The view from the cattle catwalk

BEING THERE:With the insistent mooing, like a bovine orchestra tuning up for a performance, a trip to Skibbereen's cattle mart can feel like a visit to a theatre of dairy and beef, where the ring is the stage, writes RÓISÍN INGLE

IF YOU ARE NOT from rural Ireland, if the pigs in the farm in Dublin zoo were the closest you ever got to livestock as a child, and if you've recently given up eating meat, then a cattle mart can be a disconcerting place.

For example, the first time a fine Hereford heifer relieves herself in front of you with a surprisingly lengthy whoosh of pale yellow liquid, your stomach may flip-flop violently in protest at both the noise and the smell.

Thankfully, by the seventh time it happens you barely notice. Not only that, but you've gleaned enough from the friendly farmers at Skibbereen mart in west Cork to know that on a hot summer's day, a single cow might drink 40 gallons of water which - whoosh! - explains a lot.

You watch and smell the action from the catwalk, a series of raised walkways from which vantage point the farmers size up the animals in the pens below. With meat now absent from your diet, the weekly medium-rare fillet steak a thing of the past, you notice details you might not have before. The soulful eyes of a Charolais bull. The Friesian's incredibly long eye-lashes. The innocent beauty of a calf about to be sent to the Netherlands to be turned into, a farmer tells you helpfully, veal.

But then you catch yourself. These thoughts seem churlish in a place so steeped in and so reliant on the tradition of beef and dairy farming.

WHEN IT OPENED in the 1960s, Skibbereen mart was based in the centre of town and moved to this location just outside the centre only eight years ago.

From early each Friday morning, the cattle are driven out of the lorries, into the pens and then into the ring where they are bought and sold. Their mooing is loud and insistent, like a bovine orchestra tuning up for a matinee performance. And if the mart is a theatre of dairy and beef, the ring is the stage.

They say if a fly wandered into the ring, John Ryan would know the colour of its wings. He has worked for Cork Marts since 1961 and been an auctioneer with the company for most of that time. In two days he will retire, but today he sits in his white coat on a bench beside a female clerk who keeps a detailed record of every deal done. His voice is unobtrusive yet clear enough to command attention. "He's the straightest man who ever held a gavel," says one farmer hearing the news that John is about to retire. But he's not going yet. There's work to be done first.

Each animal is weighed and led out of the metal turnstile which is known as the "crush". As the cattle driver encourages the heifer around the ring, the suckler cows or dry cows, bullocks or heifers get the once over from the farmers. The auctioneer announces the starting price, a figure he senses instinctively from the weight, age and look of the animal.

As the cow wanders around the ring, the usual mysterious workings of any auction, whether it's Caravaggios or cattle, begin. Farmers waggle their fingers or rotate their arms or nod or wink up at the bench and John Ryan interprets all of this as the price rises and finally stops.

Someone has bid successfully, but even watching closely you can't figure out who has bought the animal - and that's the way it should be, John says. The men in caps push forward onto the metal rails around the ring and place farm-hardened hands on each other's shoulders, assessing the next lot. The talk around the ring is of quality and value and of the marching farmers and the latest negotiations at the World Trade Organisation. "They'll flood the market with inferior product," the farmers say. "There'll be nowhere for us to get rid of the beef."

THE AUCTIONEER has wavy silver hair and stands tall in the pinstriped suit he wears underneath his white coat. He was 16 when he started with Cork Marts. One day he was a clerk, then another day one of the contract auctioneers failed to show up at the mart in Fermoy.

The manager called for John Ryan. Said there was nobody to sell calves. Would John sell calves? He would. After lunch, the heifers were due to start and his manager said they had no one to sell heifers. Would John sell heifers? "I'm selling them ever since," he says.

He made a decision early on not to drink alcohol, figuring that getting drunk with people you were buying and selling to was not a good idea. "You might have been compromised or under compliment," he says.

He travels more than 300 miles a week, selling cattle from Dungarvan to Fermoy, Bandon to Skibbereen. On the way to Skibbereen, he drives to Bandon mart to meet the cattle drivers. Between them and the auctioneer, they've got more than 250 years service to Cork Marts under their belts. Joe drives the van to Skibbereen, with the auctioneer up front beside him, through Rosscarbery and Ballinascarthy and Clonakilty.

