Donegal beef farmers are "on their knees" as crisis worsens

Donegal beef farmers are “on their knees”. That is the stark succinct warning from recently elected county Donegal IFA chairman Brendan McLaughlin, who called a crisis meeting earlier this week in the Clanree Hotel Letterkenny, to highlight the current crisis in the livestock industry locally.

And he called for immediate help from the government and the EU to help alleviate this crisis. Mr McLaughlin said the reason for the meeting was that the “beef farmers in Donegal are all on their knees at the moment.”

“There is a major beef crisis here at present and farmers have been losing from €100 to €300 in the price they get for their animal. It is as high as €300 in some cases”.

Mr McLaughlin said there were two major factors causing this crisis-market forces and the grave uncertainty over Brexit.

“Supply and demand always govern prices. There are not enough live exports going abroad to Europe because of a recession.

“You need that competition with the beef factories to keep the prices up for the farmers.”

He added: “The negativity on Brexit is also causing big problems here and is discouraging in investment in beef. This is a scare mongering game and that should not be happening.

“Nobody knows what is going to happen in Brexit and Britain could still stay in, so how can the factories and the farmers know? The threat of Brexit means we will have no investment. We export 50 per cent of our beef to Britain. If tariffs go up and if you have an animal going for €1,000 to Britain, the farmer could be paying a tariff of up to €700. So that would put us out of business in the morning and lamb is much the same.”

He added: “There could be tariffs of up to 70 per cent on beef and we can do nothing about that. It is not the farmer’s fault and it is not the factories fault, it is to do with the EU and Britain and I think Europe has to compensate us in some way or another to save farming.

“The suckler farmer is the basis for farming in Donegal and the West of Ireland and we need the beef man around the ring to buy our calves that we rear, the weanlings. And if we don’t have those men, we are finished, beef men will not invest anymore because of all the uncertainty”.

He added: "We are lobbying the government and Irish farmers in general have lost €102m since last September on beef alone. We want the government and the EU to do something. We want the government to stop hiding behind the EU and the EU to stop hiding behind the government.”

“And that is why I called the crisis meeting in Letterkenny on Monday night, the IFA is doing its very best for the farmers of Donegal," he added.