Butchers should be required to display signs showing the country of origin of loose chicken fillets on sale in their shops, a leading food scientist said yesterday.
Dr Wayne Anderson, chief specialist in food science with the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI), said that at present butchers were required to indicate only the country of origin of beef.
"So why not chicken? They should also have to indicate where chicken comes from but there is no legal requirement on them to do so at the moment," he said.
Dr Anderson's call for change, which has been supported by the Irish Farmers' Association, follows publication of the findings of an FSAI investigation which found that chicken fillets being imported from the Netherlands for the catering sector and butchers had been injected with cattle and pig proteins, as well as high quantities of water to "bulk them up".
The fillets imported from the Netherlands are believed to have originated in Thailand or Brazil, the largest exporters of chicken to the EU, and would have been cheaper than Irish-produced chicken.
Dr Anderson said, however, that consumers should not have food safety concerns as the chicken factories in South East Asia and South America would have been granted EU import licences only after inspection.
Regulations which permitted the labelling of the chicken fillets as Dutch, even if it originated in Thailand, needed to be clarified, Dr Anderson said.
"If chicken is produced in Thailand and processed in an EU member-state, it's widely accepted that it can be stated as produced in the Netherlands. There certainly seems to be a grey area in the legislation on this," he said.
"The same could be done here but I've no knowledge of any processors here bringing in chicken from Thailand and labelling it as Irish," he added.
The FSAI investigation also looked at Irish chicken fillets but found no foreign protein in them. It did not examine their water or meat content.
"I don't know if we will look at that again but the Department of Agriculture might be interested in looking at it," Dr Anderson suggested.
The director general of the Irish Poultry Processors' Association, Dr Pat Mulvehill, said there was no way Irish fillets could be injected with water to make them look bigger as there were Department of Agriculture inspectors in every processing plant.
He said 50,000 tonnes of poultry was imported last year. The vast bulk of it was used in the catering trade but "a substantial amount" was sold by butchers and in supermarkets as loose fillets.
Fillets recently imported from eight Dutch companies, now under investigation by EU and Dutch authorities, have been isolated. Dr Anderson said the FSAI was "still desperately waiting" for the Dutch authorities to come back to it with an explanation for its findings.
IFA president Mr John Dillon said retailers and the catering sector should be obliged to declare the country of origin of chicken fillets. "In the retail sector it is often not possible for the consumer to identify country of origin of loose chicken fillets. Ireland needs tighter labelling laws to close this loophole."