The translation of dreams into realities is no easy task.
In the years after 1850, the prosperity of agriculture was central to Irish economic development. This centrality underpinned a social position that was founded on the rise of tenant farmers in the nineteenth century and in the triumph of peasant proprietorship in the early twentieth century. The nature of the Irish political revolution and the subsequent partition of the island further influenced the lives of farmers and their position either side of the border. The entry of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland into the EEC in 1973 was also significant in changing farming in Ireland. Into the new millennium, farming remained a vital industry in Ireland, despite the substantial diminution of the importance of agriculture on the island.
The Triumph of Livestock, 1850–79
Irish agriculture, wrote Raymond Crotty, is influenced by climate, system of land tenure and demand for its products. Seemingly oblivious to patterns of land tenure, though, the cattle trade dominated after 1850 through the comparative advantage arising from climatic conditions and the proximity of the British market. The trade in cattle across the Irish Sea was underway by 1600 and was so attractive it was suggested that Ireland seemed destined for conversion into vast cattle walks while its population might be transferred to provide a helot class in England. The caustic exaggeration of such suggestions does not disguise the essential truth of the enduring romance between cattle and Irish land.
The decades immediately before the Great Famine of the 1840s had seen both pastoral and tillage farming in Ireland struggle under falling prices, but tillage, with its higher inputs, proved less profitable than grass, thriving, as ever, with little encouragement under Irish conditions. Most critically, cattle prices held more firmly than tillage ones as demand on the British market ebbed from cereals towards livestock. This trend continued after the Great Famine. Britain's policy of free trade encompassed unlimited food importation on a comparative cost basis and on the lines best suited to the British economy. Imported American grain on an improving transport network worsened the corn market, while Irish agriculture bowed to the imperatives of climate and allowed natural conditions to provide enough grass at negligible cost to feed livestock.