
The Farming Week: Michael Gaine case update, CAP protests in Dublin, new TB plan
May 22, 2025 5:00 pm
Charles O'Donnel and Stella Meehan bring you the biggest stories of the week in Irish agriculture from Agriland, which this week includes:
Michael Gaine murder case update
CAP protests in Dublin
TB latest
Agri-Food Regulator's conference
ACRES payments update
Milk prices for April & GDT
Shannon Airport grazing cattle
Don't forget to rate, review and follow The Farming Week, Agriland's weekly review of Irish agriculture, and visit Agriland.ie for more.
*This podcast is sponsored by AXA Farm Insurance
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Irish Examiner
3 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Joe McNamee: The Cork on a Fork buzz shows the city's progress as a food destination
Next Wednesday, the Lord Mayor of Cork will launch the fourth Cork on a Fork food festival, at Good Day Deli in the Nano Nagle Centre — which will then be followed by the Irish Examiner Business Breakfast, sponsored by Musgrave's SuperValu, hosted by yours truly and featuring four great speakers from the food world. The inaugural Cork on a Fork festival in 2022 was a tentative affair, hampered by a too short run-in, a tricky time slot in August, and a reluctance from many local restaurants to fully come on board. The leaps and bounds ever since have been enormous. Last year, in 2024, the festival finally came into its own as a potential keeper in the annual culinary calendar. So, the irony is not lost on me that the speakers will be addressing the following theme: 'Putting a Price on Quality: Promoting specialty foods in a cost-conscious market'. As Cork on a Fork, a celebration of the food and food culture of Cork City and its surrounding region, grows ever stronger, many of the producers being celebrated are facing a multiplicity of challenges, homegrown and 'imported', that threaten the very viability of the sector itself. The same applies to hospitality, both local and national — and the current existential crisis is far worse than the impact of the crash of the Celtic Tiger. I was working as a chef in Cork City in 1993 when Denis Cotter's Paradiso (then Cafe Paradiso) and Seamus O'Connell's Ivory Tower opened almost in tandem. Anthony Bourdain with Chef Seamus O'Connell in the Ivory Tower restaurant in 2006. Both revolutionary restaurants in an Irish and even international context. Their impact was immediate, and many of us lesser mortals toiling away in lesser kitchens around the city had a sense we were all about to hitch a ride on a new Cork culinary wave. In fact, the dining duo were so far ahead of the curve, it was some time in the future before their real influence was felt in Irish dining. Both were born in a time when recession was a near-permanent state, but that's par for the course in hospitality; some of the very best restaurants, and specialty food producers, have traditionally emerged when times were toughest and real creativity makes up for financial shortfalls. The subsequent heady gold rush days of the Celtic Tiger, if anything, appeared to dull creativity and innovation. Certainly, there was still great cooking to be found in and around the city but none of the genuine sense of invention of Paradiso and the Ivory Tower. When the Celtic Tiger crashed, local restaurants battened down the hatches and retreated behind stultifying culinary conservatism and the safety of combination pizza-pasta-burger menus. It was only when the new century was some way into its teens that a fresh radicalism re-emerged with the arrival of Takashi Miyazaki's eponymous Japanese street food restaurant, Miyazaki — which in turn led to his Ichigo Ichie restaurant, the first to hold a Michelin star in the city since Arbutus Lodge in the 1980s — and Beverley Mathews' L'Atitude 51's pronounced body swerve into the world of natural wine, sublimely complemented by culinary director Simone Kelly's local produce-driven menus. There was a sense that culinary Cork was on the rise once more. The pandemic, if anything, only drove Cork hospitality to greater heights and in all my time dining in Cork, I am hard pressed to recall a similar sense of excitement as prevails right now around the town. Not only are Cork chefs delivering on the plate, they are doing so with a newfound sense of camaraderie and cooperation. These new Young Turks regularly socialise together but they also have each others' backs, offering support and engaging in inspiring collaborations, even as every business opens the shutters each day to yet another battle for survival. So, blessed as we are in Cork, not only should we relish this newfound culinary creativity in the city, we should also do everything in our power to support it. The next time you are dining out in Cork, skip past those imported franchise restaurant models and seek out a genuinely local independent