It’s no fun when ‘the joker’ takes over as the real boss

Country Living with Francis Farragher

One of the jokes doing the rounds about the CV requirements for being a British Prime Minister is that the applicants must be over-educated, under-intelligent, be naturally mendacious and prone to bullying, so maybe why we’ve ended up with Big BJ in the hot-seat across the water from us.

We all could pretty much have a laugh the situation were it not for the fact, that whether we like it or not, our fortunes and future as an Irish people, are to a large extent dependent on the stability of our nearest neighbours.

God knows, the history between the two countries is pock-marked with wars, repression, colonial dominance and famines, but for the last 20 years or so, since the Good Friday peace deal, there has been a major settling down in the relationship between Ireland and the UK.

The all-embracing umbrella of the European Union and the freedom of living in a borderless island brought about a change for the better in Ireland that could not have been contemplated through the height of ‘The Troubles’ from the early 1970s right through to the 1990s.

Britain has always been our biggest trading partner and over recent weeks while farmers quite rightly make their case for being more for their cattle, the doomsday scenario of things getting an awful lot worse rears its head, especially if a no-deal Brexit comes to pass.

Close on half of our beef exports end up in the UK – almost 300,000 tonnes each year – of if huge tariffs were to fall into place for imports into Britain, the situation could be close to catastrophic for our agri-food sector.  Agri-food is of course far more wide-embracing than just farming. According to Dept. of Agriculture, there are 173,000 people employed in the Irish agri-food sector, or almost 8% of the total working population while the total value of food exports is pushing up to €14 billion, with almost 50% of that (€5.2 billion) going to the UK.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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