Animal Welfare Dail Éireann — 2026-03-19 ============================================================ Martin Heydon (FG), Kildare South A throwaway comment on the floor of Parliament where she says that there is hardly any traceability is not borne out by the facts. The financial support my colleagues in the Department of agriculture and I are happy to provide for the Horse and Greyhound Racing Fund has seen increased allocations towards the area of welfare. On the question that was raised, I want to look at some of the success of the previous strategy on animal welfare from 2021 to 2025. Funding to welfare charities increased from the 2020 budget of €2.4 million to over €6 million distributed to over 100 organisations in 2023, 2024 and 2025. We saw the banning of fur farming. The Farm Animal Welfare Advisory Council was relaunched and the first chair of the UCD school of veterinary animal welfare and veterinary ethics was appointed. I will look to building on that in the next strategy. --- 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/2026-03-19/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:45+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-03-19