Farmers picketing a Wexford meat factory escalated their dispute yesterday after the High Court increased the fine imposed on the IFA to £500,000 a day.
Picketers at the Slaney Meats plant in Bunclody claimed the court's decision meant the IFA was "effectively gone". Far from breaking their resolve, however, it had made them more determined to continue their protest.
"He [Mr Justice O'Donovan] may break the organisation, but he won't break the spirit of the people," said the chairman of Co Wexford IFA, Mr Peter Earle. "Even if the IFA goes bankrupt in the morning, this picket will remain."
All slaughtering at the factory was stopped yesterday as a result of the increase in the fine. Until then, farmers outside Slaney Meats had been allowing sheep - but not cattle - through the picket lines. Sheep had already been included in other factory blockades around the State.
Members of the IFA appear to have decided they have nothing to lose by continuing the protest. "They can't throw any more at us at this stage," said Mr John Murphy, a mixed enterprise farmer from Cranford.
The IFA was "effectively a thing of the past" as a result of the court's decision, he said, which had made farmers twice as angry. Mr Godfrey Birthistle, from Ferns, also a mixed enterprise farmer, said no other group seeking an increase in their income, including gardai and nurses in the recent past, had had an injunction served on them.
Mr Earle said: "basically what we're saying is that there can be no meat industry in Ireland without farmers, and at the present price of beef there is no industry because we cannot produce it at that price. "We have taken that price for the last three years. Farmers have stripped out any fat they had in the business and the only alternative we see on the horizon is to quit the beef industry completely and sow trees. We would get £147 an acre tax-free for that and I'll tell you, that's where it's going."
Farmers, he said, were "very angry" as a result of yesterday's High Court decision. "They told me if I did not escalate the dispute they would." The decision to include sheep in the blockade had been taken in spite of the fact that sheep prices had reached their highest level for some time.
"It's the first time sheep farmers have had an opportunity to make a few bob, but such is the anger out there that they're prepared to sacrifice that." Most of the sheep farmers affected are also beef producers. Mr Earle said farmers had no argument with the thousands of meat plant workers who had been laid off as a result of the dispute. "But what we're saying to them is `unless we're in this business, you have no business'. If there's no future for us, which there isn't at present prices, there's none for them either."
The dispute, he said, was proving stressful but there was no prospect of ending it unless the farmers' demands, including a minimum beef price of 90p a pound were met.
