The front page of a pro-Treaty newspaper in July 1932 featured a cartoon of a Viking ship marked ‘Denmark’ transporting a cargo of butter, eggs and bacon to England. The Viking on board roared ‘Up Dev!’Footnote ¹ This cartoon reflected deep concern that Irish Free State President Eamon de Valera’s emerging trade war with England would benefit Denmark, Irish agriculture’s bitter rival. In fact, Denmark was a frequent referent for politicians and reformers in the Free State, particularly on agrarian matters. The analogy was an understandable one for Irish commentators: Denmark was a small, European nation that built its economic success on agrarian exports while maintaining its cultural and political independence from a larger neighbour. Danish agriculture also successfully ‘modernised’, and its history seemed to offer a path by which Ireland could move forward technologically and socially without emulating the British or transforming its fundamentally agrarian identity.

Analysis of these rhetorical invocations of Denmark addresses two themes current in Irish historiography: modernity and transnationalism. The constant, and almost always favourable, references to Danish agricultural modernisation show that the Irish Free State’s relationship with modernity was more complicated than has often been thought. The initial interpretation of Irish nationalism was that it was atavistic, pastoral and antimodern, seeking to create an autarkic state dominated by agriculture and handicrafts. Certainly, much Sinn Féin rhetoric could be read this way, as could many of the economic stylings of de Valera, particularly his famous 1943 St Patrick’s Day radio eclogue extolling frugal comfort and bucolic anti-materialism. But a closer look at agrarian reformers in the Free State demonstrates that there was a collective appetite for European examples of modernity that could be fashioned into something that was anticolonial and particularly Irish. Much of what appears as antimodernism in Irish nationalist thought was simply a desire to define Ireland as not-Britain. Most Irish nationalists wanted Ireland to be ‘agrarian’, as against Britain’s ‘industrial’ identity, but they were not particularly unusual in seeking a path to economic success that bypassed the inequality, class warfare and imperialism of the British model. This is where Denmark entered the discussion. Denmark seemed independent, agrarian, modern and successful. It showed that modernity was not homogenising and could exist alongside the revival of traditional culture. The Danish example also provoked an Irish conversation about modernity that included rural people as something other than archaic bearers of Gaelicism and conservatism.

This comparison, though, was potentially problematic for nationalists in the Free State. It came at a time when Ireland was attempting to define itself as a small European nation, similar to those that the First World War had purportedly been fought to protect. In promoting the Irish cause during the postwar ‘Wilsonian moment’, Sinn Féin depicted Ireland, in George Gavan Duffy’s words, as ‘the first of the small nations’, a leader in an anticipated anti-imperialist postwar Europe. Sinn Féin also positioned itself as a world avatar for decolonisation from which other, particularly non-white, colonised countries could learn.Footnote ² The Danish analogy was a different sort of transnationalism, in that it assumed the very thing that a decolonising nationalism was keen to deny: that Ireland was far from being a pathbreaking model for other countries, but was instead relatively backward and dangerously close to falling terminally behind. This deficit was at times ascribed to the colonial legacy, but after the revolution was more often blamed on Irish flaws. This presented a very different picture of Ireland than did the rhetoric about Irish vanguardism, and it sat uncomfortably next to the Gaelic Revival’s elevation of Irish peasants as repositories of ancient virtue and communal ethos. Instead, it depicted an Ireland in need of tutelage, a difficult thing for nationalists to concede.

Pre-revolutionary Irish activists studied many continental examples that could have been useful models for Irish modernisation. After the revolution, though, the agrarian focus narrowed to Denmark. This was partly because Denmark was seen as both prosperous and Irish agriculture’s chief rival for the postwar British import market. In addition, there were elements of Denmark’s history that overlapped with Ireland’s postcolonial narrative and ambition. The Wilsonian moment, that brief period where it seemed the world might realign around small nations and anticolonialism, also made Denmark attractive as a small European nation that had managed to create prosperity and retain its agricultural nature in the face of globalisation and industrialisation. Denmark became the key touchstone, but different political actors in the 1920s — Treatyites, anti-Treatyites, the Farmers’ Party and former Irish party members — chose different parts of the Danish story to emphasise, meaning that an analysis of such rhetoric also can tell us about Irish political differences in the 1920s.

The 1920s brought a greater sense of urgency to the discussions, as the agrarian issue became even more acute after the First World War. The wartime prosperity of Irish agriculture dissipated, and the policy of the coloniser could no longer be as easily blamed, especially as the new Free State government was keen to advance itself as a problem solver rather than merely a mouthpiece for prior grievances. Neither the destruction of the landlord system, started in earnest with the 1903 Wyndham Land Act, nor the creation of a native government had solved Irish rural poverty. This led to an intense desire to find an external model that could be used to accelerate the Free State’s agrarian modernisation, a quest that was seen by its supporters as fundamental to the survival of the whole state. With the stakes perceived as quite high, analysis of Denmark became more common across the 1920s.

Historians of Ireland have devoted much more attention recently to transnational topics and modernising trends, leading to the emergence of a very different picture of Irish nationalism.Footnote ³ In the decades after the revolution, historians often depicted the Free State as a stifling backwater, deliberately spurning most interwar modernising trends. Terence Brown’s Ireland: a social and cultural history is a quintessential example, describing an atrophying and isolated Free State. Similarly, Tom Garvin’s Preventing the future identified the church, a backwards educational system and a misguided language movement as factors in Ireland’s continued lack of development.Footnote ⁴ More recently, though, historians have queried the colouring of Irish nationalism as antimodern and internally focused. Tim McMahon highlighted the Gaelic League’s interest in industrial development, Ciara Meehan demonstrated the modernity of Free State electioneering, Ken Shonk analysed the blend of modernity and tradition in Fianna Fáil’s idealised gender roles, and Stephanie Rains outlined the coming of modern advertising to Ireland, just to give a few examples.Footnote ⁵ There also has been increased focus on Ireland’s status as the ‘first of the small nations’. Monographs by Kate O’Malley and Gerard Keown have underlined Ireland’s role as an exemplar of decolonisation and resistance, both in terms of connections with other (particularly Indian) anticolonial movements and at the League of Nations.Footnote ⁶ Fearghal McGarry and Patrick Mannion edited a volume dedicated to the global influences and ramifications of the Irish Revolution.Footnote ⁷ The Irish Revolution that has emerged from recent scholarship is much more outwardly-engaged and modernising than the one depicted in many previous works.

