One question exercising farmers at the Ploughing Championships in Co Wexford this week was the German election result. As if Gerhard Schroder's ousting of the farmers' old friend Helmut Kohl wasn't enough, the German media's decision to have a go at their long-established subsidies stirred them up no end. There were genuine worries, and politicians were besieged. FG MEP Alan Gillis, whose posters festooned Ferns, told them the Government would have to come up with a better farm package than Tuesday's if they were to survive, and he would make it an issue in the June European elections. Green MEP Nuala Ahern had a different answer. They need not fear the Greens in the new German government, she said. What the Greens are hostile to is all of the money going to the large farmers and not to smaller farmers. There is a huge imbalance, but it will change. "We want money to go to farmers who are environmentally friendly and are farming in a sustainable way. It will be a very serious switch; the old ways are gone."
One of those Greens who may be in the new German government is a great friend of Nuala Ahern's and a true friend to Ireland, she says. Claudia Roth, co- president of the Green group and former rock band manager, visits often and understands our needs, says Ahern. Indeed, on one occasion Roth got stuck in traffic so often in country towns that she became fully sympathetic to our need for bypass money and understood at last why the Irish Greens were supporting road building.