One of the organisers of the protests over the past week has said that protesters will have to regroup now and see where they go from here.

Westmeath agricultural contractor James Geoghegan told the Irish Farmers Journal that there is “talk about national protest on Friday that I’m not involved in organising”.

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“I think we’ll have to regroup and let it sit now, we’re all very busy at this time of year. There’s talk that there could be major protests during the European presidency gig in July, which would embarrass the Government but at this stage I don’t know.”

He said he believes there will be meetings held around the country in the next week or two to see what people want to do.

Package

He said he and protesters are disappointed at the 2.4c/l cut to green diesel that was announced on Sunday and that the €100m fuel support scheme will be complicated.

“It’s another insult when you consider the VAT take alone on diesel is gone from roughly 10c/l up to roughly 20c/l, so the Government are up 10c/l and they’re only giving back 2.5c. Is that fair? I don’t know like,” he said.

The problem for a lot of contractors is actually cashflow and turnover, he said. “There’s really low credit on fuel this year and when we go cutting silage and we’re burning €3,000 or €4,000 a day, and the bigger contractor is burning up to €10,000 a day, the cashflow is going to be a serious problem, because there’s going to be no credit to the tune that’s required.

“Farmers are going to have to get finance sorted to cut silage to pay contractors on the day because there’s no contractor that can carry this expense this year, it’s just not possible,” he said.

He said the past week and the package proves “how disconnected the Government are with rural Ireland”.

He hit out at rural TDs for voting confidence in the Government on Tuesday. Government won the motion by 92 votes to 78.

Geoghegan said that he has been asked over the past three days by “around 1,000 people” would he be interested in running the next election. He said it would be something he is interested in. He said that no party has approached him to date but that “there’s people talking about setting up a new rural party”.

Revenue

When asked to comment on judgments to the tune of over €500,000 that the Revenue Commissioners have registered against him, Geoghegan said that his accountant told him that he has “nothing to worry about”. Essentially that figure is “totally inaccurate,” he claimed, stating that there “was accountancy errors that were done in COVID-19 where we had set up a new company and we didn’t go ahead using it”.

“There was a lot of accounting mistakes made but as of last week my accountant told me I’d absolutely nothing to worry about,” he said. He said he currently owes Revenue “for some money for the latest VAT round, but that’s just standard stuff”.

Geoghegan was convicted of 13 counts of animal cruelty and the neglect of 65 cattle at Tullamore Court in the mid-2000s. When asked to comment on the conviction he said it happened “a long time ago when we had an awful lot of cattle on the farm”.

“We got a bad doing with rotavirus, we did lose a good few calves, but in the evidence in the court the mortality rate on our farm was below the national average and that’s all I really want to say on that”.