Another Life Michael VineyTo drive the southern flank of Co Mayo's Clew Bay, from Westport, past the Reek and out towards Louisburgh, is to find a landscape transformed, not just within the decade but often, as it seems, from week to week.
New houses are not merely one-off but inserted above, behind, in between others, or in dozens. What used to be farmland, increasingly wild and whiskery as one drove west, now reflects the ocean sunset in myriad picture windows, gleaming among the terraces of salt-proof shrubs.
In other cultures and at other times, such flourishing human settlement would also have made a market for local, farm-produced food. Westport does, indeed, have its country market and niche outlets for the polytunnel vegetables grown by mainly organic blow-ins, but the farm hinterland, like Irish farming generally, is in thrall to the supermarket food-chain.
How little sense remains that the countryside has anything a town or city wants, except as a backdrop for pleasure and recreation! Its ranks of animals, made even more anonymous by their identifying ear-tags, are divorced from anything most city-dwellers think of as food. Even the farmer has ceased to produce for his family. In place of any real relationship between city and hinterland, farmer and soil, we have a mutual, and in rural parts, increasingly sullen, failure of comprehension.
The ecologist John Feehan, in his new book, Farming in Ireland, sees this, for example, in the working of REPS, the Rural Environment Protection Scheme. While many farmers may be grateful for the lifeline of its payments, and more or less compliant with the new eco-friendly farm plan, "the values which underpin these activities are at best seen as not truly important, at worst as the alien values of faceless people . . . whose interest in all that is rural is merely recreational." The different intimacy of people and land, and of farming and nature, that shaped the Irish landscape over 6,500 years, is the substance of Feehan's magnificent tome - some 600 A4 pages. It is published by UCD on the centenary of the Faculty of Agriculture (where Feehan is a senior lecturer) and costs €90, for which one might have hoped for a few more pages in colour. But, like UCD's previous volume, The Bogs of Ireland, this book boasts its own rich heritage of historical images in black-and-white.
In the bogs book, John Feehan was teamed with a botanist, but the new one is all his own work. In its history of crops and farm animals, of trees and wild shrubs and the crafts that depended on them, of farm houses, boundaries and field implements, there is a constant interplay between agriculture and nature's biodiversity, and studies of wild plants and their insects trace the impact of farming on the environment.
For generations in Ireland, mixed farming to traditional patterns ran in substantial harmony with the natural world. Pressures to specialise and intensify have damaged not only the countryside but, says Feehan, have brought about "a decline in the vocational dignity of the farmer, a progressive down-grading of the farming way of life". He concludes with a passionate call for a revolution in attitudes, a "new philosophy" in which small-scale mixed farming, integrated with local markets, could take a separate path from the leviathan of major agribusiness. This raises the banner of "bioregionalism", reuniting communities with their local resources, an increasingly vital theme in the search for alternative, energy-lean systems.
A return to traditional priorities of husbandry, but without their drudgery, would, says Feehan, need to be "more, not less, scientific, but the science must be applied to the land in a more intelligent, holistic, ethical and sustainable way". Small-scale farming can only thrive "if it is in the hands of men and women who have a deep understanding of the sciences of ecology and soil [and\] for whom working the land is more than a second-rate job; who appreciate fully the other values of country living and the functions of the natural world". Who is he talking about? By 2016, a significant anniversary, the number of young people entering farming will have declined to 300 a year. Some 60,000 Irish farmers have no identified successor, and however strongly one might hope that rural Ireland could engender its own change of attitude, there is little encouragement in the relentless rearguard negativity of the IFA .
Feehan throws out a none-too-confident appeal to the political parties to rediscover the agrarian idealism of their origins. But he seems resigned to think that change will come only as part as part of a global awakening; even "a new invasion to add to the other waves of settlement that have periodically rejuvenated rural Ireland". For such bright-eyed blow-ins, Farming in Ireland would offer an essential reconnaissance.