Farmers picket meat plants in 24hour protest

Farmers across the country are staging a 24-hour protest outside meat factories this week to highlight low beef prices.
The Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) called for protests to take place outside every meat processing plant in Ireland from 3pm on Monday 27th October until Tuesday afternoon, 28th October.

Among the plants hit by the protest is Kepak in Clonee.

The IFA president Eddie Downey said anger with meat factories had “boiled over” and that farmers “have had enough”. He said farmers were not prepared to tolerate loss-making prices any longer when markets were returning much higher prices.
He challenged the factories to explain their failure to pass back recent UK market price increases of more than €100 (£79) a head.
The IFA president claimed that, for the past 12 months, the factories have hammered farmers with loss-making prices and specification cuts that have inflicted serious income damage on producers.
“Farmers cannot continue to sell cattle at a loss. Teagasc figures show that on our most efficient farms, producers need a base price of at least €4.00/kg to make a small margin and €4.50/kg to make a return on investment and labour,” he said.
Eddie Downey said farmers were very determined that beef prices at the factories must rise to fairly reflect the very strong increase in UK cattle prices, where Irish beef sales are up 20 per cent this year.
Mr Downey said nobody can explain to farmers why the price increases in the UK, which takes over half of Irish exports, are not reflected in higher prices to Irish farmers. He added that Irish prices are now also below the EU average.
The IFA said the most recent Teagasc National Farm Income survey data showed that incomes on livestock farms continue to be extremely low. Teagasc has confirmed that livestock farm incomes are down 13 per cent to 22 per cent last year, ranging from €9,469 to €15,595.