Mr. Matt Dempsey:

I was the editor of the Irish Farmers' Journalat the time. Pádraig Walshe was the president of the Irish Farmers Association. I am delighted to have the opportunity to give my views and experiences simply as an observer to all of this. Mr. Walshe rang me one day to tell me about an extraordinary farm in County Kilkenny that he thought I might find interesting. I went to Castlecomer and brought our chief photographer with me. I had never seen anything like what was there in my life. The cattle were stunted, with two-year-old cattle looking like they were six months old, except that they had very swollen, artificially large heads compared to the rest of their body. The records of the farm showed that 70 calves, from just 40 cows, had died in the space of four years. Production was extremely low as regards milk yield and cows did not calve until they were three years of age. I simply observed, in my capacity with the Irish Farmers' Journal, that this was a farmer with evident problems. In such a case, the first thing one would wonder is whether the farmer is doing something seriously wrong as regards husbandry, minerals, feeding or nutrition patterns. I farm myself and from an agricultural science point of view, I hope I would not have become editor without having a view on whether I was looking at a good farmer. I was quite happy that the problem was not caused by the Brennans' farming practices.

It was also very clear that there were botany problems. Trees and hedges were dying. I knew Professor Jack Gardiner. I think he was Dean of Agriculture at the time. He was certainly a Professor of Forestry.He too had seen it. I quoted him in the article as saying that he could not identify any fungal, bacterial or insect pest and that the vegetative problems were consistent with some kind of pollution. I had known Mr. Bill Costelloe of Teagasc for years. He was the chief agricultural officer in Kilkenny. He also came out very strongly. Normally in my experience, if a farmer has a financial or emotional problem or some other problem, the organisations will not speak badly of him but neither will they come out very vocally in his defence. It was the opposite in this case: his vets, the agriculture officer and the forestry professor all said that there was something going on that did not add up.

After I wrote up my own experiences and views, I submitted the copy to our solicitor because we were clearly identifying the brick factory down the road as a possible cause. As one can imagine, we went to some lengths to ensure we were legally covering ourselves. We published the article in 2006 and that was fine. The Brennans expressed their appreciation of me having come down. It was no skin off my nose that we covered it and gave as true an impression as we could. I kept in touch with Mr. Brennan over the years. He went to Brussels and approached various people. He seemed to be coming to grips with the institutions of the State in trying to uncover what was going wrong, but then everything went cold, nothing happened, files were returned and that seemed to be the end of the matter.

In the meantime, the brick factory closed down. In October 2021, I rang Mr. Brennan and said I would be interested to see how the farm was operating at that stage. The factory had been closed a number of years by then. He told me that everything was fine. Nevertheless, I asked if I could come down and have a look because I had a very clear written record of what it had been like in 2006. In fact, the farm had completely recovered. The hedges had regrown, and milk yields were back to normal at 1,200 gallons to 1,300 gallons instead of 500 gallons to 600 gallons. Calf mortality was very low and, much more to the point, the performance of grass had come right up to what would be expected. There was a complete recovery from what had been happening on the farm.

What had happened institutionally with laboratory analysis and the examinations by various bodies was obviously of concern. However, I was mainly interested in the difference between the performance of the farm when the factory was fully operational and clear problems were affecting the farm, and the state of the farm when everything had recovered. Again I wrote up the article and again we got it legally proofed to make sure we were not libelling anyone. It was very clear that it was in many ways a completely different farm even though it was operated by the same people to the same standards I would have expected in the 2006 period. The operation of the farm had not changed particularly but the performance of the animals and the state of the vegetation were dramatically different. The conclusion I came to, even though it was not in my area of competence, was that some external circumstance had changed very fundamentally that allowed the farm to perform as one would expect a well-run Kilkenny farm to perform. That is it, broadly, from my perspective.