Michael Deely impacted the public consciousness because of his tireless quest to discover what happened to his son Trevor, who disappeared in extraordinary circumstances on the way home from a Christmas work party in December 2000.

But at his funeral in Naas last Saturday, his son Mark rightly said that there was much more to Michael than being Trevor’s father.

From a farming family in Loughrea, Co Galway, Michael Deely lived through and experienced firsthand the major changes that have affected Irish agriculture over the last 50 years.

His first job upon graduating in agriculture from UCD was with Kildare County Committee of Agriculture. In those days, each county’s agriculture existed as an independent republic. These were the days before the national farm advisory and agricultural education organisation ACOT came into existence.

ACOT was later to be amalgamated with An Foras Taluntais (The Agricultural Institute) to form Teagasc.

Michael left Kildare’s advisory service to join another organisation that has been consigned to history. In the early 1970s, farmer co-ops owned over 50% of the Irish beef-processing industry.

The dominant player by far was the giant Cork Marts – IMP Group. There were ambitions and hopes for a farmer/producer owned-and-led beef sector, as had developed in dairying.

Michael threw himself into the development of innovative farmer contract systems and technology to encourage year-round profitable beef production, but the co-op model in the beef sector proved unable to match the dynamism (some might say buccaneering) of the emerging large private groupings.

With the demise of IMP, Michael was snapped up by the newly established CBF (Córas Beostoic agus Feola).

As the State meat promotional body, it had and has as the modern Bord Bia, a role that stretches from quality assurance and efficiency at farm level, to promotion of Ireland’s food industry across the world.

Michael Deely played a pivotal role in devising and organising schemes that promoted beef efficiency and profitability at farm level, especially when dairy quotas stopped all dairy expansion in 1984 and the suckler herd expanded from 400,000 cows to over a million and ewe numbers to over five million.

May he rest in peace.