Jan 26th, 2009

"The single greatest act of political cowardice any of us can remember"

The President of Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA), Jackie Cahill, stated that were the Government to announce a system of staged payments on the capital grants for the Farm Waste Management Scheme, it would represent the single greatest act of political cowardice that any of us could remember.

“If, as government leaks to the papers would seem to indicate, the government now turns around to farmers who have borrowed average sums of €75,000 from the banks to undertake building work - in compliance with a government directive, let it be remembered - and tells those farmers that the grants, which are formally agreed, legally-binding and which are due to be paid now, will now instead be paid over a number of years with the farmers left to carry the amounts owed to the banks, then I think it represents the single most deplorable act of political cowardice that this state has ever seen”, said Mr Cahill.

“What it means is that the Government has now effectively abdicated control in favour of the public sector unions – who represent a sector completely protected from the ravages of this depression – and that the Government has now agreed with the union bosses that the people to whom the buck is to be passed will be the people already reeling from the collapse in their income, with no job security, or secure pension, or anything else. It will represent the running-up of the white flag over Merrion Street and the transfer of meaningful power to Liberty Hall. And that’s how it will be seen both inside and outside Ireland”, stated the leader of the 18,000-strong specialist dairy farmers organisation.

Mr Cahill said that anyone with the most basic understanding of economics will know that unless we get export-led growth, we are facing national bankruptcy.

“If the Government goes with this option, which is a display of spinelessness almost unparalleled in the history of the state, and chooses to delay or stagger payments legitimately owed to the country’s largest indigenous exporting sector because they’re too timid to face the real facts, then they will swing a wrecking ball into the very sector that might have led the way out of the recession and they will take us another step closer to the edge of the abyss”, he said.

BACK TO 2009 ARCHIVES