District Court<\/a> that O\u2019Regan was pleading guilty to 30 out of 52 offences under the Animal Welfare Act 2013, with the other offences being taken into account.<\/p>\nThe offences related to his failure to keep and treat animals in a way that safeguarded their health and welfare, his failure to provide them with feed and drinking water, causing them unnecessary suffering and endangering their health. They also relate to allowing carcasses to remain on the land.<\/p>\n
Department of Agriculture veterinary inspector Maria Wall said she visited O\u2019Regan\u2019s farm on May 1st, 2024, and found the worst case of animal neglect she had seen on an Irish farm.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was by far the worst I\u2019ve encountered in 20 years. On a scale of one to 10, where one is good and 10 is bad, this was a 10,\u201d said Ms Wall as she outlined how she and her colleagues were met by a stench of dead animals when they arrived at the farm following a welfare complaint.<\/p>\n
They found the carcasses of some 30 dead cows and calves hidden under plastic at a number of locations on the farm. It was impossible to say how many dead calves were there in one pile as the animals were so decomposed, but they estimated there were 18 or 19.<\/p>\n
Ms Wall said the case was made so bad by the condition of some of the living animals, with some cows so emaciated and weak they could not get up after calving and were left lying in dung. <\/p>\n
She said O\u2019Regan had been directed in an animal welfare notice (AWN) to reduce his herd from more than 250 animals to just 60 castrated non-breeding males, but he had failed to do so and his stock numbers continued to rise as cows calved and he was slow to sell animals.<\/p>\n
She said O\u2019Regan had managed to provide food and water for his animals on foot of the AWN, but he had not cleaned out the pens or provided a dry lie for them when veterinary inspectors returned to inspect the farm on July 3rd, 2024.<\/p>\n
She said O\u2019Regan finally reduced his cattle numbers down to eight animals \u2013 three breeding bulls and five castrated steers \u2013 but there were 29 animals that were still unaccounted for and some of those may be among the carcasses found.<\/p>\n
Ms Wall agreed with defence solicitor Patrick Goold that O\u2019Regan did not wilfully cause the cruelty and neglect, but he did not seem to comprehend that keeping cows that would calf was resulting in stock numbers far in excess of what he could manage, and this led to the problems.<\/p>\n
Mr Goold pleaded for leniency, saying his client lived alone with his elderly mother on the farm until her death just over two weeks ago. <\/p>\n
The judge sympathised with O\u2019Regan on the death of his mother but noted the offences all occurred before she died. While she accepted he had not deliberately neglected the animals, she had to mark the seriousness of the case by imposing substantial penalties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Irish agriculture must be protected, a judge said as she banned a farmer from keeping livestock for 15…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[46,22828,61,60,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-245118","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-cork","9":"tag-department-of-agriculture-food-and-the-marine","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}