Politics, Society and the Middle Class in Modern Ireland

Politics, Society and the Middle Class in Modern Ireland

Also by Fintan Lane THE ORIGINS OF MODERN IRISH SOCIALISM, 1881–1896 IN SEARCH OF THOMAS SHEAHAN: Radical Politics in Cork, 1824–1836 LONG BULLETS: A History of Road Bowling in Ireland POLITICS AND THE IRISH WORKING CLASS, 1830–1945 (edited with Donal Ó Drisceoil) ESSAYS IN IRISH LABOUR HISTORY (edited with Francis Devine and Niamh Puirséil) MICHAEL DAVITT: NEW PERSPECTIVES (edited with Andrew Newby)

Politics, Society and the Middle Class in Modern Ireland Edited by

Fintan Lane

Editorial matter, selection and introduction © Fintan Lane 2010 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00826–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Notes on the Contributors

vii

Introduction

1

1 The Men of Property: Politics and the Languages of Class in the 1790s Jim Smyth

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2 William Thompson, Class and His Irish Context, 1775–1833 Fintan Lane

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3 The Rise of the Catholic Middle Class: O’Connellites in County Longford, 1820–50 Fergus O’Ferrall

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4 ‘Carrying the War into the Walks of Commerce’: Exclusive Dealing and the Southern Protestant Middle Class during the Catholic Emancipation Campaign Jacqueline Hill 5 The Decline of Duelling and the Emergence of the Middle Class in Ireland James Kelly

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6 ‘You’d be disgraced!’ Middle-Class Women and Respectability in Post-Famine Ireland Maura Cronin

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7 Middle-Class Attitudes to Poverty and Welfare in Post-Famine Ireland Virginia Crossman

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8 The Industrial Elite in Ireland from the Industrial Revolution to the First World War Andy Bielenberg

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Contents

9 ‘Another Class’? Women’s Higher Education in Ireland, 1870–1909 Senia Pašeta

176

10 Class, Nation, Gender and Self: Katharine Tynan and the Construction of Political Identities, 1880–1930 Aurelia L. S. Annat

194

11 Leadership, the Middle Classes and Ulster Unionism since the Late-Nineteenth Century N. C. Fleming

212

12 William Martin Murphy, the Irish Independent and Middle-Class Politics, 1905–19 Patrick Maume

230

13 Planning and Philanthropy: Travellers and Class Boundaries in Urban Ireland, 1930–75 Aoife Bhreatnach

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14 ‘The Stupid Propaganda of the Calamity Mongers’?: The Middle Class and Irish Politics, 1945–97 Diarmaid Ferriter

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Index

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Notes on the Contributors Aurelia L.S. Annat is a lecturer in history at Trinity College, Oxford, and is involved with the Women’s History Network. Aoife Bhreatnach held an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Her publications include Becoming Conspicuous: Irish Travellers, Society and the State, 1922–70 (Dublin, 2006). Andy Bielenberg is a lecturer in history at University College, Cork. His publications include Cork’s Industrial Revolution, 1780–1880: Development or Decline? (Cork, 1991), Locke’s Distillery: A History (Dublin, 1993), The Shannon Scheme and the Electrification of the Irish Free State (Dublin, 2002), Ireland and the Industrial Revolution (London, 2009) and, as editor, The Irish Diaspora (London, 2000) and Irish Flour Milling: A History, 600–2000 (Dublin, 2004). Maura Cronin is a lecturer in history at Mary Immaculate College in Limerick. Her publications include Country, Class or Craft? The Politicisation of the Skilled Artisan in Nineteenth-Century Cork (Cork, 1994). Virginia Crossman is a reader in history at Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include Local Government in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Belfast, 1994), Politics, Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 1996), The Poor Law in Ireland, 1838–1948 (Dundalk, 2006) and Politics, Pauperism and Power in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Manchester, 2006). Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern history at University College, Dublin. His publications include Mothers, Maidens and Myths: A History of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (Dublin, 1995), A Nation of Extremes: The Pioneers in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 1999), Lovers of Liberty? Local Government in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2001) and The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London, 2004). Neil C. Fleming is an honorary research fellow in the School of History and Archaeology at Cardiff University. His publications include vii

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The Marquess of Londonderry: Aristocracy, Power and Politics in Britain and Ireland (London, 2005) and, with Alan O’Day, The Longman Handbook of Modern Irish History since 1800 (London, 2005). Jacqueline R. Hill is a professor of history at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Her publications include From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford, 1997) and, as editor, A New History of Ireland, VII: Ireland, 1921–84 (Oxford, 2003). James Kelly is Head of History at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, in Dublin. His publications include Henry Grattan (Dundalk, 1993), ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’: Duelling in Ireland, 1570–1860 (Cork, 1995), Gallows Speeches from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin, 2002), Sir Edward Newenham: Defender of the Protestant Constitution (Dublin, 2004) and The Liberty and Ormond Boys: Factional Riot in Eighteenth-Century Dublin (Dublin, 2005). Fintan Lane is a former editor of Saothar, the journal of Irish labour history. His publications include The Origins of Modern Irish Socialism, 1881–1896 (Cork, 1997), In Search of Thomas Sheahan: Radical Politics in Cork, 1824–1836 (Dublin, 2001), Long Bullets: A History of Road Bowling in Ireland (Cork, 2005) and, as co-editor, Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830–1945 (Basingstoke, 2005), Essays in Irish Labour History (Dublin, 2008) and Michael Davitt: New Perspectives (Dublin, 2009). Patrick Maume is an editorial assistant with the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography project. His publications include ‘Life that is Exile’: Daniel Corkery and the Search for Irish Ireland (Belfast, 1993), D.P. Moran (Dundalk, 1995) and The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life, 1891–1918 (Dublin, 1999). Fergus O’Ferrall is a former Director of the Adelaide Hospital Society and currently teaches health policy in Trinity College, Dublin. His publications include Daniel O’Connell (Dublin, 1981), Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy, 1820–30 (Dublin, 1985) and Citizenship and Public Service (Dundalk, 2000). Senia Pašeta is a tutorial fellow in modern history at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford. Her publications include Before the Revolution: Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Elite, 1879–1922 (Cork,

Notes on the Contributors ix

1999) and, as co-editor, Ireland and the Great War: ‘A War to Unite us All’? (Manchester, 2002). Jim Smyth is a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. His publications include The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1992), The Making of the United Kingdom, 1660–1800: State, Religion and Identity in Britain and Ireland (London, 2001) and, as editor, Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Union: Ireland in the 1790s (Cambridge, 2000).

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Introduction

This book comprises 14 essays by historians on the middle class in Ireland from the late eighteenth century to the 1990s. The novelty of this collection lies in its deliberate focus on class and class awareness as crucial factors in Irish socio-economic, cultural and political life in the late modern period and, more particularly, in its attention to the middle class as a locus of extensive social and political power. Unfortunately, dedicated analysis of the middle class – and social classes in general – has remained underdeveloped in Irish historiography, despite a widespread acceptance of its central role in key events and movements, such as, for example, the United Irishmen of the 1790s, the Catholic emancipation movement and the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century, and state building after 1921. Historians have repeatedly accentuated the importance of the middle class in Irish society, but specific interrogations of its development and trajectory; composition and boundaries; internal texture, conflict and contradictions; economic, social, cultural and political power; consumption patterns; relationship with the state; and interaction with other social classes are still uncommon. Indeed, the present collection is the first by a group of scholars to focus exclusively on the Irish middle class. However, while the various contributors collectively are agreed that the power and influence of the middle class must be acknowledged, what is presented here is not the product of a particular school of sociological or historiographical thought; the authors are not consciously promoting a common position on the nature of the Irish middle class as an historical entity, though shared assumptions and similarities of methodological approach between some of the essays may be detected by the reader. The fundamental differences of definition that are apparent in this volume reflect the current state of play in Irish 1

2

Introduction

historiography, where the term ‘middle class’ is widely used as a social category but only occasionally has its boundaries nailed down; indeed, it is not unusual to see the looser plural appellation – ‘middle classes’ – deployed to embrace all those who are not very obviously working class or aristocratic. Irish historians tend to lean on Weberian and ‘commonsense’ understandings of class that are informed largely by notions of social status; Marxism, which pioneered class analysis and posits class society as a complex set of relationships thrown up to suit particular modes of production, has had very little influence historically within Irish university history departments and, unfortunately, is more often than not viewed with grave suspicion. Likewise, the insights of sociology and anthropology have been underutilised, though there has been some improvement in that regard since the 1990s. The impact that Marxism and other forms of class analysis might have had within Irish academia was limited further in more recent decades, in line with international trends, with the collapse of the self-styled ‘socialist’ Eastern Bloc. Indeed, as the British historian Linda Colley has pointed out, ‘in recent decades . . . with the retreat of Marxian analysis, academics . . . have become notably less interested in economic and social divisions than in race, gender, culture and the makers of influential ideas.’ However, Colley, by no means a radical social commentator or left-wing historian, suggests that this is about to change, partly in response to the highlighting of social divisions in recessionary times; the ‘current outcry about “fat cats” ’, she remarked in early 2009, and widespread concern about the income gap between the rich and the poor ‘may all be indicators that social class and its discontents are coming back on the agenda.’1 For some historians, they never left the stage, but Colley is surely correct in detecting an increased interest in the ramifications of class in the past and the present. Nonetheless, understanding class as a social relationship is not as straightforward as recognising its existence, and much work remains to be done on the role and function of social classes historically. The middle class, like all social classes, has changed and adapted to new conditions over time and defining its contours is far from easy. Does it, for example, include professionals such as academics, doctors and lawyers who are employed by others, or should we view only ‘independent professionals’ as truly middle class? Marxism, applied rigidly, would categorise employed academics, doctors and lawyers as ‘wage slaves’ (even if extremely well paid) and, hence, as working class; the ‘common-sense’ consensus, of course, is that they are solidly middle class. Indeed, it would be a rare worker in nineteenth-century Ireland

Fintan Lane

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who would have described an academic employed at Trinity College, Dublin, as anything other than middle class. Elsewhere on the spectrum, does it include self-employed stall-holders who skimmed by financially through selling fruit and vegetables at local markets? Again, a ‘commonsense’ position would probably regard such traders as working class, while Marxists and many sociologists would classify them as part of the petit bourgeoisie (or lower middle class) with distinct class interests. It is clear that the issue of ‘status’ demands consideration, but it is questionable whether this should be at the expense of an appreciation that, ultimately, class power is intrinsically linked to economic power. There are additional problems with regard to gender: how do women fit into conceptions of class society? The American feminist historian Gerda Lerner, for instance, has argued that class is typically expressed in genderic terms and ‘must always be defined differently for men and women and has historically always been different for men and women.’2 Indeed, ditching both Marxist and Weberian positions, she redefined class as describing ‘multilayered locations, relations and experiences, differing according to sex, race, nationality and stage in the life cycle.’3 It is not necessary to accept gender relations as the defining feature of human society to appreciate that historians have traditionally neglected their importance.4 Lerner’s position, of course, privileges ‘identity’ – race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, nation or self – and many historians in recent decades (influenced, to some degree, by postmodernist impulses) have focused on forms of identity as central to comprehending social practices and power relations in our past: how such ‘identities’ interact with class in the Irish historical context deserves greater study. Several of the essays in this book touch on the issues mentioned above, whether directly or tangentially; indeed, it is a wide-ranging collection that illuminates many significant aspects of the Irish middleclass experience. The contributors are all agreed on the importance of the middle class in modern Ireland, particularly in economic and political terms, but also with regard to the formation of new or adjusted social and cultural values. Chronologically, the rise of middle-class power in Ireland can be dated to the eighteenth century and – in a country where the Catholic majority were excluded from the political nation – it was the Protestant middle class that first entered the stage as a significant political force, most strikingly during the mobilisation and agitation associated with the Volunteer movement and parliamentary reform in the 1770s and 1780s. The involvement of a section of the middle class in the republican United Irishmen and in the 1798 rebellion can only be understood in the light of this preceding politicisation. In his essay,

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Introduction

Jim Smyth examines the role of the ‘men of property’ in the momentous political events of the 1790s and, in particular, he looks at the ‘languages of class’ and at how class was articulated in political and cultural terms. In addition, this period is probed in a local context in Fintan Lane’s chapter on the prominent social radical William Thompson, which, although primarily focused on the early nineteenth century, looks also at the divided middle class in late eighteenth-century Cork city and highlights the resentment felt by many Catholics and some Protestants at the concentration of political power in the hands of the Anglican minority. This Protestant control of power, however, was less evident on an economic level and, as the wealth and influence of the Catholic middle class increased through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so too did its desire for political power. The rise of the Catholic middle class has attracted the attention of several historians5 and the campaign for Catholic emancipation, especially in the 1820s, has been seen as a key moment in the creation of a new political nation; Fergus O’Ferrall, the author of a seminal study of that movement,6 examines the trajectory of the struggle for increased rights for Catholics and its aftermath in the local context of County Longford. His chapter is complemented by an essay from Jacqueline Hill, who explores the economic impact of the Catholic emancipation movement on the Protestant middle class. As Hill highlights, the polarisation of existing sectarian divisions within the Irish middle class that occurred during the Catholic emancipation campaign led to economic boycotts of commercial premises, with Catholic activists, for example, calling on their co-religionists to do business solely with their ‘own side’. This politico-religious intra-class division remained a feature of middle-class life throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 The effect of the rising middle class on social and cultural values receives substantial attention in this collection. James Kelly, the author of a history of duelling in Ireland, looks at the decline of duelling as a means of redress for ‘insulted honour’ as middle-class values increasingly frowned on such practices. Lower down the social scale, among the petit bourgeoisie, particular understandings of ‘respectability’ emerged, which seeped into working-class mentalitiés, and impacted on the behaviour and social perspectives of both the lower middle class and the working class (especially its upper echelons) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is an area investigated in Maura Cronin’s chapter on women and ‘respectability’ and is also relevant to Virginia Crossman’s essay on middle-class attitudes to poverty and social welfare in post-Famine Ireland. Gender and, in particular, the role of

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5

women in society are topics explored also by Senia Pašeta and Aurelia Annat. Pa˘seta examines the involvement of middle-class women in higher education in the period between 1870 and 1909, while Annat interrogates the writer Katherine Tynan in a piece that explores the construction of layered identities that included class awareness as a component. Other middle-class figures to receive specific treatments in this book are William Thompson and William Martin Murphy, quite different individuals in terms of their relationship to their class. Thompson, an early nineteenth-century socialist, rejected many of the values of the class from which he emerged, while Murphy embraced them and is remembered popularly in Ireland today as a ruthless capitalist who attempted to tame Dublin trade unionism at the outset of the twentieth century. Patrick Maume focuses on Murphy’s relationship with the Irish Independent between 1905 and 1919, and his interaction with nationalist politics. Industrialists, such as Murphy, represented an economically – and politically – powerful section of the middle class that deserves far greater study and Andy Bielenberg, in his chapter on the industrial elite, provides valuable insights into this group and its place in Irish society. The concluding chapters in this book deal with more contemporary events. Neil Fleming examines the changing role of the middle class leadership of Ulster unionism from the late nineteenth century up to recent times. His essay indicates clearly that the middle class was as powerful a force within Irish unionism (a variant of British nationalism) as it was within Irish nationalism. Aoife Bhreatnach considers the behaviour of middle-class and working-class citizens of what is now the Republic of Ireland towards Travellers between 1930 and 1970. The travelling community has traditionally been neglected by Irish historiography, a neglect that mirrors their treatment within urban communities, where Travellers suffered from discrimination and exclusion.8 Bhreatnach looks particularly at the behaviour of the state. Finally, this wide-ranging collection concludes with an essay by Diarmaid Ferriter on the middle class and Irish politics in the post-war period, up to 1997. Ferriter outlines the contours of middle-class politics on the island, explicating how the various factions manoeuvred within the political system. In sum, the essays contained within this collection in their variation and attention to key moments and movements collectively accentuate the importance of class in Irish history; the influence and power of the middle class has been widely acknowledged, as it is again in this book, but dedicated study of this key social class remains underdeveloped. Ultimately, it is hoped that this work will encourage further research on the topic of class relations in Irish history.

6

Introduction

In conclusion, I would like to thank all those who contributed to the production of this volume and apologise to those who had their lives disrupted during its preparation. In particular, I wish to acknowledge the help and encouragement of Professor Maria Luddy of the University of Warwick; her assistance with this project was much appreciated. Fintan Lane Chapelizod, Dublin

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Linda Colley, ‘Rank and file’, Guardian, 16 May 2009. Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters (Oxford, 1997), p. 154. Ibid. For an example of a gender-focused study of the middle class, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987). See, for example, John B. O’Brien, The Catholic Middle Classes in Pre-Famine Cork (Dublin, 1979); Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Maureen Wall (Dublin, 1989); and Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992). Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy, 1820–30 (Dublin, 1985). A recent and very interesting study by Fergus Campbell, published as the present volume was going to press, argues that the Catholic middle class was largely kept outside the governing elite in Ireland until the establishment of an independent state by revolutionary separatists; see Fergus Campbell, The Irish Establishment, 1879–1914 (Oxford, 2009). However, see Aoife Bhreatnach, Becoming Conspicuous: Irish Travellers, Society and the State, 1922–70 (Dublin, 2006).

1 The Men of Property: Politics and the Languages of Class in the 1790s Jim Smyth

Political rhetoric in Ireland in the 1790s – the sharply conflicting vocabularies of reform and disaffection, liberty, innovation. nation, constitution, Protestant Ascendancy and Catholic relief – was saturated by the assumptions, platitudes and invective, in short by the ‘languages’ of ‘class’. Correlations between social position and political affiliation are scarcely stable or clear-cut, but to contemporaries, as to later historians, it seemed apparent that there were indeed alignments between the two. Conservatives routinely understood challenges to the established order in the idiom of class, just as radicals and reformers often diagnosed society’s ills in terms of a corrupt, unjust and ‘monopolising’ aristocratic elite. And in Ireland, inevitably, class antagonisms overlapped and interpenetrated with religious divisions – Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. We must then attend to the languages of class when considering the conduct of politics in the late eighteenth century. Immediately, however, difficulties – interpretative, conceptual and linguistic – arise. How is ‘class’ determined? By wealth, land, property, birth, status or occupation, or by some combination thereof? A glance at the written word in this period – in almost any conceivable genre, from printed sermons, to travel books, to political pamphlets – reveals the profusion, descriptive imprecision, blurred demarcations and sheer instability of the terminology of class. In addition to classes, these include ‘ranks’, ‘orders’, ‘sorts’, ‘degrees’, ‘stations’, ‘estates’ and ‘interests’. Each of these terms infers relationships, all more or less hierarchical, between socioeconomic groups. Hierarchies might be simple binaries (rich and poor), tripartite (aristocracy, middling sort, lower orders) or more nuanced (nobility and gentry, commercial and professional, working poor and indigent). To the conservative mind, hierarchy, and thus inequality, was 7

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The Men of Property

God-given, immutable and beneficent. Or so the theory ran, for in the age of the French Revolution, of public disorder and political upheaval, comforting metaphors of deference and subordination could no longer disguise nor suppress anxieties about social, even revolutionary, change.

New languages Language change provides a strong index of social and cultural change and the erosion of traditional social and economic stratifications destabilised the nomenclature used to categorise them. In Penelope Corfield’s formulation in late eighteenth-century Britain, ‘ “ranks” . . . were “serried”, [and] “orders” . . . were neatly aligned’, whereas ‘the mutual relationship of one “class” with another was conceptually much more fluid’.1 ‘Classes’, unlike traditional ‘ranks’, ‘orders’, ‘degrees’ and so on, were made not inherited; mutable social constructs not fixed and ‘natural’ social structures.2 Significantly, in these years the usage of ‘class’ was on the increase and with it a concomitant sense of the possibilities of mobility and change. Moreover, these languages packed a normative charge, saluting the upper echelons of society for their ‘gentility’ and denigrating the lower for their ‘vulgarity’.3 Poverty, deemed inescapable, was attributed to individual moral failings – sloth, drunkenness, ignorance, lack of initiative and the like.4 From an opposing standpoint – articulated, for example, by the United Irishman Thomas Russell – the labouring poor were industrious, indispensable and exploited, aristocrats idle and parasitic, and the commercial classes the true font of wealth and prosperity.5 Images of class pulsated with positive or pejorative connotations. In important ways, political conflict represented a conflict of representation. In the matter of ‘class’, Ireland’s 1790s boast a celebrated example of verbal ambiguity: Wolfe Tone’s reliance on ‘that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property’. The meaning of that seemingly straightforward proposition has long since been contested. Historians and political activists on the left have read the phrase literally: by ‘men of no property’, he meant what would later be called the working class.6 Tone’s modern biographer, on the other hand, contends that that simple interpretation ignores late eighteenthcentury linguistic conventions. ‘Property’, she argues, referred ‘first and foremost [to] landed property’. Tone’s ‘men of no property’ were, in fact, ‘the middle classes’.7 Yet, if that is so, it would have surprised his ‘middle class’ contemporaries, particularly Catholics of that description. In 1793, an MP sympathetic to the Catholic cause noted that leading Catholic Committeemen, such as John Keogh (retired silk mercer) and

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Edward Byrne (wealthy sugar-baker), ‘hold all the Catholic property in their hands, and hav[e] the great stake in the country’. And, avoiding any possible confusion, he further states that ‘the much greater part of the landed property is in Protestant hands’.8 That same year, Tone himself refused to confine ‘property’ to land. Refuting accusations that the Catholic Committee were guilty of ‘exciting discontent, tumult and sedition’, he insisted that It is more peculiarly their interest to preserve peace and good order than that of any other body of men in the community. They have a large stake in the country, much of it vested in that kind of property which is most peculiarly exposed to danger from popular tumult. The General Committee would suffer more by one week’s disturbance than all the members of the two houses of parliament.9 Marianne Elliott may have been led astray by the word ‘respectable’. How, after all, could such a positive adjective be applied to the wretched lower orders? During the debates on the Act of Union in 1800, Tone’s old friend, the moderate Whig MP Peter Burrowes appeared to confirm such class derision when he wondered how could it be that Lord Castlereagh, arch-enemy of Jacobinism, having got up pro-union petitions and resolutions by ‘frantic canvas’, ‘should dive into cellars and climb into garrets, to solicit plebian signatures against the ancient constitution of Ireland – that he should set on foot a poll of the populace of Ireland against its constitution – that he should blacken the columns of the government prints with the names of day labourers of the lowest description.’10 Pointed irony should not be discounted here. Certainly, radical propaganda of the 1790s is replete with altogether more affirmative rhetoric. The United Irishmen asserted ‘The necessity of giving political value and station to the great majority of the people’. These types of formulation may be read as primarily political, as examples of the Whig and republican language of inclusive citizenship. However, they also had implicit social resonance, sometimes made explicit, as when the Dublin United Irishmen asked ‘Who makes the rich?’ and answered ‘The poor. What makes the shuttle fly, and the plough cleave the furrows? – The poor. Should the poor emigrate, what would become of you, proud, powerful, silly men?’ ‘The spirit of our laws is aristocratic’, they assert elsewhere, ‘and by no means calculated for the protection of the poor’, instancing the game laws, Stamp Act and criminal code.11 More obliquely, but unmistakably, radicals asserted the moral ‘station’ of the lower classes by subverting and co-opting Edmund Burke’s notorious denigration of them as ‘the swinish multitude’. Thomas

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Spence’s Pigs Meat: Lessons for the Swinish Multitude is only the best known of the many English publications which redeployed Burke’s epithet ironically. In Ireland, William Drennan used the phrase in that manner in a 1795 pamphlet, while the rebel army which marched on Antrim town on 7 June 1798 struck up a song, ‘The Swinish Multitude’.12 To be sure, middle-class radical attitudes towards ‘the people’ could be patronising and ambivalent. For instance, prominent United Irishmen opposed the proto-trade unionism of workers ‘combinations’.13 As a number of them were themselves employers, especially in the textile trades, that is hardly surprising. Yet, if they embraced the term ‘democrat’, and assumed ‘natural’ leadership of their social ‘inferiors’, as occupants of the middle rank they faced two ways. They too were subject to obloquy from their ‘aristocrat’ social ‘betters’. As with ‘the people’, the designations ‘democrat’ and ‘aristocrat’ should be understood in the first instance as political. As Wolfe Tone put it, ‘The French revolution became the test of every man’s political creed and the nation was fairly divided into two great parties, the aristocrats and the democrats.’14 But also like ‘the people’ these words and ‘parties’ were freighted with social meaning. In Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution of France, the middling sort fared little better than the swinish multitude. ‘The state’, he observed, ‘ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern’.15 Later, he ridiculed the concept and slogan ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ by scorning its ‘bourgeois-commercial origins’ in Dublin Corporation.16 An eighteenth-century Irish elite tradition of fostering commerce and improvement thus mixed promiscuously with a contradictory disdain for upstarts and trade.17 Like radical contempt for the idle rich, none of this was new, but at certain crunch moments during the prolonged crisis of the 1790s, the languages of class antagonism moved to the centre of public debate.

Catholic agitators of the middling rank In December 1791, a serious conflict, which would have momentous consequences, erupted within the Catholic Committee. The immediate causes of this dispute lay in the founding of the Catholic Society in Dublin, in October that year, and the publication of a pamphlet by one of its number, Dr Theobald McKenna. The society’s membership drew on the urban commercial classes (with a sprinkling of physicians), or, as the Lord Lieutenant, Westmorland, saw it, consisted ‘of fifty or sixty of the most violent agitators’.18 McKenna’s pamphlet broke with

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convention to demand full emancipation. Tellingly, it also insisted upon the entitlement of Catholic ‘property’ to political representation commensurate with ‘its natural weight’.19 Up until that point, Catholic campaigning had been dominated by a handful of titular peers, senior clergy and minor gentry, whose petitions and declarations had been couched in a language of loyalty, obedience and supplication to his Majesty and his ministers. Now, a more assertive, self-confident style emerged, a style which government readily identified with ‘men in the middling rank in Dublin’, and which government hoped to ‘induce’ the ‘considerable Catholics’ to ‘discountenance’.20 In the longer term, the clash between the ‘considerable Catholics’ and the new, energised men of ‘the middling rank’ can be read as a political manifestation of a century-long process of economic and social development: Maureen Wall’s ‘rise of the Catholic middle class’.21 Wall’s justly influential thesis has since been modified. Protestants, it turns out, continued to dominate the commanding heights of finance and trade.22 Nevertheless, a Catholic middle class had arisen; by 1791, its political weight had begun to tip the balance of power within the Catholic Committee and, just as importantly, there were widespread perceptions that a prosperous, bustling set of Catholic businessmen – merchants, doctors, printers, brewers and textile manufacturers – had arrived on the political scene. Dublin Castle did not welcome their arrival and persuaded the ‘considerable Catholics’, in the person of Lord Kenmare, to publicly repudiate McKenna, precipitating a split in the committee. On 17 December, the Kenmarite minority seceded. The Dublin leadership followed up by mounting a brief, vigorous, vitriolic, nationwide and successful campaign against ‘Lord Lickspittle, the Kerry traitor’. The ‘popular party’ within the committee demonstrated its ability to mobilise public opinion as effigies of the nobleman were burned in Dublin city and counties Leitrim and Roscommon, and declarations of support came in from Limerick, Drogheda and elsewhere.23 The Kenmarites were swiftly routed and with their prelatic allies returned, chastened, to the committee in the spring of 1792. The committee now presented a united front and worked effectively with the Catholic Church, but traditional codes of social deference and authority had received a shock from which they would never entirely recover. In October, John Keogh contemptuously dismissed certain bishops as ‘old men used to bend to power’; while a month later Westmorland complained that ‘the violent attacks and threats of the democratic leaders of the Catholics have forced the clergy into cooperation with their plans and the gentry into acquiescence’.24

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The Men of Property

Nor did the matter rest there. At the beginning of 1792, the British government sponsored a Catholic Relief Act in an attempt to conciliate Ireland’s majority community and preempt an alliance between it and the reformers, especially the northern Dissenters. The bill was carried, but the strategy backfired. Catholics were more infuriated by the abuse showered upon them in the parliamentary debates, than grateful for the limited concessions passed into law. One speech, in particular, rankled. On 20 February, Sir Boyle Roche, doyen of the lurid mixed metaphor, stood in the House to ask: Who were they . . . who affected to be the representatives of the Roman Catholics of Ireland? Were there amongst them any of the ancient nobility, or of the gentry of Ireland? Was there a single man of respectability or character? No, not one. There was indeed, Mr Edward Byrne, a sugar baker, a seller of wines and other commodities . . . there was another, John Keogh; who was he? Why, he was a retailer of poplins in Dame Street . . . as for the rest of them, they were so obscure, that he could neither recollect nor describe them. Were these the representatives of the Roman Catholic nobility and gentry? No. Was there a respectable name among them? No. These fellows . . . represented themselves, and misrepresented the Roman Catholics of Ireland. Neither the Catholic nobility, the Catholic gentry, nor the Catholic clergy, had anything to do with it, and he considered it to be both an insolent and degrading petition.25 The Catholic Committee, he continued, were composed of nothing more than ‘turbulent shopkeepers and shop lifters’. A few days earlier, a pro-government newspaper had levelled a similar accusation against the committee characterising them as ‘a small popish faction in Dublin, who by fraud and cabal, have attempted to give themselves an importance to which they have no claim’.26 The committee responded by organising countrywide delegate elections to a National Convention that enjoyed a more ‘democratic’ mandate than parliament itself and placed the leadership’s claims to represent their fellow Catholics beyond dispute. Meanwhile, they engaged their detractors head on. After confirming its concern for the welfare of the poor, the committee went on to affirm its claim to property and respectability: When, therefore, it is asserted, that we are only the unlettered, poor, mechanical members of our persuasion; we deny it only because it is

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not the fact . . . But when it is considered, that it is not this committee alone, who are represented as destitute of property, character and knowledge . . . the principal merchants of so many trading cities, the householders of all the parishes of this capital, the landed proprietors of so many counties, are involved in this indiscriminate reproach of meanness, poverty and ignorance . . . the names and characters of the persons who have signed resolutions in favour of the General Committee, are of the first respectability in every class, and every line which the law has left open to us . . . it has been represented that they have no stake in the property of the country, and nothing to hazard in the event of public calamity. If we are to speak of their substance, to bring the estimate within the lowest calculation, we cannot compute the property of those who have already signed resolutions in our favour . . . at less than ten million sterling; we should come nearer the truth, if we should say twenty millions. If mercantile, and personal wealth constitutes the greater part of this sum, it is because the property of the Roman Catholics is principally vested in trade . . . we solicit relief not for the sake of the rich, but for the sake of the poor.27 When these men of property won a second, this time major, instalment of Catholic relief in 1793 (which granted the franchise but not the right of Catholics to sit in parliament), several of them reneged on their de facto alliance with the United Irishmen and commitment to parliamentary reform. Perhaps by ‘men of property’, Wolfe Tone simply meant his erstwhile allies, John Keogh and Theobald McKenna?

The United Irishmen Catholics made up roughly 50 per cent of the original Dublin Society of United Irishmen, many of whom were indeed the shopkeepers so despised by Roche.28 And the United Irishmen too were the target of (albeit non-sectarian) class disdain. In 1794, one MP denounced the society as a phalanx of ‘Doctors without practice, merchants without credit, barristers without briefs, foolish gentlemen, mad printers, malcontent politicians, and idle tradesmen.’29 Michael Durey comments that ‘Marxist historians of the French revolution would have no difficulty recognising the Dublin Society of United Irishmen; it was obviously a club led by “bourgeois” Jacobins.’30 It was also led, however, by ‘gentlemen’, such as the impeccably aristocratic Archibald Hamilton Rowan and the Hon. Simon Butler, brother of Lord Mountgarret. The aristocrat and nobleman as advanced Whig and ‘friend of the people’

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is a familiar figure in eighteenth-century Irish and British politics. From one standpoint, such men lent social caché to the United Irishmen; from another, their unearned prominence flew in the face of everything for which the society supposedly stood. William Paulet Carey, Catholic, printer, newspaper editor and renegade United Irishman, greatly admired the leadership of the Catholic Committee and applauded them for ‘overturning’ the aristocratic old guard. He praised Keogh for ‘his penetration, his courage, his ambition [and] his unbounded talents’, and ‘that estimable character, Edward Byrne . . . [whose] influence, extending through almost every trading town and city in the kingdom, wielded at will the commercial interest of the Irish Catholics’, for ‘his known probity, his great property and connections gave importance to the cause which he espoused, and in great measure ensured its success’. Carey attributed the committee’s political accomplishment to the routing of Kenmare and ‘the Catholic peerage’, when, as he saw it, ‘firmness’ replaced ‘imbecility’ and ‘decision succeeded to delay’.31 Conversely, by 1794, the United Irish project had, in his view, faltered precisely because that organisation had allowed its aristocratic faction to retain control. This critique appeared in a long pamphlet, An Appeal to the People of Ireland. Carey had been prosecuted for seditious libel as the printer of the Dublin United Irishmen’s Address to the Volunteers, published in September 1792. In his account, the leaders promised, but failed, to pay his legal costs; expelled from the society, he fetched up in court as a crown witness against the Address’s author, Dr William Drennan. Like most apostates, Carey has not generally received a good press from the historians.32 His Appeal is relentlessly self-pleading, self-inflating, disgruntled and easily dismissible. It does, nonetheless, repay close reading and the analysis is remarkable for its sheer class-consciousness. Thus to him, the middling sort, or, as he called them, the men ‘from behind the counter, and from the compting house’ were ‘the truly honourable class of society, whose wealth and industry are the real props of the state’.33 Interestingly, and in striking contrast to others of his radical cohort, Carey did not condemn journeyman combination outright, denouncing instead ‘the combination of the rich against the poor’.34 His view of ‘aristocracy’ fell into two categories: ‘an Aristocracy of the learned professions – Physic and Law’35 – represented by the likes of Drennan and Thomas Addis Emmet, a barrister; and what might be called aristocracy proper, the men of noble birth and landed property. The influence of the first had led to a loss of public confidence in the society; the influence of the second had resulted in nothing less than a ‘mode of

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feudal association’. The United Irishmen, he asserts, his invective racing ahead of his judgement, had ‘been made to resemble a Highland Clan, under a few ambitious, arbitrary chieftains, more than a dignified assembly of free, enlightened citizens’. Opposed to privilege in theory, these grandees exercised it in practice. ‘They oppose power’, he asserts in ironic echo of the standard conservative charge of radical demagogy, ‘in order to obtain it’.36 Carey’s class-charged critique is sui generis, overblown and reveals as much about the thinness of his skin as about class-based tensions within the Dublin Society. The class dimensions of politics that he identifies should not, however, on those grounds, be discounted. In the year in which he wrote, 1794, the so-called open and constitutional phase of the United Irish movement came to an end. Government proscribed the Dublin Society which, along with its Ulster counterparts, now went underground. Many of the original middle-class members (including Drennan) opted out as the political crisis deepened and the United Irishmen turned to republican separatism and prepared for insurrection. Some aristocrats, such as Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Arthur O’Connor and Valentine Lawless, Lord Cloncurry, actually chose this ‘second’ more violent post-1794 phase to enter the fray, but in general the leadership, especially at provincial level, preserved an essentially, though more modest, middle-class character.37 Meanwhile, and ineluctably, as the movement transformed itself into a mass-based revolutionary organisation in alliance with the lower-class Catholic Defenders, the rank-and-file became more plebeian. That social composition did not generate any Carey-style class friction. On the contrary – for example – a nexus of Ulster Catholic textile merchants and manufacturers, most prominently the Teeling family of Lisburn, were instrumental in politicising the Defenders and mobilising them behind the United Irish cause.38 Many middle-class radicals were, of course, ‘bourgeois’ and ‘patronising’ towards ‘the people’,39 wedded to the contemporary free market orthodoxies of political economy and hostile to journeymen combinations. Yet, many were also Paineite, and Paine in Rights of Man, part II advocates an early version of the welfare state. United Irish social and economic ideas were ambivalent and embryonic rather than intellectually consistent or conventionally bourgeois, as used to be assumed.40 Besides, the unrestrained militancy of some of these alleged bourgeois exemplars must be weighed in the interpretative scales. As a capitalist, industrialist – who introduced steam-powered machinery to Dublin – and large-scale employer, the United Irish leader Henry Jackson undoubtedly supported free trade

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The Men of Property

and opposed combinations. However, there was nothing ‘respectable’, about the manufacture of heavy-shot and pike-heads in his iron mills in the years before the rebellion.41 Jackson, Richard McCormack (a Catholic Committee activist and, like Jackson, a substantial Dublin employer), Lord Edward Fitzgerald and others continued in revolutionary politics after 1794, but as noted, in terms of wealth and status, the ‘middle-class’ leadership of the United Irish movement began to slip down the social scale. As violence, extremism, state repression and the prison population grew, the more ‘respectable’ reformers, not surprisingly, quit the scene. Their ‘desertion’ (or prudence) later gave rise to the most trenchant class-based explanation for the defeat of the 1798 rebellion. James (Jemmy) Hope, journeyman weaver, middle-ranking United Irish cadre and confidant of two of the movement’s more socially radical leaders – Henry Joy McCracken and Thomas Russell – at the request of R.R. Madden wrote his ‘autobiography’ in 1843 for inclusion in that prodigious author’s Lives of the United Irishmen. Allowing for hindsight – ‘I was always prepared for defeat’42 – and a pronounced ideological predisposition, like Carey, Hope deserves scrutiny. First, his account of the 1790s is placed in socio-economic context. Ulster society, ‘the seat of politics’, consisted of ‘three parties: those whose industry produced the necessaries of life, those who circulated them, and those whose subsistence depended on fictitious claims and capital, and lived and acted as if men and cattle were created solely for their use and benefit’. Second, that understanding compelled Hope’s ‘settled opinion that the condition of the labouring class was the fundamental question at issue between the rulers and the people’.43 Ever sensitive to class distinctions, he attributed the failures of the United Irish movement to the wholesale infiltration of informers and to the corruptions of ‘the rich farmers and shopkeepers’ (often the same people) who, as insurrection loomed, ‘abandoned the cause’.44 Hope’s political agenda is clear, and, it has been plausibly suggested, may reveal as much about 1840s British Chartist thinking as it does about 1790s Irish republicanism,45 yet his perspectives do catch the simmering mood of class hostility which permeated Ireland’s revolutionary decade. This is most evident, perhaps, in the increasingly astringent rhetoric of United Irish propaganda aimed directly at ‘the people’. ‘Oh! Lords of manors, and other men of landed property’ proclaimed one, not untypical, handbill, The Cry of the Poor for Bread, in 1796: As you have monopolised to yourselves the land, its vegetation and its game, the fish of the rivers and the fowls of heaven . . . in the

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present condition of things can the labourer, who cultivates your land with the sweat of his brow, the working manufacturer, or the mechanic, support himself, a wife and 5 or 6 children? How much comfort do you exhort from their misery, by places, offices and pensions and consume in idleness, dissipation, riot and luxury?46 In matters of class, it is not hard to see what the United Irishmen were against. They sought to pull down aristocracy – its legal privileges, economic monopolies, and, not least, its cultural purchase, the codes of deference and forelock tugging servility so brilliantly satirised by the Revd. James Porter in the pages of The Northern Star and published separately as Billy Bluff and Squire Firebrand (1796). It is more difficult to ascertain what they were for. The genuine social-radical conviction of some United Irishmen is beyond question; for others appeals to the common man, such as The Cry of the Poor for Bread, were probably an instrumental (though not necessarily cynical) way of mobilising the popular base. Yet, others in the leadership, runs a third argument, had so great an ‘instinctive fear of the people’ that they courted French intervention in order to achieve military victory without popular revolt.47 Brendan Simms takes this third view a step further. If a French-backed rebellion had succeeded, he speculates, the United Irish leadership, dependant upon their French allies ‘to rein in the very jacquerie and social radicalism’ which they had encouraged, would next have unleashed ‘a bourgeois terror against threats from below’.48 There is evidence indicating the subsistence of all the three positions. What can be said with safety is that the United Irishmen were principally political reformers and revolutionaries; that there was nonetheless a distinct social-radical dimension to their ideas, strategy and tactics; that the leadership was essentially middle class and that consequently it exhibited a spectrum of attitudes towards the common man and, finally, that this variety of stances generated internal tensions and contradictions within the movement. What may not be conjectured with Simmsian confidence is the likely outcome those tensions and contradictions, that balance of class forces, would have produced had the insurgents won power. William Paulet Carey and Jemmy Hope were very different people: one a lower middle-class Catholic Dublin printer, and United Irish deserter, who went on to a career as a London art critic and dealer; the other a self-educated, Presbyterian, journeyman weaver from rural Ulster who, when it was neither popular nor profitable, kept lifelong faith with

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the radical cause. Both wrote partisan, opinionated essays about their experience of the United Irish movement, in different places at different times; one a polemic, the other a memoir. However, they had this in common: both Carey and Hope interpreted the internal politics of the movement in class terms, congenial to the Marxist imagination and to the historian from below for its thrust if not its analytical rigour. Both probably overstressed class tensions which were more incipient and potential than acute and immediate. Religion, ‘liberty’ and nation dominated the languages of politics in the 1790s, yet class shaped discourse in every sphere. And how the internal class strains and pressures would have worked out in a French-sponsored Irish Republic remains an interesting counterfactual question. On the firmer ground of what did happen, as distinct from what might have, class, Carey and Hope remind us, mattered.

