Jun 3rd, 2009

Dairy farmers rage as Minister Smith passes them over again

Reacting to the news that Minister Smith has allocated €25 million in unused CAP funds to sheep farmers, the Chairman of West ICMSA, Rosscarbery’s Mike O’Sullivan, said the decision was just the latest in a line of inexplicable and bizarre decisions made by the minister with regards to dairy farmers and the wider dairy sector. Mr O’Sullivan said that ICMSA had made specific proposals to the Minister setting out the full extent of the unused funds that could be accessed and also setting out the case for diverting that money to the country’s dairy farmers who are on their financial knees and losing money on a daily basis through below-cost production.

Mr O’Sullivan said that while ICMSA was in favour of a vibrant sheep sector there was no comparison between the sheep sector and the dairy sector in terms of national economic and commercial importance. The fact that Minister Smith seems to either not appreciate that or, if he did appreciate it, seemed unwilling to follow through on that fact was a very worrying development and one that boded very ill for the Irish dairy sector.

The West Cork ICMSA Chairman noted that every alarm bell within the dairy sector was now ringing and yet the Minister seemed quite happy to go on pretending that things would somehow ‘pick up’ if left alone. It was now over two years, noted Mr O’Sullivan, since ICMSA had first predicted a price collapse in the face of continued quota expansion. The Department had ignored the facts then and today’s decision by Minister Smith to disregard the income crisis with dairy farming proves conclusively that he and the Department are still sound asleep

“Minister Smith promised a great deal and delivered absolutely nothing”, concluded the West Cork ICMSA Chairman.

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