"We wrapped them over the knuckles this weekend," said Robin Craig, a sheep and cattle farmer. "There is no reason not to re-impose the blockade if we need to." In January farmers in Donegal had joined with farmers throughout the Republic of Ireland to blockade meat processing plants in the fight for better prices. They won an increase from 82 pence to 90 pence a pound for lower-grade cattle, despite a high court injunction and an attempt to fine the farmers association half a million pounds a day (one pence = US 1.5 cents, £1 = US$1.57).

Farmers in the Republic of Ireland-- where the economy is on a strong upturn, often labeled the "Celtic Tiger" by commentators in the big business press--have not escaped from the declining prices of agricultural commodities. As in the United Kingdom and elsewhere around the world, pig farmers have been especially hard hit. "It now costs 85 pence for a farmer to produce one kilo of pig meat, but they will only receive 70 pence for this," explained Jim Carmichael, a working farmer and leader of the Northern Ireland Agricultural Producers Association (NIAPA). "Since 1995 the price dairy farmers receive for milk has declined by about 30 percent," he said. Farmers face a widening gap between their costs of production and the price that they get for what they produce.

Agriculture continues to play a key role in the Irish economy, despite the decline in the number of farms. More than 100,000 farmers are involved in beef production alone. The crisis has disproportionately hit smaller farmers, forcing more of them off the land. Between 1984 and 1995 the number of farms dropped by 67,000. The number of large farms--those over 50 hectares--remained the same.

Like their counterparts in Europe, farmers in Ireland have faced cuts in government subsidies as a result of the changes to the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy. Some 60 percent of Irish farmers now supplement their farm income with wages from other full- or part-time jobs.

Craig explained how Donegal farmers organized the recent blockade of the meat processing plants. "We picketed around the clock at the factory for 10 days and were joined by a small number of farmers from across the border in county Derry in Northern Ireland. We set up a cattle trough to barbecue food and we got a lot of community support. Local businesses donated food and drink.

"We got support from dairy farmers who are members of the Irish Creameries and Milk Suppliers Association," said Michael McHugh, a working farmer who farms 20 hectares of land and also works in the office of the IFA. "We organized a meeting in a nearby village with trade union representatives at the factory to win their support. Many workers at the plant are also farmers."  
 

'See confidence in farmers'

"Union officials agreed to lobby the government on our behalf," said McHugh. "Between 15 and 80 farmers and their supporters picketed the plant at any one time and we organized a local rally that drew 600 people. For the first time in years you can see some confidence in farmers around here."

Another local farmer, Austin Stevenson, a member of the Irish Cattle and Stockherders Association, explained that the demands of the action did not benefit members of his organization that produce higher grade cattle. "What we want is a 15-pence-a-pound gap between the highest grade and the next grade down, so that when the price for lower grade meat went up as a result of the action the price of the higher grade meat should have also gone up, but this didn't happen. But we wouldn't cross the picket line; we wanted to show unity with the IFA farmers. I went to the picket four times myself."

"I didn't support the action to begin with," said Jim Devaney, a grain and cattle farmer from Newtown Cunningham. "I believe in settling these things through negotiation. But after the high court injunction was imposed I changed my attitude. They threatened to seize the assets of the IFA. The farmers who were picketing were fighting for their survival, so I started to take part in the pickets."

McHugh also pointed out that the number of farmers attending the picket line grew substantially after the injunction was imposed.

Following the example of the action in the south, farmers who are members of the NIAPA took similar action for a single day at eight meat processing plants in the British-occupied north of Ireland.  
 

Protests had impact

"The meat companies will never admit it, but our protests had an impact," explained Carmichael. "As a result of our action some individual farmers got a rise in price and we held off a further decline in price that was taking place in the rest of the UK. The factories are now beginning to talk to us and we also closed the gap between payments for different grades of meat. Maybe nothing more will happen, but we are keeping our options open and we reserve the right to picket in the future."

"At the beginning of the protests we didn't intend to prevent the movement of cattle and meat at the plants, just to draw attention to what farmers were facing," continued Carmichael. "But that changed at Dungannon and Coleraine. As things got under way we decided to block them for two hours. We did the same on February 1 in Omagh and Derry."

In addition to getting higher prices and changing the grades, the protests also aimed to highlight the difference that farmers get in price in the north of Ireland and in Britain, where the price is £40–£80 more per head of cattle. According to an article in the Ulster Farmers Union (UFU) newspaper Farm Week, the gap in cattle prices between Northern Ireland and Britain has begun to drop to £50, following recent actions called by the UFU.

