All farm animals in Ireland have to have ear tags for traceability, and increasingly, health monitoring. Cattle wear two, one per ear. There are over seven million cattle in Ireland and until 2016, the tag market was effectively a monopoly. Until, that is, Ursula Kelly came back to the family farm in Tuam. “Dad had been doing sheep tags for 20 years, sheep, goat and pig tags,” she told me. The company, Cormac Tagging, was “a little cottage industry – now, he mightn’t like to call it that, but that’s what it was, effectively, out on the farm”. “We thought…

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