It's fashionable to encourage respect for nature. But "respect" is problematic. Neither a belief nor an emotion - like intuition, it floats between them both - it is both rationally and emotionally unsustainable to urge respect for trees and wildlife, say, and continue industrial-scale farming. During the Glen of the Downs standoff, some of the "eco-warriors" appeared on the Late Late Show. Public reaction to them was characteristically ambiguous, swinging between descriptions of them as scruffy, work-shy troublemakers and scruffy, free-spirit idealists.
Just a few months ago, media imaginings of the year in prospect repeatedly focused and punned on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fair enough, the sci-fi yarn provided the best-known association to a year which conspicuously lacked the millennial grandeur of the preceding one. With demonic irony however, the dominant media image of the year to date has been infinitely more grounded: palls of smoke above upturned cloven hooves silhouetted against sombre skies. It's been 2001: An Animal Inferno.
------- Few of us visit abattoirs, processing factories and rendering plants, where, even when malpractice, BSE or foot and mouth are not keeping the meat "industry" in the headlines, the odours, liquids and offal of slaughter are ever-present. Our removal from the industrialised processes of getting meat on to our plates means that we don't have to bear much responsibility for our taste for flesh. But in the meat "industry" and in laboratories, it's clear that our treatment of animals is a huge and growing ethical issue - a frontline battle in the raging war between economic efficiency and morality.
------- Most people can settle for being Caesar but what was for earlier generations an imperceptible gnawing of conscience is developing a bit more bite. It's sure to continue doing so. The burning animals of 2001 certainly won't lessen it - heightened awareness of the issues will act like a psychological prion altering our minds.
Because meat tastes good (even "succulent"), the means of producing it can be easily forgotten. However, now that we're all, at least imaginatively, getting a tour of the sausage-factory, there's no way back to blissful ignorance.
Just a few months ago, media imaginings of the year in prospect repeatedly focused and punned on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fair enough, the sci-fi yarn provided the best-known association to a year which conspicuously lacked the millennial grandeur of the preceding one. With demonic irony however, the dominant media image of the year to date has been infinitely more grounded: palls of smoke above upturned cloven hooves silhouetted against sombre skies. It's been 2001: An Animal Inferno.
Every newspaper and TV news programme in Ireland and Britain has carried such pictures. They will be lasting images of this grim year. Mind you, we usually see them in long or mid-range shots, which is vile enough and certainly not the most appetising sauce for steak, bacon or lamb chops. But the unmediated horror must be, literally, infernal. We're spared the close-ups and the stench. After all, too much sensory detail could make the reality unbearable for such a sensitive and sophisticated species as humans.
Few of us visit abattoirs, processing factories and rendering plants, where, even when malpractice, BSE or foot and mouth are not keeping the meat "industry" in the headlines, the odours, liquids and offal of slaughter are ever-present. Our removal from the industrialised processes of getting meat on to our plates means that we don't have to bear much responsibility for our taste for flesh. But in the meat "industry" and in laboratories, it's clear that our treatment of animals is a huge and growing ethical issue - a frontline battle in the raging war between economic efficiency and morality.
Increasing numbers of people, even if predominantly because of health fears, cannot but question our treatment of animals. Whether or not you believe animals are deserving of moral consideration, it's obvious that our treatment of them is gross. In the US alone, more than five billion animals are slaughtered every year. Most chickens, pigs and calves raised for food never see the light of day. As long as we don't see them not seeing the light of day, it's easy to eat them. But images of the heaped carcasses of healthy animals burning in the fields of Britain are much harder to stomach.
For centuries, Ireland was used as Britain's biggest farm. Generally fertile and with a militarily defeated population which could be used as a cheap, peasant workforce, Ireland's designated role should not surprise us. Nor should the fact that after independence for the Free State, rural Ireland, echoing the centuries-long primary image of all Ireland, should see itself as the most authentic version of the new State. In crude terms, urban Ireland, especially if it had factories suggestive of British towns and cities, was rather unIrish. Dev's 1943 "Dream Speech" articulated this notion.
Nowadays, however, even more than the urban/rural divide - traditionally one of the more volatile faultlines in Ireland - the vegetarian/meat-eater divide seems unbridgeable. Routinely dismissed as over-earnest, sanctimonious and sandalwearing, vegetarians make many meat-eaters uncomfortable by pricking the necessary mental repression which blots out the reality of industrialised farming and slaughter. It's an image of vegetarians, though applicable to only the most fundamentalist, which conveniently casts them as a contemporary form of killjoy teetotallers.
It's fashionable to encourage respect for nature. But "respect" is problematic. Neither a belief nor an emotion - like intuition, it floats between them both - it is both rationally and emotionally unsustainable to urge respect for trees and wildlife, say, and continue industrial-scale farming. During the Glen of the Downs standoff, some of the "eco-warriors" appeared on the Late Late Show. Public reaction to them was characteristically ambiguous, swinging between descriptions of them as scruffy, work-shy troublemakers and scruffy, free-spirit idealists.
