Dan McCarthy interview from 2011
When one of the architects of the Common Agricultural Policy, Sicco Manshalt, addressed Irish farmers at an event in Tralee in 1970, months before Ireland’s accession to the EEC, he was feted by the Irish political and agricultural establishment.
Eager to get a piece of the European pie, the great and the good listened attentively as the former Dutch agricultural minister extolled the virtues of EEC membership. However, the love-in was disrupted by a dissenting voice in the crowd, Dan McCarthy.
Dan was in Tralee in his capacity as the president of the recently formed National Land League, which the Multyfarnham native formed with friends Paddy Power and Ned Gilligan in September 1969. Established to pressurise the Land Commission into acquiring land for redistribution amongst the small farmers of north Westmeath, the Land League was so successful in its local battle against the “cheque book tycoons” who were buying up large tracts of land around Ireland, that branches sprang up across the country.
Speaking more than forty years after the event, Dan, who was pilloried in the Farmer’s Journal for being “anti-european”, said that the accusation couldn’t have been further from the truth.
“I was never anti-Europe: I was against the agricultural policy which was designed for highly developed european Ag industry - which Ireland didn’t have at the time.
“I challenged him (Manshalt) from the floor and I got an enormous amount of support. The bigger farmer who didn’t want to see the smaller farmer make it because they thought it would take away from them. Through the Farmer’s Journal they accused me of being anti-Europe pointing out that we couldn’t do without it, but they never went to any detail about why I was opposed to it or what was my thinking.”
From as early as he can remember Dan wanted to be a farmer. Like most working class boys of his time secondary school wasn’t an option and his formal education ended at the age of 14 when he got a job with a local farmer.
The youngster’s agricultural education began in the days before the mechanisaion of Irish farming. Currently the chairman of Westmeath VEC and the father of two teachers, Dan recognises more than most the importance of education, but in the 1930s people of a certain means didn’t “go on”.
“There was no other life and you didn’t look at it like that. There was no further education for people like me, it was only for the wealthy. When you were finished in national school you were finished unless you tried to educate yourself.”
Like many men of his generation Dan emigrated to England in the late forties and participated in the rebuilding of a country devastated by war. Unlike many of his fellow McAlpine’s Fusiliers, Dan didn’t settle in England. He was a man with a plan and that plan was to buy his own farm.
“I went to England on 28 August, 1949. I arrived on a Saturday and made the decision on the Sunday that whatever I did, it was towards coming home. It took me nine years to achieve that.”
In 1957, Dan was accompanied back to Westmeath by his new wife, Ann.
The couple bought a 20 acre farm and set about making a new life for themselves back in Ireland. The McCarthys had six children - three boys (Donal, Laurence and Oliver) and three girls (Marguerita, Regina and Noeleen) and with a growing family to feed Dan knew he would have to expand his farm.
Like many ambitious small farmers of the late sixties, Dan was stymied in his attempts to get ahead by the aforementioned “cheque book tycoons”, who were buying up agricultural land all over Ireland in anticipation of a beef bonanza when Ireland joined the EEC.
Eager to challenge a status quo that they felt held small farmers back, Dan and his colleagues established the National Land League at a meeting in Ballinagall in the late sixties. As word of their success spread, President McCarthy travelled the length and breadth of Ireland speaking at meetings organised by farmers hoping to follow the example set by their counterparts in Westmeath.
At its height the National Land League had more than 12,000 members and Dan believes that the Westmeath Examiner played a major role in its rapid rise in popularity.
“Its success in Westmeath was because of the support that we got from the Westmeath Examiner. They were staunch supporters all the way especially the editor, Nicholas Nally.
“He was a great man for the rural community. no matter where I went around the county, the lcoal papers knew all about the Land League because of The Examiner.”
During this period tensions ran high between some of the larger land holders and the members of the Land League, but Dan says that right from the start the organisation – which was advised by Father McDwyer from Donegal, the founder of the Co-op movement and the writer and activist Peadar O’Donnell – was adamant that violence would not play a part in their struggle.
“One of the things that Father McDwyer drilled into us was that no acts of violence should be committed. If that happened we would lose our support. We played it all the time by the law.”
Such was the organisation’s prominence that Dan was invited over to Brussels to speak to farmers from across the continent. This led to his appointment as a vice president of Comapera a pan-european organisation established by small farmers.
He was a regular sight in the corridors of european power during the 1970s, first through his role with Comapere and then later as the Chairman of the Irish Creamery and Milk Suppliers Association’s (ICMSA) Rural Development Committee.
When at home in Ireland Dan was constantly on the road, but eager to ensure that Ann didn’t shoulder all of the burden he rarely - if ever - spent a night away from Taughmon.
“I was blessed in that I had a very good wife that came from a small farm in Monaghan and it was no problem to her to milk and do those things. I often left Dingle in Kerry at 12 o’clock at night and came home to get up at seven or half seven in the morning to milk my cows. I always made a point of getting out of bed in the morning in my own house except when I’d be in Brussels.”
Dan has been a Labour councillor since 1999, but his first taste of local politics came in 1974 when he was encouraged by his Land League colleagues to run as an independent. Although a first time candidate Dan was elected, but due to his ever growing committments, he didn’t contest the seat in 1979.
After over four decades serving his community in a variety of different capacities, Dan says that he still hasn’t decided when he will bow out of public life. One thing is for sure, that whenever that day comes, his family’s gain will be Westmeath’s loss.