Acknowledgement My thanks to Dr Ultan Gillen for many helpful suggestions.

Notes 1. Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Class by name and number in eighteenth-century Britain’, in P.J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), p. 114. 2. See Raymond William’s discussion of ‘Class’ (and ‘Bourgeois’) in Key Words: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London, 1976). 3. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 36, 69. 4. R.B. McDowell, Irish Public Opinion, 1750–1800 (London, 1944), pp. 34–5. 5. Thomas Russell, A Letter to the People of Ireland on the Present State of the Country (Belfast, 1796), pp. 16–17. 6. See Jim Smyth, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (Houndmills, 1992), pp. ix–x. 7. Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (New Haven and London, 1989), p. 418. 8. Charles Kendal Bushe, A Letter to Major Doyle, on the Present State of the Catholic Question (Dublin, 1793), pp. 16, 19. Italics added. 9. [Wolfe Tone] Vindication of the Cause of the Catholics of Ireland (Dublin, 1793) in T.W. Moody, R.B. Mc Dowell and C.J. Woods (eds), The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone, 1763–98, vol 1, Tone’s Career in Ireland to June 1795 (Oxford, 1998), p. 385. Italics added. 10. The Parliamentary Register: or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons of Ireland (Dublin, 1800), p. 196. 11. Society of United Irishmen of Dublin (Dublin, 1794), pp. 8, 103, 192. On the game laws as ‘feudal slavery’, see Northern Star, 14 January 1792.

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12. William Drennan, A Letter to His Excellency Earl Fitzwilliam (London, 1795), p. 5; Mary MacNeill, The Life and Times of Mary Ann McCracken, 1770–1866 (Belfast, 1988 edn), p. 172; for a discussion of the widespread use of this term, see Smith, The Politics of Language, pp. 79–85. 13. Northern Star, 2 June 1792; R.B. McDowell, ‘The personnel of the Dublin society of United Irishmen, 1791–4’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. ii (1940–41), p. 18. 14. Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The Life of Theobald Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1998), p. 39. 15. Edmund Burke (ed. J.G.A. Pocock), Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis, 1987), pp. 84–5. Italics added. 16. W.J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork, 1994), p. 83. 17. The last Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, John Foster, provides a nice example of political reactionary as champion of commerce. 18. Quoted in Smyth, The Men of No Property, p. 57. 19. Transactions of the General Committee of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, During the Year 1791; and some Fugitive Pieces on that Subject (Dublin, 1792), p. 15. 20. Westmorland to [Henry Dundas], 21 November 1791, 21 January 1792, PRO. HO 100/33/186, 100/36/120–5. 21. Maureen Wall, ‘The rise of a Catholic middle class in eighteenth century Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies (1958), reprinted in Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Maureen Wall (Dublin, 1989), pp. 73–84. 22. David Dickson, ‘Catholics and trade in eighteenth-century Ireland: an old debate revisited’, in T.P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds), Endurance and Emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1990), pp. 85–100. Wall herself acknowledged the continued Protestant predominance in the economy, observing that in Dublin, ‘Protestants throughout the whole eighteenth century, and for long afterwards, controlled the great bulk of trade’, but she did not develop that theme; see ‘Catholics in economic life’, in O’Brien (ed.), Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, p. 86. 23. National Evening Star, 5, 7, 10 January 1792; Northern Star, 14 January 1792; the term ‘popular party’ is used in Thomas Knox to Abercorn, 29 November 1791, PRONI Abercorn Ms T 2541/IBI/2/42. 24. Keogh to [Bishop Hussey?], 2 October 1792; Westmorland to Dundas, 17 November 1792, PRO. HO 100/ 38/275–8, HO 100/38/70–82. 25. Parliamentary Register, vol xii (1792) (Dublin, 1793), pp. 185–6. 26. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 14 February 1792. 27. An address from the General Committee of Roman Catholics, to their Protestant fellow subjects, and to the public in general (Dublin, 1792), pp. 8–9. Italics added. 28. See McDowell’s invaluable, ‘The personnel of the Dublin society of United Irishmen, 1791–4’, pp. 12–53. 29. I have conflated this sentence as recorded in the Parliamentary Register, vol xiv (1794) (Dublin 1795), p. 106, with the slightly different version reported in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, cited by Nancy Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford, 1994), p. 136.

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30. Michael Durey, ‘The Dublin society of United Irishmen and the politics of the Carey-Drennan dispute, 1792–1794’, Historical Journal, vol. 37, no. 1 (1994), p. 95. 31. W.P Carey, An Appeal to the People of Ireland (2nd edn, Dublin, 1794), pp. 4, 44. 32. But see the exception: Durey, ‘The Dublin society of United Irishmen and the politics of the Carey-Drennan dispute’. 33. Carey, An Appeal to the People of Ireland, p. 4; Durey, ‘The Dublin society of United Irishmen and the politics of the Carey-Drennan dispute’, p. 100. 34. National Evening Star, 20, 22 March, 14 April, 1792. 35. Carey, An Appeal to the People of Ireland, preface to first edition. 36. Ibid., pp. 21, 23, 74–5. 37. The most detailed analysis of the social composition of the United Irish movement, especially in Ulster, in the period 1795–8 is in Curtin, United Irishmen, pp. 126–44. 38. Smyth, Men of No Property, pp. 118–20. 39. McDowell, ‘Personnel of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen’, p. 18. 40. See James Quinn, ‘The United Irishmen and social reform’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 31 (1998), pp. 188–201. 41. ‘JW’ (Leonard McNally), 2 January 1797; Francis Higgins, 18 May 1797, NAI. Rebellion Papers, 620/10/1121/44, 620/18/14. 42. James Hope, United Irishman: The Autobiography of James Hope (edited and introduced by John Newsinger) (London, 2001), p. 59. 43. Ibid., pp. 54, 59. 44. Ibid., pp. 57, 73. 45. Ibid., p. 39, n. 31. 46. Enclosure, F[rancis] H[iggins] to [Edward Cooke], 15 August 1796, NAI. Rebellion Papers 620/18/14. Higgins refers in this letter to ‘various papers of a similar tendency hav[ing] been circulated through parts of Fingal’ [north county Dublin]. 47. Marianne Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven, 1982), p. 369; Marianne Elliott, ‘The role of Ireland in French war strategy, 1796–1798’, in Hugh Gough and David Dickson (eds), Ireland and the French Revolution (Dublin, 1990), p. 202. 48. Brendan Simms, ‘Continental analogies with 1798: revolution or counterrevolution?’ in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin, 2003), p. 593.

2 William Thompson, Class and His Irish Context, 1775–1833 Fintan Lane

According to Gregory Claeys, the leading historian of Owenism, William Thompson of Cork, prior to his death in 1833, constituted the ‘major challenger to [Robert] Owen’s leadership’ of the early socialist movement in Britain and Ireland.1 In Claeys’s view, Thompson was The most analytical and original thinker to contribute to the Owenite tradition, a man recognised as a worthy opponent by some of the political economists (such as the young John Stuart Mill) with whom he debated, and a writer whose subsequent influence upon the history of socialist economic thought has been long established.2 J.F.C. Harrison expressed a similar opinion in 1969 in his seminal study of Owenism in Britain and North America, when, almost incidentally, he pronounced Thompson ‘the most influential of the Owenite socialists’ because of the impact of his various writings.3 Oddly, however, Harrison precedes this statement by listing all of Thompson’s books with the striking exception of his Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery (1825), which is probably the best known and certainly the most widely read of his works today. Nonetheless, his point is well made; Thompson’s impact on the Owenite movement and beyond was substantial and enduring. His impression on Irish history is less obvious, though Terry Eagleton has a point when he describes Thompson as ‘perhaps the greatest radical thinker of nineteenth-century Ireland’.4 Nonetheless, although given a chapter in James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History (1910) – titled ‘The First Irish Socialist; A Forerunner of Marx’ – he is almost never mentioned in long-run or short-run general surveys of Irish 21

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history.5 It is a remarkable omission, as Thompson is one of a mere handful of early nineteenth-century Irish intellectuals whose writings found an international audience. Indeed, his ideas still had a resonance in the late nineteenth century and Karl Marx, for example, referenced Thompson’s critique of capitalism in his magnum opus Das Kapital. In fact, until recently, Thompson attracted more interest outside of Ireland than in his country of origin and the only biography remains that written in the 1950s by the English scholar Richard Pankhurst, who labelled him ‘Britain’s pioneer socialist, feminist and co-operator.’6 Studies of Thompson were also published in France and Germany in the early twentieth century.7 In Ireland, in the past decade or so, Dolores Dooley and Thomas Duddy – both philosophers interested in the history of ideas – have reminded academics of the existence of Thompson, but historians have yet to show a significant interest.8 Most studies of Thompson focus on his ideas and – to a much lesser extent – on his activism within the Owenite movement in Britain; by contrast, little attention has been paid to his class background or to the particularities of his Irish context. This chapter will attempt to locate the historical Thompson and to situate him within his local Cork context. In addition, it will examine his relationship to the divided Irish middle class into which he was born. Thompson is a rare example of a privileged member of an early nineteenth-century mercantile elite who came to perceive his own class as ‘idlers’ and exploiters living off the labour of others. His response to the class-based inequities of contemporary society was complex and unusual.

Defining the middle class More than a few published pieces on William Thompson begin by describing him as a landlord from Rosscarbery in rural County Cork; this is an image that obfuscates the important reality that he was an urban working merchant for perhaps 20 years of his life and that he came from a mercantile background. However, it does pose a twofold question about Thompson’s class position: was he middle class, upper middle class, landed upper class, or something else, and does it matter? Indeed, what is the ‘middle class’? The middle class as an entity remains something of a puzzle for many historians and social commentators. The dominant commonsense view often turns on issues of status; thus, one will occasionally encounter working-class people who believe other workers to be middle class if they own their own homes and are not living in public

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housing. Likewise, it is not uncommon to come across workers who perceive themselves as ‘middle class’ simply because they work in an office (‘white collar’ rather than ‘blue collar’). Class, however, is arguably best understood as a relationship between socio-economic groups rather than as a graduated status pyramid (which, of course, is a highly subjective model); in Marxist terms, which inform my own interpretation of social class, it relates to one’s proximity to the source of economic power in society – the means of production and distribution – and the interrelationship between socio-economic groups with distinct and antagonistic positions within the relations of production. In other words, to take the clearest example, the working class (or ‘lower classes’ in the late eighteenth century) and the bourgeoisie (upper middle class or Wirtschaftsbürger) have quite different proximities to economic power and, consequently, different social interests; to use a crude example, a factory worker (‘white collar’ or ‘blue collar’) and a factory owner will perceive a gratuitous wage cut in competing ways – one sees it as an economic negative (less spending power), the other as an economic benefit (wider profit margin). A conflict of interests exists. An appreciation of these interests is part of what gives rise to a consciousness of class and of where one stands in the socio-economic power hierarchy. In an influential passage, the English historian E.P. Thompson explained class consciousness (albeit in gendered terms) as a socio-cultural process informed by economic experiences: The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value systems, ideas and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.9 Class society would be easily comprehended if it were a two-group polarisation, with proletarians versus capitalists, but, of course, it is not that simple, and neither is there a paradigmatic ‘pure’ class consciousness nor a class without internal complexities. The ‘middle class’ is a case in point, so named in the anglophone world because it stood between the landowning nobility and the lower classes; in Germany, it was labelled the Mittelstand or Bürgertum, in France the bourgeoisie. The latter term is often used by Marxists to refer specifically to the upper and

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economically powerful reaches of the old middle class – the capitalists, who, as defeudalisation progressed, displaced the nobility as the ‘ruling class’. But, the ‘middle class’, as a broad entity, remains a source of dispute among historians, sociologists and Marxists: who is in and who is out? In truth, the ‘middle class’ is an ambiguous locution that has descriptive value only if we acknowledge its segmentation. As an imprecise term, it has imprecise boundaries, but the middle class, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, can be said to encompass those who stood between the large landowners and nobility and those who sold their labour to secure a livelihood: its lower reaches – the petit bourgeoisie – included self-employed artisans, small businesspeople, independent professionals, shopkeepers, farmers and so on; its upper reaches (the bourgeoisie proper) was comprised of large merchants, industrialists and other very wealthy businesspeople. The petit bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie clearly had more advantageous positions within the relations of production than the lower-class workers and, hence, had different class interests, but they also differed from each other in significant ways. Indeed, self-employed artisans and shopkeepers, for example, often suffered during times of economic hardship and, consequently, were capable of uniting with workers in movements for social change; they generally, however, played a moderate role within such movements.10 William Thompson was a bourgeois. This brought obvious economic advantages, but it also impacted on his mentalité and on his ability to engage with civil society. Being upper middle class meant that he could articulate radical social views (within limits) and be listened to respectfully; it also gave him a level of self-confidence in his interactions with prominent figures such as Jeremy Bentham and Robert Owen. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has written of what he terms habitus in relation to human behaviour; applying his work to the middle class, it can be argued that ‘being middle class’ is inscribed in individuals in such a way that modes of behaviour, or durable dispositions, are passed from generation to generation and reinforced through culture and education.11 These patterns of behaviour include an instinctive feel for the ‘social game’, an ‘acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the particular conditions in which it is constituted’.12 Distinct class-derived behavioural patterns manifest in much of an individual’s interaction with the social world, from the clothes they wear to the way they speak, from their attitudes towards art and ‘high culture’ to the very manner in which they carry their body and deport themselves. According to Bourdieu,

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Bodily hexis, a basic dimension of the sense of social orientation, is a practical way of experiencing and expressing one’s own sense of social value. One’s relationship to the social world and to one’s proper place in it is never more clearly expressed than in the space and time one feels entitled to take from others; more precisely, in the space one claims with one’s body in physical space.13 The late eighteenth-century bourgeois possessed a heightened sense of ‘social value’ and, in this regard, Thompson entered the world with many advantages, beyond the privilege of economic power. He also belonged, of course, to a section of the Irish middle class – the members of the Established (Anglican) Church – that had significant political power, especially at local level, and his family, or his father at least, were directly implicated in the local political elite.

Revolution, war and profits William Thompson grew to adulthood at a time of war, revolution, militarism and social turmoil. Born in 1775 to an Anglican Protestant merchant family in Cork city, he arrived in the world as the American War of Independence unfolded, an event that had significant political and economic repercussions in Ireland. Indeed, the alliance of France with the rebellious American colonies in 1778 led to the formation of an extraordinary non-legal paramilitary movement, the Volunteers, who – though mobilised initially to preserve law and order and to protect Ireland from invasion – acted in tandem with the ‘patriot’ faction, led by Henry Grattan and Henry Flood, as an armed pressure on the British administration for a measure of legislative independence. The Volunteers later famously turned their attention to parliamentary reform, but their law and order role should not be forgotten, as the movement was an eager enforcer of social stability; David W. Miller has noted that the Volunteers were active in suppressing Whiteboyism, making arrests, pursuing thieves and pirates, conducting criminals to whippings and hangings, assisting at evictions, repressing ‘combinations’ (illegal trade unions), and in carrying out many other police functions.14 A thoroughly Protestant enterprise (though affluent Catholic were accepted in some instances), the Volunteer movement embraced the class interests of merchants and manufacturers; one of the chief slogans of the Dublin Volunteers at their demonstration in early November 1779 was the vaguely menacing ‘Free Trade or Else’.15 Flood interpreted this as Ireland having ‘a liberty of trading with all the world, subject

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only to our own restrictions and those of the country with whom the trade is carried on’.16 Thus, ‘free trade’ for the patriots and Volunteers meant unhindered participation in the English mercantilist system and not the removal of tariff barriers. In fact, this ‘free-trade’ demand was meshed with a non-importation (‘buy Irish’) agitation in 1779 in the urban centres of Cork and Dublin against the importing of English consumer goods, a campaign spurred on by an economic downturn in those cities and initially suggested by the hard-pressed artisans.17 By the late summer of that year, ‘buy Irish’ associations had been formed in 22 centres in the southern provinces and these encouraged commercial and consumer boycotts of English goods; it was an extra-parliamentary movement of merchants, manufacturers, retailers and their allies, and represented an important step in the growing self-confidence and political consciousness of the middle class.18 This was equally the case with the Volunteer movement itself, which, though officered at command level by the gentry and aristocracy (the culture of deference was resilient), was very much a creature of the Protestant middle class. There was a substantial involvement by the Dublin and Belfast Protestant middle class in the Volunteer movement and many took up the call for parliamentary reform after the gaining of legislative independence in 1782; the leaders in Belfast in 1783 demanded reform of the Dublin parliament and ‘an equal representation, chosen by the uninfluenced voice of the people and by frequent elections’.19 Of course, the ‘people’ were narrowly defined as propertied Protestants and did not include Catholics, who remained firmly outside the political nation.20 Cork Protestants also engaged with the Volunteer movement in the late 1770s and early 1780s, and for many city merchants it would have been a politicising experience; the successful campaigns for ‘free trade’ and legislative independence indicated that the mobilisation of middle-class public opinion could have a political impact. Cork was not as active in the Volunteer movement as Dublin or Belfast, but, as David Dickson has pointed out, ‘no family that was politically active at county level could afford to stay outside Volunteering’.21 Among those who became involved from the outset in 1778 was John Thompson – the father of 3-year-old William Thompson – and he was one of 145 prominent Cork citizens who signed a document on 26 March declaring their association ‘for the purposes of preserving the peace of the city and the property of the inhabitants thereof’.22 He was soon active with the Volunteers locally and was appointed as a captain in the infantry of the True Blues of Cork (a Volunteer corps with its origins in the militia), whose colonel was Richard Boyle, 2nd earl of

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Shannon.23 Lord Shannon, an arch-conservative on the issue of Catholic emancipation and cold towards parliamentary reform, entered the Volunteer movement to maintain the power of his own political faction in the county; it is not clear if Thompson was a Shannonite, but the True Blues were certainly anti-Catholic as a body. In late 1778, led by Shannon, the paramilitary corps paraded on the South Mall in the city, discharged some shots and then retired to dinner at which they toasted ‘a Protestant government to Ireland, and a downfall to all those that supported the Popery bill’.24 John Thompson remained with the True Blues until at least 1782 and it is almost certain that young William was brought to watch the parading of his father’s unit; like all Volunteer corps, they wore distinctive clothes and in Thompson’s case it was a blue uniform with silver lace and white buttons. John Thompson was clearly a man of ability and political skill. In 1782, he was elected to the position of sheriff by the common council of the city corporation, a role that gave him substantial influence in local politics. Under 1721 bye laws, the mayoralty of the city was decided by those who had served as sheriff, while the sheriffs themselves had to be nominated by the great officers of the corporation. In fact, because of the way in which the corporation operated, it was easily controlled by a semi-formal Protestant middle-class group, known as the ‘Friendly Club’, which was originally formed in the 1760s by urban merchants to combat the municipal influence of Lord Shannon.25 It is certain that Thompson was a member of this exclusive power bloc, as his nomination for the post of sheriff could not have occurred otherwise; the Friendly Club was self-consciously the local political elite in municipal matters and it maintained its dominance through the exclusion of those who disagreed with its Tory values. In the early nineteenth century, the Catholic middle class, long excluded from full political rights (an outcome of colonialism and the Reformation), lambasted this Friendly Club monopoly in its struggle for democratic reform and inclusion; liberal and radical Protestants also viewed it as a serious irritant.26 Thompson, however, did well from this anti-democratic arrangement and he was elected mayor of the city in 1794 and afterwards served as an alderman. The Friendly Club and the corporation also provided networking opportunities for merchants such as John Thompson and one can assume that he used these connections to improve his business. Ian d’Alton has remarked that Protestant Cork ‘was perhaps too busy making money out of the American and French wars to involve itself as heavily in the patriot game as Dublin and Belfast’, and there might be much sense in this observation.27 The prosperity, of course, was

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very uneven and the livelihoods of the majority in the city (Catholic and Protestant artisans and labourers) remained precarious; workers and their families often lived in dire conditions, with two families sometimes sharing one tenement room and subsisting on poor diets. Elsewhere in the city, a significant number of merchants thrived during the American war and through the wars with France between 1793 and 1815. Cork harbour was an important provisioning centre during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the city’s provisions merchants – of whom John Thompson was one – prospered at times of war. Until 1782, Cork was the port selected by the British navy and army as the sole provisioner for their supply ships and, after this monopoly arrangement ended, the city still supplied nearly two-thirds of ‘wet’ provisions.28 In addition, Cork merchants developed profitable trading links of their own to the American continent and to the European mainland, especially to Portugal. In 1794, for example, Cork exported 80 per cent (22,500 tons) of all Irish beef going to America; in 1795 it supplied 91.5 per cent of all Irish butter crossing the Atlantic (20,101 tons); while, between 1783 and 1800, the city shipped an average of 24,000 tons of butter per annum to the Portuguese market.29 The provisions trade was a lucrative business and expanded during wartime; agricultural exports, in particular, grew significantly, with grain crops rising from one-tenth of total exports in 1780 to one-quarter by the end of the Anglo-French wars.30 In short, Thompson’s family, like many mercantile families in Cork, profited, either directly or indirectly, from the foreign wars in which Britain engaged between 1775 and 1815.

A mercantile life in an age of revolution By 1787, John Thompson’s business premises and home were situated at 4 Patrick Street, a new main street built in 1783 following the culverting of a river inlet.31 It was a fashionable street at the time and, in a city where Protestants accounted for about 20 per cent of a population of roughly 54,000, more than 90 per cent of Patrick Street’s householders were Protestants, most of whom were solidly middle class.32 This is where William grew up and later spent much of his adult life. No. 4 Patrick Street was not an enormous residence; in fact, it was a typical middling working merchant’s house – he used the ground floor for his business – and it was situated at the upper northern end of the street, not far from the quayside.33 In later years, John moved across the river to the quieter and leafier Windmill Hill (now Richmond Hill) on the northern slopes of the city, leaving the Patrick Street residence to his son.

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Unfortunately, we know almost nothing of William Thompson’s childhood and family life – his mother’s name, for instance, remains a mystery – but we do know that he had two sisters, Lydia and Sarah. His upbringing would certainly have been comfortable and it is clear that he was well educated and developed an interest in reading. The household would have been integrated into the social circles of the local Protestant political elite, though social and business intercourse with wealthy Catholic merchants, such as the Callaghans, would have been unavoidable at times; the Cork middle class might have been badly divided on politico-religious grounds, but in the world of business a pragmatic approach was taken and there was necessary toleration. The non-statutory Committee of Merchants, for example, set up in 1769 to regulate the important Cork butter market, had accepted Catholic members from the beginning.34 John Thompson, as an alderman and provisions merchant, was intimately connected with this body. However, in a politically, religiously and class divided city, William’s socialising would have occurred largely within the Protestant middle class. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, William was listed as a partner in his father’s firm, a position he could not have attained unless he had already spent significant time learning the trade. One can safely assume that William was brought up in the family business and entered the firm, at the latest, sometime in the mid-1790s. This was an eventful period in European and Irish history: in 1789, the French Revolution erupted, changing forever the ideological landscape of the continent. It is not known how William reacted to the events in France (he was a teenager at the time), but his father and family circle were probably not sympathetic. Nonetheless, the republican ideas of the French Revolution did find a resonance in Ireland among young middle-class radicals, including politicised Protestants who looked back on the Volunteers of 1778–84 as a starting rather than a finishing point. In fact, the Society of United Irishmen, formed in 1791, was markedly different to the Volunteers from the outset, in the sense that they embraced all religious denominations and, ultimately, proved most attractive to northern Presbyterians and southern Catholics, though several important leaders such as the brothers Arthur and Roger O’Connor in west Cork were Anglicans.35 At first, influenced by the American and French revolutions, as well as the Irish patriot tradition, they sought radical parliamentary reform and greater legislative independence for Ireland, but by 1794 they had shifted towards separatism and explicit republicanism; the subsequent trajectory of the United Irishmen from reform to revolution in 1798 is well known. In Cork city, several thousand were

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sworn into the movement in the 12 months before 1798; their leader, John Swiney (a successful Catholic woollen draper), claimed 16,000, but forceful government action left the local movement directionless when the time came and there was no rising in the city.36 There was, nonetheless, plenty of brutality and violence as state terror was unleashed across the country to suppress the incipient rebellion. Where did William Thompson stand on the events of 1798? It is an interesting question, which can be only partially answered. He was 23 years old at the time and from a pro-government political family; indeed, his father was mayor of the city in 1794–5 and an alderman thereafter. As an alderman in 1798, John Thompson would have been entrusted with the enforcement of law and order, and it is clear that he never abjured this role. With regard to William, his later writings do indicate a partiality for republican political structures; however, he was also firmly opposed to the use of force. In truth, there is no evidence that the young William Thompson engaged with the United Irish movement and the likelihood is that he opposed it because of its revolutionist methods. It is impossible to know when precisely William developed the radical egalitarian views he expressed in the 1820s and it would be presumptuous to read them back to the 1790s; he never, at any stage, publicly evinced admiration for the United Irishmen and it is more plausible that the 1790s was a time of trepidation and fear for him and his family. The United Irish movement punctured the self-confidence of the Protestant political elite, propelling many towards support for the Act of Union in 1800. The Thompsons, however, were not without social consciences and, unlike many in a similar social position, John Thompson participated in philanthropic endeavours at the turn of the century. While mayor of the city in 1794–5, he was responsible for the expansion of a small group called the Benevolent Society, which had been established originally in the city by a number of Methodists; the primary purpose of the society was to provide the sick poor with food when they were unable to work. Thompson became treasurer of this society and retained this role until the early 1800s.37 Moreover, as mayor, arguably enforcing a moral economy, he ordered the construction of six communal ovens on a vacant site near the Corn Market to be deployed ‘whenever the bakers do not think proper to supply us with bread agreeable to the legal assizes’; these were to be used in times of hunger.38 He also became a governor of the city’s House of Industry and a committee member of the crosscommunity – the Protestant and Catholic bishops were both involved – Cork Society for the Relief and Discharge of Persons Confined for Small

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Debts.39 In 1800–1, during a period of great economic hardship in the city, he was chairman of the relief committee and also became involved in the very active Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (SBCICP).40 This latter society was organised by a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Thomas Dix Hincks, who in 1795 had issued a pamphlet ‘in defence of Revealed Religion’ in response to the widespread circulation in Cork of copies of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason.41 It is highly likely that William Thompson – who two decades later revealed himself as an atheist – read Hinck’s rebuttal and also may have read Paine’s work at this time. In fact, William certainly had social interaction with Hincks. John Thompson was a member of the SBCICP committee and William himself, by 1801–2, was also a signed-up member, paying an annual subscription, which makes this his first visible involvement in a social cause.42 The SBCICP, whose president or chief patron was the local Protestant bishop (the Catholic bishop was a vice-president), was central to a number of philanthropic ventures in the city, including the establishment of a Friendly Society to provide monies and medicine for its members when they were ill and, ultimately, to cover the costs of their funerals. It also established soup kitchens during times of social distress (to sell food at reduced rates), set up a School of Industry for impoverished children and initiated a Fever Hospital (which was then taken over by John Thompson’s Benevolent Society).43 A significant worry for the SBCICP was the social unrest and crime that mass poverty and destitution generated. Moreover, in terms of its guiding philosophy, the SBCICP very much reflected the social values of its middle-class, predominantly Protestant, membership: ‘After [my emphasis] the morals of society, health becomes the first object of solicitude.’44 Their Friendly Society, for example, was aimed at ‘the discouragement of improvidence and thoughtlessness . . . one of the lessons which the lower ranks of society most frequently require’.45 To improve the ‘morals’ of the lower classes, the SBCICP funded two prizes (or financial rewards): one for servants for length of service and ‘good conduct’; the second, open to all, for cleanliness ‘of their houses or persons’. To be eligible for the second prize, entrants had to fulfil a series of conditions: 1st That his or her house, or room, shall be whitewashed within the appointed time. 2nd That no dunghill shall be made or kept in the public street or road, nor water or dirt thrown into it.

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3rd That the footpath, if there be one before the house, shall be regularly swept. 4th That the pig, if one be kept, shall not be suffered to live in the same room with the family.46 Rev. Hincks was a strong believer in the positive influence of education, a viewpoint shared by William and evinced repeatedly in his later writings. Hincks favoured moral instruction and industry for the lower classes, but he also saw a need to provide a practical education for the children of the middle class and, to this end, in 1803 he founded the Cork Institution, which taught courses in literature, languages, logic, elementary mathematics, agriculture, natural history and the various sciences.47 John Thompson became a proprietor of this educational institute, while William became a subscribing supporter from 1808.48 John Thompson continued to prosper in business during this period. He had a small fleet of ships and in 1806 he acquired a landed estate in west Cork, as a result of a legal case against Apollos Morris, who was unable to pay a debt. Interestingly, the lawsuit was between Morris and ‘John and Will Thompson of Cork’, a clear indication that William was a partner in the firm by then.49 The estate, a few miles from Rosscarbery, comprised 1,350 acres in the townlands of Clounkeen, Carhoogariff, Corrran, Tullig and Cooladereen, 750 acres of which were let to tenant farmers.50 William, however, does not seem to have been a success in business and around this time he borrowed the huge sum of several thousand pounds from his father. In 1807, John, ever astute in financial affairs, won a legal judgement against his son for the recovery of this money; it is possible that this dispute revolved around William’s interest in the newly acquired Clounkeen estate, which thereafter was solely the property of his father.51 The money was not repaid (perhaps his father was simply securing full control of the lands in west Cork) and later became a key element in a legal battle between William’s sisters and the Owenite movement.

A second life Despite the friction over money, William remained heir to his father’s substantial property and, in March 1814, John Thompson, alderman, magistrate and ‘eminent merchant’, died at his home on Windmill Hill, leaving the family business – including a small fleet of trading vessels and the Clounkeen estate – to his only son.52 For William Thompson,

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it was the beginning of a new life, as he emerged from the considerable shadow of his father. He retired from work as a merchant and his income thereafter was derived from the rent-roll of his estate in west Cork; at a stroke, he went from merchant to landlord, social positions with distinct meanings in a class-conscious society.53 Indeed, Joe Lee has argued that such a shift was common among prosperous merchants, who rather than pump fixed capital back into family firms jumped at the first opportunity to abandon business for landed estates; there was, claimed Lee, a steady and economically damaging ‘haemorrhage of capital out of business and into professions and land’.54 Arthur Young, writing in the 1770s, complained of capable people ‘quitting trade or manufactures, when they have made £5,000 or £10,000 [in order] to become gentlemen’.55 It seems that William Thompson followed this trajectory, though his choices may have been restricted. William inherited the family business shortly before the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, which heralded a tangible decline in the Cork provisions trade and a post-war recession that lasted from 1816 to 1819; indeed, Cormac Ó Gráda has identified 1814–16 as a crisis period for Irish merchants in terms of bankruptcies.56 William Thompson survived into 1817, but was a declared bankrupt by the end of that year and the Court of Chancery directed the sale of his estate at Clounkeen.57 It is unclear what happened to the family business, but it is possible that Thompson sold its assets in order to secure the country estate; certainly, he fought the attempt to sell off the land, the issue dragged on through the early months of 1818 (with Thompson still a bankrupt at that stage) and he ultimately prevailed, retaining ownership of the lands and house in west Cork.58 It is possible that the bankruptcy was precipitated by a clash with his sisters, who later claimed £1,500 from William’s estate as heirs to the debt owed to their father.59 Lydia, like William, remained unmarried; Sarah, however, married Thomas Dorman, a member of a family associated with the Friendly Club, who were probably political and business friends of John Thompson. Later events indicated that the sisters were distinctly unsympathetic to their brother’s social and economic views. With his father dead, and having escaped the counting house, Thompson, now almost 40 years old, emerged more fully into the public sphere. He avoided the isolation of Clounkeen and continued to live in the city at 4 Patrick Street, where it seems he was joined by his mother; when she died on 28 August 1825, it was ‘at her lodgings in Patrick St.’, which was most likely a reference to her son’s home.60 William lived on the upper floors of this house; the shop on the ground floor was let

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to a succession of tenants, including an iron monger, and by the early 1820s was occupied by a grocer’s (run by Mary and Elizabeth Douthat).61 William Thompson was wealthy, but not enormously so. He involved himself in civic life, becoming a proprietor of the Cork Institution (in replacement of his father) and participating in discussions at the Cork Literary and Philosophical Society.62 There is a sense in which Thompson seems to have consciously upended his life once free of his father: aside from scuttling the family business, he suddenly rejected alcohol and meat at this time, feeling that abstention and vegetarianism brought him ‘lightness, and serenity of mind and body’.63 His capacity for analytical reflection and unsparing polemic also revealed itself, initially in a public dispute regarding the Cork Institution, which he lambasted in 1818 in a series of letters to the Cork Southern Reporter for alleged corruption; he later assembled these letters and published them as a pamphlet titled Practical Education for the South of Ireland (1818), which he sent to leading Irish MPs and to Sir Robert Peel, the chief secretary for Ireland. In short, his assault on the Cork Institution revolved around the mismanagement of public funds allocated to the school, but he was also distinctly unhappy with the type of education on offer and his mercantile background clearly influenced this assessment.64 Arguing that the institution was established to provide inexpensive education for the middle class and was failing to do this, he further complained that its courses provided no information on ‘the history, principles, processes, and effects of manufactures and commerce’.65 In a letter to the Southern Reporter on 16 May 1818, he wrote: The object of your institution is not to make linguists, or mathematicians, or astronomers, or antiquarian dilettanti, but to make useful citizens for active life, to make intelligent and respectable, and, let me add, benevolent tradesmen and merchants and country gentlemen, and to make their wives and daughters equally intelligent, respectable and useful.66 The hard-headed merchant is visible in these remarks, but so too are hints of the emerging radical: Thompson focuses on the production of good ‘citizens’, benevolence and, importantly, equality in education for women. Nonetheless, his educational concerns at this time were still firmly centred on the needs of his own class and, in a later letter, he explicitly emphasised that he was fighting ‘the sacred cause of

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education’ for the benefit of ‘the middling and higher classes of the South of Ireland’.67 That same year saw Thompson make his first contact with Jeremy Bentham, the doyen of utilitarianism, on the issue of education and, following an exchange of letters, he considered establishing a school in Cork based on Bentham’s theories. Indeed, by late 1819, Bentham felt able to describe Thompson as a ‘disciple’, though the school never materialised, and he also invited him to stay at his home in London.68 In addition to this correspondence, Thompson wrote to the economist David Ricardo and struck up a friendship.69 Both initiatives were evidence of his growing interest in the impact of education on society and in political economy, but also of his assuredness when dealing with prominent public intellectuals. In July 1822, he travelled to Britain where he spent some time visiting the country’s leading educational establishments; he then availed of Bentham’s offer and stayed with him from October until February the following year.70 This residence had an enormous influence on the development of Thompson’s social thought, as there he encountered a wide range of political and social activists, among them the Irishwoman and social radical Anna Wheeler, who played a significant role in persuading him of the importance of pursuing full political, civil and domestic rights for women. He also studied the ideas of mutual co-operation, then being popularised by Robert Owen, and found himself in sympathy with their collectivist principles and general scheme for eliminating mass poverty. He had initially believed Owen’s plans to be little more than ‘an improved system of pauper management’ and he was also concerned by his tendency ‘to court the patronage of non-representative lawmakers’ among the nobility.71 However, by 1823, he had decided that co-operation provided ‘the best and only yet devised mode of free exertion affording you [the labourer] any chance of enjoying the products of your labor’.72 His conversion to these ideas mirrored a developing adhesion to radical democratic values and a focus on the exploitative nature of the relationship between his own class and the working class.

