Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine díospóireacht -
Wednesday, 30 Nov 2022

Environmental Impact of Local Emissions: Discussion

Chairman

Before we begin, I bring to the attention of witnesses who are to give evidence from within the parliamentary precincts that they are protected by absolute privilege in respect of the evidence they give to the committee. This means that they have a full defence in any defamation action for anything said at the committee meeting. However, witnesses are expected not to abuse this privilege and may be directed to cease giving evidence on an issue at the Chair’s direction. Witnesses should follow the direction of the Chair in this regard and are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect that, as is reasonable, no adverse commentary should be made against an identifiable third person or entity. Witnesses who are to give evidence from a location outside the parliamentary precincts are asked to note that they may not benefit from the same level of immunity from legal proceedings as a witness giving evidence from within the parliamentary precincts and may consider it appropriate to take legal advice on this matter. Privilege against defamation does not apply to the publication by witnesses, outside the proceedings held by the committee, of any matter arising from the proceedings.

The committee will hear from the following witnesses on the environmental impact of local emissions: Mr. Dan Brennan, the landowner and farmer in question; Mr. Matt Dempsey; Mr. Padraig Walshe; Mr. Jim Crilly; and Mr. Michael Lambe, who is appearing remotely. As this is a complex case and goes back a long time, I will allow Mr. Brennan and the other witnesses to give a detailed summary of the case. The case has been dealt with in Brussels on a number of occasions. I will give Mr. Brennan the opportunity to put his account of the case and they way it has been handled until now on the record of the Oireachtas. It is an unusual way for us to handle a committee meeting but this is an unusual case. I will allow Mr. Brennan and the other witnesses 30 minutes to fully outline the case, the historical issues and the way the case has been handled by various State and European agencies.

Mr. Dan Brennan

I thank the committee for the opportunity to give an account of what happened on my farm over a 30-year period, from 1990. Cows were producing between 30% and 40% less than the national average. Cattle were growing at a rate half of the national average and the environment on our farm was severely damaged. Our cattle were extremely stunted and used to have a high mortality rate. My vet, Michael Lambe, tried various minerals to treat the problem. In 2002 he contacted the veterinary laboratory in Kilkenny and told them he had exhausted all avenues. He told them a toxic agent would have to be considered as the cause of these problems. A laboratory vet came out to our farm in January 2003 and spent at least one or two days per week on the farm for that winter. They saw that all of the cattle were losing weight. Every animal on the farm was affected. In winter of 2003-04 Teagasc drew up a feeding trial. In the first half of the winter the cattle throve normally and in the second half they lost weight. In 2004, the veterinary college visited my farm. A professor said that my farm needed to be looked at from the perspective of a helicopter as something had to be wrong in the area to cause this. The Kilkenny laboratory were still on the farm for one or two days per week. In July 2004 I was contacted by the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, which told me that our farm was in the high fallout area from Ormonde Brick factory. In September 2004, representatives from the Moorepark centre visited our farm and a vet took samples from our eave chutes and the results showed there was cadmium present in the eave chutes. In the winter of 2004-05, the Department undertook a feeding trial and employed an independent person to feed the cattle. This involved feeding cattle on my farm and on a control farm three miles away. Included in the feeding trial were ten cattle from the Abbotstown farm in Dublin. All cattle on the control farm gained 0.67 kg per day while all cattle on our farm did very poorly or lost weight. This even included the cattle brought into the farm from Abbotstown, which lost 0.5 kg per day in the last part of the trial. It pointed towards something wrong in our area, given that my silage would work on a farm three miles away but would not work on my own farm at the same time. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine told me it was caused by my disease management. In 2005, there was also more environmental damage observed on the farm. In 2006, the UCD veterinary college again became involved and at a meeting in Kilkenny in June 2006, it concluded that animal disease was not the problem on the farm. Despite this, the Department issued a report saying that my disease management had caused a problem. The veterinary laboratory in Kilkenny left, and UCD veterinary college took over. They decided to do a similar trial on our farm for the winter of 2006-07. They did this and used a control farm as well. For that winter, Ormonde Brick was closed, and the cattle on both farms throve in exactly the same way. UCD veterinary college stayed with us for 18 months, taking blood samples every two weeks. They took ten of my cattle to Abbotstown, and grazed ten of their own cattle on my farm. The trial went on for 16 months. While the factory was open, the cattle were gaining 0.21 kg per day. When the factory was closed the cattle were putting on 0.78 kg per day. Jim Crilly contacted the veterinary college in 2007 and told them to test the bloods for cadmium. In December 2008, the veterinary college contacted my vets, Michael Lambe and Tom Slevin, and told them that our cattle had 95% of the symptoms of cadmium poisoning. On 18 March 2009, UCD veterinary college rang me and told me that it was not allowed to give me the report. In October 2009 the deputy chief veterinary inspector rang me to say the cadmium found in the blood of our cattle was accidentally put into it in the laboratory and did not come from Ormonde Brick factory. What is important here is that the cattle lost weight during the trial in 2007, which was the same time the samples got contaminated in the lab. In January 2007, we took the case to the petitions committee in Brussels. They visited the farm in 2007 and were shocked at the number of dead trees on our farm. We went to Brussels in 2010, 2011 and 2012. In 2012, they agreed to do a scientific review of all the data but this never happened. Instead they just handed our case back to Ireland two years later. The present position is that, since the Ormonde Brick factory closed in 2008, our cows have gone to 1,300 gallons of milk, which is doubled in the last ten years. They are the same breed of cow. Our two-year-old cattle used to be 320 kg at two years old. Now they are 520 kg at that age. The environment on our farm has fully recovered.

Mr. Michael Lambe

I thank the committee for inviting me and I am sorry I could not attend in person. I want to take two or three minutes to flesh out a little of the history with Mr. Brennan's farm problem. I started attending the farm in 1996, when it could be clearly seen there were serious problems with ill thrift and production problems. On my first time on the farm, I thought there must have been some serious disease issues there. With Mr. Brennan's co-operation we engaged to try to improve animal health, husbandry, nutrition and general management of the farm. Over the next few years we certainly eliminated any disease issues that might have existed. We were happy we had done well. However, we were still left with these ill-thrift animals. We pushed on a bit further and said we had to look deeper. We looked at more of the mineral aspects and various things like that. Once again, any small problems were addressed, yet we were still looking at the same problem. I concluded, having used all of the veterinary medicines and investigations we had at hand, that there must be something else at work. I decided to invite the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, which at the time provided an on-farm investigation service, to join in with the investigation. I wrote to it and told the Department I had concluded that there must be some toxic agent at work. That was the beginning of Mr. Brennan's engagement with many third parties including the Department, the veterinary college and the EPA. There were also visits to Deputies and the petitions committee in Europe etc. One of early findings in the animals sent for post-mortem with the Department's initial investigation was that a lot of them had bone problems. Their bones were bendable. They almost had a bovine form of osteoporosis or osteomalacia, which was very unusual. I had not seen anything like that before in my life. That was all of the animals in Mr. Brennan's farm, just to give an indication. One of the days after we felt we had these healthy animals, but yet we had weanlings, which are six to eight-month-old animals weighing about 80 kg when they should be about 250 kg. They were about one third of the normal weight. It was like a ten-year-old who weighed three stone. It was quite remarkable. That was when we decided to engage other parties because it was something I had never seen before. We were obviously suspicious that a toxic agent was at work there. The reason I mentioned the bone problems in the laboratory is because human presentation of cadmium poisoning also affects bone and causes osteomalacia and bone change in humans. I thought that was quite a significant finding. I must also mention that Mr. Brennan became an excellent farmer who displayed top-end management skills and was compliant in everything that was asked of him. That is a teasing out of how this began and how we came to the conclusion.

