Blow-in rural settlers made an impact
in Ireland March 2007
Garreth Byrne discusses the
varied experiences and positive effects on rural Irish society
of suburban people who, following the 1960s alternative living
zeitgeist, took a daring leap into organic farming.
The second half of the 1960s in Western Europe
and North America were marked by student radicalism, demands
for educational changes, sit-ins, teach-ins and various manifestations
against the Vietnam War. One dimension of that vanished period
of youthful animation, introspection and protest was the focus,
in San Francisco and elsewhere, on love, peace, the return
to nature and alternative lifestyle. Some of it was faddish:
Californian sunshine has seen artistic, psycho, techno, fashion
and lifestyle fads come and go over the decades. Some of these
tried -and-discarded social fads washed up on the shores of
Ireland and other parts of Europe at later stages, where vanguard
groups and opinion moulders tried them out, with varying levels
of impact. A concern for nature, especially rural environment,
was a beneficial long-term bequest from the love and peace
generation, some of whom are today partly retired grandparents
down on Maggie's organic farm.
Ecology and pacifist magazines and newsletters
circulated in university campuses during the 1960s and 70s.
Some of the articles on alternative living, alternative schooling
and alternative farming turned the minds of student dreamers
towards thoughts of what to do with life after graduation.
It should be noted here that non-students from various urban
backgrounds also came into contact, through similar magazines
and publicity promoted by specialist organisations like the
Soil Association, with back-to-the-land ideas.
Dreaming about it in student flats decorated
with Che Guevara and Beatles posters and floors strewn with
ever extending piles of long-playing vinyl records was one
thing. Between the idea and the reality there fell the shadow.
It took a lot of courage or impulsive caprice to pack up and
go to unknown rural places and start living the alternative
farm lifestyle. Newly graduated students cast dreams aside,
donned their first business suits and disappeared into the
professions. Some few of the sixties awareness generation
carved out satisfying careers in entertainment. (Christy Moore's
desertion of a banking career is a famous Irish example. You
wouldn't imagine him working on Maggie's organic farm, but
he'd certainly enjoy singing about it.) Many dozens of young
couples, from Ireland, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands,
Belgium and elsewhere, took the plunge, left suburbia and
salaried careers and settled into the Irish rural unknown.
Property prices on the margins of Irish rural society were
cheap then.
A new puritan ethic
Organic farming, vegetarianism and, more rarely, vegan diets,
were features of a new puritan ethic that coloured the sporadic
back-to-the-land movement in the rural fringes of Ireland
during the 1960s onwards. The puritans often bought derelict
stone cottages at knockdown prices in difficult, isolated
places. Some were on the sides of windy hills in the Beara
peninsula or the Bluestacks mountains of South Donegal. Counties
including Leitrim, Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo and the flat, boring
hedgerowed landscape of the midlands were also among the areas
where incoming pioneers acquired their three- or ten-acre
plots. Several of them arrived towing mobile homes in which
they lived tenaciously over the first year of settlement,
clearing away overgrown scrub, boulders and skutch grass.
They learned stone building and slate roofing techniques in
a desperate can-do way as they struggled to rehabilitate deserted
cottages, put down flagstone kitchen floors, restore traditional
open fireplaces and install back boilers, plumbing systems
and basic washing facilities. The hardy few, in a rugged puritan
spirit and maybe because of income constraints, drew water
from traditional wells and constructed composting toilets
that supplied additional fertility for the organic vegetable
plots.
Preliminary digging and removal of large stones
from virgin scrub soil or from fallow old vegetable patches
was a blistering task. Lucky smallholders got assistance from
neighbouring traditional farmers who came in, for a fee, and
upturned the fields with tractor-drawn equipment. Then it
was down to tedious spadework to shape and compost lazy beds,
Rudolph Steiner biodynamic 'heaps', or regular drills and
the erection of plastic PVC polytunnels. Reconstruction of
outhouses for storage of tools and produce or for use of goats
and poultry was another infrastructure task. Hedges were often
thinned out or replanted to fill gaps. Some ambitious incoming
smallholders were able to construct irrigation channels drawing
on water from nearby streams.
When old cottages had been cleared of damp and
mould it was safe to move out of the mobile caravans, which
then served as accommodation for visiting guests and woofers.