Scholars have also noted the centrality of agriculture to the nationalist vision. Mícheál Ó Fathartaigh characterises the revolutionary generation as prioritising the creation of an agrarian state: ‘The leadership of the Irish revolution was committed — almost doctrinally — to the salvation of rural Ireland. Like most nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists, they saw their rural communities as the repository of everything that was culturally virtuous about the nation.’Footnote ⁸ Patrick Doyle argues that the co-operative movement was a crucial piece in the development of the modern Irish nation state. According to Doyle, it gave Sinn Féin a blueprint for economic development that foregrounded rural interests and aspired to be democratic, nonsectarian and non-party. The result was ‘a concerted attempt to nurture and build a new type of state in Ireland — one incubated within the rural community’.Footnote ⁹

Historians have also studied the invocation of Denmark as a model of development. Some have looked at this connection more broadly, such as Gerard Keown, who analysed Arthur Griffith’s belief that Ireland would lead a powerful postwar small nations bloc.Footnote ¹⁰ Others have themselves made comparisons between Danish and Irish agriculture, seeking to find a reason for Ireland’s relative underperformance.Footnote ¹¹ Some analysed Irish agriculturalists’ study of Denmark. Patrick Doyle said Irish reformers were told to visit ‘the dairying Valhalla’ of Denmark.Footnote ¹² Ó Fathartaigh argued that Irish nationalists ‘had a fixation with what might be called the Danish precedent. … [Denmark] was like Ireland in that it was small and European, but it was completely unlike Ireland in that it was affluent.’Footnote ¹³ Scholars have, therefore, studied the actual performance of Irish agriculture, its perceived centrality to the new state, its connections to modernity and its inferiority complex with regards to Danish agriculture. They have also revised the notion that the new Irish state was persistently antimodern, isolationist and wedded to a nineteenth-century vision of rural life. This work will further analyse the Danish comparison with a focus on how that comparison illuminates a more complicated relationship between the Free State, nationalism, colonialism and modernity. Much of the work on the transnational element of Irish revolutionary-era nationalism has focused on areas in which nationalists clearly saw themselves as a vanguard. The Danish case was different in that Irish agriculturists admitted that one of the foundational pieces of the Irish economy and nation was in real danger. Initially, that could be blamed on colonialism, but during the 1920s, the condition of Irish agriculture was more often than not blamed on problems within Ireland. This article analyses the ways that Irish nationalists fit modernisation and an admission of ‘backwardness’ into their construction of a post-independence narrative of Ireland’s place in the world.

Despite the rhetoric of self-sufficiency that suffused Irish nationalism, there was a consistent chorus of voices that urged Ireland to learn from other countries. Britain, for obvious reasons, was an undesirable model, so most of the examples were small European nations. Denmark was one of the most frequently-cited paradigms and seemed both an inspiration and a threat, as ‘in the twentieth century the Danes managed to turn their country from an impoverished sandbank into one of the world’s richest countries … in just two generations’.Footnote ¹⁴ The idea was, as one Dáil deputy put it, ‘what the Dane has done, the Irishman can do’.Footnote ¹⁵ While this mimicry may seem something less than inspirational given the revolutionaries’ cultural aspirations, by the end of the 1920s, it had been drummed into the agricultural industry that Denmark was outproducing, out-marketing and outperforming the Free State agriculturally. Comparisons to Denmark allowed the Irish to measure progress without reference to the coloniser.

The focus on external models for Irish modernisation certainly did not start with the Irish revolution. Much of this pre-revolutionary activity was summarised in a report written by a multiparty parliamentary recess committee in 1896.Footnote ¹⁶ The committee included men from across the Irish political spectrum, and it sent special commissioners to study and report on ‘those European countries whose experience in the improvement of their agricultural and industrial condition might guide those interested in the material progress of Ireland’.Footnote ¹⁷ The committee rejected England and other imperial sites as models, instead identifying France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Bavaria, Württemberg, Austria, Hungary and Switzerland as areas of study. The depiction of the state of Irish agriculture in the report’s preamble was fairly dire, stressing that many of these other sites outproduced Ireland despite inferior resources. The correspondents’ reports about other European countries emphasised the various governments’ support for scientific and technical education, co-operative movements and collective marketing. Some discussions of European countries in the report highlighted industrial development strategies, but the primary focus was the urgency of agricultural reform as a precursor to any prosperity, especially as Ireland had ‘one of the simplest and most barbarous systems of agriculture in Western Europe’ and its people lacked the proper industrious and reformist spirit.Footnote ¹⁸

By the time of Sinn Féin’s rise, agrarian reformers primarily emphasised Denmark with fewer references to other nations. There were a number of general factors that made Denmark an attractive analogue in this period. Part of the appeal was a desire to understand Irish farmers’ greatest economic adversary. Denmark had long been an agricultural trading partner of England and expanded its market share at the expense of Ireland during the postwar years. Timothy O’Connell told the College of Science’s Agricultural Debating Society in 1921 that ‘Denmark was a noted rival in Ireland’s trading policy, and a study of conditions obtaining in Denmark was therefore not only interesting, but even imperative to those desirous of elucidating the many economic problems with which the country is grappling at the present time’.Footnote ¹⁹ Aside from economic rivalry, the history, composition and trajectory of Denmark interested Irish nationalists. For one, Denmark fit the European ‘small state’ role that the Free State was trying to occupy. Denmark had also suffered in being geographically positioned closer to larger and stronger powers, having lost Norway to Sweden in 1814 and Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia in 1864. A lecture by Professor Wibberly from University College Cork highlighted that ‘the history of Denmark, like that of Ireland, has been a series of historical nightmares interspersed here and there with day dreams of liberty’.Footnote ²⁰ Senator Benjamin Haughton characterised this as determination in the face of adversity: ‘after being cruelly crushed by the German Empire and an important province taken from it … [i]nstead of throwing up their hands in despair on that occasion, the capitalists and bankers in a very patriotic way, and especially the working classes, put their heads together and so co-operated, one with the other, that today Denmark … is one of the richest countries in Europe.’Footnote ²¹ Appeals to cross-class unity and acceptance of partition probably had particular resonance in the Seanad given the preponderance of wealthy or unionist members, but it also spoke to the experiences of a small country bordering a more powerful neighbour.

Denmark was also governed by farmers. Small to medium farmers became the backbone of Danish society across the last decades of the nineteenth century, and by 1902, the Venstre party, representing farmers, had gained power peacefully and democratically.Footnote ²² Danish agriculture was generally driven by owner-occupiers, as the ownership of land had passed to the middle peasantry across the first half of the nineteenth century. These owner-occupiers commonly worked small-to-medium-sized farms and used their economic strength to wield political influence. This is what Irish farmers expected to happen after independence: the numerically superior farming class would take power and its ethos would dominate society. Denmark’s history offered an example of that happening peacefully.

