Kanturk's shadow: When blood is spilled for the lure of the land
The horrific murder-double suicide that destroyed a family in Kanturk, Co Cork, was a sobering if extreme reminder of our sometimes troubled relationship with the soil. John Meagher explores why land disputes can spark feuds that last for generations
There is a well-worn phrase used by farmers in John Connell’s patch of rural Longford that captures just how strongly they feel about their fields and farms. “Land runs deep,” he says. “That’s what people say here.”
Those three words make perfect sense to him. The farmer and author of The Cow Book, the critically lauded memoir about rural living, has long thought about his bond with the soil, and that of the farmers he has encountered throughout the country. “This might sound strange to say,” he adds, “but it feels spiritual. It’s hard to explain. It’s such a strong connection.”
The lure of the land is something that many outside farming communities struggle to understand, not least when one considers that the financial return from agriculture can often be pitiful. The most recent data shows the average annual family farm income is just €23,933.
The pull of land has been thrown into sharp relief over the past fortnight as the dust settles on the horrific murder-double suicide that destroyed a family in Kanturk, Co Cork. In an apparent dispute over the inheritance of lucrative farmland, Tadg O’Sullivan and his youngest son, Diarmuid, killed the elder son, Mark, before each took their own life.
In a row that must have caused anguish and anger within the family for weeks if not months, Mark had been due to inherit 115 acres in his mother’s will. The land, which had been leased out for years, had been passed down to her. Diarmuid — and his father — were greatly aggrieved by the perceived injustice.
The tragedy — which Kanturk priest Toby Bluitt said had caused “shock, numbness and devastation” — offered a sobering, if extreme, reminder of the country’s sometimes troubled relationship with the soil.
There have been numerous fatalities linked to disputes over land, the most notorious of which was the killing of Kerry farmer Moss Moore in 1958. Locals suspected neighbouring farmer Dan Foley, and he was ostracised by the community. It was never proved that he was the perpetrator and, years later, his grand-nephew was adamant that he had been wrongly blamed.
The case was little short of a sensation in a decade when homicides were far rarer than today. John B Keane would base his most celebrated play, The Field, on the incident and Foley would be reimagined as the fearsome ‘Bull’ McCabe.
For one Kerry solicitor and commissioner of peace, who asked to remain anonymous, the Moss Moore killing and the gruesome happenings in Kanturk last week are extreme examples of the animosity that land disputes cause every week.
The funeral of Mark O'Sullivan in St Mary's Church, Kanturk, Co Cork. Photo by David Conachy
“Thankfully, those sort of incidents rarely, if ever, happen,” she says, “but it does capture the imagination, especially in farming stock, about what could transpire in the worst-case scenario. I have seen neighbours at war with each other for years — it might have been over an acre that went for sale and the farmer whose land adjoined it lost out to someone else. And I’ve seen families not talk to each other again, especially when it comes to land inheritance. It’s really sad to see — it’s stressful and horrible and does none of the participants any good — but reason can go out the window when there’s a potentially lucrative asset at stake.”
“I’ve seen farmers fall out over the smallest of things,” says John Connell, who writes a weekly column in this newspaper. “It could be over a gate or a right of way. And when they fall out, that’s unusually it. Often they don’t talk again and if one of them tries to patch things up, the other will likely tell him to f*** off.
Author John Connell at the family farm in Ballinalee, Co Longford. Picture by Damien Eagers
“There’s a status to owning land in rural Ireland, even though people mightn’t like to see it like that, and there’s no doubt that most of us look at other land and wish we had it. We might think like that for decades and the land never comes up for sale, but there’s land that I would love to buy and I like to think if it ever came on the market, I’d be in a position to buy it.”
€10,000 an acre
The pandemic has had no impact on the price of land, according to auctioneer Robert Ganly of Sherry FitzGerald. “It’s partly because the demand far outweighs supply in any given year,” he says. “Right now, an acre of good land can easily command €10,000, and that can go up to about €12,000 depending on location. You’d have counties like Tipperary and Kilkenny with very good quality land and there’s a big demand for it — and there always has been.”
Mike Brady, a land agent and agricultural consultant, says when land and inheritance mix, enormous difficulties can ensue within families. “It can be a really difficult situation if one of the kids wants to farm the land and the others don’t,” he says. “Does that one child get the farm at the expense of the others?
“What people often fail to understand is when a parent leaves the land to the one child who has an interest in farming, they’re not handing them a huge wad of money. They’re giving them the opportunity to make a living. It might be worth €40,000 or €50,000 to that child in income per year — depending, of course, on the size of the farm and what they do with it.”
Brady says many of those left the family farm end up cash-poor, but asset-rich. “The farm could be worth a million euro, but they’re never going to see anything like that. The sibling working in an office job in Dublin might well be pulling in far more money every month.”
