What Ireland's Great Famine can teach us about the EU-Mercosur free trade deal

The sacrificing of Irish farmers by de-nationalised apparatchiks looking to slow the decline of EU relevance and scrape back some geostrategic influence is disgraceful — and dangerous

Guest post by Irish journalist Ciarán O’Regan (Substack; Twitter).

On Friday December 6, negotiations concluded on the EU-Mercosur free trade deal. Two days later I find myself sitting in the West Cork Hotel, Skibbereen, after eating a wonderful post-Mass Sunday lunch. Outside the window to my right, on an old stone building, is a sign reading “The Famine Story” with an arrow pointing toward the local Heritage Centre. Skibbereen, “the very nucleus of the Famine” according to one of the information boards on the wall of what was once a soup kitchen for the wretched, was the site of terrible tragedy.

Elihu Burritt, an American philanthropist who visited here during the blackest of black years, 1847, reported what he saw:

We entered the grave-yard, in the midst of which was a small watch-house. This miserable shed had served as a grave where the dying could bury themselves […] into this […] living men, women, and children went down to die […] we found it crammed with wan victims of famine, ready and willing to perish.

I came here for grub and to work on a writing project that had absolutely nothing to do with farming or starving to death. However, after some conversations yesterday, and the above-pictured sign outside my window, I find myself unable to put pen to paper on anything else.

“To the EU it’s more about expanding their sphere of influence”, said one farmer mate of mine, “and our agricultural industry is seen by [European Commission President] von der Leyen and her regime as acceptable collateral damage”. Another rather impassioned friend — not a farmer but living rurally — argued to me that “importing South American beef [at the expense of] our own” is nothing short of “insanity”, and reckons it “is a crime to Ériu — our cows are our country in many ways. They’re in our language, songs and blood”. Germans, he says, have no right “to be messing around with our farmers”.

Over coming weeks and months, many arguments can and will be made by people opposing the Mercosur deal on the grounds of protecting not only the livelihood of farmers and their families who will be pushed out of business, but on the grounds of losing cultural identity within rooted rural communities. The sacrificing of Irish farmers by de-nationalised apparatchiks looking to slow the decline of EU relevance and scrape back some geostrategic influence is already disgraceful enough. But what I will briefly argue, on a far darker note, is that the people of Ireland need to remember what Elihu Burritt once witnessed close to where I sit and, subsequently, be wary of anything or anyone that threatens our ability to produce food.

If the suggestion that Irish people might once again face starving to death comes across as overly dramatic, let me remind the reader of some world events since March 2020. On the largest scale, we have lived through a relatively benign plague that involved worryingly authoritarian and grossly incompetent policy responses which massively increased world hunger; an escalation of the Ukrainian civil war through Russian intervention in February 2022 which seriously disrupted gas, fertilizer and grain markets; the largest sabotage of European infrastructure since World War 2 in the mysterious September 2022 attack on Nord Stream 2; Houthis disrupting global shipping; and Hamas triggering a bloodbath on October 7, 2023 which those seeking to further expand Israeli territory appear more than willing to contribute towards.

Further, it was only in recent weeks that we have seen the German government collapse as their economy slides into decline; the election of supposedly “fascist” Donald Trump with a massive popular mandate; an attempted Maidan 2.0 coup in Georgia involving a president who refuses to step down when her term is up; US-operated missiles being fired into pre-2014 Russian territory and the astonishing Oreshnik hypersonic missile technology revealed by Russia in response; an attempted imposition of martial law by a massively unpopular South Korean president; Turkish-, Israeli- and US-backed, supposedly “diversity-friendly” and “inclusive” jihaDEIs toppling Assad’s regime in Syria; the cancellation of Romanian democracy due to fears that the EU- and NATO-sceptical candidate might win; and the collapse of the somewhat scandalously formed French government in which president Macron has refused to step down (side note: if things continue as they are, there is a non-zero probability that unapologetically nationalist elements of the French Military will get spicy).

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world”. These well-worn words of Yeats are apt here: the gyre turns faster and faster as chaos begets more of itself. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese Christian who experienced his society collapse into war, argued in his book, The Black Swan:

History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.

An evidence-based, honest analyses of major past events reveal that uncertainty is the only worldly certainty and that everything can always go to hell at any moment: this is basic historical literacy. It is through this lens that I argue against anything that puts Ireland on a path toward worsened food security.

Before global supply chain facilitated industrial farming methods, Irish farmers would find themselves unaffected by plague or war happening thousands of miles away. As it stands in 2024, however, our industrial farmers would already face quite a huge challenge in figuring out how to grow food if escalations of war in Europe and the Middle East meant supplies of diesel for their machinery, and fertilizer for their soil, were shortened — possibly even ended.

But what if due to our massive data centres, our neutrality-threatening support for the Ukrainian government, and our facilitating of a NATO airfield in Shannon, the Moffat pipeline from Scotland, through which 75% of our natural gas travels, was mysteriously damaged similar to how the Nord Stream 2 or Baltic-connector pipelines were damaged? Ireland depended on natural gas for 44.3% of its electricity in 2023, and so what would happen to our refrigeration or food processing capabilities in the absence of stable electricity supply?

Even if access to the global supply chains for fuel and fertilizer collapsed, and if the gas supply was to end, our farmers could still feed some minimum portion of cattle through grazing and stored feed. Such an absence of fuel and artificial inputs would be a forced return to old methods of pre-industrial farming. But how much worse would our food security be if Ireland’s countryside were emptied of competent cattle farmers in years to come, emptied of farmers who knew their land and their animals, due to being forced out of business by agents of an increasingly totalitarian EU apparatus?

If world events in recent years have taught us anything, it is that history is still capable of jumping from “fracture to fracture”. And as it continues to jump, historically literate observers like myself would rather live in a country with happy and competent farmers who can feed the people I love whenever things almost inevitably go to hell again. Nobody in today’s Ireland should ever have to witness the sort of horrors described on the wall outside my window.

---

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)