Woofers? Yes, those still rooted in cities wishing to test
the life for themselves before deciding to take the plunge
could link into a network called Working Weekends on Organic
Farms. They could invite themselves to woof on smallholdings,
at weekends or for longer periods during the summer. Their
struggling hosts fed them, instructed them in organic ways
and let them have some afternoons off work to explore the
surroundings. The informal support of woofers made up the
numbers during the critical growing season. I myself woofed
for short periods in two different counties in 1977 after
returning from a contract in Africa that had entailed teaching
English and managing school poultry and vegetable production.
I never took the plunge, but admired the gritty efforts of
smallholders, and learned that I could never embrace the hazards
of their chosen lifestyle.
My acquaintance with the alternative farming
movement did not end at that point, and I did not remain entombed
in the anonymity of suburbia and a pensionable career. In
the early 1980s I got a development education job based in
Sligo which took me on visits to schools, ICA guilds and other
adult associations around four counties to arrange exhibitions
and give illustrated talks on third world cultures and problems.
Publishing and food production I came in contact with and heard about the enterprises
of alternative farmers. They produced a monthly Gestetner-duplicated
magazine called North-West Newsletter. This kitchen table
publication was laboriously put together by an informal grouping
of incomer smallholders from the mid-1970s. It soon became
a communication network for smallholders all over the country.
In the 1980s it went slightly upmarket with a typeset and
web offset print run, making for better layout and the use
of photographs and technical line drawings. It changed its
title to Common Ground to reflect the island-wide readership.
In the mid-1990s, after twenty years of intrepid part-time
journalism, the producers decided to halt publication and
left the field to specialist, more professionally supported
magazines and newsletters dealing with ecology, environmental
protection, promotion of deciduous afforestation, seed diversity,
food safety, holistic medicine and alternative energy. These
and other topics had been dealt with in the pages of NW Newsletter/Common
Ground, of course. However worthy the specialist magazines
may be today, many organic farmers, especially smallholders,
feel the need for a revived publication on the lines of the
defunct Common Ground.
Incoming smallholding settlers came from urban
parts of Ireland - a small but determined number. Many more
came from suburban England, and there were people from Belgium,
the Netherlands, Germany and a few other continental countries.
Not all continental and British farmers were vegetarians.
They did not have bohemian backgrounds, indeed some came from
farm families, had specialist third level qualifications and
brought to their enterprises a sober, methodical middle class
work ethic. A proportion of incomers also brought capital,
enabling them to buy farming plots of 25 acres or more. No
hillside frugality for them. Entrepreneurs of varied farm
sizes specialised in organic beef and lamb production. Others
went into organic fruit production, while others supplemented
their incomes from home produced cheeses, jams, bread and
novelty conserves that traditional farm families have also
been associated with, often under the influence of ICA guilds.
Yet others grew an array of herbal plants that have culinary
and medicinal properties. Goats' cheese and milk is often
a substitute food for individuals who are allergic to bovine
diary produce, so smallholders have derived income from husbanding
these docile but depredating grazers.
The tough life took its toll among the smallholding
settler community. The cold, damp winters and seasonal storms
broke the patience and physical stamina of some. Yet others,
after laboriously insulating their dwellings and expertly
conditioning the vegetable plots, found the culture and self-imposed
social isolation too much, sold up and moved back to their
suburbs of origin. Other settlers discovered, as Leitrim writer
Brian Leyden notes in The Homeplace, a memoir of growing up
in the Arigna area on the Leitrim-Roscommon border, that generations
of Irish hillside smallholders had been forced into emigration
by the harshness of nature and market economics. These disillusioned
settlers cut their losses and followed the route of their
indigenous predecessors.
Encouraging successes may have outweighed the
failures, but at the expense of hard slog, economic and climatic
setbacks, miserable incomes, illness and occasional marital
breakdown. Nobody on a seven-acre farm can survive on the
sale of vegetables alone; other income sources are necessary.