restaurant, especially those serving up a real taste of Cork on the plate. TABLE TALK The Examiner Eats Club is an exclusive series of dining events hosted by the Irish Examiner food team and solely open to Irish Examiner subscribers who are offered the opportunity to purchase tickets on a first come, first served basis for the chance to dine at private dinners in some of Ireland's finest restaurants. Launched last autumn with a wonderful evening at the celebrated Goldie restaurant, subsequent and equally superb evening dinners have taken place in Good Day Deli and the Farmgate Café, in the English Market. The next Examiner Eats Club dinner (Aug 17) — part of Cork on a Fork festival programme — sees the team and a bunch of very lucky diners heading to The Glass Curtain, on MacCurtain St. A genuine leader of the new wave in Cork city, The Glass Curtain combines brilliant cooking with one of the best larders around, a hyper-local exploration of the finest local and seasonal produce. Front-of-house manager/sommelier Wesley Triggs oversees a cracking wine and cocktail list, while superbly marshalling the dining experience, and chef-proprietor Brian Murray promises to pull out all the stops with a delicious five course sharing menu. TODAY'S SPECIAL Cheese from The Lost Valley Dairy. Instead of one specific food product, this week I am encouraging you to fill shopping baskets with some of the finest food in the world, and all of it from Cork. This is no parochial 'Real Capital' hubris, just a statement of fact: Cork has been the breadbasket of the country for generations; the birthplace of the modern Irish specialty food producer movement; and, for many years, Cork winners at the Blás na hÉireann food awards outnumbered the entire rest of the country put together. The best place to start is with sublime smoked fish from Sally Barnes (Woodcock Smokery) and Frank Hederman, and the best cheeseboard in the land, including Milleens, Durrus, Gubbeen, Coolea, Hegarty's and The Lost Valley Dairy. And that's only the starting point — I think you're going to need a second trolley!

The Journal
7 hours ago
- The Journal
Government intends to pass trade ban with Israeli settlements amid pressure from some US politicians
THE GOVERNMENT INTENDS to continue to advance with its legislation to ban the import of goods from illegal Israeli settlements. This comes after 16 members of the US congress asked that Ireland be added to a list of countries boycotting Israel if the bill is passed. This group have signed a letter calling for the Bill, which seeks to ban the trade of goods between Ireland and Israeli settlements, to be investigated. Republican Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, for New York, is leading the group of politicians. The letter references the US anti-boycott laws, which seek to oppose boycotts against America and its allies. Should the US find the Irish ban constitutes a 'foreign boycott', America may take action to counteract the ban and include Ireland on a purported 'boycott list', potentially suspending future US business deals in Dublin and elsewhere. The Irish government has been aware for a number of years that the anti-boycott movement in the US, made up of a number of American politicians, would take issue with the Occupied Territories Bill. Tánaiste Simon Harris said despite the opposition, Ireland 'intends' to continue to pass the draft laws. Advertisement It comes amid global criticism of Israel after its security cabinet approved a plan to take over Gaza City. Israel's air and ground war has already killed tens of thousands of people in the Gaza Strip, displaced most of the population, destroyed vast areas and pushed the territory towards famine. Ireland's coalition of Fine Gael, Fianna Fail and a group of independents committed to passing a ban on goods from the occupied Palestinian territories in its programme for government completed in January. A cross-party committee recommended that the government pass the bill and the prohibition of imports from the Palestinian Occupied Territories should be extended to include trade in services. Harris said Ireland was not alone in wanting to ban trade with the occupied Palestinian territories. 'People in Ireland, people in Europe and people right across the world feel extraordinarily strongly about the genocidal activity that we're seeing in Gaza, about the starving children and we will use all tools at our disposal,' he told reporters today. 'It's not a surprise that some seek to distort or misrepresent our proposed actions. 'Remember, Ireland isn't alone in relation to this; this week we also saw Slovenia take action in relation to trade from the occupied territories, I expect Belgium are likely to do the same and we intend to advance with our legislation. 'Of course we'll continue to engage and explain and never allow our position to be misrepresented.'


