Food Safety Authority of Ireland

The Social Protection Minister, Darragh Cleary, is facing pressure to improve food safety standards for school meals following an inspection that uncovered rodent droppings at a site operated by a provider participating in the scheme.

The lunch bag was among 12 food businesses served with closure orders for breaches of food safety legislation published by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland last week.

We're joined by Soc Dem spokesperson for education, Jen Cummins.

Uh, Jen, you have written to Darragh Cleary, uh, asking for urgent engagement with the lunch bag and indeed other providers.

You know?

Um, obviously the Food Safety, uh, Authority of Ireland discovered, uh, this, uh, issue.

Should there be other, um, I dunno, safety audits of companies supplying, uh, meals to schools, specific ones? Or is, do you think it's enough that it is covered as it is at the moment by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland?

I think the Food Safety Authority of Ireland does a fantastic job, and I think, you know, they're, they're incredibly busy making sure that, you know, the safety, the health and safety of food businesses is to the highest standard as possible, and I think, you know, you can see from their report that came out how many businesses, you know, have closure orders or who have other, other kind of, you know, things that they need to get in order to make sure that they're at a standard.

I think now people are much more au fait, you know, with the food industry, you know, like, you see the FSA out there will publish, you know, every month they publish, like, closure orders, you know, what's happened, or you get, like, anyone can sign up for the FSA alerts, you know, typically happen on a Friday evening, or there's a recall of a product because of hysteria or because of labeling or, uh, issue you know so yeah so now it doesn't happen every day thank God like you know but as you said sometimes there'll be a phone call oh can you help us out with this thing you know and that's I suppose where that guidance is really important you know and to have that trust in you and I suppose I mean I'm long lost in the food industry now I've had a couple of cases where I would have been at the forefront of a crisis you know I was working in one of the factories that started the equine crisis, you know, back in 2013.

So I know it's actually like that when you get a phone call from the FSAI or the Department of Agriculture saying, oh yeah, look, we have an issue here we need to discuss, you know.

But it's kind of all hands on deck then.

I mean,

We were fairly- Confident in what we were saying, not just from an efficacy point of view, but also from a safety point of view.

Because all of the health agencies that have pronounced on this, the FSAI in Ireland, our own agency, the European Food Safety Authority, SACN over in the UK, the Institute of Medicine over in the, the US, now the Academies of Medicine, they all are in agreement that 100 micrograms per day of vitamin D is a dose that isn't associated with any risk of toxicity to human health.

How many international units is that?

That's 4,000.

We used to go out in summertime- When the weather was good, we used to make lots and lots of vitamin D in our skin, and we'd take that vitamin D and we would store it in our liver and in our fat tissue, and then we'd work off those supplies during the wintertime.

We don't do that anymore, so we need to take this in supplemental form.

Dietary intake or relying on dietary intake is not gonna get us anywhere near where we need to be, and that's reflected in the fact that all the health agencies now recommend people to take vitamin D supplements.

Okay.

... how much different are they? Because, uh, as I say, the bar for saying you're high protein, certainly for, say, something with a lot of chicken in it, isn't particularly high.

You know, it's, you know, say, 20% of the energy coming f- to be high in protein according to the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.

Yeah, I mean, they're still processed, and they're still high in salt, and-

Yeah