I observed from my regional travels that rugged rural entrepreneurs
survived if one partner had a salaried job (which often supplied
capital for farm development), or earned money from the sale
of crafts like perfumed candles and pottery, or did casual
carpentry and building work in the area, or practised various
forms of holistic medicine. Organic growers who introduced
unusual or specialist vegetable varieties could derive niche
seasonal incomes. On a small farm in a remote Sligo townland
I saw how smallholders had paid a neighbour to plough sloping
daub soil at the base of a wooded hill. The incomers then
covered the surface with black PVC material to control weeds
and then transplanted pumpkin plants grown from seed in a
plastic tunnel by making incisions in the PVC. Solar heat
was trapped under the dark covering thus 'forcing' the growth
of pumpkins, which were sold to city restaurants and shops
as a cash crop in the weeks before Halloween.
Filtering down into the
mainstream Traditional farm families may have looked askance at
the attire, foreign accents and food production methods of
incomers. (The word blow-ins was commonly used in local gossip,
and it applied to incoming Dubliners and other Hibernians
too.) One Irish neighbour asked a blow-in acquaintance of
mine why he and his wife didn't use nitrate chemical fertiliser
on their organic vegetable patch and pretend that it was organic.
To which the foreigner, politely suppressing his exasperation,
replied that his Irish neighbour had missed the ecological
and health point of organic production and consumption.
Over the years groups of organic farmers, both
Irish and foreign, have promoted ecological and organic ideas.
They have increasingly become more professional and have lobbied
government on policy matters. In the early 1970s individual
farm advisors employed by local authorities expressed unfamiliarity
with the nature and scope of organic farming, and in a few
instances radiated scepticism about the smallholders who came
looking for information and help. There were also problems
about marketing vegetable and other produce, the smallness
of scale being a factor that made a poor impression on supermarket
managers. Smallholders had to organise and professionalise
or perish.
The piecemeal implementation of EU directives
and the introduction of area schemes like the REPS (rural
environmental protection) have been a boon to organic producers
and have helped to spread their ecological and other messages.
Institutions have emerged from the diverse work of incoming
smallholders. In Clare the Seed Savers Association has beavered
away at promoting apple tree diversity and building up, in
tandem with university academics, a national seed bank. Experiments
have been carried out elsewhere on growing different indigenous
varieties of cereal crops. The promotion of broadleaf afforestation
has been the special work of Crann, based in Offaly, with
support from organic farmers among a wider public. In Crannagh
Castle in Tipperary, organic farmer and social philosopher
Gillies McBain established research facilities and promoted
barter as an alternative to traditional monetary systems of
rural commerce, with mixed results. The Leitrim Organic Centre
was established by small-scale farmers and now has a national
reputation in the field of practical education. Feasta, which
aims to spread the word about sustainable rural economics,
was established by Richard Douthwaite, and has a base in Tipperary.
Local Farmers' Markets operate around the country and allow
consumers to buy and taste a wide range of organically produced
vegetables, soft cheeses and meat. Associations of organic
meat producers promote their particular interest, and try
to enlighten the general public. In several villages and towns
health and alternative food shops have sprouted up, giving
shoppers interesting options. Health farms for weary urban
workers have opened for business. The late Ernest Schumacher's
bestselling book, Small is Beautiful, has had long term influence.
In many areas of Ireland the activities of back-to-the-land
pioneers have enhanced rural society. Some of their environmental
and organic concerns have filtered into the mainstream. Macroeconomic
analysts might dismiss all this as Mickey Mouse stuff when
weighed against the GDP of agribusiness. True, but the depressed
years between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s in Ireland
saw a bleeding of population from the rural periphery that
macroeconomic theory would not cauterise. Nobody in authority
shouted stop then. Only the new settlers made a difference
- they and their institutions (mentioned above) and think
groups like Fr. Harry Bohan's Rural Housing Organisation and
Rural Resources Organisation, and smaller independent initiatives
like the Rural Resettlement Organisation, which invited unemployed
city dwellers to repopulate scarred localities. For promoters
of such diverse rural initiatives the micro-economics of people
has been more relevant than the statistical impersonality
of macro-economics.
The overworked and financially under-rewarded
smallholders have survived in an EU economic climate that
relegated any farm holding below 75 acres to bureaucratic
oblivion. Recently the Nobel peace prize was awarded to someone
in Bangladesh who founded the grameen banking system to help
smallholders obtain soft loans. Microeconomic thinking has
been recognized, in the third world at least. It has been
tried out with some success in Ireland's fourth world.
