Ireland Now: Tales of Change from the Global Island

Passing on the Farms: From Family to Euro-Business

C H A P T E R 5 Passing on the Farms: From Family to Euro-Business We were standing where the paths cross near the houses—Donal, the Yank, old Eoghan, Tadhg the Joker and many more of us— chatting about the ways of the world. Who should come along but Séamisín, a bag across his back with a handful of Blacks to sow. Anyone who did not know him would swear that he had been a beggerman ever since he left the cradle. The figure he cut brought a smile they could not repress to everyone’s lips. Dear as clothes are at present, no one there would have given sixpence for what he had covering his bones. No one could muster enough courage to speak to him but since he is Séamas’ uncle he greeted him. “God save you uncle!” said he. “The same God save you,” the uncle replied. “Is it potato sets you have there?” “It is.” “Isn’t it great courage you have and to be planting them in this class of weather?” . . . “. . . I cannot tell what God will do with these, and all we could ever do was put our trust in Him,” was Séamisín’s reply. (Great Blasket Island, Spring 1920) (O’Crohan 1986) Flanagan 05 6/5/07 1:37 PM Page 112 113 PART I: FARMING AS IT MAY HAVE BEEN The business of planting potatoes was a simple matter a century ago on Great Blasket Island or on any small farm in Ireland. When the time came, you did it and hoped for the best, with only survival hanging in the balance. No matter how complicated the story of the present-day Irish, the present has grown out of the soil; it begins with people living from the land. The standard image of Ireland is rolling green farmland dotted with little white houses and shaggy sheep. To many, this is the real Ireland, the place of origin. Politically, access to the land itself is a symbol of the colonial struggle. Historically, the capacity of small farms to produce little more than subsistence was the impetus that drove millions away to other countries . Biographically, many of the people of Ireland begin their personal stories with reference to the small farms on which they grew up. This was certainly the case in the past and is still so today. It is no error of memory or perception that ties the image of Ireland to the land. When I was living in Ireland, I asked a friend who was traveling in Europe if he would stop for a visit. “No thanks. I’ve driven it once, and it’s just one big cow pasture.” Many of the young people growing up in rural Ireland have shared a similar sentiment regarding rural life. The dullness of prospects in the countryside has driven farm Flanagan 05 6/5/07 1:37 PM Page 113 boys and girls away to the cities to live and work, and this is true now more than ever. In that respect it is the same in Ireland as in other wealthy and rapidly changing countries of Europe and the Americas: the title to a piece of farmland that for countless generations meant work and life itself no longer offers an attractive option to young people. Eking out a modest living from the hard work of farming, as noble an existence as it may be, is only an attractive choice when balanced against other choices of limited promise. And twenty-first-century Ireland offers young people lots of choices. In the first part of this chapter we dip into the past a little so that we can understand the kind of change that farming and rural life have undergone up to the present day. Each of the features of life that we focus on here—the common identity of family and farm, cooperation, conventions for passing on the land, close ties among farmers—are selected based on how much these aspects of life have changed, and that is the focus of the second part of the chapter. To understand the significance of the land in the past, we need only look at a few of the images in the black-and-white photographs from the time of the land evictions in the 1800s. They show families standing by cottages reduced to...