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

collections of china ornaments would rest on sills behind the ubiquitous lace curtains. On the wall would hang, gazing at the lares and the penates of the home, pictures of the pope and of Irish patriots and heroes that were the mass-produced icons of country- and town-dweller alike.

      The towns to which the countryside was beginning to approximate in fashion and social forms were in 1926 mainly the many small collections of shops which served as service centres for the inhabitants of small surrounding rural districts. They had most developed⁶ on the basis of the distance that could easily be traversed in the course of a day, spread out evenly across the Irish countryside about ten miles apart. Their population was in each case under 3,000. Larger towns of 3,000–10,000 persons were normally about thirty miles apart; the regional capitals, Dundalk, Athlone, Waterford, Limerick, Tralee, Galway, Sligo, Derry, are at least sixty miles apart. Small towns and villages which were either rebuilt after the ravages of the seventeenth-century wars or were laid out by paternalistic landlords in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century were the commonest elements of the Irish urban scene. Often near a large demesne, where the country house may have been converted into a convent or monastery, they usually comprised a main street with two- or three-storey houses on either side, where shopkeepers both resided and did their business. Sometimes there was a marketplace or a town square and perhaps a small market hall. Some of the larger towns boasted a courthouse built in the classical style. The only recent buildings in such towns would have been the workhouses that were built in Ireland in the 1840s and 1850s under the Poor Law system, National Schools, hospitals, military barracks, railway stations, and the Catholic churches that were built in the post-Famine period declaring by size if not by their position in the towns that they had overtaken the Church of Ireland houses of worship in social importance. By the 1920s many of the towns were in a state of some dilapidation since often they depended on rural areas which were enduring population decline for their economic life blood. Indeed these many small and medium-sized towns in Ireland were to see little physical change or population increase until the 1960s.

      The life of most of these towns was by the 1920s thoroughly anglicized and considerably modernized. As Neil Kevin (Don Boyne) wrote of Templemore, Country Tipperary, his native town, in 1943:

      The fact that the overwhelming majority of the people in Ireland are in step with the rest of the English-speaking world is not deducible from the literature that is written about Ireland…

      Modernized countryside has not yet become “typically Irish” in print, though, out of print, it certainly is. The country town with a wireless-set in the houses of rich and poor, with a talkie-cinema, with inhabitants who wear the evening clothes of London or New York and dance the same dances to the same music – this town has not yet appeared in Irish literature, but it is the most typical Irish country town.⁷

      The main activity of such towns was commerce conducted by family-owned concerns in shops retailing specific goods. Change which dated from about the First World War was at work in this world as it was on the small farm:

      But recently a draper’s life had consisted in moving and dusting, and dressing-out vast piles of tweed, cutting up innumerable lengths of grey calico and army grey shirting, measuring and trimming great quantities of single-width coarse frieze for conversion into the everlasting suits that farmers wore on Sundays, and like quantities of thick white flannel, which their wives made into sleeveless waistcoats or bawneens. Heaps of smelly corduroys, nailed boots, and wide-awake hats, all one model, had made up the stock-in-trade. The day had nearly drawn blood that put twenty pounds in the safe. And, suddenly, there was this new era of readymades, artificial silks, general fancies, and light footwear.⁸

      The traders who sought respectability discouraged haggling over prices and warily eyed their competitors as they dispensed credit to the farm community that could not have existed without it. A concern with social class absorbed their excess energies directing the better-off traders to ally with members of the various professions to found tennis and golf clubs, establishing these as the symbols of polite social improvement. Life for the successful shopkeepers and the professional classes was comfortable if unadventurous. Income tax was low at three shillings in the pound in the 1920s, as were costs in general. Domestic help was readily available. Indeed, the census of 1926 reveals that nearly two-thirds of girls between thirteen and fifteen years of age who did not take up agricultural employment became domestic servants, helping to create a total of 87,000 such persons in the state as a whole. It was easy for well-placed, relatively prosperous people to ignore the social inequalities and problems of a society where the proportion of boys of sixteen and seventeen years who had no gainful employment was 28 percent, three times the proportion of such people in Scotland, England, and Wales, and the very large numbers of people, single women in particular, who were dependent on the productive work of others as they devoted themselves to the care of relatives. Of 899,000 females of twenty years and over recorded in the 1926 census, no less than 233,000, or over one-quarter, were widowed or single and without gainful employment. It allowed them to ignore a society where the number of orphans, widows, and aged persons was abnormally high, particularly in the west of the country. It allowed them also to feel a sense of class superiority to the landless labourers they saw in the marketplaces of their towns on hiring days.

      Those Irish writers, painters, and polemicists therefore who chose to identify and celebrate an ancient rural national tradition in Ireland were required to ignore much of contemporary Irish social reality – the existence even in country districts of professional men and women for example (the 1926 census recorded 55,441, including 14,145 professed clergymen and nuns, 2,051 medical doctors, 16,202 teachers, 5,341 sick nurses in the state as a whole) or the increasingly modernized countryside that was reducing the numbers of farm labourers through redundancy – directing attention by contrast wholly to the tiny regions in the west of the country, where they could affirm that a vestige of ancient Gaelic aristocracy remained:

      The racial strength of a Gaelic aristocratic mind – with its vigorous colouring and hard emotion – is easily recognized in Irish poetry, by those acquainted with the literature of our own people. Like our Gaelic stock, its poetry is sun-bred…Not with dreams – but with fire in the mind, the eyes of Gaelic poetry reflect a richness of life and the intensity of a dark people, still part of our landscape.⁹

      There was something poignant in fact about the way in which so many Irish imaginations in the early twentieth century were absorbed by the Irish west, almost as if from the anglicized rather mediocre social actuality with its manifest problems, its stagnant towns and villages, they sought inspiration for vision in extremities of geography and experience. They looked to the edge of things for imaginative sustenance.

      The 1920s saw the confirmation of the west, of the Gaeltacht, and particularly of the western island as the main locus of Irish cultural aspiration. John Wilson Foster has argued cogently that the image of the western island in pre-revolutionary Ireland had served as:

      …a new creation myth for an imminent order…as the Gaelic Revival and new nationalism gained momentum, especially after the founding of the Gaelic League in 1893, western islands such as the Arans and Blaskets focused the place of impending awakening, providing a symbolic and it was hoped actual site where Ireland would be born again…The western island came to represent Ireland’s mythic unity before the chaos of conquest: there at once were the vestige and symbolic entirety of an undivided nation.¹⁰

      After the War of Independence and the Civil War in a politically divided island with a border truncating the country, the image of the creative unity of the west, the vision of heroic rural life in the Gaeltacht or on a western island served as a metaphor of social cohesion and an earnest of a cultural unity that transcended class politics and history. Islands of Gaelic-speaking people in a sea of anglicization, the Gaeltacht and the western island represented that ideal unity which nationalist ideologues had envisaged and prophesied, but which reality had failed to provide. Douglas Hyde advised an audience at a heady meeting in Dublin’s Mansion House in 1926, after the publication of the Gaeltacht