Social change and everyday life in Ireland, 1850–1922

Social change and everyday life in Ireland, 1850–1922

Social change and everyday life in Ireland 1850–1922

Caitriona Clear

Copyright © Caitriona Clear 2007

The right of Caitriona Clear to be identified as the author of this

work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

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ISBN 978 0 7190 7437 0

First published 2007

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset

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Printed in Great Britain

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Chronology of Irish politics, 1800–1922

Religion: an explanatory note

Introduction

1 Agriculture

2 Non-agricultural work

3 Education

4 Emigration and migration

5 Marriage

6 Public health

7 Institutions

8 Extreme poverty: vagrants and prostitutes

9 Houses, food, clothes

Conclusion

Appendix

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

So many people had a hand in the production of this book that my only difficulty in writing these acknowledgments is finding synonyms for the words ‘thanks’ and ‘helpful’! The comments of undergraduate, postgraduate and diploma students on material I gave them to read over the years often spurred me towards the re-evaluation of some historical ‘truth’ I had been teaching for some time. Thanks to these most important people, without whom I would not have a job in the first place. Thanks to Professor Steven Ellis and to NUI, Galway for giving me a sabbatical year in 2005, when I put a shape on a very rough manuscript. The biggest thanks is to Pádraig Lenihan: not only did he line, insulate, floor, door, window and wire the garden shed in which I did most of this writing, he also encouraged me all the way. James Hardiman Library, NUI, Galway is a good place to work – Marie Boran, Gerry D’arcy, Josephine Finn, Evelyn Flanagan, Kieran Hoare, Gaby Honan, Margaret Hughes, Mary O’Leary, have my sincere thanks. The library stewards, led by Michael O’Connor, were always helpful and pleasant, while college porters John Devaney, Joseph Devaney, Peter Faherty and Matt Reck went way beyond the call of duty in their kindness, courtesy and humour at all times.

I did much of this research over the years in the National Library of Ireland; my thanks go to its wonderful staff. Peter Murray of the Crawford Gallery, Cork, gave me permission for the lovely cover illustration. The National Archives and the old Public Record Office at the Four Courts, and the old State Paper Office in Dublin Castle, have all been great places to do research – my thanks to their members of staff too.

On the actual book, Niall O Ciosáin read one chapter and made very useful comments. I also either discussed the book (in whole or in part, recently or long ago) with, or received valuable documents, information, insights and encouragement from, the following people, in roughly alphabetical order: Tom Bartlett, Marie Boran, Nicholas Canny, Mary Cawley, Mary Clancy, Kathleen Clear, Paddy Clear, Eileen Clear, Mary Clear (Dublin), the late Sr Gertrude Clear (Boston), Mary Coll, Maura Cronin, Mary Cullen, John Cunningham, Geraldine Curtin, Larry de Cléir, Síle de Cléir, Mary Daly, Leonore Davidoff, Phil Faherty, Tony Fahey, the late Jenny Finlay, Máire Flannery, John Gibbons, Michael Gorman, Alan Hayes, Sinéad Jackson, Sr Conleth Kelly, Claudia Kinmonth, Margaret Larkin, Mary Lawless, Maureen Langan-Egan, Pádraig Lenihan, Gráinne Lenihan, Paddy Lenihan, Bríd Lenihan, John Logan, Maria Luddy, Marie Mannion, Eithne McCormack, Margaret MacCurtain, Dympna McLoughlin, the late Gearóid MacNiocaill, Gerard Moran, Thomas Murtagh, Diarmuid O Cearbhaill, Liam O’Connor, Margaret O hOgartaigh, the late Joe O’Halloran, Tony O’Leary, Ciaran O Murchadha, the late T.P.O’Neill, Gearóid O Tuathaigh, Lionel Pilkington, Jacinta Prunty, the late Agnes Ryan, Patricia Ryan, Pauline Scully, Ide Sionóid, Jim Smith, Penny Summerfield, the late Sr Eileen (Baptist) Synnott, Sr Carmel Synnott, Elizabeth Tilley.

I was very lucky to have inspiring history teachers in the Presentation Convent, Sexton Street, Limerick – a Sr Patricia (a visiting Sister of Mercy who taught us in 1972–73 and whose surname I never learned, a brilliant teacher), Sr Maria Assumpta (who taught Latin but with a great eye for Roman history), Tony Costello and Dave Shee. In the European University Institute in Florence, where I began some of the vagrancy research in 1984–85: Fiona Hayes, Damian Collins, Richard Dunphy, Vincent Eicher, Norbert Hentz, Eve Lerman, Susanna Terstal, Martin van Gelderen, Henk Voskamp, Stuart Woolf and others were very enlightening, and I derived great benefit from the seminar series at the Institute.

