Hi, I’m Nadaline Webster and I am the Independent Ireland candidate for South Tipperary in the upcoming general election. We all have a lot of questions about the future of Ireland and where we are headed and an interesting one was posed recently by a farm organisation:
Can a TD deliver for farming if not in government?
There’s a worry that farmers should be careful who they vote for because if those with ‘loud voices’ are elected, they won’t be in government and if they aren’t in government then they can’t ‘deliver for farmers’.
There’s a couple of things to consider here:
What does ‘delivering for farmers’ even mean in this context? It’s an important question. In my opinion and with the experience of the past few years, what it means is: Accept the hand you are dealt, accept the shoddy measurements and figures, accept your allocated responsibility to shoulder the bulk of the burden of climate change policy, accept your new role as cheap providers of carbon removal services and feedstock for energy and transport solutions to lower their emissions and not yours, accept the slow erosion of property rights, accept the slow restriction on essential services like legal representation, investment, finance and insurance based on those shoddy figures, accept the moving targets and shifting sands, accept the continuing exodus from every sector of the industry….and we’ll make sure you get a few bob out of it.
That’s not good enough for me. It’s not good enough for the majority of farmers that I talk to. It’s not good enough for the equine industry also now coming under threat. It’s not good enough for the rural communities that depend on these industries thriving.
I also don’t agree that not being part of government is a serious impediment to ‘delivering for farmers’. Even as an opposition TD, there are 3 main areas where I personally feel that I can be very effective:
How we are treated. How we are measured. And how we are talked about.
Fine Gael (and Fianna Fail, the Green Party and Sinn Fein and most others are no better) treat farmers as tools to be manipulated, bribed and coerced into going along with whatever they decide to burden them with next. They are very much aware that the figures published by state bodies are riddled with inaccuracies and only tell one part of a complex story. This constant narrative functionally demonises farmers in the public perception and leans in hard to the increasing trend towards viewing privately owned farms as being something that the general public can and should gain more benefit from, have more control over and access to, eroding property rights.
As I often say, there are only two choices - either they don’t know what they are doing, in which case they are incompetent and should be fired. Or they do know what they are doing and it is both malicious and deliberate and they should be fired. There’s no magic third option. These things are undeniably happening. The only question is the motivation and I’m not sure it even matters.
The choices for farmers are starkly apparent. You can vote for the same people who put us on this road if you think that road is going to take you and the industry somewhere good. Or you can vote for people who will fight to have farmers rights respected, fight for accurate and complete information and will take that accurate and complete information to the public airwaves at every opportunity. Who will vote at every turn for farming as an industry to have a viable, profitable, high-reputation and sustainable future that their children will want to be a part of.
And you can bet your bottom dollar that Independent Ireland intends to do exactly that - because they wouldn’t have selected me if they didn’t. Whatever criticism might be levelled at me, it cannot be denied that I am unashamedly and unapologetically on the side of farmers and rural Ireland. Both myself and John have worked hard to do the research, understand the foundational issues in depth and speak up for farmers at every opportunity.
And everywhere, we meet a seemingly unbreakable wall of governmental nonsense, publicly funded NGOs, unaccountable state bodies and media…and sometimes representative bodies… that will only participate in one narrative. Nonetheless, we’ve had a significant impact. I’m running because I believe I can have more positive impact behind that wall as a TD than I can from outside it. And because in some ways, it’s now or never. I don’t think the industry has another 5 years of this left in them. The way things are going, there will only be a few big outfits left to fight in 5 years time and they might then discover that there was a power in numbers that they no longer have.
One way or another, the next 5 years are going to have a huge impact on rural Ireland. You matters. Your vote matters. Think for yourself. Vote for yourself. And don’t miss the opportunity.
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