The idea of home is a recurring Irish preoccupation – níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.[i] This can be traced to a history of Famine dispossession, and a subsequent Land War. The Irish Constitution still commits the State to supporting women as home-makers.[ii]
It perhaps explains the vehemence of recent criticism, from across the political spectrum, directed at the Fingal Battalion Direct Action for protesting outside private residences of government ministers Simon Harris, Richard Bruton and Paschal Donohoe, as well as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.
Social Democrat councillor Gary Gannon condemned the campaign as ‘entirely wrong’[iii]; while the Irish Times also weighed in, likening the protests to interventions at hospitals and medical clinics by anti-abortion groups.[iv]
While in the UK the sight of politicians’ homes being besieged by an intrusive media or angry protestors is a familiar one, in Ireland we expect restraint and even civility around the domestic space of public representatives.
That the Fingal group styles itself a ‘Battalion’ also conveys paramilitarism and a form of mob rule. Political protest, however, is always considered ugly by those in power, and an absolute ban on any form would set a dangerous precedent. What if the mob is actually in power?
Before the last Italian election a crowd, holding candles, gathered outside the Milan residence of Silvio Berlusconi, as a member of the Five Star Movement read out an indictment against the disgraced former prime minister, revealing his links to the real mob, or mafia.[v] It was a powerful democratic statement: calling a billionaire politician to account outside his home.
In order for a campaign on the margins to gain public attention a degree of civil disobedience is often required. That was certainly the case with the NAMA to Nature project in 2012.[vi] Ghost estates around the country appeared as a testament to folly and greed, making the public overwhelmingly receptive to what was a trespass on private property to heal the landscape by planting trees.
But since the Crash we have seen a steady reassertion of the rights of property-owners. This often works to the detriment of marginalised citizens, and can imperil the habitats of species under threat of extinction. Travellers also defy a widespread devotion to private ownership, making them a convenient target for unscrupulous politicians.
The government’s housing policy is failing at a fundamental level the ten thousand homeless citizens.[vii] An entrenched sympathy with landlords was set out by Eoghan Murphy in a speech to the Dáil last December:
We have to be very careful in interfering more than we are at the moment. We have to make sure that we are not placing extra burdens on these small landlords. And we have to make sure that we are not prohibiting someone from selling a property that they own when they might need to sell that property for perfectly legitimate reasons in their own lives. They may not have the money to re-compensate the person living in the property at that point.[viii]
Above all the government has failed to build the houses necessary to alleviate the Housing Crisis, at a time of when the states coffers are bulging. Taoiseach Varadkar’s oft-stated ideological opposition to socialism seems an obvious reason.
Upholding property holders rights extends to giving farmers free reign to do as they wish on their land. Last month Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Josepha Madigan signed off on an order extending the burning season of uplands, the habitats of hen harriers and skylarks, among other wildlife.
Anne Marie Hourihane in the The Times Irish edition provided a scathing assessment of the Minister’s response:
At the weekend Josepha Madigan, the heritage minister, suggested that we address Ireland’s plummeting bird population by installing bird feeders in our gardens. Unfortunately, skylarks and hen harriers are not known for their attendance at bird tables, preferring to nest in uplands. Maybe the proposed bird feeders are intended as a diversionary tactic for the birds that will be nesting in the hedgerows in August. For example, your local yellowhammer — if you have one, as the yellowhammer is already on our danger list — might leave his hedgerow to get a slap-up feed at some well-appointed bird table, then fly back to his hedgerow, where he’ll say: “Hey, man, where’s my gaff? Also, the wife and kids . . .” It’s going to be a great craic.
Hourihane also highlighted an extension to the period for cutting hedgerows, which, she wrote, ‘contain so much wildlife, so many insects — including bees — so many small mammals, that they are a permanent wildlife programme all on their own. Now we will be allowed to cut them in August.’[ix]
Madigan’s response revealed either naivete, or a disregard for vulnerable species. Yet this runs contrary to the common good of preserving wildlife, potentially infringing what may, at a later time, be found to be in breach of any native species right, ‘to be, to habitat, and to fulfil its role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth community’, as argued previously.
Leo Varadkar’s committed to an ‘extensive investment programme’ in the arts[x] during the Fine Gael leadership election, yet many artists and musicians struggle to afford a accommidation in Ireland. This is especially the case in Dublin, soon to be the EU’s most expensive city for rental accommodation.[xi] The plight of musicians is particularly difficult given how digital technology has decimated potential earnings from CD sales.
Songwriter David Kitt, who grew up in Madigan’s Dublin South constituency, where his father Tom Kitt was actually a Fianna Fail T.D., last year announced he was unable to afford accommodation in the capital, bemoaning how, ‘Dublin’s heart and soul is being ripped out and sold to the highest bidder.’[xii]
Furthermore, a recent letter signed by 407 members of the Irish theatre community claimed the direction the Abbey theatre is taking is causing ‘devastation among our ranks’, and pointing out there would not be a single Irish-based actor involved in any productions between September 2018 and February 2019.[xiii]
The Abbey, founded by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, is the national theatre of Ireland. The staging of J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World in 1907 there brought riots over an unfavourable portrayal of Irishness. A lack of indigenous theatrical productions today prevents similar interrogations of contemporary Irish culture, while forcing many thespians into exile.
True art and literature, as George Steiner argues, is ‘always, a critique’, involving ‘a value judgment of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.’[xiv]
We have also learnt of funding being denied by Irish embassies abroad to Irish artistic endeavours that fail to cast the country in a favourable light.
The reliance of artists on patronage develops worrying dynamics. Will the anointed elite continue to pose the difficult questions essential to great works if funding is jeopardised? The major concern, however, is that Dublin, in particular, is being denuded of the vitality and originality of a vibrant artistic community, compelled to make their homes elsewhere.
Rare birds and feckless artists are forms of endangered wild life that do not fit comfortably into a society dominated by the interests of land owners. Those who invade the domestic spaces of politicians are roundly condemned, but can Ireland offer the sanctity of a home for all its species?
[i] Lit. ‘There’s no hearth like your own hearth’, or ‘there’s no place like home’.
[ii] Article 41.2.1: ‘In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.’
[v] ‘Alessandro Di Battista sotto la villa di Berlusconi, legge la sentenza Dell’Utri (COMPLETO)’ Youtube, February 9th 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRpXvuxP28k, accessed 12/3/19.
It was exciting to meet the enthusiasm at the inaugural meeting of Talamh Beo, a grassroots organisation of farmers, growers and land-based workers on the island of Ireland. It aims to ensure a living landscape, where people and ecosystems thrive together.
Inspiration comes from the Landworkers’ Alliance (UK), which in the five years of its existence has become a voice for small food producers, farmers, growers and land-based workers (which also includes beekeepers, herbalists, foresters and flower farmers).
What we do at grassroots level in Ireland is of the utmost important as we confront a potential climate catastrophe, which we need to acknowledge as individuals and communities. No matter who we are in society, and what class we belong to, we all eat three times a day, and should be nourishing ourselves with good food, from a ground that is well taken care of.
We can farm in a far more sustainable way, beginning with our own gardens, and make conscientious food choices, avoiding plastic waste, and supporting local farmers.
This is crucial to our health and wellbeing, ‘Let the food be your medicine’, as Hippocrates put it; or as Darina Allen said on her ‘Foodture’ podcast: ‘Do your best to source chemical-free organic food, it’s really worth the investment … the less you spend on food the more you spend on medical care.’
If you think you can’t afford better food, consider where you now invest your money: how often do you go to the hairdresser, or drink a pint or choose to drive somewhere? There are priorities we have in terms of our time and money.
It is always a good time to start thinking about growing some of your own vegetables!
Ideally you should begin by building up soil nutrients from November onwards, but if you are starting now and feel you have missed the boat, don’t worry. We are adopting a No-dig method in our garden, which can begin at any time of the year. In this respect our inspiration is the legendary Charles Dowding, whose website and Instagram page offers plenty of excellent free advice.
If your space is limited you can use raised beds made from timber. Even a small concrete yard offers sufficient space. This type of raised bed is ideal for older people who might wish to avoid bending over.
The main ingredient of growing is good compost, which you can source from local farmers, and elsewhere. To start a bed we recommend gathering lots of cardboard, and spreading it straight onto the ground. Then spread a 10cm layer of compost over this. Beds should be approximately 1m wide, allowing 30cm for pathways between each one. Wood chips give a neat appearance to the pathways, and suppress weeds.
While your new beds are settling down, start propagating your favourite vegetable varieties in pots and trays of fine seed compost on your windowsills inside. You don’t generally need a rich compost to germinate seeds; heat and moisture are sufficient. You can multi-sow and do successional sowing to have a continuous supply of fresh ingredients throughout the year.
Those wishing to start an organic farming business, or a just develop partial self-sufficiency, should access networks of independent Irish growing organisations. We highly recommend linking up with an experienced farmer in your area to build a good relationship, and learn where the food you eat is coming from.
The Organic Growers of Ireland has created a Small Growers Network to help growers who have completed formal training or an internship with them. It is essentially a participatory network that is open to anyone who feels it would be useful. You don’t need much experience to be part of it; what you do need is the enthusiasm required to build up your strength on the farm.
The Network offers a forum for small farmers to highlight the specific needs of their holdings. It is organised by Jason Horner, founder of the OGI, and monthly meetings are happening in Cloughjordan, with farm walks providing different discussion topics, led by established organic growers.
Becoming a supporter of Irish Seedsavers helped us get involved in seed sharing and gave us access to workshops and events (including brilliant talks from Mary Raynolds). Apple-tasting days were a highlight. Seed saving is useful to anyone with an interest in biodiversity, increasing the variety of vegetables, and helping bees to pollinate by reducing monoculture.
The Flower Farmers of Ireland also promote the cultivation, marketing, sale and use of Irish-grown cut-flowers and foliage, and support and act as an advocate for growers.
We believe the Land belongs to us all. That is why we need to restore natural ecosystems, and put power back into the hands of small-scale producers. At the moment production is dominated by multinational supermarkets, which leads to waste and inequalities. It is time to get up and grow, or at least choose honestly grown local food.
The path of pollen: the lovers’ tale between bee and flower. Once upon a time, bees were carnivorous – entering into flowers to gain access to smaller insects as a means for protein food supply. After frequent visits to the opening of the flower, curiosity began to mount in the bee. The flower was so visually beautiful, producing aromas incredibly alluring, what else could this elusive creature have to offer besides a convenient fast food location?
Inching its way deeper into the delicate flower, the bee dabbled the sweet nectar and nutrient-packed pollen. Fireworks. Explosions. The bee bid farewell to catching flies and raised its standards, dedicating itself to the bees new life partner: the show-stopping flower.
With a vegetarian pledge, bee and the flower began a co-evolution, involving nourishment for the bees in exchange for seeds for the plant. A balanced, harmonious relationship. The bee still earns its stripes as one of the plant’s best allies in reproduction.
Will this love stand the test of time?
I was walking through a park wondering if I should fulfil my original intention to dedicate an article to bees, or focus on Spring Tonics (maybe another time). Suspended in this mind chatter, I stumbled upon a dead bee on the pavement. Thank you for hearing me and delivering this obvious sign, Universe.
I examined the bee – it could have just been taking a break. It was sitting on its legs, wings side up. I sat with the bee, not spotting any obvious injuries, but I did not sense any movement either.
Wishing not to leave it alone in the middle of the foot path, I regretfully took a leaf of ivy and scooped the bee up – a perfect fit. Looking around for any nearby flowers to rest the bee by, I had to settle for a mossy green spot that had collected morning dew next to a stream.
It struck me again (double thank you, Universe) that the initial direction in my head for writing this article was to raise awareness of our responsibility to plant food for bees, and Nature was presenting me with a perfect illustration.
Around this time of year, humans have adapted the ritual of planting bulbs ‘for Spring’. Flowering Daffodils and Tulips being the most obvious example. While a pop of long overdue colour is therapeutic, these plants generally are not the best options for pollinators. Modern hybrids have been heavily manipulated by plant breeders to select uniform eye-candy for human adoration, heedless of the side-effects such as loss of nectar and pollen.
These Frankenstein-flowers come at a major cost to bees: after hibernation, without early sustenance, a bee will die.
We as seed facilitators need to plant with others in mind and treat the soil and seeds as sacred. We can do so by adopting these three rule of thumb:
Prioritize bulbs and seeds or ‘in the green’ plants that are Organic. A number of commercially produced bulbs are manufactured with pesticides. What is toxic to humans is also toxic to bees. When a seed or a bulb is modified with pesticides, do you think these chemicals disappear when the plant develops?
Buy local! And plant locally, too.What plants are indigenous to your environment? These plants will be the most attractive to your local pollinators.
Shapes and sizes matter.Consider the depth of different flowers in correlation to the anatomy of different species of bees. Variety will help attract all sorts of beneficial pollinators. A varied selection of plant species is required not only for a balanced diet, but also to ensure a steady food supply throughout different species blooming times.
These three points flow in the same vein as what is important to consider when shopping for honey. Choose Organic, Local, and Variety. To me, it is best practice to purchase seeds with the understanding that everything you plant enters into a common space for fertility: the same soil we as humans and all those alive depend on for existence. Put another way, mirror purchasing seeds to the way you would choose your own food for optimal health.
