Speech at the Opening of the 2016 National Ploughing Championships
Screggan, Tullamore, Co. Offaly, Tuesday 20 September 2016
Is mór an pléisiúir dom é an t-ochto cúigiú Comórtas Náisiúnta Treabhdóireachta a oscailt. Is mian liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil leis an Cumann Náisiúnta Treabhdóireachta agus leis na hoibrithe deonacha ar fad a chuir fáilte romhainn chuig An Scragán, An Tulach Mhór i gCo. Uíbh Failí i mbliana. Is mian liom buíochas ar leith a ghabháil lenár n-óstaigh agus leis na feirmeoirí ar fad sa chomharsanacht atá tar éis 600 acra a chur ar fáil le haghaidh treabhadh, le haghaidh taispeántas agus le haghaidh parcáil.
[It is my very great pleasure to open the 85th National Ploughing Championships. As one of Europe’s largest outdoor events, the Ploughing Championships are both a momentous date in Ireland’s rural calendar and a huge organisational undertaking. May I thank the National Ploughing Association, and all the volunteers, who have worked so hard to welcome us all, this year, to this locality of Screggan, Tullamore, in Co. Offaly. I also want to extend special thanks to our hosts today and to all the neighbouring farmers, who have made some 600 acres of farmland available for ploughing, exhibitions and parking. The success of this wonderful event, year after year, is a credit to all concerned.]
The Ploughing Championships are a truly Irish phenomenon, one of the highlights of the year for so many. They are an opportunity to meet up with old friends, catch up with the latest farming news, and enjoy the great atmosphere that makes of ‘the Ploughing’ such a unique and enduring event. For all of its 85 years supporters have come here to admire the great skill and ability of those who are at the heart of these three days – our ploughing competitors, in all their different categories, including those, young and old, who take great pride and pleasure in keeping alive the ancient skill of horse ploughing and loy digging.
If the National Ploughing Championships are such a widely popular event, it is also, perhaps, because they are a splendid demonstration and celebration of farming and rural life in Ireland. And yes, indeed we should celebrate and cherish our farmers and our rural communities. Both connect us in a special way to our traditions and our past. Both are vital to our present and our future.
Our rural areas are not just places where people live and labour; they are also spaces that perform vital functions for society as a whole. They are the custodians of our food security and of our environmental balance; but they are, too, a repository of so many of our distinctive ways of life – a tapestry of landscapes, trades, and cultural riches; a mosaic of communities where locals and newcomers share warm neighbourly and working relations.
Within this rich and diverse tapestry that rural Ireland is, farming, and family farms in particular, hold an essential place. Here as elsewhere in the world, our access to good, nutritious and safe food depends very largely on the work and knowledge of farming men and women. These men and women play a vital role not just as the providers of our food, but also as the primary carers for our natural resources and as key contributors to the vibrancy of our rural communities.
Indeed, all of you here this morning who are farmers play a crucial part in shaping Ireland’s beautiful landscapes for the benefit of all citizens, and in sustaining those specific landscape features, such as hedgerows or woodland habitats, which are so important to the preservation of biodiversity, the sequestration of carbon, and the prevention of flooding. But farming also upholds an entire network of small trades, shops, services and local industries that are essential to the economic and social vitality of rural Ireland.
Thus family farms are the backbone of our rural communities, and they must be enabled to prosper for generations to come.
Unfortunately we have arrived at a critical juncture when this is far from guaranteed. Throughout Europe, there has been a general drift from the land since the early 1960s; the farming population is ageing at a very alarming pace; farms are becoming bigger and fewer. The challenges facing our farmers are many, and they are well known to those who attend ‘the Ploughing’: the difficulty of accessing credit and land for younger farmers, fierce international competition, price volatility, as well at the sometimes conflicting demands of productivity and profitability on the one hand, and environmental imperatives on the other, are a daily reality for many. For example, our thoughts today should turn to those who cannot be with us, such as those tillage farmers seeking to salvage what they can from harvests damaged by the long stretch of bad weather.
We live in an age of unprecedented urbanisation. The pursuit of economic competitiveness in contemporary conditions is fostering a global race between large cities and metropolitan areas. This sometimes presents rural territories with the choice of either attaching themselves to urban dynamics, or becoming mere recreation spaces for urban dwellers. We cannot be satisfied with such a vision if we are serious about our objectives of social cohesion, inclusive growth and sustainability – we need strong rural policies.
Farming is much more than an important part of the economy. It is a unique partnership between those who work the land, nature, fellow rural dwellers, and consumers who, if they are to live healthy life, must exercise choice. That choice requires living and supporting lifestyles that are informed by a mutual understanding of sustainability.
Sustainability refers to forms of living as much as it refers to soils. Rural communities need a diversity of services and institutions that support and create vitality. An aggregation of sectoral advantages is not, and can never be, a substitute for integrated, flourishing and sustainable rural society.
Publics, citizens, will engage better with sustainability, and the need, in particular, to respond to climate change if this response is transparent, its logic explained – if it is explained that achieving these important aims cannot be left to crude or extreme markets outcomes. Yes, markets are needed, including new markets and better, fairer, forms of them, but land and the fruits of the land – the food we eat – are not products like any other. They are the basis of any society’s subsistence. Farm life, farm communities, rural society, are not just sectors like any other, producing commodities for the market. They need to be sustained with robust public policies, good planning, as well as targeted and adequate incentives.
