When John Dillon was elected as leader of the Irish Farmers' Association, his supporters referred to themselves as the Taliban. For rather obvious reasons, being likened to Mullah Omar's bearded fanatics went out of fashion, writes Fintan O'Toole.
But as the farmers rumble through the country in their tractorcade this week, they seem determined to remind the rest of us that the metaphor had some validity.
It is not that the IFA hates women, bans dancing, attacks statues or tortures anything except, at times, economic logic. Where it does resemble the Taliban is in its doomed belief that a way of life can be preserved from change simply by insisting emphatically that change is not permissible.
The position of Irish farmers is rather like that of the Irish Catholic Church. Both are paying the price for occupying what once looked like an unassailable position. Like the Church, the farmers exerted an unquestionable influence for the first 50 years of the State's existence. Political leaders had to keep them on side at all costs. They controlled the meaning of the most potent word in the political lexicon: "Irish". Just as to be truly Irish you had to be Catholic, you also had to be racy of the soil.
This power survived enormous changes. Even though their numbers were in rapid decline from the 1960s onwards, farmers were able to dictate the terms on which Ireland entered the European Economic Community. The interests of fishing communities, for example, were sacrificed to those of agriculture. Subsidies for farmers were a far bigger priority than aid for the urban poor. Up to the mid-1980s farmers were even able to insist that they not be taxed.
More recently, however, the agricultural lobby has suffered the same kind of backlash that has been so catastrophic for the Church. When the pressure of change became too great, the Church could not cope because it had been corrupted by having it too easy for too long. It knew how to command, not how to persuade.
The same thing has happened to the farm lobby. It finds itself now in a very different Ireland. It represents a significant minority, but a minority nonetheless. It needs to be light on its feet, to control change while adapting to it, to think strategically and act intelligently. Instead, it goes lumbering on, pretending that it still has the power to stamp its feet and make demands.
For 30 years now, massive EU subsidies have allowed Irish agriculture to carry on producing vast amounts of bulk commodities whose general quality is, at best, mediocre. Most of what our farmers produce is still exported in a generic, unbranded, low value-added form.
Every plan that has been drawn up for the beef industry over the last 30 years could be reprinted tomorrow with a few minor amendments, and everything in it would still be aspirational. Each plan proposes a high-tech, high-quality value-added industry exporting mostly to European markets.
Nothing changes, however, and we go on churning out raw sides of beef, many of which are effectively dumped on non-European markets at prices far below the cost of production.
This situation is both financially and morally unsustainable. In financial terms, the Common Agricultural Policy as we know it cannot survive the expansion of the EU which brings in, from Poland alone, as many farmers are in the whole of the present Union.
Morally, it is simply obscene that the EU subsidises every dairy cow in Ireland to the tune of €2 a day, which is more than the daily income of half the world's human population. The dumping of subsidised EU food on markets in Asia and Africa is having a devastating effect on many of the world's poorest people. Such a policy neither can nor should have a future.
If there is an air of unreality about demands for even more subsidy in this context, the case is not strengthened by the rather disingenuous attempts to use statistics to put teeth in the poor mouth.
Farm leaders always quote average incomes. But the average is artificially depressed by the huge number of farmers who are not really in the business of even trying to make a living from agriculture. According to the Teagasc farm income survey, almost half of all Irish farmers have an annual income of less than €6,500. The vast majority of these are people whose main income is an off-farm job, the dole or a pension.
The reality is that there are only about 40,000 full-time farmers and that they are not especially badly off. Their average incomes are about the same as the average industrial wage, while they don't have many of the costs, like mortgage payments and transport, of most industrial workers.
This is not to say that farmers don't have problems. They have the truly frightening problem that they are stuck in a system with no future. The solution, however, is not to look for still more subsidies, which, even if they were forthcoming, would merely serve to keep a moribund system in place.
What farmers really need is a leadership that will talk to them honestly about the two things that will guarantee their future: producing safe, high-quality food and assuming the role of trustees of the environment.