Farmers’ consortium to find out mart bid fate

A farmer-led consortium will know on Thursday whether their €300,000 bid for the vacant Sixmilebridge livestock mart will be accepted by Golden Vale Marts.

A meeting of the board of GMV was planned for Wednesday and The Clare Champion understands that members were to consider the offer of €300,000 that the consortium has put on the table for the property, located on a 4.5-acre site at Ballysheen.
Paul O’Neill, a member of the Sixmilebridge and District Farmers Group, said that he had informed auctioneer Tom Crosse that their bid of €300,000 was as high as they could go and “they were sticking with that offer”.
Mr O’Neill pointed out that the farmer-led group had raised their initial bid of €230,000 to €300,000, money raised through an exhaustively promoted share initiative scheme, but that was as far as they were prepared to go.
“Our offer is back on the table with them.
“I reiterated our position to Tom Crosse and pointed out that because of our financial constraints, I couldn’t extend our bid any further. That’s the position we find ourselves in and we’ll just have to wait and see what happens,” he explained.
Last December, the GVM Group placed the property, located on the Newmarket Road, for sale on the open market, with an asking price of €600,000, and immediately a campaign was launched to set up a local co-operative soci ety with a view to purchasing the mart and reopening the facility for weekly sales.
Since then, GVM has reduced their asking price to €450,000 but it remains to be seen if the gap between what they are asking and what’s being offered is too wide to be bridged. Recently, GVM chief executive PJ Buckley confirmed that the farmers’ offer would not be accepted, as it “didn’t match expectations”.
“They are not the highest bidders. We have no specific timeframe to close a deal on the mart site in Sixmilebridge. We have different expressions of interest and we are considering them at the moment,” he said.
Mr O’Neill revealed that the board of GVM had never sat down at the table and negotiated with them but that they would welcome the opportunity to come face to face with the board members.
“We accept that may be difficult because there may be as many as 30 people on the board.
“However, what has come across to us so far is that there seems to be no definite resolve to try and sell the vacant mart back to the farming community. There doesn’t seem to be any serious intent to sell to us,” he remarked.
The mart was farmer-driven when it first opened for business in 1973. It was founded by a group of local businessmen and traded as Bunratty Farmers Export Mart.
The mart subsequently changed hands in 1986 when purchased by the Golden Vale Co-operative group.