Public intellectual and political engagé While in London, Thompson worked on a major study of political economy, which was published as An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness; Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth (1824). This was followed over subsequent years by Appeal of One Half the Human Race,

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Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery (1825); Labor Rewarded: The Claims of Labor and Capital Conciliated, or How to Secure to Labor the Whole Products of its Exertions (1827); and, finally, Practical Directions for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities, on the Principles of Mutual Co-operation, United Possessions and Equality of Exertions and of Means of Enjoyments (1830). With these publications, and through a practical activist engagement, Thompson quickly established himself as one of the foremost leaders of the early socialist, or Owenite, movement in Britain and Ireland.73 In An Inquiry, Thompson located societal inequity and mass poverty in what he termed the ‘vicious distribution of wealth’; he viewed labour ‘as the sole parent of wealth’, but argued that the wealth produced was distributed disproportionately to the disadvantage of those who laboured and to the advantage of an elite of ‘idlers’, men of his own class.74 Interestingly, however, he was simultaneously alert to the dangers posed to the middle class (or its lower reaches, at least) by the existing economic formation: The tendency of the existing arrangement of things as to wealth, is to enrich a few at the expense of the mass of the producers; to make the poverty of the poor more hopeless, to throw back the middling classes upon the poor, that a few may be enabled, not only to accumulate in perniciously large masses the real national, which is only the aggregate of individual, capital, but also, by means of such accumulation, to command the products of the yearly labor of the community. Who is not alarmed at the every-day increasing tendency to poverty on the part of the many, to the ostentation of excessive wealth on the part of the few?75 He believed that the system of co-operation offered a means of overcoming this unequal distribution of wealth and, ultimately, would deliver a just society for all, but particularly to the benefit of the workers and petit bourgeoisie. He viewed the nobility and the rising bourgeoisie as complementary rather than as class rivals and, in Labor Rewarded, he contended that both conspired in unison to defraud the ‘industrious classes’. In Thompson’s view, the feudalists had reached an accommodation with capitalism: It seems inaccurate to say that the capitalist and moneyed aristocracy have supplanted in Britain the old feudal aristocracy, or inherited its

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power. Both species of aristocracy, the capitalist and the feudal, the old aristocracy of open force and the new aristocracy of chicane, have formed a coalition against the Industrious Classes. The old aristocracy of force has been too wise to force the capitalists into the ranks of, into sympathy with, the industrious.76 Despite these sentiments, he did not demonise the ‘idle rich’ and was convinced that the majority in society could be won to co-operation through education and the power of example: ‘If Co-operative Industry tend more to human happiness than Competitive Industry, its supporters are confident it will be adopted when understood. On no other ground would they wish it to be adopted.’77 On principle, he opposed compulsion in the struggle for social change because he saw force as counter-productive. Moreover, he was painfully aware of his own class background and he made this clear to his readers at various times in his writings; a recurring trope was the image of exploiter as idler and he included himself in this category, though he did see his intellectual work as a means of escaping this denunciation and, on these grounds, pleaded for recognition as a ‘fellow labourer’.78 Thompson differed from many Owenites in his advocacy of political reform; most Owenites, in the early period of the movement, believed that their scheme of co-operation could be introduced within any political system, despotic or democratic. However, Thompson was a vocal supporter of radical democratic reforms such as full political and civil rights for women, Catholic emancipation in Ireland and universal suffrage. He favoured decentralised republican governmental structures and supported radical liberalism; in 1830, for example, he praised the liberal revolution that had just occurred in France, which, he claimed, was a revolution ‘without guillotines, or racks, or gibbets; without spoliation or murder . . . They asked for nothing but liberty and glory; nothing but moral, intellectual and physical emancipation.’79 His flying of the French tricolour on his walking stick while on occasional visits to his estate in west Cork in the early 1830s was almost certainly emblematic of his support for the events in France.80 Indeed, Daniel Donovan, the son of Thompson’s doctor in west Cork, claimed in 1876 that the co-operator had ‘spent a considerable portion of his time in France and Belgium previous to 1830, where he imbibed the revolutionary doctrines prevalent in France at the time’.81 In fact, his pronounced democratic values brought him into conflict with Robert Owen, who had little interest in the direct democracy that Thompson proposed for the running of co-operative communities, and this was a major issue

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of difference between them.82 His advocacy of democracy, however, made him popular among working-class co-operators and Claeys has noted that, somewhat ironically, ‘it was a great symbol of the trust that they placed in him, that when in 1831 it was decided that one man should govern the initial community, he was their choice’.83 In terms of Thompson’s broader Weltanschauung, he was a convinced atheist and a harsh critic of the institution of marriage, positions that would have caused social difficulties for a less advantaged inhabitant of Cork city. However, while his rationalistic atheism was well known, and publicised through the local liberal paper The Freeholder, it made little obvious difference to the way he was treated and he still commanded much respect in Cork, where he was widely seen as a clever, well-meaning and civicminded intellectual.84 Robert Owen, on the other hand, openly used Thompson’s social beliefs to undermine him within the co-operative movement. At the Co-operative Congress of 1831, Thompson suggested that they should commence with small-scale, democratic communities rather than the large, grand plan of Owen’s; there was considerable support for this proposition before the conference broke for lunch. However, according to William Lovett, who was one of those present: When we came back our friend Owen told us very solemnly, in the course of a long speech, that if we were resolved to go into a community upon Mr Thompson’s plan, we must make up our minds to dissolve our present marriage connections, and go in as single men and women. This was like the bursting of a bomb-shell in the midst of us. One after another, [those] who had been ardently anxious for this proposal of a community, began to express doubts, or to flatly declare that they could never consent to it; while others declared that the living in a community need not interfere in any way with the marriage question . . . [N]othing could have been better devised than this speech of Mr Owen to sow the seeds of doubt, and to cause his scheme to be abortive; and when we retired Mr Thompson expressed himself very strongly against his conduct.85 Robert Owen could be ruthless and autocratic in his drive to maintain control of the early socialist movement in Britain and he was aware that Thompson’s libertarian views on marriage and sex would disturb many co-operators and social radicals. Thompson continued to participate in the public life of his native city and in 1826 made a significant contribution to a furious controversy on the issue of poor laws then raging among the local middle class. The

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Cork debate was prompted by severe unemployment and social distress in the city, and an inadequate response by the local authorities; unlike Britain, Ireland had no poor laws at this time and the relief of social destitution was haphazard and often dependent on voluntary action by the wealthy.86 The introduction of an Irish poor law was proposed as a partial remedy by local radicals such as Thomas Sheahan, the editor of the liberal Cork Mercantile Chronicle, but opposed by a medley of merchants, brewers and shopkeepers, who worried that it would necessitate the levying of a tax (on them); Gerard Callaghan, the Protestant son of a prominent Catholic merchant, bluntly insisted that the poor had no ‘right’ to be ‘supported by the rest of the community’.87 A remarkable feature of this debate was the coming together of Catholic and Protestant businessmen – liberals and conservatives – in opposition to the proposed poor law. Thompson took part in a public discussion of the issue in the City Courthouse in August 1826, where, ‘while disclaiming any connexion with those persons who . . . maintained that nothing should be done’, he counterposed the system of co-operation to the adoption of poor laws.88 Speaking for a full hour, and listened to attentively, he outlined a plan for co-operative communities outside the city in which ‘the unemployed poor may be permanently provided for in the most beneficial manner to themselves, and if possible without compulsory taxation’.89 It was undoubtedly the latter aspect of his plan that proved attractive to the local middle class. The Southern Reporter and The Constitution (the former a liberal, the latter a Tory paper) both praised Thompson and published reports of what he had to say.90 However, despite the publicity given to his idea, no attempt was made to implement the proposal and it is clear that the merchants and shopkeepers were simply warm towards anything that was counterposed to a system of Irish poor laws. Thompson himself did try to organise a co-operative community on a portion of his west Cork estate in late 1826, but his call for subscriptions fell on deaf ears and, due to a lack of funds, the venture was still born.91 This probably came as little surprise to Thompson, who was acutely aware that civil society and the public sphere were dominated by an affluent minority that was wedded to the ‘competitive principle’; in 1830, he wrote: What is called public opinion, is the opinion of the influential classes of society . . . First, wealth, and then, power, in society as constituted on the competitive principle, absorb to themselves all influence, so as almost to obliterate the influence of mere talents and personal qualities, and not only to render talents silent before the influence

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William Thompson, Class and His Irish Context, 1775–1833

of wealth and power, and the assertion of truth feeble and timid on almost all occasions, but even to awe or buy over to the cause of prejudice, error, and vice, those talents and dispositions, which, if simply uninfluenced by sinister motives, would be ranged on the side of truth (or free enquiry) and virtue.92 Thompson was also prominently involved at local level in the Catholic emancipation campaign. In 1812, he had voted for Christopher HelyHutchinson in the parliamentary election and in 1826 for John HelyHutchinson, both Whigs who supported Catholic emancipation.93 By 1828, he was a member of the pro-emancipation Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty and when Daniel O’Connell spoke in Cork, on 21 August that year, it was Thompson who proposed the vote of thanks for his attendance; moreover, when a County and City of Cork Liberal Club was formed following O’Connell’s public meeting, Thompson was selected as the chairman of the new organisation. The Liberal Club, which organised the collection of the ‘Catholic rent’, was the motor behind the Catholic emancipation campaign in the city and county, and Thompson was centrally involved, acting as chairman and secretary, and joining its sub-committee on parochial organisation.94 In addition, he was one of several hundred nobles and ‘gentlemen’ who signed a national ‘Declaration of . . . Protestants in Favour of a Final and Conciliatory Adjustment of the Catholic Question’, which insisted on the immediate granting of emancipation.95 In Cork, however, he was one of only a small number of liberal and radical Protestants who openly campaigned for Catholic emancipation and it is probable that this would have engendered resentment among the Protestant middle class from which he came, many of whom feared the economic and political rise of the Catholic middle class. The political self-confidence of the Protestant middle class, felt most markedly in the early 1780s, was now well and truly on the wane, and for good reason.96 For Thompson, his support for Catholic emancipation marked a clear rejection of the privileged political elite into which he was born.

Conclusion In the late 1820s and early 1830s, Thompson was a regular visitor to England where he engaged directly with the Owenite movement, speaking at mechanics institutes and attending co-operative congresses. He also interacted with co-operators in Ireland; he visited the commune established in 1831 by John Scott Vandeleur at Ralahine in County

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Clare and was in contact with the leading Belfast co-operator Henry MacCormac, whom he introduced to Robert Owen.97 In addition, he focused on the establishment of a co-operative commune on his own lands in west Cork, drawing up elaborate plans and spending much of his time on the estate. Unfortunately, Thompson’s health was faltering and, despite the urgency he applied to this venture, the co-operative was not put in place prior to his death on 28 March 1833 from an inflammation of the chest; however, he had anticipated his demise and in a will left the west Cork estate to the co-operative movement.98 This wish, however, was confounded by his surviving sisters who claimed the estate as theirs and who pursued their legal case partly by highlighting their brother’s heterodox views on marriage and sexuality; after lengthy court proceedings, the sisters ultimately prevailed and the co-operators were denied the estate.99 William Thompson was little remembered after his death, except by the Owenite movement and by later socialists such as James Connolly; he fitted none of the narratives later constructed by Irish unionists and nationalists. In Cork city, where he spent most of his life, his passing was scarcely remarked upon; in late 1833, Thomas Sheahan, the leader of the Cork Trades Association, did list Thompson among the local Catholic emancipationists who were ‘most distinguished for their zeal and usefulness’, but, in truth, working-class activists in the city felt little tangible connection to the deceased socialist.100 Indeed, while Thompson promoted co-operation, workers in Cork were beginning to mobilise politically in pursuit of a repeal of the Act of Union and the promotion of indigenous industry; local radicals, such as Sheahan, were suspicious of Owenism and believed that the trade unions ‘instead of pursuing Owenite doctrines’ should direct ‘their intelligence, good feeling, funds, and power to the attainment of political strength’ and the election of working-class members of parliament.101 Thompson was not attracted by nationalism or Repeal and, consequently, was disconnected from local working-class political activists, who were then entering the public sphere as a significant social force. In the area around his west Cork estate, he was remembered chiefly as a sort of kindly eccentric; Standish James O’Grady, writing to James Connolly in 1910, reminisced about passing through Rosscarbery in the early 1850s and ‘an old lady pointing out a house and telling me that a strange kind of gentlemen once lived there called “Philosopher Thompson”, and the people said he had been “crossed in love”.’102 Indeed, it seems that local popular memory was somewhat conflicted regarding Thompson because of his uncommon political and social beliefs. In 1876, Daniel Donovan, whose

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William Thompson, Class and His Irish Context, 1775–1833

father knew Thompson, remarked that his ‘peculiar habits, strange creed and extraordinary theories created a great sensation’ and that the ‘country people looked upon him as a sort of magician, as he was in the habit of publicly exhibiting experiments of a chemical nature’.103 In 1887, another local, having made enquiries about Thompson, reported in Michael Cusack’s Celtic Times that the peasantry retained a popular belief that ‘Communist Thompson’, endowed with magical powers, was able to ‘change little bits of slate to half-crowns’; the anonymous writer claimed that those who knew him described Thompson ‘as being a thickset, athletic individual of about five feet eight in height’, a memory that contrasts with that of Edward Craig who met him in the early 1830s and 50 years later remembered him as ‘sanguine-nervous, with little muscular power, and a slender frame, a medium-sized head, and wellbalanced brain’.104 In fact, because no image of Thompson has survived, we have no physical sense of the man. The importance of Thompson lies primarily in his intellectual work as a stinging critic of bourgeois society and of the inequalities perpetuated or caused by capitalism; he also articulated this critique through political activism, which he clearly saw as necessary if social emancipation was to be achieved. He believed in the power of human agency and in the ability of his own class to overcome the temptations of power and economic dominance. In this regard, he fits into a voluntarist philosophical tradition that brimmed with rationalist optimism regarding the transformative effects of ‘enlightenment’ and education. In his local context, he remained an atypical voice, but he had an enduring impact on the early socialist movement in Britain and beyond.

Notes 1. Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 107. 2. Ibid., p. 90. Indeed, Mill later described Thompson as ‘a very estimable man’ and as the ‘principal champion’ of co-operation; see John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (New York, 1924), p. 87. 3. John F.C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (New York, 1969), p. 64. 4. Terry Eagleton, Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford, 1999), p. 100. 5. James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (Dublin, 1910), pp. 106–21. 6. Richard K.P. Pankhurst, William Thompson (1775–1833): Britain’s Pioneer Socialist, Feminist, and Co-operator (London, 1954). The emphasis is mine; this book has been republished by Pluto Press in recent years without the original subtitle. Pankhurst’s study contains some errors of fact and

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7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

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makes claims about Thompson’s ancestors that cannot be confirmed. His Irishness has been entirely missed by other writers, with the US historian Eric Foner, for example, referring baldly to Thompson as an Englishman; see Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York, 2005 edn), p. 264. Robert Desourteaux, Les Idées de William Thompson d’après L’Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (Bordeaux, 1912); and Marie Hasbach, William Thompson. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Nationalökonomie (Jena, 1922). Also, see Anton Menger, Das Recht auf den vollen Arbeitsertrag (Stuttgart, 1886). In particular, see Dolores Dooley, Equality in Community: Sexual Equality in the Writings of William Thompson and Anna Doyle Wheeler (Cork, 1996); Thomas Duddy, A History of Irish Thought (London, 2002), pp. 226–32; and Dooley’s entry on Thompson in Thomas Duddy (ed.), Dictionary of Irish Philosophers (Bristol, 2004), pp. 324–8. Thompson is known to nonacademic Irish readers primarily through the work of James Connolly, W.P. Ryan and other left-wing writers, and through Patrick Lynch’s short chapter on him in J.W. Boyle (ed.), Leaders and Workers (Cork, 1965). Also, see Fintan Lane, The Origins of Modern Irish Socialism, 1881–1896 (Cork, 1997), pp. 15–19. In addition, an annual William Thompson Weekend conference was held in Cork city between 2000 and 2004, and a paper on Thompson delivered at the first of these gatherings by the literary theorist Terry Eagleton was published subsequently: Terry Eagleton, ‘The radicalism of William Thompson’, Irish Review, vol. 26 (autumn 2000), pp. 80–8. The present chapter has its origins in a paper on Thompson’s local context that I delivered at the same conference. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), pp. 9–10. Examples of this, relevant to this chapter, were the Irish Manufacture Association and Cork Trades Association of the 1830s; see Fintan Lane, In Search of Thomas Sheahan: Radical Politics in Cork, 1824–1836 (Dublin, 2001), pp. 37–46. On habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA, 1984). Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), p. 95. Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 474. David W. Miller, ‘Non-professional soldiery, c.1600–1800’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 327–8. David Lammey, ‘The free trade crisis: a reappraisal’, in Gerard O’Brien (ed.), Parliament, Politics and People: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Irish History (Dublin, 1989), p. 84. Ibid., p. 81. David Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland, 1660–1800 (Dublin, 2000), pp. 165–6; Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 145, 147. In 1772, for example, there had been trade attacks in Cork against shops and vehicles believed to contain English goods; a sloop was also destroyed in April of that year on the city quays because it was carrying a loom from

44

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

William Thompson, Class and His Irish Context, 1775–1833 Dublin, something the weavers viewed as a threat to their employment prospects. The widespread fear of unemployment among artisans meant that the ‘free trade’ agitation in the late 1770s had the immediate backing of many skilled workers and their families. On the Cork trade attacks, see C.B. Gibson, History of the County and City of Cork (London, 1861), vol. ii, pp. 209–10. Lammey, ‘The free trade crisis’, p. 83. Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, p. 146; W.H. Crawford, ‘The Belfast middle classes in the late-eighteenth century’, in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion (Dublin, 1993), p. 69. Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992), pp. 103, 114–16. David Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630–1830 (Cork, 2005), p. 445. See the list in Gibson, History of the County and City of Cork, vol. ii, p. 219. Ibid., p. 223. Dickson, Old World Colony, p. 443. For the workings of the Friendly Club and Cork corporation, see Ian d’Alton, Protestant Society and Politics in Cork, 1812–1844 (Cork, 1980), pp. 90–101. d’Alton, Protestant Society and Politics in Cork, pp. 100–1; Lane, In Search of Thomas Sheahan, pp. 15–16. Ian d’Alton, ‘Cork city’s Protestant culture’, in John S. Crowley et al. (eds), Atlas of Cork City (Cork, 2005), p. 167. John B. O’Brien, ‘Population, politics and society in Cork, 1780–1900’, in Cornelius Buttimer and Patrick O’Flanagan (eds), Cork: History and Society (Dublin, 1993), p. 703. Ibid., pp. 703–4. Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1994), p. 28. Also, see Andy Bielenberg, Cork’s Industrial Revolution, 1780– 1880: Development or Decline? (Cork, 1991), pp. 3–5. For John Thompson’s address in 1787, see Richard Lucas, ‘The Cork directory for 1787’, in Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, vol. lxxii (1967), pp. 135–57. Patrick O’Flanagan, ‘Beef, butter, provisions and prosperity in a golden eighteenth-century’, in Crowley, Atlas of Cork City, p. 158. The house has since been knocked and the site now forms part of the Patrick Street façade of the Merchant’s Quay Shopping Centre. David Dickson, ‘Second city syndrome: reflections on three Irish cases’, in S.J. Connolly (ed.), Kingdom United? Great Britain and Ireland since 1500 (Dublin, 1999), p. 105. On the O’Connors, see Jane Hayter Hames, Arthur O’Connor, United Irishman (Cork, 2001) and Clifford D. Conner, Arthur O’Connor (New York, 2009). Dickson, Old World Colony, pp. 468–73. Thomas Dix Hincks, A Short Account of the Different Charitable Institutions of the City of Cork, with Remarks (Cork, 1802), p. 28. Colman O’Mahony, In the Shadows: Life in Cork, 1750–1930 (Cork, 1997), p. 40.

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39. Ibid., p. 31; A Short Account of the Institution, Rules, and Proceedings of the Cork Society for the Relief and Discharge of Persons with Small Debts (Cork, 1797), p. 25. 40. Report of the Proceedings of the General Committee of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, in the Year 1801 (Cork, 1802), pp. 15, 22. [Hereafter cited as Report.] 41. Thomas Dix Hincks, Letters Addressed to the Inhabitants of Cork, occasioned by the Circulation of a Work entitled The Age of Reason in that City (Cork, 1795). 42. Report, pp. 26, 28. 43. Ibid., pp. 3–4, 9, 10. Also, see Laurence M. Geary, Medicine and Charity in Ireland, 1718–1851 (Dublin, 2004), 79–80. 44. Report, p. 7 45. Ibid., p. 12. 46. Ibid., p. 23. 47. Kieran McCarthy, ‘The Royal Cork Institution’, in Crowley, Atlas of Cork City, pp. 223–7. 48. Dooley, Equality in Community, p. 15. 49. Rosemary Ffolliott, The Pooles of Mayfield; and Other Irish Families (Dublin, 1958), pp. 68–9. 50. Ibid., pp. 68–9; Cork Mercantile Chronicle, 17 December 1817. 51. Some information on this episode can be found in The Crisis, 24 May 1834. 52. Cork Advertiser, 22 March 1814; The Freeholder, 24 March 1814; Pankhurst, William Thompson, p. 3. 53. In 1826–7, Thompson wrote that for ‘about the last twelve years of my life I have been living on what is called rent, the produce of the labor of others’; see William Thompson, Labor Rewarded: The Claims of Labor and Capital Conciliated, or How to Secure to Labor the Whole Products of its Exertions (London, 1827), p. 1. 54. Joseph Lee, ‘Capital in the Irish economy’, in L.M. Cullen (ed.), The Formation of the Irish Economy (Cork, 1969), p. 55. 55. Quoted in ibid, p. 56. 56. Bielenberg, Cork’s Industrial Revolution, p. 3; Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, p. 156. 57. Cork Mercantile Chronicle, 17 December 1817. 58. Cork Mercantile Chronicle, 14 January, 8, 9 February 1818. 59. The Crisis, 24 May 1834. 60. The Constitution, 1 September 1825. 61. Pigot’s City of Dublin and Hibernian Provincial Directory for 1824 (London, 1824). 62. Pankhurst, William Thompson, p. 10. 63. Weekly Free Press and Co-operative Journal, 17 July 1830. 64. For discussions of this controversy, see Pankhurst, William Thompson, pp. 10–13; and Dooley, Equality in Community, pp. 15–21. 65. Quoted in Pankhurst, William Thompson, pp. 12–13. 66. Quoted in Dooley, Equality in Community, p. 18. 67. Cork Southern Reporter, 19 May 1818. 68. Jeremy Bentham to William Plumer, 17 October 1819, in Stephen Conway (ed.), The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 9 (Oxford, 1989), p. 360; Pankhurst, William Thompson, pp. 14–15.

46 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93.

94. 95. 96.

William Thompson, Class and His Irish Context, 1775–1833 Pankhurst, William Thompson, pp. 15–16. Ibid., pp. 16–17. Thompson, Labor Rewarded, pp. 98–9. Ibid, p. 117. For a useful review of Thompson’s economic thought, see Claeys, Money, Machinery and the Millennium, pp. 90–109; for an analysis of his feminism, see Dooley, Equality in Community, passim. William Thompson, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (London, 1824), pp. xvi, 7. Ibid., pp. xvi–xvii. Thompson, Labor Rewarded, p. 7. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 1. Quoted in Dooley, Equality in Community, p. 8. Daniel Donovan, Sketches in Carbery, County Cork: Its Antiquities, History, Legends and Topography (Dublin, 1876), p. 202. Ibid., p. 200. R.G. Garnett, Co-operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–45 (Manchester, 1972), pp. 59–60. Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), p. 174. The selection of Thompson to be the ‘one man’ who ‘should govern the initial community’ might seem a contradiction of his advocacy of participatory democracy, but in fact he simultaneously believed that a ‘general director’ was necessary during the start-up period. For a highlighting of Thompson’s lack of belief in religion, see The Freeholder, 29 December 1827, 9 January 1828. William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, in his Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom; with Some Short Account of the Different Associations he belonged to, and of the Opinions he entertained (London, 1876), p. 50. For the background to the 1826 poor law debate in Cork, see Lane, In Search of Thomas Sheahan, pp. 13–14. Freeman’s Journal, 25 August 1826. The Constitution, 31 August 1826. Southern Reporter, 26 August 1826. Southern Reporter, 17, 22, 24, 26 August 1826; The Constitution, 31 August 1826. London Co-operative Magazine, October 1826. William Thompson, ‘Practical Directions for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities’ (1830), in Gregory Claeys (ed.), Owenite Socialism: Pamphlets and Correspondence (London, 2005), vol. iii, p. 39. Pankhurst, William Thompson, pp. 4–5; Lane, In Search of Thomas Sheahan, pp. 16–17; Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy, 1820–30 (Dublin, 1985), pp. 7, 171. Lane, In Search of Thomas Sheahan, pp. 20–22. Thomas Wyse, Historical Sketch of the Late Catholic Association of Ireland (London, 1829), vol. ii, appendix xxxi, p. 227. See Kerby A. Miller, ‘No middle ground: the erosion of the Protestant middle class in southern Ireland during the pre-Famine era’, Huntington

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97.

98.

99. 100. 101. 102.

103.

104.

47

Library Quarterly, vol. 49 (1986), pp. 295–306. Also, on Cork, see John B. O’Brien, The Catholic Middle Classes in Pre-Famine Cork (Cork, 1979), although O’Brien overestimates the political power of the local middle class among the artisan population when he mistakenly asserts that that ‘in the early stages’, they ‘even controlled’ the Cork Trades Association (p. 17). E.T. Craig, An Irish Commune (Dublin, 1983), pp. 123–6; William Thompson to Robert Owen, 18 March 1830, in Claeys, Owenite Socialism: Pamphlets and Correspondence, vol. ix, p. 18. On MacCormac, see Vincent Geoghegan, ‘Robert Owen, co-operation and Ulster in the 1830s’, in Fintan Lane and Donal Ó Drisceoil (eds), Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830–1945 (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 6–26. The Crisis, 13 July 1833. I would like to thank Theresa Moriarty for this reference and for her very useful insights into the life and writings of William Thompson. The Crisis, 24 May 1834; Pankhurst, William Thompson, pp. 183–93. Thomas Sheahan, Articles of Irish Manufacture; or Portions of Cork History (Cork, 1833), p. 42. Lane, In Search of Thomas Sheahan, p. 61. Standish O’Grady to James Connolly, 2 October 1910, in Donal Nevin (ed.), Between Comrades: James Connolly, Letters and Correspondence, 1889– 1916 (Dublin, 2007), p. 434. It is not clear who ‘crossed’ Thompson in love, though it is certain that he never married. Over the years, it has been inferred and suggested that his strong friendship with the feminist Anna Wheeler may have had a romantic and sexual dimension; this is an interesting proposition, but, in the absence of any evidence, it remains unsubstantiated speculation and, perhaps, wishful thinking. This speculation, however, has led to Wheeler being described misleadingly in biographical entries as Thompson’s ‘partner’ (see Tim Cadogan and Jeremiah Falvey, A Biographical Dictionary of Cork [Dublin, 2006], p. 325) and even as his ‘lover’ (see S.J. Connolly [ed.], The Oxford Companion to Irish History [Oxford, 1998], p. 541). Donovan, Sketches in Carbery, pp. 200, 202. By the late twentieth century, stories about Thompson had become utterly fanciful and fictional ‘eccentricities’ were wheeled out to discredit him as a serious social thinker; one Cork writer, for example, baldly described Thompson as ‘an outlandish eccentric’ and, with no evidence (because none exists), claimed that he wore ‘his clothes back to front’, carried out ‘chemical experiments in public so that the simple folk thought he was either a vampire or a male witch’, advised ‘the West Cork farmers to share wives and practise birth control’, and described the priests as ‘rapacious parasites and dealers in brimstone’; see John M. Feehan, The Secret Places of the West Cork Coast (Cork, 1990), p. 49. ‘Carbery’, ‘A socialist philosopher’, Celtic Times, 17 September 1887; Craig, An Irish Commune, p. 125.

3 The Rise of the Catholic Middle Class: O’Connellites in County Longford, 1820–50 Fergus O’Ferrall

. . . to be suddenly summoned to the direction of public affairs, the middle class of Ireland seems almost dazzled by its own splendour. It scarcely believes in so magnificent an elevation succeeding so rapidly to so great degradation. Gustave de Beaumont, Ireland: Social, Political and Religious, ed. W.C. Taylor (London, 1839), vol. 2, pp. 121–2

Introduction In 1843, Friedrich Engels accused Daniel O’Connell of ‘miserable petty middle class objectives . . . [which] were at the bottom of all the shouting and the agitation for the Repeal’.1 In 1962, Eric Hobsbawn described O’Connell as ‘a moderate middle class autonomist’.2 More recently, two historians, Emmet Larkin and Kevin Whelan, have advanced striking hypotheses, which, if established by empirical local studies, would confirm the judgement of Beaumont and Engels and would bear out Hobsbawn’s assessment of O’Connell in the context of European history. Emmet Larkin has identified the development of the modern Irish nation with the progress of that class of Irish Roman Catholic tenant farmers who since 1750 have occupied more than 30 acres: in his view these farmers were ‘the critical nation forming class’ which was ‘enhanced by its cousinship in the cities and towns’. According to the Larkin thesis O’Connell’s fundamental strength lay in the combination of larger tenant farmers with the Catholic clergy,3 Kevin Whelan’s identification of the ‘underground gentry’ of strong assertive Catholic big 48

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farmers constructing a ‘legitimist’ status for themselves broadly supports the Larkin thesis: This new big-farm group had consolidated its interests in Irish economic and political life by the early nineteenth century . . . They constructed themselves, not as a peasant class but as proprietorsin-waiting, who would reclaim a patrimony of which their noble ancestors had been unjustly stripped . . . That big-farm class also constituted the backbone of the emergent Catholic nationalist project which was largely constructed and given organised political form by O’Connell.4 It is only by detailed local studies that such broad hypotheses can be fully tested. The O’Connellite movement in County Longford from 1820 to 1850 provides an opportunity to examine the social composition and behaviour of a remarkable generation of Catholic activists.

Building a county political organisation, 1824–9 Before the 1830s, the political, administrative and judicial control of County Longford lay almost exclusively in Protestant hands.5 The basis for challenging this supremacy was laid during the 1820s as Longford Catholics began to organise in response to O’Connell’s Catholic Association.6 It is important to situate the Catholic middle class as it emerges onto the political stage in the 1820s within the socio-economic context that existed in pre-Famine county Longford. The economy of the county was predominantly rural and agricultural with 75 per cent of families engaged in agriculture, 18 per cent in trade or manufacture and 7 per cent in other pursuits, according to the 1841 census, which showed a total population in the county of 115,491.7 Though the county, in general, was characterised by small farms, there was a very significant rural middle class of tenant farmers over 30 acres and some had very substantial acreages. Lewis in 1837 noted that Longford town (1841 population: 4,966) was ‘rapidly improving’.8 The Halls described it as ‘neat, clean, and well-ordered . . . the best painted town in Ireland.’9 According to Pigot’s Directory of 1824, the prosperity of Longford was ‘greatly assisted by its being on the high road to Sligo, by its extensive market, which is held on Saturday, for linen, corn, butter, etc. and by two annual fairs’. The town had some small industries, including distilling, brewing and tanning, and was well integrated into its agricultural hinterland.

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Granard (1841 population: 2,048) and Ballymahon (1841 population: 1,229) were lesser, but similar centres for markets and distribution. The Protestant population of the county amounted to somewhat less than 10 per cent of the total, with 10,337 persons.10 Protestants were generally in a better socio-economic position than the majority of the Catholic population and they represented the base for the emerging Tory party in opposition to the O’Connellites.11 An estimate of the overall size of the middle class in the social structure of the total population may be made from the classification of families according to the quality of their housing in the 1841 census. There were 20,599 families in the county of which 3,887 lived in firstor second-class houses, that is good houses of 5 to 9 rooms or better, as against 10,725 families in third-class houses (mud houses of 2 to 4 rooms with windows, i.e. traditional thatched house types) and 5,967 families in fourth-class homes, which were mud cabins. Of the 3,887 in the first and second class of houses, 3,290 lived in the second class of homes of 5 to 9 rooms.12 It may be inferred from these figures that just under a fifth of the families composed the rural and urban middle class. Given a multiplier of 5 or 6 per family, this middle-class population of about 20,000 (out of the total population of 115,491) greatly exceeds the urban population of about 8,000 in total (only a proportion of whom would have been housed in first- or second-class houses), so a strong rural middle class may be confidently posited. The O’Connellites, therefore, had a middle-class base in the rural economy of the county upon which to build their efforts, albeit one led by an urban bourgeoisie. By 1829, the Catholic middle class of County Longford had emerged as an organised political community. The county was polarised between a Liberal/Catholic party and an emerging Tory/Protestant party.13 These two parties engaged in a fierce struggle over the next two decades for political, administrative and judicial control of the county.

