To enter the weird world shown to us this week by Teagasc's National Farm Survey is a bit like wandering around a fairground hall of mirrors. Nothing is what it seems and reality appears as a series of increasingly grotesque distortions of itself, writes Mary Raftery.
Thus we are presented with the truly remarkable statistic that Irish farmers earn virtually nothing (a mere 2 per cent of their income) from the sale of farm produce. How can this be, you ask. Surely farmers exist to produce food and sell it to us.
Such notions are strictly confined to children's storybooks. As every Irish farmer has long known, and the rest of us are only beginning to realise, farmers in fact exist in order to get money from Europe.
The National Farm Survey tells us that the average farmer in this country now earns a whopping 98 per cent of his or her income from direct subsidies. Roughly two-thirds of these payments to farmers come directly from the EU, with one-third being provided by the Irish exchequer.
The amount paid by the Irish taxpayer is set to increase in coming years, as we are expected to shoulder ever greater amounts of the financial load of supporting the lifestyles of Irish farmers.
Most of what comes from Europe is called the Single Farm Payment, and is paid out regardless of the economic activity of the farmer. It is based only on what was produced in the past. In other words, you can now get a great big pile of money for producing absolutely nothing.
This new way of paying farmers, introduced in 2005, was called "reform". Everyone seemed to think it was a good thing. Up to that point, farmers had been subsidised on the basis of what they produced. So the more productive they were, the higher their subsidy. This in turn resulted in vast excesses, the obscene butter mountains and wine lakes.
So, to stop farmers producing too much food, it was decided to sever (or "decouple") the link between subsidy and production. Farmers would now receive their money regardless of what they produced. In other words, they get money for nothing - at least in theory.
The proportion of farmers' incomes shelled out directly by the Irish Government is made up of a number of different schemes. The most notorious of these is called the Disadvantaged Areas Scheme, which is largely a great wheeze whereby we managed to have almost the entire country declared "disadvantaged" in order to get money from Europe. The joke of course is now on us - with the European contribution diminishing over time, we have to pay more and more of this ourselves.
The only other equivalent for the transfer of such large amounts of money from the State to any one group of people is through the various social welfare schemes. These at least have the virtue of being accurately described as designed to assist the needy.
The subsidies for farmers, on the other hand, masquerade as an entirely normal part of agricultural activity. It would perhaps be more honest to state baldly that farmers in this country are almost wholly dependent on social welfare payments.
It is these farm social welfare payouts that are negotiated under the national wage agreements, where they go under the grandiose title of the Rural Development Programme.
Last year, in the charade that constituted the farming element of the social partnership talks, the Government fell over itself to beg the farmers to accept almost €7 billion under this fund.
There was no concept of farmers giving anything in return, not even a willingness, for instance, to allow the taxpayers who support them so generously a right of access to cross their land while walking in the countryside.
In the Byzantine world of Irish agriculture, it is strange but true that some sectors would actually make more money if they entirely ceased all economic activity. This applies particularly to beef and sheep producers - the National Farm Survey tells us that almost 150 per cent of their income comes from State subsidies.
Confusing as it may appear to be able to earn more than 100 per cent of your income, what this in fact means is that these sectors make significant losses from production, which are then covered by a part of their subsidies.
However, since the subsidies remain static, the elimination of production would mean that the income of these farmers would actually increase.
And if that is not bizarre enough, next year's survey is likely to present us with the most extraordinary reality of all. Year after year, the amount of direct subsidy as a proportion of farmers' incomes has risen. It is now only a matter of months until more than 100 per cent of farm income across the board will come from subsidies.
It will then be official - Irish farming is a profoundly uneconomic activity, surviving only on the backs of taxpayers. We need to start asking tough questions about exactly what we are paying for and why.