Animal Health and Welfare (Ban on Fox Hunting) Bill 2025: Second Stage [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-17
============================================================

Richard O'Donoghue (II), Limerick County

I watched everyone standing up here with notebooks in front of them when speaking. What they were saying was rhetorical stuff. It was the same stuff coming out of their mouths. There is no urban and rural divide here. I have people from an urban area who come out hunting in our area and they have done it for decades. I am from a farming background. I live in an area where there is cover behind me. The hunt comes through the back of our land every season. I have seen the devastation a fox has caused when a cow was calving outside in the field. I have seen what it has done to lambs. I have also seen what the hunt has done in curtailing foxes in an area. In our own place, we had two sets of hens. We always kept hens. They were actually savaged so now I do not have hens. People are saying the foxes are making their way into the city and they are. People are feeding foxes in the city. If that is what they want to do, that is what they want to do. If there is overpopulation and no hunting, that will mean we cannot defend against what a fox does to our animals. A woman in Cavan got six stitches during the week defending her chickens. We are not talking about all day, every day. There is a hunting season as there is a slurry season. There is a season for everything. People stood up here today and said they are not from a veterinary background. There are vets involved in this. The veterinary service is involved in this.
The Social Democrats last year tried to ban greyhound hunting. They were on the television saying it was desperate. They were out at the front of the House saying they had a greyhound but it was not a greyhound at all, it was a lurcher.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:29+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-17