FROM THE ARCHIVES:The state of agriculture, by far the largest part of the economy in the 1950s, was described by James Gilbert in his Down to Earth farming column in 1956.
– JOE JOYCE
BY NOW pretty well everyone agrees that this country is getting into a desperate state. The emigration figures provide so damning an indictment of our miserable condition that no one can gloss over the situation any longer.
We are the only country in the world to-day that had a declining population. Why should we be the only one? What is it that we’ve got – or haven’t got – that is causing this unique phenomenon? Why is this the one place in the world to be suffering from a malignant depression?
The well-being of the people is the first responsibility of any government; agreed? And our own people are so fed up with the condition of things here that they are streaming out of Ireland at a rate that has never been reached since the Famine.
Well there’s clearly no actual food famine driving them out to-day. And to pile the blame for all our woes onto the poor wretched Coalition Government is just fatuous scape-goatism. Certainly, they have plenty to answer for, but they are, after all, only a product of modern Ireland’s myopia. It’s plain enough that to-day’s Exodus from Ireland has not been caused by any Act of God. It has been brought about by our own collective sluggishness, selfishness and super-cuteness. Somehow, we have succeeded in creating here a monster of social self-destruction.
Another long overdue and immensely important change has occurred to the urban mind. It has “discovered” agriculture. There is now almost general agreement that it is the key to our future, that a thriving agriculture is something we’ve got to have before we can make any real progress.
Agriculture . . . has to be the foundation of our economy, but right now that foundation is rotten. This is the root cause of all our tragic trouble to-day. It has been rotting away . . . when it should have been nursed back to strength as the first objective of the young Republic. Instead, it has been exploited, despised and neglected. Above all, it has been misunderstood. To-day our whole farming system is as rotten as frosted turnip.
If we could find some egg-head capable of the job, there could be no more useful and rewarding study for him than the evolution and present pattern of Irish agriculture. It has developed to-day into an extraordinary complex thing to which somehow the normal rules of economics and conduct can’t be applied.
We can’t expect to re-vitalise Irish farming by formulating a few new laws, or disbursing a few subsidies. The troubles are far too deep-seated. And we need to understand them before we can put them right.
Firstly, there is . . . a tragic absence of . . . “husbandry-sense”; there is very little true “love of the land”; there is only a small amount of “pride in the work”.
“Peasant Proprietorship” has seldom even approached the realization of the ideal. Although the land tenure laws were framed with the object of promoting the best sort of peasant proprietorship, they failed, and have to-day become one of the cruelest instruments against the people and against the land – because the countryman was too cute.
He always is too cute. That is the tragedy. Even when the Agricultural Adviser is talking the best sense to him, the farmer has generally decided in advance that he is not going to be such a fool as to believe him. He is not going to be taken in by him. He’s been caught before. He’s wary. So wary that he trusts no-one. That’s his abiding principle; to trust nobody.
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