The Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation strategy is based on prevention of animal welfare problems through compliance with the legislation, which in many regards is stricter than EU requirements. The Board of Agriculture has in turn set objectives to ensure good- risk based and fair controls and uses its Multi-Annual National Control Plan operational objectives to monitor the performance of the twenty one county administrative boards. By focussing on the delivery of the operational objectives, the Board of Agriculture has gone a long way to achieve fair and consistent controls throughout the country. However, the focus has been to ensure that county administrative boards operate in a correct manner, rather than checking if they are doing the correct thing, and the Board does not measure if the system as a whole meets higher level objectives. As a result all counties now use the Board's risk classification model, but the Board of Agriculture has not reviewed or evaluated the effectiveness or efficiency of this model, and hasn’t assessed if the objective for "a good risk- based" control has been met.

Calibration exercises and a joint animal welfare control council help to achieve consistent controls and procedures for inspection are quite comprehensive. However there were two gaps in controls: a failure to communicate relevant findings from post-mortem inspections to the authority responsible for follow-up investigations, and inadequate data of mortalities in broiler flocks was sent with each flock to slaughter, as well as inadequate checking of this data.