WHAT THE HELL HAS CATTLE GOT TO DO WITH NAMA?
Jul 25th, 2010 by Conor McCabe
Now we all know that the farming industry, particularly the cattle trade, is the rock on which our economic structure rests — the whole economic structure of the 26 counties which we control at the present time rests. The farming industry is the one sound and staple thing in the present welter of commercial uncertainty and insecurity. (J.J. Burke, Dáil Debates, 19 September 1922, paragraph 443.)
It is frankly impossible to understand modern Irish society without understanding the role that the cattle industry played in shaping that society. No amount of footnotes citing Labour in Irish History, the IRA, Republicanism, Sectarianism, partition, Lemass, Whittaker, Collins and De Valera, unemployed movements and industrial development, boom/busts, haircuts and showbands, emigration and late liberalisation - none of it makes sense until the cattle industry makes sense. None of it.
There are two Irish history books I have come across which have completely understood this.
The first is by Ray Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production, written in 1966. It is dense, at times borderline unreadable, but nonetheless essential.
The second, and the one I recommend everyone to go out and buy borrow or steal today, is by Paul Rouse, Ireland’s Own Soil: Government and Agriculture in Ireland, 1945 to 1965. It’s currently out of print, but the Farmers Journal, which published it, still have a few copies available. I rang them last summer and they sent one out to me for €5.
It is a masterful piece of work. I don’t quite agree with all of the conclusions (when do I ever?) but the research and analysis is among the best that has been produced by an Irish historian in a long time.
It shows the overwhelmingly negative effect the live cattle export business had on the development of the Irish economy post-independence.
The political influence welded by the 25,000 or so ranchers helped to scupper almost all attempts to develop indigenous industry - including an indigenous beef industry, something that the American consultancy firm Ibec, simply couldn’t understand when it wrote its 1952 report: An Appraisal of Ireland’s Industrial Potentials.
It appears to an outsider that the overall pattern of the Irish cattle industry has been organised in a fashion that serves the convenience of the economy of the United Kingdom rather than its own economy. The historical basis of this mode of procedure is easy to understand, if not condone, but its persistence for so long a period after the Republic of Ireland had won its political independence is somewhat of an enigma.
There can be no doubt that the organization of Ireland’s cattle industry is exceptional in the degree to which its product is disposed of through export shipments of live cattle and, consequently, in the meagerness of its meat production from cattle in Ireland relative to the size of its cattle industry.” (p.73)
Ibec saw that beef processing was where the jobs were. Instead of exporting a raw material to England, in this case live cattle, Ireland should be exporting finished products to the world, as that’s where the money lay.
the initial processing alone in Ireland of live cattle worth £20 million would add £3.6 million of processing activity to the Irish economy. This figure would be raised to about £6 million if the United States ratio was applied. There would be available on the Irish market an additional £3.5 million hides (468,000 times 60 pounds times 30 pence per pound) for local processing which, since the fellmongery and leather category adds some 41% in net product to the cost of materials, might contribute another £1.4 million of processing activity.This could make a substantial contribution also to Ireland’s exchange position since Ireland’s leather imports in 1949 (net of leather exports) amounted to £1.3 million. If the additional supply of leather from a domestic source was not of a suitable type to displace imported shoe leathers, it might be used substantially to increase leather manufacturers of other types in Ireland.
Estimating upon the analogy of Ireland’s boot and shoe industry, in which the net product amounts to about 70% of material costs, this could increase manufactures based on leather by £2.52 million, (£3.5 for hides and £1.4 for leather processing minus £1.3 imports times .7). Offal value should amount to at least £3 per beast, and that would provide another £1.4 million of raw materials for processing.
The initial survey relating to ECA’s Technical Assistance Project TA 44-74, indicates that over £2.6 million of protein feeds and related by-products could be produced from presently wasted bones of domestically slaughtered animals (of all types), mortality carcasses and fish offal. This could be enormously increased as a potential through processing more cattle at home… [and] that should be the ultimate goal… (p.72)
In short, beef is jobs.
Although Seán Lemass was much taken with the report, he was not able to resist the influence of the live cattle exporters, and instead implemented a ‘third way’ compromise of transplanting wholly-formed foreign factories on Irish soil as a way of industrializing the State. This was supposed to be a short-time developmental measure, but instead it ends up as the bedrock of Irish economic doctrine.
