**EXTRACT:** *….in short, the question of who owned and used Irish farmland was one in which the State and its political processes were centrally involved. Underused agricultural land was liable to be acquired and redistributed among neighbouring farms. The Land Commission inspectors were as powerful as the clergy in the affairs of rural Ireland.*
*A central issue was the ideal size for family farms. As the years passed, it became clear that family farms of under 100 acres were economically questionable in terms of viability and development. Many believed that larger farms were the only means of developing the entire Irish agricultural sector.*
*From our 1973 accession to the EEC, a radical change in policy took shape. The Land Commission was allowed to wither and was formally abolished as late as 1999 (in Northern Ireland it was wound up in 1935).*
*Has Ireland lapsed from fervent belief in land policy to bordering on agnosticism?*
*The issue is re-emerging as one of potential political importance. Quite apart from large-scale purchase of agricultural land by property speculators eyeing its potential for redevelopment, there is a comparatively new phenomenon of long-term portfolio farmland purchase by wealthy individuals, syndicates and investment trusts.*
*These purchasers want to become landlords where agriculture will be undertaken by tenants and contractors with no long-term rights or property interest in the land. The super-wealthy are building portfolios of many tens of thousands of the best agricultural acres simply as long-term stores of value on the basis that “they aren’t making land any more, you know”….*
​
*…The fundamental question arises as to whether the independent State is simply to walk away and permit Irish agriculture to revert after a century and a half to a landlord/tenant sector where the rich and powerful own the land and farmers toil to pay them rent. It’s not just our urban homeowners who are being shunted into tenant status.*
*Maybe the time has come to reverse this unseen trend, and to use our tax systems to limit and reverse the growing concentration of farmland ownership in the hands of the wealthy few….*
Says the one who spent almost €30 million on Thornton, Hall €200k per acre,!!! knowing it was ridiculously overpriced , but paid it anyway to stay in bed with Fianna Fail.
I’m going to copy and paste a semi relevant comment I made yesterday on the thread about farming and emissions, because it’s not only a land grab, but a green washed land grab
“What you are completely missing here is an enormous amount of historical and political context. It didn’t get like this overnight. We actually had an extremely efficient and sustainable form of agriculture up to 50 years ago, to the degree that a huge amount of the shite they’re talking about with regards to “sustainable agriculture” I remember the remains of and old people talking about it. An enormous amount of what makes up modern regenerative agriculture is basically stolen ideas from Irish and Scottish practices on the livestock end, and indigenous practices on the arable end. Even the sitka spruce situation, I have extensively read studies and experiments from the foundation of the state up to now with regards to agriculture, and back in the day it was native scots pine that was being put forward to be our main timber species and that would have supported so many of our native fauna, chiefly the red squirrel, until money and politics got involved.
The mantra from the top was, especially post joining the EU from once international money and politics got involved, “bigger is better, the more intensive the better, follow america and Germany”
What the “jackeens” don’t see is the number of farmers who refused to change who were pushed out and are now mostly dead and gone, you have 2 generations since who were brought up with this mantra being gospel and those who disagreed being labeled “backwards, ignorant auld superstitious fools” and compliance was essentially mandatory because if you didn’t follow the mantra and if you didn’t jump trough the hoops to get the farm improvement grants you went under. This is fact. My own family didn’t comply and we lost our fuckin shirt.
How do you put that genie back in the bottle, when you have erased an entire culture and put their descendants in a position where they are now so up to their holes in debt chasing the pie in the sky they’ve been promised for 50 years they can’t go back, they can’t take the loss of production and the only answer being given is “here’s a grant that doesn’t begin to cover what we want you to do let alone the loss of production, we are going to frame this in the media as a handout, sorry for all the bullshit we made your dad and grandad do, we were wrong, but it’s your fault for listening to it, your now going to have to farm like your great grandad and don’t look to us for further help, and don’t you dare protest. The Irish examiner is running an article about why if we don’t crucify you and your entire posterity Saoirse and Diarmuid won’t be able to keep both the Landy and the Audi”
This is the fuckin reality.
And the sad part is, if there was a half ounce of a proper cohesive plan, a half ounce of leadership, none of this would even be a problem.
We need tree cover: adopt silviopasture as a national strategy and stop putting up barriers to the people who want to do it. I want to do it but don’t qualify because my land is not “improved” enough (translation: not pushed within an inch of its life)
We need to stop fertilizer and slurry runoff, and we could really use more energy for the grid and stop having to import gas: stop granting planning for large standard slurry tanks, mandate anerobic digestion instead and grant fund it instead of grant funding the other bullshit that’s part of the problem. Force the ESB to accept and pay for the energy sent to the grid, and put in solar panels as a condition to the planning for sheds and again, force the ESB to take the excess.
