Part of a load of sheep brought into the North that may have carried foot-and-mouth has been tracked down in the Republic, Stormont Agriculture minister Mrs Bríd Rodgers confirmed today.
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Mrs Bríd Rodgers
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Some 30 of the flock that brought the disease into the North last month after being transported from a market in Cumbria have now been slaughtered, she told the North's Assembly. The first outbreak in this State was confirmed last week on a Co Louth farm.
The time lapse between this and the only case so far in Northern Ireland - just across the Border in south Armagh - had been around 21 days.
This had prompted fears that a third and unidentified source of infection had still to be found.
Ms Rodgers said: "The Department of Agriculture in Dublin has now advised us that they have located a number of sheep which, in their view, are the missing animals to which I referred in my last statement to the Assembly."
She told the Assembly earlier this month some 60 sheep from the original consignment were unaccounted for.
She told the Assembly today about half the missing sheep had been slaughtered immediately after being smuggled over the Border.
Ms Rodgers also hit out at the Europen Union's decision to regionalise the outbreak in Co Louth while a total ban on Northern Ireland exports remained in place. "It is clearly indefensible that we are still caught up in EU-imposed export restrictions when every outbreak in other member-states has been treated as a regional phenomenon," she said.
The Minister for Agriculture Mr Walsh visits Co Louth this afternoon in the wake of the local outbreak.
His visit comes as the three-kilometre exclusion zone in the Proleek area of the county is extended and the culling of sheep and cattle continues.
In the past 48 hours, over 1,200 animals have been slaughtered on farms across the State in an attempt to prevent the spread of the disease. In the Proleek exclusion zone, nearly 13,500 sheep and 3,000 cattle have been slaughtered since the outbreak was confirmed last Thursday.
The visit to Louth will be Minister Walsh's first since foot and mouth was confirmed in the area. He is expected to issue a statement later this afternoon.
PA