Ciara Murphy

Yeah, definitely.

I think the straw that broke the camel's back is exactly what struck me.

I decided to do some primary research for this and called my cousin, who's a farmer, to try to understand really, because he participated in the protests.

And I think there's a rural urban issue and there's also an intergenerational rural issue too, where it was kind of younger people, you know, farmers are living longer, people are inheriting later.

So they're working a lot off farm, a lot in contracting.

And I think that a lot of urban... That's not the fault of the government that we're living for longer and we're healthier.

All of this is social change that needs to be governed and managed.

And I think a lot of urban people...

really underestimate the economic anxiety that goes with farming and how much risk they deal with all the time.

And I think, you know, you hear stories of suicides when it goes wrong.

And I mean, I think that the level of risk that's involved in farming, and they've had really tough years, you know, feed prices, fertilizer prices being really, really volatile.

There's money to be made, but there is a lot of anxiety there.

And I think what's happening now, what we really see with this Leo Varadkar comment is status anxiety too.

And there's cultural anxiety, too.

And you see that with the migration and the housing crisis also pushing more people into villages and towns kind of further and further out of the towns.

But this status anxiety, this idea that, you know, farmers were very powerful and they still are very powerful.

But there's kind of a there's a disdain happening.

And I think one thing that really came out when I talked to my cousin was this idea of how they're portrayed in the media.

And this kind of looked down on disdain.

And I think one thing that Leo Varadkar has missed in these comments is it's not about who pays the bills.