Sir, - So Ireland reverts to a culchie/gurrier split with an ill-tempered and ill-informed spat between the poor PAYE worker backed up by the poor Dublin Business Association and the even poorer farmer. It is not funny that the infighting starts up when Brussels announces reductions in structural aid likely to hit the cities as well as cuts in CAP for the farmers?
It is worth remembering that most city-dwellers are only one or two generational steps from the bog and that today so many farm families have a son or daughter working for the urban tiger.
As a large dairy farmer I did not march in Dublin on Wednesday; I can make a decent living. But I would never deny there are thousands of smaller farmers suffering real hardship on the land.
Agriculture has fundamental questions to be addressed in what is perhaps the last "State organised economy" in the world. Agriculture is run by governments. This is what makes it political.
Yes, a huge proportion of Irish farming produces a highly seasonal (and not very good) product that no-one will buy without subsidies - beef on the hoof for the Third World or frozen for the Russians. There has to be something wrong with this. Yes, farmers do receive tranches of money from the EU taxpayer. But still they are leaving the land as quickly as you can say Jackeen.
Do we end subsidies and go for wholesale rural depopulation? Does the Irish consumer want ranch beef produced with growth hormones (known as Angel Dust here) that are legal virtually everywhere except the EU? Or milk from cows injected daily with BST? Do we want to ease environmental controls and holiday in townlands half deserted?
And farmers. They cannot go on expecting a God-given right to make a living from the land. If it requires getting off farm work, then so be it. Most urban Irish families now need two incomes to pay the bills. For farmers to get the Family Income Supplement when they are sitting on, say £100,000 worth of land is totally unfair to the city taxpayers who may never in their lives own such an asset.
In the light of the upcoming Agenda 2000 reforms which propose cuts of up to 30 per cent in farm incomes, we all, urban and rural alike, have to consider what we want from the land and the people who work it. Farmers cannot demand money forever. Nor can the city dweller expect the food they eat and the countryside they enjoy to be the same in 10 years' time unless there is some State contribution and control. - Yours, etc., Danny Haskins,
Oatlands, Wicklow.