Wholesome in appetite

Vet-turned-doctor Dr Paddy Wall always seems to be trying to make things better, whether working in a missionary hospital in the wilds of Tanzania or as a consultant in the National Communicable Disease Surveillance Unit in Britain where he worked on AIDS and TB. And he seems to have brought that same zeal to his latest job as chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.

It's a science-based agency, independent of the food industry and responsible for co-ordinating the work of 1,900 officials in 48 organisations involved in policing the food industry.

Enforcement of regulations, ensuring the food industry takes responsibility for safety and complies with proper standards, and training people for the industry in all its facets will be the emphasis of the authority from now on. Responsibility for alerting consumers to the risks in food will transfer to the new all-Ireland Food Safety Promotions Board when it starts work in October.

"I think in Ireland we have safe food but we need to improve it," Dr Wall says, emphasising the major responsibility the industry itself has for producing safe food. "It costs a fortune to build a brand which you can wreck overnight. All you need is a scare. When a scare comes up, you need to be able to demonstrate you're innocent. We need to have recall procedures. "Every company should have a crisis plan; they don't. It's no good looking to regulatory agencies. You need to have a strategy to deal with complaints."

Food safety, he said, is more than public health and more than science; it is about getting consumer confidence in food and giving guarantees to consumers.

Into his third year at the helm of the first national food safety agency established in the EU, he says Ireland is in a more vulnerable situation than most countries with regard to food safety because we export almost 90 per cent of the food we produce.

Where before "cows doing the Riverdance was sufficient to sell our food", the BSE scare in beef changed everything. "BSE has rewritten the script when it comes to food safety.

"Only now, David Byrne (the EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner and a good friend) has standardised surveillance across Europe. There is a problem in several European countries.

"The level of unease in Ireland in March 1996 is now being felt elsewhere in Europe. BSE will drag all the food safety issues up," he predicted.

Dr Wall insisted that people worry about the wrong things. "People worry about BSE, dioxins and GMOs [genetically modified organisms]. The thing they should be worrying about is simple hygiene. There's room for improvement across the board. "The fact that food poisoning figures are going upwards indicates that hygiene is not what it should be.

"To get to be a food poisoning statistic in Ireland, you have to jump over more fences than Istabraq. The real figures could be 100 to 1,000 times what the actual figures say."

What those figures mean is that 829 cases of food poisoning bacteria, other than salmonella, were reported in the first six months of this year. Salmonella cases numbered 305, an increase of 10 per cent on the same period last year. There were 11 cases of the really dangerous E.coli 0157.

He is outspoken on these food scares and as fearless in standing over the facts. On BSE, he said: "The public are concerned and it doesn't matter what the scientists say. Because of BSE, consumer confidence in scientists is damaged." On GMOs, he said: "Genetic engineering is a tool. It can deliver good benefits if used appropriately. Every health care worker is protected with hepatitis B vaccine which is genetically engineered. It's wrong to say it's bad. What we've said is that every new food must be assessed. "In the US, they are eating their way through 40 different foods and there is still no indication anybody is ill."

On organic food, he said: "There is no evidence it is any safer but is it more natural or environmentally-friendly? Most of the people who are pro-organic are against intensive farming. It's a pity that debate has gone like that." Cutting through the fog surrounding food safety issues, he said national governments and supermarket multiples are using them as part of a trade war.

"The Americans are trying to force-feed us and the French don't want British food. Others claim food coming in from abroad is inferior; who says? There is a lot of politics involved. Traceability is a trade issue.

"Where genetically modified maize and soya could benefit farmers in developing countries, supermarkets have used this in a trade war. It's a benefit for producers not consumers." On the issue of food labelling, he said authority guidelines stipulate that the consumer must not be misled. "There is mischievous labelling out there and it is misleading the public. Because of this issue, we have been working with the Director of Consumer Affairs," he added.

Dr Wall was born in Dublin and lived in Newry, Omagh and Armagh, where his father was a bank manager. "You do lose out by being nomadic. I was cheering for Meath before they got knocked out (because he lived in Ratoath for longer than anywhere else as a "horse vet"); then I cheered for Dublin."

He finished his schooling as a boarder at St Patrick's in Armagh, before going to UCD to do veterinary medicine.

The route to the Food Safety Authority of Ireland's airy office concealed in shrubbery near the Irish Life Centre in Dublin city centre was anything but conventional. He wanted to travel, but voluntary organisations working in developing countries did not have much need of vets.

So he went to the Royal College of Surgeons to study medicine. "It was the best five years I ever had. Working as a vet part-time, being a student and having money. Then I started working as a meat inspector for Larry Goodman."

He worked in the Richmond Hospital in Dublin and the Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, where he said the doctors and nurses taught him everything they knew because he was going to Africa. Not that he was going out of altruism. "It was out of a sense of adventure." "Africa was very educational, the way people lived, the priorities they had. They teach you how lucky we really are."

"I was at a 142-bed hospital, out in the sticks big-time. The best training there is to be a vet, there are no referrals from doctors."

Returning to Britain after two years was a shock and even more so when he realised, in spite of the range of experience he had acquired, that he was the oldest junior doctor in the Medway Hospital in Kent and the most junior. So he did his master's at the University of London in infectious diseases, trained in public health medicine and was a consultant in the NHS in the Communicable Disease Surveillance Unit dealing with gastro-intestinal diseases.

Part of his training was in the Communicable Diseases Center in Atlanta in the US.

On the side, he became a popular after-dinner speaker. "I was 10 years out of Ireland. It was too long to be away . . . things move on."

When food safety became an issue, he thinks it was again his veterinary background that was most relevant. Returning to Ireland, Dr Wall, a lover of sports, found that "all the lads who used to go racing are now playing golf - it's an epidemic in Ireland", so he has taken up the clubs. But it is his love of horses that has been most important in reintegrating him into Irish life.

He takes part in hunter trials - he represented Irish universities in showjumping - and is a member of the Ward Union Hunt. He fishes on the Boyne at Slane "but I put most of them back, I'm not into murdering fish". And he loves his food. "I have a ferocious appetite. I like wholesome natural products I can identify. Going out to eat is a social event. A place that is dirty or unhygenic freaks me," he said.