Rising expectations of the Catholic middle class An important factor mobilising the Catholic rural middle class in the 1830s was the bringing of pasture land, and thus grazier and larger tenants, into the new tithe assessments under the Tithe Composition Acts of 1823 and 1824. From their initial politicisation in the 1820s, the agricultural and urban middle class formed a powerful alliance to resist tithes in a sustained and well-organised resistance between 1830 and 1838. By 1832, County Longford was amongst the six counties of Leinster in which half or more of the tithes were unpaid putting the county

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in the forefront of the anti-tithe campaign.14 A second major impulse to Catholic middle-class political activity in the early 1830s was the campaign for parliamentary reform and, in particular, the subsequent reform registration of voters, which became the focus of bitter competition between the O’Connellites and the Tories in County Longford. What was so significant about both tithes and parliamentary reform was that they established a vital connection between parliamentary objectives and popular politics: the Catholic middle class could muster support from many small-holders and from the Catholic Church to create a broad front for their political objectives. In County Longford in 1832, a Longford Political Trades Union, with local branches, co-ordinated the popular campaign and provided the political leadership and direction.15 The evidence given to the Select Committee on Fictitious Votes in 1838 yields valuable information about political organisation in the county. Simon Nichols, secretary of the local ‘Liberal Club’ (this was the same as the Political Trades Union) in 1832, and a number of other activists, gave detailed evidence. Nichols, who had been very active in the emancipation movement in County Longford, was a well-to-do apothecary and accoucheur. He considered himself a ‘Radical’, as he thought that the laws should be administered in the interest of the people; he did not favour universal suffrage; he hoped for a secret ballot and household suffrage. The purpose of the Liberal Club was to advance the registry in the liberal interest. Nichols said that, in addition to the club in Longford, There were trades’ unions formed in the different towns, and the people, the intelligent middle classes, came forward with money, and in some instances, where the priests did not make themselves active, in advising the people how to register, how they would avail themselves in the easiest way of the right to register their votes, the priests were very unpopular with the people at times, very unpopular.16 To Maria Edgeworth, the struggle over tithe, rent and cess in County Longford was not merely a matter of Catholic against Protestant, a Union against Repeal, or O’Connell against the government; rather it was a struggle between ‘all who want to have against all who have’. She continued: Observe; not merely want against have, but want to have, which includes many more than the . . . truly distressed classes and is much more powerful and dangerous – all who now look to revolution for plunder and to change of Government for bettering themselves.17

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The rising expectations of the Catholic middle class underlay the popular campaign challenging the elite position of the minority Protestant community. The Catholic middle-class drive in Longford was ably supported in every parish by Catholic priests, despite the evidence of Nichols, who wished to emphasise lay leadership. When the Liberal agent James Ternan was pressed at the Select Committee on Fictitious Votes to name the politically active priests, he replied, ‘I should enumerate the entire of them in the county, with the exception of four or five, I think, and there are upwards of 30 in the county; they all did it.’ Priests shared the social, political and economic views of the middle class and, indeed, were drawn from that class. The agitation in County Longford and the widespread clerical involvement in the 1830s owed a great deal to Bishop Higgins.18 This powerful episcopal support for the anti-tithe campaign must have contributed greatly to the agitation in Longford.19 The tithe campaign in County Longford followed the plan outlined in March 1831 by public notice issued in Dublin and circulated throughout the country; this plan was applied nationally and provided the framework for the tithe resistance of the 1830s.20 The Granard Trades Political Union, for example, held a large anti-tithe meeting at the end of May 1832, which was attended by 300 to 400 people, and heard ‘agitators’ denounce ‘in a most violent manner’ tithes and other grievances; a hostile observer wrote that it was ‘cruel to permit the minds of a very quiet population to be agitated by 5 or 6 low shopkeepers’.21 Indeed, the activists typically were townsmen such as Joseph Reilly, the Granard shopkeeper, who acted as treasurer of the Granard Trades Political Union. A printed notice for a meeting at Ballymahon to petition against tithes helps to identify the occupations of the activists around the town.22 It is clear that there were close links between the towns and the surrounding rural areas. Many of the activists were both urban and rural, being landholders and businessmen or, like the Dowdall family in Ballymahon, who were millers, they had a dependence upon the agricultural produce of the area.23 An interesting feature of the police remarks on the Longford tithe agitators is that they noted seven of them, including Luke Dowdall, Thomas Bracken, Edward Rooney and Christopher Carbry, as ‘insolvent’; this may reflect dislike of such relatively lowly men taking part in politics, but more likely it is a commentary upon economic depression that provided the initial impetus behind the demands for tithe reductions. Also Liberal activists suffered economic sanctions: Edward Rooney gave

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Ballymahon Tithe Activists 1832 Name Francis Davys Thomas Bracken Hugh Tormy William Gogan Matthew Higgins Bryan Keenan James Ward Michael Leonard Michael Shanly James Kiernan George Corcoran Patrick Conran John Slevin George Watson John Coffy William Mulvihill Pat Sullivan T. McDermott

Occupation 400 acre farmer Land-agent, landowner, apothecary Shopkeeper Smith and farmer Farmer Doctor Farmer, 56 acres Whiskey seller Whiskey seller Saddler Apothecary Miller, £20 freeholder Shopkeeper Miller, £50 freeholder Attorney, large farmer Whiskey seller Shopkeeper Hotel keeper

evidence in 1838 of how he had farmed 90 to 100 acres on the Shuldham estate until he was turned out.24 Moreover, economic conditions provided a key argument for Repeal of the Union, which was supposed to rectify the ‘commercial injustices’ suffered by Ireland. The popular agitation of 1832 ended the payment of tithes in the county, despite the forces of law and order and the Tory response; SubInspector Simpson reported in October 1832 that, as a result of the general state of combination and intimidation, no tithe had been paid for the previous 12 months in County Longford.25 The tithe struggle continued in Longford until 1838, following the pattern set in 1832.26 An additional infusion of confidence came with the general election of December 1832, which saw the Catholic middle-class political machine triumph for the first time. An indication of the great effort at the registration prior to the election is that 3,067 notices were served by freeholders of their intention to register. The registration process was fraught with legal ambiguity, but a closer examination of the process gives an indication of the size of farm holding common among the support base for the Catholic middle-class struggle for local power. The close-fought six-week registration sessions, supported on the Liberal side by extensive voluntary contributions, laid the foundation upon

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The Rise of the Catholic Middle Class

which the electoral campaign in the county was to be fought for the rest of the O’Connell era. For this purpose, £435/7/8½d was raised in the county collection, which was more than the total ‘Catholic Rent’ collected from the county.27 As a result of the Reform registry, the county electorate almost doubled to 1,295 voters: there were 192 £50 voters, 11 £20 leaseholders, 111 £20 freeholders, 33 £10 leaseholders and 948 £10 freeholders.28 It is clear that the 948 £10 freeholders were the key elements in the county electorate; the £20 and £50 voters were not easily influenced and their politics, usually Tory, were evident to all. There were many anomalies in the £10 voters. It was admitted that some voters with less than 6 to 8 acres were registered and others rejected with 15 to 20 acres.29 The standing of tenant farmers eligible for the franchise in the county may be gauged from the evidence given to the Committees of the House of Commons, which heard petitions after the contests in 1832, 1836 and 1842. Examples of voters who were challenged illustrate that quite low acreages often qualified a tenant for the franchise; the class of tenant farmer with between 8 and 20 acres was closely involved in the struggle over the franchise. John Mulloy, a tenant of Henry Grattan, who had 10 acres for a rent of £14 13s. 4d. and house which cost £12 10s. to build, was declared a bad vote. Yet, John Masterson who held 9 acres, but paid a rent of £16 was declared a good vote. Cormac Dowd, a Greville tenant, who had 8 acres and paid £10 8s. yearly rent was declared a good vote, despite the fact that his rent, like most Greville tenants, was two-and-a-half years in arrears.30 These relatively small tenant farmers, with between 8 and 15 acres, were vulnerable to being caught between popular pressure and landlord revenge. The Tories challenged 191 such votes in 1833 and 242 in 1837, so it may be assumed that this is a good estimate of the lowest section of the electorate. Given the very narrow results that emerged at electoral contests and that these voters, when struck off, decided the seats on petition, it is clear that they were the critical elements in the electorate. In fact, it can be argued that the Reform registration had a formative influence on the development of county politics for it left it elections tottering in a fine balance between Liberals and Tories, and gave each side some hope of victory. Catholic tenant farmers with over 20 acres were solid for the O’Connellite cause after 1832. In December 1832, Luke White and James Halpin Rourke, the Liberal candidates, defeated the Tories, Forbes and Lefroy (White and Rourke secured 649 and 645 votes respectively to Forbes and Lefroy with 587 and 582 respectively). The close-fought nature of the contest is evidenced by the fact that of 1,294 registered voters, no less than 1,255

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voted. This first popular victory in electoral politics was of great importance; Maria Edgeworth wrote on the day of this Liberal success: ‘The evil will not stop at this election. It is not, as in former times, only losing an election.’31 Though, in 1833, the victors were to be unseated on petition, the impact of 1832 was a psychological one for the local Catholic middle-class activists. Tory success could only occur in the future if the franchise was permanently restricted and if the religious composition of the voters was sufficiently altered to give a majority to the Protestant tenants. The Conservative reaction to the loss of County Longford centred on developing a greater Protestant base on their estates and on the exclusion of Catholic tenants where feasible. This reaction determined the great county cleavage for the rest of the decade and beyond – a bitter, violent struggle between O’Connellites and Tories. Charles Fox, a leading local Tory, wrote to his friend Henry Maxwell, immediately after the Liberal victory in Longford, with this advice: Take care of your registry: prevent all Romans from registering; not one now dare vote with us. I am sensible of the necessity of only having Protestants if to be procured. The danger from this Parliament is tremendous & imminent.32 The King-Harman tenants, though largely Protestant, had not been rigorously controlled and evidently the Catholic voters, at least, on the estate supported the Liberals.33

A ‘revolution’ in local government Between 1833 and 1839, there were three contested elections in County Longford – 1835, 1836 and 1837. It was a period when popular politics, embracing agrarian, religious and political aims, intensified the use of a wide range of agitation methods, deployed by the Catholic middle-class leadership from a permanent club room at Tallon’s Hotel in Longford town.34 In 1838, James Ternan, the Liberal activist, commented that since the 1820s there had been ‘a battle between the people and the aristocracy, or those who call themselves the aristocracy of the county’; he felt that the people had won the battle.35 From the mid to late 1830s, the local Catholic middle class saw concrete achievements as a result of their prolonged struggle. The White brothers were MPs from 1837 to 1841 and the O’Connellite alliance with the Whigs from 1835 meant that the door to some local patronage for

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Catholics was at least ajar, if not fully open.36 The revision of the magistracy was favourable towards O’Connellites, as the new list was in sharp contrast to the previous Tory-dominated magistracy.37 Liberal activists after 1838 were elected to the Board of Guardians, which resulted from the new Poor Law Act. The tithe agitation led to the exemption of tenants-at-will and year-to-year tenants from tithe liabilities and all arrears from 1834 to 1837 written off; tithes were converted to a rentcharge payable by landlords at the amount of three-quarters of the old composition. With Thomas Drummond’s impartial administration in Dublin Castle, with landlord power curbed in the county and with the Established Church deprived of tithe-collecting powers, it was clear that the Catholic middle class in Longford was in a much stronger position. Indeed, the urban and rural Catholic middle class were becoming dominant in county affairs, with the sole exception of the Grand Jury; this dominance becomes apparent when the compositions of the Boards of Guardians and Longford Town Commission are analysed. Following the passage of the Irish Poor Law Act, 1838, County Longford was divided into two Poor Law Unions, Granard and Longford. In May 1839, a meeting took place to ratify those individuals nominated by the Longford Union electoral divisions to the new Board of Guardians; the prospect of O’Connellites dominating the Board was soon apparent. In fact, in the Longford electoral division, it was necessary to hold an election as the ‘popular party’ refused to compromise on the four guardians to be selected for that division.38 There were nine candidates for the four positions. The result was a clear-cut O’Connellite triumph: Patrick Keon, spirit merchant, 923 votes; Alexander O’Beirne, distiller, 928 votes; Christopher Carbry, shopkeeper, 892 votes; and John Dowling, corn merchant, 888 votes. The remaining Protestant and Tory-backed candidates were heavily defeated: R.E. Twigg, 259 votes; R. Barbor, 357 votes; R. Legge, 358 votes; W. Allen, 353 votes; and A. Gillooly, 31 votes. The election of the first Board of Guardians marked a radical new era for the Catholic middle class in local government; the full board comprised 30 elected members and 10 magistrates who were ex-officio members.39 The O’Connellites soon seized the spoils of victory: the magistrate James Rock J.P. was elected chairman; Rock was prominent in local O’Connellite politics. Patrick Keon was made vice-chairman and Christopher Carbry, a leading O’Connellite, deputy vice-chairman. The firm O’Connellite grip on the new body was demonstrated in the election of the Clerk to the Board, a position with a salary of £40 per annum. Edward Rooney received 18 votes in contrast to 11 votes for his

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nearest rival, Robert Wilson, while just 7 votes went to two other candidates.40 Rooney, of course, had been an active O’Connellite since 1825 and was a key electoral agent for the Liberal Registry Club.41 Other members of the board, such as Luke Dowdall, Owen Maxwell, Patrick Conran and Nicholas McGaver, were active O’Connellites and they now had a public representative forum for the first time. While constrained by the Poor Law Commissioners under the Poor Law Act, they had, for the first time, the power to levy and expend a tax (the poor rate). Extensive local patronage flowed from the board, including appointments, such as Master of the Workhouse, School teachers, Parish Wardens, Relieving Officers, Poor Law Rate Collectors, as well as Medical Attendants. For example, the O’Connellite Simon Nichols was appointed Medical Attendant at a salary of £60 per annum, a position he held for many years. Contracts for clothes, bedding, furniture, fittings and food were available and these were eagerly sought by merchants and shopkeepers in the town. Banks sought to be appointed as bankers to the board. Unsurprisingly, accusations by Tory opponents of the board regarding jobbery were frequent. W.L. Feingold has suggested that a ‘revolution in local government’ occurred through the Poor Law Guardians during the 1870s and 1880s, when the landowning monopoly on such boards was successfully challenged by Catholic tenants mobilised through the Home Rule movement.42 In fact, this ‘revolution’ began in the Longford Union as early as 1839. Until all the unions are studied in detail, the extent of Catholic middle-class involvement will remain unclear; given Feingold’s work, it appears that Longford was a precocious development relative to what occurred in most of the other 130 unions. It clearly marks the rise of the Catholic middle class in County Longford to substantial power and influence in local affairs. The Poor Law Unions, in response especially to the crisis in the late 1840s, developed into an important administrative system, as parliament assigned to them numerous new functions in areas related to poor relief, such as public health, care of orphans, voter registration and emigration.43 Hence, popular control in Longford proved a more substantial achievement than could have been foreseen in 1839. The union rivalled the Grand Jury and gradually overshadowed it, until the Local Government Act of 1898 introduced elected county and urban councils.44 The Repeal cause embraced the Catholic desire for control in local and national government. It also had a developing platform focused on the promotion of Irish manufactures, the need to reduce the burden of poor rates and the need to protect tenant farmers. At local level, the

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campaign was related to these practical questions with more effect than vague nationalistic ambitions.45 O’Connell’s 1843 manifesto outlined the Repeal programme, the ‘five great measures’, which only an Irish parliament would pass: total extinction of tithes, fixity of tenure, protection and encouragement of Irish manufactures, democratic suffrage by secret ballot and abolition of the poor rates.46 The programme united the tenant farmers and the Catholic urban middle class. In September 1843, a motion was passed at a meeting of Poor Law Guardians to discuss Repeal.47 It is significant that when O’Connell tapped the widespread feeling against the Poor Rates in late 1842 and 1843 for the Repeal cause that he did not condemn the local Boards of Guardians but rather sought an expansion of their authority and a reduction of the power of the central board.48 The General Election of 1841 repeated the pattern for electoral politics established in Longford in the 1830s. The poll closed after 4 days leaving the Whites clear victors with 621 votes each and Lefroy with 482 votes. In April 1842, Lefroy succeeded in unseating Luke White and Lefroy and Henry White shared the county until 1847. Longford shopkeepers, traders and businessmen, together with the larger Catholic farmers, were motivated to support Repeal because of their desire for patronage, status and socio-economic advance; they sought to control local government and administration. This was apparent in their control of the Board of Poor Law Guardians. It was also very obvious in the Longford Town Commission during the 1840s. There was some overlap of membership between the Board of Guardians and the Town Commission. O’Connell in 1836 made his well-known statement that he saw local government in each town as proving ‘a normal school for teaching the science of peaceful political agitation’:49 The 1840 Irish Municipal Reform Act abolished the borough corporation of Longford, by then largely defunct. This was a great gain for farmers as it undermined the legal basis of the much complained of tolls and charges on all marketed items in the town. The 1840 Act increased the importance of an Act passed in 1828 (9 Geo IV c82) which made provision for a Board of Commissioners who might levy rates for municipal services in Irish towns.50 The Longford O’Connellites, making full use of the ‘popular and useful’ 1828 Act, fulfilled O’Connell’s hope for town government in Ireland.51 By 1843 the Longford Town Commission like the Board of Guardians was a Repeal preserve. In April 1843, at a meeting in the Longford CourtHouse, Patrick Keon moved a Repeal petition basing his argument on the economic decline which he claimed resulted from the Union; Keon cited

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the decline of the linen trade in County Longford and he was supported by Christopher Carbry. The Protestant members who were a minority on the Longford Town Commission stayed away from this ‘political’ meeting which was attended by 11 Catholic Commissioners.52 In July 1843 when elections took place for the 21 member Board Carbry and Keon canvassed on the basis that ‘none but a Repealer should be returned’:53 From these elections in July 1843 the board was entirely composed of Catholic Repealers except one Presbyterian minister of the Remonstrant synod who supported Repeal: Longford Town Commission 184354 Name55

Occupation (as given in The Longford Journal)

1. Rev. Thomas Kennedy 2. C. Carbry 3. Michael Coogan+ ∗ 4. Patrick Phillips+ 5. John Murray+ ∗ 6. Michael Kenna + 7. Patrick McGaver+ 8. Edward McGaver+ ∗ 9. Edward Flood+ ∗ 10. Simon Nichols+ 11. John Nous+ 12. Michael Skelly+ 13. Daniel Smith+ 14. Daniel Quinn+ 15. Michael Quinn+ 16. Charles Smith+ 17. Arthur Campbell+ 18. John Halligan 19. John Farrell+ ∗ 20. John Tuite+ ∗ 21. Rev. J. O’Donoghue

Presbyterian minister, miller Baker, spirit dealer Calico merchant Cloth merchant Porter merchant Baker, spirit dealer Grocer, publican, baker Tobacconist Baker, hotel-owner Apothecary, surgeon Shopkeeper, delph-ware Shopkeeper, hardware Grocer, spirit dealer Dealer in soft goods Cloth merchant, pawn broker Grocer, spirit dealer Apothecary Publican Publican Hardware merchant Parish priest

∗

Those marked with asterisk were O’Connellite activists in the 1820s; those with a cross after their names had subscribed to the O’Connell Tribute. As a result of this Repeal take-over, the Longford Journal’s proprietor, John Dwyer, and other Protestants refused to pay the rates levied by the

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Commission and Dwyer campaigned against the Board vigorously. The ‘Repeal’ Town Commission frequently discussed subjects far removed from municipal services.56 Their monthly meetings were held at the residence of the Chairman Rev. Thomas Kennedy, ‘with closed doors’ as the Journal put it.57 Dwyer continued his attack on the Commission for wasting money on legal expenses in recovering taxes from Protestants ‘to establish Repeal principles’.58 During the 1840s the Board of Guardians and the Town Commission had demonstrated to Tories like Dwyer ‘that every occasion on which politics can be made available to forward Popery, it is warmly taken up by the priests . . . as another step in the ladder of Romish ascendancy’.59 Maria Edgeworth, who might be expected to be more favourable to Catholic advance than Dwyer, observed in 1843: That we poor Protestants . . . did not like, only one million as we are, to be trampled upon by seven and to have our Church pulled down about our ears and to have our clergy buried under the rubbish – and their church lands and our estates taken from us. Maria Edgeworth believed at this time that history confirmed ‘the encroaching and predominantly predatory nature and art of Catholics’.60 She was, like all Tories, haunted by a nightmare of Ireland when Repeal became a reality: in May 1843, the month of the great ‘monster’ meeting in support of Repeal held at Longford, she conjured up the nightmare of Ireland ‘the Day after the Repeal’: Taxes and no money, Protection wanted – French threatening and no fleet or in peace no commerce with England on the old terms. The Catholic Junta ruling as the Orange one did. Then good morning to the Protestants. Poor Edgeworthstown . . . the Repeal has done for us all!61 Given the experience of Catholic control in local government and the mounting local campaign for Repeal, blessed by the Catholic Bishop and his clergy, Tory fears seemed hardly exaggerated as far as their future was concerned.

Conclusion: the context for Catholic middle-class success The Catholic middle class in County Longford were led by a generation of O’Connellite activists which had benefited from the progressive removal of Catholic disabilities since the 1770s. In Longford they gained local power relatively easily largely because of the nature of Protestant

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landed society in the county. Longford lacked a strong resident nobility and indeed many of the estate owners did not reside in the county. The Tory party greatly depended upon the parvenue Lefroy family. The erosion of the Protestant middlemen in the county enabled the stronger Catholic tenant farmers led by a resourceful urban bourgeoisie to obtain greater influence in the county.62 The drive for greater Catholic control over local political, economic and social affairs was the strongest force behind O’Connellism in the county. Success in challenging tithes, and other taxes such as tolls and charges on town markets, led to tenant-right from the 1840s being articulated as a key political demand by farmers shaping county politics for succeeding decades. O’Connell had placed ‘fixity of tenure’ as one of the ‘great measures’ which would result from Repeal; this would involve compensation for improvements and leases of 21 years.63 The commercial elements composing the middle class believed an Irish parliament would protect trade and manufactures, reversing what were believed to be the detrimental economic effects of the Union. County Longford bears out the main thrust of the Larkin/Whelan hypotheses: O’Connellism at local level was largely a Catholic middleclass phenomenon. The democratic revolution in local politics laid the basis for future Catholic and nationalist advances. The dominance of Bishop Higgins foreshadowed a period of absolute control by Catholic clergy of county Longford’s parliamentary representation. For the rest of the century Longford was the only Irish county where the Conservatives were unable to secure a seat in Parliament.64 However, as Charles Gavan Duffy later reflected, Higgins and the clergy spoke for the ‘class where political power resided, the shopkeepers and the farmers’.65

Notes 1. Friedrich Engels, ‘Letters from London, 1843’ in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Ireland (London, 1971), p. 35. 2. Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (London, 2005 edn), p. 153. 3. See Emmet Larkin, ‘Church, state and nation in modern Ireland’, American Historical Review, vol. 80, no. 5 (1975) reprinted in E. Larkin, The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism (Dublin, 1997), pp. 91–130. 4. K. Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Cork, 1996), pp. 54–5; see also K. Whelan, ‘An Underground Gentry? Catholic Middlemen in Eighteenth Century Ireland’ in J.S. Donnelly, Jr., and K.A. Miller (eds), Irish Popular Culture 1650–1850 (Dublin, 1999), pp. 118–72. 5. See D. McCabe, ‘ “That part that laws or kings can cause or cure”: Crown Prosecution and Jury Trial at Longford Assizes, 1830–45’ in R. Gillespie and G. Moran (eds), Longford: Essays in County History (Dublin, 1991), pp. 153–72.

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6. F. O’Ferrall, ‘The Emergence of the Political Community in Longford, 1824– 29’ in Gillespie and Moran, Longford: Essays in County History, pp. 123–51. 7. The Census of Ireland 1841 H.C. 1843, XXIV, pp. xviii, 186. 8. S. Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (London, 1837), Vol. 2, pp. 310–11. 9. Mr. and Mrs. S.C. Hall, Ireland its Scenery and Character (London, 1843), iii, pp. 276–82. 10. See First Report of Commissioners of Public Instruction (Diocese of Ardagh parishes in County Longford) H.C. 1835, XXXIII, 103–17. 11. F. O’Ferrall, ‘The Lefroy family and the emergence of the Tory Party in County Longford, 1829–31’ in Teathbha (Journal of the County Longford Historical Society), vol. 3, no. 1 (2006), pp. 2–10. 12. Census 1841, p. 186. 13. See O’Ferrall, ‘The Lefroy family’, pp. 3–10; there is a detailed treatment of politics in County Longford 1820–1850 in R.F.B. O’Ferrall, The Growth of Political Consciousness in Ireland 1823–1847: A Study of O’Connellite Politics and Political Education (Unpublished PhD thesis, Trinity College, Dublin, 1978) pp. 453–716. 14. Lists of claimants of tithe arrears for the Diocese of Ardagh compiled in 1839 survive in OP (MA) 1832 – 82/1839/158/159/160, NAI. 15. A membership card of The Longford Political Trades Union was sent to Dublin Castle in 1832 when found in a house search by the police; see CSO R.P. – (Outrage)/1838/Carton 29, NAI. 16. Third Report from the Select Committee on Fictitious Votes (Ireland), H.C., 1837–8, (643) XIII, Part 11, Qs 10354–6; 10387; 10782–5; 10357–60; 10364. 17. Maria Edgeworth to Fanny Edgeworth, 24 October 1832, quoted in Michael Hurst, Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene (London, 1969), p. 68. 18. For a brief account of Dr. Higgins, see Very Rev. M.J. Canon Masterson ‘Bishop O’Higgins (1794–1853)’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 34 (1929), pp. 465– 72; Father Edward McGaver told the Select Committee that from 1832 every parish in the county had at least one priest engaged in politics but generally both priests in the parish were involved, see Sel. Comm. Fictitious Votes, Qs 11057–8; 11095–8; 11103–4; 11110; 12300; 12301; 12707–13. 19. Canon John Monahan, Records Relating to the Dioceses of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise (Dublin, 1886), p. 207. 20. See this printed notice in P. O’Donoghue, ‘Opposition to Tithe Payment in 1830–31’, Studia Hibernica, 6 (1966), pp. 72–4. 21. CSORP – (Outrage)/Forbes to Gosset 28 May 1832/945, NAI. 22. The notice, with some pencilled police identifications, survives in CSORP (Outrage)/July 1832/1294, NAI. 23. Occupations are noted by police on the notice and can usually be confirmed by Pigott’s Directory 1824 or reports of Parliamentary petitions as well as in the lists of Longford freeholders, GO 444. 24. Sel. Comm. Fictitious Votes, Qs 11480–11490. 25. Simpson to Sir J. Harvey, 17 October 1832, quoted in P. O’Donoghue, ‘Opposition to Tithe Payment in 1832–3’, Studia Hibernica, vol. 12 (1972), p. 91. 26. See report of Tithes meeting in Longford which was attended by 200–300 people in October 1838 and at which Carbry took a leading part The Westmeath Guardian and Longford News-Letter, 1 November 1838, see also printed

Fergus O’Ferrall

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

63

notice against the ‘cursed and blood-stained’ tithes dated from February 1838, CSORP (Outrage)/Police Report/18 February 1838, NAI. The registration process in the county is described in more detail in O’Ferrall, The Growth of Political Consciousness, pp. 612–24. See return of number of voters registered . . . since 1 October 1832 in First Report from Select Committee on Fictitious Votes (Ireland), H.C. 1837, (308), XI, Part I, Appendix A, No. 1, 573. Sel. Comm. Fictitious Voters, Q 12954. Committee on Longford Elections (House of Commons1833), Royal Irish Academy, Haliday Collection, 1570, 9, pp. 66–88. Maria Edgeworth to Fanny Edgeworth, 22 December 1832 quoted in Hurst, Maria Edgeworth, p. 71. Charles Fox to Henry Maxwell, 26 December 1832, Farnham Papers, Ms 18613 (9), NLI. Father McGaver said that the great number of Lady Rosse’s tenants were Protestant and that generally her tenants voted according to her views while she was alive, Sel. Comm. Fictitious Votes, Qs 12756, 12759. As Father McGaver stated in 1838: ‘There is but one club; that club changed its name’ according to O’Connellite politics from time to time; see Sel. Comm. Fictitious Votes Qs 12276–8, 12272–4, 8347. Ibid., Q. 11125. See R.B. McDowell, Public Opinion & Government Policy in Ireland 1801–1846 (London, 1953), pp. 46–7, for discussion of the patronage at the disposal of MPs, especially when the MP supported the Government of the day. In June 1838 the new list of Longford magistrates omitted 11 of the previous Tory magistrates, and included several Liberal supporters; see The Westmeath Guardian and Longford News-Letter, 14 June 1838; The Longford Journal, 6 April 1839. The Longford Journal, 1 June 1839. The full Board is listed in The Longford Journal, 29 June 1839. Minutes of the first meeting of the new Board of Guardians, 28 June 1839, Minute Books of the Board, Longford Local Archives, Longford Library. The Longford Journal, 29 June, 14 September, 5 October 1839. See W.L. Feingold, The Irish Boards of Poor Law Guardians, 1872–86 A Revolution in Local Government (Unpublished PhD thesis, The University of Chicago, 1974); see also his ‘Land League Power: the Tralee Poor Law Election of 1881’ in S. Clark and J.S. Donnelly Jr. (eds), Irish Peasants Violence of Political Unrest 1780–1914 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1983), pp. 285–310. For an overview of the implementation of the Irish poor law, see Virginia Crossman, The Poor Law in Ireland, 1838–1948 (Dundalk, 2006). The Longford Grand Juries continued in the O’Connell period to be composed of those from the Protestant landed interest though a very limited Catholic participation became possible under the Grand Jury (Ireland) Act, 1836, allowing Patrick Keon to serve as Grand Juror for the Quarter sessions; see The Longford Journal, 21 October 1843. See, for example, report of parish meeting at Tang, County Longford in support of Repeal and the Promotion of Irish Manufacture with Patrick Conran of Shruel in the chair, The Pilot, 27 January 1841.

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46. See L.J. McCaffrey, Daniel O’Connell and the Repeal Year (Lexington, 1966), pp. 32–3; The Nation, 7 January 1843. 47. See review of Board by The Longford Journal, 29 November 1845. 48. McCaffrey, Daniel O’Connell and the Repeal Year, p. 35. 49. Quoted in A. Macintyre, The Liberator Daniel O’Connell and the Irish Party 1830–1847 (London, 1965), p. 241. 50. For a full treatment of Irish Municipal reform, see ibid., pp. 227–61; for details of tolls and charges on agricultural produce in Longford town, see First Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Municipal Corporations in Ireland Part III, 1836, (29) XXIV, report on ‘The Borough of Longford’, pp. 1245–54. 51. Macintyre, The Liberator, p. 235. 52. The Longford Journal, 15 April 1843; Edward Rooney, who held office of Clerk to the Poor Law Guardians, was absent; there were 8 Protestants elected in July 1841 and 13 Catholics and the Protestants had urged the Catholics to hold a Repeal meeting rather than to use the Town Commission to petition, see The Longford Journal, 13 January 1844. 53. The Longford Journal, 15 July 1843. 54. Ibid., 15 July 1843, 13 January 1844; the paper tended to belittle the social standing of O’Connellites. 55. see The Nation, 23 November 1844, 20 December 1845, and for the Repeal Rent, see The Longford Journal, 20 May 1843; Patrick Phillips was appointed a Repeal Arbitrator in October 1843; see ibid., 21 October 1843; and in July 1847, the Liberal Club met at Daniel Quinn’s house in Longford, ibid., 17 July 1847; the Longford Commissioners addressed O’Connell and the State prisoners in June 1844; see The Nation, 15, 22, 29 June, 20 July 1844. 56. In May 1844 the Commissioners circulated a petition seeking the revision or rescinding of the Charter of the Bank of Ireland, The Longford Journal, 18 May 1844. 57. Ibid., 12 April 1845. 58. Ibid., 2, 9 August, 15 November, 6 December 1845. 59. Ibid., 29 April 1843. 60. Quoted in Hurst, Maria Edgeworth, p. 129. 61. Maria Edgeworth to Frances Edgeworth, 9 May 1843, quoted in Hurst, Maria Edgeworth, pp. 123–4. 62. See O’Ferrall, The Growth of Political Consciousness, pp. 454–80 for socioeconomic survey of the county; see Kerby A. Miller, ‘No middle ground: the erosion of the Protestant middle class in Southern Ireland during the pre-famine era’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 49 (1986), pp. 295–306 and expanded in ‘The lost world of Andrew Johnston: sectarianism, social conflict, and cultural change in Southern Ireland during the pre-famine era’ in Donnelly and Miller, Irish Popular Culture, pp. 222–241. 63. Daniel O’Connell to Rt. Rev. Dr. Higgins, 11 April 1841 (Photostat), Ms 11489, NLI. 64. Gerard Moran, ‘Politics and Electioneering in County Longford, 1868–80’ in Gillespie and Moran, Longford Essays, pp. 173–93. 65. C. Gavan Duffy, Young Ireland (Dublin, 1892), Part II, pp. 10, 87–88.

4 ‘Carrying the War into the Walks of Commerce’: Exclusive Dealing and the Southern Protestant Middle Class during the Catholic Emancipation Campaign Jacqueline Hill

The half-century before the Famine was a difficult period for the Irish middle classes. There were some success stories, such as linen (in Ulster), and brewing, as well as significant growth in communications and banking. However, the overall rate of economic growth slowed after 1815. Small independent manufacturers, the mainstay of industry in most Irish towns and cities, came under pressure from British imports.1 However, in addition to purely economic problems, there were difficulties arising from political and religious factors. Supporters of legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland had hoped that union would serve to soften, if not overcome, the heightened sectarian divisions that had followed the 1798 rebellion. In reality, the pre-Famine era witnessed an intensification of sectarian tensions. In part, as the state adopted a more neutral position towards the different denominations in Ireland, this was an inevitable result of the rivalry that developed between the two main churches, which were both inclined to see themselves as ‘the national church’. But it was also a side-effect of the protracted campaign for what contemporaries in the 1790s had come to call ‘Catholic emancipation’. During the final phase of the emancipation campaign in the 1820s, several novel developments occurred. The collection of a ‘Catholic rent’, the involvement of the Catholic clergy, and the mobilisation of Catholic 40-shilling freeholders to vote for pro-emancipation candidates, were the most dramatic. These tactics in turn prompted some (Protestant) landlords to use eviction, or the threat of eviction, against tenants who 65

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defied them at the polls. All these matters have been widely studied.2 There was, however, another strategy deployed to promote emancipation which, although touched on by historians, has received much less attention.3 By the time emancipation was eventually granted in 1829, the boycotting of tradesmen and shopkeepers in certain parts of the country on the grounds that they opposed emancipation was a sufficiently familiar phenomenon for the expression ‘exclusive dealing’ to have become common currency.4 At that stage, it had been complained of by those who were, or feared to become, its victims, for over 15 years. Drawing on the increasingly important purchasing power of Catholics,5 at various times from the mid-1810s onwards it had been commended by Catholic leaders, and in 1828 it became the subject of a long and passionate debate in the Catholic Association. Even during the 1830s and 1840s it remained a matter of controversy. In view of all this, it may seem surprising that exclusive dealing has received no systematic attention. In fact, the causes are not hard to find. While it is apparent that by the late 1820s contemporaries took it for granted that the practice was in fairly extensive operation, there is little detailed evidence about specific cases. In some instances, its effects on individuals can be traced; but such cases tend to rely on details that emerged during court proceedings, or (occasionally) from personal letters. The experiences of people who were most likely to become victims of the practice – Protestant tradesmen and shopkeepers in villages, towns and cities – were not necessarily recorded, or not at first hand. The perpetrators were not likely to record their activities either, although, as will be noted, there were exceptions. The conservative press reported incidents, but generally without giving details. Since their editors were not impartial observers, such evidence has to be treated with caution. Moreover, although by 1829 the term ‘exclusive dealing’ had entered the political lexicon – speakers and writers across the political spectrum used it unselfconsciously – liberals were more likely to understand it as a short-term strategy to boost support for emancipation, while their opponents tended to interpret it in starker sectarian terms. Difficulties such as these render the task of assessing the extent and impact of exclusive dealing more than usually intractable. The present study has more limited objectives. It aims to explore the circumstances in which exclusive dealing began, and considers some of the antecedents. It discusses some key developments in the 1820s, especially the debate on the subject in the Catholic Association. Finally, it will briefly discuss the reasons for the persistence of exclusive dealing into the 1830s and beyond.

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Before commencing this discussion, it will be appropriate to consider the nature and composition of the Protestant middle classes in this period. Traditionally, Protestants had been overrepresented in the towns, and this continued to be a feature of the pre-Famine period. With Protestants representing around 15 per cent of the population outside Ulster, Dublin’s Protestants comprised over one-quarter of the capital’s population, while in Connacht, Sligo’s Protestants made up a similar proportion. Protestants in Cork and Waterford made up over 17 per cent of their respective towns, and were also well represented in smaller towns. Moreover, although Catholic participation in trade had been increasing during the eighteenth century, and Catholic wealth was growing, Protestants retained a significant share of trade, and continued to dominate the professions for decades after the law had been opened to Catholics in 1792.6 Population growth in the pre-Famine era was a feature of all religious denominations (even Quakers);7 however, Protestants featured disproportionately among Irish emigrants in this period.8

Origins and context In his history of the Catholic Association published after the winning of emancipation in 1829, one of its leaders, Thomas Wyse, touched on that body’s treatment of the issue of exclusive dealing. The question, he noted, had been formally raised in November 1828 when it was proposed that the association should endorse a policy of refusing to deal with ‘notorious Orangemen’ but rather give a preference to supporters of ‘civil and religious liberty’. According to Wyse, the issue aroused ‘intense interest among all classes’. In December, after a lengthy debate, the proposal was rejected by the Catholic Association. Wyse was among those who welcomed this decision. He noted that incidents such as a run on the Wexford Provincial Bank, organised by local emancipation activists who objected to one of the bank’s directors attending a Brunswick Club meeting, might become the norm, with potentially disastrous effects on Irish banking. He went further, observing that had the proposal been adopted, ‘it would have extinguished Protestant trade, in many instances, peremptorily and altogether’.9 Wyse’s account, though reliable as far as it went, was in some respects misleading. It has been possible to deduce from it that the Catholic Association did not endorse the practice.10 Strictly speaking, this may have been correct; however, as will be shown, certain leading figures in the emancipation campaign, both in public and private, had already pronounced in favour of the principle, and since June 1828 the promotion

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of exclusive dealing had been one of the duties of an affiliated organisation, the Order of Liberators. In order to gain a fuller understanding of the phenomenon, it is necessary to go back to the stage in the campaign in which the practice originated. It has been suggested that it first arose and became a matter of public comment in the aftermath of the 1812 general election,11 and certainly during 1813 there were reports of the practice in several parts of Leinster and Munster. The reasons for the appearance of exclusive dealing at that time have to be sought in the fortunes of the Catholic emancipation campaign. The issue had made little headway since Prime Minister Pitt had failed to persuade George III of the need to combine the introduction of the act of union in 1800 with emancipation. It was not until 1821 that an emancipation bill first passed the House of Commons (it failed in the Lords). However, as historians have noted, these years did have considerable political significance. In 1811, arising from George III’s insanity, the Prince of Wales had been appointed regent, with full powers from February 1812. As a youth, he had been known to support Catholic claims, and although as regent he was soon revealed to have changed his mind, this was not immediately obvious to the Catholic leaders. Following the general election of October–November 1812, Lord Liverpool presided over a ministry in which the ‘no popery’ tenets of the Duke of Portland’s government (1807–12) were set aside in favour of allowing emancipation to become an open issue. Although the Catholics themselves were still divided on the issue of a government veto over Catholic appointments, it did appear as if emancipation might be imminent, especially when in March 1813 the House of Commons for the first time agreed to allow a Catholic relief bill, introduced by Henry Grattan, to proceed to the committee stage.12 The fact that the fate of emancipation would be determined in parliament highlighted the importance of petitioning, one of the timehonoured methods of bringing influence to bear on MPs and on legislation. The Catholic leaders had petitioned in 1805, and although the ensuing debate in the House of Commons had revealed a large hostile majority, parliamentary petitions for emancipation subsequently became an almost annual event. Given the exclusively Protestant character of parliament, it was obviously desirable that emancipation should be presented as something that would be generally acceptable to Protestants, especially Irish Protestants. One sign of this was the organisation in 1812 of a numerously signed petition to parliament from Protestants in support of Catholic claims.13 However, the spectacle of Catholics and Protestants apparently united on the issue spurred opponents of

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emancipation to demonstrate that such views were not universal. Proemancipation petitions to parliament had for many years been followed by counter-petitions from such bodies as urban corporations and grand juries, but in the winter of 1812–13, following the general election, a national counter-petitioning movement was commenced, extending both to Ireland and England. This resulted in what one of the principal organisers, John Giffard, conductor of the ultra-Protestant Dublin Journal, claimed to be 18,000 signatures from Dublin alone.14 The Dublin section of the petition was presented to parliament by Dublin Lord Mayor Abraham Bradley King on 23 February.15 It was against this background, with the prospects for emancipation improving, but with signs of opposition intensifying, that the pro-emancipationists began to take particular note of the counterpetitioning movement. Catholics themselves were mostly content to deplore the phenomenon in general terms, and to try to reassure hostile Protestants,16 but the liberal Protestant press went further. The Dublin Evening Post suggested that Dublin Castle was behind the counterpetitioning, and poured scorn on claims that they reflected the real sense of local Protestants.17 The Freeman’s Journal commented adversely on the Dublin petition, suggesting that some signatures were those of boys in the Blue-Coat charity school.18 In mid-March, the news that Grattan’s bill was to advance to the committee stage raised the stakes for those on both sides. It was shortly afterwards that the Dublin Evening Post announced that it was in possession of a copy of names appended to the Dublin counter-petition (the Protestant proprietor, John Magee, later revealed that he had requested a copy from the office of the House of Commons, in a desire ‘to vindicate the bulk of the Protestants of Ireland from the charge of bigotry and intolerance’).19 Readers were informed that the list would be published ‘for the gratification of the citizens of Dublin and the People of Ireland’. According to that paper, around two-thirds of the approximately 2,800 names to hand were those of ‘non-entities’, but the remaining 800 or so, identified as having ‘a visible residence’, would have their names ‘made known to an admiring nation, and to posterity’.20 The first batch of names was published on 20 March, under the ironic title that would become the Post’s standard one for such lists: ‘The temple of fame’. The Freeman’s Journal followed with its own version of the first batch – about 70 names, most with addresses, so it must have been a comparatively easy matter for those involved to be identified – on 23 March, also using irony to draw attention to ‘those true Patriots, who signed the Protestant Petition for Religious Monopoly’.

