The Family Farm Tax has come into effect today, to force working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to the giant American agribusinesses with which this Government was hand in glove.
As are all Epstein Class regimes, whether officially centrist or officially right-wing. Taken together or even separately, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are just about the Platonic form of an Epstein Class party. When Donald Trump waxed lyrical about Winston Churchill, then Micheál Martin did not retort with a rendition of Come Out Ye Black and Tans, but instead defended hardcore Atlanticism. Ireland is no more neutral than the green and orange stripes of the Tricolour. Shannon Airport is heavily involved in the war with Iran, because of course it is. And corporate America is landbanking Ireland, because of course it is.
The Duke of Devonshire is trying to put up the rent paid by his County Waterford tenants to €50 per hectare by 2029. While that is only about a quarter of the market rate today, and about one fourteenth of the present average rent for agricultural land, then the problem is the market, and who knows how much €50 per hectare would therefore be worth by 2029? As for colonialism, His Grace is only exercising his property rights under the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland, which has had more than long enough to change those arrangements.
As well as advocating such decidedly un-American expropriation, Irish-Americans remain as lacking as ever in any self-awareness about their own presence on the ancestral lands of the Lenape and the Massachusett, or about their own fanatical support for the settler colonists who were violently expelling the Catholic Church from the Holy Land and from at least two of its neighbours. But Ireland really is in the midst of a colonial land grab. As is Britain.
Who needs domestic food production? Next you'll be telling us we need our own fuel.
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