The National Ploughing Championships are in full swing, and with them the annual ritual in which the political class pays homage to farming in all its forms. It is the season of wellington boots and platitudes. It is also a good moment to examine assumptions that too often pass unscrutinised, and ask harder questions about the place farming occupies in Irish public life.
This week’s Irish Times investigation reveals that one in seven members of the Oireachtas have a farming interest, a much larger share than farming’s place in the modern Irish workforce would suggest. The largest landowner is none other than Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon, who holds 245 acres in Kildare and Laois, worth somewhere between €2.2 million and €4.5 million. Records show Heydon drew around €44,600 in Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments over three years.
A spokesman for the Minister has said that receiving CAP funding is not a conflict, and that he is just one of 120,000 farmers participating in the scheme, adding that his farming interests are publicly known. This is true to some degree. Yet the register of Oireachtas members’ interests records only that Heydon farms, not how much the State and the EU pay him to do so. Those figures had to be reconstructed from a separate database. That is a clear failure of transparency.
To name a conflict of interest is not to allege wrongdoing. A conflict arises simply where a person’s private interest could reasonably appear to bear on their public duty. And the appearance here is obvious. Heydon is currently helping to lead negotiations during Ireland’s EU presidency on the very budget that funds the scheme paying into his own farm.
The rules that are supposed to manage such situations are widely accepted to be threadbare. Two governments in succession promised to overhaul ethics legislation and neither delivered. The signs are that the latest promised reform is going the same way. It is precisely this kind of studied inaction that corrodes public faith in the whole enterprise of government.
For decades the Department of Agriculture has operated as though it were a branch office of the Irish Farmers’ Association, its instincts bent reliably towards the producer and away from the consumer, the environment and the taxpayer. The Government wasted valuable European capital opposing Mercosur, a deal which will benefit many other parts of the Irish economy. It fought to keep the nitrates derogation, leaving Ireland the only EU state still spreading slurry at these levels while its waterways decline even further. The time has come to ask whether the cosy understandings and close relationships on which these policies are based really serve the country as a whole.