Fianna Fáil used the impending centenary of this cataclysmic event to add legitimacy to the methods used to increase Irish food production. The government’s ‘Grow More Wheat!’ campaign became ubiquitous: the slogan was repeated on the wireless, in newspapers and in political speeches on town-square platforms. Appealing to farmers in 1941, Seán Lemass, the Minister for Supplies, reiterated that Ireland needed increased production as a matter of urgency because ‘outside sources of supply are virtually cut off’ and reserves ‘insufficient’, yet ‘people need bread’.3 More sinisterly, from 1942 onwards official announcements insisted ‘Only the Farmers are Between Us and Famine’.4 The government message was repeated from the pulpit, too. In his Lenten pastoral of 1942, the bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise attacked the ‘materialistic conflict in Europe’, reminding people that ‘lack of co-operation with the civil authority’ would result in ‘a shortage of food more terrible than the failure of the potato crop in the Black Forty Seven’.5
There was more to this than the cynical manipulation of historical memory of famine by church and state. The Dáil heard stories of the urban poor’s desperation for affordable food during the Emergency, a period when the government froze wages but the price of living skyrocketed because of wartime inflation.6 There were reports of families of thirteen forced to share a small loaf of black bread for a week and Dublin women fainting in bread queues.7 Furthermore, devastating famines occurred elsewhere with grim frequency in the early 1940s. About half a million people starved to death in Leningrad (1941–2) and some three million died from hunger in Bengal (1942–3). Famine also occurred nearer home, in Greece (1941–2), the Netherlands (1944–5) and the Warsaw Ghetto (1944). In February 1944, reports of the 1943 Chinese famine landed on de Valera’s desk. They are likely to have sent a cold shudder through the Taoiseach’s bony frame. Correspondents from China vividly depicted the erosion of a progressive, hard-working social system by hunger in provinces which had failed to grow enough rice and over-relied on imports.8 Substituting ‘wheat’ for ‘rice’ made a chilling parallel with Ireland’s supply crisis at the time.
Irish state propaganda allowed farmers to be seen as the shock troops in Ireland’s private war against the apocalypse of famine. Concentration on the farmer figure continued the post-independence nationalist idealisation of the smallholder and the ruralist ethic. The smallholder-as-Ireland was embodied in the ploughman – back hunched, tilling the soil with his horses beneath a beaming sun – depicted on the Irish pound note from 1929. The state’s focus on the farmer during the Emergency echoed the Irish hierarchy’s concept of ruralism as the all-embracing embodiment of the very spirit of Irishness.9 Politically, too, the national effort to overcome scarcity and the threat of starvation during the Emergency represented a unique national unity of purpose, with most parties and interest groups in agreement: more wheat had to be grown.
For much of the history of modern Ireland the countryside was the arena for battles between nationalist and crown forces. Post-independence, the compulsory purchase and distribution of land through the Land Commission continued the anti-colonial thrust. The compulsory tillage scheme represented a very different form of state intervention, aiming to get Ireland’s farmers to till their land to cultivate wheat and other cereal crops rather than giving land over to dairy farming or other uses. Put simply, the government sought to use the scheme to provide people with enough bread to prevent social discord. It also sought to control prices and productivity to ensure that enough food was produced and equitably distributed. Apparently unremarkable, the scheme actually came to represent the high-water mark of state involvement in agriculture in the history of independent Ireland.
