FROM THE ARCHIVES:Michael Heffernan, a Farmers' Party TD and secretary of the Farmers' Union, got an earful from the Cumann na nGaedhael minister for posts and telegraphs JJ Walsh when he dared to criticise post office inefficiencies and challenge Walsh's criticism of farmers. Walsh responded in this letter. – JOE JOYCE
YOU TALK about comparative efficiency; you do not even know the meaning of the word. It is clear that you know nothing whatever about Post Office matters, and would be well advised to leave them alone.
You take exception to my intervention on agriculture. If votes from the farming community entitle me to speak, I have much more authority than you. A representative of the union to which you belong was rejected in my constituency – though I regret his defeat, because he is one of the best tillage farmers we have – whilst my votes were triple the quota. But this, though sufficient, is not my only authority. I am the son of a farmer, who consistently tilled about 25 per cent of his land, and whose successor today tills very much more, notwithstanding your story about ‘tillage won’t pay,’ and he has no advantage not available to farmers elsewhere.
Now, for the subject itself. There appears to be no doubt about the fact that your programme is that of bullock and emigration. My programme is tillage, and, through tillage, the doubling of our stock, bullocks included, and a living for our people. This, I think, fairly sets out the roads we are following. I believe in production as the paramount necessity for the life of the State. You advocate grazing – which connotes idleness and decay. I have for my model the small countries of Europe, with dense populations and reasonable prosperity. You believe in the prairies of Alberta and Texas.
“I believe that the partial collapse of our railways is due to the decline in production from the land; that the drying up of money circulation in urban areas is due to a similar cause; that our adverse trade balance is due to the absence of food for our cattle in winter; that the absence of winter dairying, and with it the heavy import of butter, are due to this cause; that three-fourths of the fluke is due to starvation in winter; that the decline in cultivation is solely to blame for unemployment and emigration; that the fifteen millions we pay for the import of bacon and grain are traceable to a similar source. These little items, however, are of no concern to you. Your grand remedy is personal abuse. You see a country living on its reserves, like a camel on its hump, but you do not care; the rancher is safe, and yet you speak of Tipperary.
Speaking just as a citizen, and not as a politician, I have no hesitation in saying that the leaders of the Farmers’ Union are a poor bunch, devoid of any national outlook whatever. They stand pat on the grass, and the bullock, and secretly aver that emigration is the cure of our ills. It is a humiliating role for representatives of the people.
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