Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001

Various reasons have been suggested for the strange marital abstemiousness of the Irish countryman and woman in the period. It has been argued, for example, that the influence of a French Jansenist professorship at the major Irish seminary, St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, had an unduly puritanical influence on the Irish priesthood and people in the decades following the French Revolution and that this abstemiousness was somehow attractive to a Celtic people whose religious tradition had included masochistic excesses of penitential zeal and whose mythology and imaginative literature had combined male solidarity with heroic idealism.7

Rather than attributing the patterns of rural life in Ireland (marital abstemiousness and emigration) to some innate perversity of the Celtic personality, one is much more impressed with the arguments of the social historians who have shown that these patterns have their origin mainly in the economic and social realities of Irish farming life in the post-Famine period. The argument is as follows. The Famine, in which the Irish rural population, particularly in the congested districts of the west of Ireland, suffered terribly, confronted the small farmer with the abject insecurity of his position and the economic folly of the mode of life tradition had bequeathed him. He did not own the land he worked, and he was likely to be asked to subdivide it to accommodate the domestic and social ambitions of his sons as they sought the early marriages common in the two or three generations following 1780, when, as K. H. Connell reports, “peasant children, by and large, married whom they pleased when they pleased.”8 In the years following the Famine Irish rural life was characterized not by the agreeable carelessness of earlier decades in matters of land and marriage, but by a calculating sensitivity to the economic meaning of marriage and in due course during the Land War in the 1880s by a political will to achieve individual economic security.

Rather than exhibiting that disinclination to bow to the “despotism of fact” that Matthew Arnold had promoted in his On the Study of Celtic Literature in 1867 as a distinguishing feature of the Celtic imagination, the Irish tenant farmer displayed in the post-Famine period an almost Darwinian capacity to adapt in the interests of survival and an attention to the despotism of fact that would have gratified Jeremy Bentham or Mr. Gradgrind. Fathers held on to their land as long as was possible, eventually supported agitation for land reform, which in due course came, chose which one of their sons would inherit the farm, discouraged the early marriages of their children, determined that the holdings would remain intact without subdivision, and faced the prospect that most of their offspring would be forced to emigrate, if not with equanimity then with a resigned consciousness that no other course was possible.

Irish rural life was like a raft afloat in the calm after a great storm. The Famine had betrayed so many that the survivor, conscious of the frailty of his craft and of the likelihood of future buffetings, calculated its precise seaworthiness and supported a social order that allowed no significant role in the countryside for those sons and daughters who could neither inherit the land nor make an appropriate marriage. For them emigration was the only possible route to a life without the frustrations and indignities of their position as helpers about the farm they neither owned, nor, accidents apart, would ever own.9 So, in the first two decades of independence, emigration was much less a reflection of demoralization in the countryside than a measure of continuity in Irish life and an indication of how powerfully the values that had taken hold in the second half of the nineteenth century still held sway.

Some historians have doubted the apocalyptic simplicity of this thesis, suggesting that the Famine rather confirmed and extended to the smaller farmers a way of life that had already established itself in the economy of the wealthier or strong farmers of pre-Famine Ireland.10 Be that as it may, even as late as the 1930s two American anthropologists, C. M. Arensberg and S. T. Kimball, found in County Clare a society and mode of life that preserved substantially intact the values and assumptions, the social and cultural forms that can most readily be accounted for in terms of an economic necessity made all the more stringent by the appalling depredations of the Famine. In the 1930s the prudent social values, reflected in postponed marriage and emigration, that had characterized the world of some larger, wealthier farmers even before the Famine, seemed dominant in smaller and larger farms alike.

County Clare, a remote county that had suffered much in the famines of the 1840s, may seem altogether too unrepresentative an Irish county to bear the weight of such a generalization, but in fact much of the farming life of the country in the early years of independence was similar to that found in Clare in the 1930s. Only in the cattle trade based on farming in Leinster in the east of the country and in dairying in central Munster to the south was agricultural activity highly commercialized. Throughout much of the rest of the country subsistence and mixed agriculture of the kind found in Clare, where farmers farmed on their own behalf with the help of relatives, was predominant.