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The publication of these batches of names was not accompanied by any suggestion that they were being printed for any purpose other than holding up the individuals concerned to the disapproval of readers. Nor were the early batches supplemented by any pejorative comments about individuals on the lists. Nevertheless, the very day after publishing its first list, the Freeman’s Journal carried a disclaimer from one of those named, Thomas Hetherington, to the effect that he was anxious for it to be known that he had never signed ‘the Anti-Catholic Petition’.21 He was, in fact, so anxious that he had attempted to swear a deposition to that effect in front of several magistrates, all of whom, however, had refused to comply. Hetherington identified himself as a hatter, in Temple Bar. The following day’s issue carried two more disclaimers, including one from a woollen draper in Westmoreland Street. And thus began a pattern. As more and more batches of names appeared, so disclaimers continued to be published, most of them from tradesmen. Amounting in all to perhaps around three dozen, these were few enough in the context of the whole, but sufficient to indicate that at least some individuals regarded their exposure in this way as highly damaging. The language used reflected this: denying that he had signed the petition, George Rawdon, saddler, of Great Britain Street, protested that his name must have been added ‘by some enemy of mine’; John Mills, grocer, of Charlotte Street, urged the Freeman’s Journal not to publish any more names without addresses attached ‘in case the innocent suffer’.22 J. Pounden & Son, iron founders, Bridgefoot Street, wrote to say that the firm had received ‘threatening Anonymous Letters’, which they attributed ‘to some incendiary having spread word that we signed the Anti-Catholic petition, wishing thereby to injure us in the opinion of our friends of that persuasion’. Offering a £50 reward to anyone helping convict the writer of the letters, the Poundens denied having signed the petition.23 A brewer, William Robinson, of Blackpitts followed Hetherington’s example (but with more success) and obtained an affidavit to the effect that neither he nor his father was among those listed. Besides tradesmen, disclaimers included an apprentice attorney and an auctioneer.24 With a steady trickle of disclaimers appearing in the liberal press,25 attention turned to how such names had come to be appended to the petition. Various explanations were advanced. ‘P.L.S.’, writing in the Freeman’s Journal of 8 April, noted that he had seen the name ‘P. Knox’ among those published in that paper. That name, he claimed, was added by a man who went to the Mansion House to see the petition, but was told that he must first sign his name. The visitor had signed,

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allegedly using a fictitious name, and others had probably done the same. Samuel Stephens, a member of Dublin corporation’s lower house, wrote to say that it had come to his attention that there were copies of the petition for signature in different locations, including the office of Giffard’s Dublin Journal in Parliament Street.26 ‘Philantropos’ went further and suggested that half the signatures were gross forgeries, the rest a mixture of fictitious names and those of placemen, pensioners and dependents.27 Editorial interpolations, registering pained surprise, or contempt, became more frequent: when Francis L’Estrange’s name appeared in the batch of 29 March, a query followed: ‘surely not the governor of the House of Industry?’ Pat M’Gee, whose name was published on 13 April, was dismissed as: ‘vendor of Greengroceries in a Cellar, situate in Green Street’; of certain names published on 23 April, it was commented ‘not one of these are freemen or freeholders of Dublin’.28 By the end of April the Catholic Board had been drawn in, and was considering establishing a committee to enquire into the ‘forgeries’ attached ‘to the famous Protestant petition’.29 The Freeman’s Journal surmised that the lord mayor might have to defend himself at the Bar of the House of Commons against a charge of fraud upon the legislature.30 Even Dublin corporation’s lower house (of which Giffard was a member), which might have been expected to rally behind the lord mayor, by a twothirds majority chose to thank the city MPs, Henry Grattan and Robert Shaw, who had supported the relief bill, rather than the lord mayor, who had conveyed the anti-emancipation petition to parliament.31 Following the defeat of the bill at the end of May, some of the heat evaporated, but disclaimers continued to be published.32 The Dublin Evening Post’s proprietor congratulated himself for having obtained a copy of the petition, thus helping to expose its signatories as ‘Orangemen and the refuse of an ascendancy on the wane’.33 All this might seem to have placed the liberal press on the high moral ground, and certainly the initial reaction in anti-emancipation quarters to the publication of the Dublin names seemed a little forced: ‘Nothing’, argued the Dublin Journal, ‘can be so beneficial to our cause than such a candid statement of our sentiments and opinions’.34 But if the publicity given to what were called ‘the forgeries’ suggested that the opponents of emancipation had been careless, if not downright dishonest, in their collection of signatures, some of the consequences of the publicity were unfortunate for the pro-emancipationists. It fell to the Dublin Journal to spell out the consequences that its liberal counterparts had shrunk from articulating. Within a week of the first names being published, an editorial claimed that

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in the true spirit of Popish persecution two Protestant Citizens, whose names appeared to [sic] the Protestant Petition, have been put out of Trade by a combination of Papists to withdraw all custom from them. This has been one consequence, among many others, of the exhibition of names, true or false, by those abominable vehicles of slander and of treason, the disaffected Newspapers of Dublin.35 No further details were given, but some days later it was noted that ‘were it not for the kindness of Protestants, two Bakers, would, ere this, have been destroyed’. According to the Dublin Journal, ‘the Papists have announced their System of Exclusion against every “Anti-Catholic” individual, using thus gratefully the wealth which Protestant folly first put into their hands . . .’.36 Claiming that it had been known that Protestants would be ridiculed and threatened for signing the petition, the Dublin Journal stated that Protestant anxiety about the publicity given to the signatures was understandable, in view of ‘popish malignancy’. Emancipation had ceased to be an issue of ‘Liberality’, and had become a matter of ‘Prudence’.37 It might have been possible to dismiss such reflections as scaremongering, had it not been for the stream of disclaimers, and the evident concern that the publicity was likely to have damaging consequences for individual tradesmen or firms. This became all too plain when a high-profile Protestant firm was caught up in the febrile atmosphere. Among the names published in the Dublin Evening Post in April was that of a Richard Guinness of Nicholas Street. It turned out that no such person lived at that address, but according to advertisements placed by Arthur, Benjamin and W.L Guinness, publication of the name had resulted in the spread of slanders against the firm, ‘exciting the public by threats and persuasions against dealing in our brewery’.38 In fact, the Guinnesses of the brewery had a solid record of supporting Catholic emancipation, dating back to the 1790s: they were obviously among those Protestants whose support, at this stage of the campaign, was vital to Catholics.39 On 22 May, the Freeman’s Journal suggested that the attack on the Guinnesses had become a matter of ‘national concern’. That paper noted that the Catholic Board had come forward ‘to disarm the assassin, who contemplates the ruin of a House, which now ranks so high in the confidence of the Catholics of Ireland’. At the board, praise was heaped upon ‘our beloved countrymen, the Protestants of Ireland’, whose ‘noble, magnanimous, and disinterested assistance’ had contributed to the extraordinary progress of the Catholic cause in the previous two years. Among such friends, it was confirmed,

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the Guinnesses ranked highly, having signed pro-emancipation petitions. Protestants and Catholics came forward to defend the family’s record, including a Catholic brewer, John Byrne, of the Anchor Brewery in Usher Street, who indicated that he had instructed his own clerks to contradict the rumours. The Catholic Board’s resolution of support for the Guinnesses was passed with acclamation, and ordered to be printed.40 In the autumn of 1813, further batches of names to the counterpetition, this time from Counties Tipperary and Kilkenny, were published in the Dublin Evening Post, again under the title ‘The temple of fame’.41 Of the Kilkenny petition, it was claimed that some unidentified signatures were those of soldiers; of the Tipperary petition that at least 600 of the 2000 who had signed were children.42 Members of the local liberal Protestant elites, particularly from County Tipperary, played a part in identifying such irregularities: Francis Prittie, MP for the county, Lord Donoughmore and Lord Llandaff were clearly offended at the lowly social status of some who had signed, who included some of their own tenants and dependents.43 As in the case of the Dublin names, publication was followed by disclaimers, and, to judge by letters received by Dublin Castle, by allegations of exclusive dealing. By this time the practice had also been reported in Cork.44 The events of 1813 are striking because, although the newspapers involved in the publication of the names had given no hint that ‘exclusive dealing’, as it would subsequently be called, was an expected consequence, as matters turned out there was no need for such a hint. The various players appeared to know, without having to be told, their allotted roles. Thus, some Protestant tradesmen immediately panicked on finding their names published; and some were duly threatened and boycotted. This could only mean that something like what the Dublin Journal called ‘the System of Exclusion’ was ready to move into operation if a pretext appeared. Thomas Wyse’s account, noted above, mentioned the non-importation agreements of the 1780s, and in certain respects they did constitute a precedent. The economic depression that followed the trade embargo imposed by the London government during the American War of Independence, and the hostility manifested by British manufacturers to the relaxation in 1778 of some restrictions on Irish trade, prompted Dublin corporation, and several other urban corporations and grand juries, to adopt non-importation agreements in 1779. The campaign, borrowing American tactics, was backed in April 1779 by an ‘aggregate’ meeting of Dublin inhabitants (under the leadership of James Napper Tandy and other corporation activists, all

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Protestants), who resolved to import, purchase and wear no article of English manufacture as long as the illiberal spirit of English monopoly remained.45 But a note of controversy soon arose. The committee of the aggregate body had taken a decision to publish lists of names of those who imported British goods, and such lists appeared regularly in the press until December 1779, when further trading concessions were announced by government. A Protestant silversmith, Jeremiah D’Olier, resigned from the committee of the aggregate body over the publication of the names; this drew the attention of the activists to his own actions, and he felt obliged to publicise the cancellation of his own orders from Britain. Moreover, some of those so named apparently had their premises wrecked by ‘the mob’. While it has been pointed out that the effectiveness of the campaign, outside Dublin, is hard to measure, by the end of the year, in Dublin at least, merchants were not advertising their usual range of imported goods.46 And although the issue died down, following the removal in 1780 of restrictions on Ireland’s trade with Britain’s colonies, thereafter the call for non-importation agreements was apt to be revived at times when Anglo-Irish relations were tense.47 A generation later, John Giffard recalled another victim of the non-importation agreements, the former MP for Dublin city, Nathaniel Warren. Some time after his election in 1784 he had taken office as a police commissioner under the notorious police act of 1786. By the time of the 1790 general election this had made him sufficiently unpopular to induce him not to contest his seat. According to Giffard, Warren had been forced to abandon ‘a most profitable [brewing] establishment’ because as a magistrate he had suppressed ‘the rioters who went about tarring and feathering such as bought English goods’.48 Several of the elements of what would become the exclusive dealing associated with the Catholic emancipation campaign, therefore, were present in the non-importation era. These included, crucially, the publication of names of offenders,49 and the practice of boycotting. Moreover, the lead in organising the non-importation agreements had been taken by Protestants, although the composition of what contemporaries called ‘the mob’ was probably a mixture of Protestants and Catholics. But while individual Protestant businessmen would appear to have been damaged by the boycott, there was no obvious sectarian motive present, and in all probability Catholic as well as Protestant tradesmen and merchants suffered. The period between the 1780s and the 1810s witnessed the mass politicisation of the Irish population, and there is evidence that in some areas the United Irishmen borrowed tactics from agrarian secret

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societies, including the sending of threatening letters to those refusing to patronise certain public houses and shops. A sectarian dimension was present in some cases; and certainly Catholic consciousness increased in this period.50 However, what was needed to forge the link between the practice of politically motivated trade boycotts and religion was for Catholic emancipation to take centre stage. As that issue came to the fore in the post-union era, an incident occurred in 1810 which constituted an even closer precedent to the events of 1813 than the non-importation agreements. That incident involved Dublin corporation, and, as in 1813, had its origins in a petition against Catholic emancipation. Since 1807 the Catholics had been organising nation-wide petitions to parliament on the subject, enlisting the clergy in the cause; and in its New Year review for 1810, the Dublin Journal deplored the fact that the Catholic question would again be raised in parliament. At the January assembly of Dublin corporation, a proposal was made to the lower house by the board of aldermen for a petition to parliament against Catholic claims. The corporation was known for its hostility to emancipation, and had petitioned against it several times before: Giffard had been sacked from his post in the Customs for promoting such a petition contrary to government wishes in 1805.51 On this occasion a vote was taken (by secret ballot, as was the custom) and by 39 votes to 34 it was agreed to postpone the issue for a year, with the result that no petition could be sent. At an adjourned meeting of the corporation in February, the city commons voted to establish a committee to investigate whether the secrecy of the ballot had been violated, following the publication in the proemancipation Dublin Weekly Messenger of a list of how members had allegedly voted on the issue. Several members were said to have received abusive and threatening letters on account of their supposed votes, and four of those who had been named on the anti-emancipation side asked the Messenger to contradict the allegation. It was agreed to offer a reward for the discovery of the letter writers, to enable prosecutions to be brought.52 The committee, under Giffard’s chairmanship, produced a report for the corporation’s Easter assembly on 4 May 1810. According to witnesses, certain liberal members of the city commons had compiled the list, sought comments on it from other members, and then secured publication. The committee split evenly on a resolution to the effect that the secrecy of the ballot had apparently been violated by the persons proved to have fabricated a ‘Red and Black List’: Giffard gave his casting vote in its favour. The city commons endorsed the report, and

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passed a resolution by 59 votes to 17 that the city Recorder be consulted on how to proceed on the report’s findings.53 The following day, in its account of the deliberations, the Dublin Journal included a long speech by Giffard to the assembly, which (bearing in mind that Giffard was highly partisan) affords further insights into the fall-out from the publication of the names: It is unnecessary, Gentlemen, to tell you, that circumstanced as most of us are, men of business, depending on the good will of our Fellow Citizens, the ballot was instituted as a shield to our honesty. By ballot a man may safely vote according to his conscience; but were he openly to avow his sentiments, he would soon feel the vengeance of the Mob. All those trades which depend on general consumption are in the power of the rabble – a Brewer for instance. [Recollecting the fate of Alderman Warren’s business, Giffard continued]: [Such] lists . . . must be false . . . How sorely distressed must the Members of this House have been, who felt themselves obliged in the public papers to declare, that they did not vote against Popery . . . . I privately asked a particular friend, how could he condescend to make such a declaration; his answer was – ‘You know I depend upon the public – no Papist entered my door from the day I appeared in the Black List until I published the denial, and I did it to prevent my family from starving!’ On the contrary, how glorious, how dignified must be thought the situation of those who were placed in the Red list!54 The 1810 episode, therefore, foreshadowed the 1813 events in all key particulars. It involved a Protestant petition against emancipation; the publication of names of anti-emancipationists; and subsequent allegations of threats and exclusive dealing, directed against some of those so named, all of whom were Protestants. The only significant difference was that the fall-out from the 1810 incident, arising as did from a Dublin corporation petition, was confined to Dublin. But it should be stressed that in both cases, the immediate divisions that afforded the pretext for exclusive dealing were not so much between Protestants and Catholics as within the Protestant community, as members of that body reacted in different ways to the growing cohesion and assertiveness of the Catholics. Soon after the controversial events of 1813, the issue of exclusive dealing was taken up at the Catholic Board. In a speech on 8 January 1814, Daniel O’Connell complained that Catholics were in practice excluded from freedom of the city of Dublin, despite the fact that they had been

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legally eligible since 1793. He thanked those in the corporation who did support Catholic rights, and said that it was only reasonable that the Catholics should put any business their way. Some, he noted, might call this ‘bigotry’: he preferred to call it ‘gratitude’.55 But reasonable as this strategy sounded, it was undermined by the fact that what had given the 1813 developments their edge was that names of both proand anti-emancipists had been published. Had the liberal press confined its publicity to Protestant supporters of emancipation (and such lists had been published),56 then Catholics, and the public generally, could indeed have given the tradesmen among them a preference – and this may well have occurred. But some on the other side had been threatened and boycotted. A further insight into the views of Catholic leaders at about this time is contained in a private letter written early in 1815. Following the end of hostilities with France, the prospects for emancipation had become bleaker. Writing to the former United Irishman, Thomas Cloney, of Graig, County Kilkenny, Denys Scully commented: For the present, therefore, I should wish to see the opportunity taken of strengthening ourselves at home, supporting each other by preferences in private life, by confining dealings to each other, by marking & avoiding those trading or professional Protest[ant]s who have acted hostilely towards us, and by preserving our own stations and industry, as well as we can, for a more favourable occasion than the present.57 Compared with O’Connell’s benign construction, this seems to have been a more objective gloss on what had taken place in some parts of the country in 1813.

The 1820s The period from 1815 to 1823 was a bleak one for the supporters of Catholic emancipation. Even the establishment of the Catholic Association in 1823 took time to bear fruit: the Catholic Rent was not introduced until 1824. However, as the campaign for emancipation again gathered force, so did complaints from Protestants of exclusive dealing. Giffard retired from the Dublin Journal in 1816, and that paper ceased publication in 1825,58 but the 1820s saw the founding of several new Conservative Protestant newspapers, including The Warder (founded 1821), and the Dublin Evening Mail (1823), which frequently

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aired such complaints. In a New Year editorial of 1825, the Evening Mail contended that the involvement of the priests in the Catholic Association had turned that body into an ‘object of awe and terror’, intimidating traders into purchasing safety or an increase in business.59 Noting that the year 1824 had been popularly supposed to mark the downfall of Protestantism (apparently foretold in the widely circulated Prophecies of Pastorini), the Evening Mail accused the priests of telling ‘the Popish rabble that confidence between them and Protestants can never exist’. The following year, after the historic County Waterford election (June–July 1826), at which the liberal Protestant Henry Villiers Stuart, backed by the Catholic Association, triumphed over the Conservative Beresfords, reports came in to the Castle of exclusive dealing. Chief Secretary Henry Goulburn informed Sir Robert Peel that at chapel the priests were directing their flocks ‘to abstain from trading with their enemies’, and urban Protestants were said to be suffering the effects.60 A grim state of affairs was reported from Mountmellick, Queen’s County: This town . . . is as tranquil as can well be expected considering that two classes of its inhabitants are at variance. The non-intercourse system with Protestants, and the exclusive dealing with persons of their own communion, continues being rigidly acted upon by the Roman Catholics under the recommendation of the Priesthood.61 The suggestion that by this time responsibility for the practice rested squarely with the priests requires examination. Certainly, the local priest was central to one of the few instances where quite extensive local details of exclusive dealing are extant, because they were incidental to a celebrated court case in 1827 involving the parish priest of Drumkeerin, County Leitrim. This was Fr Thomas Maguire, renowned for his defence of Catholicism in debate with evangelical Protestants. Although Protestants numbered only around 450 out of the parish’s population of just over 8,000, they were, apparently, well represented among shopkeepers in the town.62 Following an allegation that Fr Maguire had seduced the daughter of the local (Protestant) innkeeper, Bartholomew McGarrahan, a notice was posted on the chapel door on Sunday, 13 May 1827, warning ‘all Catholics for the time being . . . to avoid buying any commodity whatever from the Protestants of Drumkeerin’. The blunt sectarianism of the warning was softened slightly in the notice’s injunction that two Drumkeerin Protestants were to be exempt ‘from the above exclusion of commercial intercourse, namely Mr James Miller and Mr Thomas Milliken, they are liberal Protestants’.63 In the weeks following Maguire’s

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trial for seduction (December 1827), at which the innkeeper (a member of the Orange Order, but also of the Freemasons) was awarded only nominal damages – it was a measure of Maguire’s status as a Catholic champion that his defence counsel was Daniel O’Connell – the boycotting of Protestant businesses spread to neighbouring towns in the county, including Drumshanbo. Even the unfortunate Milliken found his business targeted, on the grounds that one of the prosecution witnesses had worn a shawl from his shop. And Fr Maguire boasted after the trial that he expected to obtain possession of two houses owned by the innkeeper.64 But if the priest could be seen as a direct beneficiary in this case of exclusive dealing, the author of the study of this episode rightly places it in a much wider context. This included powerful religious tensions, associated with Protestant evangelical activity in a border area stretching from Leitrim to Louth, ‘dividing the Protestant north from the Catholic south’; the presence of the Orange Order (there was a suggestion at the trial that the Order was paying the prosecution’s costs), and of a Catholic secret society, the Steelboys, which apparently took on the role of enforcing the boycott and attacking the relatives and friends of the McGarrahans. This extended to the murder, in January 1828, of one Cassidy, accused of ‘violating the laws of the Steelboys by dealing with a Protestant’.65 In addition to all this, there was the progress at national level of the emancipation campaign, which served to heighten the significance of local tensions. Thus, there were present in Drumkeerin – as in many other towns outside the more Protestant areas of Ulster – conditions that made exclusive dealing possible. Fundamental was the presence of a vulnerable Protestant minority, involved in shopkeeping and providing services. In other words, simply to attribute the system to the priests misses a much wider picture. In any case, according to the Freeman’s Journal the clergy were generally averse to the system; and this was endorsed from an unlikely quarter: J.C. Beresford, a former MP for Dublin city, and an Orangeman.66 Daniel O’Connell’s victory in July 1828 at the County Clare election forced government to recognise that emancipation would finally have to be conceded. However, this was not immediately made known, and meanwhile, one of the issues that came to preoccupy the Catholic Association, and also concerned its opponents, was exclusive dealing. Debate had begun following developments in the Order of Liberators, a body established by O’Connell in August 1826, as an auxiliary to the Catholic Association.67 At a meeting of the Association in June 1828, O’Connell announced a list of duties of members of the Order. Most of

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these concerned practical matters, such as promoting voter registration. Overall, the duties conveyed an irenic spirit: duty no. 2, for instance, was to foster conciliation, ‘so that all religious animosities may forever cease among Irishmen’. Duty no. 8, however, was ‘to promote the system of dealing exclusively with the friends of civil and religious liberty, Protestant and Catholic, with a selection, where a choice can be made, of Protestant friends, being the most disinterested of the two’. This reflected the positive form of exclusive dealing that O’Connell had commended in 1814. But it continued ‘and also to prevent, as much as possible, all dealing with the enemies of Ireland, whether Protestant Orangemen, or Orange Catholics, the worst of all Orangeists’.68 The anti-emancipation press soon noticed this recommendation, which was followed closely by news of O’Connell’s return for Clare. The Warder began calling on Protestants to associate for their own security, and to retaliate against the endorsement of exclusive dealing. In August 1828 the first Brunswick Constitutional Club of Ireland was founded as a rallying point for ultra Protestants, and local branches soon followed.69 At some of these meetings, the issue of exclusive dealing was mentioned as one that called for Protestants to display solidarity. Reverend Charles Boyton, FTCD, asked, rhetorically, ‘Are we to see individuals oppressed, lopped away one by one, sinking under the united influence and united purse of the many, merely because they hold the one faith with ourselves?’ Others urged more drastic action. Speaking at the County Tyrone Brunswick Club, Reverend Joseph Stack, FTCD, urged landlords to level the cabins of their Catholic tenants and replace them with Protestants.70 It was against this background of heightened tensions that William Ford, a Catholic solicitor, gave notice in October 1828 that he would propose that the Catholic Association recommend Catholics not to deal with Orangemen and ‘Brunswickers’. Speaking to the motion in November, Ford argued that ‘by this means, the Orangemen could not live twelve months in Ireland, as the liberal Protestants and the Catholics would engross to themselves the entire of the circulating medium’.71 Thomas Wyse may have been correct in suggesting that this resolution had been introduced with the backing of O’Connell, who certainly defended ‘the perfect propriety of the principle’, as did certain other speakers. However, opposition was voiced by both Protestant and Catholic members, and O’Connell appears to have been pulled in two directions. He commended the sentiments of the Catholic champion, Fr Arthur O’Leary, who nearly fifty years earlier had claimed that Catholics never carried religious differences into the market place (‘when we go

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to the shambles, we never inquire into the butcher’s religion, but into the quality of his meat’).72 Yet O’Connell himself had been responsible for the Order of Liberators’ precept about exclusive dealing, and he displayed an uncharacteristic defensiveness about the matter. Insisting that the system ‘had been commenced by our enemies’, he alleged that the Church of Ireland Archbishop Magee of Dublin had commended the principle in 1825. But he accepted that the Association ought not to adopt it ‘as a measure of retaliation’. Instead, he proposed that a committee be set up to investigate how far the system, especially as it related to the employment of Catholic servants, had been carried on by Protestants.73 Here he was on safe ground, for a supposed preference on the part of some Protestants for employing Protestant servants had for many years prompted the placing of ‘Situations Wanted’ advertisements in which the Protestant affiliation of the servant was mentioned.74 While the committee took evidence – during which some Catholic servants were admonished for risking their hopes of eternal salvation by passing themselves off as Protestants – the Freeman’s Journal conducted a campaign against Ford’s motion, publishing letter and editorials opposing it.75 Although Ford clearly had strong support from rank-and-file Association members, such was the extent of opposition that when the committee reported on 2 December, O’Connell had little choice but to move that the Association ‘does not deem it right to give advice on the subject of exclusive dealing’.76 That view eventually prevailed, but not before a passionate debate had taken place on the issue of exclusive dealing. The secretary, Nicholas Purcell O’Gorman, moved an amendment to the effect that although the principle had been extensively acted upon by the opponents of the Catholics, ‘we the Catholic Association repudiate the baneful and illiberal example . . . and declare, that we deem that principle to be inconsistent with Christian charity, and Catholic principle, social order, and good fellowship’. Ford, meanwhile, stuck to his position, arguing that ‘in every necessary of life, we are the great consumers, and if my resolution be acted upon, we must get rid of a class who, while we support them, have an interest in opposing us’. This prompted James Dwyer to ask ‘were they to carry on a war of extermination, in which one party or the other must perish?’, while Richard O’Gorman urged ‘Let us not place a perpetual barrier between us and the conversion of the Orangemen’.77 The Catholic Association’s decision not to endorse exclusive dealing reflected the weight of such arguments. Yet that decision could have made little difference to those who felt threatened, since the practice evidently had a life of its own. In the latter part of 1828 it was being reported in towns as far apart

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as Dublin; Mountmellick, Queen’s County (where it was said to have brought down ‘the Orange faction’); Longford town and Edgeworth town, County Longford, and Newmarket and Ennis, County Clare.78 Early in 1829 it was reported to be widespread in the town and district of Sligo. Even Ulster was drawn in: John Lawless boasted that he had urged the Catholics of Monaghan, Cavan, Louth and Meath, to buy no ale, porter, whiskey, sugar or tea from the Monaghan Orangemen who had halted his tour of the North in September 1828.79 On the antiemancipation side, there were reports of Protestants in Dublin refusing to deal with Catholic tradesmen.80

After emancipation By April 1829, Catholic emancipation was on the statute book, and the Catholic Association had been dissolved – it was deemed unnecessary to an era in which religious distinctions would be forgotten. But during the 1828 debate, one of the critics of exclusive dealing had speculated: ‘who is there would take it on himself to say, that after emancipation should have been granted, all the bile, wrath, and venom, engendered by this severing system, would subside?’81 In the event, politics continued to have religious overtones – after all, tithe reform was a major issue during the 1830s – and exclusive dealing continued to be complained of, and accusations levelled against liberal Protestants that their politics stemmed from cowardice rather than conviction.82 Exclusive dealing was one of the factors that helped heal divisions between ultras and some liberal Protestants during the 1830s (as, for instance, in Youghal, County Cork).83 Of course, not all Protestants abandoned liberal causes (some benefited personally from their identification with the Catholic side against unpopular Protestants)84 – but few supported repeal of the union, which O’Connell went on to demand. Some opponents of repeal found themselves threatened with exclusive dealing; these included the Guinnesses, who continued, from time to time, to be targeted.85 In parts of the country, agrarian secret societies continued to enforce the practice;86 and the pretexts multiplied.87 At the various Conservative organisations that succeeded the Brunswick clubs in the 1830s, exclusive dealing and its effects, such as Protestant emigration, became a perennial topic, sometimes accompanied by calls for retaliation in kind against liberal Protestants, or Catholics.88 Measures were urged to protect its victims, especially those among the lower classes of tradesmen.89 On the liberal side, in 1833 O’Connell hinted that some Catholics had gone too far in practising exclusive dealing, and said that he had often felt

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that the Catholic cause had suffered more harm than good from such ‘friends’.90 But the practice went on: in 1844, Protestant doctors in country areas were said to be losing business for failing to support repeal.91 In conclusion, there is much about exclusive dealing that remains opaque. Some points, however, can be made. By 1813 the practice was being reported in various parts of Leinster and Munster, and during the 1820s it became even more widespread. It owed something to the nonimportation tactics of the late 1770s, but differed in that by the 1810s the target was a religious minority – albeit one section of that minority, the opponents of Catholic emancipation. Although it is impossible to reach any firm conclusions about the impact of exclusive dealing, it is likely that it contributed to the high levels of Protestant emigration from all over Ireland that was causing acute concern to Irish Conservatives by the 1830s.92 It was no respecter of persons – the village innkeeper as well as the wealthy brewer could become targets. The common factor was the presence of a Protestant minority, some of whose members resisted, or could be portrayed as resisting, the will of the pro-emancipation majority. (It is of course impossible to surmise what proportion of Protestants may have adhered to a liberal position in order to safeguard their livelihoods, as their critics claimed; and even being liberal was not invariably a protection.) In some parts of the country, from at least the 1820s, secret societies played a part in enforcing the practice; and the reported incidence of threatening letters may indicate such involvement from the beginning. Ultra-Protestant critics of exclusive dealing were apt to portray it in stark terms as the result of popish malice; and certainly some of the references to Orangemen in the 1828 Catholic Association debate were highly intolerant. However, what this discussion has shown is that the origins of exclusive dealing in the emancipation era owed as much to divisions within southern Irish Protestantism as to those between Protestants and Catholics. From the outset, liberal Protestants on Dublin corporation, together with Protestant journalists, such as Conway of the Messenger, and Magee of the Evening Post, were instrumental in obtaining and publishing lists of anti-emancipation names; and Protestant MPs and peers offered pejorative comments on some of those names. If Catholics were necessary to the implementation of exclusive dealing, it was liberal Protestants who had set the stage. And if the discussion above has centred on Leinster, Munster and Connacht, this serves as a reminder that the religious demography of much of Ulster was very different, and prompts the question: was exclusive dealing practiced to any extent against Catholic minorities in this period?

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Finally, however, it is worth noting that some tendencies towards exclusive dealing, on sectarian grounds, had been present at a much earlier period. In 1737, it was complained in Cork city that ‘if a papist at the gallows wanted an ounce of hemp, he’d skip the Protestant shops and run to Mallow Lane to get it’.93 On the Protestant side, ‘Situations wanted’ advertisements that mentioned the Protestantism of the applicant had appeared even before the troubles of the 1790s.94 As the purchasing power of Catholics grew, particularly among the lower classes, it may be that the politics of the emancipation era merely facilitated the revival and extension of much older practices.

Notes 1. Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland: A New Economic History, 1780–1939 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 138–9, 162, 273–4, 285–7; Patrick Lynch and John Vaizey, Guinness’s Brewery in the Irish Economy, 1759–1876 (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 78–81. 2. See, e.g., Thomas Bartlett, The Fall and Rise of the Irish Nation: The Catholic Question, 1690–1830 (Dublin, 1992), ch. 15; Fergus O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation: Daniel O’Connell and the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1985), chs 1–2, 4–6, and pp. 128–9; Oliver MacDonagh, O’Connell: The Life of Daniel O’Connell, 1775–1847 (London, 1991), pp. 227–9. 3. But see Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 320; O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, pp. 148, 230–1; MacDonagh, O’Connell, p. 263. 4. ‘The practice of confining one’s custom to certain special tradesmen, especially on political or ecclesiastical grounds’: the Oxford English Dictionary’s example is from Dickens, Sketches by Boz (1836). In England Chartists in the 1830s were urged to confine dealings to Chartists. G.D.H. Cole and A.W. Filson, British Working-Class Movements (London and New York, 1965), p. 363. 5. David Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630–1830 (Cork, 2005), p. 479. 6. David Dickson, ‘ “Centres of motion”: Irish cities and the origins of popular politics’, in L. Cullen and L. Bergeron (eds), Culture et Pratiques Politques en France et en Irlande xvie-xviiie siecle (Paris, 1990), pp. 101–22; Maureen Wall, Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Maureen Wall, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Dublin, 1989), chs 3–4. 7. Ó Gráda, Ireland, pp. 69–71. 8. Kerby Miller, ‘No middle ground: the erosion of the Protestant middle class in southern Ireland during the pre-Famine era’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, xlix (1986), pp. 295–306, at p. 295. 9. Thomas Wyse, Historical Sketch of the Late Catholic Association of Ireland, 2 vols (Dublin, 1829), vol. 1, pp. 423–31. For Brunswick Clubs, see Allan Blackstock, Loyalism in Ireland, 1789–1829 (Woodbridge, 2007), ch. 8. 10. O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 231. 11. Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 320; Ian d’Alton, Protestant Society and Politics in Cork, 1812–1844 (Cork, 1980), pp. 30–1.

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12. In fact, it was (effectively) defeated in the House of Commons in May. See Bartlett, Fall and Rise, pp. 301–3; MacDonagh, Daniel O’Connell, pp. 109–13. 13. Freeman’s Journal [hereafter F.J.], 24 January 1812. 14. Jacqueline Hill, ‘Dublin after the union: the age of the ultra Protestants’, in M. Brown, P. Geoghegan and J. Kelly (eds), The Irish Act of Union, 1800: Bicentennial Essays (Dublin, 2003), pp. 144–56, at p. 151. 15. F.J., 18 March 1813; Brian MacDermot (ed.), The Catholic Question in Ireland and England, 1798–1822: The Papers of Denys Scully (Dublin, 1988), letter 435, n. 1. [hereafter Scully Corr.] 16. Report of Limerick Catholic meeting, F.J., 17 February 1813. 17. Dublin Evening Post [hereafter D.E.P.], report of County Limerick Protestant meeting (9 January 1813); report from Limerick Evening Post (D.E.P., 16 January 1813); letter from ‘A liberal Protestant’ on the Queen’s County anti-emancipation meeting (D.E.P., 23 February 1813). 18. F.J., 18 February 1813. 19. D.E.P., 10 June 1813. Magee also supplied a copy to the Catholic Board (F.J., 17 May 1813). 20. D.E.P., 18 March 1813. 21. F.J., 24 March 1813. 22. Ibid., 6, 15 April 1813. 23. Ibid., 29 April 1813. 24. D.E.P., 10 June 1813; F.J., 5, 29 April 1819. 25. See also, e.g., D.E.P., 25 March 1813. 26. F.J., 1 May 1813; S. Stephens to Daniel O’Connell, 10 May 1813, in M.R. O’Connell (ed.), The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, 8 vols (Dublin, 1972– 80), vol. 1, letter 426. 27. F.J., 23 April 1813. 28. For further pejorative comments, see ibid., 6, 10 May 1813. 29. Ibid., 30 April, 8 May 1813. 30. Ibid., 30 April 1813. 31. Ibid., 1 May 1813. 32. Ibid., 1 June 1813. 33. D.E.P., 8 June 1813. 34. Dublin Journal (D.J.), 23 March 1813. 35. Ibid., 27 March 1813. 36. Ibid., 6 April 1813. 37. Ibid., 15 April 1813. 38. Lynch and Vaizey, Guinness’s Brewery, p. 142. Guinness’s was already the leading brewing firm in Dublin (ibid., p. 80). 39. F.J., 22 May 1813. 40. Ibid. The board’s vindication of the firm did not prevent the publication in June 1813 of a bizarre claim that its porter contained mashed up bibles, to undermine the Catholic faith of drinkers (Lynch and Vaizey, Guinness’s Brewery, p. 143). 41. D.E.P., 20, 21 October, 11, 23, 27 November 1813. 42. Ibid., 21 October, 9 November 1813. 43. Scully Corr., letters 425, 457–8, 460, 463. 44. Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 320; d’Alton, Protestant Society, pp. 30–31.

