The resignation of almost the entire Irish Farmers Association leadership last night, as it faced the most punitive fines imposed by a court for breaching a court order, will ensure the IFA's financial survival.

One more day of picketing the meat plants and the 85,000-strong organisation faced a fine of £500,000 a day, on top of the fines amounting to £500,000 that it has accumulated for continuing to picket for the past five days.

With annual income of £5 million and assets worth £1 million, the organisation could not continue to take such a heavy hit and continue to operate.

The organisation's legal team will be back in the High Court today to apologise for breaching the court order and promising to instruct its members to desist from all picketing. Mr Justice O'Donovan will then decide whether the IFA has pulled a legal stunt.

He will rule on whether the mass resignation of the 68-member national council, just minutes after it decided to obey the court order, was designed to circumvent the court's punitive fines and possible sequestration of its assets.

While the IFA has denied that this was a legal ploy and has said it would be instructing its members to remove the barricades, it was still not clear early today whether they will be removed.

The judge will be considering whether a decision taken by the national council which then tendered its resignation, is valid. The IFA yesterday faced one of the most difficult days in its history, even darker than the grim days in the 1960s when many of its leaders were imprisoned for disobeying the law. Then they were well-led and had political clout but lacked the sophistication they developed over the years.

The IFA still ranks along with those two other major national organisations - the GAA and the Roman Catholic Church. It draws its membership from all strands of farming. It has a non-sectarian code and successfully avoids supporting political parties. Every government of every hue has complained that the IFA opposed it.

With 925 branches in the Republic, even covering the offshore islands, its members are well-served not only by the organisation itself but its allied components, the Irish Farmers Journal and FBD, its insurance company.

It has offices in most major provincial towns and regional organisers which feed information upwards and downwards. It can mobilise thousands of people for protests or to lobby. An increasingly militant mood among the grassroots led to the election of Mr Parlon as president in December 1997. He had won a reputation as the "tough man" of the IFA, among other things organising the notorious 1992 protest in which sheep were driven into the lobby of the Department of Agriculture.

Mr John Dillon's election as his deputy was also based on his established militancy. He criticised the IFA's establishment and warned he would be guided by "the voice of the grassroots and not the men in good suits".

THE IFA runs a very efficient Brussels bureau and is an associate member of COPA, the organisation which caters for Europe's farmers. At home it has full access to ministers for agriculture and no organisation can arrange a meeting with a Taoiseach faster than the IFA.

Its only real flaw is arrogance - and the only people who seem to be able to best it are the meat barons.

When times are good, the relationship between the processors and the farmers is akin to that between punters and bookies. When times are hard, relationships are worse than anything imaginable.

Driving back to Dublin last night, a journalist passed by the Kildare Chilling company where the picket lines seemed to have swollen.

Have you not been told to go home? he inquired.

By whom? one of the picketers asked.

By the IFA, said the journalist.

Sure there's no IFA now, he was told.