The Irish Grain and Feed Association said yesterday it was coming under unfair attack by those who were seeking to blame it for spreading BSE through animal feed to the Irish herd in the 1990s.
Mr Seamus Funge, IGFA director, said his industry believed that at all times meat-and-bone meal produced in Ireland was never harmful to animals. "However, there were a number of unlicensed plants operating in the early part of the last decade and they were using feed of questionable origin," he said.
When the issue of cross-contamination of feed in Irish factories arose in March 1996, the compounding of cattle feed was segregated from pig and poultry rations, which contain meat-and-bone meal.
He said the banning of fishmeal in ruminant feeds by the EU in December would create significant nutritional and animal welfare problems, which the feed industry could overcome only with the greatest difficulty.
As Ireland was the only country which did not seek a derogation from the fishmeal ban, feed manufacturers in the North were offering feed containing fishmeal to outlets in the Republic. Production of animal compound feeds was likely to fall by half a million tonnes this year to 3.25 million tonnes, because of the BSE crisis, he predicted.
The Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, is preparing a report on the destruction scheme for next Monday's meeting of EU agriculture ministers in Brussels. The total culled so far is 26,204 animals.
The Department of Agriculture says it has had no complaint from the Romanian authorities over an incident in which Irish beef - banned from Romania since 1997 because of the BSE scare - was seized in one of the country's orphanages.
According to a report in the French newspaper Le Monde yesterday, the discovery that handicapped children and adults were being fed "potentially infected" Irish beef had caused a "scandal" in Romania, where large numbers of orphans were one of the legacies of the Ceausescu regime.
It was reported that 886 tins of beef from an Irish charity arrived in the orphanage at Negru Voda in December.
But the Department of Agriculture here said it had had no communication from the Romanian authorities about the incident. A spokesman said that where such a query arose, the Department would trace the source of the beef and advise the authorities of the country involved, where, and in what conditions it had been produced.
Export-approved beef was produced under stringent conditions, which had allowed Ireland to continue to trade worldwide since the BSE crisis, he said. Romania's continued ban was a matter for that country, he added.