Of moos and men
John Connell tells Hilary White why debate around climate crises needs to include farmers instead of alienating them
Just go slow. That was the answer John Connell found after life had begun to pull him in too many directions and a phase of burnout had ensued. “I was overdoing it,” Connell says today. “That was a horrible experience, one I wouldn’t want to happen to anyone else.
“Go slow and you can achieve everything anyway. Doing too much all at once was my trigger all those years ago. I realise now that one thing at a time is fine.
“Taking the time to appreciate and enjoy the journey – that, for me, is the most important thing.”
Connell is a writer and farmer from Co Longford. In 2018, his memoir The Cow Book became a national bestseller that scooped an Irish Book Award. The debut announced the arrival of a new voice filled with the wisdom and rhythms of a rural Ireland all too ignored in the go-go post-Celtic Tiger, one that located the universal in the local (to paraphrase his hero, John McGahern).
Follow-ups The Running
Book (2020) and The Stream of Everything (2022) completed a “Longford trilogy” that subtly wove in everything from water ecology to Connell’s recovery from depression (he maintains a daily regime of meditation, exercise and healthy diet – and is, he happily reports to me via Zoom, doing very well).
A former journalist and documentary maker, Connell continues to examine meaty issues through a rural prism via newspaper columns and occasional radio essays. He has also found himself in demand as a motivational speaker. If he was feeling stretched, it’s perhaps understandable.
Out of this period of lowering the gears has come Twelve Sheep, a new memoir. While ostensibly about acquiring and tending to a small flock on his farm, the livestock acts as a jumping-off point for much else, and it is laced with meditations on life.
As he puts it himself, it’s a book about learning to be a shepherd to oneself. Alongside this, its slim 180 pages are sprinkled with pocket essays on knotty subjects that he faces head-on.
I tell Connell that it is his most environmentally aware book to date and he agrees.
He explains that when he and wife Viv welcomed baby Ted 13 months ago, thoughts sharpened about the world we are leaving to the next generation.
“I started to think more about the future,” the 37-year-old recalls. “There have been climate crises before, but the ecological crisis we’re in now is different. I have found great comfort and solace in nature, and I want that to be there for Ted to inhabit.
“We brought him to Australia last year to visit Viv’s family, and they’re having major environmental and weather problems in that country. I lived in Los Angeles and Canada, and it’s the same in those places. It’s time to talk about this stuff.”
Agriculture, the environment, and politics currently stand at the same crossroads. How do we take better care of our world in a way that involves and incentivises those stocking the nation’s breadbasket?
It is a question Connell is keenly aware of. The family farm he manages with his father was recently converted to organic. One lovely passage in Twelve Sheep details a tree-planting project.
“My dad said something to me about cows many years ago, and I’ve always remembered it. ‘We can’t place so much weight upon a humble beast’s back.’ And a sheep is just the same.
“Those creatures haven’t changed in 10,000 years, and yet we keep putting pressure upon them. Going easier on the earth, just a little bit, can make an enormous impact.
“For farmers, there’s frustration, this feeling like they’re not being heard. This is why all these protests are happening in Europe.
“Farming is an important industry in Ireland and people are trying their best to make a difference. We need to realise that farming’s about animals but it’s also about people. It’s a people business, and we have to try and cater for everyone and ultimately provide food in a changing world.
“We have to find a way to live equitably with the world – our little solution was to go organic. It’s a small thing; I mean, I only have 12 sheep, but there’s a relationship there with the animals. Climate change is one of the great questions, but the future of farming is another.”
A component of this, Connell feels, is fostering a future where farmers can live and raise families in a thriving rural society, all while taking care of nature. Seeing deserted villages in northern Spain while walking the Camino brought home just how important this is.
“Farming creates jobs in communities where there might not traditionally be as much employment, and three-quarters of that money stays in the local economy,” he explains. “Irish farmers are very good at farming. We’re world leaders. There are very smart people constantly working on innovations. I meet farmers all the time, whether at marts or talking to people who’ve read The Cow Book and contacted me. So many are trying to make a living but also have a low impact upon the earth.”
Six years on from The Cow Book and Connell still gets letters from people around the world responding to its saga of returning to live off the land.
I did an essay called ‘Sacred Cows and Sushi Rolls’ about people moving back to the country, and said the only thing I miss is a sushi restaurant – but we have one now
A decade ago, he moved back to Ireland, swapping metropolitan Sydney for rural Longford. Viv (who is of Vietnamese-Australian stock and works in social media) “took a gamble” moving there five years ago.
The quality of life they have found – the couple bought a house just across the road from the family farm – is proof that rural living is moving with the times to become a very attractive place to raise a family. Not only have they met tech entrepreneurs, film-makers, and exciting creatives living amid the folds of the local landscape, but much-missed urban comforts have also landed.
“Viv and myself made a point of trying to make friends here because she’s new and I had been away for so long,” Connell says. “I did an essay for BBC Radio called Sacred Cows and Sushi Rolls about people moving back to the countryside, and I said the only thing I miss is a sushi restaurant – but we have one now! So all things come to those who wait!
“And I don’t knock urban living, but there’s something about having a little bit of space and time and peace and quiet. I’ve come to really love it. It’s a slower pace but it suits me very well because I need a slow mind to write and reflect and think.
“Athletes talk about flow state, when everything is working in order. I feel sometimes like I’m in a flow state here, because I just know what I’m doing. It’s taken years to get that sense of groundedness.”
Among the unlikely hotbed of creativity Connell discovered in his home county was arts curator Ronan O’Toole. The pair hit it off, and Connell suddenly found a foil to help him realise an ambition that had been percolating.
A couple of years previously, he’d attended a festival in Wigtown, Scotland that ran under the banner of ‘Booktown’. This, he discovered, was an international community of festivals designed to bring literature and ideas to rural communities.
With O’Toole’s festival nous and Connell’s literary-circuit Rolodex, the pair hatched Granard Booktown. Now in its second year, the event returns next weekend with a programme that numbers Fergal Keane, Sinéad Gleeson, and Booker-winner Paul Lynch.
“At first, people asked what the hell was Booktown about. But we got a tailwind behind us last year. Our ultimate aim is to create more events throughout the year and eventually be a Dingle of the midlands, a beautiful little town that always has something on.”
Now more than ever, Connell senses that places like Granard need good news stories to show the best of what small-town Ireland has to offer the world.
“The growth of the far right in Ireland is very worrying,” he says quietly. “The burning of these hotels and premises… As a man who has a biracial son and wife from another country, that hits hard. That’s not the best of us.
“Granard Booktown is a little way of helping one town, but we need to do so much more. Twelve Sheep is about rooting myself in Ireland and I want it to be as good a country as it can be for Ted. It is my hope that we can be a small country with a big soft-power reach, a shining light.
“The world is a tough place sometimes. It’s complex – but it’s always been that way, and it seems in some respects to be getting more complex. The secret I’ve found is to try and bring a bit of simplicity into it. It’s not easy but there is grace for those who strive to achieve it.”