A Martian coming to these shores could be forgiven for thinking our national flower and our primary cash-crop is ragwort, writes Kevin Myers.
And if our Martian had heard of that great, diseased and bloated monster called the Common Agricultural Policy, she would assume that our farmers are being paid headage or bloomage or cribbage (or whatever the EU term for bribery is) is for the industrial-scale production of ragwort.
Of course nobody is paid for growing ragwort; and though it is perfectly lethal, it is everywhere. When it is standing, animals will not touch it; but when cut, their antennae are unable to detect the plant's warning signals, and they eat it. It is deadly poison, killing livestock both when fresh and long afterwards, if inadvertently baled with fodder.
Moreover, it spreads as vigorously as scabies in a brothel. An allotment of ragwort one August can cause acres of it downwind the following summer. And there are no easy ways of dealing with the infected fields. You can plough the plants into the ground and hope they don't come back the next year; or you dig them out by hand, remove them from the pasture and burn or compost them.
Ragwort is so lethal that it has been illegal to allow it on your property for a very long time indeed. Failure to abate ragwort was one of those few agrarian crimes for which the RIC used regularly prosecute, in between those other periods of tumult which occasionally interrupted the otherwise blissful harmony of Irish rural life. Their successors in An Garda Síochána were equally vigilant in hunting down the growers of this plant, not least because there was a strong neighbourhood taboo against its tolerance. The lazy farmer of one year was causing a lot of sore backs for everyone round him a year later.
Somewhere in the intervening decades, the enforcement of this law slipped into abeyance; and a few years ago, when responsibility for prosecuting ragwort growers passed from the Garda to the Department of Agriculture, enforcement just about ceased. Now ragwort is everywhere, poisoning thousands of acres, especially land which is now lying fallow in that latest EU exercise in fiscal infamy called "setaside".
The net effect of this is that farmers are being bribed to create oases of unmanaged land, little unchecked paradises of docks, thistles, brambles and ragwort which in time will contaminate the pastures around them.
Farmers are not alone in their neglect of their land. Perhaps the greatest culprits are county councils, which own and are therefore responsible for roadside verges, along which ragwort is now prospering as never before. Vast yellow armies of invaders now line our roadways, their malevolent yellow heads bobbing in the breeze. Soon, uncropped, their flowers will turn to seeds, and their down will be borne on a breeze in a vortex of unchecked and unpunished contamination. And no one has to pay the price, other than the innocent landowners downwind over the summer months of next year. Lovely, isn't it?
So here we have, once again, a vicious, state-subsidised triangle, sponsoring the contamination of the Irish landscape. EU-supported farmers are being paid to allow their land become ragwort-factories, while the government Department which is meant to be enforcing the law over these evil vegetables apparently does nothing whatever about them. Meanwhile, local authorities are almost cultivating this poison.
This year has been the worst anyone remember, as agricultural delinquency mounts and government passivity becomes positively Bolivian: walk into the Ragwort Suppression Branch of the Department of Agriculture, and you will probably find a couple of RSB enforcement officers snoozing under their sombreros. The consequence is that I, and my farming neighbours, have once again manually to remove ragwort sent to us in seed-form by strangers, perhaps miles away.
And so it was the the other day I was stamping around my humble land-holding on a ragwort-hunt, spade in hand, the ragwort-hounds - Parsnip, Mumps and Wurrum, mongrels to a man - being generally idiotic around me. A cluster of ragwort attracted my attention on the raised edge of the ménage, where the grass is never cut. I had successfully extracted a dozen of the offending intruders by the roots when I caught sight of about 10 large blue-green eggs lying in a a little flat oval in the middle of the long grass. Beside them sat a large, unmoving, speckled bird the size of a pheasant - but it was no pheasant.
Frantically ushering the dogs away and back to the stable-yard, I went rummaging for my bird books. Could the bird be what I suspected? To Eric Dempsey and Michael O'Clery's invaluable Complete Guide to Ireland's Birds. Dumpy with short bill. Yes! Confirmation from other bird books.
Eight to 12 eggs. Yes! Brown and barred! Yes! It was a corncrake, a veritable corncrake, here on my field in Kildare! So, I softly retraced my steps towards the nest until the head of the roosting hen was just in sight, and then, very carefully, and from a safe distance, I shot it. Corncrakes roast beautifully, you know, and are delicious with cranberries; moreover, next day, I breakfasted quite imperially on the eggs.
What? It's not April 1st? All right. I left the hen alone, of course, and by the purest of good fortune, as evening descended a few days later and I was returning from putting a neighbour's horses to bed, I spotted her leading her waddling, baffled brood down the road, and away to their new lives.
And the moral of the story? No ragwort, no corncrake-sighting.