LAST Saturday I had a lovely rail excursion on the Settle railway via the Ribblehead Viaduct.
It provided a beautiful and tranquil countryside scene, but this was not always the case: the Derwent valley, where the railway runs down towards Carlisle, was the scene of utmost carnage during the last outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in 2001.
The train rattled along in the sunshine amid early autumn colours where green begins to give way to brown, with heather in flower on the high ground. It made me wonder just how all those farmers out there felt now that the wretched disease had returned to this country.
Thankfully the outbreak is 400 miles further south. For most people the disease is out of sight and out of mind: how it’s affecting farming families is of no concern to most in this country.
As the train with its two diesel engines finally approached our final destination for the day in Carlisle, we passed through Wetherall.
It was here, after the 2001 outbreak was finally over, that I attended a conference whose audience was mainly doctors.
I was made aware that farmers had been affected in other ways than just the loss of their livestock: It had also profoundly affected their mental health and the health of their families, and I am sure many of the younger people will have left home to join other youngsters in the bright lights in the towns.
After it was all over a report appeared called “Lessons to be Learned Inquiry”. Now that FMD has reappeared so soon afterwards, perhaps a better title would have been “Lessons not Learned” - it was really just a waste of effort and paper.
The important question as to how and where the disease arose from was not discussed by this report.
Whilst the real source was soon identified many miles away from the valley of the River Derwent, it does make the present outbreak look like an identical repetition of the earlier outbreak.
Different research centre, different strain of FMD, different part of the country, but probably an identical reason for the outbreak.
Unfortunately we still await the Health & Safety Executive’s report into the cause of the outbreak at Pirbright. With the jobs of well-paid public sector workers at stake I suspect we may have to wait a long time.
In the meantime livestock farmers have to undergo massive bureaucratic restraints on how they manage their businesses.
Some members of the Welsh Assembly Government even seem more interested in murdering more of Shambo’s friends at the Skanda Vale temple ranch.
I notice that about 100 police were required in the latest Assembly raid to remove cattle and a buffalo from there.
It is probably too much to expect that AMs would break their long summer breaks to realise that this outbreak of FMD had no place in Wales.
Whilst they have been sunning themselves on some faraway costa, building sandcastles, many farmers have undergone a heartbreaking summer trying to gather their harvests as well as coping with so much unnecessary bureaucracy.
