A road trip last weekend to the Gaeltacht area of Ros Muc took me through the wilds of Co Mayo and into Connemara.

It’s a beautiful part of the country that I hadn’t had the privilege of visiting before. While the landscape was breathtaking, one thing I remarked on was the low numbers of livestock grazing the mountains and hills the further west I went.

The decline in the national suckler herd over the last decade has been well documented. While beef cow numbers were gradually falling breeding ewe numbers and output held their own, initially increasing and stabilising – with throughput in factories trending north of 3m head/annum from 2016 to 2023.

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The sheep kill has collapsed in the last two years, with throughput falling by over 850,000 head in 2024/2025. The concerning drop in throughput is continuing, albeit at a slower pace in 2026, but throughput of lambs and hoggets is still down over 80,000 head in the first six months of the year.

So what is driving this decline? It’s hard to put your finger on any one aspect, and it is more likely a combination of factors – the age profile of farmers is heading in the wrong direction, with younger farmers slow to take on the shepherd’s crook.

A switch to organics has taken the focus of production on some farms, and a couple of harsh springs have increased the workload drastically.

Last week’s Teagasc National Farm survey results painted a positive picture for sheep enterprises, with the average income of sample farms rising 7% to €29,344.

In the same week, we reported that inadequate handling facilities were raised as an issue in Teagasc’s large scale labour study.

This week’s Focus on breeding puts the sector in the spotlight. The sector is too important to be let dwindle away and now is the time to act before numbers fall to a dangerous level.

Key driver

Like sucklers, sheep are a key driver of economic activity in rural and remote areas. Their role in upland ecosystems is also in the spotlight given the devastating forest fires that are raging across Europe, but maybe that is a discussion for another day.

What is a discussion for today is the importance of reversing a proposed 24% cut in the CAP budget, given that on many farms, direct payments account for 100% of family farm income.

This week, Niamh Murphy reports from an Agricultural Science Association seminar that took place last week in Laois. University of Galway’s professor David Styles comments in his presentation titled “An alternative vision for agriculture and land use” raised a few eyebrows in suckler and sheep circles. He pointed to possible opportunities for drystock farmers to make more money from carbon farming as opposed to beef or sheep farming.

We have listened to these claims for years but very little detail has come to light on how this can happen.

He went on to question whether we had enough beef with dairy beef, and whether we really needed suckler beef at all. It demonstrates a poor understanding of the important role that sucklers play, particularly in the west of Ireland.

Yes, a well-run dairy beef system, at a high stocking rate with the majority of weight gain coming from grass will compare favourably to suckler beef on carbon footprint, but setting one against the other isn’t appropriate.

There are roles for each production system and it’s up to everybody to make sure we are the very best we can be in each system.

I suspect the professor hasn’t tried to rear Friesian bull calves on the side of a mountain in Ros Muc or looked at the carbon footprint of said calves when brought to finish.

Suckler cows and sheep graze areas of the country where no other farming system works, and they also play an important role in maintaining the fabric of rural communities.

To say they may not be needed is disrespectful to the thousands of suckler farmers who at the moment don’t have any other option but to continue farming sucklers and sheep.