Close to the bone
By Eoghan Mac Cormaic
Every nursery rhyme apparently has its roots in reality. Ring a
ring a rosies, was a rhyme from the Great Plague in London, and a
`pocket full of posies' was supposed to ward off the disease.
Children being realists however, knew that scam wouldn't work and
so they added the line `attishoo, attishoo, we all fall down'. A
catching little line for a catching little disease.
My own favourite, ever since I first saw Ingrid Bergmann in `The
Inn of the Sixth Happiness', was `This Old Man'. Remember it?
This old man, he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb,
with a knick-knack paddy-whack give the dog a bone, this old man
came rolling home'. A classic. But no longer PC.
Rolling through Ballinasloe a few days ago, I noticed that the
Fianna Fáil election posters had finally been taken down. For
months after the last elections, one poster had proudly remained
to greet visitors to the town. A dark, brooding poster in the
style of Bertie's own election images, more like an advert for a
hypnotist than a political party, it repeated a line from
Proinsias de Rossa that `the farmers are rolling it in, out
there'.
Proinsias became the representative of the previous coalition,
and the farming stock were angry. Rolling it in, indeed. Fianna
Fáil were going to sort all that out; unwarranted attacking of
the farmers of Ireland would be a thing of the past if The Party
was elected.
Times change. Recent weeks have witnessed an increased scrutiny
of farming income, and imaginative grant applications which have
given some farmers a state/EEC subsidised income of up to £65 000
have been mentioned.
The farmers respond of course that they have little or no choice
in the matter, that EC quotas and EC headage and lamb and sheep
and every other sort of payment add up or cut down on the amount
that they're allowed to produce.
Intervention was the buzz word, and intervention made the farmers
rich. For many people, all they really want from farmers is the
bit of meat on the table. Farmers too, it seems, want nothing
more than to put that bit of meat on the table and many farmers
have been so anxious to do that, that they've resorted to
unsavoury practices. And made a right mess of the food chain. And
introduced BSE and CJD.
Now it's got to the stage where nobody is sure what they're
eating. In a new form of intervention Government ministers are
intervening now to tell the people not to eat meat. Or, more
precisely, meat on the bone. One butcher on TV the other night
put it all into context when he said that `In future we won't
even be able to give the poor old dog a bone', just in case the
madra gets BSE or its canine equivalent.
Even the cooks are worried after both Irish and British
government warnings about beef on the bone. Stock, you see, is
going to be affected. They'll have to resort to chicken stock (so
watch out for headless chickens' disease in future years as
intensive production takes off) or fish stock. Rolling it in
might become a thing of the past, or maybe, just maybe, the whole
farming business might be re-aligned in a way that is more
ecofriendly and less wasteful and greedy.
As for myself, I'm a vegetarian. I don't need beef stock, or
worry about on the bone or off the bone. Having survived without
meat for more than 14 years now I'm looking forward to another
pasta filled nutfest of a Christmas and my ass turned to
government health pronouncements. And a celebratory verse of a
nursery rhyme for the season that's in it... one potato, two
potato, three potato four.... Have a happy, green Christmas.
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