We went through all the normal procedures and investigated all the normal things that occur on farms but they were not factors with Mr. Brennan's farm. He had healthy animals that just failed him production-wise. They were small in stature and did not grow. Cows produced just 50% of their normal milk yield. That is the clinical presentation of this problem.

Chairman

I thank Mr. Lambe. Who wants to go next?

Mr. Matt Dempsey

I was the editor of the Irish Farmers' Journal at the time. Pádraig Walshe was the president of the Irish Farmers Association. I am delighted to have the opportunity to give my views and experiences simply as an observer to all of this. Mr. Walshe rang me one day to tell me about an extraordinary farm in County Kilkenny that he thought I might find interesting. I went to Castlecomer and brought our chief photographer with me. I had never seen anything like what was there in my life. The cattle were stunted, with two-year-old cattle looking like they were six months old, except that they had very swollen, artificially large heads compared to the rest of their body. The records of the farm showed that 70 calves, from just 40 cows, had died in the space of four years. Production was extremely low as regards milk yield and cows did not calve until they were three years of age. I simply observed, in my capacity with the Irish Farmers' Journal, that this was a farmer with evident problems. In such a case, the first thing one would wonder is whether the farmer is doing something seriously wrong as regards husbandry, minerals, feeding or nutrition patterns. I farm myself and from an agricultural science point of view, I hope I would not have become editor without having a view on whether I was looking at a good farmer. I was quite happy that the problem was not caused by the Brennans' farming practices.

It was also very clear that there were botany problems. Trees and hedges were dying. I knew Professor Jack Gardiner. I think he was Dean of Agriculture at the time. He was certainly a Professor of Forestry. He too had seen it. I quoted him in the article as saying that he could not identify any fungal, bacterial or insect pest and that the vegetative problems were consistent with some kind of pollution. I had known Mr. Bill Costelloe of Teagasc for years. He was the chief agricultural officer in Kilkenny. He also came out very strongly. Normally in my experience, if a farmer has a financial or emotional problem or some other problem, the organisations will not speak badly of him but neither will they come out very vocally in his defence. It was the opposite in this case: his vets, the agriculture officer and the forestry professor all said that there was something going on that did not add up.

After I wrote up my own experiences and views, I submitted the copy to our solicitor because we were clearly identifying the brick factory down the road as a possible cause. As one can imagine, we went to some lengths to ensure we were legally covering ourselves. We published the article in 2006 and that was fine. The Brennans expressed their appreciation of me having come down. It was no skin off my nose that we covered it and gave as true an impression as we could. I kept in touch with Mr. Brennan over the years. He went to Brussels and approached various people. He seemed to be coming to grips with the institutions of the State in trying to uncover what was going wrong, but then everything went cold, nothing happened, files were returned and that seemed to be the end of the matter.

In the meantime, the brick factory closed down. In October 2021, I rang Mr. Brennan and said I would be interested to see how the farm was operating at that stage. The factory had been closed a number of years by then. He told me that everything was fine. Nevertheless, I asked if I could come down and have a look because I had a very clear written record of what it had been like in 2006. In fact, the farm had completely recovered. The hedges had regrown, and milk yields were back to normal at 1,200 gallons to 1,300 gallons instead of 500 gallons to 600 gallons. Calf mortality was very low and, much more to the point, the performance of grass had come right up to what would be expected. There was a complete recovery from what had been happening on the farm.

What had happened institutionally with laboratory analysis and the examinations by various bodies was obviously of concern. However, I was mainly interested in the difference between the performance of the farm when the factory was fully operational and clear problems were affecting the farm, and the state of the farm when everything had recovered. Again I wrote up the article and again we got it legally proofed to make sure we were not libelling anyone. It was very clear that it was in many ways a completely different farm even though it was operated by the same people to the same standards I would have expected in the 2006 period. The operation of the farm had not changed particularly but the performance of the animals and the state of the vegetation were dramatically different. The conclusion I came to, even though it was not in my area of competence, was that some external circumstance had changed very fundamentally that allowed the farm to perform as one would expect a well-run Kilkenny farm to perform. That is it, broadly, from my perspective.

Mr. Jim Crilly

I am a vet who has worked for Teagasc. I was part of the Teagasc investigation in 2004. I found the cadmium in the eaves. I then retired and went off for a while. I went back to Kilkenny in 2007 to speak at a local veterinary meeting. When I was talking to some of the lads after the meeting, they mentioned the Brennan case and I said I had found cadmium there three or four years previously. Subsequently, I drove into Mr. Brennan's yard one day. I had not seen him in four years. I asked him what the story was. I got involved again in representing him. I would like to explain to the committee what happened. We will start with the break-in and then we will go to the cover-up, so to speak.

The brick factory was the problem. That is not in dispute. Perhaps someone wants to dispute that with me. We have been trying to get this discussion going, but nobody will argue to us that it was not the factory. We got as far as Brussels in 2012 before we were closed down. They said there would be an independent scientific evaluation of the data. The video can be seen on YouTube. At the end of the meeting, the deputy chief veterinary inspector proposed that because of the dispute about the facts of the case, the best thing would be an independent scientific evaluation. This was proposed by the Department of agriculture, which said it would be done by the joint research committee, and seconded by Mairead McGuinness, who was at the meeting and had previously sat on the petitions committee in Brussels, which is known as PETI. The meeting closed with the Italian chair saying she would put the petition in abeyance pending an independent scientific review of the data because at the previous three meetings the Irish authorities had not shown up. They showed up in 2012 and made some kind of a case that it was not the factory. We lobbied PETI to ascertain when it would set this investigation up and when we could talk to the people who were going to do it.

Without discussion, consent or notice to Mr. Brennan, his file was transferred from the petitions committee in Brussels to the petitions committee in the Oireachtas. That transfer appeared to occur without any documentation on the movement of the files or the decisions that were made. We made inquiries through MEPs in Brussels and the secretariat of the petitions committee in Brussels was unable to identify any records as to who had sanctioned the transfer of the case to Dublin or on what terms it had been transferred. Mr. Brennan was never informed of it. We only found out about it one year later. I have documented all of this and the committee has copies and can work its way through it. The committee in Dublin said it would start again. It was eight years in Brussels. It was transferred without a covering note saying it had found in favour of the petitioner and was referring the case back to national authorities, in order that they may address the issues raised. Instead, the Oireachtas petitions committee told Mr. Brennan that if he wanted to open a case with it, he should to write it all down and fire it in, which we did. We got a letter saying that on legal advice, it was of the opinion the case would not be eligible for consideration by Oireachtas petitions committee. Before the committee decided it was ineligible, the Dáil ended and when the Dáil session ends, all the petitions for that Dáil fall. It is at the discretion of the petitions committee to reinstate them in the next Dáil if it so wishes. We wrote to the committee and inquired if it so wished. It answered that it did not so wish. The case was still open in Brussels at this stage, because all Brussels had said, as is its normal operating procedure, was that it had referred the case back to the national authorities on the basis of its findings that the petitioner was owed an apology. I think they actually said that. He is owed a bit more than an apology but that is what they said. The Irish authorities should apologise to him. In December 2014, the month Phil Hogan took over as Commissioner, Mr. Brennan's case was closed by the PETI secretariat, not by the members and not in session. The PETI secretariat closed his case in Brussels. Again, this was done without discussion, without consent, or without notification. The petitions committee in Brussels was again unable to produce any documentation relating to who closed the case, or why the case was closed in Brussels. However, closing the case in Brussels meant Mr. Brennan had no way back. If the Oireachtas petitions committee decided that the case was ineligible or had lapsed and would not be reinstated, he could not now go back to Brussels.

