Sins of the Father

by Conor McCabe

  The Cromwellian settlement had a profound and long-lasting effect on Irish society. In the words of the geographer, William J. Smyth:

  [The period] from the 1690s up to the 1760s, can be described as a critical formative phase in the making of the modern [Irish] landscape and society. From the perspective of the landlord, his townland administrators (the head-tenants or ‘middlemen’) and their urban allies (the merchants, estate agents and solicitors), this phase was one of infrastructural development, while from the viewpoint of the occupiers of the land, this phase was one of reorganisation and often displacement – all consequent upon the greater commercialisation of a predominantly pastoral economy and the related expansion of the enclosure movement. This latter process involved the creation or enlargement of compact grazier farms on the lowlands and the commercialisation and privatisation of the former communally-held upland areas where both older cooperative systems in landholding and, in some instances, clustered settlements were broken up. By the 1770s then, the skeletal framework of the modern landscape of compact enclosed individual farms with large fields geared mainly to pastoral pursuits was generally established.12

  The land displacements, the new landlords, the creation of a middleman class, the attractiveness of low-labour but high-yield cattle farming, and the tenants’ need for cash to pay rent: these were the long-term developments.

  The influx of cattle from Ireland was such that the English parliament twice passed laws banning its importation – in 1667 and 1681. The effect was a short-term depression in Ireland, followed by growth in the food trade and the shipment of beef to the Continent. It also led to a shift from cattle to sheep. Over the next eighty years, Irish capital developed trade in provisions, dairying and wool production. According to a contemporary writer:

  … after some years [of the Cattle Acts] Ireland found a way of salting, barrelling and exporting beef. So that in lieu of exporting 70,000 head of live cattle to England at 40 shillings a head, which cost England all but £140,000 and which they manufactured afterwards and had all the hides and tallow [rendered beef fat] into the bargain, Ireland now exports that beef to the value of £20,000 and butter worth £200,000 more; about 3,000 raw hides to England, 70,000 raw hides to France and Spain, and about £70,000 worth of tallow.13

  The 1667 and 1681 Cattle Acts had the effect of turning Ireland into a producer, not just of livestock, but of goods as well. New markets opened up in Europe after the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and the ending of the War of Spanish Succession. The continued influence of the graziers was such that in 1735 the Irish House of Commons moved to exempt pasture from tithes.14 In 1759, Irish cattle, beef and butter were allowed once again into the UK. ‘Landlords increasingly let their land to graziers who cleared them of small tenants and turned the land over to pasture’, writes the historian Michael Beames. Within two years, ‘The pressure for new pasture was strong enough in the province of Munster to tempt graziers into enclosing lands previously understood to be commons. It was these enclosures which sparked off the earliest Whiteboy disturbances.’15 A conflict of interests was emerging between grazier and smallholders and localised class antagonisms were breaking out, often with violent repercussions.

  The picture of Ireland at the time is a complex one, as there is a strong regionalism to Irish agriculture. Most of the grazier holdings were in ‘Meath, Westmeath, Offaly, parts of Kilkenny, Roscommon, parts of Galway and Sligo’.16 At the same time as the commons enclosures, Ireland went from being an importer to an exporter of corn. After the 1820s, though, with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the reopening of Europe to Britain, and the rise in cattle and sheep prices, pastoral farming became decidedly more attractive than tillage. However, it was with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the devastating effects of the famine that the advance of grazing gathered an unstoppable momentum and transformed the face of the country.17

  1849-1924

  ‘The ranches were created by filling the emigrant ship.’

  Senator J.T. O’Farrell, 3 August 1923.

  The post-famine years saw a dramatic rise in grazing and cattle production. The land clearances in the wake of the evictions, death and emigration which surrounded the period sped the move towards livestock which had been taking place since the 1780s. ‘The whole trend of the markets in pre-famine decades was to favour cattle and sheep and to place tillage at a competitive disadvantage’, wrote Ray Crotty. ‘Had more capital been available, almost certainly this would have gone into increasing stocks of the now more profitable cattle and sheep rather than into investment for tillage.’18 The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, ‘which had protected grain-growing from competition with imported grain’ meant that ‘grain was no longer profitable … and landowners changed the focus of their enterprise to grass’.19 As Ireland was a full part of the UK, and had been since the 1801 Act of Union, its exports to Britain were categorised as domestic and as such severely affected by the change in law.

  However, in order to make grazing profitable, more land was needed for livestock. ‘There are no such thing as graziers on a small scale’, as James Quin pointed out in his evidence to the House of Commons committee on land in Ireland.20 Evictions reached their highest level during the years 1847 to 1850, while by 1851 an estimated quarter of a million had already emigrated – including between 15 and 17.5 per cent of the population of the rich grazing lands of Meath.21 By 1869, the number of sheep in Ireland was double the 1847 figure, while the amount of cattle had increased by 50 per cent to just over 3 million. Petty’s vision of a depopulated Ireland filled with livestock no longer seemed so far-fetched.

  By 1870, Irish cattle production had reached a national organisational structure which would remain relatively unchanged for the following eighty years. There was a strong geographical dimension to the process, one which reflected the division of labour.

