`It's a waiting game now. That's the worst part, that and the fear of the unknown. It's a bit like being told you might have a terminal disease. You don't want to talk about it because it's almost like admitting something could be there. You don't even want to think about it. You live in the hope that it won't come to pass."
There's a pause while Sean Connaughton, a Co Roscommon dairy farmer living about 25 miles from the Kepak factory in Athleague, is summoned outside to assist a cow in labour. A fine heifer calf is born into a beautiful, peaceful spring afternoon. "There's something ironic about it . . . That little calf is facing into such an unpleasant future."
The next 10 days will decide her fate. They will also decide Mr Connaughton's fate, the fate of Irish agriculture and the fate of the Celtic Tiger.
Rural Ireland is petrified.
"I sense that it's out there," said a farmer's wife from near Athleague. "I think it's more likely than not. My stomach is churning, and there's nothing, nothing, we can do."
There is something poignant about the disinfectant-soaked mats and straw in the gateways, the crude footbaths sliced out of plastic containers, the handwritten signs urging visitors to "Please Wash Your Feet" set against the defeated words of a milk-tanker driver, grown accustomed in recent days to being disinfected and footbathed and pumped for news: "They're doing their best, but at this stage it's like trying to hose down the common cold. How do you do that?"
Mr Connaughton's four children, aged seven to 13, sit waiting for the nightly television news, unusual behaviour, he says, for ones so young. "But they're fearful, too. They see those huge funeral pyres in the UK and they're asking questions like: `Would our calves have to be burned as well?' They ask about particular cows, the gentle, quiet ones that lick and nuzzle them, `Will they have to be burned, too?' "
The reality of what could be was brought home to several Kerry families when a suspect animal forced a virtual shutdown of normal life: entrances sealed off to prevent anyone entering or leaving, food and necessities delivered only by gardai. A student inside tries to settle down to her Leaving Cert studies in an atmosphere leaden with dread.
It is uncharted territory, say farmers repeatedly. Not quite. However, the last outbreak here was 60 years ago, and few people remember it.
Bill Walsh, now 82, has reason to remember. The first case was diagnosed in January in Ballacolla, Co Laois, only a few miles from the Walsh family at Ballykealy. That "cooled down", moved on, and they relaxed. But at the end of April the Walshes noticed that a few cows were "dribbling".
He cycled two 16-mile round trips on a bicycle to the vet in Abbeyleix before foot-and-mouth was diagnosed.
Action was swift. The farm was quarantined for three weeks. A garda was posted outside the house. He was supplemented by three-man Local Defence Force teams (now knows as the FCA) on 24-hour sentry duty, camping out in "beds" dug out of a clay bank by the gate.
"Soldiers came out and dug a hole about 12 yards by 30. It was sloped downwards so that it was 10 foot deep at the far side. The cattle were driven down into that and shot."
From a distance, the family watched and consoled themselves that the soldiers were good marksmen.
Some 50 sheep and 40 cattle, including frisky little lambs and pregnant animals, were destroyed and covered in quicklime. Bill can still pinpoint the site.
The quarantined humans survived on their potatoes and home-cured bacon. Neighbours would leave a gallon of milk in a "gap" across the fields every day.
Socialising, in the absence of phone or radio, consisted of chats "over the ditch". The family was kept busy disinfecting, whitewashing yards and outhouses, turning and spraying manure heaps.
Bill readily concedes that while there was undoubted suffering in 1941, the stakes are immeasurably higher now.
"In 1941," says Padraig Walshe, a neighbour and chairman of the IFA's dairy section, "Ireland was exporting more rabbit meat than beef; milk was irrelevant. A thousand farms were affected, but seven or eight cows was a big herd. Now you're talking about 100 animals per farm."
BILL nods. "Today is a different story. Three-quarters of our farm was in tillage, that was government orders then, and we were mad to get out to hoe beet on an out-farm. But if it happened to Jimmy now. . ." Jimmy, Bill and Mary's son, runs the farm now, an enterprise of up to 60 cows and a couple of hundred cattle.
Yes, today is a different story; £5 billion worth of a difference at least in exports of food and live animals. An export ban could wipe up to 75 per cent off this and knock as much as 1.5 per cent off GDP growth as well as the sheen off the Tiger.
All day, Padraig Walshe is getting calls asking him to put flesh on statistics as news comes in of a French ban on Irish livestock.
It's a dilemma. Does he pull his punches for fear of damaging Ireland's image further or does he tell the truth in terms that ordinary people can and must understand? That an all-out ban could wipe out Kerrygold's butter exports, which include 40,000 tonnes to Germany alone every year; or Bailey's 70 million cases of cream liqueur, for which all the cream comes from Irish cows; or Dubliner cheese, a quality product whose exports to the US, built up expensively and painstakingly, are now starting to pay off?
"I've never been so frightened before," he admits.
Ger Bergin, a Ballacolla farmer and vice-chairman of the IFA's beef section, is also torn.
"People are using words like `horrific'. I'd use the word `horrific' to describe the train crash in England this week, not to describe foot-and-mouth. No human will die because of this. Even animals don't usually die of it."
Still, the scale of the potential economic devastation is undeniable. "People have to understand that we are the largest exporters of beef in the northern hemisphere. That only New Zealand, Australia and Argentina and ourselves have more cattle than people. That this island as a whole has 10 million cattle to about five million people, where the UK has 12 million cattle to 60 million people," Mr Bergin says.
"That's the difference between us and the UK. The UK is not self-sufficient in either beef or milk, so to them an export ban is nearly irrelevant. For us, it could mean nearly 90 per cent of what we produce. People must remember: agriculture is our primary resource, it would be like closing down the oil industry in Saudi Arabia or the car industry in Germany."
Says Mr Walshe: "Take the money that's gone into establishing the Kerrygold brand in Germany, the hard work and diplomacy in trying to get Egypt open again or getting our weanlings into Spain and Italy. How long and how much would it take to win all that back?"
It was notable that, as the week wore on, the mood among farmers was moving beyond shell-shocked to an all-encompassing anger.
Much of it was directed at perceived Government inaction towards sheep-smuggling, for which the IFA provided hard evidence over two years ago.
"From that point of view, this was an accident waiting to happen," says Mr Connaughton.
"The whole thing has left farmers both annoyed and saddened. Why do meat factories need to import sheep anyway, when we're exporting 80 to 90 per cent of our own agricultural products?
"Farmers believe it's a way of controlling prices, that by bringing in sheep from abroad it forces down prices to local producers."
Which brings us back to price squeezes and a long-simmering resentment towards supermarkets with their parallel policies of squeezing farm prices to the bone while boasting of their environmentally-friendly food policies.
"Safe food is a basic requirement for human life," says Mr Connaughton, "yet last year two-litre cartons of milk were selling for less than two litres of water. There has to be something wrong there. The attitude is `get it as cheap as possible'.
"So we have chickens being brought in from Thailand by health boards who are feeding them to hospital patients; beef from South America; pork from several countries; milk from Northern Ireland," he says.
"You have to ask: are the regulations in these countries as tight as they are here? Reams upon reams of paperwork are involved in the production of animals here, and we just wonder if there's a level playing pitch out there.
"Remember the Germans, for example, and their under-declared incidences of BSE? We're just so sick and tired of producing high-quality food and not getting recognised for it.
"The Government is taking basic fire-brigade action now; all the stops are being pulled out. But you have to ask: if these measures were in place before this, if there had been a bit more regulation on the products coming in before now, could all this have been averted?" Mr Connaughton says.