Now we are here. That is A, B, C and D of what happened. That is where we got to. It is all documented. In fact the committee has more of the documents than I do. There was a visit to Brussels by the Oireachtas petitions committee at the time it was being set up. A lady on that team said that as they were leaving Brussels, somebody handed her Mr. Brennan's file and told her to take it with her. There was no cover note, no terms, no nothing. She said the file was so big that on the flight home she had to book it in. It was too big for carry-on. There have been some issues lately with the planning people. This struck me as I was reading the newspapers the other day about An Bord Pleanála. They referred to misgovernance issues including "a lapse in adherence to operating procedures and in the recording of file movements and decisions". Without wishing to disparage anybody, we have two very well-documented cases where there appear to be misgovernance issues including lapses of adherence to operating procedures in the recording of file movements and decisions. These were lapses both by the people who handed over the files, and the people who received the files. I am sure receiving a Government file without the proper documentation and authority and procedures is frowned upon. That is the cover-up.

We will go to the break-in now. The break-in is the factory, and we will go back to the factory. The factory has been there since God was a boy, since the 1960s or something. It was producing bricks because they closed the coal mine and they wanted work for the people. The integrated pollution control, IPC, licensing system came into operation in 2001. Prior to that there were no emissions limitations or controls at all in the ceramic brick sector. Part of the rationalisation of this stuff was that they would get an IPC licence. The licence was issued in January 2001. At the time of the determination of the licence Ormonde Brick had two kilns. They vented through a common stack 24.4 m high and I have provided a picture of the stack as seen from Mr. Brennan's yard, which is 12 m above the top of the stack. The stack is at the bottom of the valley, steep side, with Mr. Brennan's farmyard and his land going up to the side of it. That is the set-up. They were issued a licence for an emissions limit value, ELV, of 1 kg of fluoride per hour up to 1 January 2006, and 5 mg per cubic metre to apply thereafter. This is why I left this bit to the end as it is all a bit technical. They were allowed to pump out 1 kg of fluoride per hour. That regime operated from January 2001 to December 2006. This was the time of the excitement. It operated 24 hours per day, seven days per week, with two weeks off for the summer holidays, and ten or 12 days at Christmas and new year for relining of kilns or whatever they do. It operated for 93% of the time for six years, 24 hours per day at a permitted level of 1 kg of fluoride per hour for six years. That is a lot of fluoride. Why did they get a licence? We will go the best available technology not entailing excessive costs, BATNEEC, which is the basis for the IPC licence. The BATNEEC is 5 mg if you are abating and 10 mg if you are not abating.

Chairman

I will stop Mr. Crilly there, as we have to leave for a vote.

Sitting suspended at 8.09 p.m. and resumed at 8.25 p.m.

Chairman

We will resume. We will give Mr. Crilly another three or four minutes.

Mr. Jim Crilly

Okay. I will have to be quick then. Three or four minutes will not really cover it but if that is all the Chairman is going to give me, I will do it.

Chairman

I will not be too harsh. Go on.

Mr. Jim Crilly

It gets a licence in 2001 to emit 1 kg per hour. The factory is pumping out 60,000 m3 of gas an hour. It effectively has permission to emit waste gas at 17 mg per kg. The best available technology not entailing excessive costs, BATNEEC, guideline is 10 mg per kg. Therefore it is allowed to exceed the recommended guidelines by 70% for six years because it does not have to meet the guidelines until 1 January 2006. Between 2001 to 2005, inclusive, it has been given permission by the EPA to exceed the levels.

What about the other two brick factories in the country? Fleming's Fireclay in Laois had a limit set on it at the same of 0.35 kg per hour. Our boys get 1 kg per hour. Kingscourt Brick gets 0.25 kg per hour. So Cement Roadstone Holdings - Ormonde Brick - is given a very high emission rate and five years to come to the agreed standard. There are two kilns producing 60,000 m3 an hour.

In October 2001, Ormonde Bricks closed down kiln 1, the dirtier of the two kilns. It is recorded in 2000 as knocking out 50 kg per hour. It would never meet the standard of 10 kg per hour. The company also said it was a quiet time in the business and there was not a big demand for bricks. But it did not change the permitted emission of 1 kg. Therefore 1 kiln that is now producing 33,000 m3 is still allowed to pump out 1 kg per hour and therefore the concentration, without breaking the licence, has gone up to more than 30 mg per kg. That is a problem; it is the problem. When people ask where the fluoride came from, that is where there fluorride came from because for five years, operating 24 hours a day, it has been pumping that out.

When the factory received its preliminary determination before the licence was issued, it requested that the two things be increased - that the 5 kg go up to 10 kg. That was fair enough because the BATNEEC allows for 10 kg. However, it wanted the 1 kg pushed up; it was not even happy with that. The EPA replied and said "the potential ambient impact of this fluoride emission does not support permitting a discharge in excess of 1 kg/h" and that "no scope exists for a higher discharge limit for HF, even as a temporary expedient". It would exceed the TA Luft emission value, maximum 98 percentile, which is the guideline value because there is no legislation on emissions. That is something maybe the people here should be looking into, that we would use the German guidelines. The EPA stated quite specifically that anything in excess of 1 kg cannot happen.

That is in 2001 when they were talking about 1 kg equalling 17. From 2002 to 2005, 1 kg was equal to 30 so they were exceeding the emission levels that would have an adverse effect on the environment. That was it, that was our licence.

That is the licensing and then there is the enforcement and monitoring, which is done by a different outfit in the EPA. The results of the monitoring of emissions shows that in 2000 they were producing 50. In 2001, it was 28; 2002, 54; 2003, 58; 2004, 46; 2005, 37; 2006, 25; and 2007, 27. They were exceeding the limits every year. Seventeen is as much as can be put out without damaging the environment. They were consistently knocking out anything up to 50. The factory closed in 2008 because they gave up. There was too much pressure and too many people asking too many questions. These figures relate to fluoride.

