This is Marcus O’Halloran’s favourite time of year in the farming calendar; silage season. More often than not, it bookends the time he had between one job and the next. In a short space of time the Tipperary native has had a rather colourful career. The former University College Dublin (UCD) student union president has recently taken up the role of CEO at Agri Aware.
Marcus was the first student from the agricultural science faculty at UCD to be elected as president of the student union. That is a dramatic leap for a person who says his first day at college “was probably the most terrifying of my life. I went from a school of 300 students to a campus with 30,000.”
Marcus gives the impression that the political path he took was foisted upon him as much as it was driven by him. It started when he was elected as auditor of the Agricultural Society (Ag Soc) at the start of his third year in UCD. He says he came into the role at a difficult time for the society, as it was being closely watched by the UCD authorities for any misbehaviour.
Marcus O’Halloran on his home farm near Mullinahone. \ Philip Doyle
“The next event was the last event if it went wrong. We needed to move away from boisterous behaviour to being an educational society,” Marcus told Irish Country Living. “I think we laid the foundations for Ag Soc today which is in a strong place and continues to raise great money for worthy charities. We would have had county colours nights, we had a boxing fundraiser against the science students and did another event with the veterinary school. We got the ags (agricultural science students) out socialising with other schools in UCD.”
I had lost a friend to suicide the year before. I felt I had to be doing something for one of those charities
In the year that Marcus was auditor of Ag Soc they raised €30,000 for Pieta House and subsequent year groups have gone on to raise even more than that for various charities.
“I had lost a friend to suicide the year before. I felt I had to be doing something for one of those charities. I saw what we could do with a team of 20 people in Ag Soc. With the student union there is a membership of 30,000.”
So in fourth year Marcus set out to become president of the student union, something no ag student had achieved before. He recalls the day he went to hand up his nomination paper “with a tracksuit and hoodie on me – spot the ag”. This was his first experience of a political campaign and Marcus says it was “highly stressful”, he credits his campaign team and the team manager Alison with much of its success.
“Every move you made was observed by the student media, which is your whole world at the time. Your life is dissected by media. You try as best to plan but you run on empty half the time and there’s an adrenaline that goes with it. An entire day can go by in a campaign and you could have forgotten to eat. I think there had been 85 votes from the ag science faculty the year before I ran, but there were over 600 votes the time I got elected.”
Tipperary native Marcus O’Halloran has been appointed as executive director of the Irish agri-educational body, Agri Aware. \ Philip Doyle
Marcus won the election by 90 votes in the final count, beating stiff competition from three others. He went home to cut silage for two weeks with his uncle before coming back up to Dublin to take on the job which is a full-time paid role.
“You have to maintain your roots as a student and you also have to be able to develop a relationship with the UCD administration. You have a lot more responsibility on your shoulders and have to respect the people who put you in there in the first place.”
Some of the highlights during that year was a sky dive campaign which raised €115,000 for Youth Suicide Prevention Ireland (YSPI), an increase in engagement with UCD student union events on campus and the creation of an initiative with daft.ie to link students to accommodation.
The college administration were totally against us on it, they didn’t want the wider public to think that we had this issue in UCD
However, it was the campaign on sexual consent that Marcus sees as his legacy.
“There was a ‘rape culture doesn’t exist on this campus’-type belief. The college administration were totally against us on it, they didn’t want the wider public to think that we had this issue in UCD. But we had students confiding in our welfare officer and we were aware that these issues were on campus. Coming from a farming background you have a certain amount of tolerance for hardship and could continue with the campaign. The year after I left, there was a rape on campus that reached national headlines and really unfortunately demonstrated what we had been trying to highlight.”
There is now a compulsory course for all first year students at UCD on consent and Marcus finds comfort in the idea that “the college is a safer place for my little sisters than it was before”.
Irish Farmers’ Association
When he finished his term as UCD SU president, Marcus took another two weeks out for silage before starting his new job with the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA). He spent some time in Wexford first before taking up the role of Donegal and Monaghan regional development officer which he did for nearly two years.
“If Donegal had been beside Tipperary I would never have left it, lovely people. There are different issues; they get beaten by the weather more than anybody. The beauty of volunteerism in the IFA is that the people involved are giving of their time because they want things to improve, they believe in the cause and want to work with you.”
He then moved back home to cover Tipperary and Clare in September 2018 but was only there a short time before the position of CEO came up at Agri Aware.
