The Border was sealed, sporting events were cancelled and the countryside was out of bounds as Ireland fought to curb foot-and-mouth
TEN YEARS ago this week, Irish people were facing what many believed to be our greatest crisis since the second World War.
St Patrick’s Day parades had been cancelled, so too had the Cheltenham Festival as well as all racing in Ireland, and some Six Nations rugby games had been rescheduled. The countryside was out of bounds to nearly all but farmers. The Catholic Church said people did not have to go to Mass on Sundays and all GAA games were cancelled, as were many social functions.
The Border had been sealed off and there were gardaí on all 200 crossings. Food imports from Britain and Northern Ireland had been banned and travellers were being advised not to go to Britain.
This had nothing to do with the economy or the Troubles, but the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, which had broken out in Britain and was officially confirmed there on February 20th, 2001.
The disease, which was probably imported from Asia in aircraft food which was fed to pigs on a Northumberland farm in early February, was already spreading swiftly across Britain before it was officially confirmed at Cheale, Essex, in an abattoir. By the end of February, 26 cases had been confirmed and three cases were being investigated in Scotland.
The British authorities were slow to react and did not immediately stop the movement of animals except for slaughter. Infected sheep had moved through Hexham market and had been dispersed across the country.
Before the then Northern Ireland minister for agriculture, Bríd Rodgers, had banned the import of animals from Britain, an Irish livestock dealer, John Walsh, bought 271 sheep at Carlisle market on February 19th. The paperwork he presented said the sheep were going for slaughter to a meat plant in Lurgan, Co Armagh, a perfectly legitimate movement at the time.
On the way to the ferry and to Lurgan, the animals stopped for a time at a farm in Lockerbie – which became the location of Scotland’s first outbreak of the disease.
The sheep did not arrive in Lurgan but were diverted to a farm in Meigh, south Armagh, where they were rested overnight. As payment for lairage, the farmer kept 21 of the animals. By 4am the following day, the sheep had crossed the Border and been delivered to a Roscommon meat plant with their British ear-tags removed.
They were presented at the plant in the name of an innocent sheep farmer from Westport, Co Mayo, slaughtered, packed and labelled and dispatched to France as fresh Irish lamb.
As a result of this illegal action, Ireland North and South got its first case of foot-and-mouth disease in 60 years.
On March 1st, the disease was confirmed in Meigh. For three weeks, stringent controls were put in place in the Republic to prevent it crossing the Border.
The damage had already been done, though, and on March 22nd the then taoiseach Bertie Ahern told a hushed Dáil that foot-and-mouth had made its way across the Border to a farm at Proleek, Co Louth, on the Cooley peninsula, three miles from Meigh.
The location could not have been better from a containment point of view. Surrounded on three sides by water, the area was simply cut off from the rest of the country and all stock there slaughtered.
While Irish people watched with horror as the television images from Britain showed carcasses were burned out in the open, the Cooley slaughter began. By the time it was over, 48,744 sheep, 1,123 cattle, 166 goats, 2,908 pigs and 280 deer were dead.
Elsewhere, 3,826 sheep and 207 cattle were culled as efforts were made to trace the movement of the illegally-imported sheep from Carlisle in England.
Restrictions on animal movements remained for most of the year and it was well into 2002 before normality was restored.
According to former minister for agriculture Joe Walsh the crisis exposed the weaknesses and strengths of the industry here and allowed new controls to be implemented. These included the licensing of cattle dealers, which ultimately led to the tagging of all sheep. It also meant a strengthening of the computer-based system of cattle movements in the State.
It had also brought to the attention of the Irish public the importance of agriculture to the economy and produced a spirit where people were prepared to work together for the public good.
Also heavily involved in the crisis was Prof Patrick Wall of UCD, then head of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. Today he criticises the fact the biosecurity measures introduced then did not remain in place. They might, he added, have prevented the arrival and spread here of IBR (infectious bovine rhinotracheitis), an acute, contagious virus disease of cattle.