Your body being the soil; and food the seeds. A full circle.
Still not sure what to plant? A lot of seed providers will actually state on the packet whether a plant is attractive to pollinators. You can also consider the following bee magnets:
– Crocus
– Snow Drops
– Hellebores
– Clover
– Heather
– Herbs (Borage, Rosemary, Thyme, Lavender, Marjoram, Calendula, St. John’s Wort and many, many more!)
– Trees (Fruit, Rowan, Hawthorn, Elder etc.)
– Wild Flower Mix
Finally, nature provides some of the best early bee foods without any human intervention. Many human-classified ‘weeds’, such as dandelion, are a fantastic first food source for hungry bees, and can aid in fostering greater biodiversity within a collective ecosystem.
How Irish Propaganda Operates Part I (HIPO I) identifies an ‘essential constituency’ of farmers, which offer an overwhelmingly preponderance of their support to representatives of the political duopoly in rural constituencies. Upsetting this cohort frays a brittle alliance maintaining the dominant consensus of steady economic growth, and rising rents. As a result the media and politicians exercise caution where direct criticism of their interests is concerned, exemplified by Leo Varadkar’s volte-face in response to revealing he was cutting down on his red meat consumption.[i]
To define the ‘farming’ sector as such is, however, misleading: what is really referred to is the cartels, which control the export and domestic trade in livestock products. These have, over decades, manipulated farming opinion, especially through the in-house Irish Farmers Journal and pro-industry IFA, into falsely assuming an alignment of interests. Transnational corporations also influence national nutritional guidelines, and contribute to the state’s ‘laggardly’ response to climate change.
It would be incorrect to suggest that the sector is immune from criticism – habitually referred to as ‘our farmers’ by the state broadcaster – in mainstream Irish media. Any reputable news organisation which ignores compelling stories covered in the international press would lose credibility, and there are conscientious journalists working within these organisations. Moreover, the Irish media must appear to be balanced – ‘facts don’t have opinions’ as the Irish Times advertises – and conscientious. But the paper of record neglects to run investigations – thus the horse meat scandal of 2013 was broken by The Guardian – while subtly shaping public perception.
Veganism, in particular, is treated with a mixture of contempt and fear. This reaction may be symptomatic of an older generation’s contempt for a thrusting, and increasingly environmentally-informed, ‘snowflake’ generation, but anti-vegan invective also advantages many of their main advertisers. A recent article in the Irish Times by Brian Boyd warned: ‘Beware the perils of Veganuary’; quoting ‘renowned chef’ Anthony Bourdain’s description of vegans as ‘the Hezbollah-like splinter faction of vegetarians.’[ii] The article recycles arguments previously made in UK publications likening the philosophy to the dietary disorder called orthorexia – an unhealthy preoccupation with eating healthy food.
Yet the science on the matter is clear, with the American Dietetic Association advising that ‘appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.’[iii] The rise of Veganism is the least of Ireland’s nutritional problems: the country is in the grip of an obesity epidemic, linked to the standard Irish diet. What is striking about the paper’s coverage of veganism is that vegans themselves are rarely, if ever, permitted to speak directly to the reader.
‘Cartels have manipulated farming opinion for decades’ Image (c) Daniele Idini
Lancet Recommendations
Last month The Lancet published a paper entitled ‘Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems’, which ‘found strong evidence’, indicating ‘food production is among the largest drivers of global environmental change by contributing to climate change, biodiversity loss, freshwater use, interference with the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and land-system change’.
The paper convened thirty-seven leading scientists from sixteen countries in various disciplines including human health, agriculture, political sciences, and environmental sustainability. They argued we can provide ‘healthy diets … for an estimated global population of about 10 billion people by 2050 and remain within a safe operating space’; crucially, however, ‘even small increases in consumption of red meat or dairy foods would make this goal difficult or impossible to achieve.’ This will require ‘unprecedented global collaboration and commitment’ and ‘nothing less than a Great Food Transformation.’[iv] The headline, in the Irish media at least, was a recommendation that red meat consumption should decline by 90% in developed countries such as Ireland.
This radical and timely proposal appeared on the front page of the Irish Times. But a subtle fight back soon commenced, undermining its contents. Was it by coincidence that on the following day a recipe by Lilly Higgins appeared in the paper for sirloin steak?
More substantially, two days on, Kevin O’Sullivan interviewed Professor Alan Matthews; the headline writer emphasising his academic credentials. Matthews argued that ‘Ireland had a role in continuing meat and dairy production, provided it backed up its sustainability credentials with rigorous evidence.’[v] This is a significant proviso given that leading environmentalists have decried the government’s flagship Origin Green as an exercise in ‘greenwashing’.[vi]
The bias of the piece is demonstrated by a failure to canvass the opinion of an environmental scientist who could have offered an alternative perspective (and any number would have done so) to counter Matthews’s opinion. Instead the partisan views of the IFA’s Joe Healy were dutifully conveyed.
The editorial stance of the Irish Times (penned perhaps by O’Sullivan himself?) is made clear a few days later, when it described the report as ‘narrowly prescriptive’.[vii] The message is the equivalent of a ‘fuck you’ to the thirty-seven scientific authors, saying we in Ireland prefer to invert the food pyramid and will continue to devote 90% of our land to livestock.
The Irish Times also misleadingly conflates production with consumption. Allowing (without accepting) that Ireland enjoys a comparative advantage in low carbon-emission livestock production, which we continue to export, albeit within a reduced market: why should Irish consumers adopt a different diet to the rest of the world – especially given the authors are not only exploring environmental impact but also healthy nutrition – simply because we are living in a country currently dominated by pastoral agriculture?
As long as we operate within a global food system – where the bulk of our own agricultural products are exported and we import essential commodities including most of our fruit and vegetables. We cannot have it both ways, and say domestic consumption should mirror domestic production.
The Irish Times, for its part, is not displaying the “unprecedented global collaboration and commitment” the authors have called for. The editors are in no position to question the veracity of the Lancet analysis, leaving their pronouncement in Post-Truth territory.
Change of policy in the National Broadcaster
Hitherto virtually a cheerleader, a perceptible change in reporting policy on climate change is setting RTÉ on a collision course with the agricultrual sector.
The legitimacy of expressing climate change denial is being denied. Shutting down discussion on any subject may seem prescriptive, and a dangerous precedent to set, but considering the overwhelming scientific consensus, and the cataclysmic scenarios painted, the response appears proportionate. This works to the disadvantage of the cartels, which have been expanding the dairy industry in particular, while cloaking its emissions.
Michael Healy-Rae, ‘Self-styled Kerry man Joke’.
The new policy of zero tolerance became obvious on a recent episode of RTÉ’s Liveline, when Tim Boucher-Hayes refused to accept the validity of Michael Healy-Rae’s ‘opinion’ on climate change, before giving him enough rope to hang most political careers. Boucher Hayes exposed the self-styled Kerry man joke, who insisted he was being insulted, but could not say how.[viii]
After many years of watching, and occasionally appearing on RTÉ, I was amazed to hear the dialogue. I fear, however, that advertisers will make their feelings known, highlighting the threat to ‘livelihoods’, ignoring how most farmers’ incomes are derived entirely from EU subsidies. If anything, farmers should be paid to cultivate healthy fruit and vegetables, or re-wild their estates.
The sector makes great play on its importance to the Irish economy, but the input costs, including direct payments to farmers, imported feedstuffs, fertilizer, machinery, and fuel are not acknowledged; nor are externalised costs such as the pollution of waterways affecting the availability of potable water. This points to the long-standing failure of the Irish media to interrogate the structure and impacts of the sector.[ix] In this respect the environmental and agricultural correspondent George Lee has been a serious disappointment.
It should also be emphasised that the environmental argument has moved on from a narrow focus on climate change, which can lead to damaging outcomes, such as encouraging sitka spruce plantations which acidify soils and reduce biodiversity, in order to allow the dairy sector to expand.
The beef industry is more vulnerable to the environmental and nutritional arguments being laid against it, but the challenges to the dairy sector are mounting too, especially in terms of the idea that consumption is essential to human health, or event beneficial: the Harvard School of Public Health say that dairy is neither the only nor the best source of calcium.[x]
The shady global manipulation of nursing mothers who are encouraged to top-up with formula, or give up on breast feeding altogether, is a scandal waiting to erupt. Ireland, as the second highest exporter of powdered milk in the world, will be at the heart of it.
Unsurprisingly to date there has been no coverage in mainstream Irish media of the decision of the Canadian government to no longer identify a specific function for dairy produce in a healthy, balanced diet. Their new guidelines lump dairy in with other proteins. Canadians are advised to fill half their plates with fruits and vegetables, a quarter with carbohydrate-rich foods, and a quarter with protein sources.[xi]
Canada’s new healthy guidelines do not contain a separate dairy section.
Previously, Ireland’s leading environmental writer John Gibbons – notably writing for DeSmogUK rather than the Irish Times which he occasionally contributes to – exposed the use of fake data by the Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed purporting to show emissions from the sector were not rising as fast as they were in reality.[xii] The plot is curdling, and the message can only be managed for so long, especially with EU fines looming over rising emissions.
Source: Ireland Environmental Protection Agency.
‘Two sides of the same debased coinage’
Fintan O’Toole is the Irish Times’s most high profile columnist. Alone arguably in the Irish media, he is permitted to do investigative work alongside editorial commentary. But he has now positioned himself as a global intellectual, rather than simply an Irish hack, devoting himself to the subject of Brexit in particular in publications such as the New York Review of Books and New York Times. His articles condemning Britain’s ‘mad’ imperial hubris increasingly appear like word magnets on a fridge that are shuffled about from week to week. It means one of the progressive ‘slots’, essential to the Irish Times’s distinctive brand of conscientious virtue-signalling, is rarely focused on Irish issues.
Moreover, O’Toole has long displayed a blind spot towards environmental issues. As an urban, literary man he might be excused for playing to his strengths, and avoiding environmental questions, but how these are dealt with is increasingly important to the understanding of any country. His current emphasis is all the more frustrating given during his early career O’Toole forensically exposed the collusion between Charles J. Haughey’s administration and Larry Goodman’s Anglo-Irish Beef Processors, culminating in the Beef Tribunal of 1991.
Goodman’s company APB continues to dominate the Irish beef processing industry. Symbolically at least in 2012 the family of Larry Goodman acquired the former Bank of Ireland headquarters building on Dublin’s Baggot Street.
Yet O’Toole’s subsequent book on the subject claimed that the ‘emerging democracy of the Irish State was in a fundamental way incompatible with the power of the beef industry’; likening Ireland to a Latin American country where conversion from tillage to grassland depopulated the land and brought speculative investment, with the difference that in, ‘Ireland, the land was cleared by emigration rather than the slaughter of the Indians’[xiii]
He went so far as to claim:
The strength of the beef industry has been such as to limit the development of the kind of coherent, confident civil and political society which could control that industry and integrate it into a working notion of the common good. It is no accident, therefore, that the events described in this book are as much about political failure in contemporary Ireland as they are about the behaviour of the beef industry. They are two sides of the same debased coinage.[xiv]
O’Toole effectively conveyed the extent to which that Fianna Fáil government, especially the then Minister for Industry and Commerce Albert Reynolds, did the bidding of a company that exposed the state to a export credit liability of €100 million, and a wanton disregard for human health in the processing of cattle for food.
At one point O’Toole described how the Irish government’s relationship with the company had:
definitively pushed the government beyond the bounds of democratic authority and into the realms of the arbitrary abuse of power. The most basic norm of democratic government – that the state is not above the law – had been breached. And it had been done at the request of Larry Goodman.[xv]
The horse meat scandal of 2013 provided further evidence of a permissive attitude towards breaches of health and safety regulations in Goodman’s company or subsidiaries, yet he has remains untouchable. The mainstream Irish media, including Fintan O’Toole are seemingly uninterested, or unwilling, to conduct further investigations. Instead we get great rollicking tales about English ineptitude.
Pastoralism
After independence, pastoralist farmers (including the first Minister for Agriculture Patrick Hogan 1924-32) have effectively conveyed the idea that their interests align with the population at large. This account has rarely been challenged either by historians (with the exception of the late, Raymond Crotty) or journalists. Yet the pattern of immigration that continued into independence from rural Ireland was a product of a mode of production requiring low labour inputs, as O’Toole pointed out.
Wheat production even for domestic consumption did become uneconomic once mechanization became widely available from the early 1950s. Moisture levels during harvesting of Irish cereals make them unsuited to combined harvesters. The traditional method of tying or ‘bindering’ wheat by hand and drying it bundles before storage had become too labour intensive. It then became axiomatic from the 1960s that Ireland’s comparative advantage lay in livestock production, beef in particular, despite the historic inefficiencies of the sector.
One opportunity cost of relying on beef and dairy for export has been that overall food prices in a predominantly rural society have remained comparatively high, even by comparison with a highly-urbanised country such as Britain. This has worked to the detriment of urban workers, and even those living in rural Ireland, most of whom still live on imported foodstuffs.[xvi]
Furthermore, since independence a lack of variety in the range of crops being grown for the domestic market is apparent. In part this was a consequence of a stunted gastronomic culture. The result has been that the traditional Irish diet is notably low in fruit and vegetables consumption, increasing the likelihood of obesity. An historic missed opportunity was the failure of the state to support an emerging cooperative movement, advocating state-assisted greenhouse construction across the West of Ireland during the 1960s.
