Fodderless Farmers

national | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Tuesday April 30, 2013 11:29 by Paddy Hackett paraichackett at gmail dot com

Irish Farmers are begging again

The current Minister of Agriculture is forever defending the farming community while his government are forever attacking the Irish working class. The farming community must be exposed as a parasitic category.

Attacks are being mounted against the public sector worker as part of an attack on the working and living conditions of the Irish working class. At the same time the Irish state actively promotes and subsidizes the farming community. The working class must highlight this contrast. The privileging of the Irish farming community by successive governments is a practice that is obscured and hardly highlighted by the bourgeois media.

The farmers are moaning again. Looking for financial and other assistance from the Irish state because of the dearth of cattle fodder available to farmers. Already the latter are given annually over a billion euro. Revenue from taxation pays most if not all of this. They also obtain help in other forms. Then many of them engage in creative accounting to make their income appear to be less than it is. Some of them have investments outside of farming and lines of work.

Pat Kenny, on his show, was interviewing the Minister of Agriculture and an IFA official on the issue of the lack of fodder for cattle farming. He never raised any challenging issues with them despite the fact that Pat consistently challenges trade unionists interviewed by him on his show. He never points out that any added help offered to Irish farmers is paid for by revenue from taxation. Irish farmers, like the banks, are a privileged social category within Irish society. They virtually escape criticism by the bourgeois mass media. Farming is portrayed as a commercial activity. Yet when adversity confronts them they go begging from the state. And the state is only willing to subsidize them. Yet the representative body of farmers is the IFA. This is a body that is anti-working class in its stance concerning wage agreements and other matters that directly concern workers.

The current Minister of Agriculture is forever defending the farming community while his government are forever attacking the Irish working class. The farming community must be exposed as a parasitic category.