This year marks ten years since the removal of milk quotas in the European Union and it has been a great success for Irish dairy farms with incomes tripling over this period.

In an Irish context, this is particularly remarkable given 2015's prevailing fear was a liberalised market could mark a return to the Butter Mountains of the 1980 through an enormous dairy surplus.*

What has been missing from most of the recent coverage of this anniversary has been Glanbia, a major milk processor, and its attempt to introduce temporary milk quotas during peak production in 2021. At the time, this was interpreted by farmers as an attempt by processors to drag the industry back to quotas.

In response, I wrote a paper that was later published by the economics department I studied in which is accessible here. I take the National Farm Survey (2007-17) and Central Statistics Office data and find, using multiple linear regression, that the government should prevent such quotas from being introduced given the degree to which dairy farm incomes increased after market liberalisation. I argue that if any interventions should be offered they should be targeted and ought to focus on the most marginalised group – young farms in remote areas designed as largely uneconomical to farm, so-called Less Favoured Areas.

In 2022, Glanbia did introduce this quota but quickly retracted the policy the following year. It has been very exciting to see the the modern Irish dairy farm modernise during this period of liberalisation through rotary milking parlours and other technologies.

*Milk production was so excessive in Ireland during the 1980s most of it was processed into butter and milk powder. This contributed to the national stockpile of butter reaching 165,000 tonnes of butter in 1987 which is the subject of this report from the national broadcaster. Indeed, this was a phenomenon experienced across what was then the European Economic Community as part of its Common Agricultural Policy, part of the butter glut was stored in two Greek freighters in Cork harbour in 1984.