TEAGASC, the agriculture and food development authority, has been quietly celebrating its 50th birthday this year. It is marking a half-century of truly creative work which began with the formation of An Foras Taluntais with the aid of American money in 1958, writes Sean Mac Connell
It would not be an exaggeration to say that AFT and Teagasc have made not only rural Ireland, but this country as a whole, a much richer and safer place to be. They provided the the spine for most of the developments we have seen in agricultural in recent decades.
It would be easy to point to the vast increases in milk, beef and cereal output and the fact that our food is now safer and more plentiful than 50 years ago, but my Teagasc story is a different one altogether.
I first became aware of its role when I shared a flat in the late 1960s with a young man called John O'Beirne, who came from Kilconnell, near Ballinasloe, Co Galway. He had a flat in Church Street in Roscommon town, which then had a population of about 1,200 people. You could literally hear the corncrake calling if you were standing on the town square late at night.
I knew he was an agricultural adviser, but I had no idea what that entailed until I saw him draw up charts for use at evening meetings with farmers in small village halls and schools throughout his part of Co Roscommon. Nor did I expect to find farmers calling to the flat late at night looking for advice on whether to sell or buy cattle or take out a loan or whether or not they should send child X or Y to secondary school.
John introduced me to the legendary Frank Young from Athlone, whose love for farming, farming people and rural Ireland knew no boundary. Frank was also an adviser, but while John knew when the working day was supposed to end, Frank did not.
Frank was once asked after breakfast by the landlady of the house where he lodged in to bring back some milk for the lunch table. He arrived back at 2am the next morning because he had been giving advice or had got involved in some farm family problem.
Frank retired recently and there was a huge hooley in Athlone attended by hundreds of people from across the country. He even earned editorial mention in the rural bible, the Farmers Journal.
They had other friends too, including Harry O'Brien from Cork, a horticultural adviser and Michael Deely from Galway, whose son Trevor tragically went missing some years ago.
If there was a single vice between the lot of them it was an inordinate interest in playing cards - twenty-five, 25 to be precise. Games used to continue in our bachelor flat until the early hours of the morning.
They all worked for the county agricultural officer, Seamus Hunt, and they would go to their office for 9.30 in the morning to wait for farmers to call in with queries or phone about their problems, before heading out into the countryside. However, on many mornings, they would head back to the flat to play out the hand of cards they had been dealt in the early hours before someone had the good sense to say it was bed time.
Many of the people they dealt with back then were bachelor farmers who had no resources and they worked with them, not just as advisers but as friends, and became deeply involved in their lives. Some of these older men would make no farming decisions at all without consulting the Teagasc men. They also consulted the advisers on more personal matters such as affairs of the heart.
I know another Teagasc adviser, working in a different western county, who was once asked to see if he could arrange a marriage between one of these "clients" and a widow woman who lived a few miles away. He had the misfortune to get a bit too involved in this bit of off-farm activity which went badly astray because the widow, who was of a mature age, thought the young Teagasc man fancied her and began to stalk him.
The issue was resolved only when he applied for a transfer out of the west, away from both of them. The farmer and the widow never managed to get it together either.
Later, these friends were to add more richness to my life by introducing me to others such as Michael Miley, Padraig Mannion, P.J. Nolan and Joe Murray. When I became an agriculture correspondent for this newspaper, using their names opened a whole treasure trove of advice and help.
I am also talking about people like Tom Maher, who is a world authority on potatoes, Jim O'Mahony, the tillage expert and many, many more who carried their knowledge lightly and were willing to share it with all comers. What was and still is extraordinary about them is their dedication to the job. Theirs was a vocation, because the hours they worked were certainly not compensated with money.
But they earned due reward in the respect of those they helped out on the farms and across the fabric of rural Ireland and they can see it in the rural landscape they helped to shape.
Happy birthday, boys!