The new President of the Irish Farmers Association (IFA), Mr John Dillon, faces enormous problems in a fast-changing world where globalisation impacts heavily on the sector. A farm leader in these first years of the Millennium must not only be a specialist at home but also an expert on what is happening abroad, both in terms of farming and politics.
One of Mr Dillon's first hurdles will be to fight the cause of the Irish farmer in the forthcoming World Trade talks where there is enormous pressure to remove export subsidies for selling goods outside the EU. The EU is also conducting a mid-term review of the Common Agricultural Policy and with an increasing number of our neighbours in the Union seeking less intensive farming methods, commercial farmers will be under pressure.
The new president must also be acutely aware of the need to communicate the farming message to the non-farming public, something the outgoing president, Mr Tom Parlon did extremely well. He led a series of protests which saw the closure of the beef industry for nearly a month and he was an able leader when the scourge of foot-and-mouth disease struck.
However, the IFA row with the National Roads Authority over the amount of compensation to be paid to farmers losing their land to road building, was harder to explain to the Irish taxpayer. So too was the enormous amount of compensation paid to the beef sector when the latest BSE crisis impacted on Ireland earlier in the year.
The on-going problem of disposing of the specified risk material from animals, coupled with the direct payment of nearly £200 million to beef farmers to slaughter perfectly healthy stock to keep prices high, has not gone down well with the Irish taxpayer.
The slowdown of the Irish economy will mean that for the first time in nearly half a decade, the various sectors will be looking closely at the gains made outside their own areas. The new President will have to be able to articulate to the Irish public the importance of the farm sector to the economy as a whole without making the mistakes which have been made in this area in the past.