Between the practical and the romantic, there appears to be no common ground - only quicksand. Even then, irony abounds. Most urban meat-eaters have, albeit in varying degrees, romantic visions of the countryside and nature. But ecowarriors typically make their case by appealing to practical considerations: save the rain-forest or suffer global warming; save wildlife or future generations will never see a tiger; protect ecosystems or destroy life itself and so forth. The arguments are regularly reduced to a clash between nature and culture, and these terms, as are generally understood or misunderstood, actually are irreconcilable.
Certainly, for most of us, understandably keen to keep food prices low yet equally keen to maintain food quality and safety, there is a dilemma. Balancing the financial and ethical costs, though the notion is routinely dismissed as bleeding-heart or pinko cissyness, will have to be addressed. As ever, there's no such thing as a free lunch - literally as well as idiomatically in this case - and the cost of industrial-scale food production, while keeping costs low and profits high, is becoming increasingly unacceptable to all but the poor, the profit ravenous, the unthinking and the downright barbaric.
IT'S not merely coincidental that in the year in which Glenroe, Ireland's long-running agrisoap, faces the slaughterhouse, concerns about the relationships between city and country, humans and animals, efficiency and morality, industry and agriculture, practicality and romanticism should become acute. Of course, foot-and-mouth disease has brought them to the media and to the public mind but in an economy rooted in cattle and computers, we appear to be on a cusp.
Now that Dublin is the nightclub capital of Europe (or has some other equally vacuous title) Miley is considered an irrelevance, even an embarrassment. It's not a matter of pining for some imagined Golden Age of Dev's rural idyll of small holdings - that too held horrors which we can do without. Yet who nowadays, children excluded, can be enthusiastic about McCulture, with its meat - offal, really - on tap? Globalised, standardised and so economically efficient that it's an accountant's wet dream, it represents the inevitable end of the industrialisation of animal slaughter.
Perhaps the most intractable aspect of the entire financial and moral maze surrounding meat is the sense of individual impotence which comes with alienation from its production and processing. You're hungry, you go for a meal. You've heard all the propaganda from both sides - commercial advertising stressing the onomatopoeic "succulence" of the meat; vegans telling you that "if it's got a face, don't eat it" - it's impossible to know whether you should feel like Caesar feasting or Tyrannosaurus Rex gorging.
Most people can settle for being Caesar but what was for earlier generations an imperceptible gnawing of conscience is developing a bit more bite. It's sure to continue doing so. The burning animals of 2001 certainly won't lessen it - heightened awareness of the issues will act like a psychological prion altering our minds. Because meat tastes good (even "succulent"), the means of producing it can be easily forgotten. However, now that we're all, at least imaginatively, getting a tour of the sausage-factory, there's no way back to blissful ignorance.
It's easy to apportion blame for the arrival here of foot and mouth. In some respects, it's fair too. We know that the Irish meat "industry" has been infested by crooks and codgers. But it's not alone in that. Connections to politics - party politics and even the very existence of the Border - are easily made. With Ireland now having an urban majority, a fact reflected in the death of Glenroe, farmers (like teachers, nurses and public servants generally) naturally resent their declining status. Hard to enjoy lap-dancing in the nightclub capital of Europe when you're stuck at the end of a rural boreen cursing Dev's dream.
Anyway, whatever comes of it all, we've got to hope that some reordering of proportion between people's reasonable desire to eat meat and the treatment of animals providing that meat will result. Who can know whether it's sensible or "speciesist' to say that pain felt by animals is not as bad as when felt by humans? It's simply impossible to know, even though we do know that many white slave owners held the same to be true about black slaves or even that contemporary courts often seem to believe such a "different strokes" principle applies to the wealthy and the poor.
As regards the relationship between the country and the city, often simplistically and mistakenly construed as that between "nature" and "culture", the problem is scarcely less complex. We know, for instance, that groups as diverse as Hitler's SS and the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s glorified the country. For the SS purists, the city was a dark, Satanic place (favoured by Jews!) and as such, corrupting of wholesome Aryans. For the hippies, the city was the seat of the despised "System". You might argue that one focused on the nature of culture and the other on the culture of nature but neither was rational.
Whatever comes of it all, the burning pyres of animals, so suggestive of mediaeval plagues, mock the Space Odyssey imaginings of the start of the year. In the classic yarn, with people living on bloodless, fleshless, protein pills, a controlling computer was the rogue. But in reality, human hubris seeking to control and streamline animal life to computer-like efficiency is undoing us. How apt that in the week that foot and mouth was confirmed in Ireland, the space station Mir crashed into the ocean.
It's ludicrous to expect people to stop eating meat. It's not going to happen. But fears fanned by swine fever, BSE and foot and mouth are forcing us all to rethink. Ireland's rural/urban divide is not like Britain's, where the feudal system and the industrial revolution have left legacies of hatred between city and country. (There is, of course, also a museum-ised wedge of green welly, four-wheel drive, Barbour-jacketed "country living" between the hating factions but that is not the living country.)
Here the country, even with growing development, remains very much alive. It will, however, go the way of Britain if the industrialisation of livestock farming continues apace. Somehow, an ethically acceptable and financially efficient balance between living nature and economic culture, suitable to our times, needs to be found. Otherwise, it's not only the industrially-farmed animals which will fail to see the light. These dark days tell us as much.