A farm organisation has hit out at meat factories for pulling sheep prices in the week before Christmas, despite sheep numbers being "significantly tighter".

Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers' Association (ICSA) sheep chair Willie Shaw said that sheep throughput this year is "down by around 20% on last year, which amounts to a staggering 600,000 fewer sheep in the system".

"In any normal market, that level of tight supply should be lifting prices, not seeing them cut," Shaw said.

"If those 600,000 lambs were actually coming through the system, how low would prices have gone? Sheep farmers would have been completely cleaned out."

'Economic gymnastics'

Shaw said "adding insult to injury is the fact that price cuts are happening at all given dwindling supplies".

"Processors continue to perform economic gymnastics that fly in the face of basic supply and demand logic," he continued.

"There is no transparency and no accountability in how these prices are set, yet farmers are always the ones left carrying the cost."

He said the timing of the cuts, coming just before Christmas, sends the "worst possible signal" to farmers already under severe pressure, particularly those trying to build a future in the sector.

"There is constant talk about generational renewal, but it’s hard to see how young people are expected to stay in sheep farming when prices can be cut at critical times of the year," he added.

"If they can’t see a fair return for their work, they simply won’t stay. It really is that straightforward."