Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I move:

That Dáil Éireann shall take note of the Report of the Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine entitled "Environmental Impact of Local Industrial Emissions in Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny", copies of which were laid before Dáil Éireann on 11th May, 2023.

As Chairman of the Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine, I am glad to present this report to the Dáil for discussion this evening. I pass on apologies from Deputy McGuinness, who is unavoidably absent. I welcome, in the Visitors Gallery, the farmer in question, Dan Brennan, and his friends and neighbours. To show how serious this issue is being taken by the agricultural community, the president of the IFA, Francie Gorman, and the president of the ICMSA, Denis Drennan, are also in the Visitors Gallery to show solidarity with Dan Brennan.

We did this report at the back end of last year. The committee's view was that it would have liked to have done an independent investigation. The legal representatives of the House stated, however, that that was beyond the remit of the committee. I thank the Minister for taking the time to be here to discuss this report. I earnestly request that an independent investigation be carried out into what happened on Dan Brennan's farm. I make the point that this was not on the current Minister's watch. It happened a number of years ago. We are talking about something that happened 20 years ago on Dan Brennan's farm in Castlecomer, County Kilkenny. However, there are a lot of unanswered questions. One thing is certain, which is that Dan Brennan has suffered huge mental anguish and financial hardship from what happened on his farm. I will raise a number of issues that I think will prove conclusively that an independent investigation needs to happen into the incidents on Dan Brennan's farm. I have three letters from vets who worked in the Department.

The first is dated is from Mr. Dolan on 15 October 2004, and who had spent two years on Dan Brennan's farm. He wrote that it had been confirmed that there was a severe problem of illthrift and stunting on this farm. No infectious cause of the problem had been identified to that date. The second is from Pat Kelleher, the head of the Department laboratory in Kilkenny dated 26 October 2004. He wrote that Mr. Brennan's farm is close to an EPA licensed facility, and the circumstances in which he finds himself are outside his control and could not have been foreseen.

The third letter is from John Moriarty on 24 May 2005, who said that the farm was now the subject of an interagency investigation consisting of the Department, the EPA, Teagasc, the health board and county council, in accordance with specific guidelines and protocols of investigation approaches to serious animal and human health problems. The activation by the State of this protocol is only made in exceptional cases. He wrote that they had carried out extensive testing, analysis and feed trials, but had not yet identified the cause of, or a possible solution to the problem. He continued that the circumstances in which Mr. Brennan found himself were outside his control and could not have been foreseen. He had implemented all recommendations given to him by the laboratory and Teagasc. Mr. Brennan had been extremely co-operative throughout the investigation and invested huge time and financial resources in assisting with the investigation. However, the problem continued.

I have the full copies of those letters if the Minister wants them, but they were three Department vets who stated clearly that an issue they could not comprehend was happening on Dan Brennan's farm. Why did the Department allow the laboratory to publish a report saying that Dan Brennan's disease management was the problem on his farm? Michael Sheridan, the deputy chief veterinary inspector, was one of 15 people present at a meeting in the Newpark Hotel in June 2006. Also present were representatives of Teagasc, Kilkenny regional veterinary laboratory, UCD's veterinary college, the EPA, Kilkenny County Council, Dan Brennan's vets, Limerick university and a scientist from North Carolina. The UCD veterinary college had done an epidemiology report on the farm and told the lab in Kilkenny and Michael Sheridan that it was not disease.

The veterinary college proved this later when it took over the farm. A blood test was taken every two weeks for a period of two years and no disease was found. This point is important. The veterinary college conducted extensive blood testing on the animals on Mr. Brennan's farm and no disease was found.

Why did the Department ignore Mr. Tom Slevin when he told them the cattle had bones growing in their soft tissues and their vertebrae could be cut with a knife? He had never seen this before in his 45 years as vet. Eleven of the 40 cattle died during the investigation and underwent post mortems. A number of important points need to be made about those port mortems. To say that bones growing in soft tissues was unusual would very much be an understatement. It was agreed that a pathologist from the UK would come - I believe two names were provided to the Department - to conduct independent post mortems, but that never came about. It is extraordinary that animals would have bones growing out of their kidneys, so there had to be an extraordinary reason for that to happen. The question of why independent post mortems were not conducted merits an investigation on its own. The results of the post mortems have never explained how animals could experience such internal issues.

In January 2003, Teagasc in Kilkenny wrote to the EPA to say there was something seriously wrong on Mr. Brennan's farm. The EPA stated that the management of the farm was not the problem and that it was down to something it had never seen before. Professor Jack Gardiner, then a dean at UCD, was commissioned to do a study. He concluded that 45 acres of the farm's trees, ditches and so on had been affected by pollution. In his view, it had been caused by fluoride. This is a serious point.

The case was taken to Brussels. I have watched videos of the hearings there. The video from 2012 shows Commissioner Mairead McGuinness, who was an MEP at the time, saying the joint research committee would examine the matter. Department of agriculture and the EPA officials were in attendance. Mr. Brennan got a phone call in July of that year from a person on the committee stating that there was political interference in his case and it would not progress any further. That was the end of the process in Brussels.

