Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), p. 148

This lyrical post-modern biography set against the quiet beauty of Bantry Bay is much more than the mere chronicle of a virtuous life on the land. The author, who is the nephew of the principal character John Sheehan, sees his subject’s life and fate as being intimately connected with the fate of Ireland herself and accordingly, homely agricultural images soon become metaphors for incisive social comment. In describing the rites of passage of Jack’s farming life, which was generally untouched by the cultural issues preoccupying the Irish intellectual classes, Sheehan offers a critique of three generations of modern Irish history and of the shifting values underlying it. His farm was the result of Jack’s labours and the embodiment of what he did, while he himself was the product of centuries of geographical and historical processes. The Anglo-Irish War, the creation of the chaotic Free State with its obscurantist alliance with the Catholic Church, the class divisions and social attitudes of the western Irish community and, much later, the venality and corruption at the heart of the late twentieth-century Irish body politic, were principal ‘contexts’ for the quiet drama of Jack’s bachelor life. But, as befitted a man who wisely eschewed both television and telephone before 2001, these issues seemed of less importance than the daily farming round. Jack was on the land and of the land and imbued with a deep spiritual understanding of its history, rhythm and mysteries. Revolutions, guerrilla warfare and de Valera’s concepts of romantic nationalism were all very well, but like Falstaff, Jack was a realist, knowing perfectly well that radical change usually has little relevance to the essentials of working the land.

As one might expect from the author of a guide to anarchism and a student of Lenin’s writings, Sheehan’s book is richly larded with the language of class warfare. Commercial farmers, the ten per cent of Irish society controlling more than half of its wealth, the builders of holiday homes and ‘the canker of consumerism’, all come under attack in a work which sees capitalism at the root of so many social ills. In stark contrast, Jack’s non-materialistic, non-capitalist world was based upon a system of values which accorded wealth not to the accumulation of material things, but to the quiet contemplation of nature and a deep immersion in the land itself. For Sheehan, Jack’s world fell into decay when ‘all that was solid (was) melting into property prices’ and the countryside of western Ireland became commodified. As the farmer became both physically and psychically separated from the land that had nurtured him, so the soul of the land itself was in danger of perishing. But perhaps there remains something left to recover? As Sheehan puts it, in terms not unlike those used by the English ruralist Right of the 1930s, there may be ‘survivors of a peasantry with values that now acquire a new value and provide an axis of hope’. Jack himself rejected the idea of embracing the market and selling to speculators once his small farm became unviable. He probably agreed with his nephew, though he might have put it a little more simply,

… that history is not so linear as to make this the only possibility and that in the whirligig of time a new dialectic may emerge, when the viability of life on a small mixed farm like Jack’s will reassert itself, redeeming the principles on which he made some of his choices. This is a truly happy thought, doubtless shared by

many a middle-class good-lifer and many a part-time organic/organicist hobby farmer. Sadly I suspect that Jack’s world and the values it embodied have disappeared beyond recovery.

This is a wholly delightful and charming book. It is a brilliantly written and lusciously illustrated account of a man whose life began in dire poverty and ended in ease and contentment, but who never deviated from the principle that duty to the land and those relying upon its bounties was a fundamental to the farmer’s existence.