The former Consumer Association of Ireland chairman and veterinarian, Mr Peter Dargan, has strongly criticised the State's cattle-killing programme, which he insisted was contrary to the interests of Irish consumers.
"It is appalling that we have been given £1 billion by the EU to grow animals and now we're spending £300 million just to destroy them," said Mr Dargan, who is the CAI spokesman on food.
Whatever food of quality the consumer wanted should be available - with the appropriate safety measures built in to the production process, Mr Dargan argued. "The consumer is prepared to pay the price for this." But the emphasis on the priority of food over agriculture was being ignored, he claimed.
People were scared, Mr Dargan said, when they opened their newspapers to find details of farmers behaving badly - importing a BSE-infected animal from Northern Ireland, for example, or injecting slurry into cows. Neither was it good enough to claim that meat was safer now than it was 30 years ago, he insisted. "That is simply not true."
The IFA president, Mr Tom Parlon, reacted angrily to Mr Dargan's comments. "As late as today," he said, "the chief executive of the independent Food and Safety Authority, Dr Paddy Wall, said that given the present controls that are in place, beef is safer now than it ever was in Ireland."
It now looked as if Mr Dargan disagreed with the FSA, "as well as every other agency and interest in agriculture. Under the circumstances, I would ask Mr Dargan to withdraw his scaremongering allegations".