One other issue I have to mention is the cadmium. I found the cadmium in the gutters. I took grab samples from the roof gutters of Mr. Brennan's farm and I found cadmium levels there. Cadmium behaves like a gas. Particulate matter PM 10 is the stuff that comes out of a dirty diesel engine. PM 2.5 is the one that is causing problems in urban areas because it is a very small particle and it can penetrate deep into the lungs. Cadmium adheres to particles of less that PM 1 according to an EU report on cadmium. Cadmium is enriched in the fine particles mode about or below 1 micron and consequently can penetrate deeply into the respiratory system and have a long residual time in the atmosphere. It states that cadmium emitted from the factory has "a zero deposition velocity". This means that it just floats. It does not go up or down. It got worse with the rain on the roof of Mr. Brennan's sheds and collected in the gutters, which is where I found it.

When I told the people from UCD in 2007 that I had found cadmium in 2004, they included cadmium in their monitoring of the farm. They did various weight trials and the stuff Mr. Brennan talked about. They started to find cadmium in the blood of the animals at levels that are indicative of toxicity. The break point is 40. They were getting figures of 80,100 and 200. This was at the start of the season, up until April. Samples were taken every month. The 600 blood samples that came from Mr. Brennan's farm over the next five months were contaminated with cadmium. The IAS Laboratories in Bagenalstown prepared the samples before sending them to a German laboratory for analysis. It is an approved laboratory for cadmium. They do not just keep it beside the bench beside the sugar in the canteen. They know what cadmium is. They managed to contaminate 600 samples. The processing of these samples occurred over a period. It was not just one point. It went on for a period but it got diluted out. One could actually see, the samples that were done one particular morning were clean. Then from 11 a.m. on they started picking up 6,000 parts of cadmium. The ones they did the next day were down to 4,000 and then the next day 2,000 and the next day 1,000, 500, 80 and so on. There was one contamination event at the start and then everything that went into it after that got slightly less contamination over time. They managed to make it impossible to confirm that there was cadmium in the cattle. Even though there was some before and after, the IAS people always maintained that the samples were contaminated and that they could not look at them because the did not mean anything. As a result, we could not do anything except bloods. However, we had kidneys. Cadmium accumulates in the kidney over time in both humans and cattle. Twenty three of Mr. Brennan's cattle were analysed for cadmium in their kidneys. The legal maximum for food consumption in the EU is 1 part per million, ppm. We found up to 5 ppm in old cows. They said that it was unusual but that it did not prove anything because other cows in different parts of the country had been found with five ppm of cadmium in them. We had no national database with which to compare Mr. Brennan's 23 cows.

Subsequently, as part of the European Food Safety Authority study, they took samples of 380 cattle at slaughter aged from two to 16. I have two graphs here. One graph is related by age and it shows a 16-year-old cow and a two-year-old cow. There is a straight line going up and the slope of the line is 0.133, which means that every year the milligram per kilogramme figure goes up by 0.133.

Mr. Brennan's cattle were tested. Every year on his farm the increase was by 0.25. His cattle were accumulating kidney cadmium at twice the rate of the national average. The other issue about the kidney cadmium from all the farms is they stratified them all across Ireland. They got a strong linear relationship between the level of cadmium in the soil and the level of cadmium in the cows. This is to be expected. It will happen mostly through soil ingestion. Cadmium does not get into the grass but when cattle are eating dirty, parched ground up to 10% of their intake is actually soil. Ingestion is main the pathway for cadmium contamination. They got a nice predicted line that showed that their high cadmium contamination levels were on farms that had high levels of cadmium in soil, from 1.5 up to 2.0. This was in County Meath and north Kildare near Tara Mines which is the largest lead and zinc mine in Europe. Lead, zinc and cadmium all go together so geo-chemical pollution occurs. That area was rotten with cadmium. We expected that because Mr. Brennan's farm is here and beyond here that his soil cadmium concentration should be very high. They took 54 soil samples from the farm in 2007. All 54 samples were below the level of detection of 0.1 mg per kg. There is 0.5 mg per kg and there is 1 mg per kg. All 54 samples were less than 0.1 mg per kg. They were off the fecking scale. This indicates to me that the people who were taking those samples and analysing them did not know what they were doing. There is now way that 54 samples were less than the limit of detection for cadmium. We did our own analysis and it came out at about 0.25 mg per kg or 0.35 mg per kg, which would be the normal range for Kilkenny. These numbers are still down at the bottom of the graph. There is no way the excess cadmium in the kidneys of Mr. Brennan's cattle came from the soil or the herbage; it was by inhalation. The average of that is 0.25 mg per kg. Mr. Brennan had an eight month old calf that was never out of the house. It was slaughtered and analysed in the Regional Veterinary Laboratory in Kilkenny and it was accumulating cadmium at a rate of 0.75 mg per kg. It was eight months old and never out of the house. Where was it getting five times the national average rate of cadmium?

It was coming out of the chimney. The EPA looked at the cadmium three times from the factory. The first time it looked at it, it found it was 180 times the technical instructions on air quality control or TA Luft guidelines. It found that 180 times more cadmium was coming out of the chimney than was permitted. The EPA did not report that to any of the other agencies in the interagency group or any of the other researchers. The agnecy knew this in September 2004.

Every report that was done on Mr. Brennan's farm is similar. I will quickly tell the committee what they said. The veterinary laboratory report of 2006 found that gases in particular analyses were found to be below designated emission thresholds or below limits of detection and, thus, further investigations into animal health were not deemed necessary. That is important. The EPA told the veterinarians not to bother looking for it because it could not find it; it was not there so they should not waste their time. That was before I told Savera Health I had found it and it started including it and then the blood samples all got contaminated. That was in 2006.

In 2008, it had an expert group comprising five international people from the UK and America. The group reported that:

The EPA has commissioned a significant amount of monitoring the atmospheric emissions from kiln 2. None of these substances were found to be present at significant concentrations in the emissions.

This means the EPA gave this independent group that was to review the operation of the factory and the monitoring of the EPA all the data. The group was not told about the cadmium that was coming out in September 2004 because it would have mentioned it. It did not mention it, however.

The final report of the interagency group in 2010 included oral petitions to the European Parliament's Committee on Petitions, PETI, in 2012. One document I secured from a freedom of information request was an email from the EPA to Savera, which stated "the cadmium emissions recorded in September were 0.24 g per hour." An email from the EPA to the researchers in UCD stated that "the cadmium emissions recorded in run 1 on 15 April 2004 were 0.24 kg per hour." They were 1,000 times higher. The EPA reported grams instead of kilograms and stuck with that story right up until we produced the actual report from scientifics that said it was kilograms. Then, the EPA backtracked. It did a modelling exercise to show that emissions from the factory at 200 times the TA Luft guidelines would still have no negative effect on Mr. Brennan's farm. Mr. Brennan's farm is 12 m from the chimney. It is right across the road. Mr. Brennan's farm starts and then goes up the hill. The EPA said that it modelled the emissions at 200 times the guidelines. The observed reading was 180 and the EPA said that to be sure, it would go to 200. It did dry deposition modelling, however, which is for that big PM10 stuff we were talking about. It does not travel to Mr. Brennan's land. A person could have the dirtiest diesel engine in the world down in the factory and Mr. Brennan would not smell the diesel. When we are talking about PM1, PM0.1 and PM0.5 with a zero-deposition velocity, however, and there is an inversion layer on a winter's day around places operating 24 hours per day, that will get into Mr. Brennan's shed. It will get into his calf and cause it to get a shitload of cadmium and die from it. Therefore, cadmium and fluoride were both there in significant enough amounts to affect the animals. The final inter-agency report said it was not. I will finish there because I am only getting excited and I do not want to be.

