1998: the good stuff Irish Restaurants:
The Irish restaurant world is becoming ever more confident and ever better. The great places and the great meals we reported on during the year ranged from every corner of the country, from dazzling food in The Stepping Stone, on the Ring of Kerry, to inspired domestic cooking in High Moors, in far-west Clifden. There was great cooking in Carlingford at McGee's Bistro, fantastic takeaway Indian food at Glenageary's Bombay Pantry, and in Portlaoise Jim Tynan's inspired Kitchen and Pantry was one of the runaway successes of the year.
Susan Holland's fish cookery in Baltimore's Customs House showed how a cook with a true grasp of fusion food can make even the simplest things sublime, while in east Cork, Colm Falvey is busy creating future classics in The Clean Slate, in Midleton. Dish, in Dublin's Temple Bar, was the exciting newcomer on the left bank, while in Kenmare, Maura Foley's cooking in Packie's proves that some of the veterans still cook like youngsters. The good cooks continue to prove the rule that location is irrelevant, and that people will travel a country mile for creative Cooking. Georgina and Barry O'Sullivan's Ballymore Inn, in Ballymore Eustace, County Kildare, is a simple pub with a restaurant far from any major town, but turn up here without a reservation and you won't get a table, such is the attraction of its brilliant food. And there are lots of exciting new places just coming through, as you will discover on these pages during the year.
Irish Artisans: Away from the restaurants, An Bord Bia masterminded the hugely successful Kinsale Speciality Foods forum, easily the slickest and most convincing spectacle of good food ever staged in Ireland. The great artisans, such as Rosarie and Kevin O'Byrne's West Cork Herb Farm, and Michael O'Crulaoi's brilliant butcher's shop and delicatessen in Ballincollig, to take but two examples, showed that dedication and specialisation are the future for Irish food. For the first time in years we saw the emergence of new farmhouse cheeses, with smashing cheeses such as Paul Keane's Bluebell Falls goats cheese just one of the exciting new discoveries.
1998: the bad stuff
The Food Island? The onward march of genetically modified food seems likely to continue, with Genetic Concern not only unsuccessful in its court case against Monsanto, but also having legal costs awarded against it. Maybe multinational, multibillion dollar Monsanto will do the decent thing and not press to have its costs paid by this raggle-taggle group of concerned citizens, and then again maybe a genetically modified pig will prove itself capable of flight.
Despite their previous, unequivocal, statement saying that they would not allow production of genetically modified food in Ireland, government ministers Joe Walsh and Noel Dempsey have felt no compunction to explain why they seem to have changed their minds. In an age when our food is already excessively dosed with insecticides and pesticides, what sort of madness is it to allow a private firm, which wishes to tweak foods so that it can sell more of its herbicides, to plant that food here? An Bord Bia likes to market the country as "Ireland - The Food Island". Somehow, I don't think "Ireland - The Genetically Modified Food Island" has quite the same touch of poetry to it.
The Farmers: The debate about genetically modified food is only one element of the crisis which has afflicted farmers throughout the year. Farming has never been in a more perilous state, with the price for raw ingredients such as beef falling to shockingly low levels. Of course, there is little sympathy for the farming lobby in the towns and cities, and with good cause: the farmers cried wolf too often in the past, in the cause of brazen self-interest, so why should people be sympathetic now? We should be sympathetic to the farmers because we need them, and because if the small farmers cannot make a living, they will simply sell out to large-scale farmers who operate agri-businesses, which care nothing for the land and the environment. It might seem a paradoxical thing to say, but farming is suffering from an intellectual crisis, where people who feel they are unappreciated produce food which has no special identity or quality for end users whom they never meet. The entire system of supports produces no greater reward for the conscientious farmer, and until it does so, it will continue to collapse. As there is no political will to change the system, the crisis will continue, and consumers will continue to try to find alternatives to a system which has no time for quality food production.