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The Galway Beef Plan AGM on Wednesday night was turned on its head by outside farmers, according to Galway Beef Plan chair Kevin O’Brien.
He told the Irish Farmers Journal that “a crowd from outside of Co Galway turned up” to the meeting in the Turloughmore Social Centre.
“They turned the meeting on its head. They came from Monaghan, Roscommon, Kerry and Kilkenny and on purpose they stopped this meeting going ahead.
“What happens next, we don’t exactly know, but the row kicked off over Eoin Donnelly not being a registered, paid-up member. He says himself that he checked it out last June. If he was in doubt last June, why didn’t he just go along and send in another registration form? That’s all he had to do,” O'Brien said.
I thought the Beef Plan was the best thing that ever came out for farmers
O’Brien told the Irish Farmers Journal that despite the election being abandoned on Wednesday night, he will remain in the contest to be chair of Galway Beef Plan.
“I thought the Beef Plan was the best thing that ever came out for farmers. It gave suckler and beef farmers a voice and we had no voice before this. I joined it for that reason and for getting a better price for the farmer. I didn’t join it for this racket that went on here [in Galway]. It’s a disgrace,” he said.
O’Brien believes that some of those at the meeting were involved in disrupting other meetings.
“They should be ashamed of themselves; they’re a shame to their families, to the counties they’re from and they should really think about where they’re going from now,” he said.
Rules
Eamon Corley, co-chair of the Beef Plan Movement, said that he tried to emphasise on Wednesday night that a set of rules was in place and that the objective was to obey the rules and governance, which were signed off on on 6 December 2019.
“We’re going to have to look at this. I did try to emphasise to the farmers that we had a set of rules in place … like up to this point we’ve only had temporary committees so it was our objective to go by the rules and governance and to put permanent committees in place, that we would have sort of permanent structures for Beef Plan going forward.
“OK, it hasn’t happened tonight but I’m sure it will happen another night and I suppose a positive from the night is that we have a huge crowd of farmers in Galway interested in Beef Plan and while it didn’t work out tonight, we hope that the elections in the other parts of the country will come together and we will get a good structure and a good organisation to represent farmers going forward.”
Corley then appealed to all Beef Plan members to think of the beef farmers and think of the crisis in which farmers find themselves.
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Beef Plan name
“I was the person that came up with the name Beef Plan and the reason we did it was because we didn’t feel organisations out there represented the suckler farmers on the ground. I do think that anyone who doesn’t agree with that philosophy should agree with it and I think we should make the effort for ourselves and for our farmers to get an organisation that’s going to work for everybody.”
A flashpoint on the night was if Eoin Donnelly, the current vice chair of Galway and western regional chair of Beef Plan, would be allowed stand the Galway election.
Corley told those at the meeting on Wednesday night that Donnelly was not a Beef Plan member. However, Donnelly said he paid his €10 and filled out a membership form in Kilkenny.
When asked by the Irish Farmers Journal what was happening with the issue, Corley said: “The whole issue around fairness is that we have a set of rules, now we’ve four directors and they signed off on the rules and in the rules it clearly says that only paid-up members can vote and only paid-up members can go for office.
“Now, unfortunately, Eoin Donnelly wasn’t a paid-up member and we had to stick by the rules. So it’s the same rules for everybody.”
Questions were raised as to whether Donnelly had his membership processed. He has said that he paid the €10 in Kilkenny and signed the membership form. Donnelly told the Irish Farmers Journal that he had flagged the issue numerous times with Hugh Doyle last year.
Apology
When asked what he would say to members of Galway Beef Plan who said they had paid the €10 and signed up but their name wasn’t on the list to vote, Corley said the committee spent a while going through the names which didn’t appear on the list.
“I think we had probably about 15 names from the large crowd in the room that couldn’t find their names, but we did check them up on the online system. We had Moira Doyle and we checked them as they came in. We did rectify some of those. There was also some of them in different counties, so they will be able to vote in their own counties.
“There was quite a few turned up tonight, even though they were registered in Galway their actual home address was in Roscommon, so that explained quite a few of them.
“The nature of Beef Plan is that a lot of people here … it’s voluntary, registrations were collected, like we had a list and we had to go by the official list. I apologise to the farmers who maybe didn’t get to vote tonight. In fact, we didn’t actually get to vote at all,” he said.
Transparency
Galway Beef Plan PRO Jackie Flannery told the Irish Farmers Journal that there has to be transparency and disclosure of what’s actually happening in Beef Plan throughout the country.
“We did not as an organisation go back to the farmers on the ground after staying with them in Athleague and in Liffey. We stayed there, I stood up in front of 600 farmers and I calmed them down there. We did our work.
“The lads went in to negotiate on behalf of the farmers. The work has started, we need the work to continue but we need the officers and we need the people that are transparent and they’re not going to be banging their gums together about this fella and that fella.”
Flannery said that there is a proposal that the national executive is having an EGM on 26 January.
“We would say: ‘Let the EGM go ahead,' and then sit down and come back, get the structures organised, get the rules properly structured, get the rules to the membership, which people haven’t got. I mean, the committees might have got them, but the ordinary farmer on the ground hasn’t a clue. Some of them haven’t got receipts for their money, they don’t know whether they’re members and we’ve seen it in there tonight,” she said.
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