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29 July 1999 Edition

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Food production in Ireland - the colonial legacy

BY ROBERT ALLEN
     
A proliferation of food-producing co-ops might have prevented the Great Hunger, because the peasant Irish would have had access to their own food supply. This is crucial. Famines are not caused by lack of food. They are caused by the lack of access to food and the inability of people to grow or pay for it.

THERE'S A MORAL in the story I'm about to tell. It concerns the production and distribution of food.

In modern Ireland, we import most of our daily food needs. Our own production of food is mostly for export. The food the majority of us eat is nutritionally poor and a major contributory factor in many of the illnesses from which we suffer. This may seem like a problem we cannot correct, but we can - we can grow and distribute our own food.

The problem we have is our attitude towards the production and distribution of food - that these are tasks that should be undertaken by industrial farmers, capitalist co-operatives, distributors and supermarket chains.

We do not have a food culture in Ireland. We do not think of growing small quantities of food for our own use. We do not involve ourselves with worker-led agricultural co-ops - which we could supply with the surplus from our gardens and smallholdings. There is a history to this which, like everything else in this country, is tied to colonialism.

Food production in Ireland might have been very different if a utopian ideal in the early decades of the 19th Century had been allowed to flourish and gain popularity. But the agricultural co-op founded in 1831 in Ralahine, near the Limerick-Ennis road in County Clare, failed because the proprietor of the land, John Scott Vandeleur, retained legal ownership of the estate.

James Connolly wrote, in Labour and Irish History, that this was the lesson of Ralahine:

``Had all the land and buildings belonged to the people, had all other estates in Ireland been conducted on the same principles, and the industries of the country also organised, had each of them appointed delegates to confer on the business of the country at some common centre as Dublin, the framework and basis of a free Ireland would have been realised.''

A MOMENT OF MADNESS


In a moment of madness not unusual among the Anglo-Irish landlord class, Vandeleur's utopian scheme crashed when he lost at the gaming tables, fled the country and allowed a Limerick relative to file for bankruptcy against him.

There has been a suggestion that he was set up because the British establishment did not want to see anarchist-style co-ops springing up all over the west of Ireland - particularly at a time when it wanted to remove the peasants from the land, turn it over to grazing for livestock and increase the size of each farm.

The real tragedy here is that a proliferation of food-producing co-ops might have prevented the Great Hunger because the peasant Irish would have had access to their own food supply. This is crucial. Famines are not caused by lack of food; they are caused by the lack of access to food and the inability of people to grow or pay for it.

ARCHITECTS OF MISERY


In Ireland in the mid-19th Century, potatoes were the staple crop for the peasantry. When the crop failed over successive years, the people starved, died of disease, or fled the country. They did not do this without a fight, because they knew who the architects of their misery were.

A select committee of the House of Commons on `The Employment of the Poor in Ireland' noted at the time:

``Those districts in the south and west presented the remarkable example of possessing a surplus of food, while the inhabitants were suffering from actual want. The calamity may, therefore, be said to have proceeded less from the want of food itself than from the adequate means of purchasing, or, in other words, from the want of employment.''

Vandeleur's personal motives for setting up the co-op are not known. They were not as altruistic as some have argued. Vandeleur did not make it easy for the co-op workers. The rent Vandeleur required the society to pay him was higher than the national average at the time, and while the workers did begin to amass savings from their earnings, it would have taken them many years to accumulate ``sufficient'' funds to pay for ``the stock, implements of husbandry and other property'' belonging to Vandeleur.

RICH SOIL - POOR PEOPLE


Cormac O Gráda has argued that Ralahine was actually not that dissimilar to other farms in Clare. Perhaps, he surmised, ``no one was interested enough to report on, far less to replicate, a largely untried `new system' elsewhere''. O Grada also made the point that Ralahine might not have lasted long ``in the form set out by Vandeleur''.

This would miss the point. It was the effect the co-op had on the well-being and health of the workers. Edward Thomas Craig, the manager of the co-op, wrote that rural Ireland presented ``a melancholy picture of a rich soil only partially cultivated, and a willing people unemployed''.

The peasants, Craig believed, did not know what to do with the land. What he should have added is that they were kept ignorant by a social system that was driven by a combination of absentee landlords, their Irish agents, the Catholic middle classes, Catholic priests, and a belief system founded on religious autocracy. Their other problem was access to land and seed.

So it was natural that the established order would object to `Vandeleur's Folly' - the epithet given to the enterprise by Margaretta D'Arcy and John Arden when they told the story as a stage drama in 1978 - because they did not believe the peasants could look after their own interests.

``Others objected to the system,'' Craig observed, ``because it was not in accordance with the established rules of political economy and the relation of landlord, farmer and labourer, and the three profits or rents.''

Despite the opposition, Vandeleur's utopian dream was made a reality by the shrewd management of Craig and the industriousness of the workers. ``The peasantry began to hope and indulge in the expectation that other landlords would adopt similar arrangements on their estates,'' wrote Craig. But it wasn't to be. The conditions for the genocide of a people had been put in place.

The effects of this mass clearance of people is still being felt in the west of Ireland today where few people grow their own food. Perhaps we could begin to learn a lesson from history. Because once again we are dependent on others for the supply of our food!

An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland