Just over a year after the foot-and-mouth scare caused by the illegal movement of sheep, the Irish Farmers' Association is demanding an end to tagging of all sheep and lambs imposed then reversed.
Even during the crisis the IFA had opposed sheep tagging. The Department of Agriculture imposed a system of tagging with a back-up register of all animals.
The Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, said that had the system been in place in February last year, foot-and-mouth disease could have been kept out of the State.
On Tuesday a number of IFA sheep farmers, representing the 40,000 flockowners, handed back their sheep registers at the front office of the Department in Kildare Street, Dublin.
In a statement yesterday the IFA president, Mr John Dillon, described the new register as "unreasonable and unworkable".While his membership accepted the need for identification and traceability, the system imposed on the farmers was a bureaucratic nightmare and was unworkable.
He called on the Minister to move to a simpler system and to abandon the sheep register and reconciliation scheme.
The Department said it could not accept that Irish flockowners were incapable of completing the flock register, now a legal requirement. It said it was mystified as to why, months after it was introduced and with growing evidence it was working well, the IFA had claimed the system was unworkable.
Since June 2001 more than 13.5 million tags had been ordered from approved suppliers, of which there were now 13. At farm level, the Department's noted, the National Sheep Identification System had been working well.
