Raymond Crotty: Escaping the Gaelic Latifundia

East Cork Landscape — Niall McCarthy

The Dunbell Experiment

A fresh-faced Raymond Crotty had had his idealism pounded into the Kilkenny clay by the Summer of 1947.  

An enthusiastic member of the bucolic “back to the land” movement, the young man decided to invest his time, energy and limited capital into purchasing a dilapidated 200-acre Kilkenny farm in a rare experiment of Irish model farming.

A townie by birth and just after finishing a stint as a sharecropper and studying at agricultural college, Crotty bought the acreage in the hopes of creating a mechanised farm.

Hoping to transition from the commonplace cattle ranching into high-yield crop farming, in doing so, Crotty wished to mimic the basic modernisation that had been commonplace in Britain since the advent of the agricultural revolution.

Ploughing his fields and running against the know-how of local farmers who played it safe and focused on cattle, Crotty envisioned breaking the economic tedium and blazing a trail for more to follow.

In the process employing more local hands than the average rancher normally would, it stood to reason that such a departure would puncture the self-defeating cycle of stagnation that had bled the Irish countryside dry since the potato blight.

Thus began an odyssey of disappointment for the idealistic agrarian. 

Within 2-years he was near bankruptcy, making a mere fraction of what risk-averse farmers who stuck to ranching reaped simply by letting their cattle munch away and while the grants rolled in.

Successful farmers in Ireland, Crotty learnt, did the opposite of what they were supposed to in a normal economic cost-benefit analysis, eschewing technology in favour of sitting back on their holdings. 

Despite eight times as much inputs, profits in Dunbell stayed flat and the incentive remained to avoid investment and direct any measly profit back into acquiring more parcels of land.  

In academic terms the marginal utility for any agricultural investment was effectively nil if not worse. There was simply no propellant forward for Crotty or anyone away from the irregular cowpens and boherrins that defined the landscape.

Eventually forced to fire the majority of his workforce and knuckle down to ranching himself, Crotty took a scholarly approach to failure and pursued a long distance economics Masters pursuant of the deeper national malaise behind the project.

Documenting his experiences in the semi-biographical A Radical’s Response, Dunbell set in motion Crotty’s rise to become Ireland’s leading eurosceptic gadfly, germinating an original prognosis about Ireland’s economic dysfunction.

And with that Crotty pondered the question:

Why did Irish fields respond differently to what had worked in Shropshire or Nebraska?

Why had Ireland and Irish farming failed to clear such basic hurdles of modernity?

Birth of an Irish Georgist

Putting pen to paper on a variety of agricultural topics through an Irish Independent column, Crotty wrote a comprehensive text on the sector in the 1966 book ‘Irish Agricultural Production while a lecturer in the University of Wales. 

Regarded today as a major revisionist text, in it Crotty dusts off the half-forgotten philosophy of Georgism.

Proponents of this ideology, named after the 19th-century economist Henry George, argue that a single tax on the ownership of land would help drive a break up of land monopolies, and create an organic redistributive process. This in turn would drive economic renewal.

Georgism is hardly communistic, as it depends on private ownership rather than state commands and intervention. To Crotty it would iron out the socio-economic links left in the country since the confiscation of Catholic lands by Cromwell. 

The land tax would also replace most other taxes such as VAT and income tax.Crotty believed this would shift the economy’s momentum away from lifeless ranch farming and dud industries, and into gainful production, reducing labour costs in the process. 

Despite a tariff wall circling the Irish economy at the time, the state would tax everything under the sun to do with production but never the very ownership of the land itself. 

Writing in 1955:

“The more a farmer produces, the more taxes he pays…..our static agricultural production in turn results in a non-expanding economy which is unable to give a fixed or increasing population the constantly improving living standards which our emigrants find overseas”

Outlandish at first, Georgists like Crotty believe that the land tax would be progressive with the amount of land owned and would therefore discourage general property speculation. This would move the economy away from land hoarding and into more motivated production. 

A national dividend would replace the standard welfare model with government expenditure slashed to 20% of its current size. It was no wonder in the early stages of his academic career some were attempting to pin the Kilkenny farmer-cum-academic as simultaneously a communist and libertarian.

Holding that the present set-up put the interests of farmers and the nation into conflict, Crotty advised depressing cattle prices for the benefit of the agricultural community and society at large, driving society away from the unimaginative routine of cattle ranching and into modern developmental patterns.

In Crotty’s analysis, Catholic helotism and post-Napoleonic agricultural conditions had unleashed a situation where cattle farming sucked the energy out of alternative pursuits, resulting in a subdued country and lethargic national oligarchy latching onto the English connection.

“The very antithesis of the ancient, indigenous brehon system, the overreliance on cattle farming grew out of the failure of peasant proprietorship before and after the Famine period.”

A land tax replacing most forms of taxation would ease this dependency and generate real-world change, breaking the chain with the surprising tyranny of the cow. The grant system delivered by government departments just added weight to the millstone history and social forces had fashioned.

In many respects rivalling and overcoming parallel critiques in Marxist circles on the creation of a defective ‘national bourgeoisie’ post-O’Connell, the Irish were marooned with a particularly lacklustre political and managerial elite even with independence.