At Manchester University Press Alison Welsby and Jonathan Bevan have been courteous, pleasant and prompt at all times, but the anonymous reader of the manuscript deserves my deepest gratitude for pointing out some embarrassing inaccuracies, curbing some flights of fancy and poking at some flabbiness in the narrative.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir! Mistakes, misinterpretations and misrepresentations are all my own.

And an acknowledgment finally to Donncha, Manus, Cora and Síle Lenihan whose only contact with my history persona are my constant mutterings about when I was their age …

Chronology of Irish politics, 1800–1922

Religion: an explanatory note

¹

Because of Ireland’s historical background – the penal laws against Catholics implemented from the late seventeenth century and the novelty of Catholic participation in local and national government – Irish society was extremely self-conscious about religious identity. Schools and other institutions reflected this self-consciousness: any institutions which had their origins in voluntary initiative were run on denominational lines. Catholic nuns were working in at least half of all workhouse hospitals by 1900, and these women – who vastly outnumbered Catholic priests and brothers – were the primary evangelists.²

This was a time of increasingly intensive church-centred practice for all denominations. Many devotional practices from Rome and the Continent were introduced into Catholicism, and there was a greater emphasis on mass attendance. Protestant denominations experienced many revivals, especially in Ulster. The north-east of the country had a concentration of Protestants, although Belfast became progressively more Catholic over this period. Elsewhere, while many (though by no means all) major landowners and ‘gentry’ were Protestants, there were also concentrations of lower-middle-class and working-class Protestants in all the major cities and, outside the nine counties of Ulster, clusters of Protestant farmers and labourers throughout the country, especially in Wicklow, Wexford, Cork, Limerick, north Tipperary, King’s County, Carlow, Kilkenny and Kildare.

People of the Jewish faith, mainly immigrants from Eastern Europe, began to make up a noticeable minority in the bigger cities towards the end of the nineteenth century. They never settled in rural Ireland.

Notes

1 For a discussion of writings in the English language on Irish religious history, see S. J. Connolly, ‘The moving statue and the turtle dove: approaches to the history of Irish religion’, Irish Economic and Social History, Vol. 31 (2004), pp. 1–22; see also Risteard O Glaisne, Módhaigh: scéal Eaglaise, scéal Pobail (Baile Atha Cliath 1998); Louis Hyman, Jews in Ireland: from earliest times to the year 1910 (Shannon 1972); and Dermot Keogh, Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork 1998).

2 Tony Fahey, ‘Nuns in the Catholic Church in Ireland in the nineteenth century’, in Mary Cullen (ed.), Girls Don’t Do Honours: Irish women in education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Dublin 1987), pp. 7–30; and Caitriona Clear, Nuns in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin 1987).

Introduction

Good social history sees people’s lives ‘from the inside out’, in Henry Glassie’s words,¹ evaluating their working lives and social and personal relationships from their standpoint. People do not go about in a permanent state of consciousness of the wider historical trends in which they are playing a part. As well-informed a man as Dr Charles Cameron, leading public health exponent, could scoff, in 1874, at the idea that the Irish population count was falling: ‘It is absurd to believe that the births of Dublin, or any part of Ireland, but slightly exceed the deaths … The prolificness of the Irish has become almost a proverb.’² People made decisions – to train, to emigrate, to leave home, to stay at home, to marry, to stay single – based on the knowledge they had at the time. The historian must appreciate this before judging the quality of life at any given time.

The historian must also juggle the need to portray life as it was, and the need to chart change and the reasons for it. History is not a series of photographs; it is a moving picture. But to over-use ‘eventually’ and ‘in the long term’ is to wriggle out of describing life as it was experienced at various times. Life in Ireland in the seventy years covered by this book was more than an inexorable acceleration towards (and an explanation of) post-independence Ireland, north and south. The trick is to make sparing use of historical hindsight, and to bear in mind Alison Light’s comment about growing up in post-war England:

[W]e didn’t think of ourselves as a class – someone might be ‘hard-up’ or ‘badly-off’ or ‘stuck-up’; it would be many years before being ‘working class’ became my ‘background’. For us there was only the foreground and we were living in the thick of it.³

In this book I look at that foreground and at those who inhabited it.

This is a history of how people worked, where they lived, what they ate, wore, sickened and died (or recovered) from, rather than a history of how they saw themselves, each other and their place in the world. In her book on the Victorian house, Judith Flanders cheerfully admits that she is more interested in S-bends than in sex.⁴ I am more interested in material life than in méntalités. Here, I summarise much useful information about life in Ireland in the period 1850–1922, incorporate some original research, suggest new lines of inquiry and dispute some historical orthodoxies that have grown up over the years.