I wish to refer to a letter that was sent to the Minister. I received a copy of it. It came from a retired Circuit Court judge. According to the retired judge, an area of concern is that the issues in question were before a committee of the European Parliament from 2010 to 2012 and that, on the last occasion, the recording confirmed that the matter was adjourned for further investigation and was due to be revisited upon the completion of that investigation. In the judge's opinion, what followed was something that ought to cause a great deal of concern to those, particularly parliamentarians, who uphold proper standards and procedures in our democratic institutions. The case never came back before the committee and the investigation in question appears to have never taken place. Instead, the file was sent to Ireland, apparently for consideration by a parliamentary committee in this jurisdiction. However, there was not so much as a covering note in that regard. Even more troubling in the retired judge's opinion is that this decision was not made by the European committee sitting in either open or closed session. Rather, it appeared to have been decided upon by the committee secretariat. The strong suspicion of political interference is inescapable. The retired judge felt it was worth noting that the effect of this transfer was the investigation by the State, inter alia, of two organs of the State, those being, the Minister's Department and the EPA. Thereafter, it took a full decade before the matter came to be considered at municipal level, and then only after extremely dogged persistence on the part of Mr. Brennan and his advisers, without which it would undoubtedly have never seen the light of day.

Of even greater concern to the retired judge is that Mr. Brennan has been denied access to this file for all the years it has been in the country. The retired judge asks on what basis such a refusal can be justified. If there ever was such a basis, it had never been communicated to Mr. Brennan or his advisers or supporters. The retired judge wrote it would be interesting to hear how this could be justified when we next spoke on this matter in the Dáil. I know the Minister has the full letter. How a case can go to Brussels and not have its hearing concluded is difficult to explain.

In September 2004, Teagasc in Moorepark told the Department that cadmium poisoning was affecting the cattle on Mr. Brennan's farm and that it had even been found in the cattle sheds' chutes. The Department did not get the veterinary college to test for cadmium when the latter took over the investigation for the former. Mr. Jim Crilly, the vet for Teagasc at Moorepark, rang the college to tell it to test for cadmium. It was only then that it showed up in the blood of Mr. Brennan's cattle. In December 2008, the college told Mr. Brennan, Mr. Slevin and Mr. Michael Lambe that the cattle had 95% of the symptoms associated with cadmium poisoning. The college told us that the report would be out in 2009. It told Mr. Brennan and his vets that it would be ten to 12 years before any major improvement would be noticed. It told him not to get out of the cow business, as his cattle had built up a level of tolerance to the pollution.

It would be remiss of me not to recall Mr. Pádraig Walshe, a former president of the IFA who put a great deal of work into pressing Mr. Brennan's case.

When the college found high levels of cadmium in the cattle's blood, it wrote to the EPA to find out how much cadmium per hour was coming out of the factory. The EPA told the college it was 1 g per hour, but the reading was actually 1,000 times higher at 1 kg. Why did no alarm bells go off in the EPA when the test from 2004 showed that Ormonde Brick was emanating 88 times the amount of cadmium set out in the German guidelines? Why are there no records of any more cadmium testing being done at this point, especially after Teagasc at Moorepark told the Department that the cattle had cadmium poisoning? Teagasc found that, despite the fact that the cattle were eating 12.5% more than normal, they were losing weight. Sick or diseased cattle do not eat. Extensive trials were done on the farm. Cattle and fodder from a neighbouring farm were brought in and cattle from Mr. Brennan's farm were taken to another farm to be fed. All these trials showed that, once animals were on Mr. Brennan's farm, they did not thrive and suffered serious ill health.

Why did the Department ignore Mr. Lambe - Mr. Brennan's vet - when he told it that there was a toxic agent at work? He had ruled out all other causes on the farm in 2002. Why did the Department ignore the veterinary college in April 2004 when the college told the Department that the farm needed to be looked at from a helicopter view and that something in the area was affecting it? This issue is cutting very close to the bone for many people in the Castlecomer area. In 2007, the parish priest said in public at a funeral that the deceased was the eighth worker from Ormonde Brick he had buried in the previous 12 years and that there were others buried in other parishes whose funeral mass he had not celebrated. From the altar at that funeral mass, the priest asked whether someone would please do something about this situation.

The Department rang Mr. Brennan in October 2009 and told him there had been a little glitch and that the cadmium found in samples taken over a six-month period had accidentally been put into those samples in the lab and had not come out of the factory. How could this have happened in an EPA-accredited lab?

Samples were taken from Dan Brennan's farm but it looks like they did not want to test them. They waited until the results would not be accurate. There is a strong correlation between increasing cadmium levels in the body of animals and weight loss in the animals. Furthermore, osteopenia occurred at levels of 11.5%. The scientific data confirming these links prove exposure of Dan's animals to toxic levels of cadmium.

I have raised a large number of questions. There are other points I can also raise. I am asking most earnestly, as Cathaoirleach of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine, that the Minister hold an independent investigation into what happened. Let us get answers to the questions. I have another nine or ten questions on the list in front of me. These are questions that need to be asked on behalf of Dan Brennan and answers need to be given to him. I have met Dan Brennan on many occasions in recent years. I find him a most genuine man. All he wants is answers to the questions he is asking and justification that the losses incurred on his farm and what was happening to his cattle were outside of his control and had nothing to do with his and his family's farming practices.

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