Queen of the Ploughing by Anna May McHugh

Author:Anna May McHugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844884230
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

11. The Highs and the Lows

It was Monday, 19 February 2001. It was such an unremarkable day that I have no recollection of what I was doing at that time. Judging by the time of year, I would probably have been preparing exhibitor packs for the Ploughing, which was due to be held more than seven months later. I would have been going about my business as normal, with no idea of the turmoil that was about to hit the country. It was only afterwards that we realized the significance of the day. It was only afterwards that we heard about the worker in Cheale Meats abattoir, in Essex, who was feeding pigs that day and noticed that some of them were limping. The vet was asked to take a closer look at the animals. That was when the dreaded words were mentioned. Foot and Mouth. No one knew it at the time, but by then about sixty farms in England were showing symptoms of the disease.

Foot and Mouth is an extremely contagious disease that affects cattle, sheep, pigs and goats and if it took hold in Ireland, it would wipe out our national herd and ruin the farming industry. News that it could be in Britain caused shockwaves here. We didn’t have long to wait to find out. The following day, the British Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food confirmed that it was dealing with a Foot and Mouth outbreak.

I’ll never forget the sense of dread when we heard the news. It’s hard to put into words how anxious everyone became. We had all been talking quietly about it and praying that it wasn’t Foot and Mouth. Now our worst fears were confirmed. You see, animals were travelling back and forth to Britain all the time and we knew that if it was in Britain, then it could spread to Ireland very quickly. It then emerged that, on the very day the abattoir worker in Essex had raised concerns about the pigs, a lorry had carried almost 300 sheep from Carlisle mart, in Scotland, to Northern Ireland. The mart had been contaminated with Foot and Mouth disease and twenty-one infected sheep on that lorry caused an outbreak on a farm in Meigh, County Armagh. Our hearts sank on 28 February when the Northern Ireland Minister for Agriculture, Bríd Rodgers, said animals had been slaughtered on the farm in Meigh and she believed Foot and Mouth Disease was in Northern Ireland.

It was an awful time, and I soon dreaded turning on the news. We were watching pyres of burning carcasses on British farms, on the television every night. There were so many animals to be slaughtered over there that the army was called in to help.

But we still recited our novenas, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t spread across the Border. Then, on Thursday, 22 March, the then taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, stood up in Dáil Éireann and said an outbreak had been confirmed on a sheep farm in Proleek, near Jenkinstown in County Louth.

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