Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

and involved with change in ways which were eventually to disrupt it entirely. Indeed any study of the social profile of Irish society in the 1920s as the new state began to exercise its authority must impress upon the student the overwhelming nature of the problems that a government would have faced if it had attempted real social reorganization in the countryside. For example, overcrowding in housing was not simply confined to urban areas but was endemic in many rural counties as well, particularly in the west of the country. Most of the rural population lived in three-room dwellings, and this was true for each size of family from two to eleven persons. The three-room dwellings referred to in the census of 1926, from which these facts were adduced, were most frequently the whitewashed Irish thatched cottages, single-storey dwellings, seldom more than one room deep, with a kitchen, where a family ate, entertained themselves, met for gossip and talk with neighbours, a sleeping area, and a parlour for important family occasions. This form of dwelling, much loved of poets and playwrights as the heart of Irish pastoral with its permanently burning turf fire as image of its primeval vitality, was the setting throughout much of the country for a scarcely idyllic way of life in which thousands of Irish parents sought to raise their children in dignity despite the difficult circumstances. In 1926 (reckoning on current estimates in other European countries that defined families having more than two persons per room as living in overcrowded conditions) County Mayo had 43 percent of its population in such conditions, Donegal 40.8 percent, Kerry 38.9 percent, Galway 31.4 percent, and Sligo 30 percent, revealing that rural Ireland as well as urban was faced by a serious housing problem.

      Between 1911 and 1926 the housing of the rural population had, however, improved somewhat, though clearly emigration had played its part in ameliorating the problem in a cruel way. There had been a decrease of 42 percent in one-room dwellings, a decrease of 33.9 percent in two-room dwellings, a decrease of 5.8 percent in three-room dwellings, and an increase of 34.1 percent in four-room dwellings. Despite such improvements, the overcrowding in Irish housing was aggravated by the high fertility rate of those Irishmen and women who did marry. As outlined in chapter one, Irish social patterns were characterized both by late marriage and by the large numbers of men and women who chose to remain single or to emigrate. What seems remarkable by contrast with this evidence of Irish inhibition and repression is the fact that the practice of raising large families also characterized Irish social life, particularly in the west of Ireland. The reasons for this apparent anomaly in the Irish character have troubled demographers, and the explanations are necessarily complex.⁴ Be that as it may, in 1926 the figures for Irish fertility showed that married women under forty-five years of age in the state reared on an average 18 percent more children under five years of age than in Northern Ireland, 36 percent more than in Canada, 41 percent more than in Denmark, 44 percent more than in Australia, 70 percent more than in the United States, and 85 percent more than in England and Wales.

      Implicit in idealized literary portraits of Irish rural life in the early decades of the twentieth century was the assumption that a traditional culture still intact, inherited from a rich past, would surely compensate the Irish countryman for any discomforts he might be forced to endure in his humble but heroic condition. Again, the social reality was less exhilarating than the writers presumed. Certainly Irish rural life, particularly in the west of the country, retained aspects of the traditional Irish civilization that predated the Famine and the fairly general loss of the Irish language in the nineteenth century.⁵ The old tales and legends were still remembered by seanachais (storytellers) in parts of the west, a repository of ballad, song, and historical legend had been handed down, the people still observed ancient pre-Christian shibboleths about fairy-thorns, holy wells, the rites of the agricultural year, the calendar customs, magic cures, pishogues (or superstitions), and the lore of the countryside. Folk festivals, folk drama, and mummers and local saints’ days still enlivened the work year. Homes were furnished with the chairs, stools, settle beds, kitchen dressers, bins, cooking utensils, the woven wickerwork baskets and cradles, the artifacts wrought from the ubiquitous osier, that were all the staple images of the Abbey Theatre’s rural sets. Cooking was often still performed on the open hearth, where food was suspended over turf fires and the housewife baked her family’s daily bread. Milk was churned at home, sometimes in the ancient dash-churn which came in various forms in different parts of the country and, since the previous century, in horse or donkey driven dash-churns which lightened this heavy domestic load on the woman of the house. Ropes were still twisted from local materials, from straw, hay, rushes, bogwood, horsehair. The traditional tools of Irish agriculture were still employed, the spades mostly produced in spade-mills established in the nineteenth century, but sometimes even the ancient wooden implement was used. Grain was harvested sometimes with the sickle, more usually with the scythe, and then threshed with a flail, though in some few places this task was performed using the ancient method of beating the grain with a stone. The hiring fair, where young agricultural labourers bearing their own spades sought to be hired by wealthier farmers for the season of May to November, was still a feature of Irish rural life well into the 1930s. Traditional means of transport and carriage still dominated the rural scene: the horse or donkey-drawn cart, even, where the land was poor and rough, the sledge or slidecar. Women could still be seen carrying huge burdens on their heads as they had been for centuries.

      When Irish writers turned to rural Ireland to discern there an unsullied tradition, they naturally highlighted those aspects of that life which suggested an undying continuity, an imperviousness to change, an almost hermetic stasis that transcended history. In so doing they were popularizing a notion of tradition that ignored the degree to which Irish rural life by the early twentieth century was as involved with the processes of history and social change as any other. For the Irish countryman of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while forced by economic circumstances as much as by inclination to retain ways of life that the writers could proclaim as time-honoured traditions, also showed himself adept in acts of adaptation, innovation, and even exploitation. He was ready to use horse-driven threshing machines, prepared to experiment with steam, and in the 1930s he began to welcome the tractor, which would render the agricultural labourer increasingly redundant, into his rural world. By the 1920s the countryman and his family had willingly accepted mass-produced articles of clothing, boots, and shoes. Their diet represented not a traditional set of recipes and ingredients but an intelligent adaptation to post-Famine agricultural conditions, substituting for the milk and potatoes of pre-Famine times, grain, eggs, and occasionally meat as the staples and by the 1920s a ready acceptance of town bakers’ bread, which on important occasions replaced the breads cooked on the cottage fire. The bicycle had introduced a new mobility to the Irish countryside, and life in the long dark winters was made more agreeable by the widespread use of commercially produced paraffin oil lamps which replaced the traditional rushlights.

      Indeed, not only was some social change evident in the countryside in signs of adaptation and modernization but aspects of rural Ireland’s life, the sports of hurling (which was of great antiquity) and football (which had been long played in Kerry), had been enlisted in support of the nationalist cause which in fact brought the rural world increasingly into contact with large-scale national organization and political movements.

      Perhaps even more suggestive of the way the world of the towns and the cities was penetrating the countryside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Ireland was the readiness with which rural dwellers quickly adapted to notions of respectability and social conformity that derived from the town. As living conditions improved somewhat and more and more small farmers abandoned the practice of keeping their livestock with them in the cottage (a practice once widespread in the peasant societies of Europe) and as numbers of them moved to the houses with loft bedrooms and slated roofs provided by the Congested Districts Board (founded in 1891) and by the commission which took over its work in 1923, and as others in the relative affluence of the years 1914–18 expanded their houses or converted them to two-storeyed structures or even built the two storeyed stone houses that date from this period all over the country, the life of the countryman became socially more akin to that of his town cousins than it had been even in the recent past. The parlour in the country cottage or small house, as in the shopkeeper’s house in the town, became the place where the best pieces of furniture were displayed, where, as photography became popular, the family portraits were exhibited, where