Tirlán contest supplies general election tension

With little over a week to go, the general election campaign has yet to wake up. No single issue has caught fire, it’s all rather low-key. Anyone expecting the short three-week campaign to be like the all-Ireland hurling final, full of excitement, chaos, fury and controversy, has been disappointed.

The best we can hope is that it resembles the football final, with the excitement mostly packed into the closing stages. One contest has gripped me, but it’s unrelated to the general election.

It’s farming politics I’m referring to. Co-op politics, specifically Tirlán. Chair John Murphy is defending his seat on the north Wexford/east Wicklow regional committee.

To represent your region on the Tirlán board, you have to be part of the committee. So if Murphy, from Craanford, loses this contest next Wednesday, he is off the board and out of the chair. Unseated and defrocked.

To thicken the plot, the challenger is Kevin Murphy from Corriganagh, Gorey, who happens to be the chair’s first cousin. Kevin is well regarded locally. He and his wife Anne are part of Teagasc’s Signpost programme. Kevin is one of the main movers in the Just Farmers group, which is highly critical of Tirlán’s board and management. Both sides are partaking in a door-to-door canvass of the 150 or so potential voters.

John Murphy is standing on his record, reminding farmers that as a new board member in 2010, he opposed the original “Dairy Ireland” co-op buy out of Glanbia’s Irish business. He was instrumental in the co-op shareholders narrowly rejecting a deal that would have seen the co-op left with only 10% of their 55% shareholding.

Instead, under Murphy’s stewardship, the co-op completed the buy-back of a much bigger Irish business, with the new Belview plant and 50% more milk being processed.

The latest spin-out will mean that about a billion euro of plc shares have been spun out to shareholders over the last decade. Almost 25% of Glanbia’s shares are still in the co-op’s ownership. Now, Murphy says the main priority of the board and management is “project one” which aims to see Tirlán pay the number one milk price in the country. It has transformed its position on the grain price table from relegation fodder to top of the table.

Kevin Murphy’s backers say the chair is too close to management, that the co-op is still being run with a corporate mentality, and a new broom is needed to sweep away complacency and staid thinking.

It will be a razor-tight contest, with the entire country watching. It would be seismic if the largest co-op in the country loses its chair mid-term, leaving a leadership vacuum.