It came as a surprise last year to Tom Parlon, the president of the Irish Farmers' Association, that there was a link between the collapse of the Russian economy and hurling in his parish.
The IFA president lives and farms in Coolderry, a rural parish between Birr, Co Offaly, and Roscrea, Co Tipperary, which is noted for its hurling.
"We have always had a good club but as this is a very rural area its membership depends on farming and the product of the farms. You need young men for hurling and young men need work," he said .
Coolderry, perhaps the most influential senior hurling club in Co Offaly, has won a county senior hurling championship in every decade of this century. It has not managed to maintain that record so far this decade and time is running out.
Enter the Russian economy. The team, according to Tom Parlon, has received a setback in its plans to win the county championship because the Russians have stopped buying our agricultural produce since late last year.
"That means that young fellows who should be able to live, work and play sport in the area have had to go. There has been a cutback in the number of jobs available and on the farms where the beef and sheep are being produced. It all impacts." This week, as he led Irish farm opposition to the new EU Commission proposals to scale down EU supports for farmers, Mr Parlon had more than hurling on his mind.
As he led the IFA delegation to join the estimated 50,000 farmers from all over the EU who had gathered to protest at the Agenda 2000 proposals, he was acutely aware of the onus on him to deliver the best possible deal for farmers at home.
"I know the damage these proposals will cause to Irish farmers, their families and the local economy because I only have to look at my own situation. I am a pig and sheep producer and I have been badly hit by what has happened already. I have had to dig deeply into my resources to survive," he said.
"I have had to totally revise my financial situation and I went and sat down with my bank to help get over the current crisis and reduce outgoings as much as I can and operate on agreed levels of credit."
He said that his 240-sow unit produced 130 pigs weekly and he was reluctant to cut back on production because his units were very efficient and he should be able to weather the storm especially if the pig trade improved, as expected, later in the year.
"I know about the difficulties in the sheep sector as well. The price I got for my lambs this year was £7 per head down on the previous year and no business can take that kind of a drop and hope to survive." His experience running his 200-acre holding will, he feels, help him this week in his efforts to convince the Government that they should not agree a farm package which will take at least £160 million from farmers and deprive the economy of £600 million.
"It impacts on us all. I took one of my sons aside following a poor enough Christmas test result to advise him that he would have to study harder because he could not expect the farm to support himself in the future if things go on as predicted. I had to tell him that he would have to study to at least get skills which may provide him with an off-farm income to support the farm."
He was full of praise for his two sons, Fergal (16) and Cathal (12), who are both interested in farming but face the possibility of not being able to survive on the income it produces.
"A lot of young people are turning their backs on farming and I don't blame them but they should have the opportunity to get a living off the land if they choose and that is why I will fight for people to have that right." But how does he see the rest of the community in rural Ireland and urban people? He believes that we are all interdependent and that is how it should be.
"Part of the reason for holding the series of nationwide marches last week was to attempt to get the message across to the wider community that they too will be hit if EU supports to farming are cut. I know there is a lot of talk about rural development and rural enterprise, but that can only go so far and it must be supported by a strong agricultural base."
If there were no farmers in Ireland there would be no rural economy, he added.
"We can only go so far in tourism, especially here in the midlands. Even in the most beautiful places in Ireland, like the Ring of Kerry, most of them shut up shop for the winter. I was recently in Austria, a country with a population the same as our own. They have six times as many tourists as we have because they are close to large numbers of people, especially in southern Germany. They are also advantaged by the fact they can have both a summer and a winter tourist trade which is based on the ski slopes and that keeps them going. We don't have that." Mr Parlon rejected the suggestion that his monster march in Dublin alienated farmers from urban people who believe farmers live on handouts and whinge.
"In the last year people in urban areas are beginning to recognise my face. They talk to me and I am very heartened by what they say," he added.
Urban people may have said, he added, that farmers have cried wolf too often: "But they tell me they now know that the wolf has arrived at the door," he said.
"I am also convinced that Irish people want to buy Irish goods and want to support Irish farmers and they tell me that on the streets of Dublin and elsewhere. I think we are succeeding in getting our message across." He has no doubt that the huge meeting in Dublin managed to get the message across to the politicians that there was a crisis and it needed to be addressed.
The fact that so many people turned out to that march enabled him to tell the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, in Brussels this week that it was delivery time, he said.
He said it was his job as head of the IFA to prod the Minister and the Government into delivering the best possible deal for Ireland.
"Mr Walsh is not unhappy when we take to the streets because it helps him argue that we are serious when we say we are going to be wiped out," he said.
Earlier this week, Mr Parlon was adamant that Ireland's special reliance on farming was now being ignored by the EU and that special consideration will have to be given to the plight of Irish agriculture.
"I have said it before and I will say it again. No deal here on CAP in Brussels would be far better than a bad deal. I would prefer if the matter went to the Summit meeting," he said.
"I think the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, may be in a better position there to make our case because the farm ministers are making no attempt to accommodate our special place in European agriculture," he added.
"I never really realised until last year just how dependent we are on exports, especially to countries like Russia and Egypt which can have their own problems. Things went wrong in the Russian economy last year and it impacted, as I said, back down all the way to the Coolderry hurling team. It is a very small world we live in," he said.
It is a small world, indeed, but one that Mr Parlon is familiar with. As a young man he spent over a year travelling the globe, living first in New Zealand for six months and later in America.
That experience should help him this week to fend off the excesses of the damage the EU may inflict on Ireland, its rural people and even the quality of hurling in Co Offaly.