Ciara Murphy

I think one thing that really strikes me about this is all of this.

One thing that's different about 20 years ago is that social partnership has ended, right?

So Matt Cooper recommends reinstating social partnership.

And previously, there was a mechanism to negotiate and decide how resources would be distributed.

And the idea behind that is that it means that the person who shouts the loudest isn't the one who gets the resources.

But everybody's heard and there's kind of this like, OK, everyone's kind of equally unhappy, more or less.

You get around the table, you all kind of thrash out a deal together.

And now it's all kind of it's much more informal.

It's much more behind the scenes.

You've got the IFA, which I mean, when I talked to my cousin, he was kind of saying, you know, we the younger people don't feel represented by the IFA.

It's a lot of the older farmers.

They're doing better.

They've made their money.

We're feeling the anxiety and we're not kind of in the IFA.

I don't know how broad, how widespread that is.

But again, without this formal mechanism, we are going to be facing this again and again.

I think it was really interesting that obviously social partnership was killed by the crash and there was no appetite to reinstate it, in part because it was quite unfairly blamed for the problems that had fueled it.

But I think that was a really short-sighted, small-minded analysis of what happened because social partnership does work to solve these distinctions.

Oh, well, it's a fascinating comparison because I think I mean, I think one thing that really struck me when this started was, oh, my God, Irish people are protesting, like because I lived in France and protest was just like a week to week phenomenon.

It's part of the DNA.