The slaughter of 12,000 chickens today to test the State's plan for coping with an outbreak of bird flu has been described as a success.
The birds were gassed to death on a farm in Kilmeedy, Co Limerick in a trial carried out by the Department of Agriculture.
Department officials watched the inside of a poultry house on monitors as carbon dioxide was pumped in to the chickens for around 10 minutes.
Ireland has been putting in place measures to cope with an outbreak since last year and hundreds of thousands of anti-virals and vaccines are being stock-piled.
Today's test was the second of its kind. Last year, 6,000 birds were destroyed in Co Monaghan.
The contingency plan is a response to the rapid spread of the disease in the past two years.
An outbreak of a new strain of the H5N1 type avian flu in poultry and fowl was detected in Hong Kong in 1997 gathering momentum in 2004 spreading rapidly throughout South East Asia and into Africa and Europe. Experts say Ireland is almost certain to be affected, probably by the end of the year.
Over 100 people have died as result of being in close contact with infected birds since 2004 and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have classified the outbreak as a pandemic.
While global sales in chicken are expected to fall by around 11 per cent as a result of falling consumer confidence, the deeper concern is over the potential for the disease to mutate into one that spread from human to human.
The WHO fears that a pandemic among humans could have disastrous consequences because an anti-dote could only be established after the outbreak of the mutated strain had been detected.
Around 50 Department of Agriculture staff were at today's exercise, which was described as a success which will contribute to Ireland's response in the event the disease reaches these shores.
The dead chickens have been sent to a rendering plant where their carcasses will be burnt and converted into bone meal.