ICMSA welcome North-South ‘pilot scheme’ co-ordination on bTB

Responding to the announcement that both jurisdictions, the Republic’s Department of Agriculture, Food & the Marine and N.I.’s Dept of Agriculture, Environment & Rural Affairs have launched a ‘pilot’ scheme to co-ordinate attempts to tackle bTB in the specific Donegal/North-West region ICMSA’s Deputy President, Eamon Carroll, who said it was logical, timely, move and signalled a realisation that “the old ways of looking at these endemic problems” have to change.

Mr. Carroll said that bTB and the factors driving the recent surge in incidences did not respect borders or observe the niceties of jurisdiction, neither should our responses. He said that ICMSA had long held that farmers – both North & South – were ready for a more radical approach to dealing with bTB provided that they could be convinced that (A) it would be effective and (B) that all parties to the problem would engage and make the changes necessary to have an effect.

“In fairness to Minister Heydon and his counterpart in the North, Andrew Muir, this is the kind of move that farmers want to see because it signals that the old ways are recognised now as no longer adequate. What we hear, time and again, from farmers in every part of the State is that they are ready for a change and that was signalled very clearly in the ESRI survey. Farmers will now tell you that if we keep doing what we have been doing, then we are going to keep getting what we have always got. And after 76 years it’s high time to accept that we need to go beyond the old ‘remedies’ and start looking at all the ways that the science says are contributing to the problem before systematically addressing them all. The idea that bTB is less of a problem in Tyrone than it is in Monaghan – or vice versa – is just absurd and this announcement signals that at administrative levels that is understood and we are going to see exchange of data, information and coordinated responses”, he said.

Ends      20 February 2026

Eamon Carroll, 087-1622049

Deputy President, ICMSA

Or

Cathal MacCarthy, 087-6168758

ICMSA Press Office