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A huge crowd travelled to Cootehill Mart in Co Cavan on Thursday night, to attend a Save Our Sucklers demonstration.
A number of farmers expressed their thoughts on the €1.9m settlement between the IFA and its former secretary general Pat Smith.
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“He got a lot of money for what happened, essentially we’re all going to have to pay for that,” one woman told the Irish Farmers Journal.
She went on to add that even though she was a fully paid-up member of the IFA, she felt that the controversy has damaged the organisation’s reputation.
“I think we stalled about going back into our membership (after 2015), but at the end of the day the organisation, apart from the leadership at that time, is a good organisation and perhaps what happened is a one-off, but that remains to be seen,” she concluded.
Slip of a tongue
Another farmer said: “I think it [IFA] did suffer, there was a lot of controversy where people didn’t renew their subscription again. It seems like a lot of money he’s after getting and it’s us that’s going to end up suffering. It could’ve been money that was better spent, than on what happened and it’s all over a slip of a tongue.”
Contractual agreement
However, one farmer said he believed that the settlement was adequate and said: “It’s probably fair from the contractual agreement that he had. He was a very experienced negotiator and if he had been given a chance maybe he would have explained himself a bit better.”
One man said that he hauled cattle for farmers and when the pay scandal broke farmers in the area immediately wrote to the factories to stop their IFA contributions.
With regard to the settlement, the farmer said: “I would not be happy with it, I don’t think it’ll affect their membership so much this time, but it’ll cause a lot of talk.”
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