THE TRACEABILITY system for pork “was not worth the paper it was written on”, former minister of State for agriculture Ned O’Keeffe, has told an Oireachtas inquiry into the recent contamination crisis.
Mr O’Keeffe told the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture that manufacturers of pork products changed labels and product during the dioxin scare.
Mr O’Keeffe, who owned one of the largest pig farms in the country until his retirement from farming, was advised by committee chairman Johnny Brady that he must take any information he had to the authorities.
He criticised secondary pork processors in Ireland, who make pork product from pigmeat, alleging they used vast amounts of imported pigmeat and said the Irish traceability system for pork “was not worth the paper it was written on”. “Once a pig leaves the factory, there is no question of any traceability because of the way the industry is set up here,” he said.
He accused the meat section of Enterprise Ireland of promoting the secondary processing pig sector to the detriment of the major producers and said no major processor in Ireland was involved in packing.
Prof Patrick Wall, associate professor of public health, University College Dublin, said the crisis had been a disaster and lessons would have to be learned from it.
“Ireland for the next 20 years will replace Belgium as the case study in dioxin contamination,” he told the committee, describing the crisis as “a spectacular own goal”.
“If you key Irish pork into any of the internet search engines, you will come up with a litany of stories about this incident that we will have to live with for many years to come. We did a disastrous job to allow it happen in the first place and it will take years for Ireland to regain its reputation,” he said.
Mr O’Keeffe said we should treat as equal all risks along the food chain and suggested that one good systems audit of food safety in all plants was much more effective than numerous inspections.
He warned that the next crisis would involve microbes and that Ireland needed to develop and maintain a database of pathogens identified in feed, livestock, food and humans to facilitate the investigation of outbreaks. We would need to ensure the health status of our livestock was the best in Europe and “that is a claim we cannot make now,” he added.
Mr O’Keeffe called for the strengthening of our reference laboratory facilities for forensic microbiology and chemical analysis to support surveillance initiatives.
He said Ireland’s response to the crisis had been extremely rapid and showed the benefits of having an independent agency for consumers, the Food Safety Authority. Mr O’Keeffe said in light of its performance, the budgetary decision to amalgamate it with the Irish Medicines Board and the Office of Tobacco Control should be reviewed.
The committee had earlier heard evidence from Mary Wallace, Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children and its chief medical officer, Dr Tony Holohan, who said the recall of pork products was a correct decision from both a public health and a trading point of view.
Dr Holohan said the management of the incident, including the recall, was “swift and decisive and demonstrated to the public that their health was the primary concern”.
Ms Wallace said her department was involved with the Department of Agriculture in a review of the crisis. The hearings continue next Wednesday in the Dáil.