After a gruelling six-week holiday, the Dáil will sit again next week and all of the main political parties have been holding their respective think-ins. This is an opportunity to set out party policies, as well as to practise the best defence of unpalatable stances.

Agriculture, again, has had an important role for the main parties.

First up last week was Fine Gael. They came into their meeting with a bounce in the opinion polls, but with a leader looking worriedly over his shoulder at a straight-talking Minister for Health on a mission.

The same minister, Leo Varadkar, and his drive for the protection of the health budget, also caused a stir among the party’s agriculture committee.

“What Varadkar has done is made the health budget untouchable. He has been seriously strategic,” one Fine Gael source told me.

“It’s looking like there’ll be no cuts to health. There might even be a bit more given to his budget. The money to do that needs to come from somewhere – the fear is that agriculture could get a clip.

“I know that the backbenchers have been talking about how to change the perception that farmers are flying, commodity prices are down, beef prices are down,” they said.

Over to Fianna Fáil. The party’s agriculture committee met on Tuesday morning, where I’m told former ICMSA president, and Longford dairy farmer, Pat O’Rourke gave a guest lecture.

FF’s farming spokesman Éamon Ó Cuív said the committee’s discussion centred on “making a fundamental change to how the beef sector operates”.

Ó Cuív added that the “sticking plaster of price increases” cannot be used to fix a “broken industry”.

Onto Labour. The city slickers who have rarely cast an eye to the people of rural Ireland appear to be making a move to capture the farmer vote. Ann Phelan’s appointment as the new junior minister for all things rural appears to have led to a St Paul on the road to Damascus-type conversion for the party. It now realises that there are votes outside of the urban areas.

Clare TD Michael McNamara told me that a focus on farmer vote-getting is part of the party’s immediate future. A sub-committee, comprising McNamara and junior ministers Ged Nash and Alan Kelly, as well as Minister Brendan Howlin, met to discuss farming.

Can anything be read into Howlin’s participation? He is the man in charge of cutting public spending and with a review of taxes in Agriculture House having taken place, is the Wexford man looking at what could go?