Northern Ireland could not have stopped illegal transports of infected cattle from the Republic during the foot-and-mouth crisis in 2001, a Northern Executive minister told colleagues.
Newly released files from Northern Ireland’s Public Record Office in Belfast illustrate the concerns felt then by Stormont ministers and officials about the spread of the disease, particularly because of the damage facing food exports from the North.
Highlighting the challenges, Northern Ireland’s minister for agriculture Bríd Rodgers said that a spread would require “considerable use” of RUC officers along the Border “in stopping vehicles and even slaughtering animals” along with support from the British Army.
“We have already acknowledged that it is impossible to seal the Border and the only real advantage of this course of action is presentational,” the SDLP minister told fellow Executive ministers.
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“ln the event of spread of the disease within Northern Ireland, we face enormous problems,” she said in a lengthy briefing note.
Every fresh case would require up to 100 people to contain the outbreak and to begin the slaughter of up to 300 sheep, or 100 cattle each day, excluding veterinarians.
“We estimate that it would take only three or four concurrent outbreaks to overwhelm us,” Rodgers warned.
The outbreak of the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease, which was first found in an Essex abattoir in February 2001, led to the culling of millions of animals.
It led to the banning of the export of meat from the United Kingdom and spread rapidly, quickly leading to the reporting of a small number of cases in the Republic and Northern Ireland.
By early March 2001, some 4,000 animals had been slaughtered and buried in Co Louth, while the Department of Agriculture in Dublin had told Stormont it had found sheep that had gone “missing” from a consignment from Carlisle.
“The outbreak in Louth is a setback, but as long as it is confined to the single case, I do not believe it represents a dramatic deterioration in the situation,” said Rodgers.
Even by then, Stormont was bidding in talks with the European Union and with London to have Northern Ireland excluded from the EU ban on exports from the United Kingdom as a whole.
Rodgers said that she had spoken with Ireland’s then European commissioner David Byrne “to press our case, and I am confident of his support”.
However, the hopes voiced in Rodgers’ early March briefing document that the outbreak of foot-and-mouth could be confined to South Armagh and North Louth were dashed in April when cases were found in Tyrone and Antrim.
The handling of the crisis by the Department of Agriculture in Dublin under Fianna Fáil minister Joe Walsh and by Rodgers is now viewed as “a model of successful cross-Border co-operation”.
In her briefing note, Rodgers accepted that Stormont’s disinfection efforts at the Border “are clearly much less impressive” than those employed by the Southern authorities.
“There is no doubt that the travelling public expect a serious attempt to clean vehicles entering Northern Ireland and will continue to make a comparison between the two administrations,” she said.
However, an upgrading of the Border disinfection efforts was “beyond the resources” of Stormont, and would, if required, have forced the drafting of too many officials from other necessary duties.
“The measures we have undertaken at the Border are under considerable scrutiny, and have the potential to cause considerable embarrassment,” the SDLP minister told colleagues.
“For presentational purposes, there would be advantage in maintaining an official presence at all 175 recognised Border crossing points,” she said, but that would require drafting in 2,000 people.
Even covering the 35 main crossing points on a 24-hour basis would need 600 people.
“This would have huge implications for the provision of other public services throughout Northern Ireland,” she said.
“Such an extension of our activity on the Border will not be effective, simply because fixed checkpoints can be easily bypassed over fields, or through forests, if someone really wants to move animals”.
Even by then, some agencies in Northern Ireland covering forestry and rivers had already stopped carrying out most, if not all, of their basic duties because of the pressures caused by the crisis.