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45. F.J., 24–7 April 1779; Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 145–8. 46. Maurice R. O’Connell, Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1965), pp. 136–40. 47. See, e.g., F.J., 6–8 April 1784. 48. Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, pp. 181–4; Giffard’s speech at Dublin corporation meeting, D.J., 5 May 1810. 49. It was not uncommon for ‘red and black’ lists of how Irish MPs had voted on key issues to be published: see, e.g., A List of Members who Voted on the Altered Money Bill, advertised in Catalogue of Political Pamphlets (n.p. [1755]), p. 4. 50. For allegations of exclusive dealing practised by Dublin United Irishmen, see Richard Musgrave, Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland (1801), 4th edn (Fort Wayne, Ind., 1995) pp. 119, 675; see also Nancy J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 119–22; Bartlett, Fall and Rise, ch. 13. 51. He was reinstated in 1808 (Bartlett, Fall and Rise, p. 290). 52. Dublin Weekly Messenger (run by F.W. Conway, a Protestant), 27 January 1810; Dublin City Library and Archive [hereafter D.C.A.], Journals of sheriffs and commons, C1/JSC/9, ff 178a, 179a. 53. D.C.A., C1/JSC/9, ff 181b–184b. 54. D.J., 5 May 1810. 55. F.J., 12 January 1814. 56. See, e.g., D.E.P., 6 March 1813; F.J., 10 April, 5 June 1813. 57. Scully to Cloney, 13 January 1815, in Scully Corr., letter 490 (italics as in original). 58. Brian Inglis, The Freedom of the Press in Ireland, 1784–1841 (London, 1954), pp. 152, 242. 59. Dublin Evening Mail [hereafter D.E.M.], 3 January 1825. 60. O’Ferrall, Catholic Emancipation, p. 148. 61. Major O’Donoghue to Goulburn, 1 October 1826 (National Archives [NAI], CSORP/1826/0–30). Mountmellick appears to have had a long history of such troubles: see letter from ‘A liberal Protestant’, Portarlington, D.E.P., 23 February 1813; comments by Mr Norton at Catholic Association, F.J., 8 December 1828. 62. For this episode, see Prionnsíos Ó Duigneáin, The Priest and the Protestant Woman (Dublin, 1997). 63. Ibid., p. 23. 64. Ibid., pp. 42–3. 65. Ibid., pp. 43–4. From the late 1780s, Defenders in County Armagh were said to have practised exclusive dealing against their Peep O’Day Boys opponents: the latter responded in kind, W.H. Crawford and B. Trainor, Aspects of Irish Social History, 1750–1800 (Belfast, 1969), p. 175. 66. F.J., 4 December 1828; report, City of Dublin Brunswick Club (F.J., 12 December 1828). 67. O’Connell Corr., vol. 3, letter 1325, n. 3. 68. Morning Register, 16 June 1828; The Warder, 28 June 1828. 69. The Warder, 28 June, 12 July, 16, 23 August 1828. 70. Reports of Co. Donegal and Co. Tyrone Brunswick Clubs, F.J., 1 October 1828.

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71. Wyse, Historical Sketch, vol. 1, p. 423; F.J., 7 November 1828. 72. For O’Connell’s comments, see F.J., 7, 8 November 1828. He and others at the meeting were referring to ‘Remarks on the foregoing letter and defence addressed to the conductors of the free-press’ (1780) (a reply to John Wesley): see Arthur O’Leary, Miscellaneous Tracts, 3rd edn (Dublin, 1797), pp. 143–56, at p. 149. 73. F.J., 8 November 1828. 74. In the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion, the liberal D.E.P. (9 January 1800) had deplored such adverts, as representing something new, but soon accepted them itself (see, e.g., 21 October 1806). Situations vacant adverts sometimes specified that a Protestant was required. See Report from the Select Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Nature . . . of Orange Lodges . . . in Ireland, p. 121 H.C. 1835 [377], xv. 75. F.J., 6, 11, 18, 25, 26 November, 4 December 1828. 76. F.J., 3 December 1828. Among the Protestants opposing exclusive dealing was Lord Cloncurry (Wyse, Historical Sketch, vol. 1, pp. 424–6). 77. F.J., 6, 8 December 1828. 78. Report of City of Dublin Brunswick Club, F.J., 12 December 1828; report of Catholic Association meeting, ibid., 8 December 1828; Inspector General’s observations, Co. Longford, 6 December 1828 (N.A.I., S.O.C. 2881/34); The Warder, 2 August 1828. 79. The Warder, 7 February 1829; F.J., 8 November 1828. 80. F.J., 8, 20 November 1828. 81. ‘F.B.H.’ to editor, F.J., 4 December 1828. 82. D.E.M., 2, 4, 27 July 1832; The Warder (supplement), 19 January 1833; Report from the Select Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Nature . . . of Orange lodges . . . in Ireland, p. 217 (H.C. 1835 [377], xv). 83. d’Alton, Protestant Society, pp. 171–2. 84. See the 1837 Co. Longford case, involving exclusive dealing, discussed in Miller, ‘No middle ground’, pp. 302–3. 85. According to the D.E.M. (17, 19 January 1831), some liberal Protestant members of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, who had signed a requisition for an anti-repeal address to the viceroy, withdrew their signatures on being threatened with exclusive dealing. For Guinness’s, see Lynch and Vaizey, Guinness’s Brewery, pp. 144–5; Hill, From Patriots to Unionists, p. 371. 86. See report from Sligo Journal of a Rockite notice threatening vengeance on any person dealing with a certain Protestant Sligo shopkeeper (D.E.M., 31 May 1830). 87. According to the D.E.M. (24 January 1831) a Co. Westmeath shopkeeper was boycotted for failing to contribute to the O’Connell fund. 88. Report of Protestant Conservative Society (D.E.M., 18, 30 January, 7 November 1832); Plain and Practical Hints, for the Serious Consideration of all Protestants, and particularly of Conservatives (Dublin, 1833) (Royal Irish Academy, Halliday pamphlets [R.I.A.H.P.], vol. 1558 (1833), pp. 11–15); Report of the Proceedings at the First Meeting of the Irish Metropolitan Conservative Society (Dublin, [1836]) (R.I.A.H.P., vol. 1677 (1836), p. 38). For retaliation, see D.E.M., 2 July, 7 November 1832; Plain Hints, pp. 14–15. 89. D.E.M., 28 March, 11 July 1832; Speech delivered by the Rev. C. Boyton at a meeting of the Protestant Conservative Society (Dublin, 1832) (R.I.A.H.P., vol. 1547

88

90. 91. 92.

93. 94.

‘Carrying the War into the Walks of Commerce’ (1832), p. 3). Measures considered included publication of lists of Protestant tradesmen with whom Protestants should deal (D.E.M., 6 July 1832). Speech at Irish Volunteer Society for a Repeal of the Union (The Warder (supplement), 5 January 1833). Henry Maunsell, MD, Rotary Parliaments (Dublin, [1844]) (R.I.A.H.P., vol. 2017 (1844), p. 25). D.E.M. (supplement), 30 January 1832. Miller, ‘No middle ground’, estimates that some 500,000 Protestants (plus a similar number of Catholics) emigrated in the half-century before the Famine (p. 295). Quoted in Patrick J. Corish, The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dublin, 1981), p. 88. See, e.g., D.E.P., 12 May 1781.

5 The Decline of Duelling and the Emergence of the Middle Class in Ireland James Kelly

Introduction Duelling was emblematic of the aristocratic order of ancien regime Europe and, between the late sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, of the Irish ruling elite.1 It was, for this reason, valorised by representatives of that elite across Europe, who passionately affirmed the reasonableness of their claim to possess a right to duel, and of the code of honour, which provided its rationale. It was, Dr Johnson observed, indicative of a ‘highly polished society’, while Lord Chesterfield, whose celebrated letters to his son constitute a revealing window onto what was expected of a gentleman, justified the resort to arms when matters of honour were at issue as a ‘humane, sensible and equitable method of decision of right and wrong’.2 Comparable sentiments were expressed from within the elite in Ireland. But it is the advancement and articulation of opposition by the middling sort that is revealing of the shift from the aristocratic order of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the increasingly middle-class order of the nineteenth century because it allows one to track the adoption of the cultural values that are diagnostic of the middle class and, by extension, to trace its emergence as a social interest. This was not a straightforward process; the ‘middle station’3 in Ireland was of modest size and, possessing little of the requisite political, cultural and social influence, exerted a correspondingly modest influence during its formative phase, which spanned the eighteenth century. There were indications as the century moved to a close that this might be about to change, as elements from the ‘middling orders’ embarked on an attempt to gain access to the political process, and, when they were frustrated in that ambition embraced revolutionary tactics in a no 89

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less vain attempt to seize control of the levers of power. Significantly, their agenda for societal reform did not extend then to the elimination of duelling. However, in the early nineteenth century a confluence of forces that include a more interventionist state, a more conservative political climate, a vigorous evangelical as well as mainstream religious sector, and a code of behaviour that extolled personal discipline lent itself to the increased acceptance of the world view of the ‘middling sort’. This, in turn, sustained an increasingly effective effort to combat duelling on religious, behavioural, ideological and legal grounds. Whereas previous attempts had proved ineffectual, the opposition presented from the increasingly influential middling orders in the early nineteenth century contrived, first, to confine its practice and, subsequently, with the assistance of the state, to which it entrusted the task of maintaining social order, to suppress it completely.

The terminology of class In Ireland, as in Great Britain, the use of the term ‘middle class’ to define as well as to locate the social interest that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries occupied the economic, social and political space between the small ruling elite and the teeming ranks of the labouring masses requires some justification. Moreover, because Ireland did not experience an industrial revolution and because Irish historiography long prioritised the ‘national question’, historians of Ireland have nothing to compare with the influential interpretative tradition that conceived of the British ‘middle class’, made rich, confident and powerful by the fruits of the industrial revolution and commercial expansion, as a unitary and coherent social interest whose admission to the political process as a consequence of the Great Reform Act of 1832 paved the way for the political eclipse of the aristocracy and for the re-modelling of Britain along definably bourgeois lines.4 This interpretation has been demonstrated to be unsatisfactory, not least because of doubts expressed about the very idea of an industrial revolution, but, still more significantly, because of the overly schematic way in which it assumed the decline of aristocratic influence and, by implication, its replacement by the middle class. This, notwithstanding, the perception that the half century prior to the Great Reform Act gave rise to a sociologically coherent middle class has proved enduring, and it was influentially reinforced in the 1980s by Davidoff and Hall’s expansion of the existing interpretation to embrace evangelical religion and gender.5 Evidence for the existence of a vigorous middle class from the late seventeenth century

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has also been adduced in support of the same thesis, but when taken together with detailed explorations of ‘propertied’ Englishmen, such as that provided by Paul Langford,6 the overall result has been to suggest that though the term ‘middle class’ achieved increasing currency from the mid-eighteenth century, it was not employed with sociological exactitude or ideological specificity. Some have gone so far, indeed, as to suggest that such was the fragmented nature of this social construct in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that it is impossible to arrive at a ‘satisfactory definition of the middle class’.7 What is apparent is that the usage of the term in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries varied greatly according to the perspective of those who had recourse to it and the time in which it was being used, and it was, as a result, possessed of a variety of meanings, which do not correspond to modern conceptions of the term, since ‘many . . . did not seem to have a clear social group in mind at all’.8 This was true, particularly, of the period 1790–1830 as Wahrman has established. Yet Wahrman is emphatic that ‘we should not allow our own reverence for social categories as analytical tools to mislead us into assuming that a welldefined sociological referent of a social terminology is a prerequisite for its meaningful deployment’.9 And since the term ‘middle class’ was used by contemporaries, and is both more felicitous and more immediately comprehensible than alternatives such as ‘middle station’, ‘middling sort’ or ‘middle orders’ to describe the expanding ranks of those who in the eighteenth century occupied the social stations below those of the aristocracy and gentry (‘the quality’) and above those of the artisans, labourers and poor, it remains a valuable tool. As this brief assessment suggests, developments in British historiography, which have eroded the mono-causal relationship between the industrial revolution and the rise of the middle class, the recognition that there was a greater range of formative factors, and the adoption of a more fluid definition of what it was to be of the middle class have significant implications for any attempt to locate its emergence in Ireland, and the displacement of aristocratic norms by those that are identifiably middle class. The most obvious is that it suggests that the middle class must be conceived ab initio, not as a sociologically and ideologically coherent interest, but as a complex of groups of equivalent rank, status and income, who profited disproportionately from economic and commercial expansion, the emergence of consumerism, the growth of the professions and the expansion of the state. Moreover, because this was accompanied by the adoption of distinctive codes of behaviour and attitude that defined what it meant to be middle class,

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by the establishment of organisations and institutions that transmitted its values, and by the adoption of religion-inspired values and conservative political principles, it is apparent that the identification of those organisational, institutional, attitudinal and behavioural indices of the middle class represents the key to tracing its emergence and fixing its impact.

Duelling as an aristocratic emblem in Ireland to 1750 The impact of definably middle-class aspirations on the law and institutions of state as well as on the mores and behaviour of the public was modest throughout the eighteenth century because societal norms were predominantly shaped by the aristocratic landed order put in place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The product of war and confiscation, the emergence, consolidation, floruit and eventual decline of this elite have traditionally been tracked via the history of the landed estate and the ‘Big House’.10 Adherence to emblematic codes of behaviour such as the code of honour offers an alternative, and in some respects more sensitive barometer of the fortunes of the Irish aristocracy, as the trajectory of its emergence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mirrors that of the Anglo-Irish landed elite.11 Significantly, duelling might not have endured long into the eighteenth century, given the influence of English men and manners on the provincial Irish elite,12 had the arguments raised in opposition in England in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries held sway. Combining the views of the supporters of strong monarchy for whom the aristocratic assertion of the right to duel was incompatible with cherished absolutist principles; lay proponents of civility and politeness for whom duelling was a relic of barbarism; and religious commentators, who deemed duelling a contravention of divine law, they offered a powerful critique. Indeed, they might well have prevailed had not Bernard Mandeville in the early eighteenth century advanced a theory of politeness, which offered a sophisticated, modern rationale for the code of honour that the elite seized on, and duelling continued uninterrupted.13 It may be, like the arguments of its opponents, that Mandeville’s reconciliation of duelling with politeness had less impact among the ranks of the Irish elite, which were slower to engage with the precepts of politeness. In any event, political and military events associated with the defeat of the Jacobites by William of Orange and the subsequent disarming of Catholics meant the way was clearer than ever by the beginning of the eighteenth century for the Protestant elite to adhere to the rules of the code of honour, and the rise in the number of duels indicates that

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they did so with enthusiasm, if not always in strict accordance with the guides to proper practice.14 This provided a target that those who aspired to a more moral order might have contrived to isolate, but duelling was not singled out for attention. Indeed, it appears, based on the comparative silence of the religious, who had long been among the foremost critics of the code of honour, and who continued to hold that it was contrary to divine law, that there was a consensus within the elite that duelling was beyond the pale of criticism. This certainly is the implication of the unwillingness of the societies for the reformation of manners that proliferated between the mid-1690s and mid-1710s to feature duelling on their lengthy index of eradicable transgressions, and the failure of the secular authorities to embrace it within the list of ‘vice, profaneness, debauchery and immorality’ they were encouraged to combat.15 Thus the proclamation emanating from the Irish Privy Council in May 1702 for the ‘encouragement of piety and virtue’ instanced only ‘excessive drinking, blasphemy and profane swearing and cursing, lewdness’, and the maintenance of ‘bawdy houses, public gaming houses . . ., and other disorderly houses’ on its list of anti-social practices.16 This was in keeping with the fact that the priority of the reforming societies was the observance of the Sabbath rather than the general reformation of society, and still less to target the transgressions of ‘the upper reaches of Irish Protestant society’, who possessed a stronger appetite for consumer goods than moral reform.17 As a result, a potential early opportunity for the ‘middling sort’ both to set themselves apart and to define a socially distinctive reformist agenda was lost. This served, inevitably, as an encouragement to those on the margins of the elite to embark on affairs of honour, and if the fact that one-fifth of those who participated in a sample of 61 duels fought between 1716 and 1750 possessed a middle-class background is reliable, it is apparent that many were drawn to imitate their social superiors.18 This was a development of some consequence, but it is hardly surprising that this was the case, given the lack of public criticism and the absence of a distinct and compelling set of values to bind the middle orders from where it might be expected to emanate. Yet paradoxically, it also indicates that the middle station in Irish society was growing both in number and definition.

The emergence of an Irish ‘middling sort’ Unlike France and Britain where it is possible to provide a statistical perspective on the increase of the number and proportion of the population

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of the middling station during the eighteenth century, one is obliged to engage in a more impressionistic qualitative assessment of the same process in Ireland.19 This inhibits precision, and the task is made still more difficult by the fact that the sectarian character of the state encouraged the marginalisation of the Catholic population. This did not preclude Catholics from engaging in trade and commerce, agriculture or in professions such as medicine, in which capacities many were able to make good livings and to become a stable part of an emerging Catholic middle class in the course of the eighteenth century.20 However, the combination of political disabilities, which excluded Catholics from the political process at local as well as national level, and social restrictions, not least the entitlement to bear arms without a licence, meant that even those Roman Catholics securely in the middling sort had little reason to possess strong opinions on the matter of duelling and no incentive to promote the adoption of an alternative, as they were effectively excluded from the public sphere when the middle station largely took shape. Members of the Church of Ireland were not similarly bound, and it is notable that many took advantage of the opportunities on offer, and that, as in England, ‘a willingness regularly to assume the burden of parochial office may have helped the middling sort to define and so distinguish themselves from the lower ranks’.21 This was of greater import in Connaught and west Munster, where the Protestant population was particularly thin, than in Dublin, Ulster and those parts of Leinster and Munster where the density of population permitted more visible social gradation and a greater concentration of those of the middle sort. This was particularly true of Dublin where the complex of industrial and service employments sustained an expanding network of master craftsmen, overseers, merchants, traders and retailers, printers, schoolmasters, attorneys, doctors and others.22 In addition, the ponderous growth of national and local government created an increasing number of opportunities, which in the case of the latter may have provided for ‘more than 5,000 Protestant men’.23 The largest concentration of official employments was in Dublin where most government offices were based, but the emergence of the revenue commissioners as the largest bureaucratic arm of the state, with a steadily increasing network of gaugers, surveyors, clerks and collectors, ensured that the process reverberated throughout the island.24 More generally, the striking improvement in the economic fortunes of the kingdom, the difficult years of the late 1710s, late 1720s and early 1740s excepted, expanded employment across a wide variety of trades and occupations that, on the evidence of

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guild membership, proved of considerable financial advantage to skilled craftsmen.25 It also encouraged burgeoning expenditure on consumer goods from clothing to proprietary medicines and from ordinary household durables to luxuries (silver, china and furniture) that echoed the consumption patterns of the aristocracy, and the purchase of which distinguished the middling from the poor.26 A comparable wish to imitate the aristocracy informed the residency patterns of the middle station, as the bespoke residences commissioned by the wealthiest nobility excepted, the primary occupiers of a majority of the thousands of more modest town houses built in large number in Dublin, Cork, Waterford, Limerick and more selectively in smaller towns came from within the middling sort.27 As this suggests, just as in England, Ireland middle station was concentrated in the country’s major urban centres. The only region to buck this trend was Ulster, where the combination of ‘a more diversified Protestant population’ and linen enabled the province to sustain a more diffused ‘modest prosperity’ than in any other part of the country.28 The visible consumerism that Berg maintains is diagnostic of the fast expanding middle station in Great Britain attests to the extent to which the evolving identity of this interest there was economically determined. Too little is known as yet of middle-class purchasing patterns in Ireland to suggest that they replicated those in Britain, but there is no reason to believe that the Irish middling sort did not share the enthusiasm of their British equivalents for lacquered goods, porcelain, plated silver, household furnishings and other commodities that were part of the expanding world of consumer goods in the eighteenth century.29 What is less opaque is that the accretion of wealth and belongings encouraged activities that contributed over time to the development of a set of actions and the forging of a set of identities that helped to shape what it was to be middle class. One of the most notable of these activities was sociability, and members of the middling station participated in and shaped a host of new and embryonic organisations that not only provided those of a comparable social station with an opportunity to interact, but also, through a process of interaction and interchange, contributed to the evolution of a distinct social identity.30 This area too is still inadequately mapped in Ireland. But it is noteworthy that the importance of organisational participation in forging a sense of identity that was communal in some instances,31 sectoral in others and sectarian in still more, and which has been identified as a component of the ‘middle class reform complex’ that was a feature of the middle class in Great Britain in the

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early nineteenth century, can be perceived, albeit in a tangibly more shadowy form, in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland.32 It is manifest, for example, in the prominence of merchants, medical doctors and lawyers on the register of membership of the Freemasons of Munster.33 Similar social interests are identifiably (if not strongly) represented among the founding members of the Dublin Society, the premier improving society in the country,34 and they dominated the membership of the various loyal societies that proliferated in Ireland during the reign of George II (1727–60);35 and of the 25 guilds that shaped commercial and political activities in the municipality of Dublin. Significantly, it was members of Dublin’s social and economic elite that were responsible for the conduct of the Ouzel Galley Society, which was founded in the 1750s to arbitrate (commercial) disputes.36 A comparable motive seems to have lain behind the decision in 1750 to reanimate the Friendly Brothers of St Patrick with the object of promoting and encouraging ‘among men the just observance of private and singular friendships’. To this end, members undertook not to ‘affront or quarrel with a continued member of the order’, and vowed explicitly, in the event of a dispute, not to ‘presume to decide . . . [a] quarrel according to the laws of pretended honour, by the barbarous practice of duelling’.37 The expectation that members of the Friendly Brothers would accede willingly to arbitration proved more than a little optimistic, but the fact that an organisation whose membership embraced the ‘middling sort’ (albeit from the higher professions and luxury trades) as well as the aristocracy prioritised the resolution of personal disputes was significant. It demonstrated not only that there was now an alternative to the extreme options permitted by the code of honour, but also that this had more than theoretical appeal. The survival of the Ouzel Galley Society reinforces this conclusion, and it is further affirmed by the fact that merchants were guided in their financial and other dealings by a code of conduct, informed by religious conviction, but determined ultimately by the realisation that the continued success of those in business depended on their reputation for honest dealings. Barnard’s observation that reputation in this sphere ‘held the same importance as honour did for the landed gentleman’ encapsulates the point.38 Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that these convictions quickly left their mark on behaviour since a statistical analysis of the engagement of individuals from the ‘middling sorts’ in duelling in the 1750s and 1760s indicates that it may have fallen to half its early eighteenth-century level. These figures must be treated with caution, but they suggest that the behaviour of those in trade contrasted sharply with that of those on the margins

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of the land-owning elite – smaller landowners, middlemen notably – whose eagerness to demonstrate they were men of honour was a significant factor in the increase in duelling at this time.39 Moreover, it obtains some support from the fact that of the island’s four provinces, the code of honour was least keenly adhered to in Ulster, where ‘a middling order, rural as well as urban, was more visible than elsewhere’.40 A further pointer to the fact that changing attitudes to duelling are of assistance in revealing an embryonic middle-class identity is offered by the publication of explicit criticism of duelling. The most notable intervention was by Samuel Madden, a clergyman of the Church of Ireland and an active member of the Dublin Society, whose seminal Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland, first published in 1738, explicitly equated duelling with a lack of refinement.41 Such interventions had little effect on those who upheld the code of honour, but the fact was that the middling sort now possessed an alternative (‘reputation’) which met its needs, and in associative behaviour a means to develop and deepen their evolving distinctiveness. Equally indicatively, duelling had also emerged as a point of difference between the ‘middling sort’ and the elite, and the adoption of a strongly anti-duelling stance by the two most influential newspapers targeted at a middle-class readership – the Freeman’s Journal founded in 1763 and the Hibernian Journal, founded in 1771 – suggests this continued to deepen.42

Opposition deepens, 1770–1800 The rapid expansion in the public sphere in the second half of the eighteenth century epitomised by the surge in print was crucial to the growth of a middle-class voice.43 This was an on-going process, and though the progressive increase in the strength of anti-duelling sentiment indicates that it became stronger in the last quarter of the century, it was still too frail and insubstantial to have much impact upon the elite’s commitment to the code of honour, which, based upon the number of recorded duels, was stronger then ever.44 Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the adoption from Britain of a rational, as opposed to religion-based critique, which ‘criticised the very principles which underlay the code of honour’ and ‘strove to replace its view of society with a more rational and modern one’, was an important development.45 It certainly prompted calls ‘to put a stop to this growing evil’, and reports in the 1770s that legislation would be introduced to outlaw duelling and to punish offenders, but MPs and peers were too attached to the code of honour to embark on such a radical undertaking.46 The

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authorities were not entirely unresponsive in that a small number of members of the judiciary – of whom Judge Christopher Robinson was the most outspoken – responded positively to applicants who sought the protection of the courts against unwelcome challenges. Moreover, though legislation was deemed inappropriate, some efforts were made to curb the number of duels arising in parliament by directing that those who issued challenges arising from the hearing of petitions in controverted elections cases would be pursued with ‘the utmost severity’, and by appealing to members in dispute not to proceed to an exchange of shots.47 This was hardly any more influential in curbing the duelling impulse than the intervention in 1777 by a number of experts to prepare a set of rules ‘for general adoption’ to ensure that duels were properly conducted, but it was indicative of a mounting sensitivity to public criticisms that duelling was simply legalised murder.48 Moreover, it was well advised as the publication of more developed critiques of duelling in the 1780s roundly portrayed the practice as an antiquated vice given a veneer of respectability by custom.49 This was a telling comment, not least because it emanated from within the ranks of the Volunteers, membership of which was crucial in equipping the middling orders with the self belief to pursue an assertive programme of parliamentary reform in the 1780s aimed at opening up the political system to their participation.50 This was a highly significant development in political terms, because it anticipated the still more revolutionary agenda of the United Irishmen in the 1790s.51 They were prompted into action by the example of revolutionary France as well as by their embrace of the anti-aristocratic views of the philosophes, but the failure both of the proponents of parliamentary reform and of the United Irishmen to identify the code of honour as an issue requiring attention is indicative of how narrow was their agenda. Like their equivalents elsewhere (France included), their priority was not to recast society but was to replace the existing ruling order in a manner than favoured the educated, monied and ambitious young men of the middle nation that bridled at their continued exclusion from power rather that to recast society.52 Thus, though the existence of the Volunteers served to discourage duelling and they were, as the pamphlet A Volunteer’s Queries attests, identified with the rhetoric of anti-duelling, they did not actively pursue its eradication. The United Irishmen were still more ambivalent. Thomas Russell, for example, condemned duelling as ‘a shameful vice of the rich’, but he still believed it was his ‘duty’ to take up pistols to defend his honour when it was impugned in 1793, and the readiness with which many of his revolutionary colleagues followed his example indicates they concurred.53

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The reinforcement of middle-class identity and the decline of duelling, 1800–40 It can be surmised from this, the existence of an identifiably modern current of anti-duelling sentiment notwithstanding, that neither the proponents of political reform nor revolution would have pursued the abolition of the code of honour had they achieved power. Yet paradoxically, developments taking place at the same time, and continuing into the nineteenth century, which served to strengthen the middling sort and to affirm its distinct identity, had brought this day nearer. The most important, arguably, was the continued expansion of the middle station due to a combination of economic growth and demographic expansion. This remains quantitatively elusive, but a revealing window on the process is provided by city directories, which highlight the continuing growth of the mercantile and professional middle class and, as government embarked on the expansion that was to be a feature of the nineteenth century, on those in the employ of the state.54 Most of the occupants of these roles came from within the middling sort, and from the more able and upwardly mobile who reinforced the ranks of the middle class from below. But an under-appreciated aspect of this process, manifested in the profile of the occupants of the terraces of substantial red-brick houses in most large urban centres, is the entry into the higher professions (medicine and law) and government of the younger sons of the gentry and aristocracy.55 The gravitation of individuals from the elite, and their embrace of middle-class values of respectability, discipline and morality helped to equip middle-class interests with the required conviction that they could shape public conduct. Still more important, arguably, was the commencement of an era of religious reform. The evangelical revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been identified as a crucial factor in the formation and empowerment of the middle class in England. The impact of evangelicalism on Ireland was more socially divisive because it exacerbated strong atavistic denominational suspicions, but the fact that it was paralleled by a ‘graceful’, but still vigorous programme of reform within each of the main religious denominations encouraged the embrace of a strongly religiously motivated commitment to moral reform within the middling sort. Manifested in the 1780s by a surge in the establishment of Sunday Schools, in the 1790s in the founding of organisations like the Society for Discountenancing Vice, and in the early nineteenth century in a plethora of evangelical bodies such as the London Hibernian Society, which oversaw

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the establishment of nearly 200 schools by 1818, and the Hibernian Sunday School Society, which was responsible for the founding of over 3,000 Sunday schools between 1809 and 1841, these Protestant bodies had a less visible Catholic equivalent in convents, sodalities and confraternities, schools and orphanages, which were no less committed than their Protestant equivalents to cultivating an approach to life grounded on religious observance and sustained by personal discipline.56 The greater conservatism in conduct that this encouraged was mirrored by a greater conservatism in politics as the threat of revolution (spearheaded ironically by ambitious middle-class idealists) manifest in the 1790s and the culmination of the promise of the French Revolution in the despotism of Napoleon in the early nineteenth century caused many middle-class critics of the aristocratic order in the late eighteenth century to look with increasing conviction to government to combat disorder and to act as a bulwark against radicalism. This was more marked for obvious reasons among Protestants than Roman Catholics, as the latter awaited the delivery of the promise of Catholic emancipation made at the time of the Act of Union, but it had wider social reverberations. It also contributed to the emergence of a perception, dated by Wahrman to the early nineteenth century in Britain, of the middle class ‘as the saviours of the country’.57 This view was less easily sustained in Ireland, but it is no less apparent that whereas representatives of the middle class had been to the fore in promoting revolution in the 1790s, the prevailing attitude in the early nineteenth century was to support the maintenance of social order. This was particularly vividly manifest in the transformation of Ulster Presbyterianism opinion, but other denominations were not unaffected, and it led, as Kerby Miller has observed, to the elaboration of what subsequently become known as ‘the Protestant way of life’, which was characterised by a devotion to industry, sobriety and loyalty. Significantly, this endorsed purging society, not only of all forms of the ‘Jacobin “French disease” of political radicalism, religious infidelity and lower-class insubordination’, but also of those practices that contravened their vision of a moral world.58 In so far as duelling was concerned, the effect of these changes was to ensure, though the code of honour continued to be seen by some devotees as a manifestation of a superior aristocratic way of life, that there was a visible decline in the number of challenges pursued to an exchange of shots in the early nineteenth century. This was encouraged, once the Napoleonic wars had concluded in 1815, by a diminution in the number of duels involving the military, but still more important was the willingness of the judiciary to take firm action to penalise those who

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were brought to trial for provoking others into presenting challenges, and the preparedness of magistrates and local officials to intervene to prevent duels taking place. Such interventions, which anticipated the adoption by the state in the nineteenth century of the active regulatory role encouraged by the middle class to combat disorder and its causes, were not unusual following the Act of Union, but it was not until Major Alexander Campbell was hanged at Armagh in August 1808 for killing Captain Alexander Boyd that the implications of this change of policy struck home.59 It was noted that Judge Edward Mayne, who presided in this case, accepted the prosecution’s argument that the law should not be stretched to justify murder as manslaughter. There was speculation too that he was guided in his stand by his strong religious convictions, but while there can be little doubt but that Mayne’s beliefs informed his decisions, the fact that his stand was endorsed by a growing swathe of the public was a more significant consideration in encouraging a sharp reduction in duelling in Dublin and its environs, as the capital was transformed from a city whose character prior to the Act of Union reflected a strong aristocratic presence to one, post-Union, that was increasingly middle class.60 If, as this suggests, adherence to the code of honour showed visible signs of weakening in its traditional urban heartland, its end could not be assumed. One reason for this was the repeal of the restriction on Catholic gentlemen bearing arms approved in 1793 prompted an observable increase in the number of duels fought by Catholics and the emergence, in succession to Dublin, of Munster as the main duelling region in the country. This did not pass the judiciary by un-noticed, but whilst their efforts to combat it were not without impact, they were less significant than the example set by Daniel O’Connell. Obliged by the combination of his penchant for extravagant rhetoric and the determination of his ultra-Protestant opponents to expose him as a coward, O’Connell met and prevailed in a duel with John D’Esterre in January 1815. It was to be his last such encounter, for while he was to receive further challenges and was only prevented from meeting Robert Peel, the chief secretary, later in 1815, by the intervention of the authorities who promised he would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law if he defied them, his subsequent refusal to entertain challenges set an example that others were encouraged to follow. In the first place, the fact that he, the leading Catholic politician of his day and the pioneer of a new more democratic politics, consciously rejected duelling as a means of resolving personal disputes was of enormous symbolic significance in respect of the conduct of the substantial Catholic middle class

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whom O’Connell ushered into the political nation. Second, O’Connell’s actions freed the Catholic Church, which had long opposed duelling as contrary to the law of God, but which had been loath to venture forth with public condemnation, to make it clear that Catholics should not duel. And third, the fact that O’Connell’s disinclination to duel was identified, initially to his detriment, to the determination of his wife Mary that he should not risk his life, and hazard the prospects of his family, over a point of honour, signalled that in the emerging world of middle-class values, the man had responsibility to his family and home that took precedence over his personal honour. These considerations did not ensure that every Catholic gentleman turned his back on challenges in the following decades, but it did serve to diminish a potentially large constituency, and the readiness with which many followed O’Connell’s example indicates that it was a pattern of behaviour that came relatively easily. Most Protestants were fast arriving at the same conclusion, as the ‘great moral change’ observed by Lord Teignmouth on a visit to Dublin in 1821 encouraged an unprecedented assault on the code of honour from that quarter.61 Much of this took the traditional form of written interventions in which those who duelled were excoriated as cowardly and those who resisted the impulse were lionised for not slavishly following an antiquated convention. This inversion of the normal order was reinforced by hard-hitting religious commentary that echoed the revivalist mood of the moment and that flatly condemned duelling and those who engaged in it as un-Christian. Now lumped together with drunkenness, gambling and irreligion as social ills demanding attention, the increasingly public commitment of the middling station to hasten the eradication of duelling because it deviated from their definition of appropriate behaviour was symbolised by the establishment in 1830 of an Association for the Suppression of Duelling.62 This organisation does not seem to have enjoyed a long life, but the very fact that a nexus of ex-army officers, medical doctors, gentlemen and clergy with evangelical leanings were prepared to participate in its foundation attests to the strength of the emerging middle-class culture. If there was any doubt about this, it was vividly revealed when the by now largely middle-class city of Dublin reacted angrily to the death in a duel of Captain Standish Stamer O’Grady at the hands of a fellow soldier.63 It was the last important duel to take place near to the capital. Challenges continued to be issued elsewhere, albeit in declining number, but the fact that the constabulary, which as the leading institutional symbol of the state and the new middle-class order, was successfully able

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to ensure only a handful proceeded to an exchange of shots demonstrated that the era of aristocratic values had concluded and that of the middle class had begun.

Conclusion The end of duelling anticipated the ending of an era, as the coalition of middle-class interests that had rejected it as an appropriate way of resolving disagreements, and the various activists that campaigned for its abandonment emerged as a crucial force in society. The fact that this happened in the early nineteenth century rather than earlier reflects the trajectory of the emergence of middle-class values, and specifically of the rise of a middle-class culture that regarded duelling as anathema as well as immoral. This was not a new perception, but it was not possible to achieve this outcome earlier because, as the history of duelling in Britain as well as Ireland demonstrates, those of the middle station who frowned on the practice did not then possess the required political and social influence to bring it about.

Notes 1. See Francois Billacois, The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Early Modern France (London, 1990); V.G. Kiernan. The Duel in European History (Oxford, 1988); James Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’: Duelling in Ireland, 1570–1860 (Cork, 1995). 2. Bonamy Dobree (ed.), The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield (6 vols, London, 1932), v, 206; G.B. Hill (ed.), Boswell’s Life of Johnston (6 vols, Oxford, 1934–64), ii, pp. 179–80. 3. This is Toby Barnard’s term; see A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649–1770 (London, 2003), chapter 9. 4. See Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (London, 1969), for a classic expression of this interpretation. 5. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes (London, revised edition 2002). 6. Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991). 7. Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 9–10; Donna Loftus, ‘The rise of the Victorian middle class’ at http://bbc.co.uk/history/ british/victorians/middle_classes (accessed September 2006). 8. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, p. 16. 9. Ibid. 10. For a superb example, see David Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630–1830 (Cork, 2005). 11. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, chapter 1.

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12. Ibid, chapter 2; Barnard, A New Anatomy, chapters 2 and 3 passim. 13. Markku Peltonen, The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Cambridge, 2003), chapter 5. 14. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, chapter 2. 15. Toby Barnard, ‘Reforming Irish manners: the religious societies in Dublin during the 1690s’ in Toby Barnard , Irish Protestant Ascents and Descents (Dublin, 2003), pp. 143–78. 16. Proclamation ‘for the encouraging piety and virtue and for the preventing and punishing of vice, profaneness and immorality’, 4 May 1702 in HMC, Ormonde Mss, ii, 463–4. 17. Barnard, ‘The religious societies in Dublin’, pp. 152–3, 158, 159. 18. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 67–8, table 2.1. 19. The French bourgeoisie increased in the eighteenth century from c. 700,000 in 1700 to 2.3 million in 1780 (Peter McPhee, The French Revolution, 1789– 1799 (Oxford, 2002), p. 26). In England, those with ‘middling’ incomes (between £50 and £400) increased in the second half of the century from 15 to 25 per cent of the population (P.H. Lindert and J.G. Williamson, ‘Revising England’s social tables, 1688–1812’, Explorations in Economic History, 19 [1983], pp. 395–408; M. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005), pp. 208, 211). 20. Patrick Fagan, Catholics in a Protestant Country (Dublin, 1998); David Dickson, ‘Catholics and trade in eighteenth-century Ireland’ in T.P. Power and Kevin Whelan (eds), Endurance and Emergence: Catholics in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin, 1990), pp. 85–100; C.J. Woods, ‘The personnel of the Catholic Convention, 1792–3’, Archivium Hibernicum 57 (2003), pp. 26–76. 21. Barnard, A New Anatomy, p. 242. 22. See Dublin Directory, 1738 onwards for an indication of the growth of these employments. 23. Barnard, A New Anatomy, pp. 264–5. 24. Minutes of the Revenue Commissioners, 1716–1800 (The National Archives, CUST1). 25. Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660–1840 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 24–41. 26. See James Kelly, ‘Health for sale: mountebanks, doctors, printers and the supply of medication in eighteenth-century Ireland’ RIA proceedings 108c (2008), pp. 75–113, Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain, passim. 27. Edel Sheridan, ‘Living in the capital city: Dublin in the eighteenth century’ in Joseph Brady and Anngret Simms (eds), Dublin Through Space and Time (Dublin, 2001), pp. 136–58; Judith Hill, The Building of Limerick (Cork, 1991), chapter 4. 28. Barnard, A New Anatomy, p. 247. 29. Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain, passim 30. See Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000). 31. See James Kelly, ‘ “The Glorious and immortal memory”: commemoration and Protestant identity, 1660–1800’, RIA Proceedings, 94C(1994), pp. 25–52. 32. The phrase is David Turley’s and is quoted in R.R. Follett, Evangelicalism, Penal Theory and the Politics of Criminal Law in England, 1808–30 (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 106.

