Call a truce on the turf wars, we've all got rural rage
Turf-cutter Michael O'Sullivan from Listowel joins a protest in the town against bog evictions
Liam Fay: Not for the first time, self-styled spokespeople for the inhabitants of rural Ireland claim to have found the most precious piece of fodder in the countryside store -- the last straw.
Depending on where you get your news, the straw that threatens to break the rustic citizen's back is either the septic tank registration fee or the household charge. But listen closer and you discover that the final insult could also be the proposed introduction of water metering, or indeed the ban on turf cutting. Everywhere you look, it seems, there are whole haysheds of last straws in the wind.
The rural population is, we're told, mad as hell. Protest meetings have drawn hordes of angry yeomen and yeowomen who have pledged to resist these punitive regulations by any means necessary. Some of the more combative refuseniks have also promised to send the politicians who advocate such iniquitous laws all the way back to the ivory towers of Dublin (spit!) where they belong, at pitchfork-point if need be.
Naturally, this has attracted the attentions of the city-centred media. Wide-eyed urban journalists have journeyed to the rural badlands -- some evidently for the first time -- where their eyes have been widened even further by the bloodcurdling vitriol of the rhetoric expressed at some gatherings.
When the TV cameras arrive, of course the volume of grievance rises while the quality of argument plummets. "We're on the brink of anarchy and revolution," a middle-aged man told RTE news last week. "My mother is even encouraging revolution."
Eager to be seen taking their country cousins at their word, the metropolitan press has faithfully recorded the most provocative utterances, creating the impression of a looming uprising in the hills and valleys.
For those of us who actually live in rural Ireland, however, there is something a little too conveniently apocalyptic about the emerging picture. It isn't so long ago, after all, since the last occasion when a similarly hysterical provincial minority were predicting a no-less-imminent breakdown of civil society over the closure of rural pubs -- or was it the smoking ban? The penalty points system? The rationalisation of provincial hospitals? Whatever it was, reports of civilisation's demise were greatly exaggerated.
It is significant that, in the midst of all the breathless media coverage of this story, the single fact that is most consistently overlooked is the single most salient fact: the profoundly complicated nature of simple country folk.
Rural Ireland has never been an homogenous place. To the unsophisticated ear of the insular city slicker, us culchies might all have strange accents but we certainly do not all speak with one voice.
There are rich country people as well as poor country people; hardy bucks as well as buck eejits; boorish gentry as well as urbane peasants; cool customers as well as hotheads. There are farmers who milk 500 cows and there are farmers who milk nothing but the EU grant system.
Land ownership is supposed to be the defining characteristic of the rural dweller, yet there are lots of country people who don't own any land, beyond the patch of dirt on which their home stands -- if they have a home.
There are also country people who don't actually live in the countryside at all: these are the townies, who lead resolutely suburban lives yet some of whom gleefully adopt the poses, patter and prejudices of the most clodhopping bumpkins. Rural Ireland even has its own version of the Plastic Paddy -- the Bogus Bogman.
The notion that the interests and opinions of this diverse array of citizens can be represented by any individual or lobby group is patently absurd. Nevertheless, this is the premise on which the most truculent outpourings of so-called 'rural rage' are invariably predicated.
Make no mistake: there is a great deal of sincerely held anger among country people about a great many things. We all know what's happened to the economy and are equally alert to the institutional failure to bring the malefactors to justice. Nobody wants to pay more government levies, especially when it is increasingly obvious that most public services are being run into the ground. For the vast majority of the rural populace, however, there is a clear-eyed appreciation that country and city dwellers alike are being forced to pick up the tab.
There is also a widespread recognition that not every enviro-protection initiative -- whether it be regulation of septic tanks or the preservation of depleting boglands -- can be dismissed as a malign conspiracy concocted by the hick-hating D4 elite.
Most country people appreciate that there are unique benefits to both rural and urban living, and that every perk comes with a price tag. However, there is among us a breed of fanatical country person that is never happier than when playing the martyr. These yokel fundamentalists are invariably subscribers to the faintly fascistic view that country life is the only life worth living, and that those unfortunates who live in cities are little more than lab rats.
When presented with a change to a rural practice or an increased charge for a rural service, the country zealots tend to view the new measure as an assault by envious outsiders. Many of these people would respond to an increase in income tax with barely a whimper but, when confronted with a tariff that they can convince themselves is the product of anti-rural bias, they assert no option but all-out war.
Thankfully, this kind of tribal aggression remains a minority pursuit. In truth, the fury that burns fiercest and deepest in rural Ireland is indistinguishable from that inflaming the denizens of housing estates, flats or city-centre apartment blocks: it's a gut-wrenching indignation about the injustice of the economic calamity that has befallen this nation and the compounding injustice of the manner in which the Government intends to tackle it.
For those rural folk determined to behave like Chicken Licken, there will always be something in the air that feels like a chunk of collapsing sky, aimed directly at their heads. But instead of forever hoping to find cause for a decisive breach with their urban brethren, with whom they have more in common than they might imagine, the militant culchie brigade would be better advised to start seeing themselves as citizens of the country rather than simply the countryside.
Clutching at straws is never a smart way of getting a grip on the world.
Originally published in
