Fodderless Farmers

national | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis

Tuesday April 30, 2013 11:29

by Paddy Hackett

paraichackett at gmail dot com

Irish Farmers are begging again

The current Minister of Agriculture is forever defending the farming community while his government are forever attacking the Irish working class. The farming community must be exposed as a parasitic category.

Attacks are being mounted against the public sector worker as part of an attack on the working and living conditions of the Irish working class. At the same time the Irish state actively promotes and subsidizes the farming community. The working class must highlight this contrast. The privileging of the Irish farming community by successive governments is a practice that is obscured and hardly highlighted by the bourgeois media.

The farmers are moaning again. Looking for financial and other assistance from the Irish state because of the dearth of cattle fodder available to farmers. Already the latter are given annually over a billion euro. Revenue from taxation pays most if not all of this. They also obtain help in other forms. Then many of them engage in creative accounting to make their income appear to be less than it is. Some of them have investments outside of farming and lines of work.

Pat Kenny, on his show, was interviewing the Minister of Agriculture and an IFA official on the issue of the lack of fodder for cattle farming. He never raised any challenging issues with them despite the fact that Pat consistently challenges trade unionists interviewed by him on his show. He never points out that any added help offered to Irish farmers is paid for by revenue from taxation. Irish farmers, like the banks, are a privileged social category within Irish society. They virtually escape criticism by the bourgeois mass media. Farming is portrayed as a commercial activity. Yet when adversity confronts them they go begging from the state. And the state is only willing to subsidize them. Yet the representative body of farmers is the IFA. This is a body that is anti-working class in its stance concerning wage agreements and other matters that directly concern workers.

The current Minister of Agriculture is forever defending the farming community while his government are forever attacking the Irish working class. The farming community must be exposed as a parasitic category.

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Comments (9 of 9)

Kulaks

by Cheka

Tue Apr 30, 2013 12:39

Time to collectivise the Peasantry. Send Workers Militias into Bogland on punitive expeditions.

We must nationalise the land of Ireland

by An Draigneán Donn - Páirtí Cummanach na Poblachta

Tue Apr 30, 2013 23:54

There is certainly no justification for the land of Ireland, which rightly belongs to the people of Ireland, being appropriated by a few families as private property. Then, to add insult to injury, the landless Worker must pay them for this misappropriation, which, as Raymond Crotty pointed out, is an imperial legacy in Ireland. Private land ownership is not part of Gaelic tradition.

Here is a statement from the Communist Party of the Irish Republic on the issue:

http://soviet.ie/index.php?/topic/2277-cpir-statement-w...land/

Question

by paddy hackett

Wed May 01, 2013 16:05

Sendme the link for peasant proprietorship .... Please.Interesting.

Paddy

Nationalise the resources, by all means ...

by Damien M - PW

Wed May 01, 2013 21:39

... but Nationalise the land?

"State farms". I stopped reading at this. Reminds me of the old joke going around...'Communism: You have two cows. You give them to the Government, and the Government then gives you some milk' etc etc.

My Hungarian friend told me growing up how he was allowed one boiled egg a day. If he or anyone in his family had more than one boiled egg the secret police came a'knockin ...

your "failed ideology" ain't all it's cracked up to be either!

by pinko

Wed May 01, 2013 23:12

well, a guaranteed roof over your head and a guaranteed boiled egg beats(sic) being turfed out on to the street because you can't pay your mortgage / rent and no longer have a job, and starving because you can't afford to buy food.

We need to think in a more community oriented fashion as if people and the environment really mattered instead of the current "every rat for themselves" failed ideology we've been living under which enslaves everyone and destroys the planet producing shit we really don't need ( and gave rise to all those psychopathic pharma corporations you hate so much ), all just to benefit a few at the top who live a ridiculously affluent life at the expense of every other living thing on the planet.

Every defender of the landing owning classes has some "Hungarian Friend."

Thu May 02, 2013 00:46

It's funny how all these defenders of 4% of the Irish population owing 80% of the land - and the other 96% of the population paying them to own it - always has an imaginary friend, who told them some ludicrous story like the one above. Is the Irish Working Class really frightened into submission by these tall tales? In reality, the fear is not what the Communists would do if they gained power in Ireland, but what the imperialist powers would do as a reprisal against the Irish people for daring to say no to debt slavery.

What does it profit a man?

Thu May 02, 2013 12:38

"being turfed out on to the street because you can't pay your mortgage / rent and no longer have a job, and starving because you can't afford to buy food....
.... which enslaves everyone and destroys the planet producing shit we really don't need .... to benefit a few at the top who live a ridiculously affluent life at the expense of every other living thing on the planet."

Believe me, this sickens and appalls me the same as you and most others on here. Do you think because I agree with land ownership I also must therefore agree with obscene wealth and because I agree with the right to better oneself by hard work I agree with using this gain to exploit others? Again, typical of the left-shutting down any dissenting opinions.

It's funny An DD, that you mention the banking cartels and imperialists, but when folk like me mention 'Bilderberg', 'Council on Foreign Relations', the guys who really run the show and are the real puppet masters, we are immediately labelled Conspiracy Theorists and nutters ...

And it's not a tall tale, I really do have one. But most of my other friends don't know anyone from Hungary.

Collectivization is the Saviour of Irish Farm Families

Thu May 02, 2013 18:38

Damian M, a chara, if you support private land ownership, then you support the base on while the Bilderberg gang base their power. Without private land ownership, their banks would not be able to perform the scams that they do. Think about it, what is the current banking crisis all about? Its about land - land that was used for speculation. Cut that source off - by nationalising the land - and you have taken away most of the power of these gangs.

Another fact about private land ownership that you must take into account is that it is driving farmers off the land. The trend over the last 40 years has been a massive decline in families on the land, and massive consolidation of the land in the hands of a very few familes. There are now only 44,000 full time farmers in the 26 counties, and that figure is set to seriously decline over the next decade. EU policy is to drive the small to medium sized farmer off the land. Collectivization would reverse that trend. Collectivization is actually the saviour of farm families, not their enemy.

And worrying about Bilderberg and Illuminati is very often just an excuse to do nothing about the criminals that actually are within reach. How many Irish gombeens, who wouldn't even know how to spell Bilderberg, not to mind join it, have been made to face justice? Most of them enjoy 200,000 euro a year in pocket money from NAMA, while they purportedly try to find sale for their properties. That's the kind of justice that we would all like to have imposed on us.

As for Eastern Europe, it is a fact that several of these countries, including Yugoslavia and Romania, had a higher standard of living than Ireland had during the 1960s and 70s.

bilderbergers are closer than you think

by melgibson

Fri May 03, 2013 14:39

"And worrying about Bilderberg and Illuminati is very often just an excuse to do nothing about the criminals that actually are within reach."

Generally true and I'd normally agree, but actually Michael Noonan attended the Bilderberg meetings too! I think he's within reach. They let him in no doubt because of his key position as minister for finance. A very "useful idiot" indeed if you want to exploit and financially enslave the Irish population.

They probably didn't even have to bribe him to spill his guts. Just being among the big boys for a few days was probably enough for this stupid little mans ego to get him to betray us to the financial elites. Thats what we get for allowing a puffed up little school teacher to act as our minister for finance.

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Comments (9 of 9)