James Kelly 105 33. Eliza Meany, ‘Freemasonry in Munster, 1726–1829’ (MA thesis, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, 2004), pp. 201–2. 34. H.F. Berry, A History of the Royal Dublin Society (London, 1915), pp. 25–7. 35. Kelly, ‘The Glorious and immortal memory’, pp. 35, 38–41. 36. Barnard, A New Anatomy, pp. 260–1, 264; L.M. Cullen, Princes and Pirates: The Dublin Chamber of Commerce, 1783–1983 (Dublin, 1983), pp. 26–31. 37. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 65–6; The Fundamental Laws, Statutes and Constitutions of the Ancient and Most Benevolent Order of the Friendly Order of St Patrick (Dublin, 1751), pp. 11–12. 38. Barnard, A New Anatomy, pp. 260, 274. 39. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 68, 80. 40. Barnard, A New Anatomy, p. 247; Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 62, 72–3. 41. Samuel Madden, Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland (Dublin, 1816), p, 141; Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, p. 65. 42. James Kelly, ‘Political publishing, 1700–1800’ in A. Hadfield and R. Gillespie (eds), The Oxford History of the Book in Ireland, 1550–1800 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 227–8;Freeman’s Journal, 7 February 1764; 24 February 1767; Hibernian Journal, 5 February 1772, 24 February 1773, 29 March 1775. 43. Kelly, ‘Political publishing, 1700–1800’, pp. 225–30; Douglas Simes, ‘Ireland, 1760–1820’ in Hannah Barker and Simon Burrowes (eds), Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America 1760–1800 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 113–22; Brian Inglis, Freedom of the Press in Ireland, 1784–1841 (London, 1954), pp. 19–25, 74–92. 44. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, chapters 4 and 5. 45. Donna T. Andrew, ‘The code of honour and its critics: the opposition to duelling in England, 1700–1850’, Social History, 5 (1980), pp. 420–1. 46. Finns’s Leinster Journal, 11 February 1775; Hibernian Journal, 30 June 1777; Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 160, 163–4. 47. Sir Henry Cavendish’s parliamentary diary, v, ff. 106–9, 124–7 (Library of Congress, Washington); Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 163–4. 48. Jonah Barrington, Personal Sketches of His Own Time (3 vols, London, 1827), ii, 14–22; Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 168–70. 49. A Volunteer’s Queries in Spring 1780 Humbly Offered to the Consideration of All Men in Ireland (Dublin, 1780); Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 164–6. 50. Ian McBride, Scripture Politics: Ulster Presbyterians and Irish Radicalism in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 123–33; James Kelly, ‘Parliamentary reform in Irish politics, 1760–90’ in D. Dickson et al. (eds), The United Irishmen (Dublin, 1991), pp. 74–87. 51. Kelly, ‘Parliamentary reform in Irish politics’, p. 87. 52. Pamela Pilbeam, The Middle Classes in Europe, 1789–1914 (Basingstoke, 1990), p. 3; James Quinn (‘The United Irishmen and social reform’, IHS, 31 (1998– 9), pp. 188–201) offers a more positive reading of the social agenda of the United Irishmen, but acknowledges the unsystematic manner in which they engaged with the subject. 53. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 203–5. 54. Wilson’s Dublin Directory, 1790–1840 passim; Lucas’s Limerick Directory, 1788; Pigott’s Trade Directory, 1824.

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55. This observation is informed by the experiences of families like the Newenhams (see J. Kelly, Sir Edward Newenham, MP, 1734–1814: Defender of the Protestant Constitution (Dublin, 2004), chapters 7 and 8 passim). 56. Joseph Liechty, ‘Irish evangelism, Trinity College Dublin and the mission of the Church of Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century’ (PhD, NUI, Maynooth, 1987); David Hempton and Myrtle Hill, Evangelical Protestantism in Ulster Society, 1740–1890 (London, 1992), pp. 58–60; A.P.W. Malcomson, Archbishop Charles Agar: Churchmanship and Politics in Ireland, 1760–1810 (Dublin, 2002), pp. 240–1; Nigel Yates, The Religious Condition of Ireland, 1770–1850 (Oxford, 2006). 57. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, p. 181. 58. See Ian McBride, ‘Memory and forgetting: Ulster Presbyterians and 1798’ in T. Bartlett et al. (eds), 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp. 478– 96; Kirby Miller, ‘Forging the Protestant way of life in early nineteenthcentury Ulster’ in D.A. Wilson and M.G. Spencer (eds), Ulster Presbyterians in the Atlantic World (Dublin, 2006), pp. 141, 144, 150. 59. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, pp. 232–3. 60. Ibid., pp. 234–5. 61. Lord Teignmouth, Reminiscences of Many Years (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1878), i, 285. 62. Kelly, ‘That Damn’d Thing Called Honour’, p. 260. 63. Ibid., p. 267.

6 ‘You’d be disgraced!’ Middle-Class Women and Respectability in Post-Famine Ireland Maura Cronin

This chapter explores the construction of class identity and respectability among Irish middle-class women, particularly those of the lower middle class, in the 120 years after the great famine of 1845–50. Such an exploration is fraught with difficulty, since the related concepts of class and respectability are notoriously difficult to define. Irish society was certainly status-conscious – class-based terminology being used increasingly from the 1870s onwards1 – yet neither urbanisation nor industry was sufficiently developed to allow clear-cut economic stratification. This makes it very difficult to pinpoint the Irish middle-class boundaries, particularly at its lower reaches. Where did the working class end and the middle class begin? Was class determined by the nature of employment (paid or otherwise)? Did the criteria for class differ between country and town? Did the same class indicators apply to women as to men? And was the quest for respectability a concept that divided one class from another or provided a bridge between them?

Class and status Contemporary definitions of class were loosely based on occupation and on access to property, and although the term ‘class’ was practically unheard of in the rural context, access to land remained a criterion of social status over a century or more. An Irish poem pinpointed a conceited woman’s attitude on her ownership of three cows (and the land to graze them) – ‘Go réidh, a bhean na dtrí mbó, As do bhólacht ná bí teann..’ 2 Old ways died hard: as late as the 1930s, a County Waterford family’s disapproval of their daughter’s chosen marriage partner sprang from the fact that ‘he hadn’t enough acres’; in the 1960s a city-born 107

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farmer’s wife in the same county distinguished clearly between farmers and ‘cottage people’; and, 20 years later, an 80-year-old woman from a labouring family in County Kilkenny still categorised her neighbours socially by reference to their ‘bit of ground’.3 Similarly, occupational criteria were considered vital by contemporaries in pinpointing class. When officialdom and press referred to ‘shop girls’ or ‘factory girls’ – or, more pointedly, ‘menials’ – there was no doubt that such terms were meant to imply social inferiority, while some kinds of work – needlework, dressmaking and millinery –were (though frequently miserably paid) considered to confer higher status than others.4 However, such class identifiers were used more in relation to the lower socio-economic ranks than to the middle levels of society and, outside officialdom and platform oratory, despite the existence of very deep social divisions, the socio-economic labelling process was the very opposite of clear-cut.5 Contemporaries relied on vague phrases such as ‘the class which supplies domestic servants to shopkeepers’, ‘the class known as poor’, ‘the poorer class’ and the ‘respectable class’.6 The difficulty of defining class in the broad context of Irish society is even more marked when we try to define the classes to which women belonged. As the country’s female occupational structure (despite regional variations) altered considerably in the century after the Great Famine, perceptions of class and status also changed. The proportion of women in manufacture, retailing and general service remained relatively constant, but major changes occurred as the proportion of women in agricultural labour fell drastically from 1891 onwards while that of female professional and white-collar workers rose steadily.7 The waters are further muddied by the tendency for class categories to overlap as women changed occupation, married ‘up’ or ‘down’, moved from their place of origin, or ascended the social ladder through education. Most available sources compound this confusion. Coming ‘from above’, they cast some light on the upper middle-class sense of identity, but reveal little of what those in that twilight zone between lower middle and working classes thought of themselves or others. Census material, too, has its limitations in class identification. Just as enumerators blurred class distinctions between males by failing to distinguish masters from journeymen, so they also omitted or distorted women’s occupations and class.8 As for contemporary trade directories, they were generally selective in their entries, frequently failing to distinguish between male and female business people and omitting smaller businesses in less prominent streets. Parliamentary commissions, too, while recording the opinions of a social cross-section of males, seldom sought

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the evidence of women – particularly those below the ranks of the professional sector. Newspaper reports on philanthropic, recreational and educational matters reveal the self-image of the upper middling ranks of urban and rural society, but their evidence for women tends to be both episodic and tangential. Ironically, too, middle-class women are actually less visible in the newspapers than are the lower ranks of female society whose poverty or misdemeanours sometimes propelled them into the public arena of the court or Poor Law Board. The vagueness of class differentiation was also due in great measure to Ireland’s predominantly rural and small-town structure and to the fact that even in cities (particularly outside Dublin and Belfast) social divisions were blurred by the intimacy of local society. In Irish cities, the very real divisions between lower middle and working classes were bridged (if only temporarily) by common membership of sporting clubs and musical bands, and (before the segregation of later public authority housing) by shared residential areas.9 In the rural areas, labourers merged into the ranks of smaller farmers; the shopkeepers of the smaller towns were often linked by blood and social ties to neighbouring farmers, and the local church and creamery provided a regular meeting place where neighbours of different social status met on (perhaps superficially) equal terms.10 So, how can the historian progress beyond a purely occupationalresidential designation of class to discovering how women defined their respectability, whether they saw themselves and others in class terms, or whether their identity and status was based on other considerations? First, documentary sources, despite their limitations, can be combed for throwaway phrases, equivocations and turns of speech that obliquely articulate class identity. Second, retrospective oral evidence and personal memoirs fill in the gaps left by documentary sources for, though frequently selective and romanticised, they allow exploration of issues and areas skirted or ignored in official documentary sources11 . Also, reported memories of the type – ‘my mother always said . . .’ – can bridge gaps of more than a century, and combine with contemporary sources to reveal not only changing ideas, but also a continuity of social attitudes in post-famine Irish society: ‘Times change, but I doubt if we change with them.’12

The ambiguity of occupation The present chapter, centring largely on women in small-town and rural Munster (particularly Cork, Limerick and Waterford), suggests that

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a regional study combining contemporary and retrospective evidence not only confirms the deep social divisions within Irish society, but also, contradictorily, challenges the concept of class as either clear-cut or static. This combined stratification and fusion is particularly true in relation to occupation, particularly in the lower middle class where women were involved in a myriad of ‘hidden occupations’ bridging the gap between working and middle classes. In city lanes, some females combined their role of slum dweller with that of slum landlord, owning not only their own run-down houses, but also others in the same or a neighbouring lane.13 A much larger category of small-scale urban female entrepreneur spanning the divide between working and lower middle class was represented by those rearing pigs in their back yards. This mini-economy throve not only in the lanes but also in the terrace house yards of Cork and Limerick and in smaller towns like Dungarvan, where it was claimed that ‘You’d smell the place before you’d see it’.14 Such entrepreneurial effort was not, of course, confined to women, but even where the husband was technically in charge of the venture, it was frequently the wife (or sister) who looked after the animals and performed the vital role of communicating with the municipal authorities when complaints of smells and ‘nuisance’ were raised.15 Thus, behind the bland occupational label of vintner or shopkeeper, there existed in Irish towns and cities small but thriving female-run businesses, difficult to categorise in class terms, and interlinked with the countryside on the one hand and the booming local provision trade on the other. Where livestock and its handlers gathered, there too was another opening for the female entrepreneur who ran the ‘eating house’ or the boarding establishment.16 While some of these small-scale businesswomen can be identified in the census, most remain hidden behind the term ‘housewife’ or ‘unoccupied’, their entrepreneurial role being revealed only by the listing of other residents as lodgers and boarders. In terms of class, these women inhabited something of a twilight zone. Contemporary perception, their places of residence (middle-grade or run-down streets) and the generally sub-middle-class status of their clientele put them firmly in the ranks of the working class. Yet, their business acumen and their property stake (small though it was) categorised them as enterprising lower middle class. Nor was this combined middle-and working-class status exclusive to women. Pig buyers in early twentieth-century Limerick, unequivocally working class to the eye of the outsider, were actually men of considerable prosperity and status, and considered to be ‘a step above’ the neighbours with whom they lived cheek-by-jowl.17

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For such individuals, with a foot in both the working and middle classes, movement upwards or downwards was possible. Within the ranks of urban artisans, men could rise from journeyman to master status or descend in the opposite direction, though it must be admitted that whether such moves were seen in class terms is not at all clear.18 The ascent of small shopkeeper to merchant status did bring about a change of class, but without necessarily obliterating the former lower status. ‘Honest John’, the fictitious late nineteenth-century merchant in Kate O’Brien’s Without My Cloak, began life working in his mother’s crubeen shop.19 Similarly in real life, John Daly, a prosperous Cork provision merchant and the city’s parliamentary representative in the 1870s, stressed his working-class and retailing origins – and, more significantly, the accompanying criteria of respectability – when he recalled for the benefit of his working-class supporters that his ‘father was a good honest man who paid his debts, and his mother was a virtuous woman who was not ashamed to stand inside her own counter’.20 The association between occupational change, class mobility and the promotion of respectability was particularly obvious in the philanthropic work engaged in by women of the upper middle and gentry classes. For those promoting ‘suitable’ female work (religious orders, post-Famine manufacture revival organisations, and individual activists like Lady Aberdeen) the objective was that of ‘moralisation’, that is to change behavioural patterns and to raise (a frequently used term) working women to fit more comfortably into the predominant middleclass value system.21 For the prosperous Cork merchants’ wives involved in manufacture revival in the 1850s, domestic industry was seen as a refining force among poor women who, newly introduced to the skills of needlework, knitting or lace-making, would act as conduits of respectability, diligence and frugality to counteract the ‘habits of indolence and . . . contentment with privation, dirt and misery’ considered characteristic of the Irish lower classes.22 On either side of the denominational divide, this work-induced social elevation of lower-class women was continued by branches of the Protestant Orphan Society and by convent schools, both industrial and mainstream, long after the manufacture revival of the 1850s had run its course.23 In the 1870s, for instance, the efforts of Sister Arsenius Murrough-Bernard, a Sister of Charity sprung from the Kerry gentry and based in the Mayo town of Foxford, enabled the establishment of a woollen mill, which not only greatly alleviated the unemployment problems of the area but ran in tandem with savings schemes, an orchestra, and a library – all designed to foster the bourgeois virtues of thrift, temperance and

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self-betterment.24 Similarly, the nuns at Benada Abbey in Sligo equated the virtues of hard work with the fostering of respectability, enabling ‘poor women’ not only to earn money for the support of their families but also to avoid ‘spend[ing] much time in idleness, with all its vicious consequences’.25 The twin banners of industry and order continued to be carried into the early twentieth century by the home industry revivalists who promoted the values of frugality, self-respect and self-reliance and by employers who, in describing the ideal female employee, stressed ‘character’ and ‘conduct outside the factory’, with a decided preference for those who proved ‘steady’, ‘respectable’ and ‘temperate’.26 Although for most of those touched by industrial revival, the future lay not in upward mobility but in factory work and domestic service, changed employment could facilitate an elevation of material and social status, if only to a limited extent.27 Some of the most successful graduates of the female industrial schools did indeed raise their status (if not their class) by becoming shop assistants, milliners, needlework teachers, nursery governesses, or emigrant ladies’ maids.28 A report in 1851 on St. Mary’s Convent Industrial School in Limerick saw excellence in needlework as a chance for a young woman to ‘multiply her own chances of promotion, either as an emigrant, a ladies’ maid, or . . . she herself can become a qualified teacher’, the latter occupation teetering on the brink of the middle class.29 Even service in the ‘big house’, usually below the rank of the ‘lady’s maid’ (reserved for English-born individuals), was itself a step up socially.30 Admittedly, the servant might not leave her class when she entered such service, but in many cases her respectability was enhanced and her social expectations rose, marking her out from her family, place and class of origin and placing her in a twilight zone – neither middle nor working class.31

Family, marriage and social mobility Marriage, too, was a potential upward propellant. As in contemporary Britain, ‘marrying down’ was avoided, though marriages contracted between lower middle class and skilled working class could also ‘blur the distinctions at this [class] boundary’.32 Marriage, in fact, was a reliable social elevator only in the case of women who were already on the borders of the middle class. Small farmers’ daughters who married skilled craftsmen in full employment, skilled railway employees or wellestablished clerks were definitely upwardly mobile, if only in a modest way. Similarly, the daughters of tenant farmers and small shopkeepers considered marriage to a policeman as an upward step, partly because

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policemen tended to come from within the farming community, but also because the hardships and inconveniences of the life were compensated for by the status of marriage to officialdom.33 For women from strong farming households, the social convention of marrying one’s ‘social equals’ had been well established from at least the early nineteenth century, and even more particularly after the famine. Farmers’ daughters married farmers’ sons (preferably of an acreage equivalent to that of their own family) and the dowry which they brought with them to their new home allowed further similar marriages to be arranged for the sisters of the bridegroom.34 As an interviewee on the Limerick Rural Survey in the mid-twentieth century expressed it, It’s only right that a girl should pay off her husband’s sister; she has worked hard for him. £500 would help her to start a little business or give her a chance to get married herself.35 Thus, the solidity of the farming ‘class’ was ensured. Yet, this apparently mercenary system had its own inbuilt logic based on issues of compatibility and contemporary views of ‘right behaviour’ that, as articulated in 2001 by a 90-year-old County Limerick male farmer, were not necessarily anti-woman. ‘My mother used always say, “A woman can marry a man beneath her, but a man cannot [marry down]” ’. Pressed to explain this, he explained that if disagreements occurred in the marriage, a man who considered his wife to be socially inferior might insult her, ‘and that would not be right’.36 It was when marriage combined with a move outside the home area, particularly to the city, that a woman’s class and respectability (or at least that of her children) could be elevated most effectively. Though contemporaries from the 1880s onwards claimed that the new migrants’ poverty only swelled the ranks of the city poor, analysis of census returns for selected streets on Cork city’s north side combines with personal memories to suggest that a move to the city proved for many women a progressive upward – or, at least, sideways – step.37 Some women, in the style of Percy French’s Eileen Óg who ‘at the fair of Ballintubber . . . met McGrath the cattle-jobber’, had come in through marrying city-born cattle and pig dealers whom they had met in the course of the latters’ travels around the country.38 Others had met their policemen husbands in towns throughout Munster and Leinster, moved with them from one posting to the next, before finally settling in Cork city.39 Some cases can be followed up in more detail, raising questions as to social mobility. Take the case of the 71-year-old widow in Cork’s

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Castle Street. Originally from a village 14 miles from the city, she was by 1901 a shopkeeper and flour dealer in a busy side street, helped by her 32-year-old daughter and providing living accommodation for her two teenage grandsons.40 Then there was the mother of the writer, Seán Ó Faoláin who left a smallholding in County Limerick to marry a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Moving to Half Moon Street in the centre of the city, she took in lodgers to supplement her husband’s earnings and finance her children’s education.41 Finally, one must consider the typical case of the small farmer’s daughter from County Waterford who in the late 1880s took a position as a shop assistant in a large County Cork town. There she met her train-driver husband and moved to Cork city to live in a respectable (if overcrowded) terraced house in a middle-class area. Her younger sister took over the shop service position she had vacated, there meeting her husband, a commercial traveller, and in turn moving to the same terrace as her sister.42 Had these women changed their class? Apparently yes, from small farming stock to upper working or lower middle class. However, the upward move was not so much by the women themselves as by the next generation whose access to education – the most powerful class and status changer of all – had been enhanced by their mothers’ or grandmothers’ move to the city. The Castle Street shopkeeper’s grandsons benefited, lodging with their grandmother while studying medicine. In the case of Ó Faoláin’s mother, the son was the one who progressed, attending the Presentation College, which in turn led to the university. For the County Waterford sisters who moved to the city, the ‘next generation’ progression was even more significant in the context of this chapter, since in their case that next generation consisted largely of daughters, all of whom moved upwards socially through education.

Education and respectability While primary education, available since 1831, transmitted literacy, numeracy and religious doctrine, the more advanced secondary education promoted the Intermediate Education Act of 1878 provided the real door to advancement. A ‘superior’ education had always been the mark of the young woman of status, whether within the business and professional classes or in the stronger farming community. Sissy O’Brien had been sent to the convent at Bruff, County Limerick, where girls ‘were educated as gentlewomen by gentlewomen’.43 The status and class of this young woman and others like her was not changed by education. It was merely confirmed, as she went on to marry a gentleman farmer. The

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real change was for those further down the ranks. As late as the 1950s, it was noted that The unusually high standard of education provided for the daughters of [County Limerick farmers] in comparison with that provided for the sons suggests that the daughter has an important role vis-v-vis the community as a whole. The refinement of one’s daughter does seem to raise the status of the family . . .44 The role of religious sisters in this onward march of education and respectability cannot be underestimated. The ‘transforming power of the nuns’ who fostered the growth of devotional Catholicism, particularly from the 1850s onwards, ensured that devout Catholicism and bourgeois respectability were closely interwoven in the value systems of their female pupils, whether in ‘poor’ or ‘superior’ schools.45 In the 1920s, a Mercy sister in a County Waterford convent school touched a whole generation of village and country girls with a combination of Marian devotion, an equal appreciation of great English poetry and Irish folklore, an extreme aversion to ‘bad’ or ‘coarse’ language, and a firm belief in the virtue of hard work.46 This situation was not very different to the County Waterford women’s children of 20 years earlier, who, originating within the ranks of the upper working and lower middle class, were impelled ‘upwards’ by a combination of hard work, dedicated religious teachers, supportive parents and – that veritable ‘open sesame’ – the King’s Scholarship.47 Those who won a King’s Scholarship in the early years of the twentieth century found themselves on the road to the teacher training colleges (still in their infancy) and ‘going up into the next class’ to the professional position of teacher – the equal (in status if not in gender terms) of the priest and the doctor, and perhaps even the superior of business people and large farmers.48 Other siblings, especially the younger ones, gained access to university education, one (female) to enter the ranks of secondary teaching in London, the other (male) to qualify as an engineer and join the British colonial service.49 For those whose ability or preference put them outside the range of college and university education, the sure ladder to security and advanced status was nursing, an occupation increasingly professionalised over the course of the later nineteenth century. The transition from the slatternly lower class nurse-tenders of the 1850s to the prim wearers of starched aprons and frilly caps in the 1920s was the ultimate evidence of the bourgeoisification of the calling, by now attracting farmers’, shopkeepers’ and lower professionals’ daughters into a career that combined status, security and marriageability.50

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Strained relationships There always existed some resentment against those women who ‘changed class’, whether through marriage, a residential move or an occupational change. The existence of a thin line between deference and contempt, between admiration and begrudgery, was especially obvious in the relationship between subordinates and those superiors who were perceived to have risen from below, the former being very quick to identify and resent any perceived éirí in áirde (pride of the parvenu) on the part of a mistress, neighbour or employer.51 Women from the condemned lanes around Cork’s Barrack Street, faced in 1878 with a public health enquiry into their area, were quick to turn the tables on the upwardly aspiring residents of the model buildings up the street in Prosperity Square: ‘Sure, sir, when the pock was up in Prosperity Square, not a bit of it came near our little place . . . .’52 Such resentment had also come across in a different context at a murder enquiry in Limerick City in 1850. The dead woman, a respectable baker’s wife (probably classifiable as lower middle class), had died from injuries sustained as a result of either a blow by her husband or a fall while she was drunk. A labouring man giving evidence at the ensuing trial, asked if he ever drank with the woman, seems to have touched a raw nerve locally when he retorted: ‘Oh, no! She was too much the lady for that . . ..’ Did the ensuing laughter in court mean that the woman was resented because she was ‘too fond of the bottle’ or because she had the ‘high notions’, which distinguished her in class terms from others on the street – or, more likely, because the former undermined the latter and pulled her ‘down’ to an equal footing with her poorer neighbours?53 Seventy years later, the same resentment against the parvenu in authority came from a woman in a County Waterford village who, in the belief that her daughter had been wronged by one of the sisters in the local convent school, rushed into the classroom and accosted the sister with the threat – ‘I’ll tear the veil off you, you bloody counter-lepper’ – a nonetoo-subtle reference to the fact that the offender had begun life as a draper’s assistant and had now become too big for her boots.54 So, moving from one class to another, though certainly possible over a two to three generation time-span, was not easy. Yet, there were many ways in which social divisions were bridged in everyday life – so many ways, in fact, that we have to question whether existing divisions were based on class difference or on something more subtle. The first bridge was within occupation itself, the complexity of women’s class being revealed by contemporary terminology. Apparently clear-cut

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occupational terms frequently hid multiple layers of social reality, and analysing specific cases only further complicates the social labyrinth. Take, for instance, the term ‘servant’, which clearly implies workingclass status but which could mean many different things depending on the dynamics of the individual household and on whether the context was urban or rural. Sometimes the servant’s social status was clear enough, as in the case of a 20-year-old woman from the working-class district of Blackpool in Cork city census of 1901. Listed by her grandmother, the head of the household, as ‘slavey’ and working in some well-to-do household well outside the confines of her own area, there was little doubt that she was defined – and defined herself – as working class.55 On the other hand, the relationship between ‘servant’ and employer in the rural setting had many possible shapes. In the case of servants in ‘big houses’, there was little bridging of the social divide between servant and employer.56 Mary Healy, who worked as a maid in a Kilkenny ‘big house’ during the Great War, retrospectively described the wide gulf which separated her from her employers: Domestic service in those days (I don’t know what it is like now) was nothing short of slavery. ‘Yes, my lady’ to Lady Cuffe, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ as the case might be, Sir Otway. The women were Madam, to married women, and Miss, so it would be Miss Rose, or Miss Elizabeth as the case might be . . . It was considered more servile to call the young ladies Miss Rose, or whatever their first name might be, than just Miss, and no matter how young boys were, they were addressed as master . . .57 Aggie Donovan from the same county was unable, 60 years later, to depart from the ingrained habit of addressing the woman of the neighbouring ‘big house’ as ‘Ma’am’.58 We are, on the other hand, on much shakier ground in defining the relationship between a (working class) female servant and a (middle-rank) farmer’s wife. The complexities of this relationship were determined by regional conditions centred on acreage and social conventions. In Limerick’s Golden Vale, on the one hand, the gentleman farmer’s wife in the 1870s supervised the maids in the dairy and was always referred to by them as ‘the mistress’.59 Almost a century later, the labourer–farmer divide in County Limerick was emphasised by the provision of separate tables for farmers and labourers at meal-time.60 On a middle-sized farm, however, the farmer’s wife, while certainly considering herself above the rank of the labouring population, did heavy

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physical outdoor work, which she shared with her paid female servant so that social differences could be transcended by personal friendship and the common experience of the everyday round of work. Again, however, there were fine gradations in the relationship, as suggested by two 1911 examples from County Waterford. Maggie, the 14-year-old city-born farm servant, can have had little enough rapport with the 70year-old farmer’s wife for whom she worked, separated from her as she was by a huge age gap as well as a social and urban-rural divide. On the other hand, the 55-year-old Alice, a domestic servant in the same parish, may well have had a more sisterly (if unequal) relationship with the 40-year-old farmer’s wife for whom she worked.61 Social divisions were most blurred by the common task when the workplace of one woman was the kitchen of another. This was as true in the urban as in the rural context. Take, for instance, the case of another County Waterford farmer’s wife who employed a neighbouring woman from a small cottage to help with the children and the washing, or the Cork city traindriver’s wife who received similar help from a neighbour from a much smaller house in a neighbouring lane. In the latter case the employed neighbour wielded considerable influence in the actual management of the house, while in both the country and city households she was always addressed courteously as ‘Mrs’ – also a term of mutually recognised equality and shared respectability in rural Kilkenny.62 The social divide between servant and employer could also be permanently bridged by inter-class acquaintances forged in childhood. In addressing members of the strong farming class, labouring women in rural Ireland used first-name terms with their own contemporaries but referred to members of the older generation as ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’. In the older socially mixed areas of cities, where half-door housing and larger, higher status terraces existed side by side, the same bridges were visible, Patricia Lynch’s memories of her late nineteenth-century childhood on Cork’s Fair Hill including a firm friendship with the local washerwoman’s son, Dinny, a bond which percolated upwards into the ranks of the adults in both houses.63

‘Respectables’ and ‘roughs’ Such bonds of sympathy were not, of course, universal, but they were hampered less by differences in occupation, housing and financial means than by differences in attitude. Ultimately, the main divide in Irish female society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was along this line. Just as in contemporary Britain, the essential divide

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was between the respectable and non-respectable, women (like men) being either ‘respectable’ and ‘hardworking’ or ‘rough’ and ‘good for nothing’.64 At the top of the spectrum were those whose respectability, bordering on gentility, was visible in working and living conditions. In some of the more prominent dressmaking and large retailing concerns, for instance, continued residence with one’s parents or ‘living-in’ on the premises was cited as a mark of a young woman’s respectability.65 So was an interest in appropriate entertainment, so that in such establishments a piano – the ultimate symbol of gentility – was made available in the residential accommodation, or else the girls clubbed together to buy one between them.66 Those who looked upwards from below also had their way of defining class – though they seldom used the term. For servants and poorer neighbours, the hallmarks of a ‘real lady’ were tangible, if ill-defined. It was, of course, easy enough to categorise the female members of the large landlord’s family. They inhabited a different world and their status was based on wealth, elegant dress, accent and forms of address. Yet, even within that milieu, those below could draw fine distinctions between inherited and ‘real quality’, as did Mary Healy, looking back at her days of service in a big house in County Kilkenny during the Great War: But I must say that Sir Otway was one of nature’s gentlemen, as distinct from being considered a gentleman because of his position. Lady Cuffe was every inch the ‘Lady’, haughty and distant in her manner . . .67 ‘Real’ ladies and gentlemen, moreover, fulfilled their moral obligations, the most important being open-handedness. Patricia Lynch’s grandfather in late nineteenth-century Cork city was frequently praised for his generosity by beggars on the street: ‘I knew ye’d put yer hand in yer pocket for a neighbour in distress, Mr. Lynch . . .’68 But the generosity motif was most marked in relation to women. Just as the early eighteenth-century Munster song, ‘Cill Cais’, lamented the passing of the generous lady of the Butler family – ‘Sí ná tógfadh seilbh na ndaoine, Sí cara na bhfíorbhochtán’ (She would not take the people’s possessions, She was the friend of the really poor) – so farmers’ wives, in particular, were judged on their open-handedness.69 This was echoed in Patricia Lynch’s mother’s praise for a countrywoman resident in middle-class area of London – ‘A lovely woman . . . flahooil to the backbone’.70 Folklore and individual family tradition from all over the island

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recount the story of the generous woman who, despite constant giving to the travelling and neighbouring poor, always found her meal bin full.71 At every level of the social ladder, such criteria were used, and frequently by women themselves, to differentiate the ‘respectable’ self from the inferior ‘other’. Attitudes to alcohol, perhaps even more in the case of women than men, confirmed their perceived place on the social hierarchy. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, respectable working men’s wives in Waterford, for instance, favoured the Sunday closing of public houses, even when their menfolk took the opposite side.72 Over a century later, a grandmother from the same city, responding to her granddaughter’s question on women’s drinking habits in her youth, was emphatic in her reply: ‘Only the men went into pubs – no women. God bless you, you’d be disgraced. I was never fond of pubs’.73 On the other hand, less respectable women and flighty young girls scandalised the supporters of temperance by their frequenting of pubs, either in the company of young men or in female groups – only the ‘lowest’ patronising the shebeens or unlicensed houses – while equal concern was voiced in 1916 about those soldiers’ wives throughout the country who spent their ‘separation money’ on alcoholic drink.74 Respectability did not totally preclude female consumption of alcohol, but from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s it was vital that a woman drank only on rare occasions (and then only with appropriate reluctance) and that her choice of drink was something genteel, like a sherry. There was a whole world social difference between the woman who sipped a sherry at a wedding, or whose untypical husband brought her home a ‘small port’ on his return from the public house, and the ‘shawlies’ (a class-laden term) on Cork’s north side who, in the opening years of the twentieth century, consumed their porter while sitting among the fish-baskets in a dusky licensed premises.75 But interpreting social attitudes by reference to liquor must be done cautiously. The old women in the shawls were decidedly working class, but they were not considered to have wandered from the path of respectability while they remained sober. The same holds good for the time-hallowed urban custom of wives, daughters and female servants in respectable working-class areas taking liquor home to their menfolk from the public house. For the police monitoring the 325 women so engaged in one hour on a single day in April 1888, such activity was a mark of creeping depravity.76 For those so involved, both then and five decades later, it was a routine job which in no way reflected negatively on the respectability of the household – once the drinking was done by the menfolk only – but as the men so facilitated were mostly

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clerks, artisans and labourers, it was a custom that tended to distinguish the working from the middle class.77

Religion, hard work and cleanliness Religious participation was another twilight area in terms of social bridging. It may have been a unifier, insofar as common belief and enthusiasm brought women together in confraternities, pilgrimages and other devotional pursuits. However, this apparent equalisation through belief was superficial enough. Despite the mass enthusiasm spread by missions, retreats and confraternities, the public manifestation of Catholic devotion was clearly stratified along class and status lines. Some Cork city churches, even into the early twentieth century, were divided during Sunday Mass between the ‘penny side’, the ‘halfpenny side’ and the ‘poor side’.78 Although Limerick city was noted for its overt and enthusiastically cross-class catholic character, selected women of higher social standing entered the Jesuit Church through a private door – a custom continuing until the mid-twentieth century.79 As for the women’s confraternities that later provided a meeting point for women of all backgrounds, photographs from the early twentieth century suggest that participation in confraternity processions was the preserve of the wearers of hats and coats – in the Cork context, at least, the outward sign of middle- or upper working-class status. The wearers of shawls stood on the sidewalk to watch the procession pass.80 Yet, religious devotion, more particularly in the case of women than men, conferred respectability, particularly in its promotion of the intrinsic ‘merit’ of hard work. In late nineteenth-century Ireland, while paid female farm workers were voting with their feet, the wives and daughters of small farmers were still doing extremely hard physical work on their own land and, making virtue of necessity, interpreted involvement in such work as a hallmark of social acceptability.81 The farmer’s wife who could ‘turn a hand’ to tasks as varied as milking, ‘pulling calves’ and cleaning out sheds was considered the epitome of professional competence and moral superiority. Sometimes, the virtue was defined by its absence. Malachy Horan, describing a thrice-married woman in his area, reflected the general negative consensus on the grounds of her avoidance of work: She was the useless woman; good for nothing but getting married. She could neither cook nor wash, neither could she work the land.