Take the 5k cap off the glas scheme, and reform the fuckin thing.
We need biodiversity: stop forcing people when they do grow silviopasture to only grow a limited selection of commercial timber species remove the 10% cap on fruit trees. If someone wants to grow a whole fuckin organic orchard on the silviopasture scheme, let them. It’s only good for the animals and insects, and only good for our food security and economic development.
These are simple things, and all they take is a diversion of funds, not much if any additional investment except to upgrade the electricity and gas grid and we need to do that anyway in order to keep the whole tech thing going. We can literally just use agriculture to power the tech industry and we could even use it to power and develop a green manufacturing industry.
We could slash livestock emissions directly by up to 60%
We could power the country exclusively on renewable energy, fuck it we could even export both renewable energy and biogas.
We could diversify our agricultural output and create whole new industries.
We could offset not only our own entire national emissions but have some surplus offsets.
Without culling any cattle or bankrupting anyone
But no, because this isn’t about the environment. It’s a greenwashed land grab brought to you by the same politicians, the same investors, and the same companies that brought you the housing crisis. And they’re coming for us all.”
If you’re going to make a post about a paywalled news article for the love of Christ archive it on a site like archive.is and link it in the OP, posts like this should be deleted imo
Anyone willing to share a non paywalled version of agri rantmans article? Would love to follow his argument. Also seriously wondering why agri rantman isn’t a politician, have not heard so much sense on the matter in years.
Lumping dubs in with affluent south dub suburbs=counterproductive.
Dead right, look at US , the largest land owning farmer there is Bill Gates. What the heck does a computer nerd want to be doing with slurry?
I see Michael has used up his quota of SF articles for the quarter.
Step 1: Make farming unprofitable through policy, farmers are forced to sell up.
Step 2: Relax policies to make farming lucrative, farmers now need to rent land from an investment company.
Mad as a box of frogs 🐸
How much land does Magnier and the horse racing Tycoons own. No land can be bought in South East Tipp in competition with him.
More people, particularly in Ireland, need to know about Geoism/Georgism, the single tax movement and LVT land value tax. We won’t though, probably the least politically literate shower of moaners…
Is this the same fucking Michael McDowell, ex PD, who doesn’t want [the upgraded metro passing to close to his rental properties in Ranelagh](https://twitter.com/kenfoxe/status/1100133969499246596)? Why the feck would I read anything he has to say about ‘The Rich’?
12 comments
**EXTRACT:** *….in short, the question of who owned and used Irish farmland was one in which the State and its political processes were centrally involved. Underused agricultural land was liable to be acquired and redistributed among neighbouring farms. The Land Commission inspectors were as powerful as the clergy in the affairs of rural Ireland.*
*A central issue was the ideal size for family farms. As the years passed, it became clear that family farms of under 100 acres were economically questionable in terms of viability and development. Many believed that larger farms were the only means of developing the entire Irish agricultural sector.*
*From our 1973 accession to the EEC, a radical change in policy took shape. The Land Commission was allowed to wither and was formally abolished as late as 1999 (in Northern Ireland it was wound up in 1935).*
*Has Ireland lapsed from fervent belief in land policy to bordering on agnosticism?*
*The issue is re-emerging as one of potential political importance. Quite apart from large-scale purchase of agricultural land by property speculators eyeing its potential for redevelopment, there is a comparatively new phenomenon of long-term portfolio farmland purchase by wealthy individuals, syndicates and investment trusts.*
*These purchasers want to become landlords where agriculture will be undertaken by tenants and contractors with no long-term rights or property interest in the land. The super-wealthy are building portfolios of many tens of thousands of the best agricultural acres simply as long-term stores of value on the basis that “they aren’t making land any more, you know”….*
​
*…The fundamental question arises as to whether the independent State is simply to walk away and permit Irish agriculture to revert after a century and a half to a landlord/tenant sector where the rich and powerful own the land and farmers toil to pay them rent. It’s not just our urban homeowners who are being shunted into tenant status.*
*Maybe the time has come to reverse this unseen trend, and to use our tax systems to limit and reverse the growing concentration of farmland ownership in the hands of the wealthy few….*
Says the one who spent almost €30 million on Thornton, Hall €200k per acre,!!! knowing it was ridiculously overpriced , but paid it anyway to stay in bed with Fianna Fail.
I’m going to copy and paste a semi relevant comment I made yesterday on the thread about farming and emissions, because it’s not only a land grab, but a green washed land grab
“What you are completely missing here is an enormous amount of historical and political context. It didn’t get like this overnight. We actually had an extremely efficient and sustainable form of agriculture up to 50 years ago, to the degree that a huge amount of the shite they’re talking about with regards to “sustainable agriculture” I remember the remains of and old people talking about it. An enormous amount of what makes up modern regenerative agriculture is basically stolen ideas from Irish and Scottish practices on the livestock end, and indigenous practices on the arable end. Even the sitka spruce situation, I have extensively read studies and experiments from the foundation of the state up to now with regards to agriculture, and back in the day it was native scots pine that was being put forward to be our main timber species and that would have supported so many of our native fauna, chiefly the red squirrel, until money and politics got involved.
