Meathman's Diary: Hard to letgo on the grip of the land

I HAVE lived in important places, times, When great events were decided; who owned That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land.

The opening couple of lines of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem Epic, details two neighbours embroiled in a vicious dispute over a barren, rocky patch of earth in Monaghan in the late 1930s.

Such is the intensity of the dispute Kavanagh compares it to the ‘Munich Bother’ i.e. the Munich Agreement, an attempt by the Allies to appease Hitler by allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia, which is seen as one of the major reasons for the outbreak of World War Two. So Epic was the dispute he invokes the spirit of Homer and compares it to his 'Iliad', which spans 15,693 lines over 24 books, and depicts the last stages of the ten-year-long Siege of Troy.

In the 80-plus years since this poem was set a lot has changed in Irish life. We’ve opted out of the then brewing world war, declared ourselves a republic, joined the EU, fallen out from under the control of the catholic church, legalised divorce, gay marriage, and abortion, signed the Good Friday Agreement, sent literal and figurative turkeys to the Eurovision and seen Fianna Fail and Fine Gael shack up, but one thing remains the same: our unending obsession with land.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where this fascination began. Some argue that it can be traced back to plantation times when Irish people were driven off their lands (‘Too Hell or to Connaught’), to facilitate British settlers.

In Ireland we are on average two generations separated from farms, meaning that most people have at least one grandparent from an agricultural background, so most people know what it is worth, often leading to from begrudging visits to relations houses who 'got the farm' and therefore ‘got free sites’.

This is in contrast to the rest of Europe where industry is more developed. In Germany for example the average person is six generations separated from a farm, meaning many never set foot beyond a farm gate.

When someone mentions they’ve married a farmer, their friends, who often don’t know a sheep from a shovel invariably ask “have they much road frontage”. We are the land. It’s in our DNA (which stands for DoNottouchmyAcres).

I recently spoke to a publican who said one of his busiest weeks was when several plots of the land went on sale in his parish and locals met in his establishment to discuss/spread wildly inaccurate rumours about who would buy the various parcels with astronomical figures being conjured up.

When it comes to our parochial fascination with territory it’s important to step outside our own echo chamber. As Homer said to Kavanagh: "I made the Iliad from such A local row. Gods make their own importance."