Compulsory tillage formed the centrepiece of the Irish government’s emergency controls on agriculture, introduced in 1939 and periodically extended thereafter. Jim Ryan’s Department of Agriculture oversaw these regulations; Seán Lemass’ Ministry of Supplies dealt with prices and complaints of overcharging.10 As with many Emergency measures, the government’s hand was forced by the British precedent of rationing and a strict price-control mechanism.11 These, together with the high insurance costs of transporting cattle during a time of marine warfare and the scarcity of feed and fertiliser, ensured that the export of livestock to Britain fetched very little profit at this time and Irish farmers’ ample returns from export during the First World War became little more than a distant memory.12
Ryan announced the scheme in late 1939 and it was implemented from 1940 to 1948. The Department of Agriculture sent inspectors to nearly every farm in the state, to assess the holding and determine how much land the farmer should put under tillage, a quota based on the farm’s size and quality. When the scheme was launched as the Emergency Powers (No. 12) Order 1939, Ryan announced that farmers with holdings below ten acres would be exempted, but the rest were required to till one-eighth of their arable land.13 Those who failed to meet the requirements would be liable for a fine of up to £100 or six months’ imprisonment.14 Rough mountain, bog, sand dunes, forest and land subject to flooding were exempted.15 Inspectors had the power to enter holdings, repeatedly if necessary, to provide the evidence that could result in prosecution for offending farmers.16
Even more significant, however, was a threat to farmers articulated by Jim Ryan shortly after the scheme was launched. Before the harvest of 1940, the minister announced that he had instructed his officers ‘to enter on to and take possession of holdings’ of any farmers who failed to comply with his quota.17 This empowered the department’s inspectors to act as bailiffs, enabling the state to seize private land and let it to conacre tenants considered more reliable and productive.18 This was a bold threat indeed and it belied the cosy ruralism of government propaganda. As a derogation of property rights, the scheme evoked uncomfortable parallels with Soviet agricultural collectives of the era. Reacting to the announcement, the Irish Independent attacked the power to confiscate holdings with typical bluster, accusing Ryan of a ‘repugnant’, ‘high-handed threat’ which would allow the state to act as ‘judge, jury, sheriff and bailiff’.19
The policy was not without precedent in Ireland, however. The compulsion to till built on Fianna Fáil’s emphasis on tillage during the years of the Economic War (1932–8), when trade restrictions made stock unprofitable and the government vigorously encouraged wheat growing.20 Drawing up plans for what was to become compulsory tillage in 1938, officials from the Department of Agriculture noted that the average yield for tillage crops had declined after tillage drive propaganda was relaxed from 1935.21 During the Emergency the department therefore decided to place a premium on propaganda. They also noted that compulsory tillage had been witnessed before, if briefly and less extensively, when the imperial authorities introduced it during the Great War. Records showed that in 1915 and 1916, despite intensive propaganda, farmers were still devoting most of their time to livestock.22 When tillage was made compulsory, under the Defence of the Realm Act in 1917, the area under tillage increased by a million acres. This convinced Agriculture officials that ‘intensive tillage developments cannot be obtained without compulsion’.23 During the Emergency, then, the state adopted a twin-pronged approach in enforcing increased tillage, combining counsel with coercion. The scheme followed that instituted in Northern Ireland in September 1939 by the Craigavon administration, itself following Westminster’s lead. At the time, The Irish Times commented: ‘farmers are notorious anarchists, and it remains to be seen how those of Northern Ireland will respond to the new discipline.’24 When it was introduced south of the border, these proved prescient words indeed.
