Rural guerrilla

Folk heroes are thin on the ground these days. Our cynical era - the same one that worships vacuous celebrity and mediocrity - is notoriously judgmental when it comes to assessing the achievements of ordinary folk. What living person could survive that scepticism to become the hero of a ballad or the stuff of legend in the local?

Tom Parlon could. Take the chorus of "The Port Boys from the IFA":

"Tom Parlon, you're a rare one, you're known both near and far;

From your humble home in Coolderry, you grew up to be a star.

With fire in your heart, you left your own home town

We're glad that you're our President, 'cause you'd never let us down".

There's more, but you get the drift. The man who coined the word "pickade" to describe the killer (not to mention illegal) combination of picket and blockade that brought the meat processors to heel in recent weeks; the man who drove the entire campaign and was intimately involved at every step, has become to the farmers what the legendary US labour leader Joe Hill was to the workers. And while it might not be fair to say that he's loving every minute of it . . . well, he comes across as a contented man.

Suddenly, people who were showering obscenities on him a few months ago, to his face and behind his back, are coaxing him out to star at functions, or keeping their heads well down. "If they appeared, they might feel they had to congratulate me or something and that would be too much for them," he says with a grin.

Other old warriors too have been showing fresh interest. "The likes of Peter Cassells and Des Geraghty . . . I felt there was a new level of respect there and of a very good-natured kind, from all sections around the partnership talks. I think trade unionists like to be macho guys, to take a stand - that's what they were built upon, going back to Joe Hill and so on. Partnership has meant that you don't do that anymore to any great extent so I think they were a little bit envious that IFA had been out there on the streets and fought the good fight and won." More respect too from the meat processors who are expected to be more just and enlightened in their dealings with producers, and to look constructively at ways of reversing the appalling damage to the Irish meat industry wreaked by their misuse of intervention.

But Tom Parlon is too long in the business to be smug. "I met a famous Offaly hurler at a match on Sunday, Damien Martin, and he said `well done . . . you must have a woeful swelled head on you altogether'. But honestly I don't feel in the least bit like that.

When I was getting the shit kicked out of me everywhere I went in the country, it didn't bother me that much either. I'm fully conscious that that's how life is. As the song goes, `one day I'm loaded, the next day I'm broke'. People are fickle".

Over many hours in the warm, bright Parlon kitchen, in the bungalow they built 17 years ago in the velvety, rolling hills near Roscrea on the Offaly/Tipperary border, he never gets exasperated, never tires of explaining the issues. It is the curse of farming activism that such background explanations are complex, unbearably tedious and therefore of zero interest to the average citizen. But the crusade never abates.

Friends describe him as relentlessly cool under pressure, but with a "low bullshit threshold"; someone who needs little sleep, is a social animal and can drink everyone under the table. (Favourite pubs run from his local, The Black Bull in Coolderry to Doheny & Nesbitts, owned by another Offaly man, Tom Mangan). He also gets the farmers' vote as one of their own, the son of a farmer who walked to Dublin alongside Rickard Deasy, a keen hurling and racing man fiercely proud of his Offaly roots, a hard worker who had to borrow to buy his own land and who has experienced the slings and arrows of ordinary farming life.

He also has five supportive children and his wife, Martha. She keeps the farm running, deals with callers, often drives him to functions, cooks up enormous fries and interjects the odd irreverent remark (she remembers him as "a brat with long hair" from their days on the same school bus). He comes across as a master of his brief (or the 150 briefs said to be bound up in agriculture), and as an engaging man who loves to talk. Surprisingly - in view of the steely determination that saw him kick over a few traces in the path to IFA presidency - he also has a perceptible shy streak. "I used to be very shy," he confirms earnestly (while Martha rolls her eyes), "and it never really goes away. I used to have a major problem with public speaking. I used to hyperventilate when I had anything to say at all." In fact, he couldn't even eat before speaking back then, recalls Martha. And the man to whom access to Taoisigh and Commissioners is now a given, still vividly remembers his first terrified outing on Morning Ireland not many years ago.

He has come a long way. With nearly two years to go of his term, he says that no political party has approached him yet. In any event, he is already doing - and suffering - in spades what every politician does and suffers. The difference is that he doesn't get paid for it.

Would Europe appeal to him? "The salary and so on would be very attractive," he says honestly. "I mean the one thing I don't have is financial security. I still owe a substantial amount of money on my farm. It's not a very big farm and there are no guarantees with pigs or suckler cows or sheep. I'm just hanging in there year in, year out, and that is one thing that would be a concern. I never ever had money. Ever. I was always borrowed. I probably had as good a lifestyle as anyone else but was always borrowed and always worked very hard to keep things together".

But he has seen too much of the MEPs' lifestyles to be attracted to the gruesome Brussels/Strasbourg run and anyway, they haven't the degree of clout that would keep him interested, he says.

