The Irish Farmers Association (IFA) yesterday staged a spectacular 50th birthday party in the RDS, Ballsbridge.
As well as being proud of their history, leaders past and present made it clear to politicians that they also had a big future and had no intention of disappearing.
Over 2,500 members gathered for a day of celebration to mark the foundation of the organisation on the same day 50 years ago in the Four Provinces Ballroom in Dublin's Harcourt Street.
Leading the celebrations, the President, Mrs McAleese, told the guests that not only rural people but all Irish people owed a great deal to the organisation.
"You would be hard pressed to find such an example of practical patriotism on this island," she said while describing the founders of the organisation.
The President said the founders had taken on a very closed country which was "almost hermetically sealed".
They had prised it open, she said, and let the future in and had become the voice of the farming community.
The IFA was at the heart of Irish political, civic and cultural life, the well of deep resource from which the nation draws, she said.
Mrs McAleese, who described the IFA leader, John Dillon as "a terrible man" because he would not sit down to rest his injured legs when she asked him to, recalled her involvement on her relatives' farm when she was young.
Explaining that she and her family would come out to visit their country cousins on Sundays where "helpful" cousins introduced her and her patent shoes to the dunghill.
Mr Dillon said that while the numbers in agriculture had declined over the years, farming remained the backbone of the rural economy with Irish farm output and food processing worth €7 billion last year, almost 20 per cent of Ireland's net foreign earnings.
"The main challenge for this generation of IFA leaders and for the Government must be to ensure that a viable agriculture will continue to make an important contribution to the modern Irish economy and particularly the rural economy," he said.
Mr Dillon said the IFA had always recognised the contribution of part-time farmers and would continue to do so. "However, if the Government believes that subsidising low farm income with an off-farm job is a policy for agriculture, they are wrong," he said.
"Relying on off-farm income to subsidise farm investment is at best a short-term approach. But it is no long-term strategy and will weaken the whole production base of Irish agriculture within a generation," he said.
The day-long celebrations began with an ecumenical service of remembrance conducted by Cardinal Desmond Connell, the former Catholic Archbishop of Dublin; the Most Rev Dr John Neill, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin; Rev Alan Mitchell, Moderator of the Dublin and Munster Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland; and Most Rev Dr Kenneth Wilson, Supt of the Dublin District of the Methodist Church in Ireland.
The formal lunch was attended by two Cabinet Ministers, the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Ms Coughlan, and the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Mr Ó Cuív.
Former IFA presidents who attended the event included, Mr Paddy Lane, Mr Donal Cashman, Mr Joe Rea, Mr Tom Clinton, Mr John Donnelly, Mr Alan Gillis and Mr Tom Parlon.