DEAR SIR:

The decision to move our out-of-hours fees temporarily to €500 for a farm visit and €200 for a clinic visit is solely mine.

We have had a corporate structure as Donegal Animal Hospital Ltd with shareholders in our practice for several years. Any recent changes in our present structure enhances our chance of survival as a practice.

I set our fees and this temporary fee increase was forced on me by an acute shortage of cattle vets, due to illness, available to do our night roster.

I am a farmer myself and totally understand that the suckler farmers in west Donegal are on their knees but at least having someone available who is expensive is a lesser evil than the phone going unanswered.

It is easy to be critical in the south of us providing a service to farmers on the Atlantic seaboard from our base in Letterkenny. Many of our clients are west of the Gweebarrra fault line and a round trip of three hours on bad twisting dangerous roads.

It’s a five-hour mission to do a C-section in the Rosses or Gaothdobhair on big, well-fed Charolais cows. This is not the Golden Vale with practices at every crossroads and easy-calving Friesians.

I suggest a more constructive line of questioning is to ask why there are no other practices west of us? Why has no one shouted about the six practices in west Donegal which closed in my professional lifetime? Why is no one asking why our upland farmers are so reliant on night-time emergency vets? The rest of the county has progressed with herd and flock health programmes. Is it because all the Teagasc advisory offices are based solely in the east of the country that there is an over-reliance on vets for an ambulance service in west Donegal? Who is advising on sire selection and nutrition? Some of our west Donegal farmer clients have a dystocia rate of 20%. Some of our vets are left ready to collapse with exhaustion on farms after doing five C-sections in a row in a 24-hour shift.

One cannot get Irish cattle vets for love nor money to practice in Donegal. We are reliant on fantastic Germans, Poles, Croatians and Hungarians.

Our short-term solution which we have begun is to build a calving unit for sections to be brought to us and educate our younger farmers to do their calvings, milk fevers, prolapses and C-sections.

A medium-term solution is education of farmers to minimise the need for an ambulatory service. Long-term, it is up to the Minster for Education to reform UCD entrance requirements and the CAO so we are in safe Donegal hands there.