Nor was it that the anthropologists in Clare had come upon a region which, having escaped by reason of its isolation the tides of modernization, exhibited traditional social patterns in extreme form. Rather the society they encountered there was obviously touched by modernizing forces – it was literate, open to mass communications, served by roads and railway, involved, often to an intense degree, in the democratic process, with a history of revolutionary political activity11 – suggesting the degree to which the values and assumptions of the Irish countryside could be sustained despite a good deal of social and political change. It is therefore reasonable to believe that the life of most farmers in Ireland working their land with family help bore a close if not complete resemblance to what Arensberg and Kimball found in County Clare, even in districts closer to the cities, the centres of modernizing influence. That such literary records of Irish rural life in the twentieth century as we possess from different parts of the country bear out this belief is further confirmatory evidence. Patrick Kavanagh’s autobiographical works, The Green Fool (1938), for example, and that searing indictment of the sexual frustration of the Irish countryman The Great Hunger (1942), set in County Monaghan in the east of the country, display striking resemblances in the ways of life they record to the picture the anthropologists paint of life in the distant west.

Arensberg and Kimball employed the term “familism” to describe the social structure they observed in the Irish countryside in the 1930s. They employed this term to characterise the mode of life of mostly small farmers engaged in raising cattle, sheep, and pigs, whose wives were responsible, in a strict division of labour, for the domestic economy of the house, for the poultry, milking, and dairying. The father was the dominant figure in the family, making all economic decisions, not even allowing his fully grown sons to handle money when produce was to be sold at the local fair in the town. A male child was exclusively looked after by his mother until his first communion was taken in the church at seven years of age. Then he came under the charge of his father and was in the company of his older brothers during that extraordinary “boyhood” which might well last until his fortieth or fiftieth year if he was the favoured heir and had not been forced into emigration or a job in the town.

Daughters of the household learned the ways of farm domesticity from their mothers until the time came for them to receive offers of marriage or to seek a life elsewhere. Marriage was a complicated process in which a matchmaker played a part in the subtle economic valuations that were necessary before the favoured son who would inherit the farm could be allowed to introduce a new bride to the household. Sometimes the introduction of the new woman to the household was effected at the moment when it was possible for the farmer to hand over the main responsibility for the farm to his heir (the old age pension allowed for this possibility when the farmer turned seventy), and when this occurred it was perhaps easier to avoid the tensions which must often have developed between mother and daughter-in-law. The centre of the house was the kitchen, and when the old couple “retired”, they ceased sleeping in that room and moved to a small room at the west of the house, where the family heirlooms, pictures, and religious symbols were displayed. As the anthropologists report, “They move in among the symbols of family unity, among the religious symbols of the house, into surroundings of a certain religious or sacred character.”12 Their hierarchical position was maintained. The father could still occupy the nearest chair to the fire with the older men when they came to visit, and the old couple achieved an almost patriarchal status as the grandchildren were born. The society was strictly hierarchical, and the family unit was its fundamental organizing principle.

Co-operation in farming work between different farmers did exist in a system known as “cooring,” but this was not a sign of any collectivist impulse. Rather, it was a deeply felt system of obligation in the exchange of services and implements between individual households. The only interruption to this strictly familist social system was the help proffered to individuals who could not be expected to reciprocate in any way. A widow, for example, trying to keep her farm together with the help of hired hands, could expect a local family to help her out at harvest time, but again the impulse was not at all collectivist, but, in such instances, charitable. In Arensberg and Kimball’s succinct summary, ‘Economic endeavour, both upon the individual farms and in the form of co-operation between farms, is controlled through the operation of social forces springing from the family.”13

The sons and daughters who could find no significant role in this system had a limited number of choices open to them. They might seek jobs in a nearby town, they might aspire to join one of the professions, or they might emigrate. An option firmly closed to them was the choice of finding a fulfiling role at home, for by the 1920s it was increasingly unlikely that they could final rural occupations that would allow them to stay in the district of their birth. Many of the rural trades and crafts that had flourished in nineteenth-century Ireland had declined in the face of competition from mass-produced goods, and the craftsmen and women of the countryside instead of being absorbed, as such people were in other European countries, by an industrial revolution in which their technical abilities were useful, had been forced into emigration. So even if the sons and daughters of farmers had been willing to accept the loss of social status entailed in following a rural trade, the opportunities to do so were rapidly diminishing and a future as a craftsman or craftswoman would have seemed as bleak as that of an unmarried son or daughter about the farm.

A job in the town usually meant the grocery trade to which a young man became indentured as an assistant until such time as he was able to set up business on his own account, often upon marriage to a farmer’s daughter. The farmer helped with the initial capital required in the form of a dowry. Daughters were also so indentured and might have hoped in time to make a sound marriage within the trade. As exact an awareness of economic responsibilities attended the marital arrangements in the world of provisions and weighing scales as it did in the world of acreage and cattle. The values and familist social structures of the farm world were transferred to the shop and town, thereby ensuring that the cultural and political influence of the small and strong farmers in the country was augmented by that of the grocers and small traders of the town.

