Tipperary ICMSA leader Pat McCormack praises Phil Hogan for tackling corporations

Several prominent farmers from Tipperary were among the more than 300 delegates who attended the ICMSA annual general meeting in Limerick’s South Court Hotel last Friday.

A high-powered selection of speakers, including Minister Creed, Commissioner Phil Hogan and John Jordan, CEO of Ornua, heard ICMSA president, Tipperary’s Pat McCormack, pay tribute to Commissioner Hogan’s efforts to reform margins in the EU food supply chain and make the farmers less vulnerable to the “margin-grabbing” practiced by the giant transnational retail corporations who, the meeting was told, “dictate price forwards to the consumers and backwards to the cow” in respect of dairy price.

Speaking to the commissioner, Mr McCormack said he was the first commissioner who had not “stood idly by, wringing his hands”, but had, instead, decided to confront a long-standing and endemic scandal that had systematically destroyed most of Europe’s indigenous family farm system and would do the same here unless reformed with margins made fair and transparent.