Part of me feels sorry for Ryan Tubridy. Just hear me out for a second. Did he deserve the ghastly sums of money being bandied about in the public domain? Absolutely not, the quantities are every bit as obscene as the dough being dished out to top level soccer players.
But anyone thinking Tubs is the only one in play here must also have the Tooth Fairy on Speed Dial. To be fair, Ken McFadden was beating that drum for a long time when nobody would listen, but, whomever did begin to let the effluent leak out here cannot and should not see their efforts go limp like a flag on a wet day.
There’s no point knocking the crust off the slurry pit if you don’t agitate it right to the bottom and let rip.
If that’s the law, then the law’s an ass
I see the long running battle between planning authorities and the Murray family regarding a property in Co Meath rumbles on. That it does suggests to me that the complained against obviously have substance to their case. Otherwise they and it would’ve been kicked to touch long ago. More luck to them.
The planning situation in this country is absurd in its draconian nature. No, I am not saying anyone should be allowed build anything anywhere, but needing ‘permission’ to build on or alter one’s own property, when it may have been in families for decades. Especially when placed against a backdrop of what feel like concerted efforts to obliterate agriculture in certain areas. I’ve no doubt some will see the irony in yours truly commenting as such, but here’s the thing – just because you abide by democracy doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing with its outcomes.
Questions And Answers
Another week, another case over a mishandled birth. Another huge financial settlement. Unfortunately, the first two of that can be related to all too easily. Thus festers the perhaps unanswerable conundrum in this seat – could similar avenues be explored from this sit point and would it be worth it?
Right, so even if some form of recompense was attained, it would be highly unlikely to change the basic nuts and bolts of the situation but it’s very hard looking at your peers getting to places in the world – literal and otherwise – that you strive for but are precluded from reaching due to the incompetence and ignorance of others.
All farmers deserve a level playing field
Anybody who has been hovering around this site for long enough will know of my passion for farming and the fact that in the last decade or so I had actually managed to get actually involved in it insofar as was physically possible. Before that too was taken beyond my control by that damn thing democracy. Kent Brockman was right – it simply doesn’t work!
That however doesn’t mean that interest here has dulled. If anything, the pangs have only sharpened from being away from it and determination and stubbornness to find a way back – whether in cattle, sheep, poultry, vegetables or whatever it may be – has only heightened. Mind you, even if or hopefully when, a way back is found, it will still be difficult not to be left feeling like an outsider. One thing that really grinded my gears when more directly involved was the BPS/Single Farm Payment and other grant schemes available…to some.
Confining eligibility for such things to just one reference year – which I believe was 1988 – is not only lunacy, it’s insulting to a large swathe of farmers (this one included) who for whatever contrived reason, don’t qualify for anything. Surely if a holder of a herd number can prove they have farmed their own within say, a three or four year period, they should at least be entitled to apply for some kind of incentivised reward scheme?
Does the finisher with throughput of 40/50/hd/yr not matter as much as the producer slaughtering 1,000 a year? Because that’s certainly how it seems. A feeling underpinned by alterations to the Nitrates Directive designed to reduce stocking rates. The upshot of which will be to leave the family farm model untenable for most.
Then again, as a fountain of local knowledge in these parts once said ‘When everyone is getting out of something, you get into it’. I will, or at least strain every muscle trying to, as long as these wheels turn.
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