“We were young people — we were only involved in politics a couple of years at that stage, but we definitely had a sense that we were part of something big.”

 

Joining Sinn Féin

“Just a few years before that, Sinn Féin were barred from radio and television,” says the father-of-five, who is married to Lynn. “I remember as a teenager in secondary school staying up until 12 o’clock one night with headphones that I got free from Lucozade to hear Gerry Adams’ voice for the first time.

“I didn’t come from a political family, certainly not a republican family. As a teenager, we spent time in Wales (Carthy was born in Birmingham, before his family moved to Roscommon); it was the late 80s, so there were sporadic IRA bombings, things like that, so there would have been a little bit of anti-Irish sentiment.

“We moved back to Carrickmacross. I just had an interest in trying to get an understanding of the politics and history of Ireland. We were living in a rented house across the road from the library, so I was reading an awful lot, particularly around the War of Independence, and developed an interest in politics.

“And then one day, I happened to be just a few miles away and all of a sudden I saw all these British soldiers around the place, and it was a massive wake-up call that as far as I was aware, we have these successors to the Black and Tans still in our country.

“Anybody with experience of the British Army patrols in around the border, particularly South Armagh… it was a very hostile environment and it was very, very angering.

“Those experiences shaped me an awful lot. I developed a republican view of the world.

“I didn’t know any avenue of how to reflect that other than in school, public debates and informal conversations we’d be having. But if we were going to Dublin for anything, the first place I’d go was a newspaper stand on O’Connell Street to get An Phoblacht.

“I had an appetite for information. When I went to Dublin [to DIT], I joined Sinn Féin and just really got active. I probably chained myself to a dozen buildings around Dublin at the time.”

He particularly remembers the Róisín McAliskey campaign in 1996.

“She was being imprisoned on an extradition warrant from Germany, by the British government.”

Carthy was also instrumental in setting up what developed into Ogra Shinn Féin in Dublin, along with the likes of Eoin Ó Broin, Doherty and David Cullinane.

First step on the rung

With Ó Caoláin’s election, Carthy says: “You had a sense that something big was happening in Irish politics, and that Cavan-Monaghan was part of it and we were part of it. We were spending hours campaigning. Where we have come since is phenomenal.”

And it’s Ó Caoláin who Carthy cites as putting him on the first stepping stone into politics.

“He was giving me a lift from Dublin down to Carrickmacross and suggested I consider running for the town council elections on the promise that everybody is always given: that you probably won’t get elected and even if you do, it’s only a meeting once a month. But I got elected into Carrickmacross Town Council and loved it.”

Carthy was just 21 at the time, in 1999, and the only Sinn Féin member of the council. “I probably looked like I was 14, but I loved the local aspect of politics.”

Almost 20 years later, in 2018, Carthy held on to the Dáil seat after Ó Caoláin stepped aside. He was elected on the first count.

Sinn Féin in government

Carthy says of Sinn Féin’s future: “I’d never be presumptuous and say that we will be in government or that I will be re-elected,” he says.

“Sinn Féin will be in government if we do our job right. We’re putting forward credible policies that deliver for ordinary workers and families and rural communities.

“If we can show that we’re honest and sincere about implementing those policies, I think people will engage and respond.

“And if that’s the case, and we manage to do our job well, then I think the next general election is clearly the signpost to do that.”

Carthy says he would love to be Agriculture Minister, despite not being from a farming background.

“Absolutely, where I’d like to be right now is in Agricultural House, being able to implement changes.”

School friends, he says, “have good fun talking about me as a spokesperson on agriculture because as far as they’re concerned, I’m a townie”.

“But in local politics, I represented a big rural area and I always had a passing interest in agricultural issues.”

It was when he was running for the European elections in 2013 that his interest began to focus around agriculture. After being elected, he “made a big push for my priority committee to be the Agriculture and Rural Development committee”.

“Agricultural policy wasn’t serving the most important element of Irish agriculture, which is the family-farm network — it was skewed against farmers, particularly smaller farmers and poorer farmers, those in peripheral areas, and there was a dominance of processors, and retailers and other vested interests that were actually directing policies,” he says.

“If you’re talking about the type of society we live in, all of that fits perfectly into having a vibrant farm network that revitalises the communities in which they are based, generating and distributing wealth beyond those vested interests.”

CAP

The division of the EU budget, Carthy says, is “disastrous for Irish farming and for CAP... to this day, they are arguing that they negotiated a successful budget when clearly they didn’t”.

And on the recently negotiated CAP agreement, he says Agriculture Minister Charlie McConalogue is “not being honest in terms of his own position”.

“The Minister had positions on all of the key components of CAP while he was in opposition, but essentially what he’s been saying for the past year is that he is the only person in Irish agriculture that doesn’t have a view on matters that are being discussed in every farmyard of every mart. I don’t think that’s logical.

