Coping with change 2: agriculture and rural Ireland

Abstract

It is time to turn our attention to agriculture, the dominant occupation and way of life in Ireland until this period. The most bizarre feature of the complex network of committees and consultative fora that emerged during the 1960s is the absence of farming representation or the failure to create a parallel set of committees focusing on agriculture. The NIEC, a tripartite forum of employers, trade unions and government officials, was the National Industrial and Economic Council. There was no parallel National Agricultural Council. Lemass justified agriculture's exclusion from the NIEC with the claim that ‘agricultural policy is determined to a large extent by external conditions, which we cannot hope to alter by discussions taken here’. This was a false distinction: industrial prices and exports were strongly influenced by external conditions, especially by what was happening in Britain, and from the mid-1960s onwards farm incomes were increasingly determined by the guaranteed prices set by government. In May 1958, the Taoiseach (de Valera) and Minister for Agriculture Patrick Smith met the NFA (established in 1955) to discuss the current position of agriculture. Such meetings became an annual event, with the NFA presenting the government with a list of priority concerns and demands. In the autumn of 1961, the government met farming organisations and the county committees of agriculture (the local committees that oversaw the agricultural advisory service) to discuss Ireland's application for EEC membership. Given this history of regular meetings, agriculture's exclusion from a national economic council is rather surprising and it left Lemass’ government open to the charge of neglecting agriculture, at a time when increases in agricultural incomes lagged behind waged and salaried workers. Agriculture's absence from the NIEC resulted in a rather lop sided process of engagement – with formal structures in place for communicating with employers and unions and more informal ad hoc arrangements for agriculture. One complicating factor was the NFA's demand to be treated as the sole representative of farmers, given the existence of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) plus the smaller, more specialist Irish Beet-growers’ Association. The NFA was popularly described as ‘Fine Gael on tractors’, which might have left the government reluctant to accord them sole negotiating rights. The composition of farming representation was obviously a complex question, but it could arguably have been resolved if the government had made serious efforts to do so.