Chairman

We have to suspend the meeting again for another vote in the Dáil. When we resume, I will go straight to questions from the members.

Sitting suspended at 8.44 p.m. and resumed at 9.15 p.m.

Chairman

I will call on Mr. Walshe before we go to the members. He has two minutes.

Mr. Padraig Walshe

I thank the Chair for inviting us to come before the committee. I offer the Chair my congratulations for his being appointed to high office. He used to be sitting on this side of the table when I was in here before.

Chairman

It was easier then.

Mr. Padraig Walshe

I am delighted to be here to give my support to Mr. Brennan's case. I first became involved in this case in 2003, when Mr. Brennan and a neighbour of his came to visit me at home one evening. Subsequently, we went up to the farm. I knew from the minute I drove into the farm that the farmer was not the problem. You would know from looking around any farmyard whether you were dealing with someone who was below par or with somebody who was on their game, to put it in sporting parlance. The fact that so many of Mr. Brennan's neighbours are here tonight to support him is proof of this. There are ten people who took time to come here this evening to show their support for Dan Brennan. I thank them for doing it and they are delighted to be here in support of the man.

A great deal of investigation and reporting was carried out on this farm over a few years. Do not forget that we are talking about the worst period on the farm, which was from approximately 1999 to 2007, when the Celtic tiger was roaring loud and when production in that factory increased day after day to meet the demands for building materials at the time. The higher the production in the factory, the worse the situation became on the farm. I would not have believed what I had witnessed if I had not seen it with my own eyes. Many institutions of this State set out to prove that Dan Brennan was a bad farmer, rather than trying to get to the bottom of what was at issue. They spent a fortune trying to prove that Dan Brennan was a bad farmer. They put in a tractor and a diet feed wagon for two years, with a man driving it and moving cattle to different farms. The owner of one of the farms to which the cattle were moved is here tonight. The one thing that the feeding trial proved was there was no problem with the feed on Dan Brennan's farm because it worked on the other farm. Yet, the feed that was brought from the other farm onto Dan Brennan's farm did not work with the animals. This proves to me as a layperson that the problem was actually on the farm. If it had not been for people such as Jim Crilly, Michael Lambe, Tom Slevin and the other veterinary people who were involved and who discovered items such as fluoride and cadmium on the farm, we would not have been able to get to the bottom of this.

One of the most annoying parts of the whole system in Ireland is factories do their own monitoring and the EPA does very little of the monitoring of the factory. I know an owner-operator of another factory of a similar type who told me that the EPA always gave him approximately two weeks' notice before its representatives came up. We also know what happened around the samples being contaminated with cadmium in the laboratory. That leaves me very suspicious that it was deliberate.

Not only that but other samples that were taken on the farm were mislaid or lost because obviously somebody did not want them to be tested for cadmium or fluoride. Dan Brennan spent something like two years getting cattle in every two weeks for veterinary personnel to play with them and take those blood samples, 600 of which were contaminated in a laboratory and more than 200 of which were mislaid. As a farmer, if I were to present that type of defence for anything that happened on my farm, do the members think it would be accepted by the same Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine? I can assure them it would not and the Chairman knows well it would not.

I do not blame Dan Brennan for refusing to co-operate with the Department in the later years when it wanted to take more samples and to continue to try to prove the problem was on the farm rather than looking elsewhere to where the real problem was. Dan Brennan's farm, as Mr. Crilly pointed out, was 12 m higher than the chimney stack in the factory. The EPA admits it was the main area for fallout from that chimney stack, but yet the agency refused to go any further than Dan Brennan's farm with its investigations.

I will not delay the committee except to mention one simple incident. Dan was working on his farm one day and a pungent smell came to him. He rang the EPA to complain about it, but within ten minutes of him ringing the EPA, there were too many personnel from the factory on his farm abusing him. Obviously, the EPA had rung the factory.

Chairman, I do not think there is much more that can be said other than that I, as a farmer who farms not ten miles from Dan Brennan, support him 100% and I lay any reputation or credibility I have on the line to support this man because I would not believe, as I said, the way the institutions of the State colluded to undermine this individual. He is a strong man to be here and his wife, who is here with him, is strong too because there are a lot of people out there who are not around today who went through a lot less than what Dan Brennan did.

Chairman

I am going to give each member four minutes because we are at a late time and I think we will discuss this matter in a private session. I will start with Deputy Carthy and then go to Senator Daly.

Deputy Matt Carthy

With such a short time I will not ask many questions, and many of the initial questions that would have come to mind have already been answered. I thank the Cathaoirleach for organising this meeting. I was aware from a report last year that Matt Dempsey had in the Irish Farmers' Journal of some of the background of the case, but having listened to the testimonies here this evening, it is nothing short of horrifying. If a fraction of what we have been told is proven to be true, then it will be a scandal to match some of the greatest scandals that have ever affected the State. I am very sorry to hear of the trauma, and it cannot be described as anything other than trauma, that Dan and his family have gone through. There is undoubtedly going to be a role for this committee in following up this matter.

Before Mr. Walshe made his comments in respect of the inspection regime within the Department, and notwithstanding that, I was struck by the thought that if there was any suspicion that a farm operation was causing pollution to another business or an adjoining property, that farmer would feel a ton of bricks upon them. Therefore, if there is any question that a farm is being polluted by an external activity, then the same approach should follow.

I will suggest, and I am sure the Chairman will propose it as well, that we seek responses from both the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the EPA in respect of the questions that have been raised. If it is his intention to pursue this matter, then all I can say is he will have my full support.

I thank Dan because it is never easy to come before the committee, give a personal testimony and relive the horrors he has gone through. The financial loss he must have endured as a result of all this is significant, but considering what bearing this would have had on his personal life throughout those years, I am sure the financial aspect would pale in comparison.

Senator Paul Daly

I welcome the guests and, having heard what they have said, I am sure they all wish they were not here. I have read all of the submissions and listened to what was said. Dan has gone as far as Brussels with this case, and I would go as far as saying that he and his family have been to hell and back. I know they want action and not sympathy, but Dan and his family certainly have my sympathy. I am a farmer and I have yet to meet a farmer who does not take pride in his animal husbandry, stock, farm and lands, so I can only imagine the nightmare Dan and his family have lived through at the worst of times of this matter.

I wish to ask a few brief questions to understand the case. Dan said the feed trials were supervised by Teagasc so some of his cattle were taken to another farm and both sets of animals were both fed the same in laboratory-type conditions. I have read about the very small weight gain and weight loss among the cattle that were kept on his farm and how the cattle performed on another farm. The results of that test are definitive. Where did Teagasc, as a State body, go with its results? If Teagasc supervised everything that happened and documented the results, then to me that is black and white. Where did the results end up? Who buried them?

I am a bit confused about what was said about the contamination of the laboratory samples. When was Dan told that? Was it when the results came back or did someone hold their hand up early and say there had been a cock-up or whatever? I am finding it hard to grasp the scenario.

Finally, the application to the 2012 to 2016 petitions committee fell with the Government. Did Dan come back? Did he apply after 2016 to the 2016 to 2020 petitions committee? If so, what was the outcome?