As a result, Denmark was frequently referenced by the main parties concerned with agrarian reform in the Free State. As with other issues, the Treaty brought out political differences over agriculture. Treatyites tended to emphasise Danish marketing and organisation of export agriculture, as befitted their general focus on larger farmers. Anti-Treatyites, in contrast, pointed to Danish expansion of tillage and promotion of small farmers. The Farmers’ Party was often suspicious of state regulation, but welcomed greater investment from the state in marketing and rural education. There were, though, some areas in which Treatyites, the Farmers’ Party and anti-Treatyites generally agreed, such as the need to reform Irish education and improve the quality of life of Irish farmers. In terms of educational reform, the examples most often cited by Irish enthusiasts were the Danish folk (or people’s) high schools. These schools were the brainchild of Bishop N. F. S. Grundtvig, a nineteenth-century Danish educational and cultural reformer. After Denmark’s defeat in the Napoleonic wars, Grundtvig worried that Denmark would lose its identity and what remained of its political power. He thought a different educational system would minimise these dangers and reverse Danish decline. He wanted schools for ordinary Danes, not just elites, that would emphasise Danish and Nordic culture and fend off the spread of German culture.Footnote ²³ These schools were not specifically agricultural schools — specialised schools started after students completed the folk high school curriculum — but were supposed to give students a broad education in Danish culture. They created, according to Irish observers, ‘the thirst for further knowledge, and the capacity for organisation which characterise the Danish people’.Footnote ²⁴ According to the Farmers’ Gazette, they were intended to create a new class of people who could help to improve and reinvigorate Danish rural life:

This was exactly what Irish reformers wanted: practical education that would create in students both a desire to modernise and a respect for indigenous traditions and rural life. Much like the Gaelic Revival was thought to be a necessary precursor to any Irish self-government, ‘the main cause of the revival of Danish agriculture is directly attributable to the Danish national revival’.Footnote ²⁶ The Danish schools dovetailed with the desire to make Irish education more national and Gaelic after the revolution.

Despite the fact that Danish Folk High Schools focused on delivering a general nationalist curriculum, Irish enthusiasts hoped that they could be a model for a more rural-centred education in Ireland and reverse the trends established by British colonial schools. Emulating Denmark would elevate the position of Irish farmers, a claim that demonstrates the widespread assumption that Irish culture was fundamentally rural culture, or at least favourable to rural interests, and that rural interests had been neglected for decades. Patrick Baxter of the Farmers’ Party attributed Irish backwardness to its delayed educational reform: ‘if the Irish farmers are not in the position of the Danish farmers, we must remember that the Danish farmers got their opportunity fifty or sixty years ago by a system of education to improve their standards of knowledge, and the Irish farmers have not so far got a similar opportunity.’Footnote ²⁷ Farmers’ union stalwart Col. O’Callaghan-Westropp said the same thing: ‘old countries like Denmark’ had several generations’ head start on agrarian training and educational reforms.Footnote ²⁸ The Farmers’ Party programme for 1923 called for ‘the reform of the Educational System in the rural districts to bring it in accordance with the requirements of Agriculture’.Footnote ²⁹ It was generally thought that Denmark did this well, while the Free State did not. Noêlle Ffrench Davies, who taught at a Danish folk high school, celebrated ‘all that the High-School has meant for the development of small nations like Denmark and Finland’, and urged their adoption in Ireland. She claimed they brought together people from all over the country and ‘would not have that urban bias which is too often apparent in the Universities, making their students discontented with life and work in the country. The High-Schools would be country schools, and in close touch with rural interests.’Footnote ³⁰ Farmers’ Party TD Michael Heffernan wanted such schools to change the perception of agrarian life among the next generation: ‘the outlook at present is that agriculture is a job for the least intelligent of the family, and that other members of the family should be brought up to go in for scholarships, to go into the Civil Service, to go into the Civic Guards.’ Danish-inspired schools would ‘bring our people closer together, and it would help to eliminate these selfish and very often spiteful feelings which are prevalent in the country and which prevent the advancement of our people in scientific agriculture, and from co-operating’.Footnote ³¹ Cumann na nGaedheal’s Michael Hennessy argued for model farms in the countryside alongside more traditional educational opportunities, including displays of dirty ‘manure-clad’ Irish cows juxtaposed with cleaner cows as they were kept in Denmark, which again used colonial-era language that Ireland was dirtier than other European countries.Footnote ³² The goal was for education on the Danish model to completely transform Irish agricultural practice and preparation. In O’Callaghan-Westropp’s words, ‘the methods of our fathers were not sufficient to carry us through the intensive competition of today. Until these questions were tackled by those responsible for the education of this country, and a beginning made with the children of nine and ten years, it would never be properly realised that the land, not the publichouse, the drapery store or the desk, was our best asset.’Footnote ³³ This was a call to reassert Ireland’s agrarian identity.

The Danish school model was also supposed to protect Irish culture from anglicisation, as the ‘national’ content of the Danish curriculum in the folk schools was one of its main selling points for Irish reformers. Commentators ranging from Thomas O’Donnell in 1909 to Noêlle Ffrench Davies in the 1920s compared Bishop Grundtvig to Thomas Davis and argued that folk schools in Ireland would finally fulfil the educational vision of Young Ireland.Footnote ³⁴ Eoin MacNeill, the Free State’s initial minister for education, did not want to copy all of the Danish system, but liked that it was ‘intensely national’.Footnote ³⁵ Thomas Derrig, later Fianna Fáil’s minister for education, said that the Gaelic League supported ‘something like the Danish system’ that would provide ‘a good cultural foundation in the Irish language and literature’.Footnote ³⁶

Arguments about education were also deeply enmeshed with worries that Irish life, both urban and rural, lagged behind that of the rest of western Europe, a factor that led to increased emigration. Denmark was often a referent in this debate also, as Irish life was depicted as dreary, dirty and colourless, while Denmark was seen as bright, clean and prosperous. Future National League politician Thomas O’Donnell set up the basic comparison in 1909, finding Copenhagen far superior to Dublin:

He also wrote of ‘the neat, comfortable [Danish] cottages, the well-cooked, substantial if plain meals, the general appearance of comfort presented by the small farmer’s household’ as something that ‘would well repay careful study on our part’. This was in contrast to Irish rural houses, which were ‘of the most primitive character, small, insanitary, and cheerless, a certain hotbed of disease, a black spot on the face of the country’.Footnote ³⁸

