'Brexit must go back to the people' – Marshall

As the British parliament prepares to vote on the Brexit withdrawal agreement, one of the voices calling for a second referendum in the UK comes from the Irish Oireachtas – that of senator and Co Armagh farmer Ian Marshall.

“It’s looking more likely that it must go back to the people,” Marshall told the Irish Farmers Journal. At present, he sees the political debate in the UK as driven by ideology. “There’s an element of imperialism and colonialism” on the side of Brexiteers keen to seal trade deals inspired by “the Great Britain that was in 1918, not 2018”, he said. But saying “Europe is fantastic” on the remain side is equally ideological, he added.

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Marshall still hopes Brexit won’t happen. “No one, two years into this conversation, has presented me something that categorically says: here is the rationale why we should leave; it would be better outside Europe.” While he respects the decision people made with the information they had in 2016, “we’ve learned in hindsight that there were many lies told”.

As a unionist, he “fully understand[s] the insecurities” expressed by the DUP if Northern Ireland found itself under a different regime than Britain to avoid an Irish border. “We have a divided society, and if we’re serious about uniting our society, then this must end up in one place and that’s back to the will of the people to make a call,” he said. If a second, better informed referendum confirmed the Brexit decision, he would respect it.

As the next CAP is taking shape, Marshall doesn’t see any change in the need to keep supporting farmers.

“The perceived value of food has decreased. Either we keep subsidising farmers to produce food at the price they are producing it, or we go to the consumer and say, ‘you’re going to have to pay more for food at the checkout’,” he said – and he does not expect governments to choose this.

Marshall said farmers are not the only ones facing tough rules and inspections. “The reality is that when you go across all industries now, it’s heavily regulated,” he said – and this is key to export success to countries such as China. Yet he recently won a five-year court battle after Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture ignored his successful appeal against a water penalty.

“We’ve got quite a fragmented process for inspecting, checking and regulating,” Marshall said. “We need to start afresh with some of this. What farmers especially feel aggrieved about is the duplication and repetition of inspections.” They should come together under one inspection regime ensuring penalties are proportional to breaches, and Marshall is optimistic that “we are learning on this”.

Positive environmental contribution

Marshall sits on the Oireachtas climate action committee. “We’re very quick to criticise agriculture, but we’re very slow to acknowledge the positive contribution it has and can make,” he said. “Actively growing grass and vegetation will sequester carbon.” While he conceded that Europeans eat too much protein, he said that millions of others don’t eat enough.

Marshall says information overload means respectable choices such as vegetarianism and veganism are associated with anti-livestock farming “spin”. He insists that decision-makers must go back to “evidence-based policy”. Although politicians are judged on a short-term electoral period, Marshall said we need “a long-term strategic approach to climate change and the environment that is underpinned and supported by science”.

Ian Marshall comes from a mixed farm in Markethill, Co Armagh, where his family had dairy, beef, sheep and crops. Going to agricultural college in the early 1980s, he was told to specialise and focused on dairying for the next 30 years. But with a job at Queens University in Belfast, a seat in the Seanad and his agricultural engineer son now spending a lot of time off-farm, they have gone against the trend and converted to beef and sheep farming.

Marshall doesn’t believe the advice he received 35 years ago is still valid in today’s volatile markets. “When you have all your eggs in one basket, that will lead to some problems,” he said. Mixed farming allows “a spread of risk across different sectors that actually insulates and protects you from that volatility”.