Department of Agriculture accusations that farmers are showing "a great unwillingness to proceed" with sheep-ID tagging have been met with counter-proposals by the Irish Farmers Association (IFA).
IFA president Mr Tom Parlon today said farmers were "fully committed to a comprehensive and effective system" to track the movement of sheep but that they still believed the system the Department of Agriculture was proposaling was too "bureaucratic and unworkable in practice."
The IFA plan to present the Government with a list of proposals it believes will get the support of the farming community and has called for new tagging legislation that would concentrate on traceability at factory level.
The IFA also said it believed tagging sheep within a year of birth would be more practical than the Department's proposal to tag within six months. It believes the best time would be October-December when most farmers usually collect their ewes because tagging during the summer months could cause health problems among the flock.
It also said it was opposed to any scheme that involved removable tags, believing permanent ID for sheep would mean less paperwork and make factories compelled to link the ear tags with the carcass.