However idealised, Denmark was thought to have the kind of rural modernity that Ireland needed to prioritise. Deputy William Sears said that Denmark had a good balance of industrial and agrarian development, which had helped Danish rural life: ‘there are no stagnant, impoverished towns and villages in Denmark.’ Danish farmers’ sons either worked the land or found well-paying jobs, but ‘for the Irish farmers’ sons and daughters there is Queenstown [emigration] or poverty or the dole or half-wages at home’.Footnote ³⁹ The assumption was that the drudgery, dreariness and general hopelessness of rural life was fueling emigration to sites of greater modernity. The United Irishwomen claimed in 1927 that ‘most people deprecate the rush of modern country youth to the towns or to emigrate. Country life is dull, the work is hard, generally dirty, always inconvenient, and children are not educated to take an intelligent interest in country life, which might enable them either to improve the working conditions or rise superior to the drabness of your surroundings.’ The piece also noted a lack of rural health care that was particularly evident during the Spanish flu epidemic: ‘is it any wonder that the young people flee to the towns where they have doctors, nurses, hospitals, and companionship?’Footnote ⁴⁰

While there were divisions on issues of education and quality of rural life — the Farmers’ Party tended to be more skeptical of liberal arts education and city life — nearly all sides in 1920s politics supported educational reforms along Danish lines. Other issues, though, found more division. The Treatyites and Farmers’ Party, generally more concerned with larger farms and export agriculture, often emphasised Denmark’s co-operative movements, collective marketing, scientific agriculture and other measures designed to make exports more competitive in London. The Treatyite government across the 1920s deployed its usual combination of exhortation, shame and legislation to motivate Irish farmers to improve along Danish lines. They also tried to walk a fine line between Sinn Féin notions of self-help and the need for more direct state intervention. A lot of these efforts focused on Danish co-ops. As with much of Cumann na nGaedheal’s rhetoric, this often ended up condemning Irish backwardness in terms scarcely different from that of the former coloniser, criticising Irish farming methods, the lack of collective spirit during an era of nationalism and the poor work culture evident in the Irish countryside.

Horace Plunkett, the godfather of the Irish co-operative movement, wrote approvingly that the Dane has ‘co-operatised their agriculture down to the last egg’.Footnote ⁴¹ Timothy O’Connell observed that ‘Denmark’s great achievements are to be attributed in a large measure to her widespread adoption of co-operative societies — practically every Danish activity being under the control of a society’.Footnote ⁴² According to advocates, Denmark’s co-ops offered a number of lessons to Irish farmers. For one, they provided a way to maintain the small farmer ethos while still competing with larger producers. The Irish Farmer published a letter in 1920 asserting that ‘the study of economic history clearly shows that the day of the small holder is over, because the forces working against him are too many and too great to give him any chance of success’. A 1927 editorial in the Farmers’ Gazette predicted ‘The Great New Force is Group Endeavour’ and that ‘the day of the individualist in business is almost done. The time is gone, too, when the farmer ploughing his lonely furrow was able to work out his own salvation without any particular regard to general movements in the economic sphere.’Footnote ⁴³ Co-ops preserved the small farmer element in a way pleasing to nationalists while creating economies of scale.

They also promoted co-operation between individuals and classes. The Irish Farmer opined during the revolution that ‘the co-operative society is a wonderful instrument for mutual good and for enabling different classes to appreciate each other’s point of view’. It specifically urged farmers to bring agrarian labourers into their co-ops. Irish audiences were told that this kind of collaboration was a feature of Danish co-ops: ‘the Danish co-operative associations are strictly business organisations. They are organised, operate and function purely along economic lines, and are developed free from all political, state, religious, or social class influence.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Such organisation would allow Irish agriculture to transcend sectarian differences from the past, as well as avoid the class conflict that had characterised modernisation in many industrialised nations, as well as during the Irish Land War.

Co-ops also allowed Danish agriculturalists to use the most up-to-date scientific processes in farming. Discussion of these elements of modernisation tended to focus on the butter, eggs and bacon industries, as those were the areas in which Denmark and the Free State were in the most direct competition. Irish farmers in those industries were frequently told that they lagged behind Denmark in adopting the lessons of scientific farming. The Farmers’ Gazette set out the problem clearly:

The Irish farmer fell short in not embracing the blending of modern science with rural life.

The Irish lack of cow-testing societies, which tracked milk production and eliminated unproductive cattle, was particularly criticised.Footnote ⁴⁶ An Irish Farmer article complained: ‘Cow-testing societies are practically non-existent in Ireland, and as a result many cows of inferior milking qualities are kept which do not pay their way. The reverse is the case in Denmark.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Farmers’ Party deputy Richard Wilson noted in 1924 that ‘Three per cent of the cows in Ireland are under test. In Denmark 25 per cent are under test.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Dairy farmers reading the Farmers’ Gazette were told that ‘the example of Denmark points to the backwardness of this country in putting into force a system [cow-testing] which can be shown to be capable of adding so materially to the revenue derivable from the dairying industry’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even after twenty years of propaganda, observers despaired of the inability of Irish farmers to modernise in even the simplest ways on their own. Senator Edward MacLysaght said, ‘The fate of so many of the cow-testing stations throughout the country shows the hopelessness of securing more than a local effect by voluntary effort. Nothing but general national co-operation in methods can possibly have any real effect in these times of mass production and national marketing. … “Watch Denmark” is a very good watchword.’Footnote ⁵⁰ A similar line of argument was advanced to criticise Irish farmers’ unwillingness to adopt Danish practices of winter dairying.

Irish backwardness in the bacon industry was likewise condemned for its unscientific approach. Farmers’ Party deputy Patrick McKenna noted: ‘we had a little practical experience here in Ireland during the war of how Denmark stole a march on us. In Denmark the government subsidises the breeding industry. … An avalanche of pigs coming from Denmark into England week after week is a big fact.’Footnote ⁵¹ Several years later, Patrick Belton TD noted the uniformity of Danish pig stock compared to Irish pigs amidst debate over a Fianna Fáil bill intended to boost bacon production.Footnote ⁵² In the 1920s, Minister for Agriculture Patrick Hogan blamed Irish farmers for doing less with the same resources afforded in Denmark and suggested that if Irish farmers were as organised as Danish farmers, they could produce agrarian commodities more cheaply than the Danes. Hogan grumbled, ‘This is a most exacting country. It requires probably more social service by the State than any other country.’Footnote ⁵³