Dominic, another cattle driver, laughs and says driving cattle in and out of the pens is "the lowest job in the book", but he adds that driving is also "a drug". "We are the last of our kind now like, we're a dying breed, we don't know anything else," he says before offering a basic driving lesson. "The cattle are unloaded, their tags checked and then the stock is supplied into the ring to me. The sticks are for the driving, you have to help them along," he says. "If you are afraid of the animals, you are wasting your time, you'd be watching out for them, I've had a nasty kick before alright, but we're experienced by now".

Being around the cattle hasn't put them off their meat, quite the opposite. Dominic eats beef twice a day but gets a bit sick of steak. John Ryan likes a nice T-Bone, medium well.

Things have changed in the mart system. John explains how in the 1950s and 1960s when marts replaced the fairs, "we would get the same animal maybe five times during its lifetime . . . the dairy farmer would sell a calf. Within a year, the fella that would buy it would come back again and sell it through us and then the following year it would come again to someone else and be bought as a store, it might be bought again as a forward store and we might get it at the finish as a beef animal".

Not any more. "Because of EEC rules and regulations movement has been curtailed, with the animal we used to get five times in the 1950s and 1950s, we are lucky now to get one crack of the whip".

Every animal wears a tag on its ear, and when it is sold it goes straight into the system. "If you buy it, it's on your farm tonight and the Department of Agriculture know where each animal is supposed to be. It's a fairly foolproof system, in the past there was a lot of tag switching and . . ." "Skulduggery?" "Yeah, a bit".

Con O'Leary is a beef farmer who bought his first animal in Bandon Mart 45 years ago when he was 11 years old.

"It cost £35 and I resold her the following week for £40 . My father gave me that profit to keep and I have been involved in cattle ever since," he says. He is buying cattle to summer graze, to beef up ready for slaughter. Then he will sell them off to the factory. What he is looking to buy are animals with "potential for good weight gain on grass". The animal must look healthy, with a good frame. "It's definitely a visual thing," he says.

IT'S MOSTLY MEN at the mart, so the lady in the red jacket, with bits of her dairy farm in Rosscarbery clinging fast to her fingernails, stands out. Bernie O'Regan walks between Ring 1 and Ring 2, where she has animals for sale. Her lot numbers are written on her hand, and she has to be at the auctioneer's bench when her number comes up. As she waits she talks about life on the farm. Yes, it's hard work but "I love farming, I wouldn't want to do anything else," she says. She has her concerns, though. We walk down the catwalks, looking over at the penned cattle, Limousins, Charolais bulls and Friesians, who as the long day draws to a close seem tired and uncomfortable.

It's been a big mart, a busy day, and some animals have barely any room to move, never mind lie down. Bernie, who doesn't eat beef, is sometimes uneasy about their treatment. There are cattle drivers who use more force than others.

Bernie doesn't see the need for sticks. "They are like humans," she says of the cattle, "they move at their own pace just like us, you just let them go on". She has burnt all her husband's sticks, and won't have them used on her farm.

Like most farmers at the mart, she has no time for holidays. There was that one trip 18 years ago when she went with her mother to Lourdes for a few days, but since then, nothing.

She has six children and she doesn't think any of them will take over. You hear this a lot at the mart, that the sons and the daughters don't want to commit themselves to the farming life when there are easier, more secure and more lucrative ways to make a living.

Her nine-year-old daughter,Colette, wanders over occasionally. She says she will be a farmer when she grows up but her mother, smiling and hoping for a good price in Ring 1, is not convinced.

It's nearly 5pm. The last of the bullocks are being sold off in Ring 2, and in Ring 1 John Ryan takes off his white coat, freshly laundered each week by his wife, folds it up and puts it back in the pocket of his smart suit.

A lifetime as an auctioneer almost over, he's happy. Ask the farmers and they tell you they trust him, enjoy his wit - "those of us who understand him," laughs Con O'Leary.

"I wouldn't care what they say about me really," says the man himself. "Good, bad or indifferent, but I would appreciate it if they said I was fair." This Friday in Skibbereen mart, the auctioneer will take up the gavel for the very last time.

The straightest man who ever held one, that's what they say.

beingthere@irish-times.ie