Costs and pressures creating psychological strain, farming body says

Soaring costs and ever-increasing financial pressures are weighing heavily on the farming community with suicide or suicidal ideation a growing concern, a meeting of the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers’ Association (ICSA) in Mitchelstown, Co Cork, has heard.

ICSA vice-president for Munster, Dennis O’Callaghan, said dairy and tillage farmers, in addition to farmers from his own sector, are becoming very fearful for their future.

“What worries me is that because of the rise in estimated prices we will be wiped out. If there was ever a year that we were going to be wiped out this is the year,” he told the meeting of 30 farmers at the Firgrove Hotel on Wednesday night.

“Then you have beef. We should be getting €7 a kg for our beef for us to make a profit and to make a living. But we are getting €4. We are getting a tenth of the overall turnover of the product that is being sold on the shelf. We can’t survive on it,” he said.

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‘Loss leaders’

“Back in the 1980s the shopkeepers wanted 20 per cent. That was the ordinary guy on the side of the road. Now we have the supermarkets using us as loss leaders in to the shop.”

Mr O’Callaghan said farming had suffered from a lack of support from successive governments. He said the neglect of the sector was coming to the forefront now with possible shortages of items such as bread given the outbreak of conflict in Ukraine.

“It is a fright to think that there isn’t a biscuit or a slice of bread in this country that the corn is grown in the country. When I started in the 1980s we had Odlums Flour, we had sugar factories in Mallow and Carlow, we had a lot of poultry businesses around the country. Every day their products were sent around the country and sold to supermarkets. Now we have our chicken being brought in from God knows where,” he said.

Mr O’Callaghan said farmers take on multiple roles on any given day and are fighting fires on many fronts. “A farmer is also an accountant, a mechanic and a vet and a psychologist because he has to keep it all balanced in his head.”

‘Mental health’

He said the ICSA planned to hold a number of meetings in various counties and called on farmers to attend in large numbers.

“We feel if we get to regulate some of the problems we have discussed here tonight it would definitely be a start in going the right way. Farming is a passion. But if you can’t make money out of it, your mental health suffers.”

ICSA president Dermot Kelleher spoke of the isolation of farming life.

“People are working alone. It gets in their head and they have nobody to talk to,” he said.

Meanwhile, Fermoy Independent councillor Frank Roche told the meeting he was concerned about rates of depression and suicide among farmers.

“People are ringing me about finances and marriage breakdowns. The suicides are frightening and nobody is addressing it. There is nobody trying to protect these people,” he said.

“If I was speaking here in a Garda forum and it was road deaths I was talking about, every road would be policed. We would have speed vans. We would all be looking to do something about it. It would be the same if it was farm accidents. But nothing is being done about suicides.”