THE deputy chief veterinary officer at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM), Michael Sheahan, said he has “less confidence” in the passport system following the RTÉ Investigates exposé aired last week, which exposed alleged fraudulent passport behaviour in the industry, as well as putting the safety of the food chain at risk.

Speaking in front of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Sheahan said the footage of microchips allegedly being inserted into a horse and the horse getting through the slaughter system was a “surprise”, adding that the department have some “theories” on what is happening.

Sheahan was referring to footage shown at Ireland’s only horse abattoir, Shannonside Foods Ltd in Straffan, Co Kildare. Operations at the plant have since been fully suspended.

“It’s not as simple as sticking a microchip in a horse and you get through the system. It doesn’t work like that. The microchip has to be registered on our central database. It has to be a correct microchip, and then it has to match the passport.

“So just simply sticking a microchip in a horse, that won’t allow you to beat the system. We’ve been thinking about it, we’re not sure yet, how did this individual horse beat the system, we have some theories,” Sheahan told the committee, adding: “Ultimately the buck stops with the Department of Agriculture. We have overall responsibility for issues to do with identification of horses.”

In 2014, the DAFM brought in a central identification database. “The seven passport issuing organisations; everything they record is transferred to our central database. Things have tightened up considerably. If you had asked me three weeks ago, how good is our horse identification system now, I would have said ‘not perfect, but good’. I have less confidence it is now,” Sheahan added.

EU meeting

Sheahan said one of the biggest issues seems to be the “loophole”, whereby the central databases in different countries don’t correspond. “Every country has a central database, they’re required to have it by EU law. But it would appear that there’s a loophole that, in some countries, even though the horse is marked on their database as being not eligible for the food chain, it appears that those databases don’t talk to each other.”

Sheahan said a resolution is going to take an “EU approach” beginning with a meeting of the European Commission next Wednesday, bringing the member states together in an effort to close that loophole.

Horses slaughtered

The committee heard that the abattoir in Straffan is slaughtering less than 2,000 horses a year. Some 1,428 were slaughtered at the plant last year (2023), while, to date, 641 thoroughbreds have been slaughtered at the plant so far in 2024. The number of sport horses was not available.

Sheahan told the committee that it should be possible to continue slaughtering horses in humane conditions in Ireland as the alternative, exporting for slaughter, could make the situation worse.

“The scale of the horse slaughter industry in Ireland is now very small compared to what it was. Back in 2013, we had four slaughter plants killing horses. We killed, at a peak, 24,000 horses. In line with a significant decrease in the horse population, there’s been a significant decline in the number of horses being slaughtered.”