Opinion: whiskey tariffs the cloud in bright March skies

One glorious morning is following another, one dry and mostly sunny day is set to be followed by another.

In fact, a whole week of them are forecast for this little corner of Ireland. It’s cold, but dry - perfect weather for fieldwork.

The evenings have seen glorious sunsets, clear skies and full moons. It’s a wonderful time to be a farmer, especially a tillage farmer.

A sustained period of fine weather at a busy time on a tillage farm is a welcome change of the recent pattern, with the busiest times of the year being spring and late autumn planting and summer/autumn harvests.

This weather affected the pocket as strongly as it wrecked the head. Yields and quality inevitably suffered, with 2023 disastrous. Last year represented a partial recovery, but the year was no better than moderate to poor, depending on location.

The last of the beans in Wexford were only harvested last week. We were pulling beet here two weeks ago - there’s now a crop of wheat planted there.

It's hard to beat being a farmer when the weather is good and you can get lay work out in front of you and get through it.

There is a wonderful sense of achievement in seeing a field go from its winter coat - whether that’s stubble or cover crop - to fresh brown soil. Planting is quickly followed by the emergence of a new crop and the cycle of the seasons continues.

It's why we do what we do.

Distilling under pressure

So tillage farmers are grateful for the weather and happy to be busy. Of course, being farmers, every silver lining must be accompanied by a cloud. And the darkest cloud on the horizon now is the downturn in Irish distilling.

The Irish whiskey sector has had a challenging 12 months. Concerns grew following the closure of Waterford Distillery in November.

Then last week, we heard Irish distillers announce that its annual month-long spring closedown will this year extend to three months.

And then this week came the news on tractor radios in fields, where malting barley was being planted, that whiskey and other spirits are about to be dragged into the escalating trade and tariff war between the US and the EU.

We can’t blame Donald Trump completely for this one. He may have started the ball rolling with threats of tariffs on a wide range of goods, but spirits weren’t in the equation until our side threw bourbon into the mix.

And now a 200% tariff on Irish whiskey into the US is in the pipeline. That would more or less kill our transatlantic exports stone dead. It’s our most important market, accounting for 40% of all Irish whiskey exports last year, worth €400m.

Hopefully, both sides will step back from the incendiary rhetoric.

Even prior to the escalation, the dull market for malt - and therefore malt barley - led to a sombre mood at the Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) grain meeting attended by Boortmalt on Monday last.

The reality is that growers, merchants and malsters are all in this together.

Using tariffs to repatriate markets is a high-wire strategy - you will gain market space in your home market, but exporting nations may lose as much as they gain. The consumer is the one who ultimately pays the price, with higher prices inevitable.

Donald Trump’s trade aggression continues to be partnered with an attitude to the sovereignty of neighbouring nations that can only be categorised as imperialistic.

He continues to speak of Canada as a nation that would be better served joining the United States: “Canada only works as a state,” he said. "If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the US. Somebody did it a long time ago, many decades ago. Makes no sense.”

Many of Donald Trump’s closest political allies are playing down the seriousness of these comments, but I think that they should be taken at face value. This is the president of the United States, the world’s most powerful country, questioning the legitimacy of a neighbouring country.

Rhetoric

It’s exactly the kind of rhetoric Valdimir Putin used before Russia invaded Ukraine - or indeed in Chechnya and Georgia earlier in his reign. It’s an attitude which says the powerful are entitled to take whatever steps they deem necessary to protect their own interests and the weak are at fault for not being strong enough to defend themselves from attack.

Looked at from this prism, the Trump administration’s refusal to support the defence of Ukraine from a hostile invader has a certain logic. As Paul Weller once put it “the weak get crushed as the strong grow stronger”.

The same logic informs Donald Trump’s repeated claims on Greenland. He escalated his rhetoric this week, saying: “A boat landed there (Greenland) 200 years ago or something. They (Denmark) say they have rights to it. I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t think it is.”

He should know. One-hundred-and-ten years ago, during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the United States signed an international treaty with Denmark that agreed the purchase of the Danish West Indies, now known as the US Virgin Islands.

It stated: “In proceeding this day to the signature of the Convention respecting the cession of the Danish West-Indian Islands to the United States of America, the undersigned Secretary of State of the United States of America, duly authorized by his Government, has the honor to declare that the Government of the United States of America will not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.”

That is pretty clear cut by any standards. Denmark is Ireland's fellow member of the EU - we joined the EEC together in 1973. This is close to home.

It’s remarkable how quickly the imperialistic language of Donald Trump has been semi-normalised. It’s hard to imagine any US president of recent memory, such as Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, speaking like this.

Such talk is destabilising and will redouble and reinforce calls for European nations to become capable of defending themselves against aggression from any quarter.

And such spending will shrink available resources to tackle the real problems society faces, from housing and healthcare to sustainable food production and protection of the environment.

It isn't hard to be left of the right

"He's very socialist, very left,” Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said of Taoiseach Micheál Martin on the occasion of his visit to the White House on Wednesday.

It’s a political categorisation that most Irish people would struggle to recognise. Of course, all things are relative and it would be hard to find space to the right of Mr Kilmeade in the spectrum of Irish politics.

A commentator on Fox for decades, one barometer of his own political positioning is that he has espoused support for Julian Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson - the far-right British activist and founder of the English Defence League - who is currently serving a jail term.

Micheál Martin supports inclusivity, a decent minimum wage, free education and universal healthcare, so appears radically left to the eyes of Brian Kilmeade.

Of course, Micheál Martin also supports the free market and entrepreneurship. He sits slap bang in the centre of European politics. There is a gulf between the two perspectives as wide as the Atlantic Ocean.

A sizeable proportion of the US population gets all their information from media outlets that share Fox News’s - and indeed Donald Trump’s - political perspective.

They now understand Ireland to be controlled by a “very socialist, very left” government.

But there are Irish people who identify with the Fox News view of the world. Last June, Ireland's Electoral Commissioner commissioned Red C to conduct a poll following the local and European elections last June. Among other things, they looked at Irish people's attitudes to conspiracy theories. Those are the Electoral Commission’s words not mine, by the way.

One in five people definitely believe that “the government keep many important secrets from the public”. Nine percent believe that “a small secret group of people is responsible for making all major decisions in world policy”, while a further 22% think it’s probably true.

The statement that “groups of scientists manipulate, fabricate or suppress evidence in order to deceive the public” is definitely true, according to 8% of those polled, with a further 20% saying it’s probably true.

The proposition that “elected officials want more immigration to bring in obedient voters who will vote for them” is definitely true, say 7%, with a further 15% holding that it is probably true.

Similar numbers (9% definitely true and 13% probably true) agree that “the establishment is replacing white Irish people with non-white immigrants”. A further “replacement theory” concept, that “viruses and/or diseases have been deliberately disseminated to infect certain population” was definitely true, according to 6%, with 15% of the opinion that it’s probably true.

Broadly speaking, one in five Irish people think the Government and other national and international institutions have an agenda against them. That is a significant base for the far-right to build on.

Those are the kind of views that saw people support the Reform Party in the UK and the AfD in the recent German election. They are the kind of views Donald Trump has articulated and represented.

What we haven’t seen in Ireland is a political movement that articulates such views gain any traction. The handful of hard right-wing parties that have been registered have failed to get close to a Dail or European Parliament seat.

Maybe it's our narrow country byways, but most Irish people seem happiest keeping close to the middle of the road.