The Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA) has launched a blistering attack on Mick Wallace, after the Wexford TD made comments in the Dail yesterday (Wednesday, February 6) comparing farming to gas fracking.
Fracking is a controversial method of gas extraction, which environmental activists say is highly dangerous – with Wallace suggesting that farming is equally dangerous.
However, the president of the ICMSA, Pat McCormack, didn’t hold back in addressing Wallace’s comments today, calling the property developer a “personification” of an industry that caused the economic crash.
In 2009 and 2010, after banks and property developer colleagues had wrecked and bankrupted this country, it was the farm families of Ireland and the food sector they built and supply – the only productive sector left standing after the developer-caused explosion – who worked and produced and slowly inched this state back to economic stability.
“To hear deputy Wallace thrash the very sectors who had played the biggest part in rescuing our country from the wreckage will strike many of us as the single most brass-necked and hypocritical comments that the Irish public have heard in a very long time,” said McCormack.
Wallace had described the Irish beef and dairy sector as a “short-sighted cash generator”, and likened farming to fossil fuel extraction industries.
Farming…is not destructively extractive like coal mining or fracking, and farmers are, and have been, the most vociferous opponents of environmentally destructive sectors like mining, fracking and, indeed, unsustainable and badly planned construction projects.
Concluding his response to Wallace’s comments, McCormack said: “We all have challenges as we deal with environmental change, and Irish farmers will face them and deal with them as we deal with every other problem.
“We don’t run away, we don’t change career and deny previous existence, and we certainly believe in the old principle that you examine your own record before you begin lecturing anyone else,” he added.