Our politicians need to rediscover the ‘forgotten knowledge’ 

That does not mean that we do not interest ourselves closely with party policies in general terms of how they affect our state and all of its citizens. We certainly take note of how stated policies, aims and ambitions will affect the farming sector and the wider agri-food sector that rests on our members and the food they produce.

The farmer vote

It is not a secret that the farmer vote’ in Ireland has traditionally gone the way of the ‘Big Two’ established parties. That farmer vote was probably less to do with a perceived stance on any aspect of farming so much as a traditional legacy of the way that the farm family concerned had lined up on the great national questions in the 1920s or 1930s. 

Both parties seemed to be ‘pro-farmer’ to a recognised degree and, though they might be deemed to favour different sectors or types of farmers, both have been credited with a real knowledge of how farming worked and a deep appreciation of the role that farming played in assuring the wider rural hinterland of prosperity and viability.
Both of the Big Two understood innately – and at an almost literally grassroots level – that, as the old saying had it, when ‘farming was going well, then rural Ireland was going well’. They understood – in a way that their modern versions seem to have forgotten – that the money earned by farmers goes straight out the gates and into the wider rural economy through all the ‘downstream’ services and occupations that depend on our unique family-farm system that runs from the edge of Dublin Airport westwards to Connemara and from Malin in Donegal to Mizen in southwest Cork. The old Big Two realised that whatever happens Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the years and decades to come, the farmland of Ireland isn’t going anywhere; it’s not in any board or corporation’s power to decide to relocate farming and food to a cheaper environ. We were here before Google and Pfizer – millennia before them – and we’ll be here when everyone else has gone home. That’s not being sentimental or cynically patriotic; we merely make the point that Irish farming and the food sector it drives are of this State and its people in a way that these corporations, welcome though they are, never can be.

If support was there

The present variant of the Big Two would deny vehemently that their regard or sensitivity to farm problems has declined to any degree or indeed at all. They would argue that they are every bit as committed to Irish farming and agri-food as ever they were – and they might even believe that. But the facts tell otherwise. If we had the support of those politicians in the enthusiastic and knowledgeable manner they maintain they provide, then we would feel it in our pockets, we’d feel it in our spirits and morale, we’d see it in the way that the next generation would be impatient to step in and take over the farms that their forebears worked their lives to make better and make viable.
But none of those conditions apply. The mini-revival in milk price over the last three months notwithstanding, farm incomes have declined by in excess of 30 per cent year-on-year. Last spring was the lowest in farmer morale I can remember in 25 years – or ever. The most common complaint I hear at meetings now is the lack of successors – and even where they have successors, the challenges around getting him or her into place without crippling costs or bills overwhelming them on their very first day, is almost insurmountable. 

Walking away from the land

Every candidate who came to my door was asked one question bluntly and without preamble: if farming is in such a good place, how come no youngsters want to do it? And the follow-on question from that: if all those Governments have been so committed to supporting the family farm, why is that not apparent to those young women and men who are looking at farming – at the work involved and the possible incomes to be derived from that – and then looking at those FDI corporations and the work and incomes to be derived from those, before making their decision and walking away from their aged relations and the land?

Farm succession under review

Next year, we are promised a Commission on Farm Transitions that will look at all the issues around the breakdown in farm succession; the fact that we seem to be at the end of the road for many, many farm families who no longer have a member happy to take on the work and stress and criticism for the kinds of (very) modest incomes involved. Upon its announcement, the ICMSA commented that without wishing to pre-empt the Commission’s deliberations, there was little or no mystery around the reasons why we can’t get the next generation of Irish farmers to take our place in what is considered one of the world’s great traditional food-producing societies: the work is too long and too hard and the income is too low and too unpredictable.

That’s it in a sentence. We can change that, and we can win that next generation, but it’s going to require a rediscovery on the part of the old ‘Big Two’ of their roots and, more importantly, the forgotten knowledge that gave them an insight into the heart – and loyalties – of rural Ireland.