(New Beginnings, No. 8)
Published as Peter McCarthy.
In 1949, Ireland’s population was 60% rural; now it’s 60% urban. The average Irish farm is now nearly three times the size it was in 1949. In that year, 43% of the Irish work-force was engaged in agriculture; by 2000, it had dropped to 8%. The number of farmers dropped by about 7% in 2000, and is expected to drop further sharply between 2001 and 2010.
Between 1992 and 2000, direct payments to farmers from Dublin or Brussels rose from 20% of income to 56%, and are now at an average level of £11,000 per farm per year. (Small farmers feel that a disproportionately large share of that goes to big farmers.) In the mid-1990’s, only 31% of Irish farms merited a clear classification as economically viable. Farm income may drop, for some categories of farmer, by between 30% and 70% between 2000 and 2010.
Two out of three rural dwellers are not directly dependent on farming. Those in farming occupations account for only a quarter of the rural labour force. About 40% of farmers and their partners have a job outside farming. Farm households have a substantially lower risk of consistent poverty than urban and non-farm households.
In the late 1990’s, more than a quarter of the rural elderly had no bath or shower in their home, and one fifth had no indoor toilet. The rural elderly often live alone in a state of permanent marginalization.
Educational disadvantage is predominantly a rural phenomenon.
A significant part of the rural population of Ireland can feel that descriptions of Ireland’s economic transformation in the 1990’s are of “somewhere over there”.
What lies in the future? Only the Almighty knows, but it will be different from the past.