“Why should Waterford farmers pay rent to the Duke of Devonshire?” my colleague Matt asked the other day. The simple and easy and trite answer to that question is that the Duke owns the land, and is entitled by the constitution of this republic to charge rent for its use. He is also not obliged to rent it to anyone, and could of course take the lands back into his personal use should he choose. That is a constitutional right guaranteed in both jurisdictions that applies every bit as much to British landowners in Ireland as it does to Irish landowners in the United Kingdom.
But of course, that is not what has people annoyed.
The public annoyance, as Matt correctly intuits, is the fact that the landlord in this instance is the Duke of Devonshire and the put-upon tenants are small Irish landowners.
Matt expresses the view in his article that “any serious nationalist revolution would have expropriated without compensation the surviving colonial landlords and divided the land between the tenants, many of whom would have claims going back in time to when the land was first expropriated.”
There are a few points here that I feel obliged to address, while fully appreciating that Matt’s view probably reflects at least the plurality sentiment in the country.
First, that Ireland did in fact have a serious nationalist revolution which does not deserve to be diminished, whatever you think of it: Of the predominantly white, English-speaking former territories of the British Empire, the 26-county republic is the only one not to recognise The King as Head of State, and the only republic. I might venture to suggest that should we ever aspire to a United Ireland, declaring the revolution incomplete without the full expulsion of the planters is not the ideal way to sell it. But that’s a historical debate we can have another time.
Second, it should be noted that revolutionary states that expropriate property tend not to have a long half-life or much of an economic future: People tend to be less willing to invest money in countries with a track record of arbitrarily stealing the property of landowners and property-holders, for fear that they are next, whatever the historic or nationalist justifications might be.
Ireland, in my view, can be very proud of the fact that it did not become what Zimbabwe is today, where a programme of property expropriation from “surviving colonial landlords” turned a very wealthy country into a desperately poor one.
Third, and here I’ll get into really unpopular territory, but it must be said: The problem here is not the rent being charged by the landlord, but the economic unviability of hill sheep farming which cannot support even the current rent, let alone the (not exactly unreasonable but we will come to that) €50 per hectare that Lismore wishes to charge.
Consider the following quotes from local farmer Thomas Fitzgerald, given to the Irish Independent in a video which can be seen here:
“My main income is the subsidies for my sheep and sheep farming. I’m a traditional hill sheep farmer. That is my job. That is my living”.
If your main income is state subsidy, then definitionally, you are already in financial ruin and being kept in an unproductive line of work by financial transfers from other taxpayers. Even if Mr. Fitzgerald owned the land, he could not afford to farm it without you and me supporting him to do so with our taxes. Writing for Gript Media is not the fastest way by any means to become a millionaire, but it does not require the Government to write us cheques to keep us in work. That matters.
I do not write that to minimise the work and effort, and indeed passion, that goes into sheep farming – but this is pure economic reality. In addition, “hill sheep farming” has real costs and environmental impacts, which is one reason why state policy for some years now has been to move away from it: Sheep keep mountains bare and make life impossible for many plants and other animals. This might be justifiable if it was a productive economic activity, but it no longer is. To the extent that it cannot bear an entirely reasonable rent.
And what of that rent? The increase, as noted, will see rents on the Lismore Estate rise from €5 per hectare in 2013 to €50 per hectare in 2029. How does this compare to other agricultural lands? Well, Teagasc noted last year that the average rental price in Ireland for grazing lands is around €284 per acre, which (there are 2.47 acres in a hectare) works out at about €700 per hectare.
But of course: Much of that reflects better land than which is found on the sheep-grazing hillsides of the Knockmealdown mountains. You would expect some discount from the average. And the fact is, that at €50 per hectare by 2029, the Duke of Devonshire will be charging his tenants about one-fourteenth of the average rent for agricultural land. Is that really British Imperialism run wild?
The subsidies paid to sheep farmers are evidence that Irish society, for whatever reason, believes that it is worth its while to keep families involved in a long-running and economically unproductive activity. Hillside sheep farming is just about the least profitable of all the Irish agricultural enterprises. The evidence in this case would seem to suggest that the Duke of Devonshire, for all his undoubted flaws, has largely facilitated this desire by keeping rents extraordinarily low for an extraordinarily long time.
But when Waterford Sheep farmers who cannot survive without subsidy in the first place now say that paying one fourteenth of the average annual rent for their land will send them to the wall, perhaps the question is not – as Matt and doubtless many others think – about the evils of colonialism. Perhaps it is about the wisdom of keeping people in an industry that cannot support, even with extensive state subsidy and very low rents, the incomes people need to survive in modern Ireland.
One does not have to be some kind of Green Party fanatic to suggest that perhaps it would be better for the country, the environment, and all involved for the Knockmealdown mountains to be allowed, in time, to return to their original, forested, natural state. The country would probably garner more money from the tourism than it does from the sheep farming, with substantially less work involved.
Now, boo me at your leisure.