Limerick farmers 'will not be made fools of’ - ICMSA President
ICMSA president Pat McCormack said that farmers will constructively engage with the climate action plan, but warned that “Farmers will not be made fools of”.
“The Government needs to show due respect to the farming and rural communities.” he continued.
Mr McCormack said that farmers and rural communities are perfectly entitled to feel that they had been singled out by the media and some vested interests and made to “carry the carbon can” while other sectors escaped any regulation or media attention.
He said that farmers will engage constructively - as they always do - but warned that farmers will not allow themselves or their communities to be undermined by additional costs while the same people urging restrictions on Irish farmers lobby for trade deals with countries that have no intention of addressing climate change.
“The level of ignorance displayed by many in the national media and ‘activists’ about farming has been profoundly shocking and what is especially infuriating is the knowledge that, yet again, other sectors seem to escape any similar levels of scrutiny or analysis,” said Mr McCormack.
The ICMSA president said that Ireland is to dairy and beef what California is to tech. He said that Ireland was not just “potentially damaging ourselves nationally for no good reason, but we are actually limiting ourselves in the single area in which we could have helped deal with a global problem”.
Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue has rejected a view from a Rural Independent TD that there is a ban on the importation of Urea into this country from Russia.