‘Even routine things like moving silage from one farm

THE Gardai and PSNI mounted a checkpoint near Arthur Hughes’s farm in Middleton on the Armagh-Monaghan border a fortnight ago and within minutes there was a sizeable queue of vehicles running around the edge of his farm.

The checkpoint was put in place to film a promotional video for the two police forces but only gave Arthur a bad bout of deja vu as he immediately thought of the olden days of the 1980s and 1990s.

“We just don’t want to go back to that. It was all queues and queues and border custom huts with nothing moving anywhere — just torture,” he told the Farming Independent this week.

The impactof Brexit is a hot topic for Arthur’s farming neighbours in and around Middleton and the border.

He runs a 100ac dairy farm on the Armagh side of the border and a 100ac drystock farm on the Monaghan side in the Republic.

He doesn’t believe that anyone really can predict the outcome of the upcoming talks.

“Everyone is in the dark about what is going to happen. We are getting bad vibes at the moment but everyone is really just guessing,” he said.

But ask him to “guess” what might be the impact of Brexit on his dairy and cattle enterprises and the predictions are mixed. He is happy to take the word of LacPatrick about his milk. LacPatrick is about to open a new processing facility in Tyrone and he believes the capacity at the plant will be sufficient to take all the available Northern milk.

“That’s what they said at a recent information meeting so I don’t think my milk from the Northern farm will have to go south to Monaghan,” he points out. But it’s a different story regarding the cattle enterprise in the Republic.

“I can sell my stock North or South with ease at the moment. If a hard border is re-introduced I probably couldn’t sell my cattle in the North.