Today, with a climate not dissimilar, and a landmass far smaller, the Netherlands is the second leading exporter of vegetables in the world by value.[xvii]
The arrival of EU subsidies in the form of the CAP from the 1970s ossified the structure of Irish agriculture, driving up the price of land, and thereby decreasing the scope for the kind of cutting edge horticulture the Dutch have mastered.
Dig deeper into the substrate of Irish society and one discovers further ill-effects from Irish pastoralism’s inversion of the food pyramid. One-off housing is often seen as the scourge of rural Ireland. In contrast the Clachan of pre-Famine times involved substantial consolidated settlements, where farmers mostly grew crops for direct consumption. The Great Famine came about because of the tiny holdings of so many farmers, which brought intensive mono-cropping, and reliance on a single foodstuff.
Abandoned settlement, County Sligo.
Furthermore, extensive motor car reliance is connected to these one-off-developments; also bringing problems with subsequent urban development, as the preference of the pastoralist migrant to the city was for a detached home, rather than an apartment. We now contend with low density, suburban sprawl which has led the European Commission to describe Dublin as a ‘worst case scenario’ for ‘unsustainable car-dependent urban sprawl.’[xviii]
There appears to be little genuine opposition to the political duopoly, with Sinn Fein increasingly occupying the position held by Fianna Fáil in the nationalist spectrum. Sounding off on non-issues such as Venezuela belies a growing accommodation with the dominant consensus. The worst case scenario is that a Far Right party will derive support from the rising discontent with widening inequality, a housing crisis and the ongoing crisis in the provision of publish health.
Until we develop a functioning Irish media, interrogating the economic and social structures, including agriculture, and bringing accountability, the advance of genuinely progressive politics will remain stalled.
[iii] Craig WJ, Mangels AR; American Dietetic Association.’ Position of the American Dietetic Association: vegetarian diets.’ J Am Diet Assoc. 2009 Jul;109(7):1266-82. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864/, accessed 26/1/19.
[iv]Prof Walter Willett, MD, ,Prof Johan Rockström, PhD, Brent Loken, PhD, Marco Springmann, PhD, Prof Tim Lang, PhD, Sonja Vermeulen, PhD, Tara Garnett, PhD, David Tilman, PhD, Fabrice DeClerck, PhD, Amanda Wood, PhD, Malin Jonell, PhD, Michael Clark, PhD, Line J Gordon, PhD, Jessica Fanzo, PhD, Prof Corinna Hawkes, PhD, Rami Zurayk, PhD, Juan A Rivera, PhD, Prof Wim De Vries, PhD, Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, PhD, Ashkan Afshin, MD, Abhishek Chaudhary, PhD, Mario Herrero, PhD, Rina Agustina, MD, Francesco Branca, MD, Anna Lartey, PhD, Shenggen Fan, PhD, Beatrice Crona, PhD, Elizabeth Fox, PhD, Victoria Bignet, MSc, Max Troell, PhD, Therese Lindahl, PhD, Sudhvir Singh, MBChB, Sarah E Cornell, PhD, Prof K Srinath Reddy, DM, Sunita Narain, PhD, Sania Nishtar, MD, Prof Christopher J L Murray, MD, Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, January, 2019. The Lancet.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext?utm_campaign=tleat19&utm_source=HPfeature’, accessed 26/1/19.
[vi] Manus Boyle, ‘Fine Gael accused of greenwashing over Green Week campaign’, August 24th, 2018, Greennews.ie, https://greennews.ie/fine-gael-green-week-accused-greenwashing/
[ix] The cost of inputs https://greennews.ie/fine-gael-green-week-accused-greenwashing/was estimated at over €5 billion in 2017: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/oiiaf/outputinputandincomeinagriculture-finalestimate2017/ accessed 25/1/19.
[x] Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, ‘Calcium and Milk’, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/calcium-and-milk/
[xviii] Untitled, Belfast Telegraph, ‘EU using Dublin as example of worst-case urban, 4th of October, 2016, sprawl’ https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/breakingnews_ukandireland/eu-using-dublin-as-example-of-worstcase-urban-sprawl-28409383.html
There will ultimately occur conflagration of the whole world … nothing will remain but fire, by which, as a living being, and a god, once again a new world may be created and the ordered universe restored as before. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Natura Deorum ‘On the Nature of Gods’ (45BCE)
I –Buddha in the Garden
On a recent trip to Belfast my attention was drawn to a small statue of the Buddha in the garden of a house I was staying. In a cityscape distinguished by myriad places of Christian worship – from ‘low’ church chapels with gaudy signs, to matronly Anglican churches, and looming Catholic cathedrals – I wondered whether greater devotion towards the ideals of the contented-looking representation before me would prove more conducive to reconciliation than pathways offered by Christian sects, alike in their devotion to a single biblical source.
Can the tenets of any religion be dismissed as projections of economic and other power relations? A materialist conception certainly explains a lot – the use of doctrine for political ends such as keeping women in servitude – but is at odds with curious dynamics internal to traditions. Adherents may be urged into irrational acts, from welcoming a stranger into their homes on appointed days, to growing beards to a certain length. These do not appear fitted to please any capitalist overseer.
Marx recognised the suffering which impels faith in the deliverance of a higher power. Nonetheless, he viewed belief in the supernatural as an opiate, and a superstition to be overcome on the road to a rational Communism. Missing from that materialist school of thought, however, is acknowledgement of the possibility of ‘magical thinking’ co-existing with scientific rationality, even in the same brain. As the Danish physicist Neils Bohr put it: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind, at the same time, and still retain the ability to function (Turok, 2012, p.77).’
There may of course be irreconcilable tensions between religion and science, as with the museum that Creationists have built to provide an account of the nearby Giants Causeway to fit with ‘Biblical history’. This may lead to a perception that battle has been joined between the values of the Enlightenment and barbaric fundamentalists. This could, however, lead to a denial of the creative fictions contained in religions.
Perhaps the main reason that religions endure in ‘advanced’ technological societies is because they offer a trove of stories the loss of which would diminish our humanity. The fables emanating from the sacred texts of Christianity are interpreted by each generation in novel ways. This can involve a setting aside of scientific evidence, as where Kerry TD Danny Healy Rae says God is responsible for the weather and thus Climate Change too, but not always. The account may involve a weighing of moral scales, where virtue is rewarded, and vice punished.
The will of God, or gods, may seem capricious – as where Abraham agrees to sacrifice his first born son – but might also yield powerful insights. Many atheists fixate on the interpretations of religious dogmatists, and do not allow for creative ambiguities, which a mind open to magical thinking, however fleetingly, accommodates.
It is, nonetheless, fair to say that the bible, the main corpus of the various Christian faiths, enjoins belief in one God ‘the Almighty’, which is shared with its monotheistic cousins Judaism and Islam. History suggests this story lends itself to appropriation by male autocrats justifying absolute power.
But are the mythologies of Ancient Greece and Rome which furnished their religions, or the animist faiths of tribal societies, any less prone to dominance by power-hungry males? Certainly the father of the Greek gods Zeus was a bit of a scoundrel. Are animists necessarily kinder to the earth than ‘people of the book’? This is unclear because animists religions have never exercised the kind of dominion over the Earth that the bookish people wield.
The peculiarity of Buddhism is that it is a both a religion which indulges in magical stories, and a philosophy, albeit one requiring a leap of faith into the idea of karma, which says the actions of an individual affects that person in this and subsequent lives. It is well-adapted as a method of self-improvement, impelling restraint, but the Buddha in his meditative posture seems a little removed from the cut and thrust of this world for my liking; that story by itself cannot sate my appetite for ‘true’ fictions.
Art is a repository of fictions, often requiring a suspension of belief, and a surrender to magical thinking. This is the wonder we feel when staring into ‘the heavens’ of a Renaissance basilica’s ceiling, or as we enter ‘the world’ of a novel. In many respects being an artist is akin to a religious vocation, an idea which co-habitats slightly uncomfortably with any economic assessment of utility.
The twentieth century has witnessed the implosion of many hallowed artistic forms leading to what Edward Clarke has described as post-modern decrepitude, but the fictions keep bubbling up through popular songs, cinema, and perhaps in the new wave of virtual reality via the digital medium.
II – ‘The only thing that can displace a story is a story’
Environmentalists are prone to despondency, as most of humanity blithely ignores scientific projections. Despite repeated warnings of the dire consequence of Climate Change, and the Sixth Extinction which has seen humanity wipe out sixty percent of the Earth’s wildlife since 1970, behavioural change is painfully slow.
Last year George Monbiot proposed a simultaneously simple but elusive solution: change the story, writing:
Stories are the means by which we navigate the world. They allow us to interpret its complex and contradictory signals. We all possess a narrative instinct: an innate disposition to listen for an account of who we are and where we stand.
Monbiot argues that a string of facts, however accurate, will not correct or dislodge a powerful story, and often simply provoke indignation if a prior narrative ‘truth’ has been established. ‘The only thing’, he says, ‘that can displace a story is a story’. He concludes that those ‘who tell the stories run the world’.
Currently it is fair to say that the neo-liberal ‘story’ is ascendant. The American Dream, that anyone can be successful as long as the pesky state does not impose red tape and steal their hard-earned lucre, still animates many. The corollary is a fatalistic narrative which sees no other outcome than a steady slide into an ecological abyss.
To alter these stories we could understand better their primary means of conveyance: natural languages, which, unlike mathematics, have evolved in humans through use and repetition, without conscious planning or premeditation.
The fate of human languages has mirrored the fate of animals in Nature. The seminal technology of writing – a secondary modelling system based on a prior system of spoken language – standardised dialects previously subject to inter-flow and cross-fertilization. This brought a hitherto unexperienced permanence, superseding oral recitation in poetry, which changed subtly with each telling. We can only now look back on that oral universe preceding writing through the prism of our own literary universe.
According to Walter Ong: ‘Writing or script differs as such from speech in that it does not inevitably well up out of the unconscious.’ He asserts nonetheless that writing ‘heightens consciousness’ by creating distance, or objectivity. He adds: ‘though inspiration continues to derive from unconscious sources, the writer can subject the unconscious inspiration to far greater conscious control than the oral narrator.’
This profoundly altered ways of thinking: interiorizing consciousness; allowing unprecedented analysis in philosophy; and providing a recording apparatus crucial to scientific enquiry. According to Ong: ‘examination of phenomena or of stated truths is impossible without writing and reading. (Ong, 1982, pp.77-94)’ This tool has allowed man to assert control over Nature. Technologies accumulate as knowledge is passed down through generations, and interrogated in texts.
Later, print technology reduced the number of dominant languages, enforced by military and economic might. Less than one hundred human societies developed vernacular literatures. Thousands of languages perished, their marvels scattered like desert sands beneath towering pyramids.
Now with the arrival of the Internet barely a dozen languages exert an irresistible pull on those still standing. It is not inconceivable that the various translation tools we have at our disposal will reduce human communication to a single language, English most likely.
II – Agricultural and Technological Revolutions
Similarly, with the domestication of animals (cattle, pigs and sheep especially) and plants (principally wheat, rice and corn) over the course of the First Agricultural Revolution (from c. 10,000 BCE) homo sapiens – already in possession of fire and domesticated dogs – became dominant in most fertile regions of the world. It was then that exploitation of the biosphere commenced in earnest, although early humans had previously wiped out megafauna, once they migrated out of Africa.
It is no coincidence that writing was invented in the Middle East, where agricultural surpluses first freed a small intellectual strata from the demands of labouring to produce food. Henceforth agriculture and writing would form a mutually-enforcing alliance.
The development in Europe of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg circa, 1450 – as well as improvements in the quality and supply of paper – helped bring the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. The improved legibility of texts permitted rapid, silent reading. This created further scope for interiorization of consciousness, a defining feature of the Western mind.
There followed a Second Agricultural Revolution – involving improvement in crop and animal breeding, enclosure of estates and the adoption of new machinery – that swept through north-west Europe in the eighteenth century, placing further pressure on wildlife habitats. Thus, the last Irish wolf was hunted to extinction in 1783, by which time most of the island’s native forests had been stripped away to make way for agriculture, especially cattle.
The rapid dissemination of ideas brought by the Gutenberg Press was also instrumental in the colonisation of the globe by Europeans from the fifteenth century onwards. This presented new lands and pre-agricultural peoples to exploit, as well as a fruitful exchange between the primary food crops and domesticated animals of the Americas (including corn, potato and turkey) and Eurasia (especially wheat, rice, cows, pigs and sheep).
Apart from genocide, plague and irredeemable cultural loss, this brought annihilation to wildlife, particularly in the Americas where megafauna such as the buffalo were wiped out in the nineteenth century, to make way for cattle.
The mid-twentieth century witnessed the Third Agricultural Revolution, or Green Revolution, including widespread adoption of newly-invented artificial fertilizer, derived from natural gas using the Haber-Bosch process, mechanisation, and the development of high-performing cultivars. This raised crop yields prodigiously allowing human population to increase from one and a half billion in 1900 to over seven billion today.
