MacSharry to appear at BSE inquiry

THE European Parliament's inquiry into the EU handling of the BSE crisis reaches a crucial stage today when MEPs question the former agriculture commissioner, Mr Ray MacSharry, and others.

Increasingly, the parliament's Special Committee of Inquiry is focusing on what MEPs see as the Commission's failure between 1990 and 1994 to act with sufficient vigilance in the face of the rapidly increasing number of BSE cases in Britain.

Committee members acknowledge the dangers of judging with the benefit of hindsight. But some of them argue that the Commission carried out a policy of minimising the dangers to consumers in the hope of protecting the beef industry.

There is also considerable criticism of the obsessive secrecy with which many of the Union's regulatory and scientific committees work.

Sources close to the inquiry say it is likely to recommend that in future the management of animal and related public health issues within the Community should be handled under the consumer protection directorate rather than the directorate for agriculture (DG6).

A number of internal Commission documents and private papers of officials obtained by the French paper, Liberation, and seen by The Irish Times, suggest a considerable unwillingness on the part of Mr MacSharry - commissioner from 1989 to 1993 - to have the Commission play an interventionist role on the issue.

Most significant is a handwritten page from a notebook of the head of the agriculture directorate (DG6), Mr Guy Legras, dated September 18th, 1990. It is Mr Legras's personal aide memoire of a meeting of the MacSharry cabinet and includes the line, "BSE stop any meeting".

Mr Legras gave evidence to the inquiry on October 1st about a claim that in an angry outburst at this cabinet meeting Mr MacSharry had insisted he did not want to hear BSE mentioned again.

Mr Legras told the committee the remarks were off the cuff and not to be taken seriously, but he admits he recorded what he understood to be the gist of the comment in his notebook. He then passed on an instruction to the deputy director of DG6 Mr Fernando Mansito, to avoid, if possible, convening meetings on the BSE issue. Having done so, Mr Legras ticked the item off his aide memoire.

A copy of the page has now been sent to the inquiry and is expected to be raised with Mr MacSharry today.

Another note from Mr MacSharry's chef de cabinet, Mr Patrick Hennessy, dated May 21st, 1991, responds to a memo from Mr Legras about the possibility of maternal transmission of BSE. Mr Hennessy warns the latter: "The budgetary allocation for 1992 for veterinary actions does not provide for financing a BSE eradication programme even if this were considered apt."

Mr Legras, he says, should make no financial commitments without explicit consent from the commissioner.

However, a senior Commission source insists that there was indeed more than £35 million in cash to spare in the budget allocation for veterinary services for the years 1991-92. Should the Commission have wished to use it for BSE eradication measures, it could have done so.

Mr Legras, in a memo (October 17th, 1990) to Mr MacSharry, also reports that his deputy, Mr Mansito, appealed to member states at the Standing Veterinary Committee "to deal with the question with extreme care, and not take any unnecessary action."

The same memo records that BSE cases in Britain were now up to 18,545 on 9,070 farms.

In no small measure the decision by MEPs to establish their committee of inquiry was triggered by a report in Liberation of a memo from a Commission official, Mr Gerard Castille. In it he suggested that a Commission official had urged at a committee meeting that the Commission should minimise the BSE affair by practising disinformation and "officially asking the UK to stop publishing research".

The Commission responded by suggesting that the view was only that of an unrepresentative junior civil servant. Indeed, at the inquiry no suggestion of a systematic disinformation campaign or cover up has been substantiated.

The inquiry is likely also to want to focus on the serious failure of the Commission to monitor anti BSE measures in Britain. It had begun to do so in the first half of 1990 as part of routine veterinary inspections, but then stopped in June until 1994.

"We did a poor job on inspections," Mr Lars Hoelgaard, head of DGO's department of quality and health, admitted to Nature magazine, describing cessation of inspections as "a mystery". Inspectors say they understood they only had a one off instruction to carry out an inspection. Mr Hoelgaard says it was a "standing instruction".

