Rural Ireland, and in particular the agricultural sector, is undergoing
significant restructuring, within the context of a rapidly urbanising
society that has been radically transformed economically and socially in
the past ten to twenty years. The decade since the mid-1990s in Ireland
has witnessed an economic transformation, the reversal of emigration
and unemployment, rapid urbanisation and suburbanisation, and the
continued concentration of population in the urbanised East (Central
Statistics Office, 2003). The importance of agriculture as an employer has
declined and the rural economy has become more diversified (Frawley
and O'Meara, 2004).
Young farmers are at the centre of these rural restructuring processes,
making decisions to become farmers or not in the context of competing
pressures. The economic and social landscape of farming is undergoing
transformation, in which the viability of farming as an occupation and as
a lifestyle in modem Ireland is being reduced. This means that some of
the central pillars upon which Irish farm masculinities have been built are
under threat, which has implications for the construction of masculine
identities. However, at the same time, family farming carries with it
certain responsibilities and retains a very strong socio-cultural meaning
and importance, bound up closely with masculine identities. These competing
pressures are in tension with one another and are lived out
through the lives of farmers and their families. They are particularly
apparent in the lives of young farmers and farm successors, who are the
individuals who are facing or have recently faced, decisions regarding
farm succession, inheritance or transfer of holdings, and their own
futures