Animal Welfare Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-18 ============================================================ Martin Heydon (FG), Kildare South I thank Senator Andrews for raising this point. It is something I am deeply passionate about. Reform of the legislation governing dog welfare is a key priority for me and for the Government. In order to bring a coherent approach to dog control, policy and legislative responsibility under both the Control of Dogs Act 1986 and the Dog Breeding Establishments Act 2010 transferred to my Department last year as part of our programme for Government commitments. In both cases, local authorities retain responsibility for operational and enforcement matters. I am pleased to confirm the dog breeding establishments (amendment) Bill 2026 is being actively progressed. The Bill has 17 heads and addresses three broad areas, namely, welfare and breeding standards, sales and record keeping and administration and enforcement. I brought the heads of Bill to Cabinet and received approval to go ahead and draft the full legislation. On welfare and breeding standards, the Bill will place enhanced duties on operators covering the socialisation and habituation of dogs. It will introduce a four-litter lifetime limit and a one-litter-per-year cap, set minimum and maximum breeding age limits, prohibit the mating of bitches that have had two prior Caesarean sections and introduce a ban on in-breeding, which people might presume already exists in legislation but does not. We will also outlaw that awful practice. In response to the Senator’s earlier point, this is about ensuring the legislation is robust. I also have to work to make sure any current or future legislation is properly enforced. A mandatory minimum staffing ratio of one full-time equivalent staff member per 20 breeding females will also be placed on a statutory footing, with a two-year transition period to allow operators to adjust in a timely and responsible manner. The Bill will ban third-party sales from dog breeding establishments. This goes to the point the Senator made about people buying dogs online. I have heard anecdotal stories of people with their much-loved family pet and when you ask them how they acquired it and where they got it, they will say they met somebody in a public car park somewhere and they paid for that puppy. However, they had no sense of where that puppy had been bred, what the conditions were like, what the mother of that dog was, whether she was put straight back into pup and the likes. Under the new legislation, it will be unlawful for operators to sell dogs under eight weeks of age or to sell them from any premises other than where they were born and reared. Prior to any sale, prospective buyers must be shown the pup’s biological mother on site. This is a really practical and a seismic change because there are a lot of people out there who passionately believe in this legislation, love their family dog but do not know where their puppy came from and probably do not want to know. If we make the process that they have to go and see where it is, that will make a very significant change in people who have happily turned a blind eye just to get that much-loved family pet. We need to reflect on that and we need to reflect on the role charities and others can play. There is a significant role here that many other well-structured organisations can offer dogs and much-loved family pets for future operation as well. Those who carry out dog breeding properly and well will have nothing to fear from this legislation because it puts them on a firm footing, puts a proper structure in place and takes away the veil that has hung over the whole process to date. On administration and enforcement, authorised officers will be granted new powers to seize and detain dogs where it is reasonably suspected that an offence has been committed. Penalties for the most serious offences will be significantly increased, with fines of up €250,000 and-or five years imprisonment, bringing sanctions under the 2010 Act in line with those available under the Animal Health and Welfare Act 2013. I have not included a hard legislative cap on the total number of breeding females at a dog breeding establishment in the present draft heads of Bill, which is what we are currently dealing with. Legal advice indicates that there are difficulties with such an approach. There are also practical issues that would have to be explored further. An establishment can in principle increase in size and staffing to accommodate more animals without necessarily affecting welfare outcomes. My Department will engage with the Office of the Attorney General to explore the question of a cap further during the formal drafting stage and it has not been ruled out. This is draft legislation that will go through all Stages in the Dáil and Seanad. There is a long process for this to go through. --- 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/seanad/2026-06-18/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:05+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-18