For those sons and daughters of farmers who chose to enter one of the professions through attendance at a seminary, at a college of the National University, or at a teachers’ training college, the chances were slim that they could make their lives in their native parishes or indeed that they could even pursue their careers in a rural setting. By the 1920s only a few opportunities remained for a rural professional life in the priesthood and in the legal, medical, and teaching professions. If a boy or a girl wished to avoid emigration, a move to an Irish town or city was almost imperative where, in the trades, professions, and state service, they bore with them the values so indelibly etched upon their personalities by a rural Irish childhood.

The combined force of these two social groups in modern Ireland, the farmers and the tradesmen, together with such of their offspring as could find roles in the professions, was enormously influential in fashioning the political, social, and cultural moulds of the independent state. Their economic prudence, their necessarily puritanical, repressive sexual mores and nationalistic conservatism, encouraged by a priesthood and hierarchy drawn considerably from their number, largely determined the kind of country which emerged in the first decades of independence.

The role of the Irish Catholic church in directing Irish life into the narrow channels of a Jansenistic puritanism has, as was mentioned, been proffered by commentators as one explanation for the fact that so many people for so long in Ireland were able to behave as if those troublesome but exhilarating manifestations of human nature, passion, sexual aspiration, and the erotic principle itself, had been quite excised from the Irish experience. While social historians have been able to provide alternative, rather more credible accounts of a process whereby a society of farmers and shopkeepers developed, resolutely determined to restrain sexuality in the interests of economic realism, the contribution of the church as the institution which aided the process must also be assessed.

A study of the main developments within Irish Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a prerequisite for any informed understanding of the social and cultural history of modern Ireland. The great nineteenth-century struggles in the Irish church between the centralizing, apparently ultramontanist party led by that organizational genius, the first Irish Cardinal, Paul Cullen, and older, local, more independent forms of Catholicism had been resolved in favour of a church loyal to Rome. Concurrent with this political conflict within the nineteenth-century Irish Catholic church had occurred a remarkable devotional revolution whereby continental expressions of piety were introduced to an Ireland which adopted them with an astonishing enthusiasm, so that the texture of modern Irish religious life owes much to the period 1850–75 when that revolution was in large part effected. It was in those twenty-five years that the great mass of Irishmen and women were confirmed in loyalty to the modern Roman church and were provided with the symbols and institutions which might maintain and express that loyalty, which was a source of wonder to many a commentator on modern Irish affairs. The celebration of the mass was regularized (in pre-Famine Ireland the shortage of churches had led to a practice known as “stations”, whereby the priest celebrated mass in various houses in his parish), and new devotions were introduced – the rosary, forty hours, perpetual adoration, novenas, blessed altars, Via Crucis, benediction, vespers, devotion to the Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Conception, jubilees, triduums, pilgrimages, shrines, processions, and retreats. It was the period when popular piety began to express itself in beads, scapulars, religious medals, and holy pictures, and open religious feeling, as one historian has commented, was “organized in order to communalize and regularize practice under a spiritual director.”14 This organization included societies, confraternities, and sodalities. A programme of church-building was undertaken (in 1865 there were 1,842 churches, in 1906 2,417),15 and sound investments were made in land and property so that by the beginning of our period, reflecting on the piety of the people and on the rich inheritance of buildings and investment bequeathed by the nineteenth-century church, it should have been possible for the Irish hierarchy to feel serenely confident about its position in Irish life.

The hierarchy in the first few years of the Irish Free State, despite the inheritance of the nineteenth century, was nevertheless rather pessimistic about the future. The troubled years from 1912 to 1923 had often placed the hierarchy in very difficult political positions. During the Civil War the bishops had antagonized the republicans through their support of the Free State government, and they were disturbed by what they thought were signs of an unravelling moral fabric in a society which had experienced revolution and warfare and which was riskily open to the influence of rapidly developing mass media. Their concern was premature, however, for the great majority of the faithful were to remain loyal to the church practice of the devotional revolution until the late 1960s. Neither the political stance of the hierarchy during the Civil War nor the influence of an increasingly libertarian climate outside Ireland disturbed the religious devotion of Ireland’s Catholic believers. That it was maintained well into the modern period is attributable not only to the power of the church’s apologetic but also to the ways in which Irish Catholicism was precisely adapted to Irish social reality in the period.

