An Irishman's Diary

It's a bright Sunday evening in May but not a cricket is stirring in 1970s rural Ireland

It's a bright Sunday evening in May but not a cricket is stirring in 1970s rural Ireland. There's only one TV channel, yet everybody is glued to the box, engrossed by goings-on in Leestown, Co Kilkenny.

Never heard of it? Well, for the benefit of younger readers, it was the fictional setting for The Riordans - a hugely popular farm-based soap, which always attracted over a million viewers.

When Batty, Benjy and Minnie finally fade from the screen, the countryside springs to life. Sunday is the big night out for rural folk, but most people aren't heading for pubs or dance halls. They're congregating instead at remote farmyards.

Barn dances with late drinking licences, or perhaps some early variety of rave? No, actually. The attractions on offer are stock-judging events, farm skills competitions with general knowledge and know-your-parish quizzes. There isn't a pint of porter for miles yet people are pouring in. It's a rural field-evening, for 30 years ago education, not alcohol, was the true opiate of the people.

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The confident young people coming in newish, over-laden Cortinas and Carinas sport the same long hair, flares and platform-soles as their urban counterparts. And why not? Unlike the previous short-back-and-sides generations, they know emigration or unemployment is never to be their lot. Ireland is in the Common Market and farmers no longer depend on low UK food prices. Agricultural incomes are rising rapidly and for the first time the future for farming is secure.

The economic war, the mass emigration of the 1950s, the farmers' marches and sit-downs of the 1960s are things of the past. Farming has earned a new respect, exporting more and more to Europe and back-boning the national economy. Prospects were never so bright, with farm gate prices continuing to increase delightfully, no matter how much is produced.

There are over 200,000 farmers and they know this brings political clout. Hasn't their leader, T.J. Maher, just been introduced on radio as the second most powerful man in Ireland? Along with Gay Byrne and Bunny Carr, the top television personalities are Peter Murphy, host of Cross Country Quiz and Tom Hickey, the farming star of The Riordans. Any social event bearing the ploughman logo of Macra na Feirme (the young farmers' organisation) is a sure winner, bringing even town dwellers swarming in. Just now, being rural is decidedly sexy.

Of course, young farmers still haven't much in the way of formal education, but this doesn't mean they aren't smart. In fact, their thirst for knowledge seems consequently greater. This gap in the educational market is first spotted by University College Cork. Seán Ó Murchú and Willie McAuliffe are out on the by-ways bringing the best of university education to incongruous little schools and draughty halls. The Diploma in Social Studies is a huge hit, with the vast majority of graduates coming from rural Ireland. Sometimes UCC can't hold the huge conferrals and two ceremonies are required. Afterwards future farm leaders, TDs and even Cabinet Ministers happily coalesce to celebrate their first formal educational qualification.

These days we see clearly that high European food prices didn't derive from consumer demand, but were maintained by taxpayers bearing the cost of disposing huge surpluses. It was a actually bubble waiting to burst, but for those of us who came of age amid the euphoric 1970s in rural Ireland such thoughts were a world away. Inevitably, however, a new generation of European taxpayers - without memories of the post-war hardship from food shortages - began questioning the cost of agricultural subsidies.

Seven years of plenty ended abruptly in 1980. Farmers discovered the EC would no longer protect them from the effects of rising costs, nor was there any guarantee that higher prices would be passed on by food processors. Neither would EC membership make smallholdings into viable farm family units. Soon farmers were back where they had been historically - earning about 60 per cent of the non-farming wage.

Today, Teagasc estimates there are just 44,500 full-time farms remaining. More than a third of all farmers have off-farm employment and this figure is growing annually. And of those remaining full-time in agriculture, 70 per cent are subsidised by non-farming income. The decline in farmer numbers has become so serious that the once all-powerful IFA has now considered the previously unthinkable - offering countryside membership to non-farming stakeholders in rural communities.

Meanwhile, many of the confident young people who entered farming in the 1970s are now, in middle age, seeking off-farm employment. And it is hard to blame them. Agriculture is no longer the rewarding occupation they entered, but a dependent profession providing little opportunity for enterprise, where almost 75 per cent of income comes from initiative-killing subsidies.

These days, any journey outside our major urban centres shows quickly that rural areas are in serious decline, with pubs, post offices and shops closing everywhere for lack of business. More people are moving to the cities, creating a vicious circle whereby more services disappear and the drift accelerates. One third of the national population now lives in the greater Dublin area. The city is top-heavy in relation to the rest of the country, its transport system and infrastructure creaking beneath the strain.

If family farming is now allowed to decay further, the knock-on effect will make our cities even more intolerable and our countryside more desolate and depopulated. The experience of the 1970s suggests that, given a breeze of opportunity, rural folk would not be slow to take full advantage. It is doubtful, however, that nationally the willingness exists to reopen such opportunities for rural folk and thereby return - particularly for young people - a little sexiness to the idea of rural living.