The structural deficiencies in the Irish economy, whereby indigenous capitalism is a ‘middleman’ capitalism of banking, finance, construction and landlords, start to make sense once the cattle industry - the bullock in the room if you will - is pointed out and commented upon.
The world and people which NAMA is designed to protect - the property developers and financial middlemen - grew out of the accordance which developed between the ranchers and the State from the late 1950s onwards.
Unfortunately I’m too busy at the moment to give a proper review of Rouse’s book, but I will in the future. I just wanted to flag it because I’ve started work on the cattle chapter and I’ll be using a lot of it in the book.
For more on what I mean about the bullock in the room, there’s this piece from last year.
Earlier this year I gave a paper on Irish Class Relations and the Cattle Industry at the European Social Science History Conference in Ghent, Belgium, and afterwards the chair of the session (who was from Sweden) said ‘I heard you mention ranches and ranchers a lot. Do you have cowboys in Ireland?’ There were three other Irish people on the panel, and a couple more in the audience, and we all laughed as one. He was even more puzzled then so by way of explanation I said to him afterwards ‘Well we do have cowboys but they build houses, not fences.’
Anyway. Enjoy.
‘Meanwhile Back at the Ranch’ by F O’Toole is worth a read wrt the cows. Haven’t got it anymore but remember a quite good historical thread running thru it.
That’s true and it has a lot to recommend it but I think O’Toole kinda misses the point of live cattle exports. It’s not the cattle industry per se, but the fact that Ireland’s exporting live cattle - in essence a raw material - to Britain instead of exporting meat and associated products: beef, leather, shoes, etc. He also blends the cattle and beef industries together, which in an Irish context isn’t really the case as the above graph shows. Also, he seems to think that cattle and beef are the same product, which is a bit strange. The mainstream narrative that emerges is an either/or situation (not only in O’toole but in many of the historical narratives so it’s not O’Toole’s fault here, he’s only working off the secondary sources available) - that it was either cattle or industry. That wasn’t the case. We could have industrialised meat and leather production, but Britain didn’t want that, and what Britain wanted, Britain got. It is dictating terms and is getting the type of cattle export it wants, regardless of how that affects Irish society.
Paul Rouse makes that point, and does it brilliantly, with overwhelming evidence from the British archives. I really am so impressed with that book. The research is outstanding.
so yeah, it’s a crucial point about exporting live cattle , instead of exporting actual shop-ready products. I mean, it’s a colonial relationship, or at least the continuation of an economic colonial relationship. But even in 1995 when O’Toole wrote his book, if he mentioned ‘colonial’ or ‘post-colonial’ he would have been labelled IRA.
Interestingly enough, O’Toole talks about the rise of the Irish Catholic Middle Class and the ranchers, something that is never talked about in mainstream/media discussions about Ireland in the 19th century. It’s all land wars and landlords. But O’Toole pretty much nails it, so kudos there alright.
But I think the essence of where O’Toole misses the point is in his blending of cattle and beef industries. Certainly up to the 1970s, the reality is of live cattle exporters not wanting much truck with an indigenous Irish beef industry as it would affect their sales, and up to the 1950s at least, with Britain doing what it can to curb the development of an indigenous beef industry in Ireland as its development would affect their own beef industry. O’Toole merges these two spheres together when really one of the defining narratives of the Irish cattle trade is the tension between live cattle and beef.
Having said all that it is a useful book and well worth picking up again if you see it around. I got mine for €3 in Oxfam last year.
“the American consultancy firm Ibec”.
Was there really an American consultancy firm in 1952 that had the name that the CII and FIE were to adopt? (Oh, how so, so apt, the choice of the business leaders in CII and FIE were in 1993 in their choice of name for their merged body.)
Yep. Their full name was: Ibec Technical Services Corporation. It’s a fascinating report. I’m going to put up the part that deals with cattle during the week, as soon as I get the time.
Where cattle have been largely forgotten within historical and political discourse, they remain central to archaeological investigation and even more so when their bones are excavated in seventeenth-century and later sites in Dublin. Expect a major essay in 12 months or so!