We should never forget that when the Common Agricultural Policy was established, five years after the signature of the Treaty of Rome, it was recognised that markets on their own would wipe out family farms and obliterate large parts of Europe’s rural life. This is what drove Europeans to forge the public policy instruments ensuring, not just food independence and increased productivity, but also rural development at large [under the so-called second pillar]. The fundamental public mission fulfilled by farmers has even widened, today, to encompass the imperatives of social cohesion, ecological sustainability and our collective responsibility towards global climate change.
The future of farming must, therefore, remain a central concern of public policy at European and national level – but this is not all: the specific nature of farming life has to be recognised, not just by policy makers, but by all those who make up the chain, from the farmyard or field to the retail outlet.
Indeed while future as well as present generations will benefit from sustainability and actions against the consequences of climate change, there are costs involved. Those who consume must reward sustainable farming, and those in the chain between production and consumption must allow such rewards to flow to farming families in a way that acknowledges their efforts but also welcomes them to the partnership that sustainability and responding to climate change requires.
We need no less, then, than a renewed vision for the future of Irish and European family farming. We need a vision supported by all the actors in the chain as well as by public policies delivering robust support to the farming sector alongside a holistic and integrated approach to rural development at large.
This is a matter of values, of a choice we have to make between various possible futures and national priorities. This is a matter of the type of society we want to bequeath to our children. The generations of tomorrow in rural Ireland will need a diversity of forms of life and indeed income sources. All of these sources require a return to respect for nature. No community is closer to nature than farmers.
In working to make such a vision reality, we are fortunate to be able to rely on the well of initiatives, inventiveness, good will and intelligence that exists at the heart of all of our rural communities. Today these communities are the location of diverse and inspiring collective dynamics. There are, in so many segments of our farming population, demonstrations of a willingness to share – share land, share markets, share knowledge and experience – without which the sector as a whole will not survive.
Organisations such as Macra na Feirme, for example, have put forth some interesting ideas to facilitate new forms of collaborative farming and thus allow access to the land for a new generation of farmers. The government’s new Rural Development Programme has also encouraged the formation of “discussion groups” which serve to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and expertise among farmers and can also be a path to overcome that feeling of isolation and loneliness which affects so many who are struggling with difficulties on their farm. I was delighted to learn that 20,000 farmers from all sectors have already registered to join those groups since July of this year.
Then too, while “brain drain”, the loss to the city of young, educated people, has been and remains a concern for rural communities, there are, today, many talented young people who chose to settle, or return to live, in rural areas. There they find the conditions of what they deem a good life: more affordable housing, access to wide expanses of nature, but also a warmth of human relations and a special sense of cohesion, including that between generations. Roots and references, proximity, trust, and even slow pace: these are important assets indeed in world marked by speed, fragmentation and a growing fear of others.
Finally, it is very uplifting to note how Irish farmers are showing a huge interest in embracing farming practices that are respectful of nature. I know, for example, that some 38,000 farmers have already joined GLAS, our latest national agri-environmental scheme – which aims at preserving, in particular, Ireland’s watercourses, vulnerable landscapes and endangered species – and that the figure of those joining is expected to grow to 50,000 by the end of this year. This is good news for all Irish citizens. We can also take great inspiration from locally-led schemes, such as the Burren Programme, which has done so much to protect and renew the unique, vulnerable and biodiverse farming landscape of the Burren region.
A chairde,
Before concluding, may I say, once again, my deep conviction that the only road to the future is sustainability – both social and environmental. Ensuring food security for all, building a prospering and labour-intensive agricultural sector, while preventing further climate change and protecting our natural advantages for future generations: these are some of the crucial challenges facing us in this generation. They are challenges we must face resolutely, invigorated by the knowledge that signing up for sustainability, at national, European or global level, involves acknowledging interdependency: interdependency between man and nature; interdependency between the urban and the rural; interdependency with all the other peoples with whom we share this fragile planet.
Gan phobail tuaithe bheoga ní bheidh sochaí beo fuinniúil ann. Agus ní bheidh pobail tuaithe bheoga ann gan feirmeacha theaghlaigh. Mar sochaí tá orainn a chinntiú go mbeidh ár bhfeirmeoirí in ann leanacht lena gcuid oibre, thábhachtach, ársa, álainn: saothrú na talún as a dtagann ár mbia.
[There can be no vibrant society without vibrant rural communities. And there can be no vibrant rural communities without thriving family farms. We must, as a society, ensure that our farming men and women are enabled to continue to carry out what is one of the most ancient, one of the most important and beautiful human activities on earth: the tending of the land and the cultivation of its fruits, from which all of our food is drawn.]
The Ploughing Championships are an enduring testimony to this vibrancy of our farming sector. They are also, of course, a great showcase of the skill and ability of those who work the land. With over 350 competitors this year displaying their mastery of the art of the plough across the fields of Screggan – these Championships are truly the Olympics of the Land.
Is mian liom gach rath a ghuí orthu siúd atá ag dul san iomaíocht, agus tá súil agam go mbeidh an-lá agaibhse ar fad. Tá áthas orm a rá go bhfuil an t-ochto cúigiú Comórtas Náisiúnta Treabhdóireachta faoi lánseól anois!
[May I conclude by wishing all of our competitors the best of luck, and a most enjoyable time to all of you. I am delighted to declare the 85th National Ploughing Championships open!]