Countrywide Full Episode 18/07/2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Countrywide on RTE Radio 1.
Hello, good morning. How are you doing? Between now and nine, sheep fit for a president in Galway. Do they say yo or you down under? And shaggy sheep dog tails in the Dublin Hills. However hot you think you're going to be today, imagine being a sheep. Imagine lumbering around the place under all of that wool, which is of course why they have all been shorn by last month. Imagine then being the farmer who has to pay for that shearing, knowing that in the current market, the wool is to all intents and purposes worth nothing.
Charles Hughes. We're two miles from the village of Holly Mountain, County Mayo. We run a suckler herd and a flock of about 200 ewes.
What are your feelings about this time of year in shearing?
It's a job that has to be done, and if we could get away without doing it, if we wouldn't do it, it's so useless. Its value is so useless.
Why are Irish farmers finding shearing more expensive than the value of wool?
It costs a lot more money to get the wool shorn than it does to get fired.
It must really irritate you, though, that you know that there are uses for this raw material, for this wool, but yet it is, as you say, valued as if it's useless.
Well, if I thought about it enough, yeah, that's true, but I don't put a lot of thought into it. We have to take what we get. Some people years ago used to store this wool until it would become valuable and it used to fluctuate. But for the last number of years, the sooner you can get it off the farm, the better. You couldn't provide a shed to hold it like the people, our ancestors did.
Because space is money.
Well, exactly, yeah. There's no money for it. Simple as that.
We have four million sheep. That's just in the 26 counties. And every year they produce seven million kilos of wool. And right now, wool is a waste product that is legally categorised the same way that we have to treat animal carcasses. So, there's two challenges here. First is to find uses for that wool. Now, we have made whole programmes about that in the past. The second challenge is to produce sheep that will be as prized for their wool as for their meat, not just one or the other. The Galway Sheep, its supporters believe, is that sheep. This morning in Athenry Mart, President Connolly will be at the sixth national harvest of wool from the Galway. It's a mehal organised by the Galway Wool Co-op. There will be shearing and spinning demonstrations and examples of soft wool garments made from the wool of the Galway Sheep.
Nothing scratchy about this if it's done properly. Suzanne Campbell travelled to the farm of Blonad Gallagher, co-founder of the co-op, to see her flock of pedigree galways.
This is a lovely field. And what a beautiful day to be here as well. What we're actually doing now, Suzanne, is we're walking over to what was planted. There was no housing here on the farm for, I don't know, my uncle just saw trees were the best type of housing that you could get for livestock. So as we approach, you'll actually see how quiet they are. That's their home, a woodland grove, and they'll actually spend a lot of time in there during really, really hot, hot temperature. When it comes to lambing, then they're great mums. They'll lamb on their own, inside or outside, depending whatever system you're running. You send them to the factory, obviously, at what weight or what age? I actually kill at a local butcher.
I'm all out for help. Yeah, yeah, I love being able to keep the local abattoir open. That's brilliant, yeah. Yeah, so we'll do direct sales. We have a couple of them down in Ballymalu. Doreena took a small flock this year. And feedback we get is that the meat is very well marbled and it's an excellent slow roast. It's also nice to have something very special, something that you know is very rare and there isn't a lot of out there. People coming to Ireland might be familiar with the black-faced sheep around Connemara and Galway. But these are really, really different. These are a much thicker, sturdier animal. They're much larger. Very different to what we might think. Oh, very different. Because a lot of the mountainy breeds were actually imported from Wales and Scotland.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:12
2
Why are Irish farmers finding shearing more expensive than the value of wool?
1:12–11:22
3
What makes the Galway sheep breed valuable for both meat and wool?
11:22–14:08
4
How did Blánod Gallagher describe restoring the cultural integrity of the Galway breed?
14:08–26:48
5
Why has Irish wool infrastructure and traceability declined and how does that affect prices?
26:48–38:05
6
How can different processing methods change the texture and marketability of Irish wool?
38:05–40:53