Eurolink News

Ireland’s food regulatory regime has come under fire this week during a debate on the recent pig meat scare at the European Parliament. The EU Health Commissioner said shortcomings in the Irish system contributed to the crisis, and that a ‘prudent’ member state would have taken more stringent control measures to avoid dioxin contamination of the food chain.
Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou also criticised the Irish traceability system for pigs, which operates only by the date of production of the pig meat and not the farms from which the meat comes. ‘If stricter rules of traceability were applicable, then only meat from farms which used the contaminated feed would have had to have been withdrawn from the marketplace,’ she said.
The Commissioner also said that every EU member state must enforce existing rules on PCBs, the cancer-causing electronic oil at the centre of the scare that tainted products at a County Wexford bread meal plant. The substance has been illegal since 1985, and EU law requires that all PCB oils are destroyed in the appropriate way by the end of 2010. Despite this legislation, it’s believed significant amounts of transformer oils containing PCBs remain in storage throughout the EU. Until these chemicals are disposed of safely, a repeat of the dioxin contamination of the food chain could, in principal, occur at any time.