PROFESSOR WILLIE NOLAN, academic and author on the regional history and geography of Ireland, writes EOIN BUTLER
What is it about Irish farmers and their relationship with the land? People who grow up on farms identify with that place, with its fields and its landscape. And if those fields have been passed down through their family for 100, or even 200 years, then that relationship goes far, far beyond money. The land is a permanent, elemental thing. Without it, we have nothing. This is why farmers often make decisions that would have economists scratching their heads.
Looking back in history, the turmoil that convulsed Ireland from the 1870s through the 1930s was largely about land ownership, wasn't it?Well, I think the idea that Ireland should belong to the Irish people was a political idea first and foremost.
But land agitators were acting in their own economic self-interest? Yes, the Land League was founded with the purpose of gaining security of tenure for small holders. But as often happens in Ireland, it was the large farmers who ended up being the beneficiaries.
And the new State's conservatism also dovetailed with the economic interests of farmers? Maybe, but it would be wrong to assume that Irish farmers were an inherently conservative group. The people who founded Kerry Co-op weren't conservative people. The farmers who went out to the likes of Denmark and New Zealand and brought back new philosophies and technologies weren't conservative people. Irish farmers have never been afraid to innovate.
What I'm really asking, I suppose, is when farmers ceased to be rational economic actors?Well, it's important to remember, first of all, just how many farmers have left the land in the last century. In many cases the people who left Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s were glad to get away to the cities of Britain and north America, where the lifestyle wasn't as harsh and they hadn't the church looking over their shoulders. But the ones who have remained are pragmatists. They've always been very responsive to market forces.
Today most family farms bring in less than €6,500 revenue per annum. Farmers don’t have huge incomes, that’s true. But they don’t have huge expenses either. They don’t have mortgages. They don’t have extravagant lifestyles. Increasingly also they have other sources of income.
Yet if a farmer with 50 or 60 acres was offered €20,000 for a half-acre site, he'd probably refuse. How does that make economic sense?There is a belief that you don't sell land, that you pass on your holding intact to the next generation at all costs. It comes back to the identity thing. Many farmers can trace their family history in a particular place back hundreds of years. I grew up on a very small farm in Killenaule, Co Tipperary. My family are supposed to have arrived from Kildare with the monks to look after the Derrynaflan chalice. It's hard to analyse something so complex, that has so many unquantifiable elements.
Is a pathological obsession with land ownership unique to Ireland?No, I think it's a feature of almost every peasant culture in the world. Identity invariably becomes tied up with land. In Ireland, land hunger is part of our national psyche. And the property bubble of the Celtic Tiger years was really just an extension of that. People didn't need all of that property, but they went after it anyway. In some ways, Nama is like the old Land Commission. Back then it was the landlords who were bankrupt, now it's the developers.
The Celtic Tiger era also saw the construction of a lot of commuter and holiday homes in rural areas. Has that altered the fabric of rural life?The vast majority of rural dwellers these days have no connection with farming whatsoever. So the landscape has become privatised. Many of the old paths people might have walked as children are blocked up now. There are signs up warning that trespassers will be prosecuted. Animals are not as domesticated as they were in the 1950s when there were smaller herds and more children about the place. The connection between the farmer and the non-farmer is becoming more and more distant.
So what does the future hold for the family farm? Well, despite all that, few people in this country are more than a couple of decades removed from agriculture. All that stuff about land and land hunger, that's still there. We lost the run of ourselves during the Celtic Tiger years.
We thought we were urbanised. We’re not urbanised. We’re back now to thinking that we’re a nice quiet rural backwater. And that’s just fine.
The Home Place,a two-part history of the Irish family farm by director Sean O Mordha, is on RTÉ 1 on Monday and Tuesday. Prof Nolan appears in the documentary