Mr. Dan Brennan

On the feeding trial, the only thing I can say is as follows. While Pat Kelliher was the boss in the laboratory in Kilkenny, there was absolutely no problem whatsoever. He was a real, decent man. Pat Kelliher got moved and then all I was met with every day was, "You are a bad farmer and it is your disease management." Even a senior research officer came from Abbottstown and he told me one of our sheds was too long, one was too wide and one was too high.

Senator Paul Daly

Please give the details about the way cattle were moved from one farm to another.

Chairman

The results.

Mr. Dan Brennan

I will get to that in a second. My point is that Teagasc then had to get a specialist from Kildalton College to say my sheds were right. The Senator has asked me where was Teagasc. Teagasc did stand up but each time the Department threw a spanner in the works.

I will explain about the feed trial. Thirty-six cattle were picked out on my farm. There were two pens of mine left on my farm and two pens of mine were left on Martin Healy's farm. They hired a man and put into the diet feeder what would feed 18 cattle. They fed nine cattle on my farm. A tractor was driven to Martin Healy's farm and the other nine cattle were fed exactly the same amount and same mix of silage. Then they put Martin's silage into the diet feeder at Martin's place and fed another pen of nine cattle at Martin's farm and they drove back to our farm and fed the other pen of mine on Martin's silage. Then they had ten bullocks from the Department from Abbottstown and they fed them with my silage.

The end result was that my silage and my cattle would work in Martin Healy's yard, my cattle and Martin Healy's silage would work in his yard, my cattle in my yard with my silage would not work, and my cattle in my yard with Martin Healy's silage would not work at the exact same time. The Abbotstown cattle were given my silage. They really fell asunder because they brought in a new animal that had been nearly worse. Our cattle had a slight tolerance for what was wrong. That feeding trial was fairly conclusive to me.

The first time we noticed something was wrong was when the laboratory in Kilkenny said it would not accept this. The Teagasc college in Kildalton weighed the cattle. It brought down its own scales from Abbotstown and started to re-weigh the cattle but after weighing three cattle, it realised the trial was correct. Then it said it was my disease management that caused it. Each vet that came out to me gave me, I will not say abuse, but smart comments that we had an invisible disease problem with symptomless salmonella - stupid stuff that defeats intelligence. One shed was too long, another was too wide while another was too high. This nonsense went on for three years.

Mr. Walshe said I got in cattle for two years. For six and a half years, I got in cattle for the Department and the veterinary college and co-operated 100% with them. I used to get up at 4 a.m. to milk my cows to be ready for the veterinary college for 6 a.m. to catch 77 cattle every second Monday, and I did this year in year out. In the end, the veterinary college rang me. Tom Slevin and Michael Lambe were the two vets. Tom Slevin was the vet in Castlecomer while Michael Lambe was the vet in Kilkenny. They left the report on our kitchen table in December 2008 and said it was cadmium poisoning. The cattle had 95% of the symptoms and the report was going to the Department but they would not be happy. They came back in February and said it would take another month to get the report together. They rang me on 18 March. The professor at the veterinary college said they were not allowed to give me the report and more or less cut off contact. I then got a phone call from the deputy chief veterinary inspector in October 2009 telling me a little glitch happened on my farm and the cadmium did not come out of the big factory but was accidentally put into the samples when they were digesting the samples. At the stroke of a pen, the whole thing was gone.

Deputy Joe Flaherty

I thank Mr. Brennan for coming in and giving such heartfelt testimony. I know he is not here for sympathy and wants to get a resolution to this. I was struck by part of Mr. Dempsey's testimony when he said it is rare for vets when they identify a problem to get behind a farmer so forcefully and affirmatively, so it is very evident that Mr. Brennan has a case. We probably have a history in this country of agencies and State bodies failing people, but it is probably rare for five State agencies combined to fail one person, and this is certainly what is happening in Mr. Brennan's case. Teagasc, the Department, the HSE, Kilkenny County Council and the EPA must come before the committee to answer questions.

We will get some answers at this committee but Mr. Brennan's case shines a light on what has been an horrific chapter in his life and a very dark passage in terms of accountability and responsibility. Mr. Brennan was failed by Kilkenny County Council when the site was given planning permission. Based on my limited experience of engineering, I can say you would not put a facility like that in a valley where Mr. Brennan's farm would be 12 metres over the chimney. It beggars belief.

The process deserves a full inquiry. A lot of documents need to be salvaged. We are very much at the starting point but nothing short of a full inquiry into what happened on Mr. Brennan's farm will suffice. Mr. Brennan deserves it and, more importantly, his neighbours deserve it. In his very detailed testimony, he spoke of the parish priest speaking out about the number of deaths and the incidence of cancer in the local area. I mean no disrespect to Mr. Brennan but this is a wider issue for his community. He probably bore the brunt of it and I can see pain and anguish etched on his face. As his neighbour and friend Mr. Walshe would have said, it would have broken lesser men and Mr. Brennan is a remarkable man. There is no doubt that the least this man and his community deserve is a full inquiry with all agencies of the State brought in and their evidence given and held to account. There is a lot of documentation to which Mr. Brennan has had no access despite the best efforts of Jim Crilly. I am sure there are documents and reports lying in drawers and archive boxes not just in the EU but in the Department. It behoves this committee to get the ball rolling, but the end result is that there needs to be a full and detailed inquiry into what happened on Mr. Brennan's farm. If it takes a week, month or year, so be it. If we were able to do it for planning inquiries, we can surely do it for a farmer and a community that were quite literally brought to their knees.

I again thank Mr. Brennan and his wife for having the strength and determination to go through with it. Something like this would have broken many households and families. It is a testimony to his strength that he has managed to come this far. I was going through his catalogue. He battled Europe for ten years and then suddenly a box was sent back. We have testimony in many instances where people were given the remains of children to take home in boxes, but ten years of Mr. Brennan's life were dispatched back in a box that had to be booked onto a plane because it was so big. It was brought back but he got no result there either. We failed him as a society and a State. At the very minimum, this man deserves a full and frank inquiry. Whatever repercussions that brings, let them flow.

Deputy Michael Fitzmaurice

I welcome Mr. Brennan and the other witnesses. My son Jackie would have talked about this and I listened to the Committee on Public Petitions. It is probably one of the worst cases I have ever seen of somebody being failed by the State. I do not agree with going to the Committee on Public Petitions. I was involved with it a few years ago with regard to bogs and I wasted my time. The sad part of it is that everywhere Mr. Brennan has gone, people have said what happened to him was terrible and wrong but nobody has ever fixed the problem. That is the bottom line. I do not know whether the political system is fit to fix it for him. It is a damnable thing to say because it could be permanent governments, be they in Brussels or here, but someone somewhere is blocking justice for him. Regarding kilograms and grams, is there evidence the EPA has that it was 200 times more of the stuff? I cannot think of the name of it.

Mr. Padraig Walshe

Cadmium fluoride.

Deputy Michael Fitzmaurice

Is there evidence that if this goes into animals, it does the damage from a veterinary perspective? Mr. Walshe was involved in the IFA at the time. Has anyone looked at a legal case if they had veterinarians backing them up and the likes of the EPA reports? Did anyone ever look at taking them on? I know a farmer never wants to go to court. I understand that because of the fear surrounding money, but was anything like that ever looked at?

