Rural Irish

By Lawrence J. Taylor

Éireanneach

For the Irish and Ireland, identification and location are inextricably linked aspects of self-definition. Ireland, located between 51°30' and 55°30' N and 6°00' and 10°30' W, is an island 480 by 273 kilometers at its longest and widest (N-S and E-W, respectively). It is separated on the east from Great Britain by the narrow Irish Sea (17 to 192 kilometers wide). To the west is the Atlantic Ocean. The island consists mainly of low-lying land whose central lowlands support rich pastureland, agricultural regions, and a large central peat bog. The rim is mountainous, especially in the west, but elevations are rarely higher than 900 meters. Ireland's geographical location—combining proximity to England with peripherality vis-à-vis Europe—has played the major role in defining its historical experience. This relationship has also made the definition of just who and what is Irish problematic. Centuries of British rule culminated in the division of the island in 1922 into two political entities: the Republic (Free State from 1922 to 1949) of Ireland, comprising twenty-six counties and 70,550 square kilometers, and the Province of Northern Ireland, comprising six counties and remaining part of the United Kingdom. The population of the republic is ninety-five percent Catholic and that segment identifies itself unambiguously as Irish. Members of the Protestant minority may choose to emphasize their English ancestry, but they typically call themselves "Irish"—or "Anglo-Irish" as they are identified by their Irish Catholic neighbors. In Northern Ireland the situation is more complex. The substantial Catholic minority—whatever their political affiliation—consider themselves ethnically Irish, while the subjective and objective identification of Protestants has been far more fluctuating and context-dependent. At various points, they may identify themselves as "Irish," "Ulster," "Ulster Protestant," or "British." The merging of religious, geographical, and ethnic labels is also applied from the outside. Irish Catholics may use a variety of such terms to identify their neighbors, and the choice of label nearly always has a political subtext.

The population of the Republic of Ireland was 3,540,643 in 1986, representing an increase of 97,238 persons since the 1981 census. The estimated population for 2015 was 4,892,305. The population, which began a steep decline during the late 1840s famine, has been increasing since the 1961 census and toward the end of the century was finally restored to the level of 1889-90. However, a decline in the birthrate and a leap in the emigration rate between 1981 and 1986 slowed the increase down. The high birthrate in the sixties and seventies made Ireland one of the youngest countries in Europe, and migration to Dublin made the population far more urban (63 percent, versus 37 percent rural), with close to a third of the population living in Dublin County.

Although Irish Gaelic is the official language of the republic, the vast majority of people on both sides of the border speak English. Irish is the daily language of only tens of thousands of inhabitants of scattered Gaeltacht zones, mainly along the west coast. The 2011 Irish census found 110, 642 who use the language at least weekly outside of educational contexts, 77,185 of whom are daily speakers. Irish Gaelic, a Celtic language, has three main dialects and is closely related to Scottish Gaelic. The Goidelic Branch of the Celtic languages also includes Manx (once spoken on the Isle of Man), while the Brythonic Branch is represented by Welsh and Breton. Language has played a central part in the ethnic identity issues previously mentioned. Although Irish Gaelic was by the late nineteenth century very much a minority language, proponents of Irish nationalism (both Protestant and Catholic) favored the restoration of the "national language" as a critical element in the maintenance of a distinct national identity and culture. Government measures meant to ensure this restoration have gradually relaxed, and despite the persistence of Irish in a few enclaves and a lively Irish-language literary and cultural scene, the de facto national language is English.

The earliest inhabitants of Ireland were Mesolithic hunter-gatherers whose sites are dated as early as 8980 BP, but it is the extensive Neolithic settlement that has left a large number of impressive megalithic constructions. The exact origin point of "Celtic culture" in Ireland and its relation to preexisting cultures and/or populations is much disputed. By the first few centuries BC, however, a clearly Celtic culture was established all over the island, with clear connections to continental Celts. Iron Age Celtic society established a lasting economic, political, social, and cultural framework for Irish society. Unhampered by the Romanization that transformed so much of continental Europe, Ireland's cattle-based chieftaincies remained the basic social unit through the early Christian period, giving Irish Christianity a Celtic construction at times at odds with Rome. Celtic Ireland was notably rural, and it was the Vikings who established the major port cities that would continue to play an important role in Irish history (e.g., Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Wexford).

