Opinion: CAP, not Mercosur or nitrates, will determine viability of farming

On Monday morning, Irish Farmers Association (IFA) president Francie Gorman will depart the Irish Farm Centre bound for Brussels.

Every IFA president before him has done the same thing at some point in their presidency since we joined the EEC in 1973 (the Irish Farm Centre, which also houses this newspaper, Macra and FBD, is two years older than that).

I've seen cars head for the airport, seen buses bound for Brussels, but this journey is of a different order. Francie Gorman is driving to Brussels by tractor.

In doing so, he will pass within shouting distance of our own farm as he goes by the picturesque village of Ballycarney.

It's barely a crossroads, but features some historical sites, including a memorial to the first victims of the 1798 rebellion, the Redmond brothers, who were killed by yeomen.

The memorial stone, which sits on a corner of our field as it happens, serves as a reminder that Irish people have often had to stand up for their rights though history.

And as Francie Gorman drives towards Rosslare to take a ferry to the historic French town of Dunkirk, from where he will proceed to the Europa Building in Brussels, seat of the European Council, he will be doing just that.

Because the CAP budget is under consideration next week and the proposals as they stand won't support farmers through the next decade in a way that will sustain Ireland's - and Europe's - family farm structure.

Francie won't be alone on his odyssey - his 11-year-old son Tom will be riding shotgun.

When they arrive at the nerve centre of the European project, they will be joining farmers from all over the continent, calling for a budget at least as big as the current one.

Future

Tom Gorman will probably be the youngest person there, and he and his dad will surely have taken the most time-consuming and arduous journey to get there.

The stakes are high - Tom Gorman will be 21 by the time the next CAP cycle ends in 2035. Will he have a future in farming? Will many of his generation?

Some people might brand the tractor Tour de France and Flanders as both performative and posturing. The former is true, the latter is cynical and unfair.

Yes, it's a performative action making a symbolic pilgrimage on a tractor across land and sea to stand outside a building where people are talking about your future.

But it's also all that Francie Gorman can do on behalf of his family farm and all our family farms. Bear witness and do so in a way that might engage the wider public to what's at stake.

Martin needs another win

There's a lad in England who has gained attention due to his pledge not to trim his hair until Manchester United win five games in a row. His wait for a trim, which began in September 2023, continues to this day.

While winning consistently in sport is a habit, it's a difficult one to pick up. Consecutive wins in politics are even more difficult to achieve, so Taoiseach Micheál Martin has his work cut out when he sits down with his fellow EU prime ministers at that European Council meeting on Thursday.

The first task he will have to perform will be to thank the other 26 men and women for their country's support for Ireland's nitrates derogation.

The Government not only had to convince environment commissioner Jessika Roswall of the merits of renewing the facility to allow higher stocking rates on Ireland's grassland farms than anywhere else in Europe, it also needed an official representing the government from every member state, sitting on the nitrates committee, to approve the Irish derogation application.

While Jessika Roswall seemed supportive of a derogation renewal since her visit to Ireland a month ago, I'm led to believe that many of the officials in DG Environment were not in agreement with that sentiment.

So it's fair to suppose that the Irish Government has expended some political capital in gaining the derogation.

The question is, how much is left in the political capital piggy bank? The CAP budget is undoubtedly the most significant issue for Irish farming - the Commission proposal for a 20% cut in funding would be a hammer blow to every sector.

But we also have Mercosur on the cusp of final approval and Irish farming is calling on our Government to lead the charge against the full activation of a trade deal the Commission and the German government really want.

Institutions

It's impossible to know exactly what goes on within the European political institutions, but the fact that Micheal McGrath was the one to first announce the derogation can be taken as signalling from the Commission that this was a Christmas present from them to Irish farming.

Is there an expectation that we will behave when it comes to Mercosur? That may be nuanced. Ireland may well be allowed to maintain opposition to the trade deal, but only provided that opposition will prove in vain.

If there's a snowball's chance that a coalition can be assembled between Poland, France, Austria or Italy and Ireland, then Ireland may be told to be good Europeans and approve the trade deal, even though it will hurt our farmers.