“I think there’s a sense of despondency in terms of whether or not this is a genuine consultation process.

“I think scepticism has been reinforced by so-called town-hall meetings. Of course they have to be done virtually... [but] these meetings don’t meet the definition of a town-hall meeting. I would argue that they hardly meet the definition of consultation at all.”

Convergence

While Sinn Féin has said it is looking for 100pc convergence of farm payments here, Carthy says he doesn’t want to see any farmer lose money.

“The difficulty is that convergence is happening,” he says. “By the end of the next CAP process, there’s a very good chance we’ll be a complete outlier in all of this and we’re spending all our energies having a national battle in relation to convergence as opposed to trying to ensure that the necessary support… is directed to those farmers who need it most.

“The EU budget came around and farm organisations were far too quiet on that issue — they didn’t mobilise in many cases because they didn’t want to upset Phil Hogan, and they didn’t want to end up exposing the Irish Government’s failures and they stayed silent.

“Then, at the last minute of the CAP negotiations, farmers are being called out on the pickets to oppose measures that, yes they will impact negatively on some people, but will also impact positively on people who have been disenfranchised for 20 years.

“I just don’t think it’s okay that people receive different levels of payment based on production levels of two decades ago.

“It has to be done on a fair basis and, unfortunately, the fair basis has to be that you have a flat-rate payment per hectare for those farmers who are genuinely farming, and that you front-load in order to give support to those smaller farmers that might have been on higher entitlements.”

Carthy also wants robust measures that support younger entrants, along with supporting farmers who want to retire in transition, without obliging them to stay off the farm, and encouraging more women into farming.

Further, he says, distinct State supports are necessary for those sectors that need them the most, and that are most beneficial — suckler and sheep farmers.

 

Beef

Carthy has been vocal recently in relation to the beef sector.

“There are cartel-like behaviours within the meat processing sector in Ireland. [Following an investigation, the CCPC said last year there was insufficient evidence of a breach of competition law and meat processors have also denied allegations in this regard].

“The fundamental problem is that there has never been a political appetite to try to tackle that.”

While he’s critical of the Beef Taskforce’s call for farmers to bring evidence of a cartel, he says there is a need for a stakeholders’ forum and a regulator that has “real teeth”.

“The big secret in Irish beef is that there’s money to be made from it. The problem is that the people making it aren’t the primary producers. Retailers are making money, the processors are making a lot of money.

“The first thing we need is transparency in the entire market chain in terms of the prices being received and the profits being made.”

Consumers, he says, also need to know what they’re getting.

“The picture sold abroad is of a farmer in a field with a cow and calf, but there is no guarantee that the piece of meat I’m buying didn’t come from a factory feedlot.

“Most people would fear the taskforce was set up to take the heat off the Government after the protests, so there’s an obligation on all of us to make sure that’s not what happens.

National herd

Calls for a cut to the national herd, Carthy says, are frustrating as the debate “misses the point”.

“We’re not going to ask Irish farmers to produce less while our Government is negotiating and supporting EU trade deals that will see importations coming into our markets from elsewhere. That’s not climate action, that’s just pure hypocrisy and will deliver for no one.

“It is absolute lunacy that we would suggest that we would curtail or reduce our suckler herd... the Irish suckler herd is the most sustainable product you can get, arguably, in the world, and yet it’s not being promoted, and we’re trying to cut it.

“The Government have never done anything to try to reduce the product coming from factory feedlots, which are on a different scale altogether in terms of emissions and environmental impact.”

Forestry

Far too many farmers have been stung by their forestry experience and Carthy “would find it very hard to look a farmer in the eye and tell them they should go into large-scale forestry”.

He says “a trust-building exercise” is required in the sector.

“Every time Department officials and ministers defend the current framework, they’re undermining that trust even further,” he says.

“It’s a back-to-basics approach: a good forestry policy should be beneficial to the environment, the economy and the local community.

“A forest is something that people should want to live beside because it should be the source of recreation, amenity and biodiversity.

“The geniuses that we’ve had running forestry policy in this State have managed to come up with a forestry system that does none of those three things. And that is a systemic and catastrophic failure on their part.

“And the problem is every solution that has been brought forward is based on the exact same people who have been responsible for the catastrophe, reviewing what should be done next.

“We have ministers that are being played like fiddles by the officials and behind the scenes, and in my view, all we’re going to see in the future is more and more people exit forestry.”

Carthy describes the country’s organic targets as “actually pathetic” and says there’s a good chance Ireland won’t reach them.

“It’s really hard to believe there’s a party that calls itself a Green Party that’s overseeing organics,” he says. “Organics can play a really, really important role in ensuring that we produce good food and our farmers receive good prices.

“We’re behind every single other European country with the exception of Malta, and our ambition is by 2030 to be where the EU average was three years ago.

“We have a 7.5pc target and the EU average is already 8.5pc in terms of land designated for organics.”