I welcome the Minister and the Bill to the House. I was reminded of the importance of veterinary practice when the Minister said it was not simply a question of animal care, but also one of food safety. I met an American some time back who planned to come to Ireland on business but expressed fear about eating beef while here. I asked him what he meant, to discover he was thinking of BSE and its human form. It is not just the beef industry but tourism and the other aspects of our economy which depend on confidence in food safety.
In 1989, my company began to hear from customers, mainly from Dublin, who were worried about what they were eating. The source of their worry was advertising on radio for the products of pharmaceutical companies which were calling on farmers to inject them into animals to protect them from various diseases. Customers were concerned about what was happening to our beef. One does not hear such advertisements now though I am sure they exist in some form or other. The work of protecting the nation in this context has been carried out by professionals in veterinary practice. Given the importance of animals to our economy and the technological changes which have taken place in the last 70 years, it is almost incredible that we continue to regulate the veterinary profession on the basis of legislation which dates from 1931. Since then, a need has arisen to provide a legal basis for the recognition of veterinary specialists and veterinary nursing qualifications.
Changes in EU law make it easier to move animals internationally. Inevitably, this leads to the importation of new diseases which were previously considered exotic. I was amazed recently to disembark from a plane which had come from Ireland to the United States of America and see a dog being taken off which had travelled with a passenger. I expressed my surprise that she could bring a dog into the United States of America from Ireland and she told me it was not a problem. She had taken the dog to Ireland three years previously but had to keep it in quarantine for six months. I realised the extent to which animal travel was taking place. With the advent in Europe of passports for pets, we require the professional skills of veterinarians to a greater extent.
The standard of animal care must continue to be as high as we can make it if we are to identify and treat new problems. When we have asked customers in our business what influenced them in the food they eat, they have always said taste and food safety. Recently, customers have begun to point to animal care, especially with regard to eggs, but also beef and pork. In this regard, BSE comes to mind first. It is largely due to our veterinary controls that we managed to maintain our beef markets in the European Union. We were alone among those countries with BSE to achieve such a success. Our successful containment of the foot and mouth disease outbreak three years ago was largely due to the efficiency of our veterinary controls and the diligence of our State and private veterinarians. As a nation, we owe a great deal to our veterinary professionals who have served us well.
Individual animal owners, whether farmers or pet owners, have a right to expect members of the veterinary profession to be well educated, up to date and capable of providing the best care to animals placed with them. Until now, responsibility for professional standards has been in the hands of the Veterinary Council, which has done an excellent job. One change proposed in the Bill involves the membership profile of the new council. Whereas the membership of the existing council consists entirely of veterinarians, the Bill recognises the modern realisation that the regulation of any profession is too important to be left entirely in the hands of the professionals themselves. It is right to provide for a lay or non-professional component in this council as one would in any other. Lay people bring a sense of independence to the deliberations of a council. They come without baggage and the bonds that can result from professional associations or friendships. As a result, regulation by a council that includes lay people is likely to be welcome to the public, who can have greater confidence in it. That does not apply to only one profession. I wonder whether the Minister has not gone too far in this direction and over-egged the pudding as a result. I am not a great cook but that was the problem I had when I tried to make pudding some years ago. As I understand the Bill, the membership of the council would consist of a majority of people who are not veterinary practitioners. The total membership is to number 17, of whom only eight will be practising veterinary practitioners, including the chief veterinary officer who will be nominated by the Minister.
Contacts I have had with some veterinary practitioners in recent days suggest to me that many members of the profession are disturbed by the idea of being regulated by a council on which their peers will be in a minority. To put non-professionals in a majority on a council that is ostensibly meant to be a profession's self-regulating body appears to be a contradiction in terms. It results from a misunderstanding of the role that lay members should play in a such a situation. They are there to provide the balance of an outside view. To leaven the lump, as it were, but surely not to become the lump itself.
I remember a few years back proposals were put forward to regulate the Judiciary, proposals that so far, to the best of my knowledge, have come to nothing. One of the elements of those proposals that received much praise, and was considered even to be revolutionary in some circles, was the idea of including a lay element in the overseeing bodies. There was no suggestion that those lay members would be in the majority, and if there had been such a suggestion, I am sure the Judiciary and the entire legal profession would have erupted in revolt.
I urge the Minister, therefore, before Committee Stage to consider altering the balance of the membership of the proposed new council. I am not arguing for a wholesale reduction in the number of lay members — but just enough to leave the professional veterinary practitioners in a majority in their own council. That would involve increasing the number of elected veterinary practitioners by two and reducing the number of lay members by two. It is a retrograde step to provide for completely changing the membership all at one time. Members will be aware that in the American Senate every six years one third of the members are changed and, therefore, there is not a total change. On the present council there is a system whereby only half the members are replaced at the one time. That guarantees an element of continuity from council to council. As a principle, I thought it had been accepted as a good practice. The recent Arts Act, for instance, provides for the replacement of members of the Arts Council in stages rather than all at the one time and this was generally hailed as a useful step forward.
Moving to another aspect of the Bill, the role of veterinary nurse requires clarification in terms of what procedures they may carry out, and the degree of veterinary supervision required. In the Bill, it would appear that a veterinary nurse would be able to initiate the taking of X-rays and administer medication, including anaesthetics, without prior examination by a veterinarian, and without veterinary supervision. That kind of procedure impacts profoundly on animal health and in some cases on human health. I would question whether they should be performed without direction based on veterinary diagnosis.
Another ambiguous provision appears to allow the Minister to enable non-veterinary practitioners, or nurses, to carry out procedures defined as acts of veterinary medicine, including an undefined means of administering euthanasia. This area should be clarified now, rather than wait for a crisis in public confidence to develop in time. In the long term the public will not be best served by people who over estimate their expertise, no matter how well intentioned.
Apart from details such as this, the Bill is a welcome and overdue step forward, and I am happy to support it on Second Stage. I hope the Minister will give thought to some of the points I have raised before Committee Stage.
