Joe Walsh and his officials can be thanked for much of the success of this week's farmers' protest, writes Sean MacConnell, Agriculture Correspondent.
Even for a countryman like myself, 300 tractors driving in convoy is a spectacular sight. Tomorrow, Dubliners can judge for themselves.
But the issues that have brought this motorcade to the streets of Dublin are likely to remain unresolved despite the IFA "spectacular" this week in bringing so many of its people out.
Barring some horrifying accident involving one of the monster tractors from the country, the score sheet at the end of the week is likely to read, IFA-3; Government-1.
This was a pretty unfocused protest when it began early this week. In fact, the new president of IFA, John Dillon, had some difficulty persuading his national council that it should go ahead.
However, by Tuesday, with hundreds of tractors parked in Fermoy, Castlerea, and Ballinasloe, the mood of the countrymen began to change and they wanted to buy into the protest.
That change was driven by Joe Walsh and his officials from the Department of Agriculture and Food, who decided to launch an offensive on farm incomes.
As we drove along country roads in Cork where one could imagine that the last bit of excitement generated there had left with the Black and Tans, farmers who had not pounded the roads before began joining the protest.
They were deeply irritated by the Minister's assertions that they were averaging €45,000 a year, that they were getting €1.6 billion in cheques annually and were being truly cherished by the State.
The truth is that the majority of them do not make that kind of money.About one-third of the 100,000 farmers have been doing pretty well, one- third are struggling and one-third are below or hovering on the poverty line.
As in every part of society, those who have most, gain most.
The bigger you are, the more you get, the smaller you are, the more you get screwed.
While moderate-sized farmers may be asset rich, many of them have little or no income even with the massive support which comes from Brussels and from Dublin.
Apart from Mr Walsh's assertion that things were not that bad down on the farm, most farmers have had a terrible year because of bad weather and falling product prices.
Significantly, the dairy farmers, known in the business as the white gold men, have had their worst year in 10. They compete for the title of the princes of farming with the 5,000 tillage farmers who this year had a dramatic fall in income.
Beef prices have been poor and for the second year in a row, the farmers have seen more and more of their direct payments, which should be compensating them for producing at world prices, being eaten up by rising costs.
These are the people who are on their tractors on this protest, looking for help from Dublin and Brussels or wherever they can get it.
They feel that they have one chance or no chance at all to make some sort of protest before they eventually wither away to be replaced in the market by cheap non-EU imports or cheaply produced products from an expanded Union.
Their demands that the €200 million cuts they face in the Book of Estimates and the Budget be reversed are unlikely to be met in these post-Celtic Tiger days.
The Minister for Agriculture may be able to tinker around with areas of non-EU policy to help the sector. But with every other Minister at the Cabinet table looking over his shoulder, this will be difficult.
It would appear that the era of the farmer being the most cherished child of the State is coming to an end, not with a whimper but a bang.
It may have been a bad week for Mr Walsh but it has been a very special one for John Dillon. He has asserted himself as a real leader of IFA.
The protest has rejuvenated small farming communities who have been literally feeding sandwiches, soup and providing beds for the troops.
It has unified a very fragmented organisation which split over his presidency just over a year ago, mainly over his perceived militancy.
That doubt lingered until Monday last, fuelled by The Irish Farmers' Journal, the farmers' bible, which saw the protest as a page three, not a page one story.
Even allowing for the fact that it has been anti-Dillon up to now, the protest will most certainly make front-page news this week.
However, it is difficult to see how much can be achieved by the tractorcade unless the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, who has personally intervened on a number of occasions during the last administration to deal with the farmers, becomes personally involved.
It is far more likely, however, that Goverment will circle the wagons around its Minister for Agriculture and heap odium on the farmers.
The reality is that because there is so much anti-Government feeling out there, the farmers may well win this one.
There has been a lot of grudging repect for their action and that may well spill into the capital with its high crime rate, slow response to health queues and a realisation that farming tractors will have only a marginal impact on their morning trip to work.
Perhaps the wiser people in Government circles may recognise that in the worst case scenario, the farmers may provide a vehicle for an expression of the growing anti-Government sentiment which is clearly out there.
They may even clap.
Series concluded
Crisis on the farm
Underlying the current unease on farms is a sense that European agriculture may be reaching a decisive crossroads. Pressure from many industrial countries for a new round of world trade liberalisation is seen in the developing world as intimately linked to the creation of a level playing field for their farm produce.
The target will inevitably be farm production subisidies where (see panel) the EU and Japan are out at the head of the league. Hostility within the EU to the CAP regime, and pressure for budget savings ahead of enlargement, have led the EU Commission in the Mid-Term Review of CAP to propose radical decoupling of subisidies from production, continuing a process started in 2000.
Critics say that not least of the problems with the current system is the reality that 80 per cent of CAP payments go to the 20 per cent richest farmers.
The OECD estimates that its members spent some $311 billion in 2001 supporting agriculture through protection or subsidies - or 1.3 per cent of their total GDP. Within the EU such support means that one third of farm income comes from transfers from taxpayers and consumers. In the US the figure is 21 per cent.