Fine book celebrates when farmers took the power back

I’M READING a fine history of Golden Vale Marts by local historian and Limerick farmer Sean Liston. Entitled From Fair To Mart And Beyond... (pictured right), the book celebrates 60 years of GVM since fairs gave way to marts.

The process happened over time but came to a head in the 1950s and 60s when farmers began to take control of the selling and buying of animals. It is one of those success stories that farmers need to celebrate and remember.

In tracing the history of our national affair with the cow, the author takes us back to Queen Maeve and the Táin Bo Cuailgne when cows were currency. Quoting author AT Lucas from his book Cattle In Ancient Ireland, Liston refers to a time when bovines had practically the status of members of society. Brian Ború, whose name means ‘Brian of the Tributes’ or Brian of the taxes, gathered his revenue in livestock.

Selling and buying cattle was an important feature of ancient Ireland. The word ‘aonach’ originally referred to a gathering held on the occasion of the death of a king and as fairs evolved, they became associated with monasteries and saints’ days. In a neat piece of historical coincidence, one of the biggest fairs in Medieval Ireland was held at Lynally, Tullamore, near the site of the annual Tullamore Show and the current site of the Ploughing championships.

As the centuries moved on, fairs moved to the Fairgreens and the main streets and were known to host everything from matchmaking to faction fights. The fair spawned its own folklore and what better spawning ground for tales and legends than long nocturnal journeys with families and drovers walking herds of animals through the night to get a good spot ahead of the day’s transactions.

The calendar came to be marked by fairs with the Kilmallock fair in March marking the spring and the Ballinasloe fair marking the beginning of winter. These were all fixed in law under the patronage of a local grandee.

The main business was the sale of stock and Sean Liston clearly shows that the ultimate demise of the fair is directly linked, not to any cultural or historical movement, but to a flaw in the economics at the heart of the pursuit — the failure of the fairs to establish a fair price.

Prices were established by the dealers, jobbers and exporters, often acting in cahoots. A farmer approaching a fair with his stock would be met by the representatives of a variety of dealers offering him a common price for his animals. At the fair proper, a particular dealer would offer him slightly more and, taking this to be the fair price, he would sell. Liston points out that the absence of any system of measurement and any mechanism for weighing the cattle gave great power to the dealer. Many farmers didn’t have a notion what their animals weighed.

In the 1950s, it became clear that farmers needed to take control of the point of sale or they would continue to lose. Illustrating the frustration felt by the farmer, Liston quotes Ted Hunt from Athea in Limerick, a former group chairman of GVM: “As for agreeing the deal, I was never any good at it — the procedure was you ask enough, he tried to beat you down. Not only that, he had helpers as well, they were called middlemen or blockers and they would come in and bid you a lower price again… there was a lot of haggling going on and I detested it.”

Having seen the effectiveness of the co-operative creameries in enabling farmers to produce and sell milk in quantity and at profit, farmers around the country began to look at applying the model to the livestock trade.

John P McCarthy from Feenagh in west Limerick was a pioneer in this regard. Liston notes that McCarthy was a product of Macra na Feirme, founded in 1944, which was instrumental in the foundation of the Farmers Journal, The NFA, IFAC, Macra na Tuaithe, Farm Relief Services and the Farm Apprenticeship Board. These organisations produced a cohort of people with an array of skills and the capacity to organise and campaign.