The Farm Relief Service, which supplies skilled farm labour, has been forced to advertise in New Zealand for workers for Irish farms. The service, which is a national co-operative with 26 offices throughout the State, has also been seeking farm help without success from other countries, including the Netherlands.
Mr Peter Byrne, who coordinates the National Farm Relief Service, said yesterday it is becoming increasingly difficult to get people to work on the land. "If I had five or six hundred more names for the books I would be a very happy man. There's plenty of work but we're finding it difficult to find people to do it."
Mr Byrne said the service had fallen prey to the Celtic Tiger, poor returns in farming and an unwillingness by young people to work in isolation. "Up until recently we could be fairly confident of getting our hands on the second son from the farm, but now these lads are going to the cities to work on building sites," he said.
"The Celtic Tiger, with all its development, is drawing people away and the farmers can't compete with the big building firms in terms of money. In addition, there is an isolation factor.
"Lads who do relief work normally go to a farm where the farmer is sick or absent for some reason and they find they are working on their own," he said.
Young men, in particular, he said, enjoyed working in groups and the element of isolation was not what they wanted.
He confirmed a group of young farmers from New Zealand had just arrived to work on Irish farms. Mr Pierce Casey, of the Waterford Farm Relief Service, said that in all it will bring in 24 young New Zealanders to Ireland this spring.
What had started off as an educational, three-month exchange programme between Irish and New Zealand agriculture students had turned out to be more of a commercial programme, with increasing numbers of New Zealanders being encouraged to come to Ireland for work, he said. A good deal fewer Irish students stayed in New Zealand after the three months was up than the number of New Zealanders coming to Ireland.
He said there had been attempts to get young Dutch people to come and work on farms but this had been unsuccessful.
The New Zealanders, he said, will be working mainly on farms in the south-east, Meath, Kildare and Dublin. Advertisements to attract more of them will continue both there and in Australia.