FARMING IS OFTEN seen as more than a profession. Instead, it is often characterised as a tight-knit community with long-established institutions and a deep camaraderie.
The truth is a little more complicated with a community sharing much but with divisions and rifts running deep, especially between sectors and geographical locations. A Munster lowland farmer in ‘The Golden Vale’ shares little beyond long hours with an upland farmer in Donegal. Often politics follow these similar lines, with small mostly part-time farmers, mainly beef and sheep, having very different priorities to full-time farmers, mostly dairy.
Plotting ‘the farming community’ anywhere on the political spectrum is equally challenging and confounding. Broadly, farmers follow the trend of rural dwellers voting more socially conservative. However, this is far from universal, as during both Marriage Equality and Repeal of the 8th referendums there was zero discernible rural-urban divide in Ireland. During the Repeal of the 8th referendum, Eddie Downey, former president of the Irish Farmers Association, the largest farmer organisation, formed ‘Farmers for Yes’. Meanwhile, Macra na Feirme, Ireland’s young farmer and rural youth organisation, appeared with a rainbow tractor at its first attendance at Pride in 2019.
What causes even more difficulty for political analysis is farmers’ preference for community and collective bargaining, something normally associated with the left of politics. Almost all milk in Ireland is processed by co-operatives, along with live cattle sold through cooperative marts. Irish farmers, especially since the ascension to the EU, have accepted that food is a public good too important to simply be left to market forces. Instead, their organisations have demanded state support to ensure high food production standards such as environmental protection and animal welfare, despite these costs not captured by the retail price.
Then why are so many farmers’ movements associated with far right groups? The answer is rather than farmers turning to the far right, across Europe the far right is turning to them. German protests focused on clear issues, such as government plans to remove taxation on agricultural diesel, further rising the cost of production. This did not stop attempts at infiltration by far right groups. Germany’s largest farmers’ organisation, The Deutscher Bauernverband (DBV), have pushed back on these attempts.
Many individual protesting farmers have used a sign stating ‘Agriculture is colourful, not brown’, ‘brown politics’ referring to far right politics in the German speaking world.
More recently, the centre of Brussels played host to thousands of farmers, sparking some scenes of vandalism from angry participants. These two though did not fall into a simple political grouping, representatives of farm organisations across the spectrum of free market to more socialist. Politicians across the EU parliament also voiced their support for fairer prices and concerns for their livelihood.
Yet these protests often appear on US and English speaking right wing media misidentified as protests rejecting ‘globalists and the green agenda’, such as Tucker Carlson, and on social media accounts associated with misinformation, such as Peter Sweden and Eva Vlaardingerbroek. Between them, these have crafted a narrative in English speaking media a world away from the truth more readily available in German, French or Dutch speaking media.
In Ireland, we have not escaped this attempt to co-opt farmers’ concerns. Frequently farming groups on social media have been infiltrated by those spreading myths about sexuality, gender, vaccination and most recently immigration. Into this environment a party emerged hoping to take advantage of the three in four farmers who said they would support a specific farmers’ party, ‘The Farmers Alliance’
However, legitimate and long standing farm organisations have attempted to prevent the takeover by more fringe views from being presented as representative of farmers. Most notable was the new President of the IFA, Francie Gorman, entirely disavowing working with the Farmers Alliance party when questioned. This is remarkable as for the organisation’s 69-year history it has held to the principle of all Irish farm organisations to be apolitical and engage with all parties and independents. In this case, though, it isn’t entirely unprecedented with the previous year’s then Vice-President of the IFA, Brian Rushe, taking to Twitter to distance himself and the organisation from the statements against Ukrainian refugees by the ‘Farmers’ Alliance’. Nor are they alone, with independents who have considered the effort of establishing a Dutch style ‘farmers’ party’ rejected efforts to involve themselves with this latest entity.
Despite these efforts by farm organisations to distance themselves from these fringe groups, they too have been accused of shifting towards the far right. Mostly stemming from the incredibly contentious debate over the EU Nature Restoration Law, a legislative package which would see more areas protected for biodiversity triggering concern from many farming communities that they would be excluded from practicing farming on these lands. The centre-right EU political party EPP, of which Fine Gael is a member, pushed back most strongly. Accusations of misinformation were rife, with farm groups pointing to the lack of compensation or mitigation presented in the package, while environmental groups pointed to both the urgency of the biodiversity crisis and some of the exaggerated claims, such as villages being levelled.
Unfortunately, these issues have resulted in many farmers feeling disenfranchised, as with genuine concerns over lack of rural infrastructure in many areas accommodating refugee centres, these concerns were quick to be capitalised on by those on the far right and this threat is only growing.
The mistake of branding farmers’ concerns as ‘far right’ in fact has served those fringe parties hoping to win farmers over. When farmers have seen those who have repeatedly dismissed their concerns brand these issues as ‘far right’ it has become far easier for those elements to imply only they, rather than those mainstream parties, will raise these issues. While the turn towards a focus on anti-migrant rhetoric has made many farmers weary if not downright dismissive of this set of current entities, the repeated association between farmers, their concerns and the far right have made this far more palatable in future playing into the strategy by right wing reactionary groups.
Thomas Duffy farms in partnership with his parents and sister in Co. Cavan. He is the former President of Macra na Feirme and former Vice President of CEJA, the Council of European Young Farmers.
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