O'Halloran had worked for the IFA as the regional executive for Tipperary and Clare. \ Philip Doyle
“I went for it because I believe Agri Aware is well placed to educate the general public on the environmental and economic sustainability of agriculture. This is a role that is more important than ever with the vegan movement and anti-animal agriculture brigade. In years to come, I intend to return to farming, so if there’s any way I can make that better and safer I will.”
If there was infinite funding Marcus is confident that the anti-animal agriculture brigade movement could be “blown out of the water”.
“There’s what you love to do and what you can do. You would have a well-funded education campaign based on facts and not scaremongering.
“There’s an element of our budget that is strictly focused on education so we run campaigns like the Incredible Edibles and Pasture to Plate. This year we had 1,000 schools partake in the incredible edibles. I’d like to be able to find a way to increase that. Agri Aware also runs the open farm weekend which saw 10,000 people through the doors last year at four locations.”
As he says, not every campaign has to cost a huge amount of money, but it does help to improve its reach. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, Agri Aware ran a Feeding the Frontline campaign on social media to show “there are real people behind the lump of steak, kilo of spuds or litre of milk. You have to show farmers that you are advocating on their behalf but to really reach the public too. There is big challenges in doing that without finance behind us.”
Former journalist Claire Fox recently joined the Agri Aware team as press officer and Marcus says the two of them are able to work well together on campaigns despite not being in the office in Bluebell.
“With COVID-19 planes have come out of the sky, cars have come off the road, but agriculture has stayed going. Yet greenhouse gas emissions have fallen. It really goes to show that transport is the major polluter and not agriculture. Over the next few months we want to drive that message home.”
Marcus is keen that any messaging around agriculture should be based on scientific evidence.
“You can only base any argument on fact, I don’t believe in bringing an argument that is largely based on emotion,” he says.
Farming
Marcus’s long-term plan is to go farming. He took the opportunity to get a third-level education and pursue a career in agriculture while he could. His father is still farming and he has two younger sisters still in education. While he found that GAA was a great hobby to have, particularly helping to get to know people in UCD, his current role means he has very little time for pastimes. And he is not willing to give up farming on his days off. Chances are, by the time you’re reading this, he’ll be flat out in the middle of another silage season.
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This is Marcus O’Halloran’s favourite time of year in the farming calendar; silage season. More often than not, it bookends the time he had between one job and the next. In a short space of time the Tipperary native has had a rather colourful career. The former University College Dublin (UCD) student union president has recently taken up the role of CEO at Agri Aware.
Marcus was the first student from the agricultural science faculty at UCD to be elected as president of the student union. That is a dramatic leap for a person who says his first day at college “was probably the most terrifying of my life. I went from a school of 300 students to a campus with 30,000.”
Marcus gives the impression that the political path he took was foisted upon him as much as it was driven by him. It started when he was elected as auditor of the Agricultural Society (Ag Soc) at the start of his third year in UCD. He says he came into the role at a difficult time for the society, as it was being closely watched by the UCD authorities for any misbehaviour.
Marcus O’Halloran on his home farm near Mullinahone. \ Philip Doyle
“The next event was the last event if it went wrong. We needed to move away from boisterous behaviour to being an educational society,” Marcus told Irish Country Living. “I think we laid the foundations for Ag Soc today which is in a strong place and continues to raise great money for worthy charities. We would have had county colours nights, we had a boxing fundraiser against the science students and did another event with the veterinary school. We got the ags (agricultural science students) out socialising with other schools in UCD.”
I had lost a friend to suicide the year before. I felt I had to be doing something for one of those charities
In the year that Marcus was auditor of Ag Soc they raised €30,000 for Pieta House and subsequent year groups have gone on to raise even more than that for various charities.
“I had lost a friend to suicide the year before. I felt I had to be doing something for one of those charities. I saw what we could do with a team of 20 people in Ag Soc. With the student union there is a membership of 30,000.”
So in fourth year Marcus set out to become president of the student union, something no ag student had achieved before. He recalls the day he went to hand up his nomination paper “with a tracksuit and hoodie on me – spot the ag”. This was his first experience of a political campaign and Marcus says it was “highly stressful”, he credits his campaign team and the team manager Alison with much of its success.
“Every move you made was observed by the student media, which is your whole world at the time. Your life is dissected by media. You try as best to plan but you run on empty half the time and there’s an adrenaline that goes with it. An entire day can go by in a campaign and you could have forgotten to eat. I think there had been 85 votes from the ag science faculty the year before I ran, but there were over 600 votes the time I got elected.”
