Minister of State for Agriculture Pippa Hackett has been a vocal supporter of local abattoirs and, in April 2019, put forward the idea that farmers should be given a tax incentive for killing their own animals for personal consumption.

She has strongly promoted the idea of having a connection between the meat people buy and the farm it came from, but said that this is getting harder as the number of butcher shops and small abattoirs has declined.

“I believe it’s really important to eat locally produced food.

“Of course, you can’t get any more local than your own beef or lamb so when we started farming, my husband Mark and I were very keen to butcher our own animals,” Minister Hackett said.

“From a welfare perspective, we wanted the journey time to the abattoir to be as short as possible so we used one in Portarlington for a while, but unfortunately it closed a couple of years ago, so now we have to travel to Mountrath.

“That abattoir is about 30 minutes away, not as close as we would like. It certainly brings home to me what a pity it would be if the small number of local abattoirs that are still in existence were to come under further threat.”