The issue of land repossession was particularly sensitive in Ireland. If historical memory of the Great Famine was powerful during the Emergency, so too was that of the Land War. In Ireland, historically, popular protest that was legitimated in moral economic terms centred on agrarian crime and land-based agitation, not the food riots witnessed in England.25 Given this background, the scope of the powers now enjoyed by t
illage inspectors proved contentious. Compulsory tillage, one senator claimed, was state instruction ‘at the point of the bayonet’.26 When the scheme was announced in October 1939 a number of farmers’ organisations sought consultation with Ryan, but he refused.27 This hard-headed, top-down approach typified Fianna Fáil’s implementation of the scheme for the remainder of the Emergency. By 1944, tillage orders were revised to take greater account of the heterogeneity of land: the country was divided into three districts to ensure quotas reflected the quality of land.28 This revision was, however, unlikely to have abated farmers’ scorn for the scheme because it came after the considerable intensification of tillage stipulations. In 1940 Ryan upped the requirement to till one-eighth of arable land to one-sixth. In 1941 he announced that the requirement to till one-sixth had now become one-fifth; and later in the year increased this mandatory quota to one-quarter.29 In 1942 the government had a bill passed increasing the maximum penalty for failing to comply with tillage orders from £100 to £500.30 In 1944 the ten-acre limit was reduced to five acres and the quota increased to three-eighths.31
As Ireland’s supply situation worsened, the government’s stance in the press switched noticeably as well. Official notices changed from external legitimation of compulsory tillage, by referring to wartime disruption, to an increasingly inward and punitive focus on disobliging farmers. Addressing the Seanad on 4 October 1939, de Valera expressed his hope that compulsion in agriculture would not be necessary, yet less than a week later compulsory tillage was introduced.32 The Department of Agriculture published statistics of farmers dispossessed of their land or fined under the order,33 the notices usually sharing space in newspapers with calls from the bishops for greater food production.34 In December 1943, in contrast to his conciliatory tone of four years earlier, de Valera attacked what he called the ‘black sheep’ among the farming community who were failing in their tillage obligations.35 This was in keeping with a warning issued by the Taoiseach the previous year, one far blunter than the ‘Grow More Wheat!’ message. Now it was ‘Till or Go to Jail’.36 Fianna Fáil were making it quite clear that coercion, not cosy homesteads and comely maidens, would be the norm in the Irish countryside.
According to the writer John McGahern, son of a garda, the rule of law was relatively weak during the Emergency: ‘In the Ireland of that time the law was still looked upon as alien, to be feared and avoided, and kept as far away as possible.’37 The lowly status of the rule of law then may help to explain the actions of Stephen Dalton, a small farmer in County Leitrim, when he was visited by a tillage inspector in late 1941. Seeing the inspector approach, Dalton ran towards him ‘cursing and threatening to sink his teeth into his belly’.38 Dalton explained in court that he had reacted so violently because he thought the inspector was a member of the police. Predictably, this excuse was greeted with hoots of laughter in the courtroom. It may be that Dalton was, in the words of the judge who charged another Leitrim farmer earlier that year for not complying with a tillage order, ‘a stupid bovine creature’.39 His reasoning may, on the other hand, have rested on a common antipathy to the stifling atmosphere of officialism during the Emergency.40 The unfortunate inspector serves as a metaphor for the evils of big government castigated by the vocationalist lobby, whose arguments formed an influential undercurrent of public opinion at the time. This popular mood was articulated in the Irish Monthly in 1939 thus: ‘if our system of government makes it more attractive to produce more and better civil servants ... and poorer farmers, then the next generation will hardly pray for us.’41
Writing in 1941 to protest against petrol rationing, a Galway farmer bemoaned the ‘deplorable ... position of the people especially the small farmers owing to the Government’s compulsory tillage order’.42 Others, fuelled by the widespread perception that compulsory tillage was foisted on them by a brutish and heedless Dublin bureaucracy, practised disobedience similar to the rather riotous behaviour of the Leitrim farmer. Some ploughed the required acreage and merely planted what they always had, leaving the rest fallow. Others sowed oats among the wheat or claimed ownership of fewer acres than they really had.43 Shortly after Ryan announced the scheme, a farmer in Meath hired a private aeroplane to fly over local churches and GAA pitches on a Sunday morning, dropping thousands of leaflets opposing compulsory tillage.44 Elsewhere, a farmer was fined for not tilling the required acreage despite claiming at his trial that he ‘thought Leitrim was exempt’.45 It is a matter of conjecture whether this response was a genuine misunderstanding or disingenuous cunning. There can be little doubt, however, over the motives of a Dingle farmer who in 1942 decided to act as if he was mentally unstable to avoid being allotted a tillage quota. While talking to a tillage inspector he began to eat horse feed and as the inspector was about to leave he smashed a lump of coal into dust with a hammer, eating the dust as he did so and encouraging the inspector to join him.46
Many farmers remained defiant even when in court. In February 1942 three Roscommon farmers were charged with not obeying tillage orders. It is uncertain whether these men were unable to till the required acreage because they were too old to cope and all spare local labour had been taken up on turf schemes, as they claimed, or whether they were merely idle.47 Either way, all three challenged the fines imposed by the judge, one telling him – ‘Do what you like with me. I am doing all I can and can do no more’ – and another saying ‘I have never had an inspector tell me what to do in my life’.48 Such recalcitrance showed the disruption that tillage orders brought to the elderly countryman’s life, a yearly round that followed the innate rhythms of the seasons and was – in some cases unchanged – in generations.
