Editor’s Note: The letter below has been sent to Minister for Agriculture, Food & the Marine Michael Creed.

DEAR SIR: As you are no doubt aware, every few months ICBF carries out genetic evaluations. It is similar to games of “Snakes and Ladders”, where some genetic evaluations go up and others go down.

Understandably, the owners of the bulls that go up are happy and the owners of those that go down are disappointed. However, the lack of consistency between evaluations is a source of considerable frustration to cattle breeders.

This is often controversial and is a source of media commentary, as was the case last week. Invariably, senior ICBF figures come out and generally say the evaluation process is great and there is no problem and the problem is that breeders whose animals are not performing well are annoyed and are trying to discredit the ICBF evaluation system.

These ICBF figures remind me of Saddam Hussein’s director of propaganda, “Comical Ali” who continued to claim Iraq would defeat the USA, as the US troops were coming in the road from Baghdad airport to arrest him. Their claims would be laughable if the stakes for the Irish beef industry were not so serious.

The ICBF propaganda machine cannot hide the fact that the ICBF does not have the interests of the Irish beef industry at heart and treats the beef industry as a byproduct of the dairy industry.

ICBF for quite some time was trying to lead us to believe that we as beef farmers should be going to dairy farmers for replacements. The dogs in the streets knew this was utter nonsense but we were bombarded with this propaganda so much so that Teagasc established herds of these byproduct dairy cross animals in an effort to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

The outcome of all that is that they’ve established that one group of such animals was slightly less worse than the other. Basing maternal research of the beef herd on a dairy industry byproduct clearly shows the esteem in which ICBF holds the beef industry and the role of beef in agriculture. To add insult to injury, these dairy cross animals would have been derived from the least fertile dairy cows.

It is little wonder things are this way when the dairy industry dominates the ICBF board to the extent it does. Is such dominance by one livestock sector consistent with the principles of good corporate governance?

Is it any coincidence that the current ICBF chairman was the chairman of the Teagasc beef research advisory committee that promoted dairy byproducts as the seed stock of the beef industry rather than develop a proper maternal research programme?

Is it any wonder when the opportunity to withhold tag levies to ICBF arose last year so many beef farmers did so, because their interests are not being served by ICBF.

Michael Doran, in response to the imposition of a compulsory tag levy on farmers in true “Comical Ali” form, claimed in the Irish Farmers Journal of 27 October this gave ICBF a mandate.

Minister, you more than most will know you don’t win a mandate on a compulsory tag levy – you win a mandate by convincing your stakeholders that you have a vision and people have confidence and buy into that vision.

In that instance, people voted with their pockets and saw through the propaganda being propagated by ICBF. The yo-yo nature and lack of consistency in ICBF evaluations makes it impossible for beef farmers to retain confidence in ICBF.

There is no vision for beef farming in Ireland like the vision for dairy. All the eggs are making their way into the dairy basket.

Not everyone wants to be or can be a dairy farmer. However, in the current narrative the beef industry, to a large extent, seems to be based on utilising a dairy industry byproduct.

It is time for you to set out a blueprint for beef farmers to give them a future, similar to the blueprint set out for the dairy industry.

The BGDP scheme is more about funding ICBF than actual suckler farmers and we need a more rounded plan for the beef industry.