  The breeding, rearing and fattening of cattle was divided fairly systematically among the eastern, western and southern provinces. Munster contributed the main proportion of the store cattle, though fattening was also carried out in the rich grazing lands of Limerick and Tipperary; Connaught reared a large share of the cattle, while Leinster concentrated mainly on fattening the animals – cattle and sheep – from both provinces.22

  The different stages of cattle production – rearing, grazing, fattening, and shipping – were undertaken by different groups of farmers with different-sized holdings. The historian Fergus Campbell gives a succinct overview of the process which is worth quoting in full:

  [The] smallholders were the ‘breeders’ who reared the young calves and bullocks that were the basis of the Irish cattle industry. They then sold their cattle (typically when aged between one and two years) to the ‘grazier’, who kept them for a further period of between six months and two years. He then sold them as 2- or 3-year-olds to the ‘fattener’, who grazed them on the rich grazing lands of counties Kildare, Meath and Westmeath. Most of the land of Connacht was insufficiently rich to ‘fatten’ cattle and usually this part of the process took place on the large grazing farms of Leinster. Finally the ‘fattener’ sold the finished cattle to the ‘shipper’ who exported the cattle to the fairs and markets of England and Scotland.

  The smallholders had insufficient land to raise themselves above the role of ‘breeders’ in the Irish cattle industry. If they were to improve their standard of living, they would have to rear a larger number of cattle for sale at a more advanced stage of development. This would require capital, better-quality land, and a certain amount of expertise. The least available of these commodities was grazing land: the primary source of income in an agrarian economy devoted to the sale of cattle.23

  Although the 1880s were dominated by the Land League and the campaign for ownership, the smallholders of the south and west were well aware that a simple transfer of title (from tenant to owner-occupier) would not in itself lead to a transformation of the inequalities inherent in the system of production as outlined above. The La
nd League itself was:

  … above all a class alliance of the rural bourgeoisie, the middle and poor peasantry, and the agricultural proletariat … The large and middle farmers were looking for rent reductions, the smallholders of the West were looking for land redistribution, while the labourers of the South were contemplating at least a general strike for better wages.24

  It is important to recognise that the Land League did not change the economic system of production in Ireland. After the Land Acts were passed, instead of renting an uneconomic farm which was often little more than a feeder for graziers, a smallholder was now securely tenured and paying a fair price for an uneconomic farm which was often little more than a feeder for graziers. As Paul Bew has observed, ‘there was a widespread awareness [among smallholders] that their land – even if rent-free – could not support a family and that they needed more land’.25

  The key to breaking this poverty trap was the redistribution of grasslands and a move to tillage in order to make small to medium-sized farming tenable. The needs of the small farmer to make a living, however, were at odds with the needs of the grazier to make a profit, and this clash of interests between the class of graziers and the class of small farmers and labourers, came to the fore when the Land League’s nationalist and anti-landlord campaign, the glue which held these opposing forces together, became unstuck with the passing of the Land Acts.

  On 31 March 1907, a crowd gathered in the little village of Elphin, County Roscommon to hear the United Irish League organiser, C.W.P. Cogan, speak in protest against ‘grazierism and grabberism’ and to make an appeal ‘to the people to stick together until the graziers were driven from the ranches of North Roscommon’.26 It was part of a wider campaign for land redistribution, rather than the simple purchase of current holdings. The 1903 Wyndham Land Act allowed almost 200,000 Irish tenant farmers to become owner-occupiers, but despite the moves to encourage landlords to sell untenanted lands, the MP for North Westmeath, Laurence Ginnell found that after three years of the ‘greatest Land Act ever passed, ranchers’ cattle [were] still grazing over evicted lands, and young people [were] still emigrating from the neighbouring uneconomic bog holdings for want of land to live upon, while the parts of the Act purporting to have provided for them remained a dead letter’.27 A campaign of protests, rent strikes and cattle driving followed the passing of the Wyndham Act and lasted from 1904 to 1908. It became known as the Ranch War, the object of which was to ‘harass and demoralise the graziers; eventually, it was hoped, such men would surrender their land to the surrounding peasantry, rather than have their lives made a misery’.28 The limited success of the 1904-8 campaign was due in no small part to the fact that the smallholders ‘were dependent on [the graziers] to buy the cattle which paid their rent’.29 The system of production had a lock on the lives of the small holder, with disciplined, united action – a difficult momentum to sustain – their only effective weapon.

