Sixty years ago this autumn Charles Haughey, as Minister for Agriculture, announced the successful completion of Ireland’s first intensive campaign to eradicate TB.

At a function in the Silversprings Hotel in Cork on 19 October 1965 Haughey claimed that the 11-year battle to control the disease – which had cost £38m (around €44m today) and resulted in the removal of over 850,000 cattle – was effectively at an end. With the national herd fully tested by then, Haughey stated that all restrictions on cattle movements were to be withdrawn for the first time since 1954.

The impetus for a national eradication scheme had come from a UK government decision to have its herd TB-free by 1961.

There was a risk that Irish cattle would be excluded from the crucial British market at that point if the disease was not eradicated here.

This would have been a disaster for the Irish livestock sector, given that the live trade was the bedrock of the farm sector, with annual exports to Britain generally ranging from 500,000 head to 650,000 head.

The incidence of the disease in the Irish herd was not exactly known but a pilot testing scheme carried out in Bansha, Co Tipperary, found that 30% of the cattle and 44% of cows were infected. On the back of the Bansha study, a pilot eradication scheme was introduced in Limerick and Clare in 1952.

This was followed by a voluntary programme in 1954 and a compulsory scheme in 1957. By 1959, the Department of Agriculture was paying farmers £15/head (€17.75 today) of a grant for each reactor cow slaughtered.

While the persistence of TB over the last six decades has called into question the judgment of Haughey – and that of the Department of Agriculture top brass – in announcing the end of the eradication campaign in 1965, figures from the period supported the assessment that the back had been broken on the disease.

TB testing.\ Donal O' Leary

The incidence of TB in herds in 1965 was just over 2%, compared to an estimated 17% in 1953. However, as is now well known, TB levels can build from the smallest of reservoirs.

History shows that the TB scheme of the 1950s and early 1960s failed to eradicate the disease, but it would be incorrect to classify the initiative a failure. The scheme protected the vital live trade to Britain and Europe, while the flood of subsidised reactors enabled the beef processing industry to expand exponentially.

Browne breaks the stigma of TB

Protecting Ireland’s vital access to the British market for live cattle was not the only reason for tackling TB in 1950s.

Eradication of bovine TB tallied with efforts by successive Governments in the late 1940s and 1950s to stamp out the disease in the general population.

Indeed, Jack Nagle, the secretary general at the Department of Agriculture, told British farm leaders in 1961 that Ireland was motivated to eradicate the disease by both human and animal health considerations. TB was a major killer in Ireland during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

By the early 1950s, there were still nearly 7,000 cases per year, with almost 10,000 people dying from TB between 1950 and 1960.

These death rates were compounded by the stigma of TB, which was viewed by many as a disease of the poor.

Ireland’s performance in relation to TB in the human population changed with arrival of better drug therapies after World War II, and with the appointment of Noel Browne as the Minister for Health in 1948. Throughout the 1950s, researchers developed combination drug therapies to work alongside streptomycin, keeping TB in remission for longer periods of time.

Browne’s championing of these therapies, and the development of sanatoriums to treat patients with the disease, meant that death levels from TB collapsed in the 1950s.

The death rate from TB fell from 1.25 people per 1,000 in 1945 to 0.54 people per 1,000 in 1952. There were no new cases of the disease recorded in 1958.