Palaeontologists from all over the world gathered in Ireland last week to see the largest migration for years of that usually invisible but very audible Irish species, agrisaurus whingensis, lumbering towards the capital.
Agrisaurus is not unique to Ireland - each EU country has its own sub-species, with local characteristics. The French specimen has a strange addiction to gathering at Channel ports and preventing lorries from Britain and Ireland moving. The French government has devised a cunning counter-ploy to this tactic: it is known as "capitulation".
Well might you have gazed avidly last week at the capital investment represented by the hundreds of vast agrisaurus tractors. Well might you have gazed at the astonishing number of them that appeared to have no licence plates, which meant, of course, that they were not lawfully entitled to be on the roads. And well might you have wondered how many of those hundreds of tractors on the roads were not taxed and insured.
Land League
So who are we to blame for the presence of so many tractors migrating in such vast herds around the country? Well, we can in part blame Michael Davitt, the founder of the Land League, and we can blame his contemporary, John Philip Holland, the inventor of the submarine. And who else? Lenin and Hitler, of course, and Admiral Doenitz. Go to jail, the lot of you.
The Land League was one of the most disastrous mass movements in Irish history. Admittedly, it was popular; but merely because people are demanding something doesn't mean they should get it. We know about populism in government: it's called Peronism.
And if you want to know what that sad heresy achieves, look up the price of Argentina in this morning's newspaper; you can get the entire country for €15, a stick of gum, a model of the Eiffel Tower and a pet hamster. But don't worry: it'll be cheaper tomorrow.
The Land League sought and got the creation of tens of thousands of uneconomic agricultural units. You can't call them farms, because the origin of that word - "firm" - suggests a strong economic basis, which these wretched small-holdings never possessed.
But once farmers had acquired them, the cultural duty to keep and work them was quite irresistible, no matter the heart-breaking isolation, or the lack of profit.
The Land Acts were a disaster for Ireland: but they were a popular disaster, and Irish schoolchildren are still taught that they were a good thing, though they were the utter reverse. Yet the Land Acts alone were not responsible for all those tractors rumbling illegally everywhere last week.
John Philip Holland was another reason. This Clare man invented the submarine, a quite brilliant device which nearly won two world wars for Germany. And the ability of the U-boat to close the Atlantic terrified European military strategists after 1945, with the prospect of war with the Soviet Union also bringing the apparent certainty of an Atlantic blockade.
Principle of the CAP
That is the underlying principle of the CAP, which is sometimes incorrectly called the Commmon Agricultural Policy. Its real title is Criminal Anti-competitive Protectionism. CAP created Pyrenees of food across Europe; CAP subsidises wet and boggy Offaly to produce sugar, as CAP also ensures that the Caribbean sugar industry can't compete with that of Clara. This is the equivalent of subsidised fresh cod from the Sahara outselling that of Killybegs.
As it happens, it wasn't necessary for the EEC (as it then was) to concoct the CAP to ensure that Europe never went hungry in a third world war. The huge Soviet submarine fleet wasn't built for a siege: its torpedo-carrying vessels were intended to keep sub-hunters well away from Soviet missile-bearing subs, which were intended to turn the US and Western Europe into, well, the Sahara, but without the cod, subsidised or otherwise.
That's how the strands of history came together around those tractors on our roads last week. Yet still, there's something rather touching about how unreal that history has made our farmers. It has made them addicted to subsidies, and they take it as a natural right that the cheques, signed The German Taxpayer, continue to be their main source of income. Indeed, they expect Fritz to be even more generous as farm incomes "fall", into the indefinite future.
Small farms generate small incomes and require small amounts of work. Ergo, farmers, get another job, as farmers do in Germany.
We did a deal
We did a deal when we entered the EEC. Quid pro quo, we sacrificed our fisheries for our farmers, and gave the Spanish trawling rights over our waters. Hence our farmers on their bogs got deutschmarks, and we got Spaniards on our seas. This is what we negotiated. In grown-up land, it's called a deal.
Deals don't mean much in the Jurassic Park of the IFA, which wants smiling Joe Walsh to "deliver strong market management to lift milk, beef and grain prices". This is, presumably, agrisaurus-speak for more money from Fritz. No mention - yet, anyway - of the IFA demanding that Joe open the planet Venus up for Irish beef exports, with Germany supplying the rockets (which, as we know, from the events that brought about the CAP, they're rather good at).
But never mind CAP for the moment. When will Irish farmers - and indeed builders - put number-plates on all their tractors and JCBs? And when will An Garda Síochána make sure that they do?