An undergraduate course entitled ‘Gender, work and family in Ireland 1850–1922’ was the spur for this book. Finding a suitable textbook was difficult. Existing social histories of Ireland either did not incorporate the research of recent decades or focused more on economics than on social issues. While those works remain essential reading for the student,⁵ some kind of summary is sorely needed. Putting multiple copies of books on desk reserve in the library and spending a lot of time at the photocopier, I consoled myself with the thought that there is no need for a textbook as such. Doesn’t a text imply an approved and agreed-on narrative, with subject areas and cut-off points? Wouldn’t such a narrative exclude as much as it included? However it was not easy to get students to discuss different historical viewpoints on various phenomena without their (and my!) knowing what had actually happened. There is no point in comparing Akenson’s view of emigration with that of Miller⁶ without knowing, first of all, how many emigrated and when. It is impossible to debate changes in the quality of life without first pinning down what ailments people were dying of and what facilities existed to help or hinder their battle with disease and hardship. What began as a series of handouts setting out the basic facts evolved into a story I had to write. And somewhere along the way, from the newspapers, Census records, Parliamentary Papers, Poor Law records, local history journals, popular autobiographies and other sources I consulted (some of them for the second or third time), Ireland between 1850 and 1922 stopped being a dress-rehearsal for the twentieth century and started to emerge as a place full of all kinds of people with varying degrees of control over their lives. The questions the social historian always wants to ask are: ‘Did life get better or worse? Were people happier or unhappier?’ Yet before I tried to answer these big questions – to which there are no easy answers – I had to get to know the texture of everyday life. That is why I refer to individual experience whenever possible.

Although Irish language sources are used extensively in this book, the decline of the Irish language is too big a subject for it; so too is religion, though I include a short explanatory note. Politics, local or national, and pressure groups – nationalist, Unionist, trade unionist or feminist – have also been left out, though a chronology of political events has been included. Only passing attention is paid to wealthy landowners and upper–middle-class people in towns and cities, for their diet, clothing, accommodation and health did not differ much from those of wealthy British people at this time, and there are plenty of books about them.⁷ I would not presume to call myself a historical voice for the voiceless, but I have tried in this book to look at people whose lives have not been looked at very often before. This is a summary and a survey; if my only achievement is to identify gaps in the research, I am well pleased. Enterprising students can pick up on suggestions for further research scattered throughout the text.

Notes

1 Though this is not a cultural history, I have, like many other scholars, derived great benefit from the humane and inspiring anthropological work of Henry Glassie. This statement is taken from Passing the Time in Ballymenone: culture and history of an Ulster community (Indiana, IN 1982), p. 86.

2 Charles A. Cameron, A Manual of Hygiene, Public and Private, and Compendium of Sanitary Laws (Dublin 1874), p. 35.

3 Alison Light, ‘The word made flesh’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 46 (autumn 1998), pp. 177–86.

4 Judith Flanders, The Victorian House (London 1993), pp. 2–3.

5 J. J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848–1918 (Dublin 1973); L. M. Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland from 1660 (Dublin 1972); L. M. Cullen (ed.), The Formation of the Irish Economy (Cork 1969); and Cormac O Gráda, Ireland: a new economic history 1780–1939 (Oxford 1994).

6 D. H. Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: a primer (Belfast, 1996); Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish exodus to North America (Oxford 1985).

7 Peter Somerville-Large’s The Irish Country House: a social history (London 1995) is good on Irish landowners and the relatively prosperous urbanites of this period.

1

Agriculture

As far as major trends and changes in Irish agriculture after 1850 are concerned, the bog (so to speak) has been so skilfully, ably and comprehensively stripped that it would be an insult to the hardworking historians who performed this back-breaking task to clamp their sods of evidence in different patterns to make them look somehow new. What follows is a brief summary of their findings, but the bulk of the chapter is a discussion of change and continuity in everyday farm-work in Ireland between 1850 and 1922 for men, women and farm labourers.

Summary of existing research

The most obvious change in Irish agriculture over this period was the gradual transfer, between 1870 and 1909, of ownership from landlords to tenants. The most vigorous phase of the popular countrywide movement led by the Land League, known as the Land War, 1879–82, was succeeded by the less high-profile but arguably more effective (because more irritating and consistent) Plan of Campaign, 1885–91. Successive Conservative governments, meanwhile, gave more and more concessions to Irish tenant farmers. Owner–occupiership was established by the Conservatives in 1903 and was fully completed by the Liberals in 1909. Donnelly and Turner agree that the change from tillage to pasture-farming can be dated to the early 1860s, and that bigger farmers had built up enough prosperity and confidence by the 1870s to unite and challenge the British government and the landlords by 1879 – though Moody, Vaughan, Solow, Clark, Donnelly and Bew differ as to the crucial precipitating factor in the land movement. Other important changes in agriculture over these years