Ireland needs to embark on a TB vaccination programme in the country’s cattle herd, Fianna Fáil senator Paul Daly has said.
“It’s an old saying that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the first sign of madness.
“I’m convinced that the [TB] test strategy will not solve the TB crisis and we need to start investing money, as has been done by DEFRA in the UK, in a vaccination programme,” he told the Irish Farmers Journal at Ploughing 2026.
He said the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine, which is used to vaccinate badgers and is used in humans against TB, could be used to inoculate cattle against the disease. However, he admitted this would cause issues with TB testing.
“The problem being that that gives you a weak strain of TB, so then the cattle will actually test positive and you won’t know whether they were vaccinated or because they actually had TB.
“The work needs to be done and the research needs to be done and money needs to be invested in that end of it on the test side.
“Plus, I know we’re involved in a lot of export contracts and we would need to renegotiate them if we had a vaccinated herd,” he added.
Spending
Senator Daly said that Ireland is approaching a whopping €6bn in TB spending over the past 78 years.
“In my opinion we’re not making any inroads at all, so we have to start thinking outside the box and I would be a strong advocate of vaccination and the development on same.
“We will eventually get a vaccination that we can test for and it won’t come up as a positive,” he said.
Senator Daly was asked if Ireland could afford to go down the road of a vaccination programme, given the current costs of the TB programme.
He said it would be a couple of years down the line before any results would be seen from such a programme.
“But you have to speculate to accumulate and we’re touching on €6bn since we started the testing campaign. If we don’t do something different, we’re going to be throwing bad money after good. We can’t continue that.
“We cannot keep going the way we are going.”
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