Now in this the Anthropocene many free animals survive only through piecemeal human protection. Our dominance extends to every continent, while thousands of species die out each year. Ecocide continues apace in the Amazon rainforest, and elsewhere.
The Internet – our latest communication breakthrough – places further pressure on minority languages. Will it accelerate the Sixth Extinction and devastating Climate Change? Or could it shatter a long-standing perception of a divide between the rights of homo sapiens and all other species? Can we move from human rights towards a more expansive idea of rights for all of Nature? To do so we must change the story.
IV – The Greek Legacy
The first comprehensive writing system, cuneiform, was developed in Sumeria, just over five thousand years ago, diffusing slowly around the globe.
Later the Ancient Greek alphabet accurately fixed the sound of language for the first time by introducing vowels as letters. This according to Ong ‘analyzed sound more abstractly into purely spatial components (Ong, 1982, p.90)’, making it easier for anyone to attain literacy. It allowed fuller description than unvocalised Semitic scripts, or pictographic alphabets such as Chinese, whose vast number of characters lends itself to educational elitism.
The breakthrough in script seems to explains the extraordinary eruption of Ancient Greek culture which laid the foundations of Western music, mathematics, philosophy and literature. Regrettably however, through Plato especially, the notion of human superiority over all other animals was implanted, a philosophical assumption that furnished the Abrahamic faiths with reasoned justification for the mythology of man being made in the image of God.
This idea of a divine right over Nature became axiomatic, even surviving the profound questioning of religious assumptions in the Enlightenment. This is the story we must change.
V – Virtual Reality
The Internet brings unmatched access to knowledge: a universal human library. A young child can easily access information about the plight of other animals, and develop an understanding of the looming threat of Climate Change. But the technology also has an as yet unchecked capacity to distract and isolate, especially through the smart phone device. How are we are we then to reach a point where we accept the true fiction that any one individual’s life can make a difference?
The physicist Neil Turok describes the digital format as, ‘the crudest, bluntest, most brutal form of information that we know.’ In this form, he says, everything is reduced to ‘finite strings of 0s and 1s’, with analogue information ‘infinitely richer. (Turok, 2012, p.230)’ The Internet effectively conveys attenuated images and sounds, but other sensations, and connections, are unavailable, even those conveyed in seemingly obsolete books. This suggests it could breed isolation, perhaps compounding an apathy towards ecological collapse.
Yet through the Internet we demystify specialisations in various domains; text shifts into pictographic emoticons; hyperlinks move us beyond the linear progress of the book form; video is cinema-for-all – while photographs implant images telling a thousand tales; the division between virtual and real collapses, especially in gaming technology. There is also another avenue for the spoken word, via traditional ‘radio’ stations, and the podcast is a powerful new medium, offering an opening for the revival of oral poetry perhaps.
Down through the ages poetry has been in metaphorical play with Nature, while novels generally move into the interior world of the narrator. In the latter, phenomena such as storms or floods tend not to intrude – they serve no moral purpose – whereas the ancient poet is in dialogue with a cosmos of which he is at the centre. Poets used mythologies to bind peoples into a singular tribal identity.
For the ancients, whose laws and customs were conveyed through poetry, disastrous weather was seen as punishment by the gods, perhaps for failure to perform the requisite sacrifices. In contrast, the rational person-of-the-book, explains bad weather in terms of air currents moving around the globe, and reasons there is nothing one person can possibly do to alter these conditions. Novels according to Amitav Gosh:
conjure up worlds that became real precisely because of their finitude and distinctiveness. Within the mansion of serious fiction, no one will speak of how the continents were created, nor will they refer to the passage of a thousand year: connections and events on this scale appear not just unlikely but also absurd within the delineated horizon of a novel (Gosh, 2016, p.61).
The earlier poetic view, however obscurantist, actually offers a greater likelihood of someone taking responsibility for their actions, as the person-of-the-book may more easily dwell in his interior world. How then can we reconcile scientific reason with a belief that individual actions feed into a collective responsibility?
Can Homo Digitalas move beyond her solitary life into a universal scheme of responsibility? If we believe ourselves to be part of a greater whole the possibility for collective action may yet arise. The Internet may broaden the fiction of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Global Village’, enlivening what is a scientific myth of Gaia: an imagined community of Nature, including ourselves.
The novel, written from the perspective of the solitary individual at a fixed moment could pass into obscurity. The Internet can engender new artistic forms closer to the spoken tradition of poetry, with a common vision in aeons and origins. An older relationship with the word might be restored, with mythology and scientific rationality co-habiting to create a new story.
Already, however, we see social and political cleavages opening up, linked to the arrival of the new medium. Just as the rupture of Gutenberg’s Press awoke sectarian identities, leading to the Wars of Religion of the seventeenth century, similarly the fingerprints of a technological shift seem evident in contemporary clashes.
To realise fresh narratives out of the Internet we need to adapt our behaviour, tempering our dependence on the smartphone device. An interface less conducive to isolation is surely necessary.
In the meantime Nature groans under the weight of human exploitation, and we demand a Fourth Agricultural Revolution bringing humans and other animals into an elusive symbiosis. Few languages may survive the Internet, but that technology may help engender a unifying mythology, maintaining our precious Nature. Without this we seem doomed.
References
Amitav Gosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2016.
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Metheun, London, 1982.
Neil Turok, The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos, Faber, London, 2012.
The possibility of an association existing between animal protein and cancer goes back at least to the 1960s. At that time in the Philippines, a slowly increasing incidence of liver cancer was taking place amongst children that carried a high mortality rate. Because such cancers were very rare in this age group, news of the outbreak spread to the USA and prompted Virginia Tech. University to send a young nutritional scientist over there to see what was going on. His name was T. Colin Campbell.
Even before this visit took place researchers had already come to the conclusion that dietary factors were the most likely cause of the cancer, as the onset of the disease appeared to coincide with the discovery that large areas of the peanut crop had become infected by a fungus. It was, therefore, believed that the fungus was carcinogenic for the liver, and this theory was considerably reinforced when it was discovered that new cases of the disease plummeted as soon as children were instructed to avoid peanuts from fungus infected areas.
I – Campbell in the Philippines
That was how matters stood when Colin Campbell arrived on the scene. By then, not alone were researchers confident that the exact cause of the cancer was known, they were also satisfied that they could prevent new cases developing, simply by ensuring that peanuts from fungus-infected-areas were not eaten. In fact, all that seemed to remain for Campbell to do was to familiarize himself with the research that had taken place, and to read some of the case histories that had been documented.
It was while this evaluation was taking place, however, that a very puzzling statistic came to the researchers’ attention. It was discovered that it was only children from wealthy families that were dying of the disease; children from poor families, although they appeared to eat just as many peanuts as rich children, did not develop the cancer, much less die of it.
This was such a strange finding that doctors were forced to consider the possibility that factors other than peanuts might also be playing a role in the development of the cancer. It was decided, therefore, to identify all the major dietary differences that existed between the two groups of children. It was a task that proved surprisingly easy as it quickly became apparent that the main dietary difference between them was in the amount of animal protein being consumed.
Children from rich families ate lots of animal protein in the form of milk, cheese, eggs, poultry and all sorts of meats and these were precisely the foods that poorer families often could not afford.
It was a bit of a dilemma. If indeed it was only children of the rich that were developing liver cancer then one would have to conclude that there existed an association existed between the proteins that rich children were eating and the growth of the cancer. Few doctors could have felt entirely comfortable with this assumption, however, as it had long been acknowledged that animal protein was the most nutritious food that money could buy.
When shortly thereafter Campbell headed back to the USA these were the thoughts that were buzzing about in his head. Certainly there was convincing evidence that the liver cancer outbreak in the Philippines was primarily due to a fungal infection of the peanut crop, but what then was one to make of the fact that it was only the children of the rich, eating lots of animal protein, that were dying from the disease?
Bewildering questions sometimes turn out to have very simple answers and this was one such case. It was Colin Campbell that solved the riddle. What occurred to him was that if indeed animal protein was so wonderfully nutritious for the cells of humans and many other animals, then surely they would also be highly nutritious for these same cells should they become malignant. Indeed one might even suspect that cancer cells, with their inherent characteristic of out-of-control-replication, might actually require the nutritional power of animal proteins, if they were to thrive and grow.
II – Laboratory Tests
Once back in the United States, Campbell set to work and began by checking the medical literature, in case some research might have taken place on the subject of liver cancer that had previously escaped his eye.
To his surprise he found that there was one scientific paper published by two Indian researchers in ‘The Archives of Pathology’ from February 1968. These researchers, Madhavan and Gopalan, must have been on much the same track then as Campbell was now. They too were interested in the apparent association between animal protein and liver cancer, and they had carried out research that involved setting up experiments using laboratory rats.
All the rats were first exposed to some well known carcinogens with the intention of causing at least some of their liver cells to develop cancer. One group of the rats was then kept on a diet containing 20% animal protein in the form of casein from cows’ milk, and a second group was fed 5% casein. The results were remarkable in that the cancer cells in every rat fed on the 20% diet began to grow while little change occurred in the cells of rats on 5% casein.
On the strength of this scientific paper from India and his own experiences in The Philippines, Campbell wrote a large number of articles on the subject for top scientific journals in the USA. The articles received a lot of attention but much of this was critical as his suggestion of there being an association between animal protein and cancer was considered too farfetched to be accurate.
Campbell’s reaction was to set up his own experiments using, laboratory rats and the results were almost identical to those achieved by the Indian researchers. By this time he had become Professor of Nutrition and Biochemistry at Cornell University, where he remained for twenty-two years, and while there he carried out many more experiments on rats for the benefit of his students.
One of the more important findings he made during these experiments was that it was entirely possible to switch the growth of cancer on and off, simply by varying the amount of animal protein in the diet. When plant proteins were used in these experiments no such results were achieved.
III – Resistance of Vested Interests
By now Campbell had come to believe that he had a very significant discovery on his hands and attempted in every way possible to get his message across both to the general public and to the medical profession. He continued to write articles and lectured widely on the subject in many universities. He also wrote a number of books. His first and most famous book, The China Study (Dallas, 2005) sold well over two million copies, and was reviewed favourably in The New York Times. Even so, and notwithstanding the fact that he was now a full professor with tenure at one of the major universities in the United States, his work remained unread by the vast majority of medical doctors.
In The China Study Campbell makes no bones about the vested interest groups that confronted him whenever he brought up the subject of a relationship between animal protein and cancer. He listed three main groups.
The very powerful pharmaceutical industry with its enormous influence in practically all areas of medicine headed the list. Their immense wealth comes from the vast sums of money they earn from producing drugs to combat disease. Cancer drugs rank high in this research and so in monetary terms at least, the pharmaceutical industry would have most to lose should Campbell’s ideas prove correct.
Next on the list of vested interests came the farming community and the associated food industries. It was these that produced most of the animal protein that we consume, and needless to say they were none too pleased to find that their products were now being accused not alone of making cancers grow, but also of contributing to the greenhouse gasses responsible for Climate Change.
Ranked third on Campbell’s list of vested interests came the medical profession itself. The surprise here was that doctors were not ranked at number one as down through the years Campbell and his theory had been completely ignored by cancer specialists.
My own feelings are that the entire medical profession have made a very big mistake in not researching the subject. It would have been so easy for them to do so, and all relevant findings could then have been fully established. But such is life, and we all make mistakes. Overwork amongst wealthy, specialist doctors is widespread and while practice sometimes makes perfect, rushing headlong in the wrong direction helps nobody.
IV – Family Doctoring
My credentials are that I had been a family doctor in Ireland for many years and in 2005, after reading The China Study, I became convinced that some sort of relationship existed between animal protein and cancer.
I was sufficiently impressed to ask some cancer specialists that I knew what they thought about Campbell’s theory, but they all had more pressing problems on their minds. It was their lack of response that forced me to consider the possibility of carrying out some research myself. Cancer being such a common disease a busy family doctor could expect to have about seventy cancer patients, at various stages of the disease, attending the practice at any one time. So I had plenty of material to work on.
What I did was simply to bring up the subject of a possible association between animal protein and cancer with every cancer patient that passed through my office. I explained to each of them how I had been influenced by Colin Campbell’s book and suggested that they too should not alone read it, but should seriously consider going on an animal protein-free, plant-based diet, straight away.
It was a big ask, but people generally listen to what a family doctors has to say, and most of my patients decided to give the diet a try. As time went by and everybody became increasingly aware of just how difficult it was to give up eating their favourite foods, attitudes began to change and this was not helped by a lack of support for the diet from cancer specialists. For a time it began to appear that my whole research effort might go down the drain.
V – A ‘Eureka’ Moment
What was becoming evident was that the diet was just too difficult for many people and there did not appear to be much that I could do about it. Making the diet more palatable was the only solution that came to mind but this didn’t appear very realistic. Or was it?
I had a sort of eureka moment when I began to realise that for those that were struggling with the diet, no great harm could be done by allowing fish to be eaten a few times per week. It was not something that I had read about in Professor Campbell’s writings, or anywhere else for that matter, but I had always wondered whether fish might be in a different category to other forms of animal protein.
