Foyle Meats set to close with 85 jobs under threat

Northern Ireland’s Foyle Meats has announced it is to close it lamb processing facility at Campsie, County Londonderry, leaving a massive hole in local slaughtering capacity.

The firm has the largest capacity in Northern Ireland, at 12,000 lambs a week, and state-of-the-art processing lines. At its peak, the Foyle Group was Northern Ireland’s biggest exporter of lambs, processing up to 400,000 carcasses a year and supplying contracts in France and Tesco in the UK.

However, falling throughputs had put pressure on margins, and the Foyle Food Group, which also owns Omagh Meats, Donegal meat, Foyle Proteins and Hilton Meats, said up to 85 positions were now at risk of redundancy. However, its cattle facility would continue unaffected.

Between 2007 and 2009 the number of lambs processed in Northern Ireland fell by 29%, said the firm, with a further 25% drop so far this year. Electronic Identification rules had crushed trade with the Republic of Ireland, and Bluetongue restrictions had dried up supplies from Scotland.

Victor Chestnutt, who keeps 250 ewes at Bushmills on the Northern coast, said the firm would be a great loss. “They are going to be missed – they had a lot of buyers in the right markets. Other companies may take up some of the slack but they haven’t got the capacity.” With the 85 workers on a month’s notice, Foyle Meats had told suppliers it would continue processing lambs until farmers could find alternative buyers.

Mr Chestnutt was examining options in both the Republic of Ireland and Scotland. “But the cost of haulage is going to be a problem. Foyle Meats are a decent firm – with the number of lambs in the UK down it was inevitable that there would be some shakedown, but we didn’t think it would be Foyle that went.”

The Ulster Farmers’ Union said the announcement raised fresh concerns about the wellbeing of the sheep sector in Northern Ireland. “The number of breeding ewes in our sheep flock has fallen by half a million in the past decade,” said UFU President John Thompson. “A once thriving sheep sector is now downsizing at an alarming rate and Foyle Meats is the latest casualty.”