PICTURES: Large attendance of Limerick farmers at the 75th AGM of ICMSA

ICMSA president Denis Drennan told Taoiseach Micheal Martin at the association’s 75th AGM in Limerick that “the devil was going to be in the detail” on the Nitrates Derogation and the prospect of a three-year extension.

Mr Drennan said that the right policy, in the right place, at the right time was always superior to the ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy that present policy was based on.

The Taoiseach and Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon were also challenged on the Mercosur Agreement being progressed through the EU. Mr Drennan said that it was difficult to see Ireland’s opposition to the agreement, saying Ireland’s public position of opposition had been “regrettably lacklustre”.

However,  most of the debate and comment at the AGM in the Radisson Blu Hotel was focused on the collapse in milk price that had seen ICMSA’s dairy farmer members lose around 10 cents per litre in just the last three months.

It has resulted in an income loss of thousands of Euros per farmer as milk price falls to just below the costs of production.

Mr Drennan said that the rest of the dairy sector used the farmer-suppliers as the sector’s “risk management tool” and collapsed farmer income as the "reset" button to be pressed every couple of years.

“The worst effects of the latest fall in milk price could - and should – have been mitigated by the introduction of a farmer deposit scheme that would allow farmers to put away funds in ‘good’ years and draw down in ‘bad’ years all under Government supervision.

“Such a scheme had been designed and presented to the Government before the last Budget but had been ignored. As similar schemes had been ignored for the last decade,” said Mr Drennan.

 He said this volatility in income and the uncertainty around issues like Nitrates meant that the next generation of farmers were not going into the sector.

“The data was there for everyone: just 4.5% of farmers were under 35 years of age while some 38% were over 65. The average age of Irish farmers was now 60,” he said.

Mr Drennan noted that it was the farming and food sector’s exports that had rebuilt the State’s economic foundation after the financial crash.

He warned everyone that if anything similar happened again and the Government of the day turned around to ask the farming and food sector to “get going” and produce the food to export and rebuild national finances, that “the Government would find no-one left in the milking parlours or cattle sheds”.  

He told the Taoiseach that young people wanted, and were entitled to, stable incomes and the ability to plan their futures.

“If farming could not give them that – and present policies left us unable to do that – then they would find those features elsewhere,” said Mr Drennan.

The ICMSA president also told the Taoiseach that the whole country was beginning to experience the exhausting “dog in the manger attitude brought to every debate and decision by self-appointed and self-elected NGOs and serial objectors”.  

Mr Drennan challenged the definition of NGO used by these groups and he told the Taoiseach that if he wanted to know what independent national grassroots organisations looked like, he had only to look out on the hundreds of ICMSA members he was about to address.

They paid their own way, he said, and in the very unlikely event of their association going to court to defend farm family interests, then they paid their own legal bills.

Mr Drennan said we had long ago “passed the point of absurdity that had these niche interest groups running to court at the ‘drop of the proverbial hat’ where they would fight properly arrived at Government decisions that had gone through years of consultation every step of the way and then – without a hint of embarrassment -  pass enormous legal bills back to the very government whose decisions they had used government funding to challenge”.

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