Cork Farmers say 'Enough is Enough' as convoy of tractors takes to the road for protest
Farmers led a convoy of tractors at Cork Airport early on Monday morning as part of their campaign against the over-regulation of farming. Picture: Dan Linehan.
FARMERS from across Cork have held a protest at Cork Airport this morning prior to a convoy of tractors making their way into the city ahead of a further protest outside of Cork County Hall.
The protests are part of IFA’s ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign, announced by IFA President Francis Gorman recently.
The IFA said it will continue highlighting farmers' frustration and anger with the political system over the next month by targeting County Council meetings around the country.
IFA Munster Chairman Conor O’Leary, from Donoughmore, told that the protest was about “the ongoing frustration at unworkable regulations.”
“That covers everything from payment systems failure, the nitrates, it’s all encompassed – the whole level of regulations coming from Europe and how often they’re coming," said Mr O'Leary.
He explained that some of the regulations every contradict each other, “so we can’t comply with them all.”
“It’s just gotten too complicated for the Department of Agriculture to get through, they’re six months behind on payments, so the EU has got to look again at the regulations.”
Mr O’Leary added that the amount of changes are making it impossible for farmers to make a business plan, saying that they need more time to make changes and plan ahead.
“There’s no security at the moment, not knowing where we’re going to be, the certainty is missing out of the farming industry, and it’s the same common theme all across Europe,” he concluded.
Mr O’Leary said the decision to tie the protest in with the airport related to the announcement that Dublin airport plans to expand by 25%.
"That was the exact figure we were told, agriculture needs to reduce emissions by 25%, and that’s economic suicide for rural Ireland," he said.
In a statement, the daa and Cork Airport said: "daa is playing its part in the national and global effort to address climate change. Both Cork and Dublin airports have committed to reducing their Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 51% by 2030 – these are the emissions we have direct control over."
It said it continues to work with its airline partners to identify opportunities to reduce the carbon emissions that are under their control.
The general sense of frustration with over regulation on farmers resulting in sharp impacts on their income was the cause of the latest protests, which saw between 50 – 100 tractors make their way from Cork Airport and line up outside County Hall on the Carrigrohane Road as councillors prepared to hold their bi-weekly council meeting early on Monday morning.
Matt Hurley, chairman of Cork Central IFA, told that these protests were likely to continue until election time as the agricultural sector sought to get the Government to heed its appeals.
“Over regulation, the way the Government doesn’t listen to us, the Nitrates directive, where rules are constantly being changed and every time there’s a rules change, it can cost us a very substantial amount of money,” said Mr Hurley.
The EU Nitrates directive was introduced in order to reduce the amount of nitrates in Ireland’s rivers, lakes and other water bodies and Ireland had a derogation on it for a number of years. This allowed them a limit of 250kg per hectare up to January 1 this year. This has now been reduced to 220 kg per hectare in many areas.
While environmental experts say the nitrates were causing pollution in our rivers and lakes, farmers say that they have contributed, through new farming methods, to much less pollution in recent years.
Last November farmers received a letter informing them they would have to reduce the number of cows per hectare – or increase their holdings by buying or renting more land – by the end of December. As cows are in calf at that time of the year and expecting to give birth in the early months of this year, there were fears that this would lead to a substantial cull of livestock.
According to Matt Hurley, this has already happened.
“A lot of that has taken place at this stage but there is a knock on effect from that in that some farmers will want to hold on to what stock they have and to do that, they have to rent more land, putting tillage farmers out of land they’ve been in for many years and generally disrupting the land market totally,” he said.
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