IRISH POLITICS experienced a new phenomenon yesterday, with the introduction of what one politician described as “rural speed-dating” by the Irish Farmers Association.
It was launching its pre-budget submission at the Davenport Hotel near Leinster House and had invited all the TDs and Senators in the Oireachtas to attend.
An astonishing 100 members heeded the invitation and arrived to a briefing in the basement of the hotel at just after lunchtime yesterday.
There they found the entire IFA executive divided around a series of tables, where each county was identified by a large notice showing the members where to sit.
Each of the invitees was handed a copy of the pre-budget submission and escorted to their table to meet the local representatives who were there to brief them.
After the briefings, instead of moving to another table, the TDs and Senators were escorted again, this time to an IFA backdrop, where they were photographed with their local county teams.
“It is rural speed-dating. But it’s better than having 200 of them turn up on a Saturday morning at your clinic,” said one backbench Fianna Fáiler.
The IFA campaign, which has been conducted since cuts to the Rural Environment Protection Scheme (Reps) suckler cow and disadvantaged area schemes were announced, has seen 10,000 farmers from IFA’s 947 branches lobby their local Government TDs.
IFA president Pádraig Walshe was understandably proud of the turnout and said the purpose of the exercise was to emphasise to the TDs and Senators the need to support rather than cut the only truly productive area of the economy.
“A productive farm sector is critical to tens of thousands of jobs in the food processing sector and rural Ireland will be devastated unless the sector is supported through its worst income crisis in a generation,” he said.
The submission contained a detailed alternative to the cuts to farm schemes, identifying annual savings of 27 per cent which could be achieved in the Department of Agriculture.
These involved administrative savings, reductions of inspections on farms and changes to the bovine TB scheme. It also rejected, pending reforms, the introduction of a carbon tax.