Sociology: Yes, land matters, but less and less. This lively sociological study might equally have been called "The Death of Irish Farming". Today farm output, sluggish and unlikely to grow much in the future, accounts for about 2.5 per cent of GDP, and only one-twentieth of the labour force works on the land, compared to one-seventh when we joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973.
Although you might not think so from reading Land Matters, the construction sector now provides twice as much employment as farming, and there are more jobs in education and in hotels and restaurants than on the land. To compound matters, our farmers are ageing - one-third of them are over 55, compared to one-tenth of the labour force as a whole - and their children seem to have little interest in following their calling. Farming is becoming marginal.
Rural Ireland is not dying, but that is because only a small minority in rural Ireland relies on the land for a living. In west Cork and west Kerry the change is due in part to "blow-ins", but even in places largely untouched by immigration the same is true. Take Newtownshandrum, whose hurlers competed in the All-Ireland club final on St Patrick's Day. They included a network analyst, a joinery fitter, two electricians, two accountants, a guard, a hurley-maker and even a gym instructor, but only one farmer, a part-timer. And, despite all their Kepak, Wexford Creameries, Avonmore and Enfer logos, few of those who thrill the crowds on summer Sunday afternoons have anything to do with farming any more.
The recent history of Irish farming is full of paradoxes, many of them ably described in Land Matters. Farmers were always the most vocal advocates of membership of the EEC, yet since 1973 their number has plummeted. Their representatives have always supported the Common Agricultural Policy (Cap), even though its benefits were tilted towards a minority of well-heeled farmers. Recent reforms have redressed the balance, at least in part. The Rural Environment Protection Scheme (REPS) appeals to the small and marginal farmer, while Council Directive 676/91 (the so-called Nitrates Directive) threatens the intensive dairy and tillage farmer. These days the farm organisations produce apocalyptic estimates of the cost of storing slurry, while Minister for Agriculture and Food Mary Coughlan reassures them that they will not be "hounded" by inspectors or "forced to operate at uneconomic levels of fertilization", and fully expects Teagasc to provide "robust science supporting higher levels for phosphorous".
Land Matters clings to the traditional notion that the rest of society owes farmers a living. For all its on-the-surface radicalism, its policy implications are rather backward-looking. Although Crowley's critique of the "productivist", pro-big-farm impetus of past agricultural policy is compelling, she provides no justification for why the rest of us should have carried the can for so long for less progressive farmers "with other interests at heart beside profit maximisation". Bygones are bygones, but how likely are such "peasants" now to invoke her small-is- beautiful prescriptions of locally branded food and organic farm markets?
The back-to-the-future bias of Land Matters also colours its interesting account of the Bantry Local Economic Trading Systems (Bats) scheme. This attempt to de-globalise the region by encouraging community-building through the bartering of services and produce between members began in 1997. For a time Bats had more than 200 members, but by 2004 only a few dozen remained, mainly newcomers "who have time on their hands". Such organisations must by nature be small; they also tend to come and go. Bats, described as "not exactly thriving" in Land Matters, no longer has an internet presence. Ironically, the idealism that spawned Bats was itself the product of a globalisation that attracted hundreds of outsiders to west Cork.
Crowley acknowledges the fading sympathy of urbanites for their farming cousins, and the increasing tensions within rural Ireland between farmers and others. Now that farmers are being paid for merely owning land, like our landlords of yore, the sympathy must fade further. Currently, a farmer gets an average of nearly €300 per hectare in a yearly dole "regardless of what s/he does with the farm". The least that those who bear this extraordinary fiscal burden might expect is a clean environment and the right to roam hills freely.
Cormac Ó Gráda lectures in economics at UCD. His last book was Black '47 and Beyond (Princeton, 1999). Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socio-economic History (Princeton UP) and Ireland's Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Essays (UCD Press) are due this year
Land Matters: Power Struggles in Rural Ireland By Ethel Crowley. Lilliput Press, 232pp. €14.99