Farming in Ireland. Crisis and Climate: Lived experience of our rural hinterland

Farming in Ireland: Crisis and Climate

Author: Pat Brereton

ISBN-13: 978-1916742215

Publisher: Wordwell

Guideline Price: €30

While Ireland has undergone dramatic and well-documented changes in recent decades, rural Ireland and the farming community have been reshaped no less radically. Yet the lives and lived experience of the people in our rural hinterland have been the subject of far less critical attention.

Pat Brereton, an emeritus communications professor at DCU, set out to bridge that knowledge gap by zeroing in on the farming community where he grew up in the midlands, centred on the village of Cloghan, Co Offaly. “I have gone back to my roots”, as he puts it, in what he describes as “my somewhat random oral history interviews”.

While narrow in geographical focus, Brereton’s painstaking interviews are abundant in detail, revealing a rich and largely hidden seam of social history. The bulk of the interviewees are elderly men, who share vivid recollections of an era that is now at the very edge of living memory.

One, Alo Horan, remembers neighbours’ children coming to school in bare feet, with one child from a poor local family dying of malnutrition in the hungry years of the late 1940s.

While absolute poverty no longer exists, progress has been double-edged. Another interviewee fondly recalls the rambling houses of his youth, when “every house was an open house”. Those communal bonds, he feels, have been greatly frayed with the advent of modernity.

“The biggest shock for me was the isolation. You might see nobody from the start to the end of the day,” recalls young farmer Ronan Feighery. Another, Tom Loonam, adds, “neighbours do not even talk to each other as much now”.

Brereton’s interviews chart the virtual disappearance of small mixed farms, with larger monocultural operations now dominating. Many of his interviewees are defensive about the negative environmental impacts of farming, feeling they are often unfairly maligned.

A rare dissenting view is voiced by former agriculture adviser Timothy Camon, who argues that our livestock-based farming model is inefficient and unsustainable. “I buy a small bag of porridge oats, which can provide me with breakfast for three weeks. But if I feed it to an animal, it will only sustain or produce a teaspoon of meat.”

Brereton’s book is an insightful, sometimes quirky and clearly personal account of a rapidly vanishing way of life.

John Gibbons is a journalist and author of The Lie of the Land – A Game Plan for Ireland in the Climate Crisis