The food sector, not farming, is the future

SOME weeks ago a major report into the state of agriculture here concluded no more than 10,000 full-time farmers would be working in Ireland by 2025.

One of the chief architects of that report, Dr Liam Downey, stood over that figure when Minister for Agriculture Mary Coughlan dismissed the findings, commissioned in fact by her own department.

She spoke about how that was not were she was coming from and offered platitudes about what her department was doing to ensure agriculture in Ireland has a bright future.