Francie Gorman

And Clare, it's not about being divisive.

I've always said, as President of IFA, any time I spoke about food production,

that it's not just us produce the food.

We depend on our lorry drivers to pick up our milk.

We pick up our stock to go to processing plants.

We depend on people who work in them to deliver it and get it to market.

And overall in society, whether you're a farmer or a nurse or a guard or working in RTE, everybody needs each other.

So I was surprised that someone who had served as teacher of the country would be as divisive

in his comments as he was in this podcast.

But look, at the end of the day, maybe it's about getting attention and trying to be relevant.

But he's no longer Taoiseach and he is a private citizen and he is entitled to his private views.

But you would be concerned about it.

Concerned I think that there's been a disconnect I think between government and rural Ireland over the last couple of years in particular and going back I think if you look at the cost of doing business which I would and we would have outlined in IFA

over the last two years, three years in particular, that that issue hasn't been addressed.

But the Minister for Agriculture distanced himself from the former Taoiseach's comments, as did the Taoiseach yesterday.

But you would be concerned when you see how the Mercosur trade deal panned out.

It was in the programme for government and yet we had to lobby extremely hard to have that honoured.

And then we had the issue of

Obviously the issue of the rising fuel costs, availability of fertiliser and the price of fertiliser.

We warned the government in talks on the 1st of April before the protest started that if they didn't do something significant on it, that this would happen.