Comments on: WHERE THERE’S MUCK, THERE’S CATTLE

By: Conor McCabe

Conor McCabe — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:16:11 +0000

the creation of classes within an economic system isn’t a conspiracy, it’s hotwired into the dynamics of the economic system itself. The small farmer sold calves to large farmers, who then fattened the calves for export. That’s a market. Large numbers of those small farmers found themselves selling their labour at certain times of the year, as agricultural or road labourers. That’s also a market. Now, what were the dynamics of those two markets? We can’t just say that because the South exported cattle, that somehow that is the only dynamic going on within the system. There is an internal class dynamic going on, surrounding the markets of cattle and labour, and it needs to be explored.

By: londoner

londoner — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:02:45 +0000

I don’t think it is a utopian view, i don’t think it was ever a desireable state of affairs. My point really is that the whole system was geared towards sending raw materials to wealthier markets - a fairly typical extractive colonial industry, a symptom of under development, rather than a conspiracy by one class of farmers against another, certainly not an internal market, the consumer of Irish beef was, and remains abroad. Undoubtedly wealthier ranchers benefited from the system in a way poorer farmers simply didn’t but they were all products of a business which, after all, was the single most important part of the national economy. Evidence more recently across swathes of decolonised Africa has shown that its is more desireable to have some degree of a functioning market and to build on it - for our case by mar shampla exporting meat rather than cattle, developing fertilizer, animal feeds or vetinary medices industries to supplement and even overtake the original, basic industry,none of which ever really happened. Schemes floated at the time to drain the Shannon, or the old slogan of the ‘bull for the road and the land for the people’ were based on a false and self defeating notion that there was x amount of cake and the gombeen had too big a slice, undoubtedly he had, but that didn’t mean the ingredients had to be discarded. The Economic War did attempt to break this system, in large part for class reasons, and succeeded by cutting all classes of farmer off from consumers in the UK, without opening alternative markets causing desperate hardship across rural Ireland up to the outb

By: Conor McCabe

Conor McCabe — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:25:44 +0000

That’s quite a utopian view you have there, Londoner, of the cattle trade during this period. The inequalities of the system were highlighted by the commission on agriculture in 1924, who then went on to make excuses for keeping those inequalities in place. Those inequalities persisted right up to the the 1970s - well past the lunacy times you mention. What we’re looking at here is a class-based internal cattle market.

By: Londoner

Londoner — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:08:59 +0000

Producing younger, smaller and less hungry store cattle could traditionally be done on mixed farms and smaller farms on lower quality land, in part as a by product of the dairy industry, and in part as a less capital intensive product in itself. Fattening or finishing quality beef is capital intensive and relies on access to excellent pasture land: Meath, the Golden Vale etc, where graziers often rented or leased rather than owned their holdings. In large part the fattened results were exported on the hoof on cattle boats from ports like Dublin and Drogheda to be slaughtered in the UK. The entire chain is of animals moving from west to east, from birth to butcher, fattened on better pasture as they grow and all the while moving closer to the consumer. Small holding persisted in the west at least partly because often very small scale store cattle rearing made it reasonably viable realtive to the value of agricultural land. The lunacy of disrupting this trade was demonstrated in the 1930s.