An abject surrender

And that’s one of the reasons why I don’t think I can ever remember so much fury over the actions – or inactions – of an Irish Government in relation to the farming and wider agri-sector that is our national pride. Minister McConalogue and his cabinet colleagues can spin all they want, but the 220kg nitrogen (N) reduction is a massive reverse and blow to our sustainable dairy sector. The net effect of this reduction is that (at least) hundreds of medium-sized family dairy farms will be tipped into unviability. The cost or impossibility of adding more land or the alternative reduction in cow numbers will mean that their family income margin will now disappear. No one seriously disputes that this will be the net result here and no one can seriously dispute that that has been the aim of some of those who agitated for this punitive measure under the guise of ‘improving our water quality’. They are what they are, and they do what they do.

Problem

We have much more of a problem with a minister and a Government that do not appear to understand what ‘they’ are and what ‘that’ means in terms of acting in the national interest. The performance of the Irish Government in relation to their defense of our absolutely legitimate derogation from the Nitrates Directive has been shameful and abject. Ireland has already introduced a raft of measures aimed at improving water quality and those measures are already working with evidential data emerging all the time. The European Commission needed to know this! The Commission’s approach seems to have been that because other Member States with multiple times worse water quality had been forced to destock, then Ireland should have to follow suit. By comparison with other Member States, Ireland’s water quality is pristine and there was no basis in logic or science to contemplate the kind of reductions in N per hectare that are now on the way and that will undermine hundreds of farmers and negatively impact thousands. The non-defense of our national position has been so wretched, in my view, that one would have to ask the question why this was the case? 

Even today, even after this surrender, farmers cannot check their nitrates figures online and there’s no firm date for this online check facility to be put in place

The ICMSA wanted to believe that the more realistic elements of this Government understood that the continuation of Ireland’s 250kg derogation from the Nitrates Directive was eminently possible if we were willing to mount a skillful campaign based on the evidence that is already emerging. No such campaign was ever mounted by this Government and this minister and consequently we have had our N limits reduced despite the evidence that shows improvements are being made – economic and environmental – that the existing 250kg is perfectly compatible with improving water quality while maintaining the production capacity so indispensable when prices are falling.

Impact

Because this is the vital point: this blow to production capacity and viable volumes comes on top of a ferocious downward pressure on farmer milk price that has us and other farmer groups in the EU seriously contemplating a re-run of the 2016 voluntary production reduction scheme. The ICMSA estimates that falling milk price this year will deduct in excess of €2bn from Irish dairy farmer income. That is the background against which we see this additional burden heaped on the already groaning shoulders of our family dairy farms.  Fiddling around with the maps and trying to localise the impact just compounds the concession and fools no one. Even today, even after this surrender, farmers cannot check their nitrates figures online and there’s no firm date for this online check facility to be put in place.  The degree of real commitment shown by our Government can be gauged by the fact that they didn’t even travel over to Brussels to make the case. A Zoom call was deemed sufficient.
It is up to us to try – and not for the first time – to ‘make some fist’ out of the absolute mess in which the Government has landed those 3,000 farm families. That’s why we went into meet the minister and his officials. There’s no time for tokenism and grandstanding anymore – if ever there was. Our family farm members are entitled to look to us for a defense of their farms and incomes that their Government was either unable or unwilling to mount. We must at least try.