The long honeymoon: the IFA and the ICMSA

John McAleese will the IFA and the ICMSA ever do the decent thing?

Rights to considerable sums of money may now hang in the balance as the result of the collapse of unity negotiations between the Irish Farmers' Association and the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers' Association. Nobody knows as yet who will get their hands on £400,000 or so that is docked out of farmers' milk cheques each year. And this money could be one reason for the apparent wish of both organisations not to slam the door totally on future contact with each other.

It may even go some way to explain the curious pot pourri of recriminations and expressions of good faith that have been heard in recent days. The result is that the unity saga, far from being at an end, may be set fair to stagger on for another while. For several years past, farmers have paid into what is an embryo fund for the unified farm body of the future. But for the moment, after the deduction of a share for Macra na Feirme, the proceeds are divided between the IFA and the ICMSA. Such money has become an essential part of the revenue of the former. For the latter it may not be quite essential but it is still a welcome addition to funds. In both cases its loss would be a heavy blow.

Both sides were therefore well aware of the significance of what Mr John Barry had to say when he resigned in mid-February as mediator between them. Mr Barry is, after all, president of the co-ops' national body ICOS. And it is the co-ops that collect the levy around the country.

"The co-ops only agreed to collect the money on the basis of assurances from the presidents of the two organisations," he warned, "so they will now have to look at their legal position. Some co-ops may now consider handing the money back to farmers. Or they may collect it and put it into a unity fund in the hope that a shortage of revenue and a build up in the unity fund will put pressure on both organisations to listen to farmers around the country. Those farmers are clamouring for unity."

"In due course I think you will find that the ICOS council is going to have a view on the matter. I think we have an obligation to make a directive on the issue after we have discussed it. I sincerely hope in the meantime that neither organisation will attempt to wage war to get its hands on the levy."

The vital need for the money in the IFA is readily conceded by its president Mr Donal Cashman. He regards it as "certainly very important" and he hints that he won't give it up without a fight. "We must see that funds are available to us to give the best service to farmers," he says, "and we will certainly be asking the co-ops to make sure that the funds are continuously available to us."

Donal Murphy the general secretary of the ICMSA is equally trenchant: "There is no doubt that the funding of the two organisations will have to be looked at. And there are implications for staff in both if there are not adequate finance for them:" But Donal Murphy also insists that neither side is in a position to hijack the levy in any creamery: "Nobody can put their hand into another man's pocket and take his money. Under present arrangements co-ops haven't any authority to pay over farmers' money to an organisation without the general agreement of the co-op's suppliers."

Although cash has now emerged as the most urgent concrete issue, the collapse of the unity drive actually came on a less important matter of procedure - how to run an opinion poll. The poll was supposed to determine farmers' views on what sort of joint body should represent them in the future. Mr Barry was basing it on a sample of 1500 farmers selected proportionately on the basis of age, acreage and location by the Central Statistics Office in the same way as the national farm management survey. When the ICMSA insisted that he was doing it the wrong way, the ICOS president resigned as mediator. A breakdown on such a technical point may be interesting, or even elegant, from a procedural point of view, but it tells us little about the passions really at play. We can glimpse these if we go back to last December in County Cork.

“We regard the IFA as the last remnant of British rule in Ireland," said Sean Kelly the president of ICMSA. "There they are with their big holdings like the landlords. There's not much change in that."

"We know what it was to have nothing. We know what it was to struggle in the years when there was nothing. We are the true country people of Ireland."

He was pouring out all of this candour amidst the rolling greenery of north Cork, standing on a promontory above the town of Newmarket outside the door of a long low dance-hall called the Hyland. Inside were a lot of the dairy farmers that Sean Kelly represents. They are mostly large men physically, even though they like to call themselves "the small men". Men of no property they are not. And indeed some of them are rather well-off. But they are held together by the shared memory of days in the 1950s when the dairy farmers hadn't twopence to rub together.

It would scarcely be going too far to say that this is an authenticity that they draw around themselves like a protective cloak, a cloak that protects them nowadays from critical argument. There is no use, for example, in pointing out that they have done well from the common market dairy policy. They will simply point out that if it ends they are faced again with the spectre of the 1950s. In their hearts they have forged a belief and there is no good in city slickers or carpetbaggers from the IFA headquarters in Bluebell coming down to change their mind.

On that bright December day we were thinking about Jimmy O'Keeffe. For this was his home town and so something of a holy place in the ICMSA scheme of things. We were there for the announcement of the James O'Keeffe Memorial Institute, an adult education centre for the farming community in what can most conveniently be described as the local "big house". There is no doubting Jimmy's place in the history of the ICMSA. His memory is called down by ICMSA speakers when they want to add force to an argument. He had been a largely self-taught, selfless, modest, imaginative diplomat who led the ICMSA for ten years from 1968-1978. Jimmy 0 'Keeffe had very much wanted to lead his unruly army into a unified national farmers' organisation, and his efforts hold the key to much that has happened since.

Already in the early sixties he and others put a lot of work into an agreement that was nearly accepted, then turned down at the last minute. The main opposition came on that occasion from a Tipperary man who was chairman of the NFA (as it then was) dairy section. He had the most to lose through an amalgamation since the ICMSA would have dominated the dairy side after the merger. That man's name was T.J. Maher.