I explained to patients that little or no direct research had been done on the subject of fish eating and cancer, but pointed out that people living In Japan and other parts of the world with strong fish eating cultures were amongst the most long-lived on the planet, with very low cancer rates. There was also the fact that recent evolutionary research was suggesting that mankind appeared to have evolved walking in or around river estuaries eating plants and shellfish. Perhaps this could offer some explanation as to why fish protein might be an exception to the rule.
It was a bit of a gamble but it appears to have paid off. Certainly the diet with fish included became much easier to follow, and soon it was not only the strugglers that were eating fish a couple of times a week, most of my cancer patients were doing so also while otherwise strictly adhering to a wholefood plant-based regime.
Patients welcomed this small change in the diet, and few if any now lapse. We are all learning as we go along.
Many patients recount how they experience an improved sense of wellbeing after being on the diet for only a matter of weeks. This may just be in the head, but I suggest that improved wellbeing reflects how the cancer cells inside them have stopped replicating.
Improved wellbeing also appears to be associated with a good long term prognosis, and I now suggest to patients that most of them should be able to return to their normal pre-cancer lives, within a matter of weeks and broadly speaking this is what I have seen.
*******
My hope for the future is that all patients diagnosed with any form of cancer will automatically stop eating animal protein as soon as the diagnosis is made. This is a risk-free form of treatment, and far from interfering with treatments given by cancer specialists, makes recovery more rapid and assured.
I also emphasise to patients that by staying on an animal-protein-free, plant-based diet indefinitely that not alone are cancers very unlikely to return but that they also have a much better chance of avoiding most of the chronic diseases we are prone to, including coronary heart disease.
Over the years I have put together a short book explaining why I have gone down the path that I have taken. The book recounts a number of case histories that readers should find helpful. The title is Stop Feeding Your Cancer and it is available for purchase on Amazon.
Dr John Kelly MB.BCh.BAO.DCh.LM.MRCGP jkellypiat@yahoo.com
At a festival recently I fell into the company of an exuberant character in his early twenties. After a while this smiling extrovert revealed he was tripping on LSD. Between performing acro-aerobics, and welcoming lashes from a fly-swatter that generated a temporary tattoo, he declared he was going to take a further dose. I dutifully warned him to consider biding his time, but he laughed off my concerns and threw the tablet down the hatch. Last I saw he was leading a toaster around by its chord, proclaiming – wild-eyed – it was his cat.
Festival frolics.
I wonder has he since returned to a respectable job to draw a wage, that ‘one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar’, as Allen Ginsberg puts it in his ‘Howl’, with festive memories sustaining him through the tedium of spread sheets or digital marketing. I pray he has not fallen over the edge into insanity, and like Carl Solomon in Ginsberg’s epic poem of post-modernity, ended up in a mental asylum:
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
or
where fifty more shocks will return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
To be clear, LSD, or acid, can, in rare circumstances, trigger a first psychotic episode, and should be treated with extreme caution. It is also a controlled substance, with possession or intent to supply ordinarily prohibited in most countries.
But after decades of identification with an orgiastic counterculture – famously with Timothy Leary’s 1960s rallying cry ‘to turn on, tune in and drop out’ – research scientists are returning to examine its profound therapeutic capabilities, including for treatment of seemingly incurable depression.
The ritualistic abandonment that I encountered at that festival is giving way to ‘white coat Shamanism’, where guides reduce the chance of bad trips, and lasting insanity, as well as more measured ingestion, including ‘micro-dosing Fridays’ in Silicon Valley.
Could its use yet realise a paradigm shift in how humanity interacts with the world, such as was hoped for by many of the 1960s evangelists, including Allen Ginsberg himself?
I – LSD and Psilocybin
There are two main varieties of psychedelics, or hallucinogens, in use: lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD or ‘Acid’) , and psilocybin, commonly referred to as ‘magic mushrooms’.
Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman discovered the properties of LSD in 1943, after deriving it from a naturally occurring compound called ergot, a fungus that infects grains, especially rye, exposed to moisture. Indeed, the visions – beatific and diabolic – commonly reported by peasants and others in the Middle Ages, and generally associated with the effects of starvation, have been attributed to this fungal growth in staple foodstuffs (Ferrières, 2006, p.141).
Hoffman himself had little doubt as to the significance of his discovery for humanity, subsequently writing:
the feeling of co-creationism with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and materialist and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong (Pollan, 2018, p.26).
The difficulty, however, for Sandoz, the Swiss laboratory which manufactured it, was to find a practical application for the curious, mind-altering compound. Throughout the 1950s the company responded positively to most requests from bodies engaged in research; this included the CIA’s MK Ultra Programme, involving trials on thousands of participants, mostly without their consent, in order to advance techniques in mind control.
Its discovery also ushered in a new class of anti-depressants, through an understanding of serotonin; and, notably, successful trials on alcoholics, before its use became tied up – inextricably it would seem – with the counterculture of the 1960s, and was prohibited in the U.S.A. from 1966. Timothy Leary believed that if four million people experienced its effects it would bring about major changes to society, in the end only two million gained the experience.
Nonetheless Michael Pollan writes of the period:
LSD truly was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind (the superego, ego and unconscious) and going on from there to society’s various structures of authority and then to lines of every imaginable kind between patient and therapist, research and recreation, sickness and health, self and other, subject and object, the spiritual and the material (Pollan, 2018, p.214).
Psilocybin, the other psychedelic in common use, also known as ‘magic mushroom’, is of far more ancient vintage in human culture, especially in the New World. It played a role in Mayan religious ceremonies, to the disgust of the Catholic church, which in 1620 described the use of plants for divination as an act of superstition ‘opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic Faith (Pollan, 2018, p.109)’.
Despite the appalling repression by Spanish authorities of this and other aspects of the indigenous culture including foodstuffs like amaranth, the use of these substances survived in popular Mexican religious rituals. These were first brought to the attention of the English-speaking world in a seminal article for Life Magazine written by New York banker R. Gordon Wasson in 1956, entitled ‘Seeking the Magic Mushroom’, which contained the first known use of that term.
Wasson and his wife inveigled there way into one of the secret ceremonies; ultimately to the cost of the healer who was shunned by her village community after the revelations encouraged a steady stream of drug tourists to descend on them.
Terence McKenna has since popularized an hypothesis – ‘the Stoned Ape Theory’ – proposing that consumption of these mushrooms brought an expansion in human brain capacity. The idea is no longer so far-fetched when one learns that several tribes still feed psychoactive plants to their dogs to improve their hunting ability (Pollan, 2018, p.123), although it remains speculative.
Psychedelic mushrooms were also probably used by the Ancient Greeks in the Eleusinian Mysteries, initiations held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone. Elsewhere in Europe, the Viking berserkers may also have been under its influence, explaining a disregard for personal safety in battle.
We may safely assume that such a powerful compound was well known across Europe, and probably used in various ceremonies, before the adoption of Christianity appears to have brought an end to its use. Monotheism does not appear compatible with the ambiguity fostered by hallucinogens.
II – The Ego is Stranded
Neuroscientists have isolated a hub of brain activity in the cerebral cortex known as the Default Network Mode (DMN). This performs metacognitive processes such as self-reflection, mental time travel, mental constructions, moral reasoning and ‘theory of mind’, all commonly associated with expression of ego, leading it to be referred to as the ‘me’ network (Pollan, 2018, p.302-4).
Revealingly, the DMN is only operational late in a child’s development, by which time a strong sense of self has been asserted, and a roaming imagination has given way to more ‘sensible’ considerations.
The DMN exerts an inhibitory influence on lower parts of the brain, like emotion and memory, which may help someone maintain a singular focus. According to Marcus Raichle it ‘acts as an uber-conductor to ensure that the cacophonies of competing signals from one system do not interfere with those from another (Pollan, 2018, p.303)’.
In experiments carried out under Robin Carhart-Harris volunteers were given psilocybin in a controlled environment. This revealed that the steepest drops in DMN activity correlated with the subjective experience of ‘ego dissolution’. This disinhibition may explain why thoughts, and even visions, not normally present during waking consciousness float to the surface of our awareness. In this Ted Talk he explains the benefits of the experiments:
As the influence of the DMN is unseated a feelings of connection with other ‘beings’ around us tends to manifest, making us ‘at one’ with Nature, a common experience among those under the influence of psychedelics.
This occurs alongside the disintegration of the visual processing system, allowing thoughts and even music to conjure images. The brain as a whole becomes more integrated as new connections spring up among regions that ordinarily keep to themselves, or were linked only via the central hub of the DMN. As Michael Pollan puts it: ‘The brain appears to become less specialized, and more globally interconnected, with considerably more intercourse, or cross-talk, among its various neighbourhoods (Pollan, 2018, p.316)’.
Franz Vollenweider also refers to ‘neuroplasticity’, whereby a window is opened in which destructive patterns of thought and behaviour are easier to change (Pollan, 2018, p.320).
III – Invention or Creation?
When Michael Pollan consumed magic mushrooms while researching his recent book on psychedelics he finds himself believing the trees in his gardens were the equivalent of his parents. As an atheist, he dismisses the idea there was anything supernatural about this ‘heightened perception’ requiring belief in a divinity, or magic, to explain it (Pollan, 2018, p.136), but his connectedness is nonetheless a fiction without scientific basis.
No great distance would appear to lie between Pollan’s belief in the truth of his mind’s subjective, and unprovable, conjecture, and a religious outlook, which George Steiner defines as ‘an endeavour to grasp, to offer thanks for, the gratuitous miracle of creation (Steiner, 2001, p.128).’
Steiner distinguishes between creation, which he connects to a religious belief in the truth of a fiction, and invention which arrives in science and technology.
Psychedelic drugs appear to play a role in permitting advances in the latter, but, surprisingly, not the former. Among those who tried LSD in the 1960s were technological visionaries in Silicon Valley, who began to revolutionize computers. These engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, finding it helpful for visualising staggering complexities in these dimensions, and holding it all in their heads.
Scientists are not generally associated with mind-altering drugs, but the confounding influence on otherwise highly-rational, even rigid, minds may increase the possibility of technological innovation.
The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who who was fascinated by science throughout his life, once mused on the counter-intuitive nature of scientific understanding:
When we try to recognise the idea inherent in a phenomena we are confused by the fact that it frequently – even normally – contradicts our senses. The Copernican system is based on an idea which was hard to grasp; even now it contradicts our senses every day … The metamorphosis of plants contradicts our senses in the same way (Holmes, 2009, p.247).
Quantum Uncertainty is similarly counter-intuitive (how is something simultaneously a wave and a particle?). A fixed appreciation of ‘reality’ often must be set aside in order for a breakthrough to occur, permitting the vision that God plays dice.
What holds for scientific invention does not seem to apply to artistic creativity. The prevalence of LSD in the avant-garde of the 1960s Counterculture dissolved much of our cultural inheritance – not least the literary canon in the eyes of Post Modernists – but since the 1960s it is hard to identify an artistic genre that has advanced in any way comparable to previous movements, such as the Romantics, or even Surrealists, both of whom we continually hark back to in common speech.
In his account of the music of the Beatles Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald points to the effect of the LSD on the wider culture:
Though framed into terms of sexual liberation and scaffolded by religious ideas imported from the Orient, the central shift of the counterculture was drugs, and one drug above all: d-lysergic acid diethylamide 25, or LSD.
With the removal of what he describes as ‘the brain’s neural concierge’:
The LSD view of life took the form of a smiling non-judgmentalism which saw ‘straight’ thinking, including political opinion across the board from extreme Left to Right, as basically insane. To those enlightened by the drug, all human problems and divisions were issues, not of substance, but of perception. With LSD, humanity could transcend its ‘primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility’ and, realising the oneness of all creation, proceed directly to utopia.
He continues:
Using it, normal people were able to move directly to the state of ‘oceanic consciousness’ achieved by a mystic only after years of preparation and many intervening stages of growing self-awareness – as a result of which most of them not unnaturally concluded that reality was a chaos of dancing energies without meaning or purpose. There being no way to evaluate such a phenomenon, all one could do was ‘dig it’. Hence at the heart of the counterculture was a moral vacuum: not God, but The Void.
While pop music and television flourished, initially at least, McDonald identified a clear degeneration in older artistic forms. Thus:
Classical music, once an art of expression, became a pseudo-scientific, quasi-architectural craft of technique whose principles of design, opaque to the ear, were appreciable only by examining the ‘blueprint’ of the score. Similarly the rapid succession of conceptual coups in the world of painting and sculpture, so novel at the time, turned out to be merely the end of modernism and, as such, the dying fall of Western art. Overtaken by the ‘artistic discourse’ of post-modernism, art became as literary as post-Wagnerian classical music was visual, producing the arid paradox of paintings to listen to and music to look at. Shorn of their content, art, music, and literature degenerated by increasingly inconsequential stages from art about art, to jokes about art about art, and finally to jokes about art about art (McDonald, Ian, 2005, pp. 15-23).
Artistic creativity has been described as a form of divine madness, in which an immediate reality is dismissed in favour of the constructs of the imagination. Thus the nineteenth century John Ruskin asserted a belief in ‘spiritual powers … genii, fairies, or spirits’, claiming, ‘No true happiness exists, nor is any good work done … but in the sense or imagination of such presences.’ Who in their ‘right mind’ could conceive such an idea, yet such conceit is often a necessary tool for an artist. Whatever brain activity that is going on with the artist it does not appear that her ego needs to be dissolved.