  The production of livestock for export to Britain had other, less high-profile effects. In terms of cattle, the dominant breed in Ireland was the Shorthorn. It was originally developed in Britain and introduced to Ireland in the 1820s as a dual-purpose breed – that is, suitable for both beef and dairy production. By 1860, Ireland was ‘The centre of excellence for Shorthorns’30 and by the 1880s it had replaced the Old Irish Cow. Yet the ‘dual-purpose’ tag was a bit of a misnomer. The Shorthorn was bred primarily for its beef, not its milk. In 1921, the Commission of Inquiry into the Resources and Industries of Ireland produced a report on stock-breeding farms. With regard to the Shorthorn it had this to say:

  It is a fact that the pedigree Shorthorn is constitutionally and naturally a beef and not a dairy cow. The expression ‘dairy Shorthorn’ is, in fact, somewhat of a contradiction in terms. As a consequence, the attempt to change its natural line of development in the effort to obtain milk from her is large quantities is, in the words of one capable witness, ‘a fight against nature’. The statement is made that very heavy milking Shorthorns lose health, develop udder troubles, or fail to breed.31

  This was not, by any means, a revelation. It was well known that dairy farmers needed a specialist breed in order to compete and grow. ‘Shorthorns have not been bred during the past decade on milking lines,’ stated the Armagh Agricultural Committee in 1910, ‘and are, therefore, to a large extent, unsuitable for a country that, as years roll by, finds itself drifting deeper into the dairy industry.’32

  The system of cattle production, however, was such that the ‘feeder’ farmers who produced calves did so primarily for the ranchers. Dairy farming was almost an afterthought. The Irish dairy industry found itself flanked by livestock export business on one side, and those ‘feeder’ farmers who needed to sell beef calves on the other, and it lost out as a result. The number of milch (milking) cows in Ireland hardly grew during the years 1851 to 1911, while the total number of cattle during the same period increased by almost 70 per cent.33 For all intents and purposes, Irish breeders produced only one thing: beef calves destined for Britain. Everything else – tillage, dairying and people – came a very distant second.

  The subsumption of small farms into larger holdings – a process which had been accelerated by the famine – coupled with the declining power of the landlord class, saw the consolidation of both economic and societal power into the hands of wealthy farmers and their familial networks. For them, government was the next logical step. As William J. Smyth puts it, ‘By the 1880s, the urban kinsmen of such [wealthy] tenant farmers played a vital link role in the legal, ecclesiastical, journalistic and trading spheres … [and] their descendents were to dominate the structures and ethos of the newly independent state between the 1920s and the 1960s.’34

  1924 TO 1957

  In January 1924, the Minister for Agriculture, Patrick Hogan, wrote a memo to his cabinet colleagues in which he emphasised his opinion, that ‘national development in Ireland for our generation at least is practically synonymous with agricultural development’.35 It was a view shared by the rest of the government. It was also accepted by Hogan and the cabinet that ‘agricultural development’ meant a continuation of the status quo, i.e. the livestock trade with Britain and the subordination of all other economic activities to that trade.

  The bias towards beef-producing cattle stock, instead of specialisation in dairy and beef breeds, for example, was also held by the Department of Agriculture. In the 1920s it published its criteria for the register of non-pedigree dairy cattle. It accepted for registration only those cows which upon inspection were found to be of ‘good conformation, short-legged, well-ribbed and deep in body’. The reason it favoured non-pedigree dairy cattle of such dimensions was because ‘The dairy farmer is to a large extent also the breeder of store cattle … and it is essential that his cows as well as being deep milkers should be of a type calculated to produce good store and beef animals’.36 This was despite the findings of the Report on Stock-Breeding Farms in 1921, as noted above, which saw the dairy Shorthorn as ‘a fight against nature’. This did not stop Hogan telling the Dáil in January 1924 that it was the dairy farmers who were the kingpins:

  The raising of grass-fed beef though an extremely important part of the industry, is at present small – it is a by-product of the great dairy industry. Anyone who knows anything about farming knows that, and as the dairy industry gets more and more efficient, as I hope it will, the less stores and the less grass-fed beef you will have in the country.37

  This was simply a lie on the part of the Minister. The promotion of the ‘dual-purpose’ Shorthorn and the bias towards beef calves, ‘encouraged dairy farmers to breed as much for beef as for milk, thereby lowering yields. Inevitably, the greater profitability of the beef trade ensured a bias towards beef characteristics.’38 And as already noted, from the 1860s onwards, the total number of dairy cattle remained almost static. The growth in cattle occurred in beef-producing stock for export.

  The promotion of the livestock trade to Britain was also justified wi
th a 1920s version of trickle-down economics. According to George O’Brien, professor of economics at UCD and a personal friend of Hogan, the Minister believed that it was important to help graziers and exporters achieve greater profits because the more they consumed in goods and services, the more the rest of the economy would benefit:

  The farmers being the most important section of the population, everything that raised their income raised the national income of the country. Prosperity amongst farmers would provide the purchasing power necessary to sustain the demand for non-agricultural goods and services, and it was useless to encourage secondary industries unless the primary industry was in a position to purchase their products. The principal aim of agricultural policy in the Free State should therefore be the maximization of the farmers’ income, and not, as in certain other countries differently situated, the provision of food for the urban population or the solution of the unemployment problem.39

  For Hogan, ‘The lawyer son of a senior Land Commission official’, the ordinary farmer was ‘The 200 acre man’.40 In order to address the needs of this class, he ‘urged curbs on local government spending to reduce taxes on farmers, advocated cutting the wages of local authority road workers to prevent pressure on farm labourers’ wages, pressed for lower tax levels to increase competitiveness, and urged that farmers be compensated for cost increases consequent on protection’.41