Beef farming contributed to rural depopulation which favoured big producers over small innovators. The ingrained deontas culture merely kept economic losers going to the detriment of wider agrarian life. What the Emerald isle cherished as its farming industry was in fact just an inefficient phenomenon that grew up to cover the scars of the Cromwellian confiscations at the expense of small scale producers.

Later developing his own eclectic theories about Indo-European pastoral farming and its role in global history, in the 1980s Crotty became a leading and alternative voice in the debate over membership of the EEC. 

Carrying close to his heart the experience of a colonised people, Crotty battled against what he saw as a continuation of imperial economic conditions by the emerging EU arguing that Brussels would put on steroids pre-existing bad habits.

Leaving the Gaelic Latifundia

“Is mar barra air mo ṁéala, feuċ gur díol deóra,

Go ngaḃann gaċ récs don réim sin roinn Eoruip

A bairrḟionn tais féin go saoġalta síṫeóilte,

Aċt banba a b-péin gan céile is í posda!”

“And to crown my sorrow, behold it is a fit subject for tears,

That every king of the dynasties who divide Europe amongst them

Possesses his own fair, gentle spouse in prosperity and peace,

While Banba is in pain without a consort, wedded though she be.”

Aogán Ó Rathaille

Crotty drew closer to a root cause analysis of Irish economic underperformance as originating in colonialism and in particular the scars left by the collapse of the Gaelic order into a maladjusted system of land ownership. The economist came to the conclusion that this imbalance put us out of kilter with the rest of Western Europe when it came to opposing the emergent European project.

Tracing the national underperformance back to the 17th century, colonisation had not adjusted economic or agricultural production to fit the wants and needs of the indigenous people, instead it served the colonising powers. 

To Crotty, the land transfers from Gaelic to Tudor and Cromwellian ownership altered the pre-existing notion of land as a social asset to the notion of land as  a private good. With architects of the conquest like Sir William Petty arguing for the eradication of the native Irish to pave the way for pastoral farming for the English market, a unique combination of farm production, land tenure, and market conditions hampered any move towards sustained economic advancement.

Ireland did not follow any pattern of European development such as leaving feudalism or creating a working nation state— nevermind dabbling in imperialism abroad. Irish capitalism consisted of a reluctant petit bourgeois grappling with a superimposed form of land ownership which drastically altered its pathway into modernity, replicating the postcolonial Global South more than any Western European democracy. 

Irish land ownership was more reminiscent of a Latin American latifundia than the enclosed field of England or France.

“Those flaws derive from the unresolved conflicts between an indigenous, tribal pastoralism and a superimposed capitalism. They persist beneath a veneer of 'modernization' acquired during the past four centuries, including the most recent quarter century of 'programmes of economic growth and development' financed by government borrowing. Similar flaws exist in all the other former colonies where, as in Ireland, an alien capitalism was superimposed on earlier, indigenous, non-capitalist cultures and which now comprise the undeveloping Third World.”-Crotty 1987

Coming to what is the standard republican rhetoric about the 26 county state, Crotty acknowledged that economically the Dublin-based state merely replicated the colonial norms which incentivised meagre subsistence farming and a badly suited economic framework through the lack of a land tax. Leinster House was defined by the lacklustre imaginations of an economy of uninspired ranchers rather than a fully formed nation-state.

The gentleman farmer famously took a 1987 landmark case which forced the state to hold referenda, not just on joining the Common Market, but also on matters challenging Bunreacht more generally.

Arguing that Ireland had a divergent history, more akin to the Global South rather than the post-imperial welfare states that formed the then EEC, Crotty had the Sisyphean task of intellectually directing the 1980s Irish eurosceptic cause alongside Dr. Anthony Coughlan and an ideologically motley crew of socialists, republicans, and rural populists.

Europe to Crotty was another step in the wrong direction precisely because it put Ireland in league and back under the auspices of colonising powers, merely adding fuel to the fire of the low-input, low-yield industries the nation had endured for centuries.

While wrong in imagining that the dysfunctional state of affairs would lapse into despotism, Crotty’s approach is worth thinking of when it comes to analysing the current FDI-reliant state of the Irish economy and the millstone of a housing crisis hanging heavy over the land where— just like the Kilkenny cattle farmers— the market is plagued by a distinct lack of dynamism.

Passing away in 1994 after a distinguished career it is likely that Crotty would have seen the influx of foreign capital as providing merely a lifeline or more specifically a sugar buzz to the status quo, and not changing the fundamentals of the underlying economics.

With a perverse grant system from Brussels and shortsighted pseudo-green regulations the system of ranching has been replaced by data centres and footloose tech industries as the mainstay of the economy. 

Real indigenous growth is weighed down by the Faustian economic presence of alien industries with poor land management, killing the social contract as the rental market implodes. The partial gains made by the native Irish since independence through the chaotic land management policies under the Fianna Fáil party machine and housing are being wiped out in a single generation.

The Irish are still butting their heads over the scraps of what should be their national wealth with systemic issues of land management not yet addressed.

With mass immigration just adding fuel to the fire, a comprador class lives off the petty profits and avoids real national responsibility of running a fully fledged European nation state.

Crotty was and very much still is an eclectic voice refusing to bend to political categorisation. Getting to the particularist roots of Ireland's low economic horizons, he learnt the hard way in the fields and hillsides of Dunbell to avoid the simple textbook answers, and to look instead to the heart and history of a nation and to decide its future.

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