Denmark was also depicted as an avatar of modern marketing, while Irish branding, quality control and transportation all fell well behind. This came about from a combination of too many individual unregulated suppliers, insufficient quality control at the point of production and a varying amount of product. The result was that British importers thought that Free State products were inherently more risky than Danish ones. Butter was perhaps the most critical failure in this regard. Denmark had a national trademark (Lur) and inspected creameries to make sure that exports met the brand’s standards. Such butter was generally produced by co-operative creameries using standard processes. A London importer told the Free State Commission on Agriculture that Danish butter had a reputation for consistent quality and that ‘the State does everything for its great national industry’, including providing free university education, co-operative banks and land laws that allowed small farmers to own their own plots. He also said that ‘unsettled conditions’ and ‘a great lack of care and a great lack of honesty amongst some managers in making the butter’ had caused Irish dairy exports to plummet since the war.Footnote ⁵⁴ The commission’s final report warned that ‘the evidence we have heard with regard to the condition of the Irish Butter Trade in Great Britain points to the existence of an extremely unsatisfactory state of affairs, and is such that, unless it is radically amended and improved, the whole future of the Irish Dairy Industry is threatened’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Michael Heffernan told the South Tipperary Farmers’ Union that the Irish lack of standardisation and centralisation was costing exporters, as ‘it was well known that Irish butter was being placed on the market in a somewhat inferior condition, owing to defects in the system of marketing … where we were competing with the Danes, New Zealanders, and the Australians, whose produce was sent to market under the control of one board’.Footnote ⁵⁶ This led to a situation where quality and consistency could be expected from Danish butter, whereas the Irish supply varied tremendously.

Patrick Hogan tried to reform the industry throughout the 1920s. The government asked the British Department of Overseas Trade to request from the Danish government copies of its agricultural laws as they were passed, as well as information on livestock breeding, marketing and agrarian regulations more generally.Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1924, he proposed and passed the Dairy Produce Bill, which set up inspection of producers and their products, as well as forcing exporters to meet standards and obtain licenses. In presenting the bill to the Dáil, Hogan admitted that ‘it is felt that we should aim in this country, at least, at something approaching the standard of Denmark’.Footnote ⁵⁸

The problem was that those producing a poor-quality butter — butter that would not have been allowed out of Denmark — were besmirching the reputation of all Free State products in export markets. The fact that Irish producers and exporters of butter would not agree to a common marketing standard irritated Hogan until the end of his ministerial term. In 1931, shortly before leaving office, he lamented that the creameries would have to take up the issue themselves: ‘how could civil servants run a marketing business? It could only be done on commercial grounds. There are some things which the creameries must do for themselves. They must market their own butter. They are doing it in Denmark and other countries.’ Hogan tried to suggest a united marketing scheme but ‘it was turned down and the creameries went back deliberately to individual marketing. I do not think that we should interfere with them until they see the light eventually.’Footnote ⁵⁹ As a result, the reputation of Irish butter continued to suffer abroad. Government reforms had improved the situation, but they had not regained the Free State’s market share, its reputation or the lofty prices it once commanded in butter. Timothy Sheehy, a Cumann na nGaedheal deputy from Cork — itself a former butter exporting centre — congratulated Hogan on at least staving off catastrophe, noting that without government regulation, Irish butter would have been so bad (‘third or fourth quality’) that ‘it would not be sold in England, it would have to be sent to Portugal and to Africa, as it used to be in the old days’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Here again, Ireland was being depicted by Irish politicians as deficient and struggling. There was little talk of England discriminating against Irish butter because of lingering imperial hostility. Instead, it was generally admitted that Irish butter was marketed and presented badly. Thomas Hennessy from Cumann na nGaedheal urged that ‘the cows in this country should present as good a picture of cleanliness as the Danish cows’ in order to rectify these perceptions.Footnote ⁶¹ The association of Ireland with dirtiness recalls colonial rhetoric, as does the notion that it had to be cleaned up for a broader consumer audience. But the Danish comparison perhaps took some sting out of that reference because Denmark had not been part of the Irish colonial relationship.

This failure to innovate, modernise and improve was also evident in the marketing of Irish eggs. Col. O’Callaghan-Westropp told the Commission on Agriculture:

Unsurprisingly, the commission’s final report noted that the price of Irish eggs abroad suffered because of the ‘unsatisfactory conditions under which Irish eggs are marketed. It would appear that eggs of the highest quality frequently fail to realise their true value owing to their dirty condition.’Footnote ⁶³ An article in the Farmers’ Gazette from 1922 called ‘Dirty Irish eggs’ claimed that ‘Bad marketing methods result in a loss of trade’ and unfavourably contrasted the ‘carelessness at home’ with superior Danish and Dutch practices.Footnote ⁶⁴ Patrick Baxter, Farmers’ Party TD, told the agricultural commission that ‘it should be compulsory to market eggs while fresh and also to pack carefully. The copying of the Danish system would be a good and wise step for Ireland.’Footnote ⁶⁵ A Mr Byrne testified that the Irish egg was considered the fifth best in the English market ‘due … to our own neglect’. Byrne concluded: ‘English, Danish, Dutch, and French come before us at present. The countries that come behind us … are the recently liberated Russian states, the Poles, the Chinese, and the Egyptians.’Footnote ⁶⁶ The Free State was again placed near formerly colonised or underdeveloped nations, and Free State exporters commanded a lower price for their eggs in London than did most of their rivals throughout the 1920s.Footnote ⁶⁷

A similar story was told for Irish bacon exports. The Danes produced a better, more consistent product and were rewarded with a higher market share and better prices. The narrative was basically the same as in the other industries: Ireland produced a less consistent product and marketed it badly. A series of letters from a Col. Gibbon to the Irish agriculture department highlighted ‘the essential need of grading to secure uniformity of quality of Irish bacon. Grading is the foundation of the Danish pig industry. … There are many other points but the essential one is that Irish bacon is being driven out of English and even Dublin markets by Danish.’ Gibbon had been part of a deputation from Irish bacon producers that had asked for the department to help them ‘acquire information as to the method of grading pigs practised in Denmark’. His string of correspondence concluded, in December 1924, that ‘every week the industry in Ireland is falling to a worse and worse position in comparison to Denmark’.Footnote ⁶⁸ J. P. Drew, an agricultural science professor at University College Cork, wrote similar jeremiads arguing for the more wholesale adoption of the Danish system. He highlighted Danish use of breeding societies, a national brand, differential payments to farmers based on the class of pig produced and experimental agricultural stations that taught farmers how best to fatten their pigs.Footnote ⁶⁹

In appealing to commercial farmers, Cumann na nGaedheal painted a picture of Denmark as an agrarian society that had embraced modern methods of production and marketing. Through national brands, selective breeding and co-operative production, Danish butter, eggs and bacon expanded their foothold in the London markets. Free State marketing, on the other hand, seemed uncoordinated and counter-productive, as low-quality products were dumped without being distinguished from superior grades. Even more damning, this problem persisted in the era of self-government and could no longer be blamed on colonial neglect.

