After Tuesday’s Six One News on RTÉ, Reeling in the Years recalled 1982, a year of three governments and GUBU.

“GUBU” was an acronym of Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented, the reaction of then Taoiseach Charles Haughey to the news that a murder suspect was found hiding in the apartment of the Attorney General.

After RTÉ’s Nine O’Clock News, Fine Gael’s Simon Coveney was on Primetime defending Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s decision to sack his fellow Fianna Fáiler Barry Cowen as Minister for Agriculture, denying that the fledgling coalition was already falling apart. 2020 – the second coming of GUBU.

While there is considerable sympathy on a personal level for Barry Cowen, his position had become politically untenable because it was now threatening the stability of the Government.

It is a significant blow for farming, one that shouldn’t be underestimated. Firstly, we have lost someone of ability and ambition, who had hit the ground running, who had impressed those who met him, and who had, I understand, shown good early chemistry with his departmental Government colleagues, Pippa Hackett and Martin Heydon.

Dara Calleary will be the new kid around the cabinet table. The Government may be barely three weeks old, but do you remember when a student joined the class in late September? They were the new kid until someone else joined afterwards, which mightn’t be for two years. This is similar.

Most damaging of all is the effect in Europe. Barry Cowen had already attended his first meeting of the ministerial council.

The next time they meet, the council will be presented with a third Irish minister in the space of a month.

When we are battling for our voice to be heard on CAP, both in terms of funding and of the programme priorities, on Brexit and trade, and on agriculture’s response to climate change, such instability weakens our position.

Of course, Barry Cowen won’t have wanted any of this, and his supporters will feel he has been shafted, perhaps from within his own party. Nothing was more GUBU than Meath TD Thomas Byrne, his Fianna Fáil colleague, appearing on local radio to deny he was the source of the leak. Offaly Fianna Fáil may now resemble Meath IFA or Cork ICMSA, with anger fuelled by a fierce sense of injustice that will last a generation.

It’s now vital that we have a period of boring stable politics under Minister Calleary. It’s never good for farming when it generates footage for future Reeling in the Years episodes.