Imagine trying to run a business on the following basis - you spend a year developing a product, you've perfected it, invested in it, and your market is waiting. Then, just as it’s ready to sell, it disappears.
This is a reality for hundreds of farmers all over Ireland, north and south, whose cattle and sheep are being stolen and being sold onto the black market.
We spoke to one farmer in County Mayo who had almost €15,000 worth of cattle taken from his farm in June of last year, “nine of me best” as he told us. Now more than a year later, there is no trace, they have vanished. But his bills have not. He still has to pay for the feed that he bought to fatten his animals (feed is sold on credit), he also has to pay his insurance, electricity and yes water, farmers have been paying water bills for years.
He says it is now that he is really feeling the pinch, the bills are here, but the cattle to sell to pay them are not. In this case, the farmer’s son depends on the enterprise to feed his pregnant wife and their child. He is unemployed.
With a tear in his eye, the farmer tells us, “there’s no work for him (his son) and he doesn't want to emigrate, cause if everyone emigrates outside the village there’ll be no one left at all”, an awkward silence falls and his son responds, “it’s tough”. We are speaking to these farmers in Bohola in County Mayo, almost 120 kilometres from the border. This is not just a border problem, one of the highest theft rates is in Limerick.
Every month all over Ireland cattle and sheep are being stolen from farms. In most cases they are ready for slaughter, ‘finished’, within hours of being stolen they are killed in make-shift abattoirs, the meat then distributed and sold at a knock down price.
The Department of Agriculture say that it is an insignificant problem, and very small in scale.
Almost 1.5 million cattle are slaughtered in the Republic of Ireland every year, so far this year just over 100 cattle have been stolen. Last year 319 were robbed. Whilst the numbers are low, the impact and potential danger to public health is high.
North of the border since 2010 Prime Time has seen details of the number of cattle stolen, the figure runs to thousands, the number of sheep stolen also runs into several thousand.
Outside of the human impact there are food safety and health concerns too. The meat from these stolen animals is being slaughtered illegally, evidence of that has been found in illicit border abattoirs, more than once. The last facility was found by customs officers on the Armagh/Louth border - they suspected diesel laundering but instead they found a sophisticated and well-equipped unapproved slaughter house.
On Thursday nights report we speak to one of the most well-respected food safety and food fraud experts in the UK and Ireland. He says there is evidence that meat is being processed and sold on the black market, “out of the back of vans, through fast food outlets”.
We’ll address that and other issues in our piece on Prime Time tonight, 9.35pm, RTÉ One.
Fran McNulty