In his essay ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (1900) W. B. Yeats refers to the ‘ministering spirits’ evident in his subject matter’s poem ‘Intellectual Beauty’: ‘who correspond to the Devas of the East, and the Elemental Spirits of medieval Europe, and the Sidhe [sic] of ancient Ireland’. In quoting that poem he evokes the mythical síde, nourishing his own Art:
These are ‘gleams of a remoter world which visit us in sleep,’ spiritual essences whose shadows are the delights of the senses, sounds ‘folded in cells of crystal silence,’ ‘visions swift, and sweet, and quaint,’ which lie waiting their moment ‘each in its thin sheath, like a chrysalis,’ ‘odours’ among ‘ever-blooming Eden trees,’ ‘liquors’ that can give ‘happy sleep,’ or can make tears ‘all wonder and delight’; ‘the golden genii who spoke to the poets of Greece in dreams’; ‘the phantoms’ which become the forms of the arts when ‘the mind, arising bright from the embrace of beauty,’ ‘casts on them the gathered rays which are reality’; ‘the guardians’ who move in ‘the atmosphere of human thought,’ as ‘birds within the wind, or the fish within the wave,’
Louis le Brocquy’s Portrait Head of W.B. Yeats.
The vivid fantasy of the creative artist may generate eidetic images, which are a type of mental picture, a vision, not necessarily derived from an actual external event or memory. This sounds much like the experience of someone on LSD, but the chemical manipulation of the brain does not appear to yield the same creative fruits, probably because, as MacDonald opines, it bypasses years of preparation.
IV – Paradigmatic shifts
Michael Pollan suggests that ‘Homo sapiens might have arrived at one of those periods of crisis that calls for some mental and behavioural depatterning’ (Pollan, 2018, p.124), resulting in a greater environmental awareness. Here he rather appears to be reprising Timothy Leary’s suggestion that widespread LSD use would dissolve the stolid social structures of post-War America, But in artistic terms this may prove to be fool’s gold, only leading to further dissolution and isolation.
Unfortunately, a common feature of the perceived wisdom derived from drug visions is its sheer banality: love is all we need, etc. Psychedelics may shake up rigid thinking among scientists, and have important therapeutic capabilities that should be better understood, and utilised, but there seems little prospect of profound artistic departures occurring under their influence.
Art at its best is invariably a hard-won product of intense labour, and drugs are generally a distraction. Thus Yeats opined in ‘Speaking to the Psalter’ (1903): ‘All art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of the imagination (italics added)’. The best works of art, capable of changing the way we think and act, seem to emerge when a narrow imaginative journey occurs, and LSD would in all likelihood just interfere.
Ginsberg’ ‘Howl’, like Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’, is instructive in this regard. I am guessing he wrote while he was sober, before he had ever sampled LSD, and it is a singular journey and experience that nonetheless is part of a conversation within a canon: ‘Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war’. He knew intimately the sacred cows of meter and rhyme he appears to be dispensing with, which may not be said for many of those that have followed in his wake.
The paradigmatic shifts we require in order to generate a genuinely “oceanic compassion” will not involve, alas, seeing one’s cat in a toaster at a festival, but will surely demand intense labour, in many artistic forms, in order to overthrow the toxic assumptions of our time.
That is not, however, to say that any state should criminalize these drugs, and drive their use underground. What we need is education. Anyone who embarks on a trip should be aware of what it entails, and certain personality types should be seriously discouraged from making use of them.
Perhaps the greatest irony of LSD is that many of the flighty characters who seek out LSD are precisely those who should avoid it, whereas the rigid personality types, who are unlikely to use it, might actually benefit from its unseating of the ego, and the eureka moments of scientific inspiration it appears to impart.
But unfortunately, as Timothy Leary put it: ‘Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them’.
References
Madeleine Ferrières’s Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006.
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Harper Press, Croydon, 2009.
Ian McDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the 1960s, Pimlico, New York, 2005.
Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics, Penguin, New York, 2018.
George Steiner, Grammars of Creation, New Haven CT, Yale University Press, 2001.
During the 1990s the Irish state achieved economic lift-off, with almost double-digit growth each year. Outward migration flows not only halted, but actually reversed, leading to an unforeseen surge in demand for residential and commercial spaces. Notably, much of this pressure occurred in the Greater Dublin Area, where growth was most focused.
A study at the turn of the century noted that the preferences of both businesses and ordinary homeowners were, ‘determined primarily by access to vital infrastructure’. Deficiencies in administrative coordination had already, however, generated substantial urban sprawl, particularly as ‘management of the peripheral development of the region is seen to be inadequate’.
Matched by weak bureaucratic control, low density real estate development associated with sprawl occurred only with ‘the private motor car becoming the preferred or only method of transport in such areas’. The authors concluded that ‘previous commitments made to principles of sustainable development are null and void (Shiels and Williams, 2000).’
I – Sustainable Development
In attempting to resolve this the national policy document Sustainable Development: A Strategy for Ireland (Department of the Environment, 1997), had advocated minimising growth in transport demand, ‘and it was recommended that this be a leading consideration in future land use planning (Murphy, 2004)’.
The National Spatial Strategy (2002) further addressed the unchecked growth, recommending mixed-use and higher density development, which would focus on public transport centres. It also recognised a need to minimise urban sprawl, and maintain physically-compact and public transport-friendly cities. This stated policy of moving away from car-dependent development was refined further in the ‘2004 Regional Planning Guidelines for the Greater Dublin Area, 2004-2016 (Phillips et al, 2004)’, which emphasised the need for new developments to be sited along high qualify transport corridors.
Although access to public transport, and lax planning controls, have been major factors in bringing about car-dependent real estate developments, other aspects of governance have also contributed. Not the least of these have been fiscal policies in the housing area, which ‘have tended to systematically favour and support new building at greenfield locations’, these included inter alia ‘preferential taxation treatment in terms of stamp duty and first-time buyers grants (Williams and Shiels, 2000)’.
Not only are such developments car-dependent, but ‘allied with an increased dependence on edge city retail development encourage car usage and complement the edge city employment pattern in a combination which negates stated policies on sustainability (Wiliams and Shiels, 2000)’. Hence, a vicious circle develops wherein cars are not only required for accessing new developments, but this spawns further car-dependency, both by virtue of the remoteness of the location in the first instance, and because the car becomes, far and away, the most convenient way of getting around.
Between 1994 and 1999, with rising prosperity, rates of car ownership rose by a remarkable 164% in the Dublin area, but this was nothing compared to the exponential increases in outer commuter areas, such as County Louth, where ownership soared by 433.5% (Williams and Shiels, 2000).
With Dublin house prices soaring by 136% between 1994 and 1999 (Department of Environment and Local Government, 2000), a commuter belt emerged spanning an area within ninety kilometres of the city, and encompassing towns such as Gorey, Portlaoise, Mullingar, and Dundalk. Clearly, therefore, it is not that real estate development occurred simply because of road transport access, but because of the absence of affordable housing in central locations.
II – Deindustrialisation of the Urban Core
Another factor has been the deindustrialisation of Dublin’s city centre, in line with international trends, with plants, and hence places of work, relocating to the edge of the city (Murphy, 2004). Such changing commuter patterns have also placed a premium on car-based travel.
The facilitation of real estate development has not, however, been occurring on an entirely ad hoc basis along existing roads; a Dublin Region ‘edge city’ developed along an entirely newly-built road, that now forms ‘the central axis of Dublin’s edge city’, namely the M50 C-ring motorway (Williams and Shiels, 2000).
As with the residential sector, it appears that commercial growth was greatly driven by a lack of supply within the traditional downtown Dublin business district, where in 1999 vacancy – and hence supply – was estimated to be as little as 1.45% (DTZ Sherry FitzGerald, 1999).
The centrality of the M50 to Dublin’s new business axis is referred to in Chaos at the Crossroads by Frank McDonald and James Nix’s polemical account of Ireland’s construction craze. The authors claimed that ‘Gold-plating of greater Dublin through the NDP’s roads programme’ copper-fastened the location’s distinct advantage as the focal point of the new ‘hub and spoke’ motorway network that was rolled out under the NDP’s national roads programme.
Hence, while the Dublin region commercially developed, they contend that many areas were bypassed – albeit new developments could occur along the spokes.
Moreover, the projected cost of the national roads programme began at €6.8 billion, before climbing to €16 billion at the time of McDonald and Nix’s publication, who noted that the Department of Finance in 2002 had warned internally that the ultimate cost would likely rise to €22 billion, an estimate which has since been proved correct.
As subsequently described by the National Roads Authority in ‘A Decade of Progress 2000 – 2010’, overall this has meant ‘All told, over 1,200 kilometres of motorway and over 400 kilometres of single carriageway and link roads were built’, during these years, and also ‘some 100 grade separated junctions’.
III – The Poor Relation
In contrast to the apparently endless cash shovelled into a seemingly never-ending roads programme, not one kilometre of greenfield heavy gauge railway was built. Instead, as noted by McDonald and Nix, additional commuter trains were only laid on in response to demand in outer-lying towns such as Gorey, Portlaoise and Mullingar; matching this was NRA resistance to bus lanes being developed along national routes.
As is noted also by McDonald and Nix, public transport is at a fundamental disadvantage when dispersed development occurs. This leads to ‘empty bus syndrome’ wherein the further a bus has to travel at peak times in order to pick up passengers, the less viable the service becomes.
Hence, when the Gorey Local Area Plan was published in 2002, and the population had risen by 44% between 1996 and 2002, it noted ‘that ‘as much as 70% of the town’s new residents commute to Dublin on a daily basis, mostly by car (McDonald and Nix, 2005)’.
Gorey could be viewed as a microcosm for what was happening elsewhere; McDonald and Nix recall how thirty-seven acres of agricultural land beside an interchange on the new Gorey bypass, belonging to the elderly mother of a Fianna Fáil councillor Lorcan Allen, was rezoned without public consultation, and without any significant repercussions for the councillor.
Thus, the car-dependent pattern of commuter housing along or close to the new motorways, leading away from the main urban centres, became a feature of development in that period – with Killenard off the now M7 in Co. Laois described as the ‘most shocking’ – while separately McDonald and Nix predicted that much of Westmeath’s development would likely be a ‘necklace of villages’ along the M6 route.
Notwithstanding the relationship between property development and new road schemes, the effect of good public transport on the value of real estate also became apparent – albeit belatedly.
A 2008 paper by Karen Mayor et al evaluated the financial impact of suburban rail transport – including the two light rail Luas lines – on the price of nearby property. At the time of the 2007 census a mere 7% of commuters in the Greater Dublin Area travel by rail, in contrast to the 49% traveling by private car.
In total 6,956 house prices ‘covering most of the Dublin area’ were assessed to evaluate appreciation in house value attributable to proximity to the rail network, bearing in mind other environmental amenities, and the structural characteristics of the houses themselves.
They found, ‘properties within 500 metres to 2 kilometres of a light rail station are found to sell for between 7% and 17% more than properties not in proximity of the station’, with proximity being a decisive factor – typically 12–17% when within 500 metres.
Yet when the DART was analysed, the authors found the ‘station premium is approximately 5%’ – a lower figure they attribute to good buses services already existing, and also the antiquated rolling stock. A further complicating factor was that while there seemed to be a correlation between demand and proximity to functional stations, ‘train tracks however are considered a disamenity and reduce the price of a dwelling’.
The authors concluded that ‘rail connections have value to home owners, but also that not all connections are equally valuable (Mayor et al, 2008)’.
IV – One-off Housing
No review of the relationship between property development and transport in Ireland in recent years is complete without some assessment of the phenomenal amount of rural bungalows being built, where ‘single rural dwellings (SRDs) dominate the rural housing profile, accounting for all dwellings in some Electoral Divisions and 80% on average’ (Keaveney, 2007).
Keaveney notes:
Clearly, accessibility to urban centres and by road networks has continually been a driving force in the location of housing. Densities in 2002 reached up to 25 households per square kilometre along the national road network and adjacent to urban centres.
Hence while many of these houses are supposed to be for the benefit of the local economy, it seems reasonable to deduce that a premium is placed on good road access – although this is a variable factor that is probably best determined on a case-by-case basis.
Despite high level official policy statements and aspirations regarding sustainability, the institutions of the state encouraged private car transport in a manner that not only subverted such sentiments, but also opened up virgin lands for property developments that otherwise would have been inaccessible, uneconomic, or both.
While a genuine shortage of supply combined with economic prosperity drove demand, these two factors alone would not have created car dependent outer suburbs and developments. Without aggressive promotion and development of roads by the authorities – usually requiring property developers to provide car spaces – it would not have been possible in many instances to construct the low-quality unsustainable sprawl we now live with.
References
Brendan Williams and Patrick Shiels, ‘Acceleration into Sprawl: Causes and Potential Policy Responses’, ESRI, Dublin, June 2000.
Department of the Environment, Ireland, Sustainable Development: A Strategy for Ireland, Department of the Environment, Dublin, 1997.
Department of Environment and Local Government, Annual Report, 2000.
DTZ Sherry FitzGerald, Annual Report, 1999
Karen Keaveney, ‘Contested Ruralities: Housing in the Irish Countryside’, PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth, 2007.
