The news that Irish beef can now be sold to China is certainly a significant boost for the beef sector. But as Angus Woods, chair of the IFA Livestock Committee, rightly points out, for it to be a real success, farmers have to see some benefit in their pockets.
It’s amazing how important this far away market has become for Irish agriculture. Total Irish agri food exports to China (that include dairy and pig meat) are approaching €1bn.
That’s more than double what it was five years ago.
Given the concern over Brexit and our reliance on the UK market, especially when it comes to beef exports, it’s a very welcome addition with huge potential for growth.
But let’s not forget that it’s taken a very long time, painstaking negotiations and a lot of diplomacy to get this far and the agreement now needs to be honoured in every detail.
Brexit will present a huge challenge to this. We live on an island which should give us some advantages when it comes to controlling disease.
With Brexit, the aspirations of having an all-Ireland database for animal identification and all the good work that has been done to control disease on the island could be in jeopardy.
Sad to say, but along the border there was a culture in the past of smuggling and there was always plenty of money to be made by those who didn’t give a fig for the consequences.
People use to say that ‘a 100 yards of border on your farm had the same earning capacity as 500 acres of good land anywhere else in the country’.
Reverting to those activities has the potential to put the entire livestock sector in jeopardy.
It was once said of a financial regulator who was charged with the financial security of the country that he ’wouldn’t be able to track bullocks through a snow drift’.
This time the gatekeepers are the State vets and farmers themselves, and they cannot afford to fail.
As I was writing this on Tuesday morning, the very sad news had come through of the death of Big Tom McBride.
Coming so shortly after the death of his wife, Rose, in January, his passing is a huge loss to their family, large circle of friends and fans from one end of the country to the other, never mind abroad.
I’d always known about Big Tom, but hadn’t seen him live until I attended one of Michael Commins’ concert nights down in Salthill, Co Galway.
Michael warned me the place would be mobbed and that whatever about how well-known or good the other performers were, the majority of the crowd were there for Big Tom.
It was near the end of the evening when he came on-stage to a standing ovation and sustained applause.
Talk about feeling the love. And then he started to sing the big hits - Gentle Mother, Four Country Roads and Back to Castleblaney – and the huge crowd sang right back at him.
It was the very same when he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Country Sound Music Awards.
Michael Commins will have an extended remembrance of Big Tom in next week’s paper. May he rest in peace.
Mairead Lavery: Celebrating the impressive women on our farms