The former option, which you could call the 'Ted and Dougal' approach, is the more likely, in my opinion.

I can't see France, with its lame duck government and its embattled president, standing against this deal.

Thus, Micheal Martin and Simon Harris will be able to stand with Irish farmers outside the Commission building saying "careful now" and "down with that sort of thing", knowing the maths don't add up for a blocking minority.

And that is really performative politics.

The more interesting dynamic is within the European Parliament. Will Irish MEPs be forced into a definitive vote on the Mercosur deal? And, if so, how will they vote?

In particular, how will the Government MEPs from Dublin, Barry Andrews and Regina Doherty, vote? Sinn Féin is resolutely opposed to Mercosur and may be about to side with Irish farming and against the Irish Government in an unprecedented way.

It is all very fascinating, but amid all the political intrigue, we shouldn't lose sight of the importance of what's being decided.

Europe needs Mercosur

The stark reality is that Europe never needed a trade deal more. Apart from the economic benefits being lauded by Mercosur's proponents, the political importance of forging an alliance with South American countries cannot be underestimated.

The US administration's hostility towards the European Union and the centrist democracies that have mostly held sway across the member states has continued to escalate through 2025.

It's funny, but Donald Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk et al despise centrist politics every bit as much as they despise the hard left.

To them, any ideology that doesn't chime with their hard-right view of how economies and societies should function is to be attacked.

The narrative from Stateside is that Europe is a civilisation in its twilight. What better riposte than a political and economic link-up between the EU and Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia.

Seen in that light, Irish opposition to the deal over beef imports takes on a different aspect.

Of course, the difference in standards between Brazil and Ireland in terms of of traceability, in use of medicines and antibiotics, and herd health status verification, vividly exposed (again!) by the Irish Farmers Journal/IFA investigation, can't simply be brushed aside.

As in 2007, some response will be required. Alongside those issues, the safeguards put in place need to be adjusted before the Mercosur deal would be in any way palatable.

Back to CAP

Having expressed gratitude over the nitrates derogation and opposition (perhaps only cursory) to Mercosur, Micheál Martin and his officials then must return to the main issue, the EU and CAP budget.

Once more, Ireland will be searching anxiously for allies who share our priorities.

This may prove quite difficult. Europe's need to ratchet up security, defence and military spending is acute. Countries such as Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia all border Russia - their priorities are easy to comprehend.

Former eastern bloc countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Czechia remember Russian domination.

So despite Hungary and Slovakia's slide towards Moscow and away from the European project, there is a huge push for ensuring that Europe shows the capacity to defend itself. The security guarantee provided by the USA no longer exists.

The fact that food security is a genuine parallel issue may be hard to emphasise at this moment.

The fact that the CAP budget proposal is a 20% cut on a budget that has been static in real terms for 35 years - despite EU enlargement and galloping inflation - may be trampled on for the simple reason that the money has all gone elsewhere.

And I haven't even mentioned migration. The EU is developing a harder line on migration, even as the Trump administration predicts that Europe will be overwhelmed by migrants.

His fears for "European civilisation" are shared by at least 20% of the population of every EU country, including Ireland.

It's an unfortunate and uncomfortable truth fact that many of the people coming to Europe from Asia were displaced by the disastrous "war on terror" response to the atrocity of 9/11.

And that most people coming from Africa hail from countries suffering from the legacy of European colonialism.

As the Redmond brothers were being killed by those representing the British crown in 1798, peoples all across the continents of Asia, Africa and, yes, the Americas, were being displaced and annihilated by European settlers.

Erase its own history

The current US government may well be trying to erase its own history, but we in Europe have an obligation to be better than the imperialist colonialists of previous generations.

And Ireland - colony rather than coloniser - has benefited from membership of the EU alongside the countries that pillaged the rest of the world.

So we need to understand that the best way to protect European borders in the long term is to work for geopolitical progress across the planet.

And in the middle of all this, France Gorman, his son and farmers from all across Europe will stand outside the European Council meeting on Thursday demanding a bigger slice of a cake that is struggling to retain its sweetness.

No-one ever said any of this was simple.