DEAR SIR: In response to an article in last week’s Irish Farmers Journal (dated 28 September 2019) in relation to Temporary Veterinary Inspectors (TVIs) employed in meat plants, I wish to point out that the report to which the whistleblower refers – and a number of subsequent reports conducted by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine into the Meat Inspection Service – was in fact fully scrutinised and analysed on behalf of Veterinary Ireland.

Veterinary Ireland clearly demonstrated, following analysis of these reports and a number of false models on which their findings were based, that instead of making cost savings of €4m annually, the replacement of the efficient part-time TVI service with an inefficient full-time official auxiliary service would in fact be in the region of €7m above TVI costs annually.

I suspect that this was more likely the reason why the reports remained unpublished, as it did not stand up to scrutiny.

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