Sunday's television news bulletins all featured the same footage of pork products withdrawals and department of agriculture press conferences obtained from RTE, as well as soundbites from the FSAI's Alan Reilly revealing that dioxin levels were “80 to 100 times higher” than safe limits.

France 2, the main state-owned channel, added that only “regular” consumption of tainted meat was harmful and played a clip of IFA president Padraig Walshe saying: “How could this happen even though our farmers did nothing wrong?”

The next day, TF1 television – the most widely watched channel – reported on the traceability controls in place on French farms, arguing that the scandal could not have happened here.

Several papers covered the scare extensively on Monday, especially Le Parisien-Aujourd'hui en France, which carried an interview with French minister for agriculture Michel Barnier. “This is not a major health alert in France. 95% of fresh pork consumed here is produced in France”, he told the newspaper.

Le Figaro detailed the investigation and the oil problem identified at the Millstream feed plant. The newspaper described the risk as “limited as our country consumes only 500 tonnes or Irish pigmeat every month, i.e. 0.3% of national consumption”.

Both newspapers compared the contamination to earlier food scares, including the BSE crisis and the recent adulteration of milk in China.

Belgium, too, was one of the countries where tainted Irish pork was known to have been exported through a Dutch merchant. The website of La Libre Belgique newspaper followed the developing story closely, concluding with a reassuring headline on Tuesday: “No tainted pork on our shelves”.

By Tuesday evening, most French-speaking media outlets briefly reported on the discovery of limited contamination in Irish beef, but their focus had moved on to other stories.

Overall, their coverage showed that the scare was contained to animals fed a tainted batch of feed and did not give Irish farming as a whole a bad name. However, many readers reacting to online news expressed doubts at the reassuring tone of the reports, making references to the Chernobyl disaster: the French authorities had then falsely reported that the pollution has stopped at the border.