6. Love of the Land

© Robbie O’Connell 1989 Slievenamon Music (BMI)

Irish people have a primal connection to the land. Given our long history of dispossession at the hands of our nearest neighbours, I suppose it is not surprising. Maybe it goes even further back to the deep connection to the natural world that can be clearly seen in the earliest Gaelic poems. 

In modern times, there was a story of an Irish farmer who refused to sell his farm for almost three times its value. When an amazed reporter asked why he wouldn’t accept such a generous offer, he responded, “Sure, If I sold it, I wouldn’t have it anymore,” an answer that illustrates the value placed on land ownership as against simple wealth. There is a permanence to land that money alone cannot match. Wealth can disappear but land is substantial.

When I was a boy in the 1960s, many of our local farmers were encouraged to take out bank loans to increase their holdings. When economic recessions hit in the 70s and 80s, the banks called in the loans and many family farms had to be sold off to cover the debts, leading to a surge in emigration. 

In the USA, 42 percent of the population lived on farms at the beginning of the twentieth century; by 1990 that number had dwindled to less than 2 percent. The numbers have continued falling to the present day as industrialized farming, with its reckless use of chemicals and antibiotics, ravages the environment and obliterates small holdings. The disappearance of the family farm has resulted in the loss of a deep connection to the natural world and a growing sense of alienation.

In the 1980s, I read Norwegian Nobel Prize winning author Knut Hamsun’s wonderful novel, The Growth of the Soil, in which he explored a man’s elemental attachment to the land. Around the same time, I watched French film director Louis Malle’s riveting documentary, “God’s Country,” that explored how the politics of greed was impacting rural life in the US heartland. I have no doubt that they both played a part in inspiring me to write this song.

The “Love of the Land” was the title track of my second solo album released in 1989 on the Green Linnet label.

LOVE OF THE LAND

© Robbie O’Connell 1989 Slievenamon Music (BMI)

I was born on the land like my father before me
And I worked on it year after year.
Through all kinds of weather in summer and winter
Right or wrong we persevered.
And I’ll always remember the feel of the soil
In the spring when we broke the first ground.
And the smell of the hay in the barn in the fall
Brings my childhood years all back around.

Refrain:

Ah but all that is lost now, it’s locked up in memory
And I wonder, can you understand?
When your life is torn up by the roots and discarded,
All you’ve left is the love of the land,
All you’ve left is the love of the land.

As a child I was given my own patch of garden
Where I learned all the secrets of life.
As I’d wander the land in the cool of the evening
In search of adventures, I’d ride.
And sometimes the weather would give us a battle
But we took it all in our stride.
For we knew in the end it would all come out even
We’d make up the losses next time.

But somewhere the big wheels they slowly were grinding
Pushed on by the power of greed.
And little by little they ground us all under
Destroying both flower and seed.
And what do you say to your wife and your family
When you’ve nothing, not even a plan?
And where do you go when you’re faced with foreclosure
And the bank says you must leave the land?