Nicola Kent

Vegan leather is plastic. Polyurethane on a polyester backing, made from crude oil, coated with a solvent so toxic the EU restricts it, and it peels inside two years. Vegan wool is plastic. Acrylic, which sheds more fibres per wash than any fabric ever tested, around 700,000 in a single load. Vegan fur is plastic. Modacrylic, spun from coal and oil, and a fox coat in a charity shop will outlast every coat made of it. Vegan silk is plastic. Polyester, or wood pulp dissolved in carbon disulphide, a chemical that sent factory workers mad in the 1930s. Vegan down is plastic. A duvet of oil, which stops insulating the day it goes flat and cannot be washed back to life. Vegan suede is plastic. Vegan cashmere is plastic. The pineapple leather, the mushroom leather, the cactus leather: all of it sealed in plastic, because the plant on its own falls apart in the rain. Every wash sends it down the drain. Every wear sheds it into the air. Every year 92 million tonnes of it goes into the ground, where it stays for two centuries. A third of the plastic in the ocean is clothing fibre. It is in the fish. It is in the rain. It has been found in human blood, in the placenta, in the lungs, in the testicles, and in the brain, about a spoonful per head, and rising. That is the compassionate option. Wool goes in the ground and is gone in a year. Leather lasts thirty years and then rots. Silk is a worm. Down is a goose. Fur is a coat that was already a coat. Every one of them grows on an animal, on rain and grass, and returns to the field it came from. The vegan wardrobe is an oil well, cut to look like a farm, and it will be in your grandchildren's blood after the sheep it replaced has been soil for a century. Wear the animal. It is the only fabric that knows how to leave.

Ireland was a cattle nation for 5,000 years before anyone handed it a potato, and the paperwork on the cow goes back further than the paperwork on the country. 3700 BC. On the coast of Mayo, under six feet of bog, lie the oldest field walls on earth. Miles of them, laid out in parallel by people who had just arrived by boat with cattle, to fence pasture. The first thing anyone built in Ireland was a wall to keep a cow in. 1500 BC. Butter goes into the bog. Firkins of it, wrapped in bark, buried in the cold acid peat to keep, and forgotten. Turf-cutters have been digging it up ever since. Some of it is 3,000 years old and still smells of what it was. 700s. The law is written down, and the unit of everything in it is the cow. A man's honour price is counted in cows. A fine is paid in cows. The word for road means the way of cows, and is defined as wide enough for two of them. The word for a boy means a cowherd. The national epic, when it is set down, is about the theft of a bull. 800s. The Irish eat what they call the white foods: milk sweet and sour, curds, whey, butter, cheese hard and soft, and beef and mutton off the same animals. Grain is a side dish and a beer. There is no such thing in Ireland as a meal without an animal in it. 1188. The first Englishman to write the country up complains that the Irish will not plough, live on milk and flesh, and hold that the greatest wealth is liberty. He also notes, puzzled, that they grow tall and straight without any of the care an English mother takes. He does not connect the two. 1366. The Statute of Kilkenny makes it an offence to walk the herd to summer pasture on English-held land. The first law against the Irish cow. 1590s. The potato lands from the Americas. For a century it is a garden plant, a supplement, eaten beside the milk. Nobody yet lives on it. 1601. The Elizabethan commanders write down the strategy for Ulster: the Irish live all summer on their herds, so the way to end the war is to kill the cattle. They kill the cattle, and the north starves into submission. 1652. Cromwell's settlement. The grass changes hands, county by county, and the new owners run it for the English market. 1667. The English Parliament declares the Irish cow a nuisance, bans her from the ports, and Ireland turns its herds into salt beef and butter in barrels, for the Navy and the sugar islands, shipped out through Cork. 1770s. An English traveller records what a labourer is paid: a cabin, a potato patch, and the grass of one cow. The cow is now a wage, held at the landlord's pleasure, and she is the last one the family has. 1841. Three million people are living on the potato and almost nothing else, a working man getting through 14 lb a day, with buttermilk when the cow has calved. The animal food of the island is on the boats. 1845 to 1851. The potato fails. A million die, a million and a half leave, and through every year of it the cattle, the butter and the pigs sail for Liverpool. The clause that offers relief in return for the family's acre clears the land, and the cleared land goes under bullocks. 1906. The Ranch War. Tenants drive the graziers' cattle off the land at night, because the cow that replaced them is still standing where their fathers' cabins were. 1934. The Free State, unable to sell its cattle to England, hands out beef to the unemployed on vouchers. For the first time in 300 years the beef stops at the door. 2026. There are 7 million cattle in Ireland and 5 million people. The country is the largest exporter of grass-fed beef and dairy in Europe, and the Irish drink more milk per head than almost anyone alive. The moment the landlord left, the island went back to the cow as if the potato had never happened. 2023. The Irish Department of Agriculture models a cull of 200,000 dairy cows to meet an emissions target. The cow is 37% of the nation's carbon, the paper says. Five thousand years, and the animal has been fenced for, fought over, counted, buried, bled, outlawed, killed to end a war, shipped past the starving, and finally, when the people got her back, blamed for the weather. Ireland was never a potato country. It was a cattle country that had its cattle taken and was handed a tuber to keep it alive on the rent. The potato is the interruption. The cow is the story, and the story is not over, because somebody in Dublin is drafting the next law against her now.