Karen Mayor, Seán Lyons, David Duffy and Richard S.J. Tol ‘A Hedonic Analysis of the Value of Rail Transport in the Greater Dublin Area’, Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, January, 2008.
Frank McDonald and James Nix, Chaos at the Crossroads, Gandon Editions, Dublin, 2005.
Enda Murphy, ‘Spatial Restructuring and Commuting Efficiency in Dublin’, Trinity College Dublin Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, 2004.
National Roads Authority, ‘A Decade of Progress 2000 – 2010’, Dublin, 2010.
Tom Phillips, Atkins, the Urban Institute Ireland and Goodbody Economic Consultants, ‘Regional Planning Guidelines for the Greater Dublin Area’, 2004-2016, Dublin 2004.
We have not slain our enemy, the cancer cell, or figuratively torn the limbs from his body … In our adventures we have only seen our monster more clearly and described his scales and fangs in new ways – ways that reveal a cancer cell to be, like Grendel, a distorted version of our normal selves. Harold E. Varmus, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (Stockholm, 1989).
Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm – substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York, 1962)
Over a decade ago my mother was diagnosed with skin cancer, in the form of a melanoma on her face. At the time this did not seem a big deal, at least once a surgeon had removed the offending growth and performed a successful skin graft. It had been caught early enough to prevent metastasis, or so we thought.
The ‘scare’ probably shook her more than we recognised. The diagnosis must have realised her worst nightmare after the loss of her own mother, to what seems to have been breast cancer at the age of just fifty.
Most obviously she became fretful at being exposed to the sun, though by then this would probably have made no difference.
In hindsight, perhaps she never fully recovered her poise. I suspect an accumulation of worries affected her health, contributing to the later metastasis of the cancer. Revealingly, a recent survey of seventy thousand women, aged seventy or over, showed that an optimistic frame of mind correlated with a reduced risk of cancer, and other fatal diseases. This bolsters Iain McGilchrist’s suggestion that all medicine should be seen as ‘a branch of psychiatry, and psychiatry as a branch of philosophy’.
Genetic determinism portrays physical bodies as distinct from minds. But this neo-Cartesian view ignores the bewildering complexity of our brains, within which McGilchrist estimates there are more connections ‘than there are particles in the known universe’.
It should offer solace to those with a genetic history of the disease that minds are exceedingly complex, and malleable, instruments.
According to Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2010), ‘the Ancient Roman doctor Galen reserved the most malevolent and disquieting of the four humours for cancer: black bile’. He attributed just one other disease to an excess of this ‘oily, viscuous humour: depression’. Indeed melancholia, the medieval name for ‘depressions’ draws its name from the Greek melan, meaning ‘black’, and khole, meaning ‘bile’; Mukherjee describes how ‘Depression and cancer, the psychic and physical diseases of black bile, were thus intrinsically intertwined.’ Moreover, Andrew Soloman quotes an expert to the effect that anxiety, ‘a response to future lost’, should be regarded as ‘fraternal twins’ with depression, ‘a response to past lost (quoted in Pollan, 2018, p.389)’.
Although during the Renaissance Andreas Vesalius (1514-64) established that black bile does not exist, the coupling of the two ailments by Galen, who informed Western medicine for over a millennium, is noteworthy. Contemporary approaches may profitably look backwards, as Mukherjee puts it: ‘Scientists often study the past as obsessively as historians because few other professions depend as acutely on it’.
That is not to say, of course, that cancer is somehow ‘all in the mind’, but increasing focus on the role of depression or stress, and ways of counteracting these, from spirituality to artistic expression or enjoying the great outdoors, would surely be beneficial.
II – The Human Genome Project
Mukherjee argues that cancer ‘is stitched into our genome’: somatic cells, along with the bacteria in our body with which we generally co-exist symbiotically, are in a constant flux of death and renewal, such that most of our cells survive no longer than seven years, before being replaced by new ones.
As we grow older glitches – entropy – enters into this process of renewal. Mukherjee writes: ‘Oncogenes arise from mutations in essential genes that regulate the growth of cells’. It is usually as if we become jaded by a lifetime’s effort, and errors creep in.
Predicting the behaviour of these mutations has, however, defied understanding since the ‘War on Cancer’ began in the early 1950s. The outbreak of certain rare forms can be traced to genetic inheritance, but the onset of the vast majority is not preordained.
Mukherjee argues that ‘the Human Genome Project will profile the normal genome against which cancer’s abnormal genomes can be juxtaposed and contrasted’. However the number of genetic mutations involved in most types runs into three figures.
At best scientists have been able to glean fromgenomic evidence that certain individuals do not benefit from particular therapies. But this is not the same as understanding at a cellular level why most cancers appear, and pinpointing the preventative measures which ought to be taken.
Inescapably, the claims of genomic research arrive through the prism of justifying hefty research grants.
The author of The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry (2012), Rupert Sheldrake has sought to puncture the optimism of those who believe the Human Genome Project will yield infallible algorithms predicting our future life and health: ‘The optimism that life would be understood if molecular biologists knew the ‘programs’ of an organism gave way to the realisation that there is a huge gap between gene sequences and actual human beings’.
Mukherjee also acknowledges the great variety of environmental factors, which switch on and on off the genetic mutations which give rise to cancers:
Our bodies, our cells, our genes are being immersed and re-immersed in a changing flux of molecules – pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses such as radiation and magnetism. Some of these, inevitably, will be carcinogenic. We cannot wish this world away; our task then is to sift through it vigilantly to discriminate bona fide carcinogens from innocent and useful bystanders.
Revealingly, in a recent U.S. case a jury awarded DeWayne Johnson €289 million in damages against Monsanto, the manufacturers of Roundup a glyphosate weed killer in compensation for the onset of his cancer.
Other confounding factors include the emerging field epigenetics, our co-habitation with bacteria – itself in constant evolution – and even altered states of consciousness.
III – Metastatic Melanoma
Exposure to the sun’s UV-A and UV-B rays is considered the leading cause of melanomas. The incidence is particularly high among Australians, most of whose ancestors evolved in cool and cloudy Northern European conditions, and, surprisingly, Switzerland, where a fondness for the sunny piste seems to be to blame.
My mother was not particularly pale-skinned, and nor was she ever a sun-worshipper. I recall her scrupulously applying sunscreen on herself, and her children, on beach holidays. The best guess is the damage stemmed from sunburn as a child or young adult. That her life coincided with a depletion in the ozone layer, which filters UV rays high up in the atmosphere, could also have been a factor. It has even been hypothesised that sunscreen itself contains carcinogenic properties.
When my mother’s cancer returned three years ago, in the form of tumours on the lung it did not seem such devastating news. The first battle had been won, and why not this? If I had known that a metastatic melanoma is usually considered a death sentence, and that treatments only tend to extend life by a few months, I would have reacted differently.
I remained bullish in my assessment as, a short time beforehand, she had embraced a wholefood plant-based diet. From the start I was skeptical about the treatment, fearing this could do more harm than good; as the sixteenth century physician Paracelsus put it, ‘every medicine is a poison in disguise’.
Probably wisely however – though I will never know – I kept my counsel, at least to her, and most of my family. I cannot imagine how I would feel if I had persuaded her to get off the treatment, and she had died soon afterwards.
However, I recently revisited a passage from Professor T. Colin Campbell’ 2013 book Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition, in which he describes the response of his wife Karen to a metastasised (Stage 3-Advanced) melanoma on her lymph gland. She refused any of the treatment alternatives her oncologist recommended, much to his annoyance.
Campbell writes perceptively: ‘Cancer patients intensely want to believe in their oncologist, whom they see as holding the key to their recovery’. Despite refusing treatment, including surgery, Karen Campbell, maintaining a wholefood plant-based diet had lived a further eight years by 2013 without ill-effects, and appears to be still alive today. Obviously we cannot extrapolate too much on the basis of one case, but I cannot help asking myself: ‘what if?’.
My mother was put on one trial treatment, and later a different one, of a form of immuno-therapy, which harnesses the immune system to attack cancer cells. It came as a shock to her system. Some months into it she developed a sore throat and high fever, which eventually required hospitalisation, and an antibiotic drip.
Living with my parents through much of the long treatment period I was on hand for many of the oncology treatment days, and the debilitating nausea that followed. Her vitality declined precipitously: from being a committed walker, she found it increasingly difficult to go any distance; whether the cancer played a part in this I do not know.
She managed, nonetheless, to take the odd foreign trip, overcoming her nerves, and became a grandmother to two further grandchildren in that period.
She lasted almost three years on the treatment, maintaining the plant-based diet throughout – although she did occasionally eat fish after being encouraged to increase her protein intake. According to the consultant she was top of the class on the basis of her scans. He always professed satisfaction at how well she was doing, which did not exactly chime with the increasing levels of nausea she was experiencing. This also required her to take more and more medications, which lowered further her vitality.
IV – Plant-Based Prevention?
Disconcertingly, Mukherjee characterises the history of cancer research as, ‘intensely competitive’, and featuring, ‘a grim, nearly athletic, determination’. It seems patient welfare, as opposed to survival, has not always been to the fore, as experts compete for the next breakthrough in extending life, or finding an ever-elusive cure. The same commitment has not, alas, been shown to prevention strategies, which would bring no reward to the pharmaceutical sector that generally funds the research.
In 2014 a retired Dublin G.P. John Kelly published a book entitled Stop Feeding Your Cancer in which he argued that ‘The minds of cancer specialists were so cluttered with their pharmaceutical and surgical obligations that they were unable to accommodate critical revisionary thinking.’
Kelly’s account, which has been criticised for cherry-picking data, was inspired by his reading of the same T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study (2005). Campbell, no ethical vegan, conducted experiments on two groups of laboratory rats infected with cancer. The first group were given a diet comprising twenty percent animal protein. They all promptly died, but the second group were given a diet of only five percent animal protein, and all survived.
Campbell performed these experiments in the Philippines after observing a lower survival rate among affluent cancer patients with diets high in animal products, compared to their impoverished peers on diets low in meat and dairy. In the laboratory Campbell also found vegetable proteins did not promote cancer, even when consumed in large quantities.
IV Cure or Cause?
The heartening news at the beginning of this year was that my mother’s tumours had all but disappeared from her lung, but she nevertheless continued to get sicker and sicker.
Over time her face took on a disturbingly yellowish hue, which was eventually diagnosed as jaundice – in Galenic terms an excess of yellow bile. A good friend who is a G.P. confided to me that the overwhelming likelihood was that this was linked to her cancer.
Still it was a great shock when the news came through of another tumour blocking her bile duct.
It required a painful operation, on an already weakened patient, inserting a tube to stanch the flow of bile into the bloodstream. It never worked properly, and she declined painfully from that point, despite my father’s best efforts to master the appendage.
I cannot help wondering whether, considering the prolonged bouts of nausea, the treatment itself had caused the inflammation which produced the tumour; the history of cancer is replete with examples of ‘cures’ doing more harm than good. For example, many chemotherapy agents are known carcinogens, and listed on the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Group 1 listas such.
Mukherjee also describes chemotherapists as acting like ‘lunatic cartographers’ who ‘frantically drew and redrew their strategies to annihilate cancer’. My mother went through immuno-therapy, but the basic approach of poisoning the body in order to kill the cancer appears to be the same.
It also begs the wider question as to whether a prolonged period on a debilitating cancer treatment is a life worth living.
The absence of preventative cancer programmes in our systems of public health is nothing short of scandalous. The Chicago Tribune acknowledged in 1975 that the idea of ‘preventive medicine is faintly un-American. It means, first, recognizing that the enemy is us’. Where America leads other nations appear to follow.
In Plato’s idealised Republic, Socrates castigates doctors that prolong the life of patients without curing them. He pays tribute to the carpenter who, after being prescribed a lengthy treatment regimen, replies:
that he had no leisure time to be ill and that life is no use to him if he has to neglect his work and always be concerned with his illness. After that he’d bid good-bye to his doctor, resume his usual way of life, and either recover his health or, if his body couldn’t withstand the illness, he’d die and escape his troubles.
There are of course now many procedures that are relatively simple – such as removing skin cancer – but I cannot help feeling, notwithstanding medical advances, that I too would prefer to die on the job rather than go through a debilitating, long-term course of cancer treatment. I prefer the preventative measure of a plant-based diet to reduce my own risk of developing cancer
V – Depression
Like many patients after a terminal diagnosis my mother developed symptoms of depression for which she was prescribed medication. She also benefitted greatly from spiritual counselling in the Catholic tradition from a devoted friend.
She cast away doubts and annoyances with the Church, realising great benefit from simple prayer, during what the philosopher John Moriarty has described as a universal Golgotha experience. This may give Christianity an enduring relevance, despite historic failings.
Those resistant to religion might consider the effect of psychedelic drugs on terminal cancer sufferers who experience depression. In How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics (2018) Michael Pollan reveals how in NYU and Hopkins trials 85% of cancer patients showed ‘clinically significant reductions in standard measures of anxiety and depression that endured for at least six months after the psylocybin sessions’. Fascinatingly, in both trials ‘the intensity of the mystical experience volunteers reported closely correlated with the degree to which their symptoms [of depression] subsided’.
