This article is from page 19 of the 2008-06-10 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 19 JPG
THE HEAD of the IFA in Clare has said that he has every confidence that the government will deliver on it’s promise to veto any World Trade Organisation (WTO) deal if it was negative to Irish farming.
Following last week’s agreement between IFA President Padraig Walshe and Taoiseach Brian Cowen on WTO, Clare IFA head Michael Lynch has urged all Clare farmers to vote yes on Thursday.
“The IFA has always favoured in- volvement in Europe. Our protest was always about the WTO and once we have the commitment on that then we are in favour of the treaty,’ said Mr Lynch.
“We feel that we have a guarantee; it was given in public and we would expect this to be honoured. – no mat- ter who is in power.”
“We expect that farming interests would be defended as the mainstay of the rural community in Ireland”.
Mr Lynch did admit however that despite his organisations protests, the treaty has very little to do with levuscupetse
““T don’t see it having a major influ- ence one way or the other on farm- ing. It seems to be more about the general running of Europe and mak- ing it easier to manage all the coun- tries,’ he said
“We had tried every means neces- sary to get the government to use the veto on world trade before we made the Lisbon Treaty a farming issue.”
“We had numerous meetings and
numerous protests and yet the gov- ernment wasn’t willing to move.”
“Anytime you get an election peo- ple do use it strategically to defend their position and that is what we had to do.”
‘This was really a backs to the wall job for Irish farming, we did what we really had to do. We had no alterna- tive but to put whatever pressure we could on the government on this.”
“At local levels we had commit- ments from both government and op- positions at county council level and I failed to understand how the gov- ernment failed to give a commitment for so long when their representa- tives on the ground were calling on them to do so. At the end of the day it was a last resort but it was what we had to do.”