So what about national politics? "It's like a young friend of mine years ago . . . His father was a sergeant and someone asked him was he going to join the guards and he said `no - but I'd like to join the sergeants'." It's a funny story with serious import. "Yeah, I'd like to be a Minister." For the record, he has huge admiration for both Bertie Ahern, and his own county man, Brian Cowen.

In any event, friends reckon there will be a stream of big company boards offering directorships. He doesn't seem averse to the notion.

It's an interesting scenario for a man with a well-known propensity for bending the law when things aren't going to plan. But today, he comes across as a model of sweet reason and realism. "The biggest lesson I learned from the beef action was that unless you have the support of the general public, you're at nothing. We would not have won that unless the public were sympathetic . . . Nowadays, you're not going to bully anybody. If you look at my election manifesto for the past four years, you'll find it's been very much along that line."

So is he sorry now for running 20 sheep into the shiny Dublin offices of the Department of Agriculture a few years ago? By way of reply, he launches into an explanation about ewe premia and unjust price calculations by Brussels, all with documentary support. Then he tells a story of the consequences for a French supermarket owner who defied French farmers by continuing to trade with an Irish lamb processor: "Next morning he got up and found a big electric fence erected around his car park, one of those very loud ones that spark and click". The point being that Irish farmers are grand fellows really.

Yes, but is he sorry for the sheep incident? "It certainly grabbed the headlines." But were they the right kind of headlines ? "Well, it certainly caused a major dust-up between the IFA and the Department and politicians. And no, the public weren't very impressed. So, no, they weren't the right kind of headlines." Then, with a level of honesty rare in a public figure, he adds: "But from a Tom Parlon point of view, with farmers, I was seen as a guy who was not afraid to take a hard line if necessary. I certainly wouldn't see it as the way to go now. But it didn't do my political career in IFA any harm."

So if those days are over, what about the very recent incident which involved filling a trolley with frozen lamb at Dun Laoghaire's Iceland supermarket and failing to stop at the till on the way out? "Lots of Dublin women came up and said it was an outright bloody disgrace that we have to eat New Zealand lamb here in Dun Laoghaire and the country full of good quality sheep." Indeed? "Yes, a genuine view from a number of housewives," he confirms, with another ghost of a grin. But couldn't the IFA have paid for it? "We didn't just see that," he says a tad sheepishly, "the guards were there and said `have you stolen this lamb' and we said no, that we were just bringing it outside to make an issue of it. It was sheer frustration that the farmers wanted to let off and I can certainly empathise and sympathise with that." The funny thing is, it worked. Next thing, Iceland's top management were flying in from London and Iceland was undertaking to source their lamb in Ireland and the "stolen" cuts were wending their way to a charitable institution.

Right, but as the face of an organisation that has campaigned furiously to have supermarket prices brought closer to farmgate prices, how does he explain the protest against reduced milk prices and its cross-Border origins, at Aldi supermarkets ? "Of course we have our own contradictions," he concedes, "but no matter what you're producing now, you're generally producing below cost and depending on the cheque in the post and there's very little future in that scenario - particularly when you see the massive gap building up between the farmgate price and that paid by the consumer. It's almost unexplainable."

Tom Parlon sees the writing on the wall for the old ways of protesting. "I've turned the decibels down quite a bit . . . Everyone has their own problems, regardless of your occupation." He also sees the writing on the wall for the old farming culture. "Things have changed a lot. Farmers I'd say, are changing their tack in terms of becoming more efficient and being able to stand on their own two feet. But we just need time. When CAP reform is mentioned, it's all about cutting down the supports to agriculture and what IFA wants to do is slow that down. We'll be objecting and kicking like hell and fighting - whether it be here or in Europe - saying that there's no way you can do this. But it is inevitable, it's going to happen. In the meantime, while we're slowing it down, it's giving people a chance of coping, of catching on, giving wives a chance to take up jobs, or guys to take up other jobs or learn extra skills."

The Celtic Tiger he says, is their best friend in this process, "because 50 per cent of all farm household income is earned off-farm and that is going to increase. In this rural parish here of Coolderry, I can count on one hand the families that are totally dependent on farming. I have a neighbour who makes aluminium windows; another whose brother works as a fitter; a guy up the road who drives a truck and whose wife is a nurse - all of them from farms." Soon, in many cases, the off-farm job will seem more secure and the hassle of coming hoome after a full day's work t don wellingtons and start again will seem increasingly futile.

And how will Irish agriculture look then? He is not so pessimistic. In fact, he is concerned that perhaps farm families are being overly insistent on chivvying their children off the farm now, just when opportunities are materialising. The major challenge he believes, is boosting the appeal of our run-down agricultural colleges.

"Agriculture is still a very, very big part of the economy, 30 per cent of our net export earnings . . ." The doomsday scenario is where 20,000 farmers run Irish agriculture, where it takes on the scale of New Zealand or American farming, run by corporations, with no rural communities or even networks of roads; where the withdrawal of the five billion pounds currently spent by farm families in the rural economy, causes the local shop to close down. "The question is do we want to maintain this European model of agriculture? Because if we do, it is going to cost you that little bit extra."