Bord Snip's McCarthy address to ICMSA AGM
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THIS year's ICMSA AGM was held at the Carlton Castletroy Park Hotel in Limerick and featured the controversial economist, Colm McCarthy, author of the McCarthy Report and main force behind the 'An Bord Snip Nua' menu of potential Government cuts.
He said that public spending had exploded from 2002 onwards and he gave as his opinion a warning that the figures we presently faced were actually worse than those that precipitated the ten-year long of 1982 to 1992.
The difference this time, he told a hostile but fully concentrating audience of hundreds of farmers, was that we had a chance to take courage in our own hands and do what was necessary to stop the unravelling of the nation's finances.
When one farmer asked how he was expected to survive after suffering an €8,000 per annum drop in income to the non-continuation of the present REPS system, Mr McCarthy calmly countered by pointing out that REPS had never been designed or intended to function as an income supplement; it was an environmental measure first and last.
In his address to the meeting Jackie Cahill, the ICMSA President, gave a fiery speech in which he pointed out that the present weakness of sterling against the euro was destroying our export trade to the UK, our biggest market.
"Why was no attention focused on that. The loudest voice in deciding our strategy is the public sector. And the public sector is – by and large – completely insulated from anti-export currency movements. Indeed it only seems to matter to them insofar as it provides cheap shopping in Newry on their strike days," he said.
The ICMSA leader then went on to demand that the Department of Agriculture start to 'walk the walk' on reducing costs and this must mean much more use of lay-testers in disease eradication and meat inspection.
Mr Cahill said that laytesters were widely used in the UK and it hadn't caused chaos there.
"It's time to end the featherbedding of certain professions. Nobody's owed a living. We certainly aren't and I don't see why vets should be any different," he said.
ICMSA would always speak up for dairy farmers, the ICMSA President told the packed room, and Mr Cahill said he would go down on bended knees to give thanks as Commissioner Fischer Boel left office.
"Her policy of expanding production just at the time the world price turned will go down as one of the most stupid decisions the EU ever took on agriculture. And there's very stiff competition for that prize. The idea that farmers could make up for the collapse in milk price by producing more milk and selling it into a market where the price was still falling was the equivalent of telling a man at the bottom of a very deep hole that he should keep digging down to find his way out. It made a terrible situation worse," Mr Cahill declared.
- Ted Creedon
