Bill Hogan and Sean Ferry, who together make up the West Cork Natural Cheese Company, do not have the look of dangerous anarchists, but that is how Ireland's department of agriculture has apparently viewed them for five years.
Hogan and Ferry make two singular, celebrated kinds of hard cheese, 'Desmond' and 'Gabriel': the former, which adopts the old term for the county of the Irish Riviera, is sharp, with a bite like an aged Irish parmesan; the latter, named for the mountain that looms over the romantic little seaside town of Schull at the south-western tip of the country, is more ethereal and subtle. The cheeses, Hogan and Ferry say, reflect their personalities and palates: Sean is a farmer's son from Donegal, earthy and direct; Bill is an exiled New York Irish philosopher, who was inspired to make cheese by a book Gandhi wrote, which was given to him by Martin Luther King when Hogan worked for him as an office boy in Atlanta in 1963.
I wonder how the pair of them divide the responsibilities. 'I make the cheese,' Sean says, smiling. 'Bill does the bullshitting.'
Hogan and Ferry have, it would be fair to say, been through lots together. They learned how to make wholemilk, yoghurt-based, thermophilic, unpasteurised cheese during six months spent high up in the Swiss Alps with a pair of Gruyère masters 20 years ago. They have slowly reintroduced what they learned to this fertile corner of Ireland, part of the great West Cork culinary renaissance. 'This kind of cheese used to be made here,' Hogan explains, in his soft articulated American Irish, 'but they lost the knowledge during the famine. Still, Ireland is a country where the shadows always come back to life ...'
Hogan and Ferry had imagined - having settled here for the prime milk available from seven local herds - that they would quietly spread the gospel of this artisan history and the virtues of slow food in the unforgettable flavour of their cheeses. As it has happened, in recent times, they have been forced to make their argument with greater public vigour.
In the summer of 2002 they had planned on making six or seven tonnes of Gabriel and Desmond in the copper vats of their dairy with its turquoise walls (the colour repels flies, Hogan believes). The department of agriculture was due to come and test one of the herds of cattle that supplied them for TB, but the vets did not arrive on the appointed date. The time frame for the making of Gabriel and Desmond is a short one, since they use only premium milk from cattle during the months when they feed on pasture, so Hogan and Ferry went ahead as normal. Five weeks into production of the cheese, however, one of their herds returned a delayed positive TB test. At a stroke all the cheese that Hogan and Ferry had made - about £20,000-worth - was detained, and their operation was effectively shut down with no compensation.
To someone schooled in civil rights, as Hogan had been, there did not seem to be much justice in this order. He knew that their cheese did not support bacterial life - the long curing process saw to that - but he believed also that the department was working to another agenda: 'They wanted to force us into pasteurisation as they had done with others.' In this case they had chosen the wrong victim.
On the day they were served the detention order Hogan and Ferry stood at the front door of the dairy, shook each other's hands and vowed: 'They are not going to put us out of business.' With the help of solicitor Helen Collins (grand-niece of revolutionary Michael) they read the fine print of EU legislation and discovered they could make an appeal against the department's shutdown, and the banning order on their cheese, which would have put them out of business.
So they went to the courts. 'To support its case,' Hogan explains, around the dining table of the house Ferry has built for himself on the outskirts of Schull, 'the department brought in all manner of health officials and people from this august body and that august body but they didn't bring in a single cheese expert.' Hogan and Ferry brought in Dr Tim Coogan, the leading cheese expert in Ireland. They also produced a welter of science including evidence that Swiss cheese-makers, using a near-identical method, had deliberately introduced billions of TB spores into vats to prove that they did not survive the cheese-making process. They won their appeal and the impounded cheese was pronounced fit to eat.
That was only the beginning: five other court cases have followed in which the department tried to re-establish their case and reject claims for compensation - and enforce pasteurisation. 'I don't want to use words like vindictive, but they are hard to avoid,' Hogan says.
Why did they think the department bore such a grudge?
'Aside from personal things - and we had humiliated them somewhat - they did not want risk-assessment to come into their decision-making. They thought if there was any hint of difficulty with a producer they were just going to shut them down.' They were told in passing by someone in the department that 'the entire food industry of Ireland cannot abide by the decision of a hippy judge in Skibbereen'.
Two years ago Hogan and Ferry, having won another round of their case, negotiated for damages, originally claiming €600,000 for the destruction of their business. A government assessor got that figure down to €275,000. Months later they discovered that the attorney general had decided to pay them nothing because it would open the floodgates to other claimants. They have the option of taking the compensation case to the European Court of Human Rights, but are not sure the time and costs are worth it.
Instead they have a business to rebuild and a victory to savour: the final judgment, which has cost the Irish taxpayer over a million euros, declared that the department had attempted to 'bend the science to support its case' and gave Gabriel and Desmond a clean bill of health. The years of argument have not been easy.
'Sometimes I had these terrible headaches,' Hogan says. 'Sometimes I drank too much. Sean suffered with depression, had to shoulder this financial burden, build his own house, look out for his family.' In order to protect themselves from further attack, they have moved the cheese processing away from Schull and developed a relationship with a dairy cooperative to the north of the county in Newmarket, where Sean currently oversees the cheese production.
'When you are up against the authorities as we were,' Sean says, 'you feel you are getting squeezed and squeezed and there is only so much squeezing you can take.'
