Il ministro dell’Agricoltura risponde al “divisivo” Leo Varadkar per aver affermato che gli agricoltori “portano grandi costi all’Irlanda”

The simple truth of this is that nobody really knows the true details; most comments here or in the media will be hunches at best.

We do know that without subsidies, most farms are loss-making and will fail.

My own personal opinion on this is that tax-payers cannot sustain further subsidies. People also need houses, health care, and infrastructure.

The fuel increase is being felt across the board but if the margins in farming are so tight that they need to lock down society by blocking roads then its time for these farmers on the tight margins to look at different options away from traditional farming or a different career altogether.

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Sometimes the truth hurts.

‘divisive’.. I’m sure rural and pro-farmer folks have never made ‘divisive’ comments about urban people before of course, and they certainly would be called out by every politician if they were to do so..

Varadkar knows where his bread is buttered, but like most things you only cop the flak when you’re close to the target.

Two things can be true, farming is an important industry, but it is also woefully inefficient and lavishly subsidised. There is a breaking point for all of this and farmers need to be careful that they don’t overplay their hand and break a system which is actually extremely generous to them.

They do of course. But we need food and its exspensive. We need farmers and the businesses with green taxes etc is very expensive and intensive even with modern industry farming.

The deal with south america hopefully will make meat cheaper and keep farming competitive towards the holland and UK models

What Varadkar said – which was all entirely accurate – goes to the heart of a political sore spot in Ireland without any clear resolution.

Because this takes in a myriad of factors, this is hardly exhaustive, but the simple issue facing Ireland is that Dublin has been too much of a success for the country to really understand.

Going back throughout history, the advantage of urbanisation is that it allows for specialisation. Rural living is the human norm well into the 19th century when the emergence of global trade arises from more efficient food transportation. In places like the US, food can be transported from the Midwest to the industrial cities of the North-East. In the UK the cities of the North of England are fed by rural populations in Ireland and England, France has the northeast, Germany the Ruhr, etc.

In an Irish context, our principal city has always been Dublin. As the capital of the island, Dublin was the dominant administrative, cultural, religious and commercial city of the island. Belfast had more industry and Cork and Belfast were also commercially important, but Dublin was largely the most important in almost all spheres.

In the 20th century, Ireland struggles badly, but it has certain key advantages over some of our peers, and, one that’s a bit embarrassing now is the Catholic Church’s enormous influence and partial control of education. Ireland had (and has) very good schools churning out reasonably competent people. In the later 20th century, many of these reasonably competent people also go to university.

Where this all becomes crucial is with the end of communism. When the Russian menace ended – sadly only temporarily – in the late 1980s, much of the western world reduced spending on defence and had enormous amounts of money to invest in whatever it wanted.

As a very poor but highly educated country, Ireland became a massive target for FDI, mostly from American companies wanting to build a base in Europe. (The abject failure of Europe to succeed in the tech sector is a huge debate for another day, but one which has paradoxically been a massive boon for Ireland.)

During the years of the Celtic Tiger huge monies came into Ireland predominantly into tech, pharma and professional services. Much of the tax revenue raised was used to prop up the rest of the country. Salaries for the public sector exploded, likewise grants, subsidies, etc, for farmers.

One of the problems that has never been confronted though, is that the vast, vast majority of the money is coming from a predominantly urban population.

If you consider a very ordinary Irish experience, somebody who does well in their Leaving Cert decides they want to go to university. Our best universities are in Dublin, but even if they decide to go to university, the best place to move to as a graduate is Dublin or abroad. If the ordinary student decides they want to work for some fintech company following studying finance or commerce in UCD, Dublin is the only realistic destination.

This then raises the issue of taxes. Most Irish people are near enough to tax negative. Income tax rates on poor people are negligible. Income tax is mostly paid by high-earners and corporate tax is mostly paid by the employers of high-earners. Thus you have a situation where the few thousand people in fintech, aircraft-leasing, etc, are paying vastly more taxes than much, much larger economic sectors of the country.

Ultimately, the great fear of Irish politics going back to independence has been Dublin. If Dublin voters started voting for Dublin’s interest, the country would cease to function. A Dublin party wouldn’t give a fuck about plant hire businesses paying more for diesel.

When Varadkar points out that farmers are just a cost and not a benefit, he’s opening that can of worms, and it’s something most people in Ireland aren’t really ready to confront. Why are the taxes of a hard-working 30 year old in Dublin who cannot buy the house they want propping up the uneconomic lifestyle of a 60 year old man who resents the 30 year old?

Somebody is going to realise theirs gold in those political hills at some point.

Whether it’s true or not. Why say it? As a former Taoiseach he needs to rise above those type of comments or he’ll turn into another Bertie.

He’s just trying to please the west Brits.

Talk about why you had to step down, Leo.

(He didn’t jump, he was pushed!)

The amount of anti-rural sentiment in here is shocking. People would gladly step on farmers because they have zero idea what they go through and how difficult it is.

Define ‘divisive’, Martin.

I have no idea what the current levels are, but let me share one of the very first facts I learned about how the Irish economy and taxation worked in the 90s: the workers in Waterford Crystal – there were lots of them, and some of the senior glass blowers were on high wages – paid more tax than *all* the farmers in the country.

Today, I would go an dig into those numbers and query them – if I could find them – but Varadkar is probably not wide of the mark.

Leo’s an asshole and he’s absolutely correct. We subsidise the living shit out of agriculture and its a tiny percentage of our economy.
And Leo is an asshole.

I pointed that preserving farming was one goal of the CAP scheme and certainly not the most important aspect of the CAP scheme. The value of CAP has massively declined just due to inflation. YOU ARE HUNG UP ON 1 ASPECT OF CAP SCHEME.

Not all farm subsidies schemes are the sane.