Purchase for Destruct Scheme is approaching £200 million. No industry - and farmers are no exception - could possibly desire a regime which contrives to produce bizarre outcomes such as have evolved from EU policy and an overwhelming bias in resources in favour of agriculture in Ireland.
At a minimum, one healthy industry must not be gratuitously exposed to severe damage. One can only hope that this might be the catalyst which forces us to adopt policy measures researched almost a decade ago by the OECD and the World Tourism Organisation. This research and the mechanisms recommended, ignored by successive governments and industry bodies here, were designed for nations seriously committed to tourism as a social, cultural and economic phenomenon of benefit to host communities and visitors alike.
Interministeriality was one such mechanism recommended to enable areas of national importance to be reflected across all government departments, rather than the present system which results in the machinery of State operating in discrete fashion, at cross purposes and in an uninformed way. Such arrangements might go some way to mitigate the possibility that the 100 civil servants in Tourism, Sport and Recreation are not unintentionally overwhelmed by their 4,500 colleagues in Agriculture, Food and Rural Development. At a minimum it might ensure that one sector is not blindly jettisoned in favour of another.
If the current war is successful, the outcome will be a weakened tourism industry and a live export and raw meat sector which remains heavily dependent on price support measures and production subsidies. Such results do not represent a victory worthy of the costs incurred. Having embarked on a war and endured the repesent level of casualties it is important to win the peace and at least address the imbalances and operating deficits in the mechanisms of state heightened and brought into sharp focus by this crisis. - Yours, etc.,
Michael Mulvey, Director, Dublin Institute of Technology, Faculty of Tourism and Food, Cathal Brugha Street, Dublin 1.