Keeping good times rolling off the land

There is some confusion about the starting time of the Oranmore Macra na Feirme branch meeting, in Keane's bar outside Galway. The meeting on paper is scheduled for 8.30 p.m. When I turn up about 8.50 p.m., I am the only person in the back room of the bar. About 9.30 p.m., after I have convinced myself I have got the date, time, and place wrong, people start wandering in.

Just before 10 p.m., the meeting starts. This is what the Oranmore branch members call "Macra Time". Even by the sliding leeway of Irish Mean Time, it's a surprisingly late start, especially for a weekday night. But it's not half so surprising as the fact that 13 of the some 22 people gathered in Keane's for the Macra meeting are teenagers, most of them 17 and still at school. Not quite Sons of the Farms (the translation of Macra na Feirme), most of them. National Concert HallThe Oranmore branch, which was dormant for about 10 years, was restarted earlier this year and has some 60 members, half of whom are regularly active. About 70 per cent of the members are from a non-farming community, and most of their activities are social and sporting. They meet formally once a week, and then meet in varying numbers through the different sporting and social events organised with themselves and other county branches, such as quizzes, basketball tournaments, and nights at the dogtrack.

The Oranmore members, in fact, fall neatly into two quite distinct groups: those in their teens, many of them still at school and with no farming background; and those in their late 20s and 30s, almost all of them active farmers.

"They came around the schools earlier in the year, looking for people to join," 17-year-old Majella Treanor relates. She, like many of the others, joined "for the social reasons - sports, competitions, outings," and enthuses about the experience, which several others echo. Nineteen-year-old Klaus Gottsche observes: "It's run as a youth club for rural youth."

Only two of the teenagers come directly from farming backgrounds themselves, Pat Burke (18) and Richard Burke (17 and no relation). Neither intends to stay in farming full time, since they "see no future in it".

Meanwhile, due to the delayed arrival of the chairman, Pat Flaherty (32), secretary Henry Walsh (38) takes the meeting, the atmosphere of which has to commute between the world of school and the adult world of years spent farming. This is probably best summed up by the eternal delight the teenagers get in pronouncing Walsh's Christian name: "Oh, An-ri!" they crow good-naturedly at every opportunity.

When Flaherty does arrive, he strides in and snaps his fingers to order silence: "Lads, there's only one meeting going on here!" It works - the murmuring at the back ceases - but it's a method of silencing a group rarely seen outside a classroom.

Among the items on the agenda for discussion tonight are competitions; a discussion of the recent milk-price dispute and ideas for recruiting more members. The branch is successful, but more members will mean more flexibility in organising teams, and more life. It may also mean more adult female members - there is only one female present over the age of 19 - 20-year-old Cathy Cooley.

An upcoming agri-quiz is discussed, names for basketball teams are read out, times of a welding workshop are organised, and information is given on a range of sports competitions at county and national level. The milk-price dispute with Aldi is the item on the agenda discussed at greatest length. Walsh reports on travelling from Oranmore (where Oranmore Dairies is a big supplier to the county) to protest and add solidarity to national dairy farmers on the issue of supermarkets underpricing milk. "Milk is probably the ultimate consumer product because it is a complete food," he says. "And you're all consumers. The farmers of the country are finished if we don't vote with our feet."

Some of the teenagers ask questions, and he's clapped roundly when he finishes.

Later, when I ask the teenagers to write down what they think a pint and a litre of milk cost, everyone looks baffled. Richard Burke says he's never bought a pint of milk in his life, living on a dairy farm. Is he not interested in knowing the shop-price of the family farm's commodity? He says he's never thought of it that way before.

Richard is not alone, however, because nobody else is sure of the price of milk either. Guesses range from between 67p to 38p for a pint, and 62p to 87p for a litre.

The older Macra members, all farmers, for some reason are not keen to reveal the size of their holdings, but they are not a bit coy about voicing grievances as to how they see farmers perceived by a) the public and b) the media. Why did they want to get the branch going again?

"Social reasons," Brian Tarpey (35) says.

"Personal development," says Francis Craughwell (26).

"Macra is much more than a lobby group, it's a social organisation," suggests Dermot Kelly.

"Macra is like a large itinerant family," observes Pat Flaherty. "We'll fight with one another when issues arise, but when the chips are down, we'll pull together." He is pleased with this analogy.

"It can be very hard to get out when you are at home all the time on the farm," Mattie Egan (34) says. "You're not meeting any new people. Or people doing anything different from what you're doing yourself." They mention the number of young men committing suicide, and how a large proportion of these come from rural areas: some of them are farmers. "It's the isolation that's the worst. That's why having something to come out to can help."

And so, would romances have flowered through the Macra meetings? There is a howl of laughter from the teenagers, who have gravitated to their own group and are sitting on the other side of a dividing panel. The laughter is echoed by the farmers sitting around, who chuckle into their pints. Clearly, the answer is yes.

Ah, pints. The enforcement of drink-driving laws in recent years was condemned in some areas as contributing further to the social isolation of people in rural areas. Do the members of Oranmore Macra think this has happened? No, they do not. "Publicans in rural areas drive people home. They'd be like a taxi," someone offers.

"The highest percentage of people who are pioneers are farmers," someone else says. "Farmers don't drink," is yet another theory. At this stage, midnight, there are several empty pint glasses on the table, which makes this last statement a very Irish answer to an Irish question. Or maybe there's something called Macra Answers as well as Macra Time.

More information from www.macra.ie or 01-4508000