Saturday comment: Fivemiletown cull remains a PR disaster for DAERA
All the recommendations in the world would not be sufficient to cover over the cracks of just how badly Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) officials implemented the Fivemiletown cattle cull.
I don’t care how feral the animals in question had become: a way could and should have been found to euthanize them away from the public gaze. It’s not as if the logistics of culling cattle have never been worked through before in this part of the world. Experience of Foot and Mouth outbreaks back in the day should, at the very least, have left a suitable legacy in this regard.
But where the specifics of Fivemiletown are concerned, one key question arises: had the animals not been gathered in one place for the purposes of a previous TB test?
It’s unlikely that DAERA Minister, Andrew Muir, will have the job of implementing the Fivemiletown recommendations: he will be out of office by March of next year.
Putting controversial issues on the long finger seems to be the convenient way that politicians have of kicking cans down the road.
And they always have nameless civil servants to back them up in this regard.
The most graphic memory that most people will take away from the Fivemiletown incident was the confirmation of a badly wounded calf being found on a public road some days after the cull was supposed to have been completed.
The fact that the animal had not been found up to that point beggars belief. And again all of this comes back to the planning, or lack of it, that went into preparing for the cull in the first place.
Cattle are sentient animals: they feel pain and they experience fear. Anyone who has worked with livestock is fully aware of this reality.
The cattle at the very heart of the Fivemiletown issue were not responsible for the problems that arose. This accolade falls fairly squarely on the shoulders of the people involved in their management and those officials who decided their final fate.