It is totally ironic that the very week Irish farmers were celebrating the opening of the lucrative Chinese market to our beef, it emerged that the Department of Agriculture and the Foods Safety Authority of Ireland were investigating one more suspected horsemeat scandal.

This is a matter of shooting ourselves in the hoof for want of adequate legislation to protect us against the wiles of those who would use the horse for ill-gotten gains.

Yes, legislation was put in place by then Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney in the wake of our last horsemeat scare. It mandated that all equines in Ireland should be registered, microchipped and have a passport.

However that law simply did not go far enough. It in fact gave rise to the existence of the dreaded ‘white passports’, which have no parentage or DNA recorded, and are useless in terms of preventing a scam similar to the one now being investigated.

Some 5,000 of these misnamed white passports have been issued since 2013 and they are a curse on the system.

Happily, recent figures from Horse Sport Ireland indicate that the number of these documents being issued is gradually declining.

What appears to have happened in this case is that fraudulently acquired microchips were programmed to match clean passports which indicated that the animals involved were suitable for human consumption.

This in fact was not the case. The true microchip indicated that the horses involved had been injected with substances like bute, thus rendering them ineligible for inclusion in the human food chain.

Horse consumption

I wish that humans never decided to eat horses. But, be that as it may, if somebody in Belgium or France is part of a horse eating tradition they deserve to have assurances that what is on their plate has not been injected with a substance that is dangerous.

The animals involved in this current investigation may in fact predate the latest legislation regarding identification documents of Irish horses.

But looking down the line there are a large number of animals with white passports that pose a threat.

This inability to truly identify a horse or pony reminds me of an incident I once witnessed.

A young man did not have identity papers to get into a dance so he took a chance and pulled out a photo of himself.

The doorman looked at it and said: “That’s you, okay”, and let him in. White books are like that – a pass but no real identification.

In order to bring Ireland fully up to date on this matter it is essential that new legislation be introduced which would mandate that every equine born in Ireland must not only be microchipped but also have its DNA clearly recorded on its passport.

Only by doing this can we prevent one more damaging horsemeat scandal raising its ugly head in years to come.

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