T Ryle Dwyer on CAP reform: IFA short-sighted

July1991

T. Ryle Dwyer argues how the IFA took the short-sighted view in respect of the CAP.

IF urban Ireland is not upset over the MacSharry reform proposals for the Common Agricultural Policy, no one should really be surprised.

Alan Gillis, of course, reacted with predictable outrage. “If the proposals are not modified it is a disaster for us,” he declared. But as Mandy Rice Davies said to the judge: “He would say that, wouldn’t he?”

In his astute advice to Mary Robinson during her Presidential campaign, Eoghan Harris noted that “ordinary people are full of pity — but they hate whiners.” Yet there has been no crowd of greater moaners than the IFA.

Its leaders have cried wolf so often over the years that the Irish audience had been numbed into an indifferent stupor. And, if they are shaken out of it, they may well come out against Gillis and his band of never ending carpers, because the MacSharry reforms should mean cheaper bread, meat and milk.

Of course, the country as a whole will have much less money to buy these and the shortfall would likely be reflected in more unemployment and higher taxes.

While people have been starving in Africa and the Indian sub-continent, mountains of food have been built in the EC and the IFA was quite content to build the mountains ever larger. This country has been one of the greatest culprits.

Even though Ireland only produces 5% of the KC’s butter, Irish butter made up 57% of that sold into intervention in 1990. Likewise in the beef sector, where almost one third of the intervention stock was Irish - though we again produced only 5% of the beef. Had the surplus food been destroyed, there would have been an understandable outcry, but what was done was even worse, from the economic standpoint at any rate. Just keeping it in storage cost €3.3 billion in 1989.

Had the IFA been using its political clout for the surplus food to be moved to the needy or even sent as a kind of gesture of support for Gorbachev and the new democratic governments of Eastern Europe, it would at least have saved much of the money wasted on storage and there would now be some room for more. But, instead, the IFA took the short-sighted view and grabbed what it could.

The Germans, who produce three times as much beef as Ireland, sold only a fraction into intervention but they will end up footing much of the bill for the whole lot. Only a fool would think that this could go on indefinitely.

Germany has problems of her own as a result of unification and as her people get restive, their leaders are inevitably going to entrench and use more and more of their financial resources to tackle their own problems. Moreover, there are also likely to be other demands on Germany’s spare resources.

For fifty years the Germans have lived in dread of the Soviet Union. Even though this has modified with the advent of Gorbachev, such a prolonged sense of foreboding is not easily exercised.

The German people are still anxious and, as they have a vested interest in ensuring that Gorbachev succeeds, they may well be prepared to fund a kind of Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe.

The world has been looking to the United States to do this but the Americans are having serious problems of their own. So much of there economy has been tied up in the military-industrial complex which thrived on the arms race, that the United States is now faced with recognising much of its economy.

Hence the burden of a new Marshall Aid programme will fall heavily on Germany and she will have that much less to devote to the disadvantaged areas of the EC.

Over most of the last twenty years the EC has pumped considerable resources into Ireland.

These were supposed to allow us to modernise but in our complacency we have been content to struggle along in our old inefficient ways as if there were an inexhaustible source of support on the continent for poor old Ireland.

Nationally we have engaged in what Eoghan Harris graphically described as the “pity the poor whore” approach of Michael D. Higgins and his left wing of the Labour Party.

That may well be the compassionate and indeed the Christian approach but the Irish people have never bought it and it is unrealistic to expect others to buy it for us!

The MacSharry reforms have built into them aspects intended to insulate the small farmer from the worst effects of the cuts. These will be at the expense of more efficient producers. If he gets away with away with it, farmers in Kerry could be relatively unscathed, but the writing is on the wall. The EC will not fund our inefficiency indefinitely.