Murphy in bid for Connacht Chair job
FORMER Galway IFA County Chairman, Pat Murphy, will be bidding to succeed Padraic Joyce as Connacht IFA Chair when the position becomes vacant over the coming weeks.
The Ardrahan dairy and suckler farmer told the Farming Tribune that he had taken the decision based his interest in trying to ensure that farming as a way of life survived in the West of Ireland over the coming years.
He said that there were very genuine fears that younger people would turn their backs on farming given the very poor returns that farming was delivering to families across the western region.
“I suppose that in many cases it’s back to the old saying of: it takes a good job to keep the farming going. We don’t want to see young people walking away from the land,” said Pat Murphy.
He said that he wanted to see properly funded Early Retirement and Young Farmer Installation schemes as well as easier access to low cost finance for farmers who wanted to develop their enterprises.
“If we lose the young farmers and then the young families from rural Ireland then we start to lose our schools, our GAA clubs, our churches, our post-offices and our local shops,” said Pat Murphy.
He also said that there had to be a review of the planning permission policy that currently existed in Ireland which seemed to put every obstacle in the way of young people building houses on their own lands.
On the recent protest and pickets of meat plants, he said that maybe the IFA should have been more pro-active at an early stage although he added that the ‘dragging out of the protests in the end’ by some people was no help either.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.