“THERE is a hunting season as there is a slurry season. There is a season for everything.”
So County Limerick politician Richard O’Donoghue told the Dáil during a debate on the Animal Health and Welfare Bill 2025, which would prohibit the use of canines to hunt or flush out foxes and prohibit trapping or snaring foxes in order to kill them.
According to the Independent Ireland TD, much of what was said during the heated exchange was “rhetorical stuff”. He also took the view that there was no urban and rural divide around the issue of fox hunting.
“I have people from an urban area who come out hunting in our area and they have done it for decades. I am from a farming background. I live in an area where there is cover behind me. The hunt comes through the back of our land every season,” Deputy O’Donoghue revealed.
“I have seen the devastation a fox has caused when a cow was calving outside in the field. I have seen what it has done to lambs. I have also seen what the hunt has done in curtailing foxes in an area. In our own place, we had two sets of hens. We always kept hens. They were actually savaged, so now I do not have hens.
“People are saying the foxes are making their way into the city, and they are. People are feeding foxes in the city. If that is what they want to do, that is what they want to do. If there is overpopulation and no hunting, that will mean we cannot defend against what a fox does to our animals.”
Cllr O’Donoghue told the Dáil that “there is a hunting season as there is a slurry season. There is a season for everything.”