By the 1970s Jimmy, now president, was able to make more progress. It is then that he reached what is known as the European Affairs Agreement with the IFA, which provided that the two bodies share the cost of representation in Brussels.

Among other elements of that agreement was the decision to give the ICMSA access to a major source of cash. This was the so-called "marts levy" through which farmers were already contributing a small percentage of their cattle sales to the IFA. Under the new co-operation between the two, the ICMSA got a share in this money - and it came to around £50,000 a year in the mid to late 1970s. It was an act of great generosity on the part of the IFA to make such a cash transfer. And it was the financial salvation of the ICMSA, which had been staggering along under a heavy load of debt. Progress fairly steamed along under the guidance of Jimmy and the IFA president Paddy Lane. But ironically Jimmy's term of office came to an end just before the marriage contract was signed.
The action always seems to take place in the great country hotels, whose walls, if they could talk, would tell more of the real history of Ireland than any number of historians. This time round it was O'Meara's Hotel in Nenagh and the day was November 14, 1978. It was a great personal triumph for Paddy Lane to step forward and sign this historic agreement for the Irish Farmers' Association.

On the ICMSA side it was the new president Anthony Leddy from Cavan who put his name formally to the document. But he knew and all knew that the credit went to Jimmy O'Keeffe. One man who was there that day says: "Jimmy may have ended up as the bridesmaid but it was his day all the same. If he had changed the water into wine nobody would have been surprised."

The agreement laid down a timetable which was to lead to a complete merger of the two organisations in January 1982. And to lay the groundwork for this eventual union there was to be a joint levy collected by creamery co-ops through the deduction of a small proportion of each farmer's milk cheque. Anthony Leddy and Paddy Lane travelled the country to organise the new levy. The going was tough at the start with many co-ops proving hard to persuade, but the money would come through in the end, and plenty of it. But if the financial future was being secured the rest of the deal began to look like falling apart.

Nobody will ever chronicle successfully the extremely odd events of the next few years. Sometimes affairs seemed to be moving smoothly to the planned merger. Other times relations were conducted along the lines of a broad farce, with public rows or one party sending the other to Coventry. It is generally agreed that the end of Paddy Lane's term of office was a nail in the coffin. His broad bluff manner suited the ICMSA following. He was the kind of guy who might have been one of their own members. His successor Donal Cashman was a different kettle of fish. He was full of statistics and discretion and he even dressed a bit too neatly. All in all, he wasn't an ICMSA type of person.

Anthony Leddy cannot, in turn, have done himself much good by getting on well with Cashman. In fact it must have caused a lot of sore heads to see him and Cashman buddying it around like Beany and Barney. The two of them would, in the circumstances, have had plenty to talk about since both of them faced rebellions in their own camps. It doesn't much matter what such uprisings were about, and indeed they were probably about different things at different times.
 
Leddy had differences with both his elected colleagues and his general secretary Donal Murphy, who was widely assumed to be protecting his own position in the light of the coming merger. At one stage there were said to be legal actions threatened over leaks to the press. Anthony Leddy tholed it for a while, but by 1981 he had had enough, and he resigned.

Looking back on the resignation now Donal Cashman says: "I know that it was connected with the imminence of the coming together of the two organisations." And Cashman goes on to claim that within six weeks of Leddy going he found the concept of unity being turned in a different direction.

Cashman was meanwhile at loggerds with a militant and somewhat strident strain of thought among many of his own members. Daft things began to happen like Cashman failing to turn up for demonstrations that these people managed to get the IFA to run. On one famous occasion Cashman's absence from a picket was explained by his presence at an agricultural meeting in Rome. Later it turned out that he had slipped off to the Canaries for a holiday.

When the IFA organised the last big farmers' march the ICMSA dithered about joining in. In the end hardly any of its supporters turned up, although president Sean Kelly did in the end show up on the platform outside the Dail.

In mid 1982, when the merger should have already been complete, the ICMSA produced a new plan. It suggested an Irish Farm Council that would bring together not only the two farmer organisations but ACOT, the Agricultural Institute, the co-ops Macra na Feirme. "It would," declared the plan, "be left to individual organisations to decide and agree on whether they wished to maintain their identities."

By this stage the grumblings from co-ops were getting very loud indeed . . . if the two sides didn't,' show some signs of a merger the co-ops would stop the money supply the levy. Mitchelstown had been first off the mark and it was joined by Avonmore and others. Behind the scenes smaller co-ops were putting on the pressure too.

There was a school of thought that said the ICMSA had mixed feelings about the creamery levy anyway. Part of their financial deal with IFA was that until the creamery reached 75% of its potential, money would still be paid over by the IFA from the marts levy. And money was paid over. It has been argued that this led to a feeling among some ICMSA members that the full application of the creamery levy was not an unqualified blessing. Whether this was an actual factor or not may be debated, but it shows the kind of deep motive that underlay much of the politicking of the period.
 