In two reports in May 1990 the inspectors warned that there were weaknesses in the system for tracing animals, making it impossible for vets to certify they came from disease free herds. The inspectors expressed doubts about the temperature of rendering, and they noted that some butchers were still receiving brains.

Strangely, the latter of the two reports appears to have got lost in the works, with several senior officials claiming never to have seen it.

The June inspection finds similar problems with the certification system.

Then, there were no BSE visits by EU vets until 1994.

Mr Legras, before the inquiry, put the blame on understaffing of the veterinary inspectorate. It had 12 inspectors when it needed as many as 200; the UK alone has more than 500 inspectors of red meat facilities. Yet the Commission did manage in the intervening years to carry out some 38 other veterinary inspections in Britain unrelated to BSE.

Mr Hoelgaard says that when the June 1990 inspection mission found serious irregularities - failure to remove nerve tissues - the British Chief Veterinary Officer, Sir Keith Meldrum, was furious. Mr Hoelgaard is quoted in Nature as saying Sir Keith claimed the EU veterinary inspectors "had no mandate to investigate BSE controls". "BSE is a political not a technical matter," Sir Keith said, contending that "UK certificates are the best in the world."

Asked recently if he believed enough, had been done by way of inspections, Mr MacSharry told RTE's correspondent, Frances Shanahan: "I do think that if there's any question that should be raised, it is in relation to the amount of examination that was done by the British authorities themselves. But the European Union, as far as I knew, and the member states - all of them - carried out what they were intended to do."

Yet the question can still be asked was the Commission unwilling to uphold its own regulatory role by taking on the British government? That is the contention of the chairman of the parliament's environment committee, Mr Ken Collins MEP.

"We were convinced that the UK had the best record in matters of animal health. That was perhaps an error, but we had full confidence in the UK," Mr Jan Hanssen told the inquiry on November 21st. Mr Hanssen, a former Dutch representative on the Standing Veterinary Committee, is now a senior Commission official.

"You put blind trust in that member state," the chairman of the inquiry, Mr Reiman Boge MEP, responded. "The situation was allowed to deteriorate for years.

Mr MacSharry also denied to Ms Shanahan any suggestion of a Commission cover up. "I don't think there's any question of a cover up," he said.

"Everything that was done in my time as commissioner . . . was done with the unanimous, approval of the Scientific Veterinary Committee, which is an independent body which advises the European Union, by the Standing Veterinary Committee which is the vets representing the member states, by the whole of the European Union Commission, and by the Council of Ministers.

"Everything was done openly and above board. So there is no question of any cover up. It was done at that time on the basis of the scientific evidence available to the experts in the 1989-91 period."

Unanimity, openness, and strict compliance with the scientific advice? Not exactly, in one case. The spring of 1990 had seen a number of events which seriously destabilised the beef market. The unification of Germany had brought more cattle on to the market, and then France found a couple of cases of BSE in imported British cattle. It banned British beef and was quickly followed by Germany. Britain protested, demanding Commission action against France and German.

Then the first cases of BSE in cats were discovered. The industry was getting very jittery.

In June 1990, in response to scientific concerns, the Commission services in DG6 drafted a new regulation which, among other measures, proposed banning the export of all British beef from herds which had seen a single case of BSE in the last two years.

Instead of putting the issue to the Standing Veterinary Committee for scientific consideration, as might have been expected, Mr MacSharry opted to put it directly on the agenda of the Council of Ministers.

At the council on June 6th, 1990, one source says, Mr MacSharry assiduously stressed the threat to the market. The result was a foregone conclusion and the Commission proposal was rejected.

In the end the council agreed to restrict British live beef exports of animals under six months old. Exports of boned meet would be allowed from all herds as long as nervous and lymphatic tissues were removed. Only unboned meat would require the rigorous certification originally proposed.

Today Mr MacSharry will be joined before the committee of inquiry by his former chef de cabinet, Mr Hennessy, and his successor as Commissioner, the Luxembourger, Mr Rene Steichen. If unhappy with their answers, the committee is likely to demand, that Mr Delors attend.