Looking back, two things kept them going. One was the fact that Desmond and Gabriel could outlast the department: the longer they spent in solitary confinement, the more mature they became.
The other was the solidarity shown by their customers. 'Because Ireland has this dark history with TB - it was the great scourge here to the extent that if someone coughed in church everyone would walk out - we thought that even the people who loved our cheese might abandon us,' Hogan says. Actually it was quite the contrary: their case became a cause célèbre for Ireland's food culture and they found friends in unexpected places - the poet Derek Mahon, the Cork hurling team - who took their cheese in part as an act of regional, local defiance.
'The tight-asses in Dublin want to make this a one-size-fits-all country,' Hogan says. 'But there are enough individuals out there to protest that.' Their success in the courts has opened the way for other farmer-producers to take on the regulators in the cause of quality and diversity. They all have a fighting chance: Hogan bumped into one of the judges who had sat in their case one morning on Schull's high street and asked him why he had found in their favour: 'I don't want to lose these great products,' the judge said. 'We only just got them.'
After we talk about the court cases Bill Hogan drives me out to his place in the open country on the other side of Schull. It is a tiny ramshackle farmhouse, made in his own rigorous character. Inside a small converted barn, reportedly constructed with timber from a shipwreck, hundreds of rounds of cheese are maturing. The air is sharp with their scent. He then takes me into his spare one-room home, bare boards, hoards of Beckett, a Buddha statue. He lights an old stove, produces a slab of five-year-old Gabriel and explains a bit more about how he got here.
Two things got him into cheese-making, he says. The first occurred when he was 12 or 13. 'We used to go up to Canada from our home near Rochester,' he says. 'One time my father took me into a small raw-milk cheddar plant in southern Ontario, and the flavour was just sizzling. It actually burned my mouth a bit. I never forgot that day, and I never forgot that taste. The other thing was when Dr King gave me Gandhi's book.'
From the time he was very young Hogan was interested in civil rights; his parents were supporters of the Irish republican cause so there was a rebelliousness in him. He joined several different activist groups in Rochester as a teenager. After he graduated from high school he was down south with a friend. The day after President Kennedy was killed his friend took him to Martin Luther King's office in Atlanta. He volunteered to work there and King made him his office boy, franking letters, sometimes drafting them.
He worked there for six months during that winter, was involved in sit-ins, student demonstrations and was, he says, arrested many times. He pulls out some yellowed newspaper cuttings that support this. 'Dr King used to love to have debates. We were both students of philosophy. He liked Hegel, who I thought was an old stodge-bag; I liked Kierkegaard who was modern and lively. One day Dr King gave me this book of Gandhi's, and one chapter of it was about disaffected urban youth in consumer society. Gandhi was talking about how important it was for young people to do real things, to be involved in agriculture, and there was a section on the importance to society of making good cheese ...'
The book made an impact on Hogan, but for a while he ignored its message. He went back up to New York to university, found a job and a flat, had a high time. Just occasionally had a sense of figures shadowing him. 'Everyone who had been associated with Martin Luther King was under surveillance,' he says. 'I took it as a compliment, or as a kind of joke.' When King got murdered and Bobby Kennedy was killed, however, Hogan felt he should get out of American for a while. He went to Costa Rica, took a place at university to study philology and, remembering Gandhi, got a farm up in the hills, kept some cows and eventually started cheese-making. Then, one day, he was in a store selling his cheese and by chance he met the Swiss ambassador.
The ambassador introduced him to a man named Joseph Dubach, a cheese-making guru, who was working for the UN to spread Swiss cheese-making techniques in South America as a way of developing the remote highland areas. Dubach had established hundreds of cheese plants all over the Andes in places where they had great milk and no way to get it to market. By teaching cheese-making Dubach improved the local diet and gave peasant farmers something non-perishable to take to the big cities. 'In a way,' Hogan says, 'I became part of Dubach's system.'
In the mid-Seventies Hogan came to London with a friend who sold Costa Rican coffee, visited Ireland and immediately felt at home. He took on a small farm in Donegal and began farming as he had done in Costa Rica. Sean Ferry, then a teenager, lived on the neighbouring farm and helped out. Dubach invited them over to Switzerland, where for six months they perfected their techniques before setting up business in Schull.
As he talks, sifting through old photos of Atlanta, of himself carrying placards with Dr King and his supporters, it feels in a way as if Hogan's life has come full circle. I wonder if his recent stints in court brought back memories.
'Yes,' he says. 'There was a lot of déjà vu in the sense that, when you get close to the power of the status quo, you always see that a lot of what holds it together is total bullshit. There is no centre to it. Bureaucrats don't want to make life hard for themselves, so they try to ride over people who do things differently.'
Having been part of one movement that made a profound difference to people's lives, Hogan hopes, in a small way, he is now part of another.
'I think we are part of a de-commodification process. In the commodity market there is often no respect whether for the consumer or the land, and, as Gandhi said, that leads to alienation and a kind of numbness.'
Slow food, made with care, full of flavour, is one answer to that. Hogan leans forward in his chair, cuts off a hunk of his cheese. 'There is a lot of talk about biodiversity,' he says. 'Well, proper local diversity in the marketplace is human biodiversity to me. If we have achieved anything, I hope it is that.'
