This article is from page 60 of the 2007-09-25 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 60 JPG
CLARE farmer and Chairman of ICMSA’s Beef & Cattle Committee, Martin McMahon, has welcomed as ‘a move in the right direction” the EU Commission’s new proposals for changing the currant age limit at which animals must be tested for BSE.
The Commission has _ proposed that the age limit for the BSE test be raised from 30 months to 42 months for healthy slaughtered animals pro- viding that the member state wish- ing to avail of the new age limit has declining or consistently low BSE prevalence and has implemented, for
at least six years, a full BSE testing scheme based on traceability and identification of live animals.
As well as this, each individual member state must also have en- forced, for at least six years, the com- munity legislation on total feed ban for farmed animals.
“We definitely meet all those crite- ria and ICMSA will be pushing hard for the Government to expedite the matter. he said.
“We think it’s unacceptable to be talking about dragging this matter into the next year when a bit of de- termination and the full deployment of the facts should see the European Commission accepting the incontro-
vertible facts that there is no need for any Irish animal to be tested before 42 months.
“We regard this movement by the Commission as a move in the right direction and we consider these pro- posals to be a testament to the pres- sure we’ve brought to bear on both the department and the Commission on the question of BSE age-limit testing, which, quite frankly, has been illogical and pointless for some considerable time now.”
Meanwhile, ICSA President Mal- colm Thompson, last week called for BSE testing in Ireland to be finished. The President of the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers Association 1s call-
ing for the ending of BSE testing to be phased out over the next couple of years.
According to Thompson, the inci- dence of BSE is rapidly declining, with just 41 positive results returned in over 850,000 tests carried out in cattle in 2006.
Thompson met with the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mary Cough- lan, last week and requested that she establish a timetable for the phasing out of BSE testing which he claims is costing farmers money while it is now unnecessary.
The ICSA President also claimed that the BSE testing sector had be- come an industry onto itself.