Kevin MacAuley of the Antrim Farmers Action Network said the price is still too low. "The meat plants have grown bigger and fatter, while their unfortunate beef farmer 'partners' are going broke," MacAuley said. He went on to condemn the importation of cattle from the Republic. The UFU is associated with the National Farmers Union in Britain.

NIAPA was formed in 1974 by farmers who thought that the UFU was not doing enough to fight for the interests of small farmers. "We're perceived as Irish nationalist, though we have never set out to be that," said Carmichael. "Rural poverty doesn't discriminate. We will help farmers regardless of their religion or their politics" he added. "We've invited Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionist Party to speak at our rallies. All farms are hit by the crisis, even the larger farms to the east of the river Bann, which tend more to be Protestant-owned. Small farmers were never given access to loans, but bigger farms were and now they are struggling to repay them." Carmichael said farm debt in Northern Ireland is £520 million, half of which is owned by dairy farmers, meaning there is £1,000 of debt for every cow.

Other farmers in the north explained that the NIAPA actions only temporarily held back the decline in prices. Sean Quinn, a farmer with 200 cattle from Crossmaglen, Northern Ireland, said, "What really helped us were the actions the previous week in the Republic, although there has been little difference in the north for the price that we get. What we need are guaranteed prices for what we produce."

The incidence of BSE, or "mad cow disease," in Northern Ireland has been as low as in the Republic, and much lower than in Britain. However farmers in the north, unlike their counterparts in the Republic, are subjected to all the restrictions that were imposed on farmers in the rest of the UK, including being unable to sell any cattle more than 30 months old. Every animal has an ID tag on it, indicating where it came from. If a farmer is unable to get a price for cattle approaching 30 months, he ends up getting rid of the cattle for nothing, losing all the labor and resources that was put into raising it.

This ruling hits farmers like Quinn and others in the south Armagh area particularly hard. "We've totally lost our natural market just across the border in the south," said Peter Carragher, a Crossmaglen farmer and leader of the South Armagh Farmers and Residents Association. "It's hard to get cattle under 30 months to put on enough weight to sell for a good price. You end up grazing them less and spending more money on animal feed."

Henry Derry, who also farms in Crossmaglen, explained that since BSE the price he received for cattle had fallen from £1,100 to around £600 per animal. At the same time farmers' costs for everything from machinery to animal feed has gone up. Derry said that he thought that the 30-month ruling needed to be relaxed some.

"The truth is that UK agricultural policy doesn't suit farmers in Northern Ireland. Our interests lie with farmers in the south, where farm size is much more similar to that here," said Carmichael. "The average size for farms in the north is 33 hectares and in the south it is 29 hectares. But in Britain it is more than twice that at 70 hectares."

The crisis in agriculture in Northern Ireland is reflected in the decision of the Cookstown farmers market at the end of last year to end sheep and cattle auctions on all but one day of the week.

"Public transport facilities in rural areas don't really exist," said Carmichael. Farmers at Hilltown cattle market pointed to the growing cost and government tax on diesel prices that make it more expensive for farmers to transport cattle. Carmichael spends a growing proportion of his time in the NIAPA offices helping an increasing number of farmers fill out social security applications, and answering a farmers crisis hotline.  
 

British rule 'bad news' for farmers

"We're back to direct rule by the British government and that is bad news for farmers, because the government doesn't give a damn," commented Niall Allen, the auctioneer at Cookstown cattle market. The British government has decided to suspend the recently elected Northern Ireland Assembly in order to press Irish republicans, who have been fighting to end British rule, to surrender their weapons. Allen's comments were echoed by a farm laborer at Hilltown cattle market who works on machinery on several farms, both north and south of the border. "They haven't even tried the new institutions," he said. "They should be reestablished and maybe we could make something of it."

In discussing whether cattle farmers could get better prices, Jim Moghan said that the main problem farmers face is the way that all the meat processing plants effectively act to control pricing. "Although they will deny it, the meat companies are a cartel," he said, "the price is always the same at each plant and whenever it changes at one of them it changes at all of them."

As a result of their recent actions in both the north and south, farmers have begun to get a little taste of their own collective power to wage a united fight to defend their incomes. "We're always being told that only around 13,000 of Northern Ireland's 30,000 farms are viable, that the other smaller farms aren't "real farms," Carmichael said. "But we don't accept that. If farmers are producing something that people need they should be able to make a living from it."

Paul Davies is a member of the Transport and General Workers' Union in Manchester, England. Debra Jacobs, a member of the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Tansport Workers in Manchester, contributed to this article.  
 
 
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