James Murphy has stepped down as the Chairperson of Sheep Ireland after ten years in what can only be described as a very successful tenure. Alex Clarke has been elected as the incoming Chairperson of the Sheep Ireland Board.

James Murphy joined the Sheep Ireland Board in 2012, replacing Henry Burns, the outgoing IFA representative on the Board. On January 24, 2013, he was elected as the first Chairperson of the new permanent Board. Dermot Ryan from the Department of Agriculture had been the Chairperson of the Interim Board until this point.

Over that time, Sheep Ireland has grown from strength to strength under his stewardship and has now positioned itself as one of the best in the world at what it does.

One of the first significant achievements was including a ram task in the Sheep Technology Adoption Programme (STAP) with 3,000 farmers signed up. While this was a challenge for the newly formed organisation, STAP was hugely significant in increasing performance recording, education, and awareness of the Star ratings and the Sheep Ireland entity.

In more recent times, James has overseen the introduction of some amazing advances in the Irish breed improvement program, including the introduction of Across-breed evaluations, Genomic evaluations, routine testing, reporting and fixing of pedigree parentage errors, Launch of a Sheep Ireland recording App, and the increase in the industry contribution to the Sheep Breed improvement programme. Always with an eye to the future, Sheep Ireland launched ebvs for Methane production in 2023, becoming only the second country in the world to do so.

Of course, without breeders and flockbooks performance recording, this would be futile. Over James’ tenure, Sheep Ireland built up trust with each of the breed societies, and over this time they have all moved their flockbooks to the Sheep Ireland database. This has had the knock-on effect of increasing the number of flocks in LambPlus, and the availability of Euro-Star rams annually.

Only with the on-going development of the indexes and the infrastructure in the database around genomic ordering, birth notifications and flockbook services could this number of animals and flocks books (17 to date) be facilitated. All of this has now culminated in the possibility of having the Genotyped Ram Task included in the national Sheep Improvement Scheme (SIS).

As he departs, the Genotyped Ram Task in the Sheep Improvement Scheme with over 19 thousand applicants is going to be a monumental period in the Irish Sheep breed improvement journey, and James was key in making sure this would happen by making sure all the elements required were built and designed over the past number of years.

James was always clear that the right decision was not always the easy one, and he had the benefits of the Irish commercial farmer to the forefront of his decision-making.

Alex Clarke, the Flockbook representative and Texel Breeder from Co. Meath, has been elected as the Chairperson of the Board.

From everyone in Sheep Ireland, we would like to thank James and his family for all they have given to Sheep Ireland, and we wish James the best in his next endeavour.