All eyes in the Irish Farm Centre will be on Taoiseach Leo Varadkar next Tuesday evening when he sits down to dine with the IFA after its AGM. I don’t think the IFA offers vegetarian options at these gigs, so Leo better mark Tuesday down as that day of the week when he allows himself to eat a good steak.

His timing was perfect, as January is the only month of the year when we are all permitted to confess openly how we are going to do this, that and the other to be more pure. Leo didn’t miss the trick to harness that Veganuary feeling and reach out to the millennial vote. But politics is all about choreography. The very next day, opposition TDs handed Varadkar the perfect opportunity to calm those who eat their dinner while listening to the one o’clock news by declaring his love of Hereford beef too. It was a tidy bit of pan-spectrum electioneering and harmless headline-making even Bertie Ahern would have been proud of.

Some didn’t see it that way though, and he was scolded by opposition TDs for not supporting our beef farmers in their time of need. To be honest, it was an over-the-top reaction. People should be careful when choosing their battles. This wasn’t one worth going so heavy on. There are much bigger wars on the horizon that will require the renowned resilience of farmers if they are to have any hope of navigating them successfully.

Although global warming affects all of us, it has unsurprisingly been turned into an ideological and political football. It is always the same when it comes to matters of social justice – extremism rears its ugly head and clouds clear thinking.

The moderate middle ground is occupied by the rest of us who must calmly find a solution to the complex demands of feeding the world from dwindling resources in a welfare-friendly, environmentally aware and economically sustainable way. And for the most part there are signs that we are, in our own ways, doing things differently to be kinder to the planet. I am sure most of us could give examples – whether its recycling better or using more public transport.

But here is the thing, and we tend to overlook it. Let’s pretend that climate change gets sorted and let’s pretend that there is no such thing as veganism, there is still one pertinent question which faces agriculture – and livestock farming in particular.

If, as is predicted, the world population is going to exceed nine billion by 2050, if the arable land mass available to grow food is being urbanised or washed away, if we retain a ban on genetic modification and if we need to find bio-energy alternatives to fossil fuels: do we need to reduce livestock farming and the land used for fodder in order to feed people? CL

Shed success

Over the years we have lamented the demise of all the traditional, mainly male, social outlets unique to rural Ireland – and with good reason. The creamery, the post office and the pub were the common examples, as we wondered: where will the men go now? Well, it is fair to say that the Men’s Shed movement, which received deserved government funding approval last week, is doing Trojan work in plugging that gap.