The imagery of fallen trees, broken power lines and roofless sheds makes plain the impact of Storm Éowyn on Irish farms. To be on a farm without power and water in one of the busiest working months of the year is a cruel blow.
All along the west coast – but also through the midlands and the Border areas – whole communities continue to rely on small farms for their viability. This is something that jars with the idea of a country driven by the success of its foreign direct investment policies, with its thriving pharmaceutical, technology and financial services sectors.
The recent Farm Structure Survey published by the CSO revealed that the number of farms in Ireland has continued to fall over the past decade, down some 5 per cent. The number of farmers for whom farming is their sole income is also slightly down (at 53 per cent). Although this might appear to reinforce the shift from agriculture to other sectors of the economy that has transformed the Irish economy since the 1950s, the reality is much more complex.
There are still 133,174 farms in Ireland. More than a quarter are smaller than 10 hectares (25 acres), heavily weighted to the west of Ireland. This is obviously a legacy of history and of the social, cultural and political forces that remade the Irish landscape.
The demise of small farmers has long been predicted. James Connolly wrote in 1897: “Have our advocates of peasant proprietary really considered the economic tendencies of the time and the development of the mechanical arts in the agricultural world? The day of small farmers is gone and wherever they are still found, they find it impossible to compete with the mammoth farmers of America and Australia.”
In fact, Irish small farmers were only getting going.
Connolly’s prediction came even as the creation of owner-occupied small farms was being realised through Land Acts that were remarkable internationally for the relative ease in which the transfer of land ownership occurred. It involved, in essence, long-term government loans allowing tenants to buy the land they farmed on rent from their landlords. By 1916, 64 per cent of farms were owner-occupied, compared with 3 per cent in 1870.
This was funded by a British government desperate to pacify Ireland. The government failed in this, of course, but the Irish revolution brought a new dimension to landholding. Drawing on the doctrine of James Fintan Lalor, who had written that strong and independent small farming communities were the only base on which a people could be improved or on which a nation could safely rest, nationalist rhetoric was laced with the imagery of agrarianism.
All things were promised to all people – the landless were to be given land, small farmers were to have their holdings increased and larger farmers to have their position safeguarded. That the remaining landlords would be stripped of their holdings was a given, yet if the rebels were to make good on their commitments, they faced the challenge of not merely freeing Ireland, but also extending its land mass.
In this vision, political independence would ensure the agricultural prosperity that would drive a self-sufficient economy and underpin a Gaelic cultural revival. After independence, attempts were made to make real this vision. The Land Commission was reconstituted in 1923 and over the following decade, about (182,000 hectares) 450,000 acres were redistributed to 24,000 families.
The downside of the ambition to establish as many families as possible on the land was that the farms created were so small – never more than 20 hectares (50 acres) – as to render them incapable of expanding production.
Even after 1945, 25,800 small farms were created by the Irish government. This led to what the Irish Farmers Journal described as “rural slums” and the widespread practice of what was little more than subsistence farming.
Love of the land and of farming remained overwhelming. Sean Ó Faoláin, in his book The Irish: A Character Study, wrote that the tenacity, perseverance and sacrifice of the Irish small farmer was the “most moving and astonishing spectacle in the whole Irish story. For centuries, through generation after generation, starving not by thousands but by millions, falling into the earth like the dung of cattle, weeping and cursing as they slaved under the indifference of God and their masters, they clung to their wretched bits of land with a savage fierceness, clung as it were by their bleeding fingernails.”
What the Irish were trying to do flew straight into the face of the prevailing winds of the rest of the western world, however, where workers were being freed from the land to provide labour for industrial development.
[ Farming for and with nature has entered the mainstreamOpens in new window ]
This drift from the land had been under way from the 19th century, but its momentum accelerated after the second World War . In 1945, 522,000 men worked on Irish farms; 20 years later in 1965 that number had fallen to just more than 300,000. This was the great exodus to Birmingham and Boston – and it was only beginning.
Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the number whose principal occupation was farming declined by almost 2 per cent annually in Ireland, although many held on to the land. Farm households fell from 22 per cent of total population in 1973 to less than 5 per cent in 1997.
There is one other matter in the Farm Structure Survey that points to further imminent change. Over the past decade, the number of farm holders aged 65 and over has increased by a third to some 50,392. What will happen to the land when these people take their leave of it? More than half of all farmers say that they have no succession plan in place.
Paul Rouse is a professor of history in University College Dublin
- Listen to our Inside Politics Podcast for the latest analysis and chat
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
