The Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Martin Heydon, has said he is keen to implement new measures to mitigate the impact of bovine tuberculosis (TB)  within “weeks not months”.

The minister has warned that TB is "a crisis of very significant proportion".

According to Minister Heydon "only very recently a couple of years ago we were having 20,000 reactors a year, last year we had 41,600 and if I don’t act very soon we could be up at 60,000 reactors".

He has vowed that he will not let that happen on his watch.