Tipperary native Marcus O’Halloran has been appointed as executive director of the Irish agri-educational body, Agri Aware. \ Philip Doyle
Marcus won the election by 90 votes in the final count, beating stiff competition from three others. He went home to cut silage for two weeks with his uncle before coming back up to Dublin to take on the job which is a full-time paid role.
“You have to maintain your roots as a student and you also have to be able to develop a relationship with the UCD administration. You have a lot more responsibility on your shoulders and have to respect the people who put you in there in the first place.”
Some of the highlights during that year was a sky dive campaign which raised €115,000 for Youth Suicide Prevention Ireland (YSPI), an increase in engagement with UCD student union events on campus and the creation of an initiative with daft.ie to link students to accommodation.
The college administration were totally against us on it, they didn’t want the wider public to think that we had this issue in UCD
However, it was the campaign on sexual consent that Marcus sees as his legacy.
“There was a ‘rape culture doesn’t exist on this campus’-type belief. The college administration were totally against us on it, they didn’t want the wider public to think that we had this issue in UCD. But we had students confiding in our welfare officer and we were aware that these issues were on campus. Coming from a farming background you have a certain amount of tolerance for hardship and could continue with the campaign. The year after I left, there was a rape on campus that reached national headlines and really unfortunately demonstrated what we had been trying to highlight.”
There is now a compulsory course for all first year students at UCD on consent and Marcus finds comfort in the idea that “the college is a safer place for my little sisters than it was before”.
Irish Farmers’ Association
When he finished his term as UCD SU president, Marcus took another two weeks out for silage before starting his new job with the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA). He spent some time in Wexford first before taking up the role of Donegal and Monaghan regional development officer which he did for nearly two years.
“If Donegal had been beside Tipperary I would never have left it, lovely people. There are different issues; they get beaten by the weather more than anybody. The beauty of volunteerism in the IFA is that the people involved are giving of their time because they want things to improve, they believe in the cause and want to work with you.”
He then moved back home to cover Tipperary and Clare in September 2018 but was only there a short time before the position of CEO came up at Agri Aware.
O'Halloran had worked for the IFA as the regional executive for Tipperary and Clare. \ Philip Doyle
“I went for it because I believe Agri Aware is well placed to educate the general public on the environmental and economic sustainability of agriculture. This is a role that is more important than ever with the vegan movement and anti-animal agriculture brigade. In years to come, I intend to return to farming, so if there’s any way I can make that better and safer I will.”
If there was infinite funding Marcus is confident that the anti-animal agriculture brigade movement could be “blown out of the water”.
“There’s what you love to do and what you can do. You would have a well-funded education campaign based on facts and not scaremongering.
“There’s an element of our budget that is strictly focused on education so we run campaigns like the Incredible Edibles and Pasture to Plate. This year we had 1,000 schools partake in the incredible edibles. I’d like to be able to find a way to increase that. Agri Aware also runs the open farm weekend which saw 10,000 people through the doors last year at four locations.”
As he says, not every campaign has to cost a huge amount of money, but it does help to improve its reach. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, Agri Aware ran a Feeding the Frontline campaign on social media to show “there are real people behind the lump of steak, kilo of spuds or litre of milk. You have to show farmers that you are advocating on their behalf but to really reach the public too. There is big challenges in doing that without finance behind us.”
Former journalist Claire Fox recently joined the Agri Aware team as press officer and Marcus says the two of them are able to work well together on campaigns despite not being in the office in Bluebell.
“With COVID-19 planes have come out of the sky, cars have come off the road, but agriculture has stayed going. Yet greenhouse gas emissions have fallen. It really goes to show that transport is the major polluter and not agriculture. Over the next few months we want to drive that message home.”
Marcus is keen that any messaging around agriculture should be based on scientific evidence.
“You can only base any argument on fact, I don’t believe in bringing an argument that is largely based on emotion,” he says.
Farming
Marcus’s long-term plan is to go farming. He took the opportunity to get a third-level education and pursue a career in agriculture while he could. His father is still farming and he has two younger sisters still in education. While he found that GAA was a great hobby to have, particularly helping to get to know people in UCD, his current role means he has very little time for pastimes. And he is not willing to give up farming on his days off. Chances are, by the time you’re reading this, he’ll be flat out in the middle of another silage season.
Read more
'Every teacher in the country would love to be back at school' - Mary Magner
Piecing it together: a career in research psychology
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