The English presence began with the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman expedition under the auspices of Henry II, in aid of one side in an internecine struggle in the south. The invaders settled, particularly in the southeast, bringing with them a manorial type of settlement and economy, as well as a new language and culture. The succeeding centuries brought much cultural borrowing between native Irish and Anglo-Norman cultures, particularly in areas distant from the capital. The Cromwellian and Williamite wars of the seventeenth century established Ireland as a fully colonial society, with political rule and most landownership in the hands of English-speaking Protestants, and with a native population of mainly Gaelic-speaking Catholics, the vast majority of whom were poor tenant farmers, seen and described by their overlords in increasingly "primitive" terms. The wars also brought the "plantation" of Northern Ireland, the importation of thousands of mainly Presbyterian Scots who took ownership of small farms and settled in areas from which Catholic Irish had been driven. There was also a very considerable influx of Protestant English into the south. For most Catholic tenants, the central issue through the eighteenth century was local land tenure, and a variety of locally based secret societies (such as the "White Boys") were active in retaliatory guerrilla raids against landlords, agents, or collaborators. After the failure of the United Irishmen's rebellion in 1798, land tenure as well as cultural and religious identity came more and more to be linked with nationalism. The nineteenth century saw a series of armed and legislative attempts to win independence and/or redress land issues, culminating in the Easter Uprising of 1916 and the war of independence that followed. Ireland achieved independence as a Free State with the treaty of 1922, which left the six Protestant-majority counties of Ulster in the United Kingdom. The Free State became Eire, or the Republic of Ireland, in 1949. One faction of the Irish—represented thereafter by the Irish Republican Army (IRA)—refused to accept the legitimacy of the boundary. Within Northern Ireland most Catholics—and a few Protestants—are "nationalists" favoring a "United Ireland." The vast majority of Protestants—and very few Catholics—espouse "Unionism", seeking to remain a part of the United Kingdom. After the bloody reaction to Catholic civil rights demonstrations in Northern Ireland in 1969, the British Army began to maintain a strong and active presence that was reduced to a residual training force in 2007 with the decommissioning of paramilitary groups on both sides in the decade following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The Agreement recognized the legitimacy of Northern Ireland while at the same time recognizing aspirations on both sides for eventual reunification with the Republic of Ireland, initially realized in the sharing of some government institutions.

In addition to the political developments already described, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought tremendous economic and social upheaval to Ireland. The population grew increasingly dependent on the potato for sustenance. The great potato famine of the late 1840s (numerous smaller ones occurred before and after) led to evictions and immigration that vastly increased the flow of Irish to America.

While significant numbers went to England—and, to a lesser extent, Canada and Australia—the large proportion of Irish in America has had a great and lasting impact on both the United States and Ireland. Even since 1973, when Eire joined the European Economic Community, cultural (as opposed to economic) attention has been focused on the United States, to which new crops of emigrants continue to go.

Settlement patterns have, of course, varied much over time and place. The dominant Celtic pattern seems to have been scattered fort/cattle pen/households (rath). Peasant communities following a mixed-cattle, agricultural regime—at least in the west of Ireland—lived in small hamlets (clachan or clibin), using a commonly held infield for grain and vegetables and an extensive outfield "mountain" for livestock. This pattern was generally eliminated (though there are a few survivals) through landlord intervention by the middle of the nineteenth century. The demise of such traditional patterns was also accelerated by the famine and emigration. The resulting pattern was of more or less dispersed households and farms, or more concentrated but separate rows of dwellings where geography and land type made that form appropriate. In either case, the "townland" (baile fearainn), which corresponds to the common holding of the traditional cluster settlement, may continue to operate as a socially significant "neighborhood" and its inhabitants may even continue to hold common rights to turf in bogs (for fuel) and grazing land on mountains. Elsewhere, other agricultural and/or geographical factors made for other settlement types, including dispersed large farms, estate villages, or the street market towns that mainly developed in the nineteenth century under landlord regimes.