I will make one proposal. Mr. Brennan probably will not do it but I think there is only one way to go on this. There must be a new inquiry into it. Mr. Brennan has lost faith in the system because he has been kicked around by it. He has been told he is the greatest fellow ever everywhere he has gone and that what happened to him was wrong, but that does not put money in his pocket for what he has lost down through the years. If good faith was shown by the Department, it would let this committee appoint an investigator with scientific and veterinary knowledge to go through every bit of it.

I have made inquiries and while the company is closed, it is not gone. There is still a bit of life there yet. I am not going to stay talking all night but this is horrendous. I will put that to the committee, or we will talk about it later, but someone somewhere must take this by the scruff of the neck. I am not a scientist or a vet but we are farmers and we know that if there is something wrong, there is something wrong. You do not have to go to TCD to know that if an animal is losing weight in one place and puts on weight when brought somewhere else, there is something wrong fairly close to you. The eave gutters on Mr. Brennan's farm were checked but were the gutters on buildings ten or 12 m away? Was there any evidence of the same contamination there when swabs were taken? I am not going to talk all night but there is no good in our making promises. Mr. Brennan is sick of that. He is sick of going places. He has travelled to Brussels. It was not the right place because this happened in this country, on the Department's, the EPA's and the local authority's watch.

Chairman

I ask Mr. Crilly to answer briefly.

Mr. Jim Crilly

I have a copy of the email I got via a freedom of information request. I was very surprised to get it. That is the smoking gun. I think UCD gave it to me - with freedom of information requests you are not guaranteed to get anything. I was given this and it says it exactly. The answer is 1,000, not 200. There was a reduction by 1,000.

Mr. Padraig Walshe

On the legal issue, Mr. Sheehan has looked at it but the risks are too high. We are all convinced that there was a lot of collusion with the institutes of the State. I am not a sceptic by nature. As I said earlier, I would not have believed this if I had not seen it with my own eyes and experienced it myself. There has been so much collusion between various bodies. Very good veterinary people were very helpful with Mr. Sheehan in the early days. They went through a lot of rounds doing work for us. Then, all of a sudden, they were put under pressure and they pulled back. There is no question about it. In the case of one person in particular, her manager put his two hands on her shoulders and suggested she needed to be careful.

Deputy Michael Fitzmaurice

All this evidence needs to be put together.

Mr. Padraig Walshe

It happened with a lot of people who were very helpful to us. Consider the risk for Dan Brennan in taking a court case when we do not know what sort of lies are going to be told against him. It is too great. That should not happen in this country in this day and age. It is 20 years since it happened. It did not happen today.

Chairman

We are hearing the evidence this evening, but for the record, nothing has been proven on this case. I am not in any way trying to be smart or anything else but we have had evidence presented against many State agencies this evening. Unfortunately, we have never got to a case where somebody has adjudicated on this, so I wish to say there has been no verdict on any of the State agencies. I wanted to put that on the record of the committee. Mr. Brennan may proceed.

Mr. Dan Brennan

When we got post mortems done on our cattle, Tom Slevin, the vet in Castlecomer, spotted that 11 post mortems were wrong. Bone was starting to form in the kidneys, arteries and soft tissues of the animals. Mr. Slevin went to Dublin, contacted the Department and told it he wanted to get a pathologist from England to look at this. The Department agreed and told him to pick the pathologist in England. Mr. Slevin picked Mr. X, brought back his name to the Department and it wrote back to him to say, sorry, but Mr. X was not suitable. Mr. Slevin went back to England and picked Mr. Y and sent the name to the Department. It said, sorry, but Mr. Y was not suitable. That happened three times. There was a deliberate attempt not to look at what was wrong. If there are bones growing in the arteries and lungs of cattle, there is something seriously wrong. When you can cut their bones with a knife there is something seriously wrong. How could that be my fault? How could that be a disease problem? It would have showed up before then. There was a deliberate attempt to not let anybody else look at what is wrong.

Chairman

Okay. I call Deputy McGuiness.

Deputy John McGuinness

I am not a member of this committee so I am thankful for the time the Chairman is giving me. I am here to support Dan Brennan, his wife and the community of Castlecomer but I can assure all present that if this was in any other constituency, I would be sitting here as well. Dan Brennan and his family have been blackguarded by the State and a number of State agencies. What the committee has heard tonight is the truth from a man whose farm we can judge from driving into it. He is an excellent farmer. When you drive into that yard, you know you are with a farmer who is professional, experienced and is conducting his business in the way modern farmers do.

At every turn he took, Mr. Brennan was met with an obstacle. This was the case between 2004 and 2009 when all these complaints were investigated. He went to the European petitions committee and the information piece tells us the committee's members supported Mr. Brennan and acknowledged he was correct in the claims he was making, as far as they were concerned. Therefore, we have established that. We have also established that out of all the analysis, and without getting lost in the figures, there was something wrong between Mr. Brennan's farm and the factory. That is pretty clear. Like Mr. Dempsey, when I visited the farm recently I saw the difference between what is there now and what was there during the course of all these investigations.

If the committee is to have an inquiry, I suggest it be one that would bring in all of the players, including a representative of the factory. We need compellability on that and terms of reference. I would like to see that happening. Dan Brennan has been blackguarded by the State and is describing to us what is essentially a cover-up and a deliberate attempt to label him a poor farmer. He has the right to defend himself against that but he cannot do so because there are two big players on the other side of the bench. There is the State with its unlimited funds and a commercial interest with unlimited funds that will do anything to prevent Mr. Brennan from having the truth upheld by some part of this State that has blackguarded him. Therefore, as politicians representing the public, we should not be afraid to demand an inquiry because it is in the interests of the State to learn where it made the mistakes or who did what wrong to Dan Brennan to ensure it does not happen again to someone else. If we turn a blind eye to this and do not demand and put in place the ultimate inquiry to get at the truth, we will, like the EU petitions committee, become merely a sounding board for people. This must stop and I am suggesting it should stop with Dan Brennan.

There is a mountain of evidence, as I have seen from the time I first engaged with Mr. Brennan and his wife. I am delighted to see the IFA here in support. It is indicative of what the association feels about Dan Brennan's case. The Oireachtas needs to respond to him. I suggest that the committee investigate the type of inquiry I have outlined. That would remove the responsibility and the costs from Dan Brennan and place them on the State.

It put him in this position anyway. It would give an opportunity to all State agencies and the commercial interests involved to come before a public session and explain themselves. Otherwise, further cynicism will be created about politics, politicians and what they are doing and not doing. Allowing these questions to remain unanswered is not good.

I will finish on this point. I have been asking parliamentary questions. As Mr. Brennan knows, I have been going to and fro with the Department for a long time. The departmental officials told me they did not and would not conduct any investigations relating to the period after 2008 in spite of the fact that it has spent €600,000 on the investigation so far. If that kind of money - taxpayers' money - is being spent on an investigation, surely there is an obligation to bring it to an end by pointing the finger at the State legally, or at Mr. Brennan. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is falling short of its responsibility in spending €600,000 and not getting to the end of the problem. Mr. Brennan's life to this point has been ruined. His family have been put under enormous pressure. I do not know how he has withstood it. It is a great credit to his wife, family and community that he has. He is turning to us, as Oireachtas Members, this evening. The question and challenge for all Members of this Parliament is this: are we going to allow the State to trump Mr. Brennan in terms of the truth? Are we going to allow the State to use taxpayers' money to shut him up? My answer to both of those questions is that we should not tolerate that type of standard. The truth is the truth. An inquiry is the only way to deal with this and with the wrongs that have been inflicted on Mr. Brennan and his family.