Others used more conventional litigious strategies of resistance. In several court cases, judges and justices found that the state had prosecuted prematurely. In November 1940, for instance, the judge at Longford circuit court reversed the convictions of five farmers for non-compliance with their quotas ‘in 1940’. The judge reasoned that they could not be prosecuted as the year had not yet expired.49 Similarly, in a case that went before the high court in January 1941, a Blanchardstown farmer escaped prosecution for tilling only one acre of the required 33. Once again, the defence argued that the issuing of the summons by the Department of Agriculture in October 1940 was premature.50 Outraged that the judiciary could be so lenient, de Valera stormily claimed that judges who acquitted farmers ‘did not realise the seriousness of the situation’.51
Such cases are in contrast to the bulk of examples, where some harsh sentences were imposed. In February 1942 the department successfully fined the owner of land which, unbeknown to him, had not been tilled by his tenant farmer.52 By spring 1940 six holdings had been taken over by the state and sixty-eight farmers brought to court for failing to till enough land.53 Between January and April 1941 the department announced that it had taken possession of 385 acres from seventeen farms.54 Although a relatively small number, these figures relate to just the first few months of the scheme’s operation. They also reflect the time and cost incurred in confiscating and running a farm, a point raised by politicians opposed to the measures.55 In 1947 the Irish Independent reported that 300,000 farms came under compulsory tillage regulations, yet the average yearly number of convictions (1940–6) was only 236. Reproached by the government for its earlier negative appraisal of the scheme, the Independent had – by this stage – changed tack, reporting ‘in other words, not even one farmer in a thousand failed in his duty’.56 However, by including the data for 1946, the Independent distorted the figures to emphasise the extent of cooperation with tillage orders. As Dáil records showed, there were a mere ten prosecutions listed for 1946 because prosecutions were still proceeding,57 whereas the yearly mean for 1941–5 was 305.58 In this period the state dispossessed and cultivated some 7,365 acres of farm land.59
These figures indicate that the impact of compulsory tillage was widespread and, to those dispossessed, devastating. These figures do little to convey the unpopularity of state compulsion
amongst farming communities, an important factor in the coalition government’s abolition of the scheme in July 1948. Neither do they convey the rise in dispossessions as the Emergency progressed: a symptom of the desperate need to grow more food but also the growing bureaucracy of the Department of Agriculture’s inspectorate. The unrepresentative mean of 236 convictions per year also obscures the number of cases where court action was either dismissed or threatened but not executed. The dismissal of summons in 1940 against an immobile 80-year-old farmer of ‘hopelessly feeble mind’ illustrates not only the unwillingness of the judiciary to summarily punish offenders but also the dour determination of the state to secure convictions against deviants, almost regardless of circumstance.60
Failure to comply with tillage regulations, then, represented much more than a failure to do one’s duty. Frequently it signified a riotous refusal to obey outside authority, and conflict between farmers and Agriculture officials was certainly more common than censored Emergency press reports suggest. Reports of prosecutions show that those farmers who did not comply with the state’s instruction were often obstinate characters but many, sadly, were old and infirm. Summoned for non-compliance with a tillage order in 1940, an aged and hard-of-hearing Meath farmer was guffawed at in court when he confessed to the judge ‘Damnit, I can’t hear a word at all’.61 For the 1940s the farmer in the dock – often unfamiliar with even basic court proceedings – was an alternative symbol to the ploughman on the pound note, suggestive of the state’s condescension towards its rural peripheries and those who inhabited them. Perhaps the ultimate rebuff to the ploughman idyll was the revelation that the all-Ireland ploughing champion had been forced from the land by compulsory tillage regulations and had taken up selling gravel in Dublin.62
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