Speaking on RTÉ Radio One's Morning Ireland this morning, Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney said the investigation into the suspected BSE case in Co Louth is fully underway but the results are expected to be positive.

"Samples have been sent for test verification and the suspicion at the moment is it is a positive case. The results will be available in about a week's time and we will then need to act on the results," the Minister said. He added that the farmer who owns the cow is cooperating fully.

He said the three calves of the five-year-old rare breed Rotbunt dairy cow, whose mother was imported into Ireland, have been located, quarantined and that they will be destroyed later today so they can be tested for BSE.

The Minister would not go into details as to where these calves are located in Ireland.

Coveney also confirmed the farm where the suspect case was identified has had a previous outbreak of the disease.

"We're now trying to understand how a five year old cow contracted BSE", he said. "Something the animal ate as a calf is probably the cause but this has to be confirmed."

The Minister said the Department is working off of two possibilities. The first is the cow contracted basic BSE, which is contracted by meat and bonemeal feed (MBM) feed or contracted from the mother at birth.

The second is spontaneous BSE, a random mutation in the cow that caused the BSE.

If the cow contracted BSE via feed, the likelihood is that the MBM it ate was very old and crusted on a wall of the feeder. "There has been no MBM in Ireland for the last 14 years," the Minister said. "It is regulated very thoroughly so there is no chance this was new MBM the cow ate."

He also moved to reassure listeners that without the country's robust testing system for BSE, the animal would not have been found in the first place.

"Every single animal over 48 months that's a bovine that dies on a farm will get tested for BSE - we always capture them in the system," he said. "If an animal is sick on a farm, it will be tested for BSE. And once an animal goes to the factory they will be inspected by a vet before slaughter and even then all the Specified Risk Material (SRM) is taken out of the healthy dead animal - so there is no risk at all to human health."

The Minster confirmed that the worst case scenario in the case of the animal testing positive is that Ireland will lose its recently acquired negligible risk status.

However, he stressed this should not pose a risk to recently opened markets of the USA, China and Japan.

"We got into new markets on the basis of controlled risk," the Minister said. "We are exporting beef to about 70 different countries today and we have the safest and most transparent systems in the world for exporting beef. There is not one beef producing country in the world that does not have a random BSE outlier."