What is known is that the "IFA lads" in Mitchelstown were thinking by early last autumn that a final collapse in relations with the ICMSA might be no bad thing. They reckoned they could switch the whole of the dairy levy over to their own organisation. It was at this stage that co-op leader Mr Barry stepped in to stop the rot. He arranged a rather original process of criss-cross lobbying in which IFA leaders addressed the ICMSA national council and vice versa. It was a nice idea but it didn't work, so he tried another tack - that an outside expert should be appointed to take the matter further.
 
That expert was to be Professor Tom Raftery who holds the chair of agriculture at University College Cork. He started his task at the end of September, with secretarial help. He wrote later that he found there was "not either an agreed interpretation of the Nenagh agreement or an agreed programme for its implementation. Consequently we are of the opinion that there is no prospect at this stage of getting an amalgamation of the two farming organisations .... "

In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, Professor Raftery came up with certain half way house proposals later in the autumn and these were put by Mr Barry to a meeting of the leaderships of the IFA and ICMSA in Cashel on December 23. Amazingly, it seems that Tom Raftery was not there personally and that his proposals were conveyed to the meeting in a letter from him read out by Mr Barry. In the letter Professor Raftery suggested that the two farm organisations should act jointly in "areas such as government and EEC representations, farm inheritance and land leasing, animal health, farm development, animal breeding, farm taxes and credit."

In addition he said that "the longer term challenge of achieving full unity must be given a very high priority from the outset. We would suggest that a new co-ordinating committee be set up under the chairmanship of an independent person commanding the confidence of farmers generally and farmer organisations and bringing to the task a high level of experience in negotiations at government and EEC level."

Extraordinarily, there seems to have been no full account of how this proposal was greeted or explained at the Cashel meeting. The recollection of the ICMSA's Donal Murphy is that the co-ordinating group was intended to formulate policy on behalf of the two organisations from now on, and that until the co-ordinating group would speak on a topic the two organisations would have to refrain from comment on it.

This would, of course, have made it an extremely powerful body, and it would have represented immediate unity in respect of whatever it undertook to discuss. It is perhaps a little surprising, in the light of the ICMSA's previous adherence to a loose federation, that it claims to have accepted the co-ordinating group idea at Cashel. On the other hand, says general secretary Murphy, the IFA had refused to accept it, and had not explained why.

The Cashel thing was all done behind closed doors, and no news of these far-reaching ideas emerged at the time. All that farmers generally knew was there had been some talk of an opinion poll, which Donal Murphy now claims to have been a way of getting round the IFA's failure to agree.

In any event as soon as Christmas was over, John Barry set about making arrangements for his opinion poll. Thinking it was all about unity, and to put a head of steam behind the proposed co-ordinating committee, he started to make arrangements with Irish Marketing Surveys to have it done. And everything was going along nicely until the ICMSA blew the whistle.

According to Donal Murphy the Cashel meeting had agreed on "polls" of IFA and ICMSA members only and these should be selected from the membership records of the two organisations. According to Murphy's account of the Cashel meeting "the IFA suggested a CSO poll but the chairman pointed out how wrong that would be. It would be totally wrong to give a voice in the future of an organisation to people who are not members." Murphy also asserts that the poll was not even meant to be about "unity".

The IFA's Donal Cashman describes this version of events as "quite extraordinary and somewhat baffling". His recollection is that the discussion on the poll had been fairly general and Mr Barry had been left to organise it as he thought right. It would hardly be surprising if John Barry had scratched his head and wondered if he was going mad. But instead he tried to remain constructive and have one more go. So he set a deadline of February 18 for the ICMSA to agree to the poll. He met them on the evening of February 17 to sort out their problems. It must have been a most peculiar meeting, because Donal Murphy's recollection was that the ICOS president had agreed with the ICMSA interpretation of Cashel and had promised to see the IFA "to get them to agree to the terms."

Mr Barry, for his part, says he agreed only to think about the ICMSA's demands overnight. The next day he resigned and issued a statement saying: "I met the terms of my mandate from the Cashel meeting. The ICMSA was not prepared to -proceed on that basis, believing that the sample should be drawn in some way from the membership of both organisations." He added that it was not possible for him, through consultation with the pollsters, to derive a scientific basis for what the ICMSA wanted. He was not therefore in a position to proceed.

Just how nasty things will now get remains to be seen. Donal Cashman has thrown some fat on the fire with his statement on radio that "we would welcome anyone from the ICMSA who came and worked with us. We would be happy for their members to join us in meetings at county level." Sean Kelly shot back with an angry accusation that Cashman had "advised our members to desert us and join the IFA." And on top of that, he said Cashman was also hoping to get the creamery money "to keep his own expensive show on the road."

If things go like this then, far from blowing over, the row will get even worse. If it does so, it could become local, internecine, "whites of the eyes" stuff which could lead to generations of bad feeling. At local level farmers could fight each other over funds with a bitterness exceeding even the present national phase of the row.

There are no signs, in fact, that Mr Barry is hurrying to call his ICOS council into session. On the contrary, he has taken to calling the whole thing "a family row", implying that the IFA and the ICMSA still really love each other. In reality however, if a family metaphor were needed, the best might be of two old sisters who can't stand each other but have to hang on for a share of the family wealth.