Mark Hennessy considers whether farmers can maintain their political influence as the numbers making a living from agriculture continue to decline
Once upon a time, farmers could bring Dublin to a halt, cripple Agriculture House and bark at Ministers and backbenchers until they won concessions. Those days are over.
However, the 140,000 full-time and part-time farmers still tending the land remain an influential and, for politicians, a hard-to-ignore lobby, one blessed with a natural cohesiveness.
"There are 150,000 farmers with Department of Agriculture herd numbers. Multiply that by two, or three and you have an awful lot of people," said Fine Gael TD, Mr Paul Connaughton.
"The farming vote is still the single biggest grouping in Irish society that can be brought together.
"They are highly organised and highly political," said Mr Connaughton, who represents rural East Galway.
However, the cohesiveness will become more difficult to maintain as part-timers struggle with holding down a factory job along with evening and weekend work on their land.
The statistics do little to encourage farmers.
In 1973, 20 per cent of workers were involved in agriculture. Today, just 5 per cent are, according to agricultural economist Mr Brendan Kearney.
Last January's tractor protest was a major success for the Irish Farmers' Association president, Mr John Dillon, though it also subtly showed farmers' acceptance that times have changed.
Only a small number of tractors were brought into the city at off-peak times, guided by Garda motorcyclists.
Farmers know, grudgingly perhaps, that urban opinion must be appeased rather than insulted.
"Some 50 per cent, 60 per cent of them are part-time. It is hard to get to Dublin for a protest.
"The days of getting 10,000 people onto the streets are over. People are realistic enough to know that," said one IFA source.
Nevertheless, farmers' political clout in key rural constituencies was only too evident as TDs scurried up and down the ranks to make sure their presence was noted and reported back to the constituency.
Equally, farmers' influence was shown during the first and second Nice Treaty referendums when farmers were lukewarm, if not antagonistic, the first time and more enthusiastic the second time around.
Even then, though, the IFA fought to maintain its separate voice, when Mr Dillon refused to play along with the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern's wish to gather all the farming bodies for a pro-Nice photo-shoot in Cork Airport.
Instead, Mr Dillon ran his own campaign, to the Taoiseach's considerable irritation - ever the political realist, however, he acknowledged the IFA's role as Yes votes were being counted.
Farmers' influence will once more be significant when the next EU treaty, perhaps agreed during the Irish EU Presidency next year, goes before the people in 2006.
By then, the latest Common Agricultural Policy changes will have begun to be felt, along with the repercussions of world trade talks. The men and women of the land are unlikely to be happy. "Farmers vote. They vote more than other people vote.
"If they swing one way or the other, that has a major bearing," is how one Fianna Fáil strategist puts it.
A battle of wills, in the view of many, began between Government Buildings and the IFA immediately after Mr John Dillon took over from Mr Parlon after a bitter leadership battle.
"They were sounding the association out. They wanted to know if it could deliver its people. Was it divided after Dillon's accession? Could they divide and rule?" one association figure believes.
This theory explains the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy's decision to double disease levy fees late last year.
"They wanted to see what they could get away with," the same source went on.
The Government was given the upper hand when the IFA stormed out of the social partnership talks, claiming farmers were not getting enough.
"At one stage it looked as if they would be left out. That would not have done them any good.
"They were pushing very hard for concessions, but they did not really get them," said one Department of Agriculture official.
In the weeks and months that followed, the Government was seen to be gently encouraging the wayward farmer back into the talks, while the association appeared unsure of what it should do.
In the compromise that followed, the farmers got little obvious return.
Certainly, it won nothing like the €1 billion a year aid package it had originally tabled.
However, the Government did make concessions on one of the farming world's pet hates, the EU's Nitrates Directives - it aims to cut the amount of fertilisers and slurry used on farmland.
Under the revised package, the Government has sought Brussels' permission to approve the use of 250kg of nitrogen per hectare "in appropriate circumstances", up on the original 210kg laid down.
But the farmers left with a promise and a prayer that the Minister for Finance will reverse the disease levies when he delivers his 2004 budget in early December - a tall order, perhaps, in more straitened times.
Ironically, the IFA has for years boxed quietly and cleverly on the Brussels stage - more so than it has sometimes done at home, valuing access and relationships over confrontation and conflict.
There, though, much of the credit falls to the IFA's Brussels representative, Mr Michael Treacy, whose ability to get access to the EU Agriculture Commissioner of the day at the critical moment is little short of legendary. The lesson that farmers must influence, rather than bulldoze, has percolated through most layers of the farming world. "There are buttons that need to be pressed. People know that," said one key figure.
Nevertheless, farmers are perfectly willing, and able, to still raise two fingers to the State when they are on their own ground, as they showed when they barred the National Roads Authority from lands until they got better deals.
But the entry bar was backed up by months of negotiation, led by the Progressive Democrat Minister of State, Mr Tom Parlon, during his final period in charge of the IFA and its general secretary, Mr Michael Berkery. Regardless of the relations between Government and farmers, political parties will continue in search of the farming vote, particularly if their voting record stays solid as others shy away from the polling station.
In years gone by, the arithmetic for party strategists was simple: the majority of big farmers voted for the Blueshirts, smaller ones for Fianna Fáil and farm workers voted Labour.
Today, the situation is more complicated. Fine Gael lost significant support during the 1990s when farmers turned up their noses at the idea of government with the Democratic Left.
Fianna Fáil, who produced a poster showing then Democratic Left leader Mr Proinsias De Rossa under the caption, "Farmers are rolling in it", helped the natural bias along in 1997.
"We targeted them in 1997 because we believed that we could get a lot of their vote because they were so unhappy with Fine Gael. And it worked," said a member of Fianna Fáil's election team. And it worked again in 2002.
Between 1969 and 1989, Fianna Fáil won the support of 38 per cent of large farmers and 50 per cent of smaller ones, though by 2002 the party secured 45 per cent of big farmers votes and 57 per cent of smaller ones.
Between 1969 and 1989, Fine Gael, on the other hand, won the loyalty of 49 per cent of large farmers - though this collapsed to 38 per cent and 40 per cent respectively during the 1992 and 1997 general elections.
Fine Gael's success rate with smaller farmers during the same period was even worse. Between 1969 and 1989, it attracted 32 per cent of smaller farmers. In 1992, this figure fell to 25 per cent.
The 1997 general election saw an improvement when the figure rose to 36 per cent, though 2002 proved to be disastrous as Fine Gael managed to garner just 13 per cent of smaller farmers, according to Prof Richard Sinnott.
Nevertheless, Fine Gael's support base amongst farmers in the worst of elections remained significant since the partycaptured 37.1 per cent of all such votes - compared to just 18.5 per cent of working class voters.
In the longer term, though, age and part-time working could prove Irish agriculture's undoing, particularly since the connection enjoyed by children of part-time farmers to farming will loosen.
"The entry costs into farming are too high compared with the returns that people can get. Sure, most people inherit their land. But you need new people too," said former Taoiseach, Mr John Bruton.
"Farmers need a long-term vision. They haven't had that for 20 years. They need to be able to make long-term capital investments. They need politicians to tell them what the situation will be.
"The real problem is that we have lives in a era of perpetual imminent reform without having the reform done and over with.
"Farmers have the feeling that they are living perpetually on the edge."