Treatyites and the Farmers’ Party tended to identify the elements of Danish culture that would help the larger farmer or, like co-ops, would allow smaller farmers to reap some of the benefits of scale. Anti-Treatyites, on the other hand, generally depicted themselves as standing up for smaller, subsistence-level farmers. They were deeply suspicious of attempts to re-capture the British market, seeing dependence on London as a species of neo-colonialism. The economic war with Britain in the 1930s removed much of the incentive for modernisation of the export sector, and Fianna Fáil concentrated more on emphasising self-sufficiency for the home market. What Fianna Fáil took from the Danish example, other than its nationalised education and general prosperity, was Denmark’s emphasis on expanding the area under tillage, as Fianna Fáil did not agree with Treatyite commentators that the day of the small farmer had passed. Irish farmers had briefly expanded the land under the plough during the war, but by the early 1920s had reverted to a livestock and grazing-based mode of production.Footnote ⁷⁰ Danish agriculture switched from grain-focused to livestock/dairy-focused after the middle of the nineteenth century, when Danish grain found increasing external competition.Footnote ⁷¹ Many Irish nationalists who believed in Arthur Griffith’s vision of Irish autarky pointed to Denmark as a place with a better balance of tillage, rural employment and livestock. The increase in tillage was usually connected in the Free State to a desire to break up larger ranches into smaller units that would enable more people to live off the land. Alfie Byrne, an independent TD, concluded that Denmark had become ‘the first [i.e. greatest] agricultural country in Europe’ by applying ‘intensive cultivation to the soil’ and dividing the land into small holdings.Footnote ⁷²

Fianna Fáil deputies made this point frequently. James Ryan, later the Fianna Fáil minister for agriculture, said that ‘Denmark is tilling 61.2 per cent of the total arable land of the country, while the figure for the Free State is 12.4’.Footnote ⁷³ Ryan later quoted a variety of statistics that showed that Denmark outpaced the Free State in production of grain, agricultural exports, net value of agricultural exports, and population per thousand acres. He ascribed all this success to increased tillage: ‘we believe that increased tillage is necessary to maintain a larger population here if we are to follow the example of countries like Denmark, which has practically a completely agricultural population like our own.’Footnote ⁷⁴ The conclusion was that the Free State was underproductive and underperforming compared to Denmark. Fianna Fáil TD Daniel Corkery put this argument in language that explicitly referenced the revolutionary Sinn Féin campaigns:

Corkery’s solution was more tillage. This is why Denmark proved such a powerful example. For one, it was undoubtedly an agricultural country that had preserved a rural culture. In addition, Fianna Fáil could use Denmark to argue that the tillage/grazing debate was not a zero-sum game: Denmark increased its land under tillage while still managing to outproduce the Free State in livestock-based export products. Denmark also was a country of small farmers, much like that envisioned by many Irish nationalists, particularly those who eventually comprised Fianna Fáil. Finally, Denmark did not suffer high rates of emigration, despite its agrarian economy and general lack of industrialisation. According to anti-Treatyites, increasing tillage would put Ireland on the Danish path, which they characterised as preserving the independence and self-reliance of a small state amidst larger neighbours.

The melding of Irish nationalist agrarianism, support for selective modernisation in the agrarian sector and a desire to emulate other small European nations created an impression that the Free State was an agrarian country with a failing agricultural sector. The colonial-style argument that Ireland needed to learn from more advanced peoples was again asserted, although this time it focused on a new subject (agriculture, about which most early-twentieth-century British governments had cared little) and a less fraught target for emulation (Denmark). It also often involved a considerable admission of Irish backwardness and a tendency to blame Irish agriculturalists for the dismal state of their industry. This rhetoric of Irish backwardness generally framed and contextualised the comparisons to Denmark through the 1920s. Dr Rankin, the chairman of the North-West Agricultural Society, told an audience in 1927 that they had to abandon the romantic veneration of old methods:

Richard Beamish, a TD representing business interests, said in the Dáil, ‘through no fault of the farmer, we are fifty years behind in Ireland as regards agricultural education’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Specific industries fared no better. A witness at the Dáil’s Commission on Agriculture said that Ireland was twenty years behind other countries in setting up cow-testing organisations. Another witness said that Free State egg producers and marketers would take at least twenty-five years to catch up to the Danes and Dutch.Footnote ⁷⁸

This kind of rhetoric came both from traditional nationalists and Sinn Féiners. President W. T. Cosgrave starkly stated:

Minister for Finance Ernest Blythe followed suit: ‘[Ireland] certainly is an undeveloped country as compared with, say, Denmark, a country that is smaller and has not as many natural advantages as this country. I do not believe we have great unexplored mineral wealth … but our agriculture is not as developed as it should be, our industry is not developed, our organisation for export … is not developed.’ He concluded: ‘this country is undeveloped, it is really many years behind the times, and it is many years behind other countries — behind its rivals — in its methods and in its organisation, in the use of modern science and art in its industry.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Cumann na nGaedheal’s Martin Roddy claimed that ‘co-operation in other countries has made enormous strides, particularly since the war, and we, in this country, are at least twenty years behind countries like New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and Denmark, competitors in our main markets’.Footnote ⁸¹ Fianna Fáil deputies chimed in along similar lines. Thomas Derrig observed, ‘we are being passed out on the English market not alone by Denmark and old competitors … but we are being passed out by new countries like Finland, Esthonia, and Lithuania’.Footnote ⁸² James Ryan concluded that ‘Denmark has got round the corner before us’ and ‘not only is it not true that we are catching up on Denmark, but … we seem to be going further behind the Danish price in the British market’.Footnote ⁸³ Granted, some of these comments were made to denigrate the opposition, but this kind of rhetoric seemed a far cry from the revolutionary-era Sinn Féin talk of Ireland’s economic power being unleashed in the postcolonial era.

There were several potential nationalist responses to the images of backwardness illuminated by the Danish comparison. A common move for Irish nationalists in colonial times was to turn the negative stereotypes into positive characteristics and celebrate them, as Declan Kiberd has argued.Footnote ⁸⁴ Rural backwardness was repackaged as religiosity, traditionalism and anti-materialism, all trends that nationalists believed distinguished Ireland favourably from Britain and could also sit somewhat comfortably beside calls for a kind of selective modernisation that would be ‘Irish’. The problem with agrarian discussions as they developed across the 1920s, however, was that this move did not work when the comparison was to Denmark, a country the values of which most Irish nationalists shared. Nationalists’ assumption that Irish agriculture would be fixed through the removal of the largely absentee foreign landlord class had also not really borne fruit in the years since the passage of the Wyndham Act. By the 1920s, government in southern Ireland was in Irish hands, and Irish agriculture had not thrived in the landlords’ absence except for a brief boom during the First World War. Sinn Féin rhetoric had promised that once the colonial power left, the tremendous resources of Ireland would be used by a native government to create prosperity and repopulation. The 1920s, to put it mildly, offered little evidence that this was in prospect.

