“We spent 12 months not talking,” recalls Ursula Kelly of Cormac Tagging about the tumultuous period when she and her father fell out over whether they would sell the family farm business that she had helped to create.

“It was the hardest 12 months of my life,” the Galway woman told the Women & Agriculture conference on Thursday.

Kelly’s parents had invested their pension into Cormac Tagging’s legal fight against the Department of Agriculture for the right to sell cattle tags to Ireland’s farmers. Ursula had led that charge, having returned from a successful career off-farm to help run the tagging business.

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Devastated

But several years later, with her parents turning 70, they wanted to retire and were approached to sell the business. Ursula was devastated, having invested all of her efforts into building the empire but being a minority shareholder at 33% versus her parents’ combined 66% shareholding.

“I have a little girl with Down's Syndrome. Dad was like ‘Go home and mind that child with Down's Syndrome’. I was like ‘I want to run the business that we built to provide a financial future for her’,” Ursula recalled.

“And we just we couldn't get past it. We literally couldn't get past it.”

'Locked horns'

The family, having built a veritable empire in the cattle tagging industry, “locked horns”, leading to a year where they did not speak.

A year elapsed before they would speak again, and it was decided that Ursula would buy her parents out of the business by borrowing the funds.

She is philosophical about it now.

“That's literally what happened. I bought my parents out of our family business. Succession doesn't have to look the same for everybody,” she said.

“I suppose they had invested their pension at 65 years of age, in terms of invested in me, because we had no definite outcome whether the department would give in to me….they [her parents] backed me, and then I had to back myself to go on take it,” she recalled.

“I was passionately involved [in the business] at that point in time. My head was in it, my heart was in it, and I just love it. I have the best job in the world.

“I just couldn't let it go, I will say, just moving on from that then in terms of the family farm, because of the turmoil and the pain that that caused for us all, and the family farm is now divided up among five girls,” she said.

“It's not for everybody, and it should be my intention that I would buy back the family farm, but that's a conversation for another day,” Ursula said.