RTÉ News
8 hours ago
- RTÉ News
Over €66m unclaimed from Deposit Return Scheme
Irish consumers last year turned their back on €66.7m when they failed to cash in their deposits for drink containers through the Government's Deposit Return Scheme (DRS). That is according to the 2024 annual report for Re-Turn which shows that the failure by consumers to redeem the €66m worth in deposits for their drink containers was the chief reason behind the State-backed firm to record a pre-tax surplus of €51.3m for 2024. Established by Government, Re-Turn went live with its Deposit Return Scheme operations on 1 February 2024 with the aim to significantly increase the recycling rates of bottles and cans. Last year, 877.85m containers were returned made up of 433.2m plastic bottles and 444.6m cans. The annual report shows Re-turn recorded revenues of €114.4m in 2024. This included the €66.7m in unredeemed deposits and €47.7m made up of €17.2m from the sale of material and €30.5m from 'producer fees'. The annual report discloses that the income from unredeemed deposits has resulted in a VAT settlement by Re-turn of €23.7m. The company's 2024 costs totalled €62.2m made up of direct collection and recycling costs of €46.5m and administrative expenses of €15.7m which included a spend of €4.6m on 'marketing, communications, and public awareness'. The report states that the €66.7m reflects the recognition of unredeemed deposits for the financial year and "this is after a €36.5m estimate of deposits expected to be returned post year end". The report states that "unredeemed deposits are an expected and routine scenario for deposit return schemes and it was anticipated that in the initial transition period redemptions would be low and therefore there would be a high level of unredeemed deposits". The report states that "as a not-for-profit organisation, in the early stages of our maturity, the fees from unredeemed containers are being reinvested in a number of ways". These include paying off initial scheme set-up costs; infrastructure development; consumer education campaigns and contributing to its legally required contingency reserve. The report adds that income from unredeemed deposits "is expected to significantly reduce as the scheme reaches its targeted redemptions of 90% in the coming years". The report states that "in the long term, should unredeemed deposits be higher than forecast, we would support initiatives that drive increased adoption of the scheme as well as investing in broader innovative projects designed to further the country's circular economy strategy". The report states that Re-Turn closed the year with a cash balance of €89.8m. The report states that this cash figure will reduce significantly in 2025 when several significant draw-downs are scheduled and after accounting for these factors the adjusted cash balance would reduce to approximately €32m. The significant draw-downs include a VAT settlement on unredeemed deposits of €23.7m; a provision of €13.8m for Re-Turn's contingency reserve fund; a settlement of the remaining €11.7m balance of the facility agreement with Bank of Ireland grant settlement of c.€3.2m to retailers in respect of 2024 and a provision of €5.4m for corporation tax arising on surplus in the scheme. In comments attached to the report, Re-Turn CEO Ciaran Foley stated: "Thanks to the incredible buy-in and adoption from the Irish public, 877 million containers were returned through DRS in 2024, equating to an average 66% post transition period recycling rate. "The seasonality of the soft drinks market was reflected in some even higher months, such as in August when the return rate reached 75%. Every 1% increase equates to around 19 million containers, and we recorded some daily returns of over 5 million products over the Christmas period." Chair of Re-Turn Tony Keohane stated that the launch of Ireland's Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) in February 2024 marked a defining milestone in the country's journey toward a more sustainable future. He said: "From a standing start in Autumn 2022, the scheme collected more than 877 million drinks containers in its first 11 months. In that short time, we've seen Irish consumers recycle more bottles and cans than ever before and do so in a way that produces high quality recyclate, helping build a truly circular economy."