Kilkenny farmer challenges Taoiseach at national AGM

At the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA)’s 75th Annual General Meeting held in Limerick on Friday, the President of the Association and Dunbell, Kilkenny farmer, Denis Drennan, told the Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, 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 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, 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 a proverbial hat”, where they would fight Government decisions that had gone through years of consultation every step of they way and then - without a hint of embarrassment - pass enormous legal bills back to the same Government whose decisions they had used state funding to challenge.

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On the Nitrates Derogation and the prospect of a three-year extension, Mr Drennan said the “Devil was going to be in the detail” and on the broader questions of water quality, Mr Drennan said that the right policy in the place at the right time was always superior to the “one size fits all” policy that the present direction was based on.

The Taoiseach and Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Martin Heydon TD 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, and he said that the country’s public position against it had been regrettably lacklustre.

However, most of the debate and comment at the AGM 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 resulting in an income loss of thousands of Euros and farmer milk price fall 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 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, he said.

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Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme