The power-sharing arrangement that will see a rotating presidency of the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers’ Association (ICSA) for the next two years will “unify the organisation”, according to its general secretary.
Speaking to Agriland, Eddie Punch said that the scenario is unprecedented, and the solution to resolve a hung election was only arrived at on the night of the election itself.
On December 14, the two candidates who were bidding to become the new leader of the ICSA reached a power-sharing agreement after the presidential ballot ended in a tie that evening at the Midlands Park Hotel in Portlaoise, Co. Laois.
Dermot Kelleher was seeking re-election, while current sheep chair of the association, Sean McNamara, had also put his name forward for the position.
Punch said: “There’s no way of separating the two candidates who finished up with exactly the same votes. In reality then, we were looking at how we resolve that problem.
“So in the immediate aftermath of the vote we had a discussion about it with the candidates and their campaign managers, and they agreed to what we’re calling a power-sharing agreement.”
ISCA presidency
The ICSA operates on two-year presidential terms. Kelleher, who has already served one full-term, will continue as president for the first year of the upcoming presidential term.
At the end of that year he will step aside for McNamara to take over as president, finishing out the presidential term for its final year.
It has also been agreed that arrangements will be made to give McNamara a place on the association’s management committee while he waits for his term in office to begin. When it does, Kelleher will have a place on the committee ex officio as the most recent past president.
“The decision was arrived at on the night more or less. It’s an unprecedented scenario. For other less prominent positions, the solution was to draw names out of a hat. But for the position of president, we didn’t think that was ideal,” Punch said.
The ICSA general secretary explained that McNamara, who is currently the association’s sheep chairperson, will remain in that role for the coming year.
While there may be opportunities for McNamara to be involved in wider policy areas while Kelleher remains as president, there is no formal arrangement for that until he begins his half of the presidential term.
However, according to Punch, McNamara has a “huge advantage” by knowing, 12 months ahead of time, that he is going to be president. He likened it to a situation in the business world where an incoming CEO works along side the current CEO for a period of time.
“When you become president of a farm organisation, it is totally different to any other position people might typically have, whether it’s chairperson of a commodity committee, or vice-president. The buck stops with the president,” Punch said.
He added: “That’s the nature of elections. Yesterday you hope to be president but you have no clue. Tomorrow you’re elected and you have to take office in January. You could say that there is a year there now for Sean to get his head around this.
“It provides him with some opportunity to prepare himself, and in practice I suppose, that means he’ll have to extend his gaze beyond the sheep portfolio,” Punch added.
‘Power-sharing good for ICSA’
The ICSA general secretary said he believes this arrangement will be good for the association, as “all members essentially have had their candidate elected”.
“That’s a positive thing, in the sense that it should lead to a more unified organisation,” he said.
“See the reality is that the beef and sheep sectors need strong, united leadership. For the last few years we’ve seen a lot of splintering, which has done nothing really for the cattle and sheep sectors.
“The dairy sector is much more united and I think the cattle and sheep sectors need to be more united as well.”
He added: “I think that we have a lot of challenges from outside of farming in terms of the increasingly belligerent attack on farming that’s been made by all sorts of people.
“The fact is that the cattle and sheep sectors are facing down the barrel of a gun, as it were, in terms of all of these challenges, and they need united representation but they also need well-resourced representation,” he continued.
“There is a lot of money being put into the anti-livestock agenda. It is well resourced, and it has people with a lot of focus on calling for, at its most extreme, livestock farming ended.
“In a more insidious way, people are being conditioned to believe that livestock farming and your diet needs to change to save the planet,” Punch commented.
He added: “Therefore, farmers in the cattle and sheep sector need an organisation that is united, well resourced, and what they don’t want is their representation splintering into five or six groups, none of which have many resources.
“You don’t see the dairy sector doing that and the beef and sheep sectors need to get united as well,” the ICSA general secretary added.