*******
There are no simple answers to the questions I have raised in this article, but based on my experience of losing a close relative to cancer, and reading up on the subject, I would argue that we need to alter the paradigm of research, to explore more fully preventative strategies rather than simply addressing the disease after it has emerged.
Cancer is not all in the mind, and nor does it ever seem likely to be eradicated fully, but that correlation between good health and a sunny disposition is notable. Can general practitioners, in particular, develop ways of lifting our moods – without recourse to medication – while retaining a focus on physical signs of illness? Perhaps we need to train a new kind of physician, with mindfulness at the core of their study.
Finally, why is it that public health authorities do not display the same commitment to dietary change as is shown towards curbing tobacco smoking? One conclusion that might be drawn is that pharmaceutical companies, and other vested interests, are an obstacle to this coming about.
W.B. Yeats’s poem, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ retains an appeal more than a century after its publication in 1899. Musicians in particular – from Christy Moore to Mike Scott – have been drawn to its magical imagery and measured cadences.
One cruel New Years’s morning a few years ago its opening lines: ‘I went out to the hazel wood, / Because a fire was in my head’, popped into my head after romantic hopes had been dashed the night before. I realised a dose of Nature was the only conceivable cure.
Like Yeats, most of us feel overwhelmed by our racing thoughts at times. Then the sanctuary of a forest or running water can still the mind. Nothing ever feels quite so bad in a beautiful natural setting.
We may also draw lessons there, as in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, where Duke Frederik finds ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything’.
But what if, instead of a resplendent Nature, we encounter a degraded landscape and poisoned waterways? What message burns into our souls if the hazel woods are reduced to cow fields or sitka spruce plantations, where birdsong is no longer heard?
Even in Yeats’s time there were few of the virgin forests, which once covered the entire island. As Frank Mitchell puts it:
It is hard for us to picture the majesty and silence of these primeval woods, which stretched from Ireland far across northern Europe. We are accustomed to an almost treeless countryside, and if we can find anywhere some scraps of ‘native’ woodland, we are disappointed by the quality of thetrees(1).
And the picture is getting worse, with increasing use of chemicals, and intensification of agriculture: the Slow Death of Irish Nature.
Irish agriculture is neither efficient, timeless, nor equitable. It remains afloat because of European subsidies, holding in perma-frost a system designed to satisfy the appetites of the British Empire, enriching a small number of large farmers and industry barons especially, while most farms teeter on the brink.
Structural deficiencies are skillfully concealed from the Irish people by obsequious, and often corrupt, politicians, a desultory education system, and a compliant media. Only the prospect of hundreds of millions in fines for failure to reduce runaway Greenhouse Gas Emissions may save the land from further despoliation; but even one mitigation strategy, of planting monoculture plantations, is eroding biodiversity further.
The exploitation of Ireland’s Nature goes hand in hand with the exploitation of millions of domesticated animals and human beings.
Karl Marx highlighted a disturbed metabolic interaction between human society and the environment under a capitalist system, which he termed metabolic rift. The intensification of agriculture depletes nutrients from soils, which Marx viewed as analogous, and kindred with the exploitation of labour, leading to an alienation from Nature.
II – The Great Hunger
To my knowledge Ireland (North and South) is the only substantial region in the world with a lower population today than in the 1840s. The population peaked at almost 8.5 million, and has only reached 6.5 million today – a considerable rise on the 1950s, when it had dipped below three million in the South.
The steady decline was intimately connected to a shift away from a predominantly mixed agriculture, with an emphasis on tillage and subsistence, to a system based almost exclusively on generating livestock for the Imperial British market.
The catalyst was the Great Famine 1845-1850, although the move away from tillage was also a product of Britain finding cheaper sources of grain after the Napoleonic Wars. Remarkably, according to Amartyra Sen: ‘In no other famine in the world [was] the proportion of the people killed … as large as in the Irish famine of the 1840s(2)’.
The Great Famine was devastating to the three million depending, almost exclusively, on the potato for nourishment. By the eve of the disaster that vulnerable cohort of cottiers and subtenants occupied just one million acres, representing a mere five percent of the of the total acreage of land suitable for agriculture(3).
With twenty million acres available to produce the population’s food, even with the worst conceivable crop failures, an abundance of food could have been grown to feed the entire population. But the market demanded cattle ‘on-the-hoof’, exported live to England, and other livestock products. The land was not the patrimony of the people, but a generally absent landlord class.
To produce and trade commodities for the Empire required a substantial comprador class, who profited from the shift. Famine survivors took advantage of the land clearances as Kerby A. Miller writes:
an unknown but surely very large proportion of Famine sufferers were not evicted by Protestant landlords but by Catholic strong and middling farmers, who drove off their subtenants and cottiers, and dismissed their labourers and servants, both to save themselves from ruin and to consolidate their own properties(4).
Abandoned cottage, County Sligo.
Strong farmers and merchants formed the backbone of the political movements which agitated for possession of the land, and ultimately Irish independence. But tenant ownership and national sovereignty did not reverse the agricultural transition of the post-Famine era. This system depended on low labour inputs for profitability, ensuring a rapid flow of emigration throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.
Revealingly, when works were undertaken on the substantial farmhouse where my father grew up in Sligo the slates on the roof were dated to the 1840s. It is disturbing to consider a prosperous farmer building his homestead there off the back of wealth from lands seized from smallholders. Joe Lee imagines the effects across much of the country:
They will have seen corpses, if not in their own dwellings, then on the roads and in the ditches. Many are likely to have felt a degree of guilt, of the type that often afflicts survivors of tragedies, not only of the Holocaust, but of events like earthquakes, and mining catastrophes … A sense of guilt can simmer below the surface to perhaps breakout in uncontrollable and, to uncomprehending outside observers, in apparently inexplicable ways(5).
The Irish nation still lives with an echo of this survivor guilt, that has expressed itself in ways we do not yet fully comprehend. One such may have been a distortion of sexuality amidst extreme piety; another perhaps, a loathing for the land itself, still expressed in a ruthless exploitation that often seems wanton in its disregard.
III – Irish Farming Today
Teagasc’s recent National Farm Survey for 2017 revealed there were 84,599 farms in Ireland, with an average of income of €31,374. Of these 15,639 were dairy farms with an average income of €86,115. There were a mere 7,387 tillage farms (many growing feedstuffs for livestock), with an average income of €37,158. The remainder – three quarters of all farms – were (dry) cattle and sheep farms, with an average income under €15,000. Indeed, thirty-five-per cent turned a profit of less than €10,000.
According to the report (on p.5): ‘In general, farm income continues to be highly reliant on direct payments. In 2017 the average total payment received was €17,672 per farm, this accounted for 75% of average farm income.’
Remarkably, on an average dry cattle or sheep farm over 100% of ‘income’ derived from direct payments (subsidisation), while almost €20,000 of an average dairy farm’s substantial earnings, came from subsidies. It is a truly dysfunctional system.
Seventy-five percent of Irish farms would go out of business overnight under a free market, while a small number of already wealthy farmers receive subsidisation totalling approximately €300 million.
The government has committed to expanding agricultural production, particularly the dairy sector, under a report entitled, without irony, FoodWise 2025. However, a 2018 Teagasc report admits that these aspirations will ‘provide a significant challenge to meeting emissions targets, particularly as agriculture comprises one-third of national emissions and 44% of the non-Emission Trading Sectors (non-ETS).’
Revealingly the image chosen by the authors of the plan does not reveal a single tree or bush.
A growing proportion of Ireland’s agricultural products (including the thousands of animals shipped abroad in appalling conditions) are exported to non-EU states, including undemocratic regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey. The powdered milk market is of particular importance, with Ireland the second leading exporter to China, after New Zealand. Exclusive Breastfeeding is recommended by the WHO for babies up to six months of age.
Ireland grows little of its own food, relying on exports for the majority of fruit and vegetables the latter of which, remarkably, form less than 1% of overall energy intake, a deficiency linked, in all likelihood, to the obesity pandemic(6).
Contrary to the portrayal of Ireland as ‘the Food Ireland’, the country is actually a net importer of food calories, making us vulnerable to food ‘shocks’, including major storm events – such as the recent ‘Beast from the East’, when supermarkets supply chains failed. Yet Ireland’s temperate climate is suited to year-round cultivation of a wide variety of crops.
The beef industry has been subject to a succession of scandals over decades, including what amounted to a government bail out for Goodman International in the early 1990s. More recently we saw horse meat being substituted for beef. The industry has enriched a small number of barons, especially Larry Goodman who had an estimated net worth, along with his spouse, of €706 million in 2015. It would take the average dry cattle farmer, on €15,000 per annum, 47,000 years to accumulate that fortune. The disparities in wealth in Irish farming are probably greater now than ever.
The main farming organisation, the IFA advocates on behalf of an increasingly obsolete system, where food prices for consumers are so high that Tesco’s executives reportedly referred to the country as Treasure Island; while ruining the environment, and leaving most farms on the brink of collapse.
In 2015 that organisation was rocked by revelations that general secretary, Pat Smith, had received pay and perks worth some €1m for 2013 and 2014. For good measure, his payoff amounted to €2m. Just as eye-watering for ordinary farmers was how then IFA president, Eddie Downey was receiving almost €200,000 annually, some eight times the average farmer’s income at the time.
Most disturbingly, however, is the extent to which the state projects a green image for Irish farming, using taxpayers money, through the Origin Green advertising campaign, which the Irish Wildlife Trust has described as a sham.
As part of a global insectaggedon, pesticide use has continued to climb in Ireland, posing grave dangers to essential pollinators. A third of Irish bee species could soon be extinct. According to Professor John Breen Irish grasslands are useless for bees: ‘Intensification of our farming is the key issue,’ he says. ‘It has taken a toll.’
Meanwhile half of Ireland’s waterways are now polluted, mainly by farm run-offs.
The long-term prognosis for Irish agriculture is extremely bad. The system cannot endure indefinitely. We are leaching the soil of nutrients, and contributing significantly to Climate Change, while exploiting the understandable desire of farm families to stay on their land.
Exploitation of the landscape of Ireland goes hand in hand with the exploitation of most farmers, confirming Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. Farmers should instead be supported to restore biodiversity, and grow crops, primarily for local consumption, both of which would be long term investments in the health of the population.
IV – Returning to the Source
‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ is an imaginative vision for Ireland, reinvented as a glimmering girl. Yeats was singing a nation into being. But he would later bemoan the death of Romantic Ireland, as a rising class of Strong Farmers and their heirs, whose sons entered business and the professions, fumbled in greasy tills, adding the half pence to the pence, and prayer to shivering prayer.
The 1916 Rising claimed the land of Ireland to be the patrimony of the people, but the interest of individual property owners has long held sway, under a 1937 Constitution that has been interpreted to favour the wealthy, as opposed to the common good.
It was on one memorable journey, which I took during my early twenties, that I woke up to the damage being done to our environment.
The morning after the night before, I felt overwhelmed by Dublin life, and determined to proceed by foot to find a sanctuary away from the city. I would find a spot to camp, removed from the banter, bright lights and braggadocio.
I proceeded south through drab suburbs punctuated by ugly strip malls, attesting to poor planning in the city’s hinterland. I crossed a wide and ominous motorway under construction that became the M50, and proceeded to climb hills beyond the city limits; an endeavour increasingly fraught on roads lacking footpaths.
As cars shot by spewing noise, pollution and anger, I chose to proceed off-piste. After scaling fences and passing through a few deserted cow fields, I encountered ugly groves of immature spruces being fattened, like turkeys, for the satisfaction of a North American Christmas fantasy.
Eventually the terrain grew sparser, boggier and less fenced-in. At last I met a variety of deciduous trees; the spectacle a sprawling magnificence of autumnal colours as my legs wearied under the strain of my pack.
I began to collect firewood as I proceeded, soon gathering a sufficient quantity for my purposes. At last I reached the source of the River Dodder, a tributary of the Liffey, which passes within a hundred metres of my family home. Unconsciously, I was reaching back into my own origins, and I felt a spring in my step.
As the light declined, waves of midgies brought crass irritation to my reveries, but soon the sun had disappeared altogether, and smoke from the fire deterred my tormenters. I prepared a meal consisting primarily of potatoes – the food of our impoverished ancestors –that I wrapped in tinfoil and cooked in the ashes of the fire.
All about was a glorious silence, and the stars, usually masked by urban light, appeared as a hidden script that I had failed to notice. At last I felt at home.
(1) Frank Mitchell, Reading the Irish Landscape, (Dublin, 1990), p.89.
(2) Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: the Delusion of Destiny, (New York, 2006), p.105.
(3) Raymond Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production (), p.85.
(4) Kerby Miller, ‘Emigration to North America in the era of the Great Famine’, in Crawley, Smyth and Murphy, Atlas of the Great Famine ( p.221.
(5) Joseph Lee, ‘The Famine as History’, in O Grada, Famine 150: commemorative lecture series, (Dublin, 1997) p.168-9
(6) Colin Sage, Tara Kenny Connecting agri-export productivism, sustainability and domestic food security via the metabolic rift: The case of the Republic of Ireland (2017), p.19
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245226351730006X
If you think you can’t afford better food, consider where you now invest your money: how often do you go to the hairdresser, or drink a pint or choose to drive somewhere? There are priorities we have in terms of our time and money.
