Fintan O’Toole: The old Irish way of doing things must become extinct — or else we will

As the Government was struggling to agree sectoral targets for the reduction in emissions of carbon and methane, a group of Fine Gael TDs and Senators condemned the “current wave of finger-pointing” at cattle farmers. I wondered what they would say of the finger-pointing by their sainted Michael Collins.

Shortly before he was shot, Collins made a speech on the economic future of the Irish Free State. It may surprise Fine Gael TDs that he foresaw a radical reduction in the scale and number of cattle farms.

This was the Green agenda of a century ago, though not in the environmental sense. It was a common demand of Irish nationalists that cattle ranches should be broken up. As terms of political abuse, “ranchers”, “graziers” and “grabbers” were pretty much interchangeable.

When the Irish government commissioned a study on economic development from the New York consultancy firm Stacy May, its report, published in 1952, opened with the line “In the Irish economy, cattle is king”

A core belief of the founders of the State was that Irish people were emigrating because they could not get access to farmland occupied by cattle. Instead of beef farmers, as contemporary rhetoric had it, “watching cows’ tails grow”, their “ranches” should be converted to more labour-intensive tillage.

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There is, in other words, nothing new in Irish political conflicts about cattle, land use and sustainability.

The underlying conflict about the nature and purposes of agriculture in the early decades of the State was dietary: meat versus plants, animal versus vegetable. Not unlike today.

The dynamics of this earlier conflict were not those of our climate emergency. Critics of “ranchers” were not concerned with the belches of their beasts. Their existential crisis was emigration.

Yet, at a deeper level, there was the same issue: sustainability. A century ago, it was the demographic sustainability of the new Irish state. Now, it is the continuity of human life on the planet.

The old clash, moreover, came down to a choice between raising beasts and growing grain. Was it better for the common good to allow the unrestricted expansion of cattle farming or to replace cows with crops?

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Reality vs rhetoric

As it happened, this conflict was dealt with in the manner that is so characteristic of Irish politics: one side of the argument won the rhetorical war and the other the real one.

The rhetoric of Irish politics remained essentially anti-rancher. It was enshrined in coded form in article 45 of the Constitution, with a perfect balance between pious sentiment and utter lack of effect: “there may be established on the land in economic security as many families as in the circumstances shall be practicable” — a ghostly vestige of “breaking up the ranches”.

But in practice, after the bitter Economic War of the 1930s that set the interests of the small farmers against those of the graziers, the graziers won. When the Irish government commissioned a study on economic development from the New York consultancy firm Stacy May, its report, published in 1952, opened with the line: “In the Irish economy, cattle is king.”

King Cattle has long been dethroned. Agriculture as a whole now accounts for just 6 per cent of gross national income and 9 per cent of the value of Irish exports.

But it accounts for 37.5 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. And that means that the relationship of cattle numbers to sustainability can no longer be fudged. The great Irish skill of saying one thing and doing another is no use to us in this existential crisis.

Not natural

There is nothing “natural” about the way land is used in Ireland. Even in recent years, it has been transformed. Tillage, which is climate-friendly, has shrunk — the area used for cereals will be 14 per cent smaller in 2030 than it was in 2019.

Meanwhile, the cattle herd has shifted dramatically away from beef and towards dairying, which produces more emissions. Over the past decade alone, the dairy herd has grown 40 per cent while the number of beef cattle has declined 17 per cent.

The Economic War of the 1930s was a terrible time for many Irish cattle farmers. But it’s nothing to the environmental wars that are coming in 2030s if we do not act urgently

These are choices driven by profitability — dairying is where the money is. But profitability itself is determined by politics. It is the EU that shapes the market.

Compared with what leaders such as Collins said they wanted to do to them a century ago, the demands being made of Irish cattle farmers now are relatively mild. And many of those farmers might remember from their own family histories the cost of social conflict over land use.

The Economic War of the 1930s was a terrible time for many of them. But it’s nothing to the environmental wars that are coming in 2030s if we do not act urgently.

The last time we had this struggle over the balance between animals and plants in our farming, it ended up being pointlessly divisive. Nothing useful came of it, just a lot of hostile rhetoric, a period of general hardship and an exacerbation of the problem (population decline) that was supposed to be at the heart of it all.

This time, we don’t have the luxury of limitless rhetorical emissions.

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