ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT, MARY McALEESE, TO MARK THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FARMERS’ JOURNAL
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT, MARY McALEESE, TO MARK THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FARMERS' JOURNAL AND TO MAKE A PRESENTATION
I am delighted to have been asked to make this presentation to John Mooney to mark his unique contribution to Irish agriculture. The occasion has been well chosen, marking also as it does, the fifieth anniversary of the founding of the Farmers' Journal. We are, therefore, able to pay tribute to both, to the man and the publication which he nurtured and which has now become an indispensible part of the national and rural scene. John Mooney did not found the Farmers' Journal. The credit for this is due to Macra na Feirme - the Young Farmers' Association - which was part of that remarkable self-help ethos which took root in the nineteenth century and has flourished since. That movement gave us many of the organisations which are now an established feature of Irish life and which participate fully in the development, not only of sectoral policy, but also in the determination of the way ahead at national level. From the beginning these organisations recognised the importance of education, training and information for both the personal development of their members and for the advancement of the agricultural industry as a whole. On this principle Macra na Feirme, in 1948, founded the Farmers' Journal with the aim of supplying accurate technical and marketing information direct to farmers. Unfortunately, although having an admirable purpose, the project faltered due to a succession of start-up difficulties.
However, many of our present day rural organisations also has an uncertain start and were, in their early days, propelled by the dedication and persistence of leaders with vision who gave, in so many cases, not only of their personal but also of their own financial resoureces. I see John Mooney as being in this great tradition, stepping in as he did, in 1951, to buy the Journal and building it up from his own resources. He nurtured the fledgling paper, under the stewardship of ist first editor, Paddy O'Keeffe, until its circulation had grown to 60,000 copies a week by the mid 1960s. So successful did the Journal become that Mr. Mooney was approached with a take over offer from London. In an extraordinary gesture, however, he gave the Farmers' Journal into a charitable trust, totally free, and with absolutely no gain to himself. he himself remained on as unpaid non-executive chairman until he resigned from that position at the end of 1993. His legacy continues, however, in the terms of the trust which he formed. while clearly the Journal's Board has to maintain a profitable base to enable them to fulfil their obligations to the agricultural sector and to invest in technological developments as they occur within the newspaper industry, they are free of the constraints of having to meet the normal investor needs. It is also an essential term of the trust that a significant proportion of their profits go to fund research and student and the Journal annually funds bursaries and scholarships.
Since the inception of the Journal fifty years ago, life in Ireland and particularly the rural way of life has changed significantly. Agriculture always has been, and continues to be, our largest indigenous industry. Primary agriculture currently accounts for a significant percentage of GDP, while the agri-food sector employs considerable numbers and makes a major contribution to export earnings. The enormous net increase in the value of agricultural output