The IFA has this evening announced a policy of non-co-operation with the compulsory purchase of land for road development.
The association is demanding an increase in the level of compensation paid to farmers affected by road developments and a review of the compulsory purchase of lands for roadways which it says is out-of-date.
The IFA says the money allocated for compensation under the Government's National Development Plan is "totally inadequate" and its members were being "devastated" by the compulsory acquisition of their lands.
Earlier a bitter dispute broke out after employers' group IBEC said the IFA's policy could derail the national roads programme and threaten the State's economic growth.
The IFA claims farmers will only get 3 per cent of total spending on roads under the National Development Plan even though 8,000 farmers and 25,000 acres will be affected.
IFA national industrial chairman Mr Francis Fanning said the association was demanding fair and realistic compensation for farmers - many of whose livelihoods will be irreparably damaged as a result of the compulsory acquisition of their lands.
But IBEC's director of transport Mr Reg McCabe said as far as he understood it the IFA wanted the level of compensation to farmers doubled.
Mr McCabe described the demand as "arbitrary and unjustified" and warned if the Government gives in to the IFA it would cost £400 million and this would damage economic growth.
He called on the Government to reject the IFA's demands and consider suspending £800 million in state subsidies to farmers if they refuse to co-operate with the national roads' programme.
The IFA reacted angrily to IBEC's intervention saying: "For an organisation that has continuously lobbied for the feather-bedding of private industry it is extraordinary for IBEC to launch such an attack on private property rights."
Mr McCabe accused IBEC of callousness and total insensitivity to the damage to rural communities the proposed infrastructural road programme will cause.
Tonight a spokesman for IBEC called on the IFA to reconsider its "short-sighted" policy. He said the organisation was putting its own sectoral needs above that of the community.