Other than simply valorising rural Ireland, which had been done frequently before the revolution, there were a few ways that politicians in the 1920s could respond to the Danish comparison. They could argue that underdevelopment remained the fault of Ireland’s long colonial past. In the 1920s, a lot of this rhetoric focused on economic neglect, a theme that reached a crescendo among nationalists after the Famine but continued into the twentieth century. Even unionists like Horace Plunkett recognised that the British government had damagingly ignored agricultural issues in Britain and Ireland.Footnote ⁸⁵ Conor Hogan of the Farmers’ Party said that Irish agricultural problems ‘had their origin in the inferior position of Irish interests in the British political and fiscal system’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Minister for Agriculture Patrick Hogan said that farmers of 200–250 acres, who he claimed were the backbone of progressive agriculture in other countries, never felt secure enough in their land tenure to invest in their land or in selective breeding of livestock.Footnote ⁸⁷

Others blamed the mental after-effects of colonialism. Col. O’Callaghan-Westropp linked the failure of agricultural modernisation efforts with ‘centuries of struggling, during which the greater duty of any patriot was to be against the Government’. He continued: ‘the lesson of centuries, and the tradition of the platform, the market-place and the fireside were not to be broken down in a few years, even though there is a home Government in office. We are suffering from the sins — or the virtues, if you like it that way — of our fathers.’Footnote ⁸⁸ Historian Mícheál Ó Fathartaigh agreed that many Irish farmers would not allow inspectors into their farms for fear of being criticised or ridiculed, an attitude that he attributed to ‘a colonial complex’.Footnote ⁸⁹

During the 1920s, some tweaked this argument and claimed that the colonial power had never really left. This was the position taken by most anti-Treaty republicans, who argued that the Free State remained in a neocolonial relationship with Britain that prioritised the livestock export market to Britain over the development of Irish industry. The Free State, according to this view, remained wedded to that model throughout the 1920s, favouring livestock exports to Britain over cultivating an Irish market and increasing tillage. All the legislation that Patrick Hogan thought so important to rural modernisation ended up aiding ongoing connections with Britain. Fianna Fáil’s P. J. Little said, ‘it is just that atmosphere of being half in and half out of the United Kingdom that causes a good many difficulties in various aspects of our economic life’.Footnote ⁹⁰

The most common response, though, was to blame the Irish themselves. Rather than being used as a mirror for the shortcomings of the colonial relationship, invocations of Denmark were often used as a mirror for the shortcomings of the Irish people in organisation and culture. For one, the rural Irish were accused of being poorly organised and unwilling to work for the common good. R. A. Anderson, an official from the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), told the Commission on Agriculture that the Irish had struggled to create co-operative societies voluntarily, unlike the Danes: ‘the Danes have no trouble. The Dane springs to attention when called upon for anything and gives it.’Footnote ⁹¹ Patrick Hogan also blamed the Irish farmer, lamenting ‘How do we expect to compete with Canada, Denmark, Holland and the other countries if we neglect to do the obvious? If the dairy farmers of the country refuse to organise themselves, unless the State does it for them and pays all the expenses of doing that simple task, what can be done?’Footnote ⁹²

Irish farmers were also accused of laziness compared to Danish farmers. This again is an old colonial charge, often leveled at potato farmers, repackaged for a different age. The lack of winter dairying showed that Irish farmers took ‘the easy course turning cows out to be grazed and be milked … from early May until late October, and then to close down, so to speak, for the next four to five months’.Footnote ⁹³ Labour TD Daniel Morrissey said the problems with Irish agriculture were because farmers refused to work and educate themselves: ‘if the average farmer in Ireland would try to educate himself to the same standard as the farmer in Denmark or Holland, we would be well able to compete with him. We have all the advantages.’Footnote ⁹⁴ Farmers’ Party TD Conor Hogan blamed this inertia on poor education and selfishness: ‘the people as yet have not been sufficiently impressed with the need for turning out the first-class article.’ He then said that in some ways, comparisons with Danish farmers were unfair because ‘the Dane is what I might call a docile Teuton. We rather resist; we do not respond so readily. We are individualists, and owing, unfortunately, to bad education, we move on wrong and perverse lines.’Footnote ⁹⁵ Cumann na nGaedheal’s J. J. Byrne said Ireland will never catch Denmark in any type of production if Irish producers ‘keep on in the old Paddy-go-easy way or what is everybody’s business is nobody’s business, as we are now doing, I see no hope whatever for the industrial development of this nation’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Laziness and lack of attention to detail created farms run in a shoddy manner, according to critics. Business deputy Richard Beamish noted that Irish farmers did not feed their cows in ways that maximised milk production and that many fields were left to weeds. He concluded: ‘these are simple problems which were dealt with years ago in Denmark.’Footnote ⁹⁷ The Farmers’ Gazette called the Danish comparison ‘at once a reminder and a reproach. It indicates the great possibilities of increasing the Irish pig output through combined effort, and through that spirit of emulation which binds Danish farmers together like a brotherhood. It is also a disheartening comment on the slipshod fashion in which Irish farmers shift about their stock-keeping methods.’Footnote ⁹⁸ An IAOS representative said that national control for butter worked in Denmark but ‘could not be expected to work successfully under present conditions in Ireland. The difference between manufacturing efficiency between the two countries is too wide. To take an illustrative example, the pasteurisation of cream and its after treatment before churning is perfectly done in every Danish creamery whereas, in Irish creameries, it is far too frequently badly done.’ This was because ‘cleanliness there [Denmark] has become a habit’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Another witness to the Commission on Agriculture said, ‘no country in the world has such a low yield of milk as has Ireland yet its soil and the climate conditions are the best’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Irish agriculture ‘must be prepared to shed some of our received and cherished opinions. … We must pay more attention than we do to the smaller things. In this connection, a study of the habits and energies of Denmark, Belgium, and Holland is very profitable and suggestive. In these countries, there is no waste in agricultural or manufacturing activities.’ In contrast, Ireland had ‘appalling waste’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Thomas Hennessy separated this even further into a rural/urban issue, saying Dublin ‘is the only place where an attempt is made to keep cows in good condition and to keep their quarters clean from manure. Dirty milk which is found in Dublin comes from the country.’ He asked, ‘will you see that in Denmark?’Footnote ¹⁰² Dirty Irish eggs were also caused by ‘carelessness at home. … in some towns there will not be one basket of clean eggs to be seen’.Footnote ¹⁰³ This frustration again evoked colonial rhetoric that the natives were too lazy, uneducated and sloppy to improve. In these cases, though, it was other small European nations that were held up as exemplars, not the coloniser.

