The president of the Irish Farmers Association (IFA) has rejected comments by former taoiseach Leo Varadkar that it was the people of urban Ireland who were “paying all the bills”.
Varadkar recently appeared on Matt Cooper’s Path to Power podcast, where he said: “What’s in the interest of farmers and the agriculture industry is by and large not in the interest of Ireland as a nation”.
“And farmers and people in that sector don’t quite realise that yet. They still see themselves as the people who bring money and jobs into Ireland ... a lot of the time they bring costs on Ireland,” he said.
Varadkar also said “people in rural Ireland are very quick to tell people in urban Ireland that you know, ‘we’re the real workers, we’re the ones paying all the bills, we’re the ones feeding the country’.”
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“I think maybe we need to be a little bit more blunt in urban Ireland and say ‘actually, that’s not the case’,” he said.
“We’re the ones paying all the bills and you’re the ones who are in receipt of a lot of subsidies and a lot of tax benefits that other people don’t get and maybe we need to sit around the table and have an honest discussion about some of that kind of stuff,” he said on the podcast.
“One positive about Ireland though is the gap between urban and rural is not as deep as it would be in the US or France for example,” he said.
He classed himself as “a very urban person,” but added he was “only one generation from the farm and that’s the norm I think in Ireland.”
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Speaking on Newstalk’s Claire Byrne Show, IFA president Francie Gorman said “the idea that you can have a rural-based economy in Ireland and not have agriculture at the backbone of it, that just doesn’t stand up. I mean, I think last year we exported €19 billion worth of food products. I think we imported about three (billion)”.
Gorman said during the financial crash in 2008 the country saw “the importance of having an indigenous industry. Farming and tourism are the two industries that we have and they need to be supported. And we’ve given really good value as farmers for the supports we’ve got and we continue to do it,” he said.
On his way into Cabinet on Tuesday, Tánaiste Simon Harris said:“It’s important in a country that we pull together at a time like this, I lead a party that wants to reward hard work,” in response to Varadkar’s comments.
“I lead a party that believes hard work should always pay. I lead a party that believes if you work hard, play by the rules, you should be able to get ahead and not just get by, we have a lot of work to do in that area.
“Those people live in rural Ireland and in urban Ireland. And we need to stop defining people based on their geography, based on their profession.
“And we need to recognise that there are people in urban Ireland and people in rural Ireland who work their backside off. And they want governments to help where we can and they want governments to get out of the way where we can’t,” said Harris.
