Has urban Ireland finally a voice?

I can't say I get that at all. I certainly haven't experienced it in all my years living rurally. Maybe it applies to some but I've never encountered them.

I know a reasonable handful of both just from those I was in secondary school with. This is just descriptive of those I know, not a case everywhere, but I really doubt this is unique!

The people who still consider themselves farmers would be kids of actual, in many cases former, farming families. May even live in a town, but would pay attention to farming news and do traditional farming, eh, "stuff". Going to the ploughing and agri shows and so on, even though they're in an office job, their partner is in an office job and their kids will likely be in office jobs. But the kids have a full set of Fendt model tractors

The part-timers are nearly all secondary teachers, I expect chosen due to the summer holidays (they'll never do exam supervision, marking etc; and I dread to know what their evenings/weekends are like with correction, planning and part-time farming). They are farmers, but I imagine their farm income is miniscule.

I know lads who's only farming is solar, but they'd still call themselves farmers rather than electricity suppliers.

We arent subsidising food security we are subsiding mass over production.

We consume about 60k Tonnes of beef per year but we produce ten times that amount.

Subsidise 100k tonnes, which is still much more than we need, but invest the remainder of subsidies on other projects that wont incur fines from the EU.

Anyway isn't the Leo comment that rattled the gage from 15 years ago?

Sounds to me like more of the far right looking to whip up anti brown skin sentiment than anything else.

The sons of the land slock wasn't exactly a lofty ideal when so many farmers were property developers.

So as you have pointed out it's really the EU is the issue seeing as they dispense the fines rather than the farmers themselves who Leo was having a pop at.

So we are food secure because they could switch to growing other crops on the land because the land can be made productive fairly easily due to our climate, we just choose to export for economic reasons.

Again that isn't the farmers fault, it's the EU etc who are providng the subsidies, he should be having a go at the policy makers not the farmers.

Cant disagree with that, althought the govt should be pushing the EU to cap agri subsidies at food security levels only and divert the remainder of our funds into other renewable projects that benefit the irish population, not a small group of farmers.

What overproduction ?
Beef and sheep meat is produced here because we have a natural advantage in doing so . It can be transported on refrigerated trucks / containers to lucrative markets within a few hours e.g the UK . Markets that simply do not have an adequate supply of it now and probably never will.
It’s a bit like saying we have too many dairy cows in Cork because some of their milk is consumed by people who live in Limerick city !

Most countries are not totally self sufficient in food. Many are precariously balanced. I read somewhere that the UK will be producing less than half of its food requirements by 2030 .
It will be a pity if we cannot supply a greater part of their needs in the future because something.subsidies.something climate fines ..something .

The subsidies don't have to be applied for.

And please stop being disingenous, you know aswell as I do that farmers would errupt as soon as the mere mention of stopping subsidies came up.

I am not unsympathetic to their situation however I am unsympathetic to extreme protest which we see coming from them.