The Department of Agriculture and Food is confident that the number of cases of BSE in the national herd will fall in the coming year from last year's record level of 333.
Already, the spokesman said, there had been a 30 per cent drop in the number of animals being detected with the disease in the September to December 2002 period.
"We expect that this trend will continue as the older animals work their way through the system," he said.
He was repeating a hope expressed late last year by the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, who said the disease could be eliminated within this decade.
"The underlying trend remains positive, and the increasing age profile of animals confirmed with the disease indicates that the enhanced controls introduced in 1996 and early 1997 are proving effective," he said.
However, one of the unfortunate facts of last year's figures was the discovery of three animals with BSE that were born after 1997. It had been thought there could be no exposure to contaminated meat and bonemeal, thought to be the cause of the continuing presence of the disease.
This raised a question about the security of the fodder controls on Irish farms, where there has been a ban on feeding meat and bonemeal to cattle since 1989. The feeding of meat and bonemeal to pigs and poultry continued to be legal.
However, it was discovered in 1996 in Britain and here, that contamination of cattle feed by infected meat and bonemeal was continuing at mills and compounding plants and it was only at that stage that the segregation of cattle and pig and poultry feed took place.
The three young animals which caught the disease came from farms where poultry feed had been or was being used and this could account for their infection.
In the first two weeks of this year, there have been 15 new cases of the disease diagnosed, most of them in the active surveillance programme which had been ordered by the EU to determine exact levels of infection in the Union.
Under that programme, which was introduced here in July 2001, over 662,000 tests were carried out in 2001 and 688,000 in 2002, including the testing of all animals over 30 months destined for the food chain.
The youngest animals reported so far this year were seven years old from two County Cavan farms. There other animals came from farms in Galway, Wexford, Leitrim, Kerry, Monaghan, Limerick, Meath, Cork and Cavan.