Agriculture—until recently the overwhelming mainstay of the Irish economy—remains important, although a decreasing percentage of the population is engaged in such pursuits. Much of the extreme west, including Gaeltacht zones, is characterized by under-farmed smallholdings that support a subsistence crop of potatoes and vegetables, combined in varying degrees with sheep farming (whose economic viability depends on government subsidies). In a few areas small- or medium-scale fishing or rural factory employment adds to the income of such families or provides the total support of younger families. Government welfare and old-age pensions nevertheless contribute importantly to the maintenance of many households. Where the farm is viable, it absorbs the labor of the entire family. In smaller holding areas, however, younger family members are often engaged in subsidiary income pursuits. Where available, factory jobs are sought by young men and women. Areas of large farms, such as Meath and West Meath, and the city and suburbs of Dublin exhibit different sociocultural patterns that finally are being studied by anthropologists.

Most arable land is devoted to pasture or hay production, and livestock and livestock products are the most important exports, sold in European and Near Eastern markets. The United States is also a major trading partner. Tourism, greatly promoted in recent decades, provides the single largest item in the country's net earnings. Since the 1960s, attractive conditions have brought many foreign-owned small factories to Ireland, and they along with Irish manufacturing and construction firms have come to employ over a quarter of the labor force. While the city of Dublin has grown at a great rate, the lack of a large industrial or commercial base there has meant much unemployment. Membership in the European Common Market benefited agricultural producers through subsidies and opened up new channels for emigration for professionals, but did little to change the economic marginality of Ireland. The relative prosperity of the sixties and seventies seems to have been based on borrowed money, leaving Ireland with one of the highest per capita foreign debts in the world. Inflation and high unemployment fueled renewed emigration in the late 1980s, mostly to the United States. European Union membership helped overcome Ireland’s marginality, with an influx of foreign investment followed by a property bubble fueling the "Celtic Tiger" economic boom from the mid-1990s until the worldwide financial crisis of 2007. In the west of Ireland, where much of the anthropological fieldwork has been carried out, small farms—where viable—continue to produce livestock and dairy products sold at markets or through local cooperatives.

On the farm, tasks are divided according to gender, corresponding to basic divisions between household, yard and fieldwork. Women engage in childcare and household work, such as housekeeping, cooking, baking, fruit preservation, and endless round of chores. In addition, they do some farm work such as milking, rearing young animals, tending poultry, butter making, and cultivation of vegetables. They also do the farm household’s bookkeeping and accounting, and run the occasional errand. Men were engaged in animal husbandry, most fieldwork (plowing and harrowing), buying and selling of animals, and heavy structural yard work. Tasks could vary depending on type of farm, i.e. dry stock or dairy, and size of farm. The larger, more commercialized farms hire farm laborers and women often find work off the farm.

Although after the seventeenth century the mainly British landlords held proprietary rights, the Irish tenantry continued to pass on the right to tenancies as if they were property. Land reforms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century turned these tenants into peasant proprietors. Common rights were often retained in bogs (for peat fuel) and in extensive mountain pasturelands.

"Clan" is an Irish word and traditionally referred to the agnatic descendants of a common ancestor (e.g., "the O'Donnells"). Such clans had a hierarchical territorial arrangement in traditional chiefdoms, wherein subgroups and individuals were linked to superiors through cattle clientship and/or tribute and service. The local kin group in this system was called a fine. In this way traditional commonage rundale (common land that is distributed among owners in such a way that an individual's holdings are scattered among those of others) was followed by divided inheritance in western Ireland, that gave way, again under landlord action, to enforced undivided inheritance. This continues to be the legal mode today, with the father naming a single son as heir to the farm. The social integrity and relative autonomy of the household farm based on the single heir is a central concern of many influential studies of the culture. However, in some areas at least, the ethos of continuing obligation to and among all siblings makes "stem family" a misleading designation, even for the contemporary rural Irish family.

Irish kinship terminology is of the Eskimo type found also in Western Europe and North America, which distinguishes between gender and generation, and between the nuclear family and other relatives. In small rural communities, where everyone knows everyone, personal names are preferred to kin terms of address.

Sibling solidarity before and after marriage is a striking feature of daily life. Individuals still tend to marry close to home and tend to keep up frequent visiting patterns with siblings, particularly in the west.

The nuclear family is the common family form. Unmarried siblings will very often live together and can be joined by a widowed sibling. In an extreme case men and women may even remain with their natal households after marriage.

