By Mairtín Ó'Catháin

It’s not discrimination; it’s just the wool. The farmers of east Galway are getting five times the price for a kilo of wool compared with their counterparts in Connemara.

Yet, it is only 'pennies'; 25c in the east of the county, and 5c in the west.

But then the aficionados at the dinner tables of Ireland may claim you cannot beat Connemara lamb, straight from the hills where Pádraig Pearse said that “mountainy men hath sown and soon would reap close to the gates of Heaven”.

The mountainy men might find the poet's thinking somewhat 'woolly'.  There were better days. 

There was a time when a hill farmer in Connemara used to claim that after selling the year's wool, he bought a new car that very evening.

The best an average hill farmer might buy for his wool now would be a couple of gallons of diesel. So what happened?

There are a number of tellings on the story about the new car, and about the demise of the wool market. But in the end, it seems to be down to the microns.

Our rugged native wool could contain anything up to, and above, 35 microns. 

The higher the mountains, it seems the higher the microns; they are the prickly things.

Consumers don’t want the prickliness and tingling of the wool nowadays; it is the cause of itching and aggravation to the skin. 

Synthetics are smoother. So are other types of wool.

There is little use in explaining that there were fine heavy woollen blankets used in the past, and that people slept soundly beneath them.

“The modern world dictates otherwise," Joe McQueenan, owner of the Foxford Woollen Mills in Co. Mayo said.

35 people are employed in the production of woollen throws and scarves at the famed Co. Mayo centre. No Irish wool is used.

Foxford Woollen Mills imports between 50,000kg and 60,000kg of Merino wool annually from New Zealand.

“It just does not come in directly from New Zealand either," Joe explained.

The Connemara blackface would never match the Merino in a throw or a scarf. The Merino has only about 15-20 microns. It is not a fair contest with the hardy blackfaced sheep with up to 35 microns.

So what makes the hill wool prickly? The weather, the rain, the winds.

In nature’s plans, this particular fiber grows rougher to protect the sheep from the elements. No modern lady or gentleman could stand the likes of that stuff scraping their necks. But the sheep farmers feel the pain.

At Forum Connemara, a community development organisation, they are looking at ways of finding other uses, and other markets, for the native wool.

What looked like an environmentally sound idea involving a marriage between the wool and the bog might work.

Nowadays there is a policy of rewetting. The water in the bogs is to be trapped so the mountain will reform. But keeping the water in is a problem. Maybe wool could do the job?

So the enterprising team at Forum Connemara took the first step; the wool from the hills was tested for environmental purity in a leading laboratory in England. The outcome was surprising.

A total of 17 impurities were found. One of them related to nicotine traces in the wool from the high hills. That was the final straw, and the plan would go up in smoke. But not quite yet.

It was established that a person who handled the wool was smoking. Would a thorough wash in a centre in England remove the nicotine, and the other impure invaders? Would it be worth it?

That has yet to be resolved and the person who was smoking has not stopped.

But between smoking and joking, the wool situation is deadly serious. Wool, for instance, is said to be an excellent insulation.

60,000 homes a year are needed. They will all need winter warmth - so if wool is considered as a proposition, new cars might be bought again.