In May 2015, Waterford brothers Niall and Paddy Browne spoke side by side at an exhibition organised in the western French city of Angers by Terrena, a French farmers’ co-operative with tens of thousands of members and employees in the region. The two Dawn Meats executives had come to discuss their company’s acquisition of a 49 per cent stake in Elivia, the meat processing branch of Terrena.  Elivia was struggling, creaking under the combined weight of ageing factories and a bloated corporate structure with separate units handling anything from individual slaughterhouses to the trade in cow hides. More fundamentally, the…

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