Photo: @griptmedia on Twitter/X, 1 February 2024.
Farmers across Ireland —vowing to overturn new EU green edicts on nitrate emissions and mandatory rewilding—took to the streets yesterday in solidarity with their agrarian counterparts around Europe.
The demonstrations were called by the Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA), the largest representative body for farmers on the island, and took place in most regional towns. IFA President Francie Gorman claimed the sector is being “regulated out of business by Brussels bureaucrats and Department of Agriculture officials who are far removed from the reality of day-to-day farming.”
There has long been speculation that Ireland will be the next flashpoint for the rising tide of farmer unrest with new EU stipulations on nitrate emissions—too extreme for even the Irish government—posing an existential risk to the nation’s seven million cows.
Traditionally farming interests in Ireland have been aligned to the ruling Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael political parties, but Irish Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue found himself the subject of a vocal picket at a hotel in the Midlands town of Athlone. This shows the strength of feeling against EU ‘Net Zero’ regulations as an existential threat to the rural way of life.
The outbreak of farmer protests in Ireland came after months of similar tractor-led demonstrations across Europe, with a pan-European coalition of farmers successfully bringing Brussels to a standstill yesterday in tense scenes in Belgian riot police.
This wave of farmer revolts originated in the Netherlands where, last year, the agrarian populist BBB movement came first in regional elections by campaigning against harsh new nitrate quotas, imposed by both the EU and central government, which mandated a reduction in production.
Joining the protests, Irish TD (MP) Richard O’Donoghue from the new populist grouping within the Irish Parliament (Dáil) “Independent Ireland” pledged that this would only be the beginning of the fight against the government, with rural independent politicians expected to be the primary beneficiaries of this new wave of farmer anger.
The Republic faces a bumper election cycle in the coming months with local, national, and European elections all expected to be held this year, as multiple right-wing groupings jockey for prominence as the left-wing Sinn Féin opposition party saw their polling numbers plummet due to the emergence of immigration as a key issue.