The Government needs to review the level five operating procedures in marts as a matter of urgency after several marts closed at the weekend, turning away hundreds of animals because of an IT system failure on one of the livestock apps, this is according to Fine Gael councillor Andrew Reddington.
Cllr Reddington said; “What farmers want is a limited number of buyers be allowed to buy in the mart in a socially distant manner.
“Marts have done an excellent job with only letting a limited number of buyers around the ring and this has to be reinstated but with the new restrictions, all sales have to be online.
“Farmers and dealers who are in a bad broadband areas, cannot bid and [on Saturday] the sale couldn’t even proceed due to an IT glitch on one of the most popular livestock app.
“[The] Government must be in cloud cuckoo land if they thought that this was going to work. The main livestock app today didn’t work and farmers were left in an awful situation. This is the biggest few weeks in the farming calendar and to think that they could remove buyers from the ring thinking it would work is beyond belief.
“More farmers will turn to Done Deal and other methods to sell their cattle.”
