Darragh McCullough: Wall of regulation destroying our slaughterhouses and sustainable opportunities

In fairness, the prospect of television cameras has that effect, but I’ve been on the job long enough to tell the difference between a quick clean done to our advantage and a habitual order that’s difficult. wired in one place.

Unlike Martin, I don’t belong to the orderly course of life. I love big new projects that constantly distract me from fixing the loose ends of the last big challenge.

As a result, there are always a few pallets in corners in the home yard where they don’t belong. There are a few fences that need tidying up since I nicked them with a loader two years ago. And there’s always a pile of scrap steel that never seems urgent enough to warrant a trip to the junkyard today.

I digress. The key point of this piece is up there in the first line. Although two Louth slaughterhouses are listed on the Food Safety Authority’s website, Martin told me the other had closed in recent months and was the only one flying the flag for what many would consider a crucial element of a sustainable food system.

It’s ironic that the home district of Europe’s biggest beef baron, Larry Goodman, is struggling to preserve even one remaining slaughterhouse.

Goodman’s ABP group slaughters over 40,000 cattle and sheep a week in Ireland alone, with many times that being handled by the company at its network of plants in the UK and Poland.

Meanwhile, Martin Commins’ little plant could kill 60 lambs and a handful of heifers every week. The farmers who supply it love how easy it is to set up.

There are no roaring stocks that have traveled overnight or the day before. No queuing, no running around with paperwork from one office to the next. Generally, the animals come from within 15 km of the facility on the outskirts of Ardee and are killed with minimal effort within hours of arrival.

It’s exactly what all food writers, animal rights activists and environmentalists want. Locally produced food treated in the most humane way possible, in a way that preserves local praise, skills and farming systems.

And yet this facility was boarded up until recently. It was only a massive surge in demand in his business during Covid that gave Martin the confidence to reopen his slaughterhouse in 2020. It had reluctantly closed its doors in the 1990s when ever-changing and increasingly unrealistic regulations made it pointless to keep the factory going.

Before that there were hundreds if not thousands of small slaughterhouses across Ireland. Today, 169 are listed on the Food Safety Authority website, including some that have recently left the sector. Counties like Dublin, Sligo, Wicklow, Wexford, Waterford and Monaghan have only two or three buildings each. But perhaps the exodus has started to change the value that local authorities see in these companies.

Martin admitted he found officials very helpful when he approached them about the possibility of a reopening. In the end, all it took was a bit of paint and a new hoist and he was back in business.

But the government doesn’t usually take it lightly when it comes to dealing with other aspects of sustainability.

We are constantly told that there is a world of greener ways for farmers to diversify. Bio, renewable energy, horticulture and direct sales.

But there is a reason for everything. The reason farmers don’t queue up to plant trees or build turbines is because they encounter a wall of regulations that defeats all but the best equipped.

We all know that we need rules and regulations to make society work, but where is the common sense to make sure the rules aren’t preventing us from being where we really want to be?

Darragh McCullough runs a mixed farming business in Meath, elmgrovefarm.ie.

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