Many identified Ireland’s agrarian problems as rooted in rural Ireland’s inherent conservatism and closed-mindedness. This was connected by many commentors to the Irish rural distrust of experts or book learning. Hogan complained that ‘we are in competition with countries where they pay for their scientists and spare no expense on their controlled schemes. Undoubtedly they are right in adopting that attitude. … Here we have these people begrudging anything like a decent recompense to a man who does a decent day’s work.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Professor Magennis, a university TD, condemned the Farmers’ Party for its lack of belief in modern science. He characterised farmers as ‘those who look around with parochial vision and see nothing except what is under their eyes, are unaware of what the big world beyond them has done and is doing. … They refuse to learn from the experience of other people.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Even the Farmers’ Gazette mournfully opined, ‘where want of knowledge and incompetence are not responsible for our failures, it will generally be found that undue prejudice against those who could teach us a few things is accountable for much inefficiency. But the old days have gone beyond recall and the old ways no longer suffice in the face of more competition.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Commentators frequently remarked that there seemed to be little sense of urgency in fixing these problems. Many diagnosed this as the result of a particularly narrow and insular view. The Farmers’ Gazette, after identifying Denmark as Ireland’s chief competitor, stated that ‘healthy rivals on the market stimulates the desire to excel. The latter objective needs much arousing in Ireland. Most farmers, both large and small, go their own quiet way, and unfortunately too many of them are so provincial, so little travelled, so little acquainted with the outside world conditions that they work blindly.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ A Farmers’ Party deputy told the Commission on Agriculture that ‘small farmers in remote districts think of nothing outside their little farms’ and it would be difficult initially to get them to come to lectures on the Danish system.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

This often turned to descriptions of the perceived negativity and pessimism of the Irish countryside. An editorial in the Irish Farmer listed this pessimism as ‘one of the great defects of Irish character at present’. When immediate results were not apparent, ‘the gospel of despair is invoked and we abandon what might be a very promising form of pursuit for some new system or revert to a state of simple inaction and lamentation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Even an article praising Cork farmers for funding a deputation to Denmark conceded, ‘Our farmers generally are often held to be an unprogressive, stick-in-the-mud lot of grumblers’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Discussing the state’s purchase of the Consolidated Creamery Company in 1927, Hogan complained: ‘if this scheme was carried out in Denmark it would be written up in the English Times. … There would not be a party in Denmark but would make use of it for propaganda. It would be pointed out in this Dáil as an example of what a go-ahead and enterprising people they were. But because it was done in this country everybody is out to find fault and show how much better he could have done it.’Footnote ¹¹¹ Labour TD T. J. O’Connell put this down to chronic insecurity: ‘I do not know why it is we are so fond of running down education and other things in our own country because they happen to be Irish. It seems to be a failing of our people.’Footnote ¹¹² At times, this devolved into mere insults. The Farmers’ Gazette wrote in 1924 that Ireland lagged far behind Denmark in cow-testing and in milk production per cow, concluding that ‘Danish farmers are more intelligent and better educated than Irish farmers’.Footnote ¹¹³

These comparisons illustrate a deep postcolonial insecurity about Ireland’s place in the globalising capitalist world. Unlike Irish diplomatic activity, which was often premised on the assumption that the Free State’s global role belied its small size and population, economic comparisons ended up pointing out endless flaws in the newly independent state. Some of this was rooted in a perception that the civil war was a tremendous setback in terms of economics and reputation. But much of it was also the continuation of colonial-era nationalist concerns that Irish agriculture was poorly set up to compete in the modern world. While this could be blamed on some combination of colonial malice and neglect, it also could be attributed to the Irish countryside’s inability to organise in its best interests and pursue goals collectively. This was particularly galling to nationalists who had insisted on Ireland’s agrarian nature and its countryside as the repository of Irishness. Irish nationalists had largely rejected comparisons with Britain by arguing that they did not desire the kind of industrial modernisation found there. Falling short of successful small agrarian nations was another matter altogether.

None of this was a uniquely Irish story. Rural modernisation debates were happening across the globe, from the nascent Soviet Union to the American west. What made the Irish version interesting was the intersection of decolonisation, modernity and a decidedly rural identity. The rhetoric of the First World War had elevated the perceived importance of the small nations of Europe amidst a wave of decolonisation. Sinn Féin had desperately tried to include Ireland under this heading, hoping that it would lead to greater support for Irish independence. At the same time, Sinn Féin claimed outsized importance for Ireland due to its geographical position as an Atlantic gateway, its worldwide diaspora, its provision of a template for anticolonial revolution and the perceived moral character of its people, the island of saints and scholars redux. Once a form of independence was achieved, Ireland made its small nation status the linchpin of its international relations. In economic matters, though, this invocation proved more difficult. Having joined the club of small nations, it was immediately apparent that some of those, particularly Denmark, were doing much better economically than the Free State. Even amidst some Irish nationalist rhetoric about the countryside as a repository of superior old ways and values, Denmark seemed to offer, ironically, a particularly Irish path to modernity: a rural-centred modernity that preserved culture and language, elevated small-to-medium farmers, and deviated from British industrial modernity and urbanisation.

But the comparison often placed the Free State in a bad light. Traditional practices in the Free State were deemed inefficient and colonial-style language was used to damn them as lazy, slipshod, dirty or backwards. Nationalists, including Sinn Féiners who generally adhered to the movement’s depiction of Ireland as an agrarian nation, increasingly saw the Irish countryside as not-Denmark instead of as the more positively framed not-Britain. Danish practices were urged on the population and the failure to meet Danish standards was presented as a catastrophic problem that threatened the continuation of export agriculture. While some responded with despair and anger, the government and co-operative advocates continued pushing standardisation and improvement through a combination of exhortation, voluntary action and legislation, to some effect. As Patrick Hogan said at the December 1927 Annual Congress of Cow-Testing Associations, ‘when all is said and done, [dairy farmers] have every reason to be proud of themselves. They have made more progress during three bad years than the farmers of every country in Europe. Pride is a dangerous virtue, but I think we can afford to run that danger. What we have always lacked in this country is proper pride; we have always been proud of the wrong things.’Footnote ¹¹⁴ In a postcolonial context, after decades of colonial language denigrating the Irish, Hogan sought a source of pride during the first decade of independence. He found it in an industry that was constantly urged to turn colonial disorder into Danish order. This fit with Cumann na nGaedheal’s message of wanting the population to accept both the rights and the duties of self-government, and it also fit with the postcolonial goal of having people look to Dublin, not London, for solutions, even if these particular Dublin solutions often came by way of Copenhagen.