How does Ireland keep its dairy dividend? An urgent question that demands an answer
Pat McCormack, president, ICMSA, on the farm in Co Tipperary.
ICMSA is delighted to be associated with ‘Dairyland: How Does Ireland Keep Its Dairy Dividend?’, the latest in a long line of supplements that we have produced with our old friends in the Irish Examiner.
The question itself is always interesting and worth consideration, but in late October 2023 it has acquired an urgency that means that answering it — or at least giving some signal that you understand the question — is now approaching emergency status. Put as bluntly as the scale of the challenge demands, I am deeply concerned that at exactly the time when we as both a sector and society need to be positive and proactive about the one commodity in which nature has given Ireland an incomparable advantage, we seem to be set on undermining ourselves and, in the name of some very questionable ‘environmental’ precepts, effectively dismantling the economic engine that keeps most of Ireland outside the cities and larger towns not just economically viable, but economically possible.
