The delegation who were on a four-day bus tour which took them as far north as the North Antrim coast, were guests on the final two days of directors of Clogher Valley Agricultural Producers who run the weekly livestock sales in Clogher.

    Donal Ryan, general manager of Clare Marts, which has its centre in Ennis, said they were selling around 2,500 head of cattle a week, and probably in the region of 90,000 animals in a year. Ennis is the largest of four sales centres in the group in a wide geographical area of the west of Ireland.

    The Ennis salering was rebuilt in recent years to become one of the flagship mart centres in the Republic. Apart from cattle facilities, overhead catwalks enables farmers to view the cattle safely. It has electronic displays showing the seller’s name and details about the animals in the ring, such as date of tests, date of birth and weight.

    A large number of cattle offered for sale in the co-op’s marts are sought after by live shippers who have markets in Italy. The mart also gets many Northern Ireland buyers eager to snap up west of Ireland bred cattle.

    The mart operates a pre-entry system advising those sellers according to their lot numbers to pen cattle about two hours beforehand. That means there are few cattle in the mart before 8.30am as the sale begins at 10.30, reducing stress.

    The registration of dealers has had a big impact on the sales system, with mostly farmers now purchasing cattle rather than middle agents.

    Once cattle would have gone through a mart such as this three or four times in its lifetime but that has been dramatically reduced nowadays.

    That point was made by T.J.Flanagan, livestock executive officer with the Irish Co-operative Organisation Society, of which Clare Marts is a co-operative member.

    In Ireland last year there were about 2.2 million animal births, and the number of registered movements were 1.38 million with about 870,000 moving from farm to farm. He says most animals were now perhaps moving just once in their lifetime.

    About half of the 100 livestock mart centres in the Republic are affiliated to the co-operative movement but account for 70 per cent of the business.

    He admits the restructuring of the selling system such as introduction of pre-movement tests, and the introduction of computerised cattle movement systems has had a big impact on marts, with up to 30 centres closing down over the last 15 years, mostly in the private sector.