Herald Opinion: Good farmers don’t breed from cull cows

A cull cow is one that doesn’t perform and is destined for off-farm employment as quickly as possible. Such an animal might look great and even fetch a great price at a mart, but a good farmer knows you can’t carry passengers, so under performing animals must go where they can be useful. This usually means them entering the food chain earlier than might have been expected.

My late father spent some years in the USA up to the mid-1930s, at which time he returned to Ireland and bought the farm where I grew up. His experience abroad maybe gave him a broader view of the world than many of his contemporaries, and he was sometimes frustrated by the lack of ambition held by people in the west. The son of a county councillor, he reserved his greatest contempt for non-performing politicians, often being heard to say that it was hard to expect them to be of any use when they were ‘just breeding from the culls.’ He couldn’t understand their lack of vision and lack of ambition.

While we have a better level of awareness among politicians nowadays, that dearth of ambition still emerges occasionally. The closed railway from Athenry to Claremorris, and the obsession of a few still centred on reopening it along the same twisting, slow route, is hard to understand. Review after review shows the non-viability of the route, particularly between Claremorris and Collooney, but some want it opened, even when they know it will be a failure.

The obvious answer is to follow the Greek solution to the old Athens to Corinth line, a service so slow that I once ran after a train I had missed and was hauled aboard by passengers standing at an open door. The Greek government built a new road between the two cities and added a railway parallel to the road, and the population is now well served by both. An upgraded N17 could provide the same solution here.

Insistence on sticking with the old lines in Mayo and Sligo is daft, and is also blocking investment that could see the derelict route used for tourism and leisure, as is the norm elsewhere. The ambition is all about having a freight railway in place quickly to export natural resources for processing elsewhere, a primitive, third-world philosophy that serves nobody in the west. No timber for instance should leave this region as round logs, it should at least go as sawn timber and at best, as modular houses, creating the wealth locally.

The same lack of ambition seems to be driving the current housing Minister, who wants to solve the housing problem by packing people into garden sheds. In this new age of the culls, could they at least arrange to build these sheds here?