One young farmer, who does not wish to be named, says the desire to amass yet more land is difficult to explain, but he is determined not to make the same mistake his late father did. “Farmers will put tens of thousands into buying a small field next to them, simply because they don’t want anyone else to get hold of it,” he says. “It’s a poor investment and, too often, it’s done for show. My father bought up land that wasn’t very good and spent way more than he should have, but he did it because he wanted to show that he was the biggest farmer in the area.
“Land means a lot to me, don’t get me wrong, but I see it as a way to make a living, not as a God-given right. I don’t think today’s generation of farmers — especially the ones that went to ag college — feel as strongly about land as our fathers did and I would have no qualms about selling a field if I needed the money. For me, the days are gone when you’d just suffer on and stick with beef farming, say, even though you own lucrative assets that could free up a lot of cash quickly.”
Yet he understands those sons and daughters of farmers who feel compelled to hold on to the land no matter what. “I’m lucky in that my dad always said to me that I wasn’t to kill myself trying to make the farm work and there was no shame in getting out of it if I needed to,” he says. “I know there are others who feel a pressure to make the land work, even if their heart isn’t in it. But it’s awful to see people who are struggling to get by, but feel they’ll be judged if they sell even part of the farm.”
Film-maker Pat Collins has made several documentaries and films that explore our relationship with the land, including the acclaimed Silence. He believes talk about the killing that inspired The Field and the other violent land confrontations that have been publicised over the years as only telling a small part of the story.
“Rather than ‘land’, I think it’s a sense of place that people feel very strongly about,” he says. “And you might have somebody in southside Dublin who feels as passionately about their garden as a farmer might about a certain parcel of land.”
Collins’ film on emigration, What We Leave in Our Wake, queries the long-held notion that the Irish are a land-obsessed people. “Joe Lee [the eminent historian] made the point that when the Irish emigrated to America, it was to the cities they went to, not the agricultural areas.” As Lee says in the film, “the Irish are the great urban people of the emigrants of Europe — far more Germans went on the land, to the Midwest, than the Irish did”.
For Collins, talk about a distinctly Irish passion for land might simply be about security. “When I was renting,” he says, “I wanted to buy a house that would give me that sort of security. If you go back to the Land League, a very tempestuous time, you had a huge transfer of land from landlords to farmers, and that gave countless families a sort of security. They came to associate the land with that security.”
Historian Fergus Campbell of Newcastle University is an expert on the Land League and the Land Commission. “The transfer of land back to the Irish was an enormous undertaking,” he says, “and it did lead to a lot of animosity and bitterness. Some people believe the land was not divided as fairly as it might have been and that anger could last for generations.
“When the Land Commission was dividing land, you had communities that were, themselves, divided. I did a lot of work in a place called Craughwell in Co Galway and the village was basically divided in two, into those getting land and those not. There were murders over it and years of violence and feuding.
Campbell’s book Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland 1891-1921 documents much of the agrarian violence that pockmarked the era. “There was a finite resource of land and there simply wasn’t enough for those who felt they had a legitimate claim. Even in Craughwell, there’s still a sense of unhappiness underneath the surface. In the last few years, I had an elderly member from that community asking me not to write anything in case it would cause trouble for his grandchildren.”
Old frustrations linger
Campbell, who is from Carlisle in north-west England but has farming relations in Co Galway, believes there has been far less movement of people in rural Ireland than its British equivalent. “My cousins are still living on the farm that their great-grandparents had,” he says, “and that can help make that connection to the land feel stronger.
“Often, you have the same neighbours now as your grandparents had so the possibility for old frustrations to linger is stronger. I remember visiting a farm in Galway in 2009, and it was about something that had happened in 1909, and I was told that one of the people who was going to do an interview with me had had negotiations with other people in the community about whether or not they should tell me anything because they were worried that what they might tell me about the events of 100 years ago might cause conflict in the present.”
This week, writing in the Farming Independent, Darragh McCullough — the farmer, journalist and broadcaster — set out to understand why some have such a toxic relationship with the land. “When I think of my own family’s experience with buying and selling land,” he wrote, “I can see where the passions begin to flicker — the pride that my grandfather was able to buy a farm three times as big as the one he was born into.”
The farm got into trouble in the 1980s and exorbitant interest rates meant that 80 acres had to be offloaded to satisfy the banks.
“I made my peace with it on the basis that you win some, you lose some. Perhaps I am still in the asymptomatic phase of my land-ownership disease life-cycle? By the time I’m 60 or 70 years old, I too could be harbouring dark grudges about land deals that didn’t go my way. It would all make you wonder if owning land is really a privilege, or a curse in disguise.”