Inheritance can vary between partible and impartible inheritance, depending on type and size of farm. Partible inheritance is found on large farms in the east, whereas primogeniture or ultimogeniture is practiced small farms in the west. In situations where there is no male heir women can inherit property.

Mothers, who can be controlling and authoritarian, have an influential role in the socialization and career paths of their children. In the past, sex was a taboo subject and there was minimal sex instruction.

Although an increasing share of the population lives in Dublin, rural culture enjoys a disproportionate importance, and many urban dwellers retain ties to the countryside. While an egalitarian ethos prevails in most rural areas, there are large differences in the "objective" class situation of farmers, ranging from large numbers of very small farmers, mainly in the west, cultivating less than six hectares to graziers farming hundreds of hectares in the east. The class structure of the cities resembles that of other urban areas in Western Europe.

Eire is a parliamentary democracy with a nonexecutive president elected by direct vote. The parliament (Oireachtas) consists of a lower house (An Dail Eireann) elected through proportional representation by a single transferable vote, and an upper house (An Seanad Eireann). The government is headed by a prime minister (An Taoiseach) chosen by An Dail. The two principal political parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, are both centrist in European terms and owe their origins to respective positions on the border question seventy years ago. The trade union affiliated Labor Party is traditionally a close third. A variety of other parties hold fewer seats, most notably Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA. Local government is through the "county council," but changes in the structure of taxation have left these bodies with few real resources and hence little power, making Eire's political system an increasingly centralized one.

In rural areas, the local community and kin groups continue to play the most obvious role in daily social control. The Catholic Church, especially in the person of the parish priest, typically continues to exercise considerable authority, especially in the rural areas. In these same areas the "legitimacy" of the state to interfere with local practice may be more often questioned.

Irish nationalists tend to sum up Ireland's history as "800 years of British oppression and Irish resistance." Academic histories currently debate whether the local uprisings and guerrilla activity of the eighteenth century, the 1798 rebellion, the Fenians of the nineteenth century, and the “troubles” of the late twentieth century can best be understood in terms of class, nationalism, or local interests. From any point of view, however, conflict continued to define the Irish experience, historically, until the first decade of the twenty-first century.

By any measure, Ireland is a profoundly Catholic country and culture. Weekly mass attendance continues at nearly ninety percent of the population, and the influence of the clergy on all social as well as narrowly religious questions is enormous. Until 1996 divorce was illegal and the prohibition on abortion, enshrined in the constitution in 1983, was judicially given exception for mortal peril to the mother in 1992, solidified in statutory law in 2013. The central tenets of the Catholic Church are mainly accepted, but various local heterodox usages continue in some areas. Notably, holy well cults are still an important aspect of local practice. There are more than three thousand holy wells listed for Ireland, most of them associated with a Roman Catholic saint and with beliefs about curing, indulgences, honor, prayer, etc. Major pilgrimage points within Ireland (Knock, Croagh Patrick, Station Island, Our Lady's Island) attract tens of thousands annually, and the Irish are disproportionately represented at Lourdes.

Although most Irish avail themselves of whatever modern medical facilities are available, many will combine such treatments with propitiation of saints and/or pilgrimages to the above sites.

Language remains perhaps the most important form of expressive culture, from the oral narrative that still characterizes much local Irish life to one of the most vibrant literary traditions in Europe. Although less well-known, there is a lively visual art scene in the urban centers. Music, always important in the folk tradition, has made a great resurgence in recent decades with much creative interaction between folk and rock forms.

For the vast majority of Irish, the rites of the Catholic Church are followed scrupulously on the occasion of death. Wakes held in the home of the deceased for two or three days, however, continue to provide a central communal focus to the event in many areas. Appropriation of the powerful act and rites of death has characterized Irish political activity, especially in the twentieth century.

This culture summary is from the article "Irish" by Lawrence J. Taylor in the Encyclopedia of World Cultures, Vol. 4, Europe, Linda A. Bennett, editor. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co. 1994. Additional sections (Trade, Division of Labor, Kinship Terminology, Inheritance, and Socialization) were written in March, 2015 by Ian Skoggard. Leon G. Doyon updated sections on population, language, commerce, politics, and religion in December, 2015.

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