A dispute has broken out between farmers and meat plants as cattle prices fell to a 20-year low on resumption of business yesterday.
For finished bullocks, factories were quoting 80p a pound but the Irish Farmers' Association said the factories should be paying 85p a pound.
Mr Raymond O'Malley, chairman of the association's livestock committee, urged farmers not to sell their animals to the plants because he claimed the returns from the markets and price supports would allow the factories to pay more.
However, Mr John Smith, of the Irish Meat Association, said the beef processing industry was facing a crisis. The international markets were not returning the kind of profits which would allow them pay extra.
He said international markets had fallen sharply since Christmas and, because of cuts in EU export refunds, non-EU competitors were able to undercut them in the Egyptian and Russian markets which underpinned Irish cattle prices.
"Third countries also know that because there is a build-up in EU intervention stocks they believe they will be able to buy stocks from intervention far more cheaply than they can buy it now from the meat plants."
However, Mr O'Malley, who was on a fact-finding mission to Britain to speak to meat traders who buy Irish, said he had discovered that Irish beef cost the same in English supermarket chains as locally-produced beef.
"We know that Irish meat plants - and they control 50 per cent of the slaughtering capacity in the UK - are paying the British farmer 95p a pound for beef and they want to pay us 80p."
Mr O'Malley said not even the Irish consumer was benefiting from the fall in beef prices paid to farmers because there had only been a marginal fall in the prices paid to butchers over the past 10 years.
"The producer price has fallen from 104p per pound in 1985, to a low of 80p per pound yesterday and it seems that only the processors are benefiting.
"I accept that there has been a reduction in consumption which the butchers say must be compensated for but, overall, there should be corresponding reductions."
He called on the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, to intervene and force the factories to pay a reasonable price for beef. "The factories want farmers to be partners in the future of the industry. I can tell you that we are not going forward into anything as demoralised paupers."