Thursday night’s Beef Summit will live long in the memory of the 1,300 or so crammed into the Shearwater Hotel function room.

The crowd was in early and the sense of expectation was high, added to by the pre-meeting set piece by the Beef Plan Movement.

The staging of a “funeral” for the beef sector by the Beef Plan Movement was not without precedent – Macra first did something similar 40 years ago. The sight of a horse-drawn coffin being followed up the street by a long cortege of farmers in hi-vis was nonetheless very striking and sombre.

For Meat Industry Ireland’s Cormac Healy to be one of the first speakers in the charged atmosphere was challenging. And he was heckled and tackled as you would expect. What was surprising was that he wasn’t the main target from the floor.

Andrew Cromie of ICBF was the Johnny Sexton of the night, with a few of the hits on him a little on the late side.

Knowledgeable observers pointed out that some of those castigating ICBF were pedigree breeders, with the interventions in part political. Nonetheless, Cromie will have been left with much to reflect on.

Within Minister for Agriculture Michael Creed’s comments lay the contradiction and conundrum at the heart of the beef sector. He extolled the virtues of Irish sucklers, “a story of a very natural way of producing beef, on temperate grasslands punctuated by trees and hedgerows and peatlands. It is also a story about farm families, caring for the land in a way that takes account of Mother Nature.”

Scale

However, the scale of our beef farms is both a marketing strength and an economic weakness, and he admitted he doesn’t see the marketplace returning a substantial income soon. That €100m might fill the bucket, but the hole in the bottom needs plugging. The IFA’s man in Brussels Liam McHale’s understated presentation stilled the room, as the dangers of a trade deal were spelt out. Similarly, Bord Bia CEO Tara McCarthy turned the intervention of a handful of animal rights activists during her presentation into a reminder that the airspace around beef production is as challenging as the market.

Lastly came Prof Gerry Boyle, who threw off the shackles and delivered a shouty but brilliant exhortation to the steaming room. It felt like a revival meeting in a tent in Tennessee, and set the tone for the Q and A that followed.

It was notable that IFA and Beef Plan Movement representatives were largely indistinguishable, all cattle farmers slowly going stone broke and angry about it. More unites than separates farmers, under whatever banner they walk.