Green Party plans stem from Enid Blyton fantasies
Friday October 16 2009
I cannot be expected to read all the verdiage produced by the Greens, so I am grateful to a reader for the following from the Great Green Plan to Save the World, and which says all we need to know about this bossy bunch of scary lunatics.
"We will develop a template for the establishment of farm-gate shops and ensure that the necessary legislative arrangements are made to facilitate this."
In other words, Enid Blyton meets The Five-Year Plan. But these people know no more about the Irish countryside than they do about tillage farming in Tanganyika in 1954. It's a place from books, full of Famous Five sounding names like Trevor and Roger, and it's all rather wizard, and what are we going to do today, chaps? "I know," says Ann (who's a bit of a tomboy) "why don't we Greens visit Farmer Giles, and see if Mrs Giles won't give us some slices of ham, and apple pie, and if we're lucky, lashings of ginger beer!"
"Good idea," says Dick, who's a sensible sort of fellow, and hopes to be a Green vet when he grows up, with recycled-tweeds and an eco-pipe and a lentil-powered Rover saloon, "but we must remember to close all gates behind us, and to beware of the Bull".
And so the Greens set off to see Farmer Giles, passing the duckpond, with the darling ducklings darting amongst the water-reeds.
"Good morning, moy dear Greens," chuckles an apple-cheeked Mrs Giles, "and what a good morning it is an' all. And I know what the Greens would like in their journey through the countryside! A slice of vegetarian pie, baked from my own home-grown soy beans, and a glass of lemonade, made from my own home-grown lemons, and lawksamussy, hark at the chickens, bless their little hearts. Speckled eggs galore they laid this morning; would you like one with your vegetarian pie?"
"Golly, Mrs Giles, that would be absolutely spiffing."
Farm-gate shops my arse. What do these Green idiots think the Irish countryside consists of? A pastoral idyll where farmers grow porridge oats and wheaten bread and vegetables, while their sturdy wives raise a few ducks and hens, with apples and pears from the orchard, and soft fruit in the strawberry and raspberry patch? That's the Irish countryside as existed solely in the nurseries of Sandycove and Foxrock: a cross between 'Wind in the Willows' and 'The Sleuthing Six Set Off Scrumping'.
Do you know how you keep hens and ducks? You kill foxes; and in particular, you kill minks. The very fact the Green Party has a mink wing tells you how deluded they are. So what do the minkies want for the minks currently in the mink farms? That they should be sent home to Sweden? Have you told the Swedes? Or they should placed in retirement homes, where they can play whist, until they finally are called to the mink-paradise? My preference is to kill them and turn them into ecologically sound fur coats.
And remember. Just because you're green doesn't mean you're nice. The first back-to-nature European political movement did poorly the first time it ran in local government elections -- under 2pc of the vote -- but five years later it won national power. The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei were the first successful greens: the Hitler Jugend and the Bund Deutscher Mádel went on long weekend hikes, learnt about country lore, wildlife, traditional arts and crafts, and knots: the Jew-hitch and untermensch-splice, probably.
But it is the other side of the 1930s totalitarian divide that the modern Greens are closest to: for communists loved a law-abiding countryside, in which agriculture was controlled by templates and contained by legislative arrangement. For all I know, they even had shops at every collective gate, to sell its main produce: beri-beri, scurvy and rickets.
Now, you can't put a shop at the entry to most Irish farms, because it consists of a rusty gate over a pool of mud. And anyway, most Irish farms haven't got anything to sell, because they don't grow food.
They make raw products: wheat, or grass, or live animals. The food is made elsewhere.
And the beef and pig farmers and the hen producers who feed millions do so using modern, scientific methods, which is the reason why food is cheap today. Though it is true that we once had an entirely chemical-free and wholly natural agricultural regimen in Ireland: better known today as The Famine.
Yet in all of this bilious affair, the Greens have made a dart at realpolitik: The Secret Seven Seek Sway.
Their programme will ban stag hunting, an utterly harmless sport in which very, very few stags are ever killed, and those that are, in fact, are shot. But it's a nice sentimentalist issue -- and who ever votes for the Ward Union?
And the Greens have taken also pity on the mink because of the internal power of their mink wing (who are all clinically insane, and are on day-release). However, the Greens are not demanding an end to closed hare-coursing, a truly disgusting, squalid, barbaric sport. Why? Because coursing is too precious for the still-powerful hillbilly faction in Fianna Fail, so the oh-deeply principled Greens leave it alone.
Fetch me the sick bag, Woger.
kmyers@independent.ie
- Kevin Myers
Irish Independent
