After two years of single-minded focus on Covid, it is time to look at health through a much broader lens. This has been brought home to me in a very stark way by a conversation that emerged out of nowhere at a recent ICSA meeting.
It began with a testimony of one attendee who was aware of three suicides in the space of one week in his locality. Instead of this being an isolated and tragic scenario, others stood up and outlined various cases involving suicide, attempted suicide and cries for help and a wider array of mental health issues, stress, and family problems.
After many years of attending farmer meetings and dealing with contentious issues and often robust debate this was something totally unexpected. The room was super-charged with emotion. It was very moving to see how people opened up and were no longer afraid or self-conscious about telling it as it is.
The reality is that people are going through a lot of difficult stuff, and it goes far deeper than Covid. Personally, I don’t know a single case of an otherwise healthy person who died from Covid but an old school pal of mine took his own life in 2020. But as one contributor pointed out, more people are dying from suicide in rural Ireland than from farm accidents or road accidents. The official statistics do not tell this story because for various reasons, suicides are not always recorded as such.
Having listened to all the different views of farming people from across Ireland, people are suffering, many in silence. The causes are multi-faceted, and the problem is complex.
External factors such as money problems, work stresses or family disputes cannot be ignored. Indeed, fear of a tax audit, farm inspection or even a threatening letter from the bureaucracy can be a trigger. Isolation which has always existed in rural areas, was made considerably worse by lockdown and other Covid measures.
Some will blame a downhill slump on such factors, but it must be admitted also that, for many, there is a deeper underlying condition. Many people suffer from mental health issues even though their lives seem predominantly successful and full of positives.
In some respects, the farming community is no different from any other sector of society. People are people. But from an ICSA perspective, we see specific challenges faced by farm families that certainly have the potential to exacerbate the problems. We have all read of the awful and tragic cases involving land disputes and succession.
Many farmers have expanded their enterprise substantially with an accompanying increase in debt which may be manageable as long as everything goes to plan. But there is a crisis of labour availability. Farm prices and costs are volatile.
For the low-income sectors such as cattle and sheep, even a slight increase in costs can be problematic. The current rocketing of costs is frightening, and improved beef and lamb prices are just not nearly as high as they need to go. Money stresses and low incomes are certainly a significant factor.
In my view, Teagasc and agri-consultants have not put enough focus on stress testing farm plans. It is not just about can this plan survive movements in price or costs; it’s what happens if the young farmer develops a back problem or gets a bi-polar diagnosis and can’t handle the calving or milking?
Organisations such as Aware, the Samaritans, Pieta House and See Change do a lot of excellent work. But the question is whether it will do to leave it to them?
ICSA is setting up a working group to examine what we can do to help, and we welcome anybody who wants to contribute. It is clear to me that this is an issue that can no longer be swept under the carpet.
Eddie Punch, ICSA general secretary.
ENDS
