It’s a year since the Beef Plan Movement went to the factory gates.

Will that campaign, which saw leaders and spokesmen on the news and Primetime, prove to be the high watermark for the movement?

Will the gains made through the Beef Market Taskforce that the campaign helped establish be its legacy? As things stand, it looks like that might be the case.

It is important to state that no one can doubt the sincerity of the founders and the main players in the Beef Plan Movement.

They came together to get a better price for beef, and change the power dynamic between retailer, processor and producer.

That said, those same leaders did question the motivation and sincerity of almost everyone else in the sector. The processors were corrupt, the established farm organisations inept and weak, the state organisations such as Bord Bia were working to a processor agenda and so on.

This suspicion descended into outright paranoia during the protests, as rumours and conspiracy theories ran like wildfire around WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.

Perhaps the most ludicrous was one in which Bord Bia CEO Tara McCarthy was married to Meat Industry Ireland director Cormac Healy.

Despite having absolutely no basis in fact, many are still convinced this is true. It seems to have originated from a satirical post on a social media platform, congratulating the couple, following an interview McCarthy gave in the Irish Examiner that annoyed protestors.

Another false story was that Simon Coveney, the former Minister for Agriculture, was married to a niece of ABP supremo Larry Goodman. This again proved to be absolutely unfounded (believe me reader, I checked).

All this fog definitely undermined the credibility of the claims being made by the same protestors around the abundance of foreign, particularly Polish, meat being observed by protestors entering meat plants.

It seems to be a phenomenon of social media, one that we are seeing the same thing happening in relation to COVID-19. None of this helped the credibility of the campaign.

By the end of the year, the Beef Plan leadership had split themselves, a split that has become bitter. Lockdown has placed it, and indeed all the fledgling organisations, in a state of suspended animation in terms of meetings and membership.

Beef Plan now needs to quickly pull itself together. While it was invited to the most recent taskforce meeting, that looked more like Michael Creed delivering a hospital pass to his successor than anything else.

To be invited to the next one, some evidence may be required that the internal differences are being worked on, and that membership is being renewed for 2020.