All but a minority of smaller Irish farms are now run by part-time farmers who don't actually produce anything anybody in this part of the world has need of. A large part of the income from the farms is not, to put it delicately, earned in the traditional way, that is, by hard work. It comes in the post.

The European taxpayer subsidises this 'farming' which, while resembling true, needdriven farming, is in reality more of a hobby. The subsidy isn't big but it is certainly useful and many a PAYE worker wouldn't mind it - given that the farmer still owns the land, and can make quite a bit from selling sites and screwing whatever he or she can out of the Roads Authority and so forth.

Fair enough. Someone has to mind the land. And it isn't the farmers' fault that this is what small farming has come to. But it isn't the European taxpayer's fault, either.

Surely they - we - have some kind of right to ask that the farming hobby at least does no harm, even if it's not doing any good?

Irish farmers have by no means been scrupulously careful of the wider environment, no more than the rest of us have been.

Everyone knows a farm with black plastic in every hedge and carcasses in every hollow and household refuse burnt so as not to pay for a bin and fertilisers streaming off the fields and the disposal of animal waste put on hold till the lads get some red diesel above at the border and the engine on the oul' tractor left running all day to save on using the battery. A bad farmer has endless ways of screwing every EU directive there ever was.

Which EU inspectors are supposed to detect. They're supposed to observe whether directives are being complied with. It stands to reason that for this they need an element of surprise. So I've been watching with something like awe the recent campaign by the farming lobby for Irish farmers to be given advance warning of when farms are going to be inspected.

Somehow - I don't quite grasp how - it was argued by the Irish farming lobby that surprise would be unjust to the Irish farmer.

Why - forgive me for asking - would it be unjust to a compliant farmer? Why not co-operate with the inspectors? Isn't the purpose of the inspections to keep Irish farming clean for the sake of Irish agriculture and of all of us?

The farming lobby was busy at the same time with being mean to the rest of us.

An IFA spokesman intemperately rejected a reasonable suggestion by the Labour Party that farmers should allow walkers to walk on uplands which are not being actively farmed.

The spokesman used an ancient rhetorical ploy.

"How would the Labour Party people like it if people could walk through their front gardens, " he enquired? But this isn't about the farmers' front gardens. It's about tens of thousands of acres of desolate, soggy crag and bog, miles from habitations.

Hillwalkers are in search of solitude. They don't want to walk in front gardens. They want to walk on peaks and ridges, preferably without being abused by some person whose only qualification as a guardian of the land of Ireland is that someone left him some of it.

The Labour Party, the spokesman said with traditional self-pity, wants to "trample on the livelihoods of hill farmers by trespassing on their property which in many cases is their sole source of income."

They do indeed want to trample on the hills of Ireland. But what harm would that do to their income? The land is a nice little earner that the owner still owns after years of taxpayers' cheques in the post. Walking on it doesn't affect that.

The IFA didn't even pay the Labour Party proposal the courtesy of a reasoned reply.

Neither did the ICMSA. "All citizens, " its president was quoted as saying, "whether landowners or other property owners, should be ever-vigilant to resist any attempt to effectively nationalise private property." He must think we're awful eejits, unable to distinguish between decent walkers going for a walk on unfarmed land and our houses being ripped from our hands by jackbooted nationalisers. I take it that the gentleman is all in favour of the redistribution of resources when it comes to the cheque arriving from Brussels.

I take it that he wouldn't like me to say that my money is my private property and I don't want to pay it, via taxation, to farmers who won't let me walk across remote land they are not doing anything with. Absolute rights can be tricky things, not to mention terrible PR.

Oh, well. I don't suppose the farming organisations are at all worried about being unpopular. Nothing they do or don't do seems to make any difference to their amazing political power.

They have brought the Minister for Agriculture, Mary Coughlan, to the point where "the minister has already raised the difficulties about inspections at EU level and is seeking approval to give farmers prior notification of inspections". By the end of this week they may well have succeeded in turning inspections into visits by appointment. And with a victory like that under their belt who knows what they'll think up next. Maybe they'll start demanding compensation for people looking at their hills. Maybe they'll start demanding compensation for the cup of tea the wife offered the inspector.

Sorry, boys. Only kidding.