It has taken a long time, but last week the Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine met under Jackie Cahill’s chairmanship to discuss the long running saga of the collapse in productivity on Dan Brennan’s farm in Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny and its subsequent recovery once the Cement Roadstone owned local brickworks shut down.

The hearing in the Dáil’s committee room took over two hours and at the end every single member representing all the parties from both the Dáil and Seanad agreed that it couldn’t simply end there.

Extraordinary efforts

The wealth of evidence before the hearing of the extraordinary efforts to prove the inadequacies of Dan Brennan as a farmer, the monitoring of the plant’s emissions and the apparent litany of mistakes and lack of follow up in the handling of blood samples, as stated at the hearing, gave rise to a concern of a failure by the State of its responsibility to its citizens or a cover-up and suppression of evidence.

Somebody impartial needs to make a call. At the end of the hearing, the Committee chairman made reference to the large number of neighbours and local IFA members, including the county chairman, who came to show their support for Dan Brennan.

He also questioned where he should take it now that he had unanimous backing from his Committee for further action.

It would seem to me that a low cost but effective mechanism would be to appoint a retired senior judge to trawl through the large amount of evidence and documents already assembled and to reach a conclusion on this long running and disturbing case.

For transparency, I have to acknowledge that I was one of the witnesses at the hearing, along with former IFA president Padraig Walshe and specialist vet Jim Crilly.

No more needs to be said at this stage, but this has dragged on far too long, as outlined at the hearing, with too many abrupt calling off of important lines of enquiry in odd circumstances. Jackie Cahill and his Committee have fulfilled a valuable service in airing the problem.

They now need to take the next logical step in setting up a process that will get behind the facts surrounding the farm’s plunge into near bankruptcy and its subsequent recovery.