But what’s even more fascinating, well for me anyway, are the ancillary things beyond food consumption and waste disposal. Most archaeologists working in Dublin (and in Limerick and Belfast) over the past 10 years would have (reluctantly) dug on a tannery site, mostly in the Liberties or Kilmainham, all equally disgusting, messy- in-rain and smelly. There were loads of them, most of them gone out of business by the 1850s due to cheap imported manufactured leather products flooding in from the American west. You’d invariably get a dump of cattlehorns (useful for newbies to pimp their hardhats for the Viking look), where the outer shiny envelope of the horn cores had been removed for the button-maker. In one case on Ardee Street, the outflow from a tannery was being pumped out into a small stream, with the next business downstream being a brewery which took in the water from the… you get it.
And even later still you see the Emergency Scientific Research Bureau; they were charged with the identification of areas where experimental work could be undertaken to encourage self-sufficiency and moreover, reduce dependence on imported raw materials. The research undertaken by the Bureau extended well beyond the provision of basic foodstuffs, synthetic leather and artificial manures and reached out to the more effective transmission of short wave signals and even more arcane ephemera (including what appears to have been an early form of napalm). Anyway, it appears there was an insufficiency of boots when it came to the feet of the thousands of new recruits. So yeah, the whole cattle thing reaches into every corner of our lives and our history…
On a different note entirely and a cheeky one this, would anybody be able to scan me a hi-res version of the shot of Phil Lynott, Eric Bell and Brian Downey walking through St. Stephen’s Green in September 1972? It’s on the inner sleeve of Shades of a Blue Orphanage but I can’t find it on the web… Thanks!
Somewhat ironic to see the (American) Ibec people recommending what turned out to be the recipe for Mad Cow Disease back in the 50s (using mortality carcasses to produce protein feeds).
Mind you, the beer produced with tannery polluted water as mentioned by Anarchaeologist must’ve caused something even worse than ‘cider madness’.
The brewery wasn’t making Tennents by any chance ??
Wow! didn’t pick up on that at all Seán. Thanks for pointing that out.
The brewery was owned by Thwaite’s, who later produced minerals (though not on the same site). But it would seem they were producing stout before Arthur Guinness as they were giving bottles of the stuff to pregnant women in the precursor of the Rotunda when it was on George’s Street (more or less behind the Camera Exchange). Strangely enough, the plot of land containing the tannery and brewery was originally leased from the earl of Meath by an ancestor of Dick Cheney’s.
Another aspect of the cattle trade which occurs to me is the labyrinthine system of now overgrown lanes throughout the countryside, along which the animals were driven long distances to other areas to be fattened, before being driven off again to the ‘ranchers’ who after the end of the war were themselves driving trucks. According to an elderly relative in east Clare, the initial smalltimers couldn’t afford trucks until the ’60s and by that stage, they were considered superfluous by the ranchers who were starting to rear the calves from scratch (more or less). If this is true, it’d be interesting to look at sales at individual marts and fairs to see who was buying from whom. I suspect though that these records don’t exist pre-EEC?
Getting back to the laneways, I’ve recorded some in Clare and west Cavan and I think Tim Robinson has recorded them in the Burren and Connemara. They don’t benefit from any sort of legislative or statutory protection unless a) they’re associated with a saint or an ecclesiastical centre or b) you can prove they were in use before 1700 (yeah, right). Anecdotal evidence, again from east Clare, suggests they were extensively used by the IRA to get around the countryside undetected, as few are on maps (except on early Ordnance 6″ editions) and entrances to public roads were disguised by local sympathisers. A lot of information may have been collected by folklorists, but little is in the public domain.
The archaeological angle is interesting where on many occasions animals and drovers over-nighted together in fields close to sites known as cilíní, generally with a much earlier origin as small ecclesiastical centres, forgotten as the church centralised itself around the parish system. These are isolated, lonely sites where unbaptised children or ’strangers’ were buried until the 1960s. Any linkages are of crucial importance when considering how people got around the place in the 6-7th centuries and indeed in the early ’20s and into the ’60s.
Ok, rant over.
[…] weekend I read the chapter on Irish industry, and most of it was a complete eye opener. Conor has already argued that it is only by examining Ireland’s economic history from the perspective of economic […]