Fifty years ago, agriculture was the mainspring of the economy, supplemented by indigenous industry and tourism. They could not provide the employment or fund the services that people aspired to and could find elsewhere. The result was the haemorrhage of emigration.
The farming population, mostly on small to medium-size farms, struggled to provide sufficient family income, but a mutually supportive community met each morning at rural creameries. Problems included excessive dependence on the British market, whose farmers were supported by deficiency payments, and the limited ability of the Irish exchequer on a narrow tax base to provide meaningful support.
It was in this context that the National Farmers' Association was born in 1955. It blooded itself 10 years later in its stand-off with the government, to the indignation of the Dublin professional classes discommoded in their travels.
The incentive to join the EEC was the Common Agricultural Policy, largely taking over from government farm support, and freeing resources for social needs. Although membership was also logical from an industrial and free trade point of view, exposure to competition for older companies initially weighed more heavily than new market opportunities, later to become hugely important. A few golden years followed. Farm incomes and production soared. Farmers modernised, bought machinery, built themselves new houses. The lagging behind of the cities led to urban-rural tensions and tax marches.
By the early 1980s the honeymoon was over. High interest rates and taxes contributed to stagnant farm incomes. The milk superlevy, reluctantly agreed in 1984, halted further dairy expansion, where Ireland had a comparative advantage. Sheep numbers went up to nine million, after a common policy was introduced, causing environmental damage to hillsides, but have fallen back since.
An always overlooked benefit to farmers of the credit insurance for beef exports to Iraq is that stock prices soared to unprecedented heights with a 12 cwt bullock in the autumn of 1988 fetching a price of £1,200.
Antagonism between trade unions and farm organisations softened with the advent of social partnership in 1987. This was preceded by a reversal of alliances. The IFA, often seen as representing larger commercial farmers, was considered closer to Fine Gael, while the ICMSA was seen as closer to Fianna Fáil. Dr FitzGerald's government's adoption of a variable flat-rate land tax, to provide an incentive to produce, a bright idea in theory, like the wealth tax and the residential property tax, was successfully resisted by the IFA in concert with Fianna Fáil.
Farmers have been subject since to income tax like everyone else. The IFA joined social partnership, but the ICMSA, annoyed over abandonment of the land tax, initially stayed out.
The 1990s saw successive waves of EU CAP reform, first, the MacSharry plan, then Agenda 2000, culminating in the single farm payment, shaped for Irish circumstances by the long stewardship of the minister, Joe Walsh, now succeeded by the popular first woman agriculture minister, Mary Coughlan.
By now modern economic sectors supplying attractive alternative jobs were beginning to dwarf agriculture, and our interest in the global trading system could not be ignored. Direct payments and the Rural Environment Protection Scheme (REPS) have become a sizeable part of most farm incomes.
Farmers battled through BSE and foot-and-mouth to maintain the viability of an industry which cannot rely on regular annual income increases nor even the average industrial wage. As Agenda 2000 negotiations concluded in Berlin on the medium-term financing of the EU, one organisation was pacing the streets outside, not IBEC or ICTU, but the IFA. If, in tense negotiations, £50 million had been lost in structural funds, would they have been missed? No prizes for guessing that negotiating efforts concentrated on securing farmers' expectations, though without detriment to a further round of structural and cohesion funding now tapering off.
As a career choice for young people, there is a real difficulty in anticipating farming conditions more than a few years ahead. A squeeze continues to come from the World Trade Organisation. A retired neighbour mused during the week, whether farming, as we know it, would exist in 30 years' time.
In the Seanad two weeks ago, Fine Gael sought reversal of Greencore's decision to close Carlow Sugar Factory, pending the outcome of WTO negotiations. Fianna Fáil, while sympathetic to deferral, was cautious of interfering with the market which companies are supposed to anticipate, not follow. Labour, like Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, foresaw the free market driving the abandonment of less economic activities in Ireland to the benefit of the developing world.
Ireland is largely self-sufficient in sugar. Security of supply was one motive for the CAP. New Zealand agriculture ministers are frustrated at protected production in Japan and Saudi Arabia, not to mention Europe, but what country wants to be totally dependent for food on distant foreign suppliers in an uncertain world?
Last summer in Berlin, Brazilian beef was on restaurant menus. Imports from outside the EU should be subject to the same quality standards and statements of origin required of domestic producers. (I was gratified, following heifer sales, when my cousin Philippa showed me the note on her Clonmel check-out docket dated November 24th, 2004: "Martin Mansergh, Friarsfield, Tipperary is a supplier of Superquinn Quality Assured Irish Beef this week".)
The IFA, of which this columnist is a member, is to be warmly congratulated on its effectiveness over 50 years under energetic leaders, not least John Dillon and Tom Parlon, supported by a first-grade, long-serving general secretary Michael Berkery.
Agriculture is no longer sufficient, if it ever was, for either regional or national prosperity, but is still essential to both. In Ireland, government from the Taoiseach down strongly supports agriculture, country life and rural development.