Earlier this month the BBC admitted it was wrong to suggest last year that badger culling in the Republic of Ireland had contributed to a fall in bovine TB, when there is no evidence to support this.

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The claim, which has been made repeatedly by proponents of the cull – most recently this morning when Environment Secretary Owen Paterson suggested that culling in the Republic had yielded positive results – is scientifically unsupported. Findings leaked on 6th March from a BBC Trust review of an article entitled 'How Did the Irish Badger Cull Play Out?' show the BBC accepts that it may have inaccurately reported that this was the case. The findings were due for release on 6th March, but publication was unexpectedly delayed until Tuesday 25th.  

At the beginning of the month, BBC spokespeople refused to comment on the report, stating that the admission was the result of a leak and that the full findings would be published later in the month.

The review was triggered by a complaint from a member of the public, who felt that government ministers were using their dominant position to spin figures on culling and, "unwitting[ly] or not, stories like this that have had a significant impact in backing up Owen Paterson and the NFU's flawed science." When the BBC Committee's ruling was published, Anti-cull campaigners criticised the 'partially upheld' verdict, which they claimed amounted to "tinkering with the wording [and] refusing to take the offending online and TV stories offline."

The BBC committee found that, although data do show a decline in the number of cattle infected with TB in Ireland, this could not be linked directly to the onset of culling, and that the introduction of other cattle-based measures over the period examined in BBC's report meant that no conclusion could be readily drawn to suggest that culling badgers had been responsible for any of this decline.

The BBC accepted that "the language used in the article had not been sufficiently precise" and so "it was inaccurate to say that [culling] can help control the disease," but the committee concluded that "The BBC had not distorted the information available in presenting the data and had not knowingly sought to mislead its audience."

Other claims made in regard to the Irish cull, which has been ongoing since the early 1980s in various forms, have also been challenged in recent weeks. Some critics have said that, due to differences in habitat and population distributions, the Irish experience of culling is not comparable to the situation in England.

In a Parliamentary debate on badger culling earlier in March, Green MP Caroline Lucas criticised pro-cull ministers' claims that Ireland's cull could be compared to Whitehall's policy of badger culling in England. Dr Lucas said that, whereas in Ireland, where badger populations are more sparsely distributed, culling may have an effect, in England this would likely lead to a spread of disease by shifting populations.

Even so, amidst the growing controversy around cull claims, anti-cull campaigners suggested this week that the BBC's ruling may have much wider implications than the correction on a potentially misleading article.

Badger Trust CEO Dominic Dyer commented, "The government have been telling the public for a long time that culling badgers is both required, and effective, and they have been citing Ireland has a prime example of this. We've been saying all along that it simply isn't the case – and this decision by the BBC justifies what we've been saying.

"What's more, the Government has been aware from the beginning that the scientific evidence does not underpin the claim that culling badgers reduces bovine TB, but they have continued to make this claim because they've been allowed to get away with it. But no longer. We hope that now, if any Minister, MP or farming leader tries to use Ireland as an example of effective culling, that journalists and members of the public alike will stand up and say 'no, you're not getting away with that'."

Prior to the formal publication of the BBC's ruling, Ziad Alhasso of Channel Four's Factcheck blog, which seeks to unravel political spin, concluded that "It may be that Owen Paterson goes too far when he says the Irish experience provides 'clear evidence' that culling is the way forward for Britain."