Áilín Quinlan: 'How much...now my jaw crashed to the floor'

“You’re kidding me,” I said to the butcher.

He wasn’t.

See, the thing is, I’d a mind for a bit of lamb. Maybe it was simply association – Spring is here and we’re coming up to Easter and all - but I was thinking of getting in a leg of lamb and maybe some stewing pieces and a few lamb shanks for the freezer.

Once I got to the counter, it emerged that the relatively modest-sized leg of lamb I’d requested would set me back more than €44.

My mouth shaped into a silent ‘O’.

“You think that’s bad,” the butcher said dolefully.

“The man before you asked me for the very same thing and he walked away without it too.

“The thing is, next week the same weight will likely cost you €52.”

“What?” I said disbelievingly.

“Lamb’s gone hideous expensive,” he said. “I can’t sell it.”

Right so. I decided I’d give the leg of lamb a skip and just make a lovely succulent lamb curry from scratch. As well as a few shanks for the slow cooker.

I pointed to a smallish container of stewing lamb pieces inside the glass. I estimated that it was about a pound and a half, give or take.

“How much?” I said.

Nearly €16.

I gaped at him.

“I know,” he said. “Sure, isn’t that what I’m telling you?”

“Well, what about a few lamb shanks then?” I asked.

Surely be to God a few lamb shanks wouldn’t sink the bloody boat.

He shook his head. “I don’t have any.”

I stared. He’d never let me down on lamb shanks before in all the time I’ve been going to him, and that’s a bit of time.

“I’ll be honest with you,” the butcher continued. “I won’t have them in for you anymore either. They’re gone too expensive. People aren’t buying them. I’m worried I’ll end up throwing out the meat.”

Now my jaw crashed to the floor.

Last time I’d done slow-cooked lamb shanks, in late November or early December, I had, without thought, very casually, purchased four large, generous ones from the same butcher for €16.

I got six big dinners out of them, four on the day, two the day after on the very generous leftovers.

In the end, I told the butcher to just give me a bit of minced beef and a few chicken thighs and maybe a few pork chops.

“Beef and lamb prices have shot up,” he told me as he wrapped up the mince, a few pork chops and the chicken.

It was to do with exports, he said.

Big demand from the UK market was exerting pressure on Irish supplies and it was a sellers’ market. Same with beef.

He’d never seen the like of it. It was, he told me, hardly worth his while making his homemade burgers anymore because people wouldn’t buy them if he upped the price, and if he didn’t increase his prices, his profit margin would be so narrow as to not even register.

“Between a rock and a hard place,” the butcher said.

God help the restaurant sector, he observed. He could think of a few that would suffer on the heels of this. More closures would be coming down the tracks because prices were going to rise further.

I quickly googled it on my phone. Yes. The price of beef and lamb had been rising.

I recalled a comedy sketch I saw on TV years ago about a massive surge in meat prices in Australia. The Australian butcher came out and displayed, to the impressed and humbled customer, a piece of beef on a purple velvet, gilt-fringed cushion. We all fell around laughing at the time.

Well, we’re laughing out of the other side of our mouths now.

Later that day, I tried another butcher shop for the shanks, but only because I was passing the door.

When I asked him for four lamb shanks – I didn’t bother talking about a leg of lamb or a pound- and-a-half of stewing lamb this time – this butcher also looked at me very thoughtfully. There was a pause.

“I’ll get them for you,” he said. “Give me a minute or two – I’ll have to cut them.”

I waited. After a while the butcher came out with four large lamb shanks.

“Now, before you say anything,” he said, “I have to ask you if you’re been following the news.”

I had, I said cautiously.

Well, he said, there’d been a very recent increase in the price of lamb and beef and this, he said, would affect the price of the lamb shanks.

There was another, rather curious pause.

Then the butcher quoted me €24 for the four shanks. Eight euro more than the €16 that the quartet of shanks had cost before Christmas.

In a matter of three or four months, the price of a humble lamb shank – not at all regarded as one of the royal cuts – has shot up by 50%.

Look, I bought them anyway, thinking the way things were going I probably wouldn’t be able to afford them at all next month.

As he wrapped them for me, he commented that the price of beef was expected to go up by 20% that very day.

And what’s the government doing about it, he asked?

We looked at each other.

The government was far too busy making a show of itself over speaking time privileges in the Dáil to even look out to see what was going on outside its own windows.

The government was far too busy not seeing the wood for the trees.

The government didn’t even seem to wonder why Conor McGregor and not the Taoiseach was received in the White House on St Patrick’s Day and held an actual press conference … and what all of that potentially means, going forward, for the Irish government’s relationship with Donald Trump’s America.

We agreed, and other customers chimed in, that the government doesn’t seem to be tackling the massive tide of seething resentment that has built up out here in the real world as a result of other things it’s not tackling, like the cost of living, lifestyle, homelessness and the cost of housing, the pressure on small businesses, the impact of immigration, the sense that there is a lack of priority regarding the needs and concerns of citizens, and the fear, stress and fury at the perceived absence of government or judicial support for An Garda Síochána and their work, or any realistic, effective consequences for either serious criminal behaviour or a whole spectrum of anti-social behaviour.

So the last thing this government is going to worry about, we all agreed in the end, was the price of a lamb shank.

Dear God.