Fintan O’Toole: Farmers’ denial of climate reality has been shaped by the parties they support

The front page of the current edition of the Irish Farmers Journal is dominated by a picture of a disconsolate-looking father and son, Francis and Aaron McNally, wading through their flooded fields on the Shannon Callows in Co Westmeath. Their summer hay ground is under water after the wettest July ever recorded in Ireland and their cattle are having to eat the grass on higher ground that should have been used for silage.

Flick through the pages and it’s basically the same story seen from different angles. Agricultural shows in Newcastle West, Louisburgh and Carnew cancelled because of the weather. A farmer in Banagher reporting that he has “never seen anything like it ... It’s a disaster for fodder”.

The Dealer, an anonymous column on the business of farming, reports that “overall yields from this year’s crops will range from unexciting to near disastrous” and suggests that “with our weather becoming more extreme and unpredictable ... we may need a reorganisation of the whole (tillage) sector to prevent its implosion”.

Of course, there are always tough years in farming. But farmers are not stupid: they know that bad weather is becoming both more frequent and more extreme.

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Yet open, for example, the Mail on Sunday and you find a column in which Emmanuel O’Dea, director of the militant Beef Plan movement, is telling us that methane emissions from cattle (responsible for 65 per cent of the greenhouse gases produced by agriculture in Ireland) are not a problem because “no additional carbon is added to the atmosphere”.

Or listen to the Fianna Fáil chair of the Oireachtas agriculture committee Jackie Cahill, who is also a dairy farmer, and you will hear knockabout anti-Green rhetoric: “Rural Ireland is not simply a park for the Greens to entertain themselves.”

On the one hand, farmers are on the frontline of climate chaos. But on the other, they are encouraged to cling to a narrative in which action to control that chaos is a plot against them.

How do we explain this strange disjunction? By wilful political obscurantism.

Let’s go back almost a decade to the Teagasc National Farm Survey of 2014. As analysed in a subsequent paper by Domna Tzemi and James Breen, it found some startling attitudes to the expected effects of climate change on farming in Ireland.

Firstly, just over half of the farmers surveyed even believed that man-made greenhouse gas emissions were contributing to global climate change and affecting weather patterns. Secondly, most farmers did not see climate change as having any short-term effect on their own lives and livelihoods.

The level of denial was astonishing: 29 per cent considered that there would be no impact at all; 28 per cent said that the effects would be felt only in 50 years’ time; and 20 per cent said they were unsure. That’s three-quarters of Irish farmers essentially unaware of the consequences of climate chaos for themselves, their livelihoods and their families.

The survey also asked the farmers whether they thought agriculture in Ireland was itself contributing to climate change. Farming accounts for 37 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions in Ireland.

Most of those agricultural emissions are methane and nitrous oxide produced in the raising of livestock. Yet in response to a question about whether livestock production was an important source of emissions, 28 per cent of farmers said that they didn’t know and 30 per cent either disagreed or strongly disagreed that it was.

[ Opinion: Farmers should be on the frontline fighting the climate crisis. Yet some deny its existence ]

Remarkably, many farmers literally did not want to know about what climate change meant for them. Nearly 40 per cent indicated that not only had they not received any agri-environmental advice or training, but also that they were not willing to receive any in the future.

More than half of the farmers stated that they would not be willing to use a Teagasc advisory plan that would show the potential reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the adoption of new technologies on their farm. Among cattle farmers that rose to over two-thirds.

When denial goes this deep, you can’t just blame individual farmers. These attitudes were shaped by their representative organisations and by the political parties they support, especially Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

It suited those parties to pretend that the threat was not climate change but climate action, a menace from which they themselves would defend rural Ireland. They consistently referred to “the Green lobby”, as though attempts to sustain human life on earth were a mere sectoral interest. Or as though floods and droughts would affect only city-dwelling sandal-wearers.

As farmers know better than anyone else, you reap what you sow. The effects of climate change are not, as so many Irish farmers convinced themselves, 50 years away. They are here and now.

[ Farming and politics on collision course over impact of our changing climate ]

We surely can’t continue to sustain a mentality in which “the Green agenda” is construed as hostile to farming rather than essential for its sustainability. Trying to produce food in dire weather, and on land where the rivers are dead and the bees are dying, is no future for anyone.

Farmers won’t listen to the Green Party and certainly won’t be swayed by columns in The Irish Times. But the parties they actually vote for have a responsibility to give them honest leadership.