MII has made it clear that the moratorium agreed at the Forum last year, will come to an end just over a week from now on 31 December.

Otherwise they were generally upbeat about last week's forum with director Cormac Healy, saying: "The meeting afforded the parties a useful opportunity to share their views on the current market situation and MII called for the Roundtable to address some of the key issues facing the Irish beef sector including the need to secure real access to international markets and to confront emerging challenges arising from both climate change and EU Trade negotiations.”

They also highlighted the 10% rise in average beef prices over 2015, which is the same amount as the euro has devalued against sterling. They had little to say that would be of comfort to Irish farmers about the huge gap that has opened between Irish and British prices which dominated debate in the forum other than to point out prices have fallen in Britain and that "domestic British beef secures a significant premium in its own market, highlighting that seven of the top ten GB retailers do not even stock Irish beef.” This highlights the cost to Irish farming of beef labeling legislation that prevents Irish cattle from having a national identity once they leave the state.

One point they made that everyone could agree on is the absolute need to get more export market destinations open in a way that they can be supplied by Irish beef.

The weights issue clearly wasn't resolved in the forum with MII saying "these animals are a small minority of the national kill and securing best value for our beef in international markets is strongly dependent on producing cattle that meet the specifications demanded by customers. From a farmers perspective it makes no sense that in-spec animals should be subsidising the minority of out-of-spec cattle.

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Beef Forum survives another round