Deputy Martin Browne

I say "well done" to Mr. Brennan. I want to be associated with all the remarks that have been made so far. Some of the stuff we have heard all evening is frightening. An awful amount of questions need to be answered. Deputies Carthy and Flaherty and other members have said there needs to be an inquiry and serious questions need to be answered by the Department. I lend my support and the support of Sinn Féin, as Deputy Carthy said, to the efforts to deal with this situation.

I will ask one question. It may have been answered earlier. It was said previously that the cadmium is in the air. It really frightened me to think that it was that simple and it could stay around. After being released, is the cadmium absorbed by neighbouring land? Is it still a potential risk to Mr. Brennan, his family, his farm and the surrounding community? I will leave it at that because the lads have been here a long time due to the voting. I imagine that at this stage, everything has been answered. Can I get a quick answer to that question?

Chairman

Is there a continuing risk from what happened up to 2008? The factory is now closed.

Deputy Martin Browne

Is that kind of thing still in the air? Can it still affect Mr. Brennan, his farm and family and the wider community down there?

Chairman

I think the answer to that is "No" because the performance on the farm has recovered completely. I would say that whatever poison was there has gone out of the atmosphere.

Mr. Jim Crilly

No. In humans, cadmium has a biological half-life of 15 years. It does not leave you. What you took in five or ten years ago is still in you. It accumulates and does not go away. It accumulates primarily in the kidneys, causing irreversible damage. We have not gone into it here because we want to respect the privacy of Mr. Brennan and his family, but this area needs to be addressed as well. The human health risks are ongoing. Cadmium is carcinogenic. Exposure has been associated with an increased risk of cancer of the kidney, breast, and prostate; Parkinson's disease; high blood pressure; emphysema; neurodegenerative disorders; and osteoporosis. It is a wonder there is anybody left alive in Castlecomer.

Chairman

It is not funny.

Deputy Kathleen Funchion

Like Deputy McGuinness, I am not a member of this committee. I appreciate being allowed to speak. I know the witnesses have been here a long time. I will say two things. First, when you take on the system or the State in any way, shape or form, you are up against it. You are dismissed and nearly painted as being crazy. The State will do everything in its power not to answer the questions.

That leads me to my main point. I am not a member of this committee but I am the Chair of the Joint Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. We have spent a great deal of time dealing with the fall-out and the legacy of the State's many failings with regard to the mother and baby homes. When people first heard the commission of investigation into the mother and baby homes was going to happen, they were delighted because they thought somebody would finally listen and they would get answers. In fact, people ended up feeling more frustrated. Regardless of what type of investigation or inquiry is done, it has to be accountable. It cannot be used as another box-ticking exercise, which Mr. Brennan has obviously been experiencing for many years at this stage. Such exercises involve people passing the buck and saying that the matters under scrutiny are not relevant to their Department. Sometimes people are told "No, you are wrong". If Mr. Brennan gets an inquiry, he does not want it to result in the State saying that it has done something even though it is really not adequate. It is really important that this is done correctly. I do not think a committee would be allowed to do that type of investigation. It would have to be something like a commission of investigation. It is really important that all of that is watched. The terms of reference will be key. They will be crucial.

I know from dealing with other people who came up against these difficulties that when they thought they were finally getting justice, they actually got the opposite. It is really important that any investigation is done correctly and that there is accountability. It must not be a sympathy exercise. As others have said, that is not what Mr. Brennan is looking for. He has persevered with this against all the odds over the years, even at times when all the agencies that were basically against him were named out. That is an impossible task. The story in itself is absolutely shocking. It is important that it is not just an inquiry but that it is done correctly and that there is accountability. All the answers must be sought. I agree with what Deputy Flaherty has said about the various agencies being brought into it. The terms of reference are so important. When people hear that there is to be an inquiry, they often think it is great because they are finally going to get answers. The terms of reference can nearly be overlooked in such circumstances. That would be my advice.

I mention one other thing. I am conscious that I am not a member of this committee, but I think it should follow up on what Mr. Walshe said about factories self-regulating. He mentioned a factory that was given something like two weeks' notice when the EPA was coming out. I do not know if things have changed since then, but it seems unacceptable that there would be that level of notice for an inspection.

Deputy Malcolm Noonan

I thank Mr. Brennan and the other witnesses for the stark evidence they have given this evening. I had to dip in and out of the meeting in order to vote but I am familiar with the case. I was on the farm with the then Minister, John Gormley, and the then Deputy, Mary White, a number of years ago. I have visited many farms over recent years in my role in the Department. The one thing I take from the farm visits I carry out is the great pride farmers take in their farms, their land, their herds and their work. To have their work and their integrity questioned and brought under the spotlight is just awful. I cannot imagine the trauma it has inflicted on Mr. Brennan and his family for this length of time. He has received universal support here this evening. It is up to the committee, through the Chair's good chairmanship, to plot a way forward regarding the evidence we have heard. I offer my support to Mr. Brennan and his family. I thank him again for his courage and perseverance, and that of his family, over an extremely long period of time.

I think justice needs to be brought here, and that is important. Again, I thank Mr. Brennan for his contribution.

Chairman

Thank you. I will conclude the meeting. I do not know how we are going to take this to the next stage. The only commitment I will make this evening is that the committee will meet in private session and we will discuss what we can do to take this forward. As someone said, a full tribunal is outside the scope of this committee. However, we have heard the evidence this evening and it is on the record of the Oireachtas after this fairly long hearing. That, in itself, is important. The evidence that Mr. Brennan has given and the submission he has made are all now on the public record.

I will close the meeting. I thank Mr. Brennan for coming in and thank all the witnesses, his neighbours and friends and, most importantly, his good wife for coming in and for presenting the case to us. It would be any farmer's worst nightmare to have a situation like this on your farm and to have that kind of trauma over that period of time, getting up in the morning and not knowing what you would face when you go out the door onto your farm. It was horrific. I met Mr. Brennan on a few occasions and I am very familiar with the case at this stage. We will sit down as a committee to see how we can progress it and to see what is the best way to bring justice. As Mr. Brennan said to me on a couple of occasions, all he wants is to be told that the issues on his farm were not of his making.

Mr. Padraig Walshe

I ask that the committee would keep Mr. Brennan informed of whatever is happening and if there are to be any further meetings of the committee with representatives of the Department, we would like to be aware of it at least.

Chairman

We will not be doing anything in secret.

The committee will next meet in public at 5.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 7 December, when in the first session it will hear from the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Deputy McConalogue, on the pre-AGRIFISH Council meeting regarding 2023 fish quotas. The second session will examine fish quotas and decommissioning with representatives of the fishing industry. As there is no further business, the meeting stands adjourned.

The joint committee adjourned at 10.03 p.m. until 5.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 7 December 2022.