If towns are country you can call me Radovan

No one has ever accused the farm lobby and its supporters of being given to understatement. So I was not particularly surprised to find myself accused in a letter to the editor from Marian Harkin, chairperson of the Council for the West, of "pseudo-intellectual `ethnic cleansing' ". My crime was writing that "rural Ireland" in the old sense no longer exists.

Evoking mass murder and mass rape as an analogy for a sociological description is, even by the normal standards of agricultural hyperbole, a bit much. But it is sadly typical of the wild rhetoric that makes it so hard to come to grips with the problems of country people.

I did not, of course, claim that there is no longer an Ireland outside of towns and cities. I placed "rural Ireland" in quotation marks to make it clear I was denying the continued existence of the pure, rustic society that is conjured up by that term, a land of rugged farmers whose daily existence is untouched by industrial modernity. In saying this, Marian Harkin claims, I "arrogantly wipe out the 1.5 million people who, according to the CSO Census 1996, live in rural Ireland. We have disappeared from the map . . . " This "we" is as good a place as any to start. Marian Harkin's address is Market Yard, Sligo town. Last time I looked (in August as it happens) Sligo town didn't have herds of cattle chewing on the paving stones or sheep grazing in Dunnes Stores. It seemed oddly urban. How does it get into the "we" of "rural Ireland"?

Are there, in any case, really 1.5 million people in rural Ireland?

The census figure of 1.5 million is actually the number of people living in what are technically defined as "rural areas", and it is easy to assume that these are therefore "rural people". But in fact a "rural area" in this sense is not just open countryside. It is also any town with a population of less than 1,500. In the western region that Ms Harkin speaks for there are, by my rough reckoning, 38 such places. There is not a single region of the Republic where the vast bulk of the population lives on the land. Even in the least urbanised areas, a minority lives in towns. In regions like the midlands, the west, the mid-west, the north-west and Donegal, some 40 per cent of the population is made up of town-dwellers.

It includes shopkeepers, solicitors, hairdressers, priests, publicans, council workers, mechanics, doctors, people working in factories and hotels, people running chip shops and serving chow mein in Chinese restaurants.

Let's accept for a moment that regions with this broad social structure are still, technically, "rural Ireland". But let's also get one thing straight: the majority of people living in this broadly defined "rural Ireland" make their living from industry and services, not from farming. Only about a third of the population in what are called "rural areas" is engaged in farming.

If acknowledging these facts is a form of ethnic cleansing, then call me Radovan. However satisfying such rhetorical flourishes may be, they don't change the fact that there is now no region of Ireland where a rural society of the old sort - made up of farmers and their families - still exists. And they don't alleviate the damage that's done by clinging to the fantasy that it does exist and that, by throwing money at it it can be preserved.

It has been obvious for decades there is no possibility of making a decent living solely from the income of a small Irish farm. As long ago as 1962, the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Problem of Small Western Farms reported: "The position of small farms cannot be permanently improved either by subsidies or special price supports since these do not necessarily improve the competitive position of the small farmer in relation to producers more favourably situated."

This isn't theoretical; it has been tested in practice. We have had 25 years of EU subsidies and special price supports. And we are left with an agricultural sector in which more than two-thirds of the farms are not economically viable.

A quarter of all farmers are aged over 65. Less than 15 per cent of all farmers have any formal training for the job. The idea that "rural Ireland" can be sustained by giving these farmers more money is fantasy.

THE great irony, in fact, is that the Brussels billions have merely served to obscure this reality and to distract attention from the proper task of integrated regional development. Before Ireland joined the EEC, we were beginning to wise up and to accept that keeping people in the countryside did not mean keeping them in farming.

For example, the Third Programme for Economic Expansion, published in 1969, stressed that State policy was "the integrated development of small farm areas, encouraging all possible lines of development in industry, afforestation, tourism and related activities, so that the problems of these areas will be met on the broadest possible front."

But this kind of language went out of favour when we went "into Europe" and the Common Agriculture Policy started to shower money around like manure from a muck-spreader. "There was," as the National Economic and Social Council put it in 1994, "an underlying and unwarranted optimism about the ability of CAP to deal with the endemic problems of the Republic's agriculture."

Integrated rural development "disappeared from the policy agenda". Only in the early 1990s, when CAP began to be phased out by Brussels, did it return. And then it did so only because EU funds were available. The results of many of the new development schemes - especially the LEADER programme - have been encouraging.

But Irish initiatives under these schemes have been, as Combat Poverty pointed out in its Poverty in Rural Ireland report in 1996, "reactive in nature and consequently reflect an ad-hoc approach which lacks an overall coherence".

Part of the incoherence is a continuing unwillingness to say clearly and openly that the future of Ireland beyond the big towns and cities does not lie with men out standing in their own fields.

At best, the 50,000 currently viable farms can continue to be viable even when they are weaned off subsidies and price supports. For the rest, State and EU support has to be directed towards creating alternative ways of earning a living in the countryside.

One of the conditions for making this happen is that we stop lumping very different things - large regional towns, small towns and open countryside; townsfolk and farmers - together in the amorphous, misleading and increasingly fantastical category of "rural Ireland".

That label, ironically, is nothing more than a polite version of the old insult "culchie", embodying as it does the notion that Ireland beyond Ballyfermot is nothing but farmers and cows. How strange that Dublin corner-boys have given up on that notion long ago while the farm lobby clings to its emotive power.