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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 even a gramophone might appear and 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 СКАЧАТЬ