Meat factory agents may have ‘infiltrated’ Beef Plan Movement – Corley

THERE ARE now effectively two “sections” within the Beef Plan Movement says Eamon Corley, one of the main figures behind the founding of the organisation.

Speaking to the Farming Independent, the Meath farmer (pictured right) also said that “factory agents” may have infiltrated the Beef Plan movement over the past year and sown the seeds of internal discontent.

“I think that it’s inevitable that in any sort of [farmers] organisation that there could be infiltration from people who just want to make life difficult. I can’t say that that has happened in our case, but the last year has been quite troublesome at the politics end of things,” he said.

“We don’t have any proof of it [infiltration of Beef Plan by the meat industry] but it is a possibility.

“A lot of farmers firmly believe that there is a cartel at work in the meat industry, but how do you prove something like that? It’s a tough industry.”

Mr Corley has conceded that last year’s Beef Plan protests were not “thought out enough” and were ultimately unsuccessful, but they were important to raise awareness of the issues.

“We needed to raise awareness [among the public] about the uneconomic nature of the beef industry. This was part of the plan,” he said.

“When the protests started it probably wasn’t coordinated well enough and wasn’t thought out enough. There wasn’t universal agreement over what was supposed to be done. It grew and grew and ended up being something that was out of the control of Beef Plan.

“It got nasty. There wasn’t very much sympathy from the factories and very little dialogue. There was no price increase, the Minister [Creed] turned against us and said that we would destroy the beef industry and at the same time we were losing money ourselves.

“The more the Government and the factories came against us the bigger the buy in from the farmers. Farmers came out, got stuck in and got very entrenched. When it was called off, it was the right thing to do. It became obvious that no matter how long we stayed there, the beef industry wasn’t going to give us a price increase. “The hope in the Plan was that we would have our protests and then reach an agreement for a base price for farmers. That hasn’t happened. We’d be disappointed about that. We hit them [the factories] as hard as we possibly could, as hard as they have ever been hit in this country and they weren’t prepared to talk.” Mr Corley believes that the Beef Plan movement can point to some significant successes over the past 12 months, including the launch of its purchasers group and the Emerald Isle Producers Group.

“While there has been internal politics within Beef Plan over the last year, which has hurt elements of it [the 86 point plan], the Producers Group and the Purchasers Group has been working away all the time,” he said.

“Emerald Isle is taking a lot of cattle on a weekly basis and is getting more for cattle than the farmers would get themselves. Emerald Isle is probably the only functioning producers’ group in the country at this stage.

Engagement

“We have eight different factories who are dealing with us at present. We are shifting maybe 300 cattle a week, something in that region. We are open to all farmers, all over the country. If we could get enough farmers into the producers group it has the potential to solve a lot of the problems that are in the beef industry at the moment.

“We need more farmers getting involved, more engagement from factories and more supports [from the Department of Agriculture] to make that a reality.”

“There is still a plan there and there is a lot of good stuff in the plan. The fact that the plan was written by farmers is something that we hope the Minister will be interested in.”