Silence surrounds death of farming

Shortly before Christmas a deal was struck in Brussels which will probably have a greater impact on Ireland than almost any other decision taken at European level. The amazing thing about it is that, apart from a furore for a few days, it has hardly been remarked on since in the mainstream media. Yet this decision will inevitably change the fabric of society in many parts of the country; it will wipe out lifestyles and see even our landscapes change.

The deal in question was, of course, the decision to eliminate farming subsidies over the next 13 years. It effectively means that, when the payments go, farmers in Ireland will be competing on a more or less level playing pitch with farmers in the third world. Already, individual farmers are talking about the end of their businesses; that subsidies were the only thing which allowed them survive in recent years. With those abolished, farming will just not make economic sense.

"Farming is gone," is something you will have heard farmers saying for a few years now. But, since Christmas, even the more successful ones seem to believe this. One farmer I know shares a very large holding with his brother. In their father's time, they were the biggest and most successful farmers in their area, but now they believe that there might not even be a living for one of them and their family when the subsidies go. If a farm of a couple of hundred acres will not be enough to support a family, what hope is there for all the other farmers? The number of farms and people working on the land will fall hugely, something which will impact significantly on rural Ireland.

Irish people have been leaving the land for generations. Post-Famine Ireland in 1855 had 419,500 farm holdings. The number declined over the next hundred years, but very slowly. In 1950 there were still 317,900 holdings. The decrease accelerated a little over the next 30 years, but since 1980 the decline in number has been really spectacular. In 1980 there were 263,600 farms, but over the last 25 years that number has halved again. Now there are just over 130,000 farms.

The results of this are to be seen every time you go into rural Ireland. While the population of the country has been growing, in many of the unfashionable parts there is simply no one there. You can buy property for next to nothing because no one wants it. No one wants it because there are no jobs and nothing to do. Even the post offices are being closed down.

Get away from the coasts and there are places like this in every county in the country. You can fool yourself into believing this is not true if you spend your holidays or weekend breaks in the west of Ireland. You can speed along the bypasses and marvel at the gaudy ugliness of most of the newly-built houses. When you arrive in the west or south west, you can marvel at the cost of holiday homes. It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that the economic success of Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and other places is spread all around the country.

It is not. The economic boom has completely bypassed huge parts of Ireland. In many places the only sign of our success is the building of holiday homes, empty for the most part, nothing more than black holes in communities for about 48 weeks of the year. In such places, the so-called Tiger economy has only ended emigration in that people no longer have to go abroad to find jobs. They just go to Dublin instead and for those who don't uproot completely, there's a commute of a few hours a day.

It seems to me that the end of farm subsidies will just add to the misery in many of the truly rural parts of our island. To survive, farms will have to become larger still, with less people. We are even in danger of turning to factory farming, which will see the hedgerows demolished to make way for larger fields. All the while, people will be abandoning the countryside, even as others among us are building holiday homes there, to lie empty for most of the year.

The emptying out of rural Ireland has grown to a flood in the last 20 years, but as far as I can see there has never been any serious discussion about it. I don't have any answers to it, but at least we should talk about it.

Fergal Keane is a reporter for RTÉ's Five Seven live