The mantra from the top was, especially post joining the EU from once international money and politics got involved, “bigger is better, the more intensive the better, follow america and Germany”
What the “jackeens” don’t see is the number of farmers who refused to change who were pushed out and are now mostly dead and gone, you have 2 generations since who were brought up with this mantra being gospel and those who disagreed being labeled “backwards, ignorant auld superstitious fools” and compliance was essentially mandatory because if you didn’t follow the mantra and if you didn’t jump trough the hoops to get the farm improvement grants you went under. This is fact. My own family didn’t comply and we lost our fuckin shirt.
How do you put that genie back in the bottle, when you have erased an entire culture and put their descendants in a position where they are now so up to their holes in debt chasing the pie in the sky they’ve been promised for 50 years they can’t go back, they can’t take the loss of production and the only answer being given is “here’s a grant that doesn’t begin to cover what we want you to do let alone the loss of production, we are going to frame this in the media as a handout, sorry for all the bullshit we made your dad and grandad do, we were wrong, but it’s your fault for listening to it, your now going to have to farm like your great grandad and don’t look to us for further help, and don’t you dare protest. The Irish examiner is running an article about why if we don’t crucify you and your entire posterity Saoirse and Diarmuid won’t be able to keep both the Landy and the Audi”
This is the fuckin reality.
And the sad part is, if there was a half ounce of a proper cohesive plan, a half ounce of leadership, none of this would even be a problem.
We need tree cover: adopt silviopasture as a national strategy and stop putting up barriers to the people who want to do it. I want to do it but don’t qualify because my land is not “improved” enough (translation: not pushed within an inch of its life)
We need to stop fertilizer and slurry runoff, and we could really use more energy for the grid and stop having to import gas: stop granting planning for large standard slurry tanks, mandate anerobic digestion instead and grant fund it instead of grant funding the other bullshit that’s part of the problem. Force the ESB to accept and pay for the energy sent to the grid, and put in solar panels as a condition to the planning for sheds and again, force the ESB to take the excess.
Take the 5k cap off the glas scheme, and reform the fuckin thing.
We need biodiversity: stop forcing people when they do grow silviopasture to only grow a limited selection of commercial timber species remove the 10% cap on fruit trees. If someone wants to grow a whole fuckin organic orchard on the silviopasture scheme, let them. It’s only good for the animals and insects, and only good for our food security and economic development.
These are simple things, and all they take is a diversion of funds, not much if any additional investment except to upgrade the electricity and gas grid and we need to do that anyway in order to keep the whole tech thing going. We can literally just use agriculture to power the tech industry and we could even use it to power and develop a green manufacturing industry.
We could slash livestock emissions directly by up to 60%
We could power the country exclusively on renewable energy, fuck it we could even export both renewable energy and biogas.
We could diversify our agricultural output and create whole new industries.
We could offset not only our own entire national emissions but have some surplus offsets.
Without culling any cattle or bankrupting anyone
But no, because this isn’t about the environment. It’s a greenwashed land grab brought to you by the same politicians, the same investors, and the same companies that brought you the housing crisis. And they’re coming for us all.”
If you’re going to make a post about a paywalled news article for the love of Christ archive it on a site like archive.is and link it in the OP, posts like this should be deleted imo
Anyone willing to share a non paywalled version of agri rantmans article? Would love to follow his argument. Also seriously wondering why agri rantman isn’t a politician, have not heard so much sense on the matter in years.
Lumping dubs in with affluent south dub suburbs=counterproductive.
Dead right, look at US , the largest land owning farmer there is Bill Gates. What the heck does a computer nerd want to be doing with slurry?
I see Michael has used up his quota of SF articles for the quarter.
Step 1: Make farming unprofitable through policy, farmers are forced to sell up.
Step 2: Relax policies to make farming lucrative, farmers now need to rent land from an investment company.
Mad as a box of frogs 🐸
How much land does Magnier and the horse racing Tycoons own. No land can be bought in South East Tipp in competition with him.
https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
More people, particularly in Ireland, need to know about Geoism/Georgism, the single tax movement and LVT land value tax. We won’t though, probably the least politically literate shower of moaners…
Is this the same fucking Michael McDowell, ex PD, who doesn’t want [the upgraded metro passing to close to his rental properties in Ranelagh](https://twitter.com/kenfoxe/status/1100133969499246596)? Why the feck would I read anything he has to say about ‘The Rich’?