Social sustainability the key to rural development

‘Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour; sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute – that’s relativity.” This quote was famously attributed to Albert Einstein in 1929 in an attempt to explain the theory of relativity.

Whether he actually said it is up for debate. However, you have to admit: even after nearly a century, it has aged well.

We now find ourselves in the year 2025 – five years away from 2030. To a small child, five years might seem like a lifetime. To those working in the areas of rural development, agriculture and climate science, it doesn’t seem like nearly enough time to meet the goals set out in the Climate Action Plan.

The Climate Action Plan envisions an ambitious goal of halving our emissions by the year 2030 and reaching “net zero” – aka climate nirvana – by no later than 2050. The target for agriculture is to reduce emissions by 25% by the year 2030. No mean feat.

According to Teagasc, “Ensuring that Irish farmers and food producers are environmentally, socially and economically sustainable throughout the period of transformation and beyond will be critical” as we make the changes deemed necessary to reach said climate goals. And while we hear a lot about environmental and economic sustainability, there seems to be very little discussed around the idea of social sustainability.

How do we achieve social sustainability in the face of the climate crisis and the many changes which need to be made to help meet these goals?

According to the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education organisation, social sustainability means building relationships which “promote equality, justice and a high quality of life”. When you consider social sustainability in agriculture, you can’t assume this applies solely to the farming population.

Professor Anna Davies, who lectures in the School of Geography at Trinity College and specialises in sustainable and resilient future food systems, says ensuring social sustainability within rural Ireland is essential for any just transition towards an environmentally sustainable future.

“There are many challenges here. Some are directly food related, such as declining numbers of small farms, aging farmers and limited access to nutritious and affordable fresh food for rural populations, and these are compounded by weak infrastructure and limited supports to build more resilient rural communities.”

Any changes made to agricultural policy will have far-reaching affects into rural Irish communities. We love to say that farmers are the backbone of rural Ireland – looking into the future, we might need to take that idea a bit more seriously.

Out the Gap

To discuss the future of rural Ireland from a social sustainability viewpoint, Irish Country Living spoke with farmer and podcaster Noel Clancy.

While farming sheep and beef with his wife and three children in Drangan, Co Tipperary, Noel also regularly takes to the hills to meet with rural folk throughout the country. He records these encounters in his podcast, Out the Gap.

Out the Gap is unique in its approach. Minimally edited, always recorded in-person and never recorded in a studio format; Noel’s interviews are a true reflection not only of the individual being featured, but of the landscape in which they live and work – either in farming, food production or, in many cases, recalling past times within their locality.

“Listeners tell me they enjoy the podcast because you can feel the place when you listen,” he says. “They can hear the ocean, or the birds singing in background. You can hear gates closing and sometimes [the subject] stops in the middle of our chat to chat with someone else on the side of the road!”

Noel launched Out the Gap in 2020, while he was also curating the (now defunct) Ireland’s Farmers Twitter account. He wanted to take the idea of Ireland’s Farmers a bit further, and wished for the stories to be a bit more diverse and inclusive.

“The idea has always been to give a glimpse into people’s rural lives. I didn’t strictly want to do a farming thing, I wanted to do a mix – food producers, farmers – getting a real taste of rural Ireland.

“For a lot of my interviewees, they wouldn’t have had anyone speaking with them [from the media] before, and they wouldn’t know what way their stories were going to come out,” he continues. “It’s easier to bring out someone’s story when you’re with them, especially if the guest is an older person. You need to be able to build a rapport with them.”

During his nearly five years recording Out the Gap, Noel has travelled the length and breadth of Ireland, speaking with rural dwellers of all ages and backgrounds. He has never taken on sponsorship for his podcast, which is important to him as it means the stories are never tailored or censored.

“I always tell people beforehand: they have time to tell their story,” he says. “I keep it fairly natural, but they have the time [to speak] and can trust that it’s not going to be edited down to five minutes.”

In sharing the stories of rural Ireland, Noel has seen social sustainability in action. Going into the next five years, there are some areas in particular he feels should be highlighted.

A few decades ago, small villages had infrastructure which made it easier for rural dwellers to socialise and avail of community services. Local GPs, post offices, shops and pubs were, more or less, at arm’s length.

The lack of smartphones and digitisation meant more in-person encounters. When it comes to isolation and loneliness, the modern lack of these local encounters and services begins to add up.

The idea has always been to give a glimpse into people’s rural lives. I didn’t strictly want to do a farming thing, I wanted to do a mix – food producers, farmers – getting a real taste of rural Ireland

“While recording an episode in Cork, we came to the end of this boreen and the interviewee told me about the woman who lived there; the only person she used to see was the postman,” Noel recalls. “She used to address letters to herself just so the postman would call. Can you just picture that?

“Over the next five years, that small family-owned corner shop – a lot of those will probably be gone,” he adds. “Those businesses seem to be on the same way out as the rural pub.”

This topic is regularly covered in the pages of Irish Country Living, but the fact remains: issues around succession continue to have negative impacts on family relationships, the long-term viability of family farms and on making environmental and financial progress. Noel agrees that farm succession needs to be a much larger topic of conversation.

“Our attachment to land can be problematic,” he says. “There’s an obsession with ownership. If you regularly speak with older people, they can recall family fall-outs with siblings because their parents didn’t have wills – this is still happening on farms all over Ireland.”

On the other side of the spectrum is the fact that an increasing number of farms don’t have anyone to pass the land down to – whether that’s because a child has no interest in taking it on, or because the farmer does not have any family.

“Plenty of young people want to farm, but in low profit margin sectors, they have the issue of low monetary reward and then also having to juggle an off-farm job alongside the farm. On the flip side, if they go down the route of dairy farming there is money to be made, but there is a problem with the general lack of relief labour.”

Growing our own

As a nation, Ireland is considered high in food security. But what about food sovereignty? Food sovereignty means communities have regular access to healthy and sustainably produced foods and also that individuals have the right to define their own food and agricultural systems.

In decades past, most farms would also have vegetable patches or fruit orchards. They would keep cows for milking, chickens for eggs and pigs for pork. There were problems then, too, but we had a much stronger connection to the foods on our plates.

“It’s just such a shame, in a country like Ireland, where you can grow vegetables for so much of the year – we don’t grow enough ourselves and we don’t support commercial growers enough,” Noel says. “And with the below cost selling we see, you can go in to a supermarket and can get crazy amounts of vegetables for very little.”

Ultimately, change is coming. It becomes a matter of finding ways to preserve our past and build resilience within rural communities in the face of these changes.

“You need to cover all elements of the changes as they come,” Noel says. “They need to be environmentally sound, and you need to be able to sustain a living. Our older generations aren’t climate deniers – they have lived.

“They have seen the changes more than any of us. We should listen to them,” he concludes.

You can listen to the Out the Gap podcast series on various platforms or wherever you normally listen to podcasts, including Spotify.

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