Whingeing farmers who forget their collusion in corruption

Galling as Wednesday's demonstrations may have been to most Dubliners, farmers have a perfect right to protest in their capital city. The problem, though, is that what we saw on Wednesday was not a protest. It was a whinge. Real political protest comes from a clear sense of who is to blame for the misfortunes that afflict you. Blaming the State which gives the farmers £200 million in annual subsidies in return for £78 million a year in taxes is absurd. Blaming the EU, which gives them £1.5 billion a year, is like an alcoholic suing the brewery that makes the beer.

Why, for example, is the Irish beef industry in such a mess that farmers can't get decent prices for their cattle? Why is it that every crisis in the world marketplace (the collapse of the Russian economy, the closure of the Libyan or Iranian markets because of BSE, and so on) leads to an emergency? Why does it seem that we have one permanent agricultural emergency that merely takes different temporary forms, always leading to the same demand for more cash?

The short and simple answer is corruption. It is now 13 years since the National Economic and Social Council developed a national plan for the beef industry. Everybody - farmers, trade unionists, employers - signed up to it when it was incorporated into the first of the social partnership agreements, in 1987.

The IDA would pour money into creating modern, high-tech processing plants. The farmers would co-operate in ending the ludicrous practice of glutting the beef market in the autumn with a vast over-supply of a perishable product. The real needs of the marketplace - a regular, guaranteed supply of fresh, safe, high-quality meat - would be met by good planning and efficient production. Ireland would stop depending on EU intervention and on unstable markets in the Middle East and Russia and become, as it should be, the leading supplier of safe, quality beef to the supermarkets of Germany, France, Britain and Italy.

Thirteen years on, all of this has happened. And bullocks ride bicycles. The leading beef barons - with a few honourable exceptions - found it much more lucrative to apply their entrepreneurship and ingenuity to fiddling EU schemes, stealing intervention beef and persuading politicians that the taxpayer should underwrite fraudulent misadventures in places like Iraq. As a result, the beef industry is, if anything, even more primitive now than it was in 1986.

Where were the farmers during all of this? Where were the outraged rallies denouncing blatant corruption? Why was the IFA not occupying the Department of Agriculture demanding an end to complicity in the fly-by-night culture of Irish agribusiness?

Because, of course, farmers were only too happy to pocket the short-term benefits of sleaze and cute-hoorism. Their collective sense of social responsibility, like their business, is seasonal. When the sun shines, their notion of the common good evaporates. When dark clouds gather, they suddenly discover the national interest. This applies, too, to poverty. Farmers' leaders have an uncanny knack of discovering the poor whenever they have to make a case for themselves. Drawing attention to the existence of rural slums is commendable in itself. There are indeed severe concentrations of poverty in Donegal and Mayo, the Border counties, Roscommon, north Kerry and Clare. But the most striking thing in the research on the distribution of deprivation published last year by the Combat Poverty Agency in Poverty in Rural Ireland is that the "overriding influence" on poverty is not place but social class. The countryside is as socially divided as the cities are.

You don't help the rural poor by throwing money at farmers in general but by developing broad anti-poverty strategies. If the farming organisations are really worried about poverty, they ought to be demanding radical social policies and ensuring that well-off farmers pay something closer to the £200 million a year they ought to be paying in taxes to help support them. Yet, since when have farmers used their disproportionate political influence to shift State policy to the left?

The same kind of hypocrisy surrounds the larger issue of maintaining a viable population on the land. Few issues, even in Ireland, are surrounded with such piety. One of the founding aims of Fianna Fail is to "get the greatest number possible of Irish families rooted in the soil of Ireland". Article 45 of the Constitution lays down as one of the "directive principles of social policy" the aim of ensuring "that there may be established on the land in economic security as many families as in the circumstances shall be practicable".

Yet one of the few constants of Irish life since the foundation of the State is the decline in the number of people working in agriculture. It was happening in the 1920s, in the 1930s and in every decade since. It is not about the collapse of the Russian beef market or the bad summer of 1998. It is part and parcel of what it means to exist in the developed western world. The truth is that "rural Ireland" no longer exists. Since the arrival of television, the motorcar and the multinational company, there are really only three kinds of places in Ireland - cities, an extended suburbia of commuters and farmers, and depopulated areas where almost no one lives by farming alone. The rhetoric of "Irish families rooted in the soil of Ireland" which was still being trotted out at the protest on Wednesday is utterly hollow.

Before farmers can turn a whinge into a protest, they have to get out from under these sentimental obfuscations. Merely being a farmer is no longer the mark of moral virtue satirised by Anthony Cronin:

The endurance of the rural breed

Seems, like the rugged landscape, stoical.

Rural grasping, rural greed,

Are somehow, unlike ours, heroical.

Now, greed and grasping are just greed and grasping. The notion that the interests of farmers and the interests of Irish society as a whole are identical doesn't wash any more. The extent to which Fianna Fail and Fine Gael can pander to the farm lobby is limited by the increasing resentment of urban Ireland.

If they want to be listened to, farmers need to convince the wider public that they understand their own collusion in the corruption that has destroyed the Irish meat industry. They need to show that their new-found commitment to social justice is more than opportunism. They need to explain how AIB in poor, rural Donegal could have £170 million in 17,000 non-resident accounts in 1991, and how the overall amount of tax paid by farmers remains so puzzlingly low. If all they have to say is the kind of self-pitying rhetoric we heard on Wednesday, they should not expect a sympathetic ear from urban Ireland.