Animal Diseases
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-14
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Martin Heydon (FG), Kildare South

Being clear and concise is important. Change is a challenge for everybody but we had to change our approach. The approach needs to be targeted, and that is what this is. We have to recognise where the key challenge is. A reduction in bovine TB levels in breeding herds, especially in dairy herds, is a key element in driving down bovine TB levels nationally. I think of the constituency and the region that the Deputy represents, where it would be predominantly sucklers and not as much dairy. The purchase of breeding heifers from high-risk dairy herds and bringing them up to the Deputy's area, where there might be low-risk herds, has been a contributor in the past to the spread of this disease in a significant way. These changes are all based on science and are targeted.
The Deputy is right, in that there was much criticism of some parts of the plan last year. I met a lot of resistance here to tackling the area of risk categorisation, but risk categorisation of the high-risk animal is the right thing to do. The simple fact that we started talking about that all last summer is indicative of the reduction of numbers we had, which I will outline in supplementary.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-05-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:56+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-14