Helen O'Sullivan: Tireless work and roadblocks, but it just wasn't working for Farmers' Alliance

"In my time shaping Farmers' Alliance as a political group, I and my team have built the profile of the party and taken it from its infancy to the strong brand that it is now." Picture: Noel Sweeney

West Cork farmer Helen O’Sullivan has announced her resignation from the Farmers’ Alliance party after a year and a half of “tireless work”.

In August of 2023, sick of being tarnished as “environmental terrorists”, Ms O’Sullivan, a suckler and drystock farmer, told the Irish Examiner how she intended to run for the new farmer-led political party in upcoming elections.

The Farmers’ Alliance organisation was launched last April.

In January of this year, the Registrar of Political Parties gave notice of his intention to approve the application by the Farmers’ Alliance party to become a registered political party eligible to stand candidates in the Dáil, local and European Parliament elections.

Ms O’Sullivan, who was involved with the Beef Plan Movement in 2019 and recently graduated from University College Cork with a HDip in sustainability in enterprise, told the Irish Examiner last year she was “very worried” about “everything being thrown at” farmers.

However, despite her recent resignation from the organisation, she said that this remains the case.

'Tirelessly worked'

Ms O’Sullivan said that up to 10 core members of the party have resigned with immediate effect, and that “as spokesperson and co-founder of Farmers’ Alliance for the past one and a half years, I am saddened to announce my departure from the movement I tirelessly worked to create”.

“Due to fundamental disagreements at management and organisational level, it is no longer practical for me to continue with Farmers’ Alliance,” she said in a statement.

In my time shaping Farmers’ Alliance as a political group, I and my team have built the profile of the party and taken it from its infancy to the strong brand that it is now.

“It is very unfortunate to have to step away from all of the tireless work that we have put in as a team.”

Ms O’Sullivan told the Irish Examiner that despite “endless hours between Zoom meetings, interviews, phone calls, travelling the country to get this up and running”, it just “wasn’t going the way we were hoping, the direction we wanted it to go in, that we initially set out for it to go”.

“We just felt that it wasn’t what we wanted, and it wasn’t just me; it was a group of others as well that resigned,” she said.

“We felt there were roadblocks put in our way, which was making it impossible for us to recruit the relevant, qualified people that we would need to be able to make this huge operational project of standing candidates across the country.

“As you could imagine, we would need an awful lot of help, but again, due to a lack of an organisational structure, we just felt we were up against a lot of roadblocks the whole time; you couldn’t progress a party on that way.”

'Walked before we ran'

She added that she and the other members who left “felt the party was going into too much of a broad range of policies, we wanted to keep it more narrowed down”.

“I think we should have walked before we ran, that’s how we felt,” Ms O’Sullivan continued.

She said that she felt the focus needed to be on rural issues, “farming communities, rural communities, planning, housing, and we do believe that national food security is a huge thing then as well” - these issues were “kind of what we set up about originally when we joined together”, Ms O’Sullivan explained.

This would have been preferable to “trying to have a wide platform covering every issue which would be impossible for a new party growing”.

According to Ms O’Sullivan, there were “plenty of people putting their names down offering to be part of Farmers’ Alliance and put their names forward as candidates”.

“Because of not having a proper structure in place that we had hoped to have, we couldn’t get around to interviewing all these people.”

In the beginning, it was all “very positive”, Ms O’Sullivan said, but now she lacks confidence in the future of Farmers’ Alliance, especially with the amount members who left who “put so much into it”.

“I wish them all the best of luck, and I walked away; it just wasn’t for me,” Ms O’Sullivan added.

Running as an independent

Ms O’Sullivan has confirmed that she intends to run as an independent for West Cork, focusing on the upcoming local elections.

She will be running with the issues “close to my heart” of: preserving Irish farms and food production infrastructure; safeguarding the freedom to farm and use Irish lands to produce healthy food for the Irish population and export market; promoting food security for Ireland; and protecting rural communities and ways of life in Ireland, among other issues.

Ms O’Sullivan has said that she is “not a politician by trade, I am a suckler farmer, but my experience in speaking honestly about the challenges faced by farmers in Ireland has led me to becoming a spearhead for the movement”.

“My goal has always been to give a voice to the farming community,” she added.

“I have been travelling and speaking at meetings both nationally and internationally. Our neighbours in Europe are suffering the same fate.”

Ms O’Sullivan said she has recently been in Brussels, “invited to take part in the protest with farmers outside the European Parliament, which was fantastic”.

“I met a lot of great people there; I’m going to pursue these contacts I’ve made in Brussels. We hope to form a European group and have a member from every country within the EU come together, sit at a table, and put all these problems together and try and get a solution for all the red tape that’s coming from Brussels.”

The Farmers’ Alliance website outlines policies on not only farming, but energy, immigration, health, and education, among several others.

A remaining co-founder of Farmers’ Alliance was contacted in relation to the resignations and declined to comment for this piece.