Agriculture is often fairly political - Irish Farmers' Association talks with the Government and so on - but in recent years problems have arisen with animal diseases like BSE and foot-and-mouth disease.
On November 22nd last, I was in Paris when the latest round of the BSE crisis broke. Consumption of beef dropped all over Europe and the Irish beef industry was very badly damaged. Just when that began to stabilise and life was returning more or less to normal, the foot-and-mouth outbreak occurred in Britain. It's been going on night, noon and morning and I've been working straight through every day for about a month.
About a week after the outbreak, The Irish Times put together a team headed by Kevin O'Sullivan, who used to cover environmental and food science, myself and Ella Shanahan, the Agribusiness Correspondent, and a number of other reporters. We've been running two to three pages every day, giving information and covering all the events. We've been on top of it all the way.
I start getting calls from radio stations at home and abroad from 6 a.m. There has been a lot of demand from both radio and television and that goes on throughout the day, but my primary responsibility is to The Irish Times. I make a series of calls to my contacts and I take calls from people coming to me with information. I talk to Kevin and we decide what the day is going to look like. He assigns various people to jobs and this allows me to stand back from the story to get a broad overview of what's going on.
I check wire services and read reports from our correspondents in London and Paris. Kevin tells me who's writing what, and my job is to pull it all into a lead story. Normally, it would just be me going out and covering agriculture. During the day, I'm out moving around meeting contacts who often don't want to be seen publicly with me - that's the freedom the team has given me.
In the last week, the Minister for Agriculture has been giving daily briefings. That can happen any time from noon to 4 p.m. That's a very useful briefing because he has up-to-the-minute information on tests on animals, what farms are restricted and what's happening in Britain and the North of Ireland. All the while, I'm processing information given to me by contacts about smuggling, illegal activity and cattle movements. That takes up quite a bit of time because you can't publish anything without checking it thoroughly. Because the team has freed me up to have an overview and the story is changing by the hour, I don't start to write until quite late in the evening. Normally I do two pieces, a catch-all piece and a main story that I compile from my own and the rest of the team's copy.
The lead story is normally the last story to be written in the paper each day so that it is completely up to date. It is on the front page and that has to be ready by a 8.45 p.m. to 9 p.m. Early pieces have to be ready by 7 p.m. but you're working on those all day. That's not necessarily the end of the day, because a lot of my contacts are private and I like to go and meet people in the agribusiness world or in "agriland" generally, who might be able to help me push the boat out further. I've got calls in the middle of the night at 2 or 3 a.m. on this particular story. I've been a journalist all my like and I live for the big story. You can surf on a big story. You seem to get energy when you need it, but I am looking forward to a break when it's all over.
In conversation with Olivia Kelly