Crucial to the institutional and popular achievements of the church in the period following the Famine until the 1960s was the role played by Catholicism in confirming a sense of national identity. The church, with her formally regularized rites and practices, offered to most Irishmen and women in the period a way to be Irish which set them apart from the rest of the inhabitants of the British Isles, meeting the needs thereby of a nascent Irish nationalism at a time when the Irish language and the Gaelic culture of the past were enduring a protracted decline. And the Catholic faith was peculiarly suited to play a role in that nationalist awakening. Bound up in the past with the traditional Gaelic way of life to which the Famine had largely put paid, historically associated with the repression of the eighteenth century, when the native priesthood had heroically resisted the proscription of their faith, permeated with that profound sense of the supernatural which had characterized the countryside for centuries, Catholicism was richly endowed with attributes appropriate to its modern role in the nation’s life. Strengthened by the Roman vigour of the devotional revolution, given a distinct tincture of Victorian respectability by the new discipline imposed on popular expressions of piety, the Catholic faith of the majority of the Irish people became therefore intimately linked with national feeling. Accordingly, from the years of the devotional revolution onward Irish Catholicism increasingly became a badge of national identity at a time when the church also felt able to propound doctrines that enshrined the rights of private property. In a nation where nationalist aspiration was so often rooted in the farmer’s rigorous attachment to his land, all this was to help ensure the church’s continued role in Irish life, even though at difficult moments during the Land War and the War of Independence ecclesiastics felt obliged to oppose the tactics employed by political activists.

It is true, one must point out, that nationalist ideologues, at least from the time of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s, always strove to define Irishness in more comprehensive terms than the merely religious, seeking national distinctiveness in language and culture. But despite brief periods when enthuasiasm for Gaelic revival showed some signs of translating itself into a major social force, transcending sectarian divisions (in the first decade of the twentieth century), Irish nationalists sometimes found themselves acutely embarrassed by the lack of immediately obvious marks of Irish identity apart from a devout, loyal Catholicism. Indeed, some of the strenuous efforts made on behalf of the Irish language were perhaps partially rooted in such embarrassment.

By contrast, few efforts were required for most of the twentieth century to develop Catholicism as a mark of national distinctiveness; the church was incontrovertibly part of Irish reality and the practice of religion an evident feature of national life. In 1926, 92.6 percent of the population of the Irish Free State were returned as Catholic in the census. From all the impressionistic evidence available, we can assume that the great majority of their number were regular in their duties and obligations. Sir Horace Plunkett must be representative of the many writers who have looked on Irish piety in the twentieth century and wondered. “In no other country probably,” he wrote in 1904, “is religion so dominant an element in the daily life of the people as in Ireland.”16

The Irish church was also successful because in spite of its ultramontanist tendencies, it was a national church in the sense that it drew its bishops from its priesthood and its priesthood in the main from the people. It therefore offered opportunities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries for preferment and power in a society that had hitherto had little chance to avail itself of the one or to exercise the other.

This statement requires some expansion. Almost all observers of religious life in the latter half of nineteenth-century Ireland are agreed that during this period, significant numbers of the sons of farmers and shopkeepers were entering the national seminary at Maynooth, County Kildare, to study for the priesthood, as they were in other ecclesiastical colleges in the country. Furthermore, literary and journalistic sources suggest that the social tone of Maynooth in this period and in the early twentieth century was somewhat boisterous and uncultivated, dominated as it was by young men from the land, and that the education provided was rather less than culturally enlarging in its anti-intellectualism and sexual prudery, confirming the rural values in which so many young men had been reared. It seems many a farmer’s son emulated William Carleton’s hero Denis O’Shaughnessy, taking the road to Maynooth with more success than he. Gerald O’Donovan’s interesting novel Father Ralph allows us a glimpse of Maynooth in the 1890s (it is important to remember that priests trained in this period would have exercised their ministry well into the 1930s). The novel, largely autobiographical, recounts the progress of a young boy of a wealthy Catholic family (they have houses in Dublin and in the country) from days of cloistered piety as a child to the tough practicalities of priesthood in a depressed Irish village. Ralph O’Brien at Maynooth discovers the intellectual poverty of the theological education offered in the 1890s.

During the few free days before the arrival of the general body of students Ralph…explored the College: the poky, ill-supplied divisional libraries, without catalogue, order, or classification, or any book that one wanted to read; the rather fine College library, not quite as despicable as the admirer of Marie Corelli found it, but still pitifully unrepresentative of any general culture.17

Ralph finds theological speculation of any kind dismissed by professors and students alike, all religious mystery apparently comprehended in a facile scholasticism. The best among them have a simple uninquiring faith, while the worst employ orthodoxy as a means of personal advancement in the church. For the religious thinker there is nothing:

After a lecture in dogmatic theology by Father Malone, who demolished all the thinkers of four centuries with an axiom culled from Aquinas, delivered in a loud self-satisfied voice and accompanied by much table-thumping, Ralph often sat in his room, limp and confused, hopeless of his own future and of the future of the Church…