A few days ago, I talked about the village markets people used
to have here, and thought I would explain where the animals came
from. This is a sheep next to, I think, a meeting-house on the
Curragh, used since Roman Times for communal grazing. Sheep,
pigs and cows do not belong to massive agribusiness factories
here; they often belong to smallholders, and you will see them
in the space of a backyard. We drive past our neighbours -- some
of whom own several acres, some small plots of perhaps half an
acre -- and most have animals of some kind, This used to be even
more common a few decades ago, in the more traditional country
that my wife remembers. A reporter on RTE, Ireland's main news
programme, recently remarked that the large amount of green
space in Dublin resulted from the large number of people who had
cows or goats in their back gardens, and cattle drives from our
county to theirs were being held into the 1950s. Council
estates, built by the new revolutionary government after the
revolution, were the