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Maybe it was the way she starved her men that made them die off that quick.’ 82 Hard work and cleanliness went together – or, at least, this was the general perception. Poverty was pardonable and the term ‘poor woman’ was used more in sympathy than in judgement, frequently being coupled with the word ‘respectable’. However, dirt wiped out all respectability. Despite the wide social gulf between them, women from farm to terraced house to slum lane subscribed to this particular value system. The early twentieth-century campaign of the United Irishwomen (forerunners of Irish Countrywomen’s Association) to ‘drive dirt, drink and thriftlessness from the country and replace them by cleanliness, sobriety and self-respect’ only echoed what was already common currency.83 Sewing home-workers in Ulster at the same period justified their involvement in paid employment on the grounds that it kept ‘yourself and your family as it should be . . . clean and beyond reproach’.84 Tenement-dwelling women in the first years of the twentieth century, too, subscribing to the middle-class value system, were remembered by the next generation as scrupulously clean: But you would go into everyone’s house . . . and you wouldn’t see Anything dirty . . . People had just bare boards on the floor, no lino, But, honest to God, they’d be like milk, scrubbed white. And keep The tables clean by putting newspapers on them. Oh, and the women Were very proud of their washing . . . And very critical of one another In them years. If they put out anything that wasn’t washed well they’d Say, ‘Ooooh, look at her wash!’85 Lane-dwelling women in Cork city half a century earlier also acted as custodians of the classical middle-class value of personal cleanliness as a mark of social respectability. Strenuously denying allegations by the local medical officer that their lanes were ‘nests of fever’, the women attended a public meeting in force, neatly and comfortably clad, with faces washed and hair well kempt, got, up, in fact, in a style that prima facie, was meant to be an answer to what they regard as the unreasonable attempt of the Corporation to demolish their ‘comfortable houses and send them into the workhouse’. The men and children, on the contrary, bore little or no trace of ‘titivation’ and presented themselves in the state of wonted squalor and dirt that characterise the localities [in question].86

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Almost a century later, children in Limerick city’s lanes felt their mothers’ wrath for the twin sins of ‘getting dirty’ and ‘back-answering’ – the sure signs of degradation – while daughters were early initiated into scrubbing the stairs and blacking the range to ensure that the cleanliness of the house – irrespective of location – stood witness to the respectability of those within.87 Convent education and the emphasis in many households on the moral authority of the mother combined to promote the virtues of hard work and decorum among high and low alike. In the St. Louis Sisters’ reformatory in the 1870s, it was reported that ‘the great principle inculcated . . . is that labour is a duty and that it is an obligation to be constantly occupied’.88 A similar emphasis was clear in the matriarchal regime of at least some strong farming families, Sissy O’Brien’s mother keeping a tight rein on the dairy maids on her County Limerick farm, watching over the standard of their work and making sure that her own was perfectly executed. It was significant, however, that this matriarchal system also involved overseeing the maids’ moral behaviour and discouraging unsupervised activities like ‘walking out’ with young men, mixing with the farm boys, and attending wakes with their attendant ‘wicked’ games – not very different from the campaign waged at precisely the same period by the Sisters of Charity in Clarinbridge against the attendance of young girls at Sunday fairs.89 Interestingly, however, Mrs O’Brien was more tolerant than her convent-educated daughter regarding her maids’ ‘superstitious’ practices and beliefs which distinguished ‘simple’ country people from their social betters and which were strongly discouraged by the Irish Catholic church of the day.90 Countryborn women turned city wives were sincere believers in the link between decorum and respectability, the ‘guardians of respectability and virtue’ as Purvis expressed it in the context of contemporary Britain.91 The Waterford-born wife of the early twentieth-century Cork train driver may never have used the term ‘respectability’, but she made sure that her children never ‘got into trouble’, warning the boys against fighting with their schoolmates, even when their city-reared father threatened them with equally dire consequences for not ‘standing up for themselves’.92 Nor was the obsession with respectability confined to the country-born urban mother. Across the city in Fair Hill, 30 years later, a young lad, son of pawnshop manager, enterprisingly set off with his friend to sell in the local bone-yard for money to go to the cinema. On his return home, though his father argued that this was honestgot money, his mother beat him around the kitchen with the sweeping brush for disgracing the family by bone-collecting.93

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Conclusion This fear of ‘disgracing’ oneself or one’s family – of lowering one’s status and respectability in the public eye – was common across the boundary between working and middle class. While class was roughly determined by a combination of birth, means, residence and education, the divisions were blurred by common value systems enforced by religion and the smallness and ensuing intimacy of communities. In such a context, while economic factors certainly played their part in shaping the status pyramid, behaviour was possibly an even more important measure of an individual’s or a family’s standing. This was very much the preoccupation of women (especially mothers) who were, after all, the custodians of their families’ respectability. Whether it was the Fair Hill mother of the 1930s, outraged by her son’s bone gathering, the Limerick mother of the 1950s warning her children to keep their clothes clean, or the Waterford wife of the 1960s who felt uncomfortable in the public house, the common denominator was the concern that behaviour should enhance status. Wealth mattered but female-enforced respectability – grounded in attitudes to alcohol, religion, work, sexuality and cleanliness – was an even more significant determinant of status.94 As the West Limerick saying, still current in the early twenty-first century, expresses it, ‘an ounce of breeding is worth a ton of feeding’.95

Notes 1. Maura Cronin, Country, Class or Craft? The Politicisation of the Skilled Artisan in Nineteenth Century Cork (Cork, 1994), pp. 174–5. From 1870 onwards, urban corporations initiated schemes of ‘working class dwellings’, working men’s clubs were established, and orators at trade union meetings spoke of ‘the rights of labour’. 2. ‘Bean na dTrí mBó’ (Woman of the Three Cows), Micheál Breathnach, Fíon na Filídheachta (Dublin, n.d.), pp. 100–1. The lines translate as: ‘Take it easy, O woman of three cows, Do not be conceited about your stock’. 3. Evidence of Mary Murphy, born 1912, in conversation with the author c.1985; Ellen Walsh, born 1902, in conversation with the author c.1969; Marilyn Silverman, ‘A labouring man’s daughter’ in Chris Curtin and Thomas Wilson (eds), Ireland from Below: Social Change and Local Communities (Galway, 1988), p. 125. 4. Cork Examiner, 29 December 1899; H.C. 1850, xxiv, Report of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland for the Year, Appendix E (cited hereafter as Reports) 1850, p. 417. 5. Cronin, Country, Class or Craft?, pp. 174–5. 6. Report of the Royal Commission on Labour, Reports on the Employment of Women, J.C. 1893–94 [c. 6894 – xxviii] xxxvii, Pt. 1, 545, p. 238; Cork Examiner, 11 January 1860.

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7. In the early twentieth century, women were still most frequently represented in the ranks of domestic servants; they figured strongly in small to middling sized retailing businesses (grocery shops, public houses, fancy goods shops, draperies), and they were the backbone of boarding establishment and ‘eating house’ proprietors. The percentage of women describing themselves as agricultural labourers fell by 35 per cent between 1891 and 1901 and by a further 72 per cent in the following decade. Female representation in the rank of professionals rose from 22 per cent in 1901 to 25 per cent in 1911. In 1841, 32 per cent of all teachers were women, while, by 1911, 63 per cent were women; See, for instance, Census of Ireland 1911, Cork City 86/7, 18, 19; Joanna Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914 (Oxford 1993), pp. 26, 32, 37; Eibhlín Breathnach, ‘Women and higher education in Ireland, 1879–1914’ Crane Bag, 4, 1980, pp. 47–8; Report of the Select Committee on Intermediate Education, H.C. 1899, xxiii, p. 5634. 8. Margaret Crawford, Counting the People: A Survey of the Irish Censuses, 1813– 1911 (Dublin, 2003), p. 82; Bourke, Housewifery to Husbandry, pp. 86–7. The proportion of women with designated occupations fell from 27 to 19 per cent between the census of 1891 and that of 1911. It is not clear whether this reflects a real decline of the number of women in specified employments, or whether it reflects the non-crediting of women with occupations that they actually pursued. My own work on the census for Cork City suggests that enumerators were far less likely to enter a woman’s (especially a married woman’s) occupation on the 1911 forms than had been the case in 1901. 9. Angela Fahy, ‘Place and class in Cork’ in Cornelius Buttimer and Patrick O’Flanagan (eds), Cork: History and Society (Dublin, 1993), pp. 793–812. 10. Maura Cronin, ‘Remembering the creameries’ in Mark McCarthy (ed.), Ireland’s Heritages: Critical Perspectives on Memory and Identity (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 175–6. 11. Silverman, ‘A labouring man’s daughter’, pp. 124–7. 12. George Little, Malachy Horan Remembers (Dublin, 1986), p. 5. Malachy Horan, born in 1847, spoke to Dr George Little in the 1940s, his own memories stretching back to the late 1850s but those he had inherited from his parents and older neighbours going back into the late eighteenth century. One 90year-old farmer from County Limerick whom I spoke to in 2001 had sayings that his mother, born in the 1880s, often repeated. 13. Cork Corporation Records (Cork Archives Council), Public Health Committee Minute Book, 13 June, 9 November 1897, 1 March, 19, 26 April, 12, 19 July, 9 August, 4 October 1898, 21 February 1999. 14. Evidence of the late Thomas Murphy, born 1896, in conversation with the writer c.1975. 15. Cork Corporation Records, Public Health Committee Minute Book, 20 August, 10, 24 September 1895, 18 February 1896, 13 June 1897. 16. The author Seán Ó Faoláin’s mother was a County Limerick woman who had married a policeman and moved to the centre of Cork where she supplemented family income by keeping lodgers, though her lodgers were drawn from among the ‘artistes’ in the nearby Opera House. Seán Ó Faoláin, Vive Moi! An Autobiography (London, 1965), pp. 60–1.

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17. John McGrath, ‘Sociability and Social Change in St. Mary’s Parish, Limerick 1890–1950’, unpublished MA dissertation, University of Limerick/Mary Immaculate College, 2006, pp. 172–82. 18. Cronin, Country, Class or Craft?, p. 187. 19. Kate O’Brien, Without My Cloak (London: Virago Press, 1986), pp. 14–16. O’Brien’s novel explored the complex relationships within the rising middle class of Meelick (based on her native Limerick) in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Crubeen (derived from the Irish crúb or hoof) means a pig’s foot. 20. Cork Examiner, 19 May 1876. 21. Moira Egan, ‘Nurses, Nuns and Ladies: A Study of Class, Ethnicity and Religion in the Crimean War’ in Alan Hayes and Diane Urquhart (eds) Irish Women’s History (Dublin, 2004), pp. 60–71. 22. Irish Trades Advocate, 25 October 1851. 23. Catherine Enright, ‘The Limerick Protestant Orphans’ Society’, Unpublished MA dissertation, University of Limerick/Mary Immaculate College, 2003. 24. An annual Christmas concert was initiated in 1892, a brass and reed band in 1897, a handball court in 1901, a men’s and women’s club room in 1915, and a music school in 1923. I.R.D. Foxford, Agnes Morrough Bernard, 1842–1932; Foundress of the Foxford Woollen Mills (Ballina, 1992), pp. 23–4. 25. Mary Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (Oxford, 1998) p. 104. 26. Bourke, From Housewifery to Husbandry, pp. 118–19; Royal Commission on Labour, H.C. 1893–4 [c. 6894 – xxiii] xxxvii, Pt. I, pp. 331, 337, 348, 350, 351. 27. Cork Union Records (Cork Archives Council), Indoor Relief Book 1884. 28. Report of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland for the Year, Appendix E, 1849, pp. 313, 318–9; ibid., 1850, pp. 413, 435. 29. Report of the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland for the Year, Appendix E, 1850, pp. 420, 425. 30. Terence Dooley, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland (Dublin, 2001), pp. 161–3; Mona Hearn, Below Stairs: Domestic Service Remembered in Dublin and Beyond, 1880–1922 (Dublin, 1991), p. 77. 31. Mary Healy, For the Poor and For the Gentry (Dublin, 1989), pp. 40–55. The upward move could, however, prove transient. The female servant had usually to choose between marriage and permanency on the household staff, and even marriage to another employee in the same service was no guarantee of continued employment since the widowed female servant with children might have to leave her employment, finding herself back in the class she had left. 32. June Purvis, Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945. An Introduction (London, 1995), p. 57. 33. Brian Griffin, ‘The Irish police: love, sex and marriage’ in Margaret Kelleher and James H. Murphy (eds), Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres (Dublin, 1997), pp. 174–5. The policemen in the Blackpool and Bridewell barracks in Cork in 1901 and 1911 were almost all the sons of farmers in other counties. Census of Ireland 1901, 83/62; Census 1911, 84/97. 34. Rosaleen Fallon, A County Roscommon Wedding: The Marriage of John Hughes and Mary Gavin, 1892 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 22–4.

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35. Patrick McNabb, ‘Social structure’ in Rev. Jeremiah Newman (ed.), The Limerick Rural Survey, 1958–1964 (Tipperary, 1964), p. 232. 36. Evidence of John (pseudonym), born 1901, in interview with the writer May 2001. 37. Third Report of His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Housing of the Working Classes, Ireland HC. 1884–85, xxxi [c.4547] Qs. 23684-8. 38. Census 1901, Cork City 83/65; Percy French, ‘Eileen Oge, or The Pride of Petravore’, in James N. Healy (ed.), Percy French and His Songs (Cork, 1976), p. 38. 39. Census 1901, Cork City 83/62; Census 1911, Cork City 84/97. 40. Census of Ireland 1901, Cork City, 87/1. 41. Ó Faoláin, Vive Moi!, p. 71. 42. Evidence of the late Thomas Murphy, born 1896, in conversation with the writer c.1975. 43. Carbery, Farm by Lough Gur, p. 103. 44. McNabb, ‘Social structure’, p. 232; Carbery, Farm by Lough Gur, pp. 94–106. 45. Magray, Transforming Power of the Nuns, pp. vii, 91–3, 97. 46. Evidence of Mary Murphy, born County Waterford 1912, in conversation with the writer, c.1980. 47. Loreto O’Connor, Passing on the Torch: A History of Mary Immaculate College, 1898–1998 (Limerick, 1998), pp. 9, 51. 48. Frances Widdowson, Going up into the Next Class: Women and Elementary Teacher Training, 1840–1914 (London, 1983). 49. Evidence of the late Nellie Walsh, born Cork 1901, in conversation with the writer c. 1980. 50. Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh, ‘Flower power and “mental grooviness”: nurses and midwives in Ireland in the early twentieth century’ in Bernadette Whelan (ed.), Women and Paid Work in Ireland, 1500–1930 (Dublin, 2000), pp. 133–47. 51. For an examination of deference and begrudgery in rural Ireland, see K.T. Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland (Oxford, 1984), pp. 89–127. 52. Cork Examiner, 21 March 1878. 53. Limerick Chronicle, 6 July 1850. 54. Evidence of Mary Murphy, born in County Waterford 1912, in conversation c.1985. A ‘counter-lepper’ (leaper) was a draper’s assistant who had left the business. 55. Census 1901, Cork City, 83/84. This term was crossed out by the enumerator and replaced by ‘domestic servant’. 56. Dooley, Decline of the Big House in Ireland, p. 162; Hearn, Below Stairs, pp. 75–7. 57. Mary Healy, For the Poor and For the Gentry (Dublin, 1989), p. 49. 58. Silverman, ‘A labouring man’s daughter’, p. 113; Healy, For the Poor and for the Gentry, p. 48. 59. Carbery, Farm by Lough Gur, p. 23. 60. Evidence of Pat, born County Limerick c.1930, interviewed by the writer March 2001; Evidence of James, b. Co. Limerick c.1955, in conversation with the writer c.1989. 61. Census of Ireland 1911, Household Schedules, County Waterford, Barony of Gaultiere, Parish of Crooke.

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62. Evidence of the late Mary Murphy, born County Waterford 1912, in conversation with the author, c.1980; Evidence of the late Thomas Murphy, born Cork 1896, in conversation with the author, c. 1975; Silverman, ‘A labouring man’s daughter’, p. 113. 63. Silverman, ‘A labouring man’s daughter’, p. 112; Patricia Lynch, A Story Teller’s Childhood (Dublin and London, 1947), p. 2. 64. Purvis, Women’s History, p. 57. 65. Royal Commission on Labour, questions 337, 350, 351. 66. Royal Commission on Labour, p. 322. 67. Healy, For the Poor and For the Gentry, p. 49. 68. Lynch, A Story Teller’s Childhood, p. 5. 69. ‘Cill Cais’, An tAthair Pádraigh Breathnach, Ceol Ár Sínsear (Dublin, 1913), Book 7, p. 12. 70. Lynch, A Story Teller’s Childhood, p. 179. ‘Flahooil’ is an anglicised spelling of the Irish adjective flathúil or generous. 71. Cathal Portéir, Famine Echoes (Dublin, 1995), pp. 262–8; Evidence of Mary Murphy b. 1913 (regarding her grandmother, Mary Skehan of Rathgormac, Co. Waterford) in conversation with the writer c.1985. 72. Report of the Select Committee on the Sale of Intoxicating Liquors on Sunday, H.C. 1877 (198) xvi, question 54, q. 6386, Evidence of Alderman Freeman, Waterford. 73. Anne, born Waterford c.1932, interviewed 2002 by the writer. 74. Report of the Select Committee on the Sale of Intoxicating Liquors on Sunday, H.C. 1877 (198) xvi, question 541, Evidence of Capt. George Talbot, Dublin; question 1533, Evidence of Alderman Peter Paul McSwiney, Dublin; Report of the Select Committee on Sunday Closing Acts, H.C. 1888 (255), xix, question 9833, Evidence of Dr John O’Connor, Youghal, Co. Cork; Colonial Office Papers, C.O. 904/99, Inspector General’s Monthly Report for Ireland, January 1916. I am indebted to Dr Jerome aan de Weil, History Department, Mary Immaculate College, for this latter reference. 75. Evidence of Thomas Murphy, born Cork 1896, in conversation with the writer c.1975. 76. Report of the Select Committee on Sunday Closing Acts, H.C. 1888 (255), xix, question 463. 77. Evidence of Mrs Noreen Cronin, born 1933, interviewed by the writer in 2001; Report of the Select Committee on the Sale of Intoxicating Liquor on Sunday (Ir) Bill, H.C. 1877, Q. 1541. 78. Evidence of Tom Murphy, born Cork 1896, in conversation with the writer c.1975. 79. Evidence of Síle de Cléir in conversation with the writer, c.1990. 80. Cork Examiner, 1 July 1913. 81. Royal Commission on Labour, Pt. IV, B-1, p. 111. Report of A. W. Fox, Poor Law Union of Baltimore (Co. Cork). 82. George Little, Malachi Horan Remembers: Rathfarnham and Tallaght in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin and Cork, 1986), p. 90. 83. Aileen Heverin, The Irish Countrywomen’s Association: A History, 1910–2000 (Dublin, 2000), p. 40. 84. Margaret Neill, ‘Homeworkers in Ulster, 1850–1911’ in Janet Holmes and Diane Urqhart (eds), Coming into the Light: Work, Politics and Religion of Women in Ulster, 1840–1940 (Belfast, 1994), p. 22.

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85. Evidence of Nancy Cullen, born 1923, cited by Kevin C. Kearns, Dublin Tenement Life: An Oral History (Dublin, 1994), p. 93. 86. Cork Examiner, 21 March 1878. 87. Anne, born Limerick 1952, interviewed by the writer, December 2003. 88. Magray, Transforming Power of the Nuns, p. 101. 89. Ibid., p. 103; Carbery, Farm by Lough Gur, pp. 22, 46–7, 167–9. 90. Carbery, Farm by Lough Gur, p. 162. 91. Purvis, Women’s History, p. 37. 92. Evidence of the late Tom Murphy, born Cork 1896, interviewed by the writer c.1978. 93. Evidence of the late Micheál Cronin, born Cork 1922, interviewed by the writer c.1985. 94. Silverman, ‘A labouring man’s daughter’, p. 114. 95. Evidence of Una Nic Einrí, in conversation with the writer c.1990.

7 Middle-Class Attitudes to Poverty and Welfare in Post-Famine Ireland Virginia Crossman

Recent analyses of the evolution of welfare systems across Europe have explored the role of ideology, class and gender in shaping attitudes to, and structures of, welfare provision.1 It is generally agreed that the middle classes were central not only to the production of welfare but also to the dominance throughout most of the nineteenth century of a concept of social relations based on individualism. In most cases, it was not until the early decades of the twentieth century, under the pressure of economic recession, class conflict and international rivalry, that the non-interventionist, individualist state began to give way to the collectivist welfare state. While progress towards the creation of a ‘classic’ welfare state was to stall in Ireland after independence, the future shape of welfare provision was the subject of ongoing debate during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was widespread dissatisfaction with the poor law system in general and with the institution of the workhouse in particular. Amongst those campaigning for reform of the poor law were welfare reformers who regarded it as inefficient and inhumane, Catholic clerics who condemned it as a foreign imposition unsuited to Irish circumstances and culture, and nationalists who rejected it as an unwanted by-product of British rule. Through an examination of the divergent roots of this dissatisfaction, this chapter reveals the complex interplay of class, religion, gender and politics in attitudes to poor relief, and the fractured nature of middle-class identity.

Class in nineteenth-century Ireland Using class as category of historical analysis is always going to be problematic in an Irish context due to the absence of a clearly defined class structure. There were clear social divisions between groups 130

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such as landlords, tenants and labourers, but the boundaries between each group were so porous as to prevent the development of classconsciousness in the sense of a common identity based on common aims and concerns. Religion and nationality proved more powerful than class in shaping political allegiances. Nevertheless, while politics undoubtedly brought disparate social groups to work together in a common cause, this did not lessen awareness of social distinctions or concern with social standing. As we shall see, Irish people had a very clear idea of their place in society relative to other people, and of the importance of maintaining this. If landowners tended to see all tenants as members of the lower classes broadly defined, middling and large tenant farmers regarded themselves as belonging to a very different social category from small tenants and labourers, and were anxious to reinforce this sense of difference through adherence to concepts such as respectability. The poor, and more particularly the destitute, were regarded by the better off as almost beyond class, belonging to what in industrial England was labelled the underclass or residuum.2 The following discussion explores class divisions through an examination of social attitudes looking first at the way in which landowners sought to maintain a binary division between upper and lower classes in an effort to maintain their own status and influence within local administration, and second at tenant farmers’ adherence to what might be described as typically middle-class values in their administration of poor relief.

Philanthropy and social welfare The post-Famine period in Ireland was one of economic growth and cultural assimilation with Britain. As the single largest group in Irish society, ‘strong’ farmers were in a good position to take advantage of these developments and as their economic position improved they became more concerned about the maintenance of social stability. Thus they were strong supporters of the Catholic Church in its efforts to wean the mass of the people away from traditional beliefs and customs and to promote the ‘Victorian’ values of self-reliance, self-restraint, obedience, diligence and strict sexual morality. Historians of philanthropy in nineteenth-century Ireland have drawn attention to the extent to which philanthropists across the religious spectrum shared common ideas about the nature of poverty and the role of the charity.3 Poverty was assumed to be a natural and permanent element of society, and while religious teaching promoted charity, indiscriminate charity was discouraged as doing more harm than good by encouraging idleness

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and dependency. The poor were regarded with pity but also with suspicion. The conditions in which they lived exposed them to disease and immorality and as such they represented a potential threat to the health of society. Such ideas provided the ideological framework in which social welfare was provided. Notwithstanding the sectarian tensions that characterised and problematised the relationship between Protestant and Catholic charitable associations in Ireland, their general approach and organising principles were strikingly similar. Indeed, both Margaret Preston and Oonagh Walsh suggest that class and gender are in many ways more significant in understanding the relationship between charity workers and their clients than religion.4 In this respect, as in its reliance on women to spearhead the fight against poverty and disease, Irish philanthropy needs to be understood within a UK context. Members of philanthropic organisations throughout the United Kingdom saw themselves as agents of civilisation spreading light amongst the lower classes. However, just as a common outlook among Irish charity workers was not sufficient to overcome sectarian divisions so that charity workers of different faiths rarely worked together to address particular social problems, shared assumptions regarding poverty and welfare produced neither a common understanding of the roots of poverty nor agreement on the best method of relieving the poor. As this chapter will show, there were competing discourses within the middle classes on how best to maintain the values to which they declared themselves committed.

The poor law system and political change In Ireland, as in other European countries, responsibility for the local administration of welfare whether through parish vestries or boards of guardians fell on the upper and middle classes. Indeed, one of the great attractions of the poor law system in the eyes of English ministers was that it would encourage local property owners to take a more active role in the relief of poverty. Making the case for an Irish poor law, the architect of the Irish act, George Nicholls, had argued that such a measure ‘would serve to connect the interests of landlords and tenants, and so become a means of benefiting both, and promoting the general peace and prosperity of the country’. The home secretary, Lord John Russell, reiterated this point when introducing the Irish poor relief bill in February 1837. The bill, he predicted, would act to promote social concord. It would help to unite the various classes in Ireland, ‘the landlord with the peasant, the man of capital with the man who depends wholly upon his

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labour’.5 Given the depth of the divide between landlords and tenants, it is questionable whether the poor law could ever have actively promoted social harmony but this outcome became even less likely in the later part of the nineteenth century when poor law elections became a focus for nationalist political activity. Landlords were able to dominate the vast majority of poor law boards until the early 1880s, when a sustained assault on the boards was made by tenant activists under the auspices of the Land League and, its successor, the National League. Nationalist leaders were anxious to maximise political organisation and activity throughout the country and quickly realised the potential of poor law elections for mobilising support and demonstrating the strength of the popular movement. In 1881 Charles Stewart Parnell called on tenant candidates to contest the poor law elections in order ‘to wrest the local government of the country from the landlord classes’. The following year, an editorial in the nationalist weekly, United Ireland, repeated the call: ‘Every seat of power is ours by right. Up and seize it.’6 In his study of poor law elections in the period from 1877 to 1886, William Feingold showed how the balance of power on the majority of Irish poor law boards shifted during these years from landlords to tenants. By categorising the holders of the three board offices (chair, vice-chair and deputy vice-chair) either as representatives of the landed elite whom he identified as broadly conservative in politics or as tenant farmers whom he identified as radical, Feingold was able to quantify both the decline in landlord influence over poor law boards and the concomitant increase in tenant radicalism. In 1877, landlords occupied 430, or 88 per cent of board offices. By 1886 this number had dropped to 245, or 50 per cent.7 Feingold was primarily interested in the political consequences of this process, but he also made an attempt to analyse its social aspects. Having correlated variations in board radicalism with social factors such as religion, poverty and farm size, he came to the conclusion that the rise of tenant radicalism was ‘strongest and most thorough in its effects in those parts of the country where large farms predominated and where Catholicism was the religion of practically the entire population’. Furthermore, the earliest instances of tenant radicalism occurred in those counties of Munster and Leinster where large tenant farmers already formed a local elite, and were impatient to realise their political ambitions.8

The social dimensions of poor law politics The social consequences of board radicalisation were not lost on contemporaries. Poor law boards were intended to bring different classes

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together and in particular to bring landlords together with tenants. Nicholls regarded the combination of ex officio guardians drawn mainly from the landlord class and elected guardians, who were more likely to be tenant farmers, as an essential element of the system, expecting ‘important benefits . . . to ensue from their frequent mingling, and from the necessity for mutual concession and forbearance which such mingling cannot fail to teach’. These benefits, he predicted, would eventually extend beyond the board room, ‘and thus the union system may become the means of healing dissensions and reconciling jarring interests in Ireland’.9 Some degree of mingling undoubtedly occurred. Commenting on social distinctions within the board room in 1861, the chair of the Newport Board of Guardians, Sir Richard O’Donnell, observed that ex-officio guardians attended the boards ‘as gentlemen’; the elected guardians were ‘the frieze-coated men’.10 Ex officio guardians tolerated this situation so long as they were in control of the boards. With the growing politicisation of poor law elections in the 1880s and the efforts of Irish nationalists to take control of as many poor law boards as possible, relations between ex officio and elected guardians deteriorated to the point where significant numbers of ex officios refused to attend board meetings. When Listowel Union came under the control of elected guardians, the former chair, a large agent in the union, was said to have ‘found such a want of courtesy, and the system so much changed on the board there, that he would not attend any longer’.11 Many observers linked the ex officio exodus to declining standards of administration. Local Government Inspector (LGI) George Spaight commented in 1885 that unions where ex-officio guardians retained control were sensibly and practically managed, whereas just the reverse was the case where they had ceased to attend. His colleague, Richard Bourke, attributed this to the fact that ‘from their habits of thought and education’, ex officio guardians were ‘better qualified to deal with large public subjects’, commenting that ‘the more sense and intelligence you put into the board, the more chance there is of having a good administration, and an economical one’.12 As an illustration of the problems encountered, Spaight recounted an incident at the Cahirciveen Board when a guardian had made an application for outdoor relief, claiming that he wanted relief ‘as much as anybody in the union’,13 thus demonstrating not only his lack of means but also his lack of discretion, both equally damning in the eyes of a former military officer such as Spaight. In conversation with a reporter from the London Times, one landowner described the ‘new breed’ of tenant guardians being elected in the west in the 1880s as ‘wholly without any business capacity’, commenting

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‘what can you expect from men of this class?’14 The social gulf between elected and ex officio guardians was widest in the west where low land valuations meant that tenants holding just six acres of land were qualified to act as poor law guardians in some areas. Even in more prosperous eastern unions however, where only tenants holding at least 20 acres of land could stand for election, much was made of elected guardians’ relative lack of education compared to ex officio guardians, as well as their administrative inexperience.

Outdoor relief as a political and social barometer Governance by elected guardians was widely associated with low standards and high rates. Elected guardians, LGI Richard Bourke explained, were ‘more susceptible of local influence, and much more imperfectly acquainted with economic science, and therefore are much more likely to act foolishly in the administration of the law, and to run up the rates, even though they have a great desire to keep them down . . . ’15 Nationalist guardians in Leinster were criticised by a local landlord for being: very lax in the matter of out-door relief. They say: ‘Oh, he’s very poor, and if he comes into the house it will cost more than to give him a small sum and keep him out.’ The fact is that coming into the house acts as a test of a man’s poverty; no one would object to taking public money and living as he is accustomed to live.16 As this comment suggests, most ex-officio guardians adhered to official guidance, discouraging the use of outdoor relief as tending to destroy the habit of self-reliance. Elected guardians believed such rectitude often masked less principled motives. Appearing before the select committee on poor law guardians in 1878, James Daly described how guardians of the Castlebar Board in County Mayo, which was under landlord control, refused to give outdoor relief to what Daly regarded as ‘deserving cases’ in order to get small holders, ‘to go into the workhouse, and give up their holdings’. Landlords, Daly claimed, were thus able to consolidate their holdings and reduce their rent burden, rates on holdings worth less than £4 an acre being paid by the landlord.17 There was clearly a political dimension to changing attitudes to outdoor relief. Feingold noted, for example, that the rise in the proportion of rate income expended as outdoor relief bore a ‘striking resemblance’ to the rise in the percentage of board offices held by tenants. Moreover,

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nationalist guardians were quick to appreciate the political capital to be made from granting outdoor relief to evicted tenants. By voting ‘high case sums to evicted tenants and suspects’ families’, guardians were able to ‘reward the martyred families and exhibit their contempt for coercion or the landlord system, while revealing themselves as staunch supporters of the popular cause’.18 The Nation observed this situation with satisfaction, commenting that when landlords had held the union purse strings, they had ensured that those whom they had doomed to destruction should not be succoured . . . Now the national guardians being in power, and having some humanity in their composition, take equally good care that the victims of a murderous system and a heartless class shall not die of want, no matter to what amount the outdoor relief bill may tot up.19 It is arguable, however, that social attitudes were as important as political ideology in shaping guardians’ responses to applications for relief. The highly politicised nature of the debate over outdoor relief that took place in the 1880s has obscured the extent to which the issue had been a divisive one ever since outdoor relief was first introduced in 1847. Analysis of the debates over this issue reveals the determination of elected, tenant guardians to maintain social hierarchies within their own communities whilst at the same time lamenting the baleful effect of the landlord system on social and economic relationships.

The poor law system under attack Rising levels of outdoor relief during the post-Famine period meant that by the end of the century the average daily number in receipt of outdoor relief exceeded the average daily total of workhouse inmates.20 For many people, however, the system remained far too reliant on indoor relief and the institution of the workhouse was the focus of sustained criticism throughout the period. Speaking the commons in 1860, the Cork MP, Sir John Arnott, recommended converting all workhouses into hospitals and granting outdoor relief to the helpless poor. The workhouse system, he declared, had ‘led to the permanent pauperism of those who received relief, and was productive of much immorality’. His colleague, J.P. Hennessy, MP for King’s County, agreed, observing that a system of outdoor relief would be ‘more in accordance with the circumstances of the Irish than the present system’.21 Noting that in other Catholic countries outdoor relief was the rule not the exception, the Nation rejected indoor

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relief as tending to ‘degrade the recipients, to destroy their self-respect, and to perpetuate pauperism, instead of making it only exceptional and temporary’.22 Twenty years later, the same arguments were being made in very similar terms. In 1886, the Nation published an article by a workhouse physician condemning the workhouse system on grounds of its cost and the vices engendered. ‘Irish purity’, he maintained, had ‘suffered a very serious declension from the deteriorating influence of workhouses’. He recommended the modification of the system ‘in the direction of home relief’ which was less demoralising and more just to the deserving poor.23 The following year, the land campaigner and nationalist MP, Michael Davitt, identified one of the most urgent tasks facing an Irish parliament as ‘the abolition, root and branch of the workhouse system’. Describing the system as ‘the bastard offspring of landlordism’, Davitt claimed that Irish workhouses were filled ‘with the hapless victims of social wrong and landlord greed. The poor we may always have with us, but it does not follow that they must be so numerous, and remain as paupers.’ Put an end to evictions and increase employment and industrial development, he argued, and ‘the workhouse will disappear from the social life of Ireland’ to be replaced by a system that did not degrade, but would provide succour ‘for the helpless and deserving poor against the inevitable misfortune of life’.24 The idea that the workhouse system was an alien imposition unsuited to Irish culture and society also remained popular. As one guardian commented in 1892, workhouses were foreign to the sentiments of the Irish people who favoured alms giving rather than state relief. Thus while there was no shame attached to accepting private charity, entering the workhouse was seen as disgraceful.25 Even those most critical of the workhouse remained wedded to the idea of a distinction between a pauper underclass whose condition was either hereditary or their own fault and a class of respectable poor who could normally support themselves but needed assistance through hard times. Speaking in 1917, the radical cleric Francis McKenna complained that the ‘mentality engendered by poor law regulations seemed to be this: here are a number of useless people . . . the refuse of society to be put out of sight of nice, respectable people. Thieves, vagabonds and tramps were mixed in horrible promiscuity with people whose only crime was poverty.’26 There was little attempt to explore the reasons for the persistence of long-term poverty or its effects in terms of life choices. Furthermore, the poor remained a group whose wants and needs were assumed to be very different from those of their social superiors. Thus what was regarded as adequate for the poor in terms of clothing and

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housing, for example, bore no relation to what were regarded as minimum standards higher up the social scale. In 1879, the Belmullet Board of Guardians informed the Local Government Board that 15 pairs of clogs had been ordered for the school children ‘which they consider sufficient as shoes have never been worn by the children in this workhouse nor are they likely ever to wear them after they leave the workhouse’.27 This attitude carried over into the granting of outdoor relief. The common practice amongst many boards of guardians was to grant people regular, small amounts of relief thus enabling them to survive outside the workhouse. The consequences for the recipients were that they were constantly on the verge of destitution. Questioned about the administration of outdoor relief in 1905, many relieving officers were critical of the practice of giving small doles of money to the aged and infirm poor even though this was popular, since it acted as ‘an inducement to people of this class to live outside in uncomfortable houses on a starvation allowance’. As Thomas Lydon, relieving officer for Clifden, County Galway, explained, those ‘making application for outdoor relief are satisfied with almost any trifle the Guardians would give before they would be compelled to break up their little homes and enter the workhouse of which they have a horror’. Another recommended that old people with no family to look after them should be compelled to enter the workhouse rather than live alone ‘in hovels in the country’.28 Yet far from being concerned about the conditions in which the poor were forced to live, guardians were generally more concerned by the possibility that outdoor relief was enabling the poor to improve their living standards to a point at which they were comparable with their better off neighbours.

Eligibility and entitlement In determining levels of relief many guardians appear to have proceeded on the principle that this should reflect the social standing and prior circumstances of the recipient. The treatment of evicted tenants is a case in point. One of the reasons why this category of applicant attracted such sympathy was due to the sudden reversal of their fortunes. Eviction transformed them from independent land-holders to homeless people lacking any immediate means of support. In 1888, for example, the Westport guardians agreed to grant 5 shillings a week to a widow, Mrs Scott, who had been evicted from her holding along with her children. It was then proposed to increase her allowance to 10 shillings a week, on the grounds that this was a particularly bad case ‘and she should get something reasonable’. Her holding, one guardian explained, had been

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‘grabbed’, driving ‘the poor widow and orphans from their home, even knocking their house and using their crops’. When another guardian pointed out that the woman could not, ‘in reality, be called destitute while she has the money to pay three years rent’, he was accused of being heartless and unfeeling. It was a ‘damnable thing’, one of Mrs Scott’s champions declared, ‘that any woman would be treated in that way, and that any man would refuse to give her relief!’29 In estimating the level of support they should provide, the guardians were thus judging Mrs Scott’s ill-treatment to be more important than her means. In some cases where substantial amounts were given in relief, there was concern that this would increase an individual’s income to an unnatural degree. Whilst supporting the principle of granting tenants evicted from the Luggacurran estate generous allowances, the Athy guardian, James McLoughlin, questioned the amount awarded in the case of a man from his own district who, he said, ‘could get employment if he liked’, and who had ‘an acre of land well sown and a son who could get work’, observing that ‘many of the ratepayers were worse off than this recipient of outdoor relief’. Another guardian remarked that some of the tenants were ‘in higher life than they ever were. All the grand people of the country are visiting them.’30 Encouraging people to get ideas above their station was something the guardians were clearly anxious to avoid. This, moreover, was not a new concern. In April 1861, an attempt had been made at the Dundalk Board of Guardians to reverse a decision not to give outdoor relief to widows with more than one legitimate child. Since those who refused to enter the workhouse were forced to survive by begging, their support, it was argued, was being ‘thrown on the poor struggling ratepayers, the humble farmers and the shopkeepers’. The majority of guardians, however, disagreed. Granting outdoor relief, one suggested, would be ‘giving a premium to idleness and laziness’ since the recipients would have little motivation to exert themselves. Furthermore, many of the widows they had relieved in the past had been ‘much better clad than the wives of labourers’.31 In neighbouring Drogheda, guardians took a very different approach, believing, as Joseph Harris a resident of the town explained, that judicious use of outdoor relief both relieved the ratepayer and benefited the poor. Give the poor 1 shilling a head per week, he observed, and they ‘will make an exertion to bring themselves through . . . but lock the poor man up in a poor house and he becomes useless to all society, and, losing caste, he becomes broken hearted and dies in a short time’. Harris detected a class dimension to the opposition to outdoor relief, arguing that the aim of the landlords and rich graziers appeared to be

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to ‘kill the poor in unwholesome prison-houses, and at the same time rob the ratepayers by keeping up a whole shoal of officials, one-half of whom might and would be sufficient if a judicious outdoor relief were administered’.32

Respectability and relief While few guardians had any compunction about requiring the very poor to enter the workhouse, many were more uncomfortable about forcing individuals whose experiences and circumstances corresponded more closely with their own to do so. One of the justifications for granting evicted tenants outdoor relief, for example, was that it would be wrong to require them to enter the workhouse. They were not paupers and should not, it was felt, be treated as such. As one Mallow guardian declared in 1889, ‘we don’t want the evicted tenantry to come into this house, to be the companions of a degraded class’.33 Such attitudes led some boards of guardians to make arrangements for evicted tenants to receive preferential treatment should they be obliged to seek refuge in the workhouse. As the Local Government Board noted in a memorandum drawn up in 1892, in the Kanturk Union a committee had been appointed in October 1886, ‘to go through the house accompanied by the Master to point out the most suitable ward, which is to be called the Evicted Tenants Ward, and to get the said ward made comfortable with a view of making tenant farmers throughout the Union threatened with eviction as comfortable as possible when evicted’. The Kanturk guardians went no further than making plans to provide special accommodation for evicted tenants. In the New Ross Union, however, the guardians ‘actually carried out their intention, and as they persisted in their illegal action the Board was dissolved and the Union placed in the hands of paid officers’.34 This action caused outrage in the nationalist press. The action of the guardians, the local newspaper People trumpeted, had been entirely proper; they had allowed the tenants ‘privileges their respectability entitled them to’.35 It was not just radical boards that applied different standards to different classes of applicant. In 1884, the conservative Rathdown Board of Guardians turned down a request from a local resident ‘to grant some outdoor relief to Anne Donohoe an old servant woman who may with other assistance be able to keep out of the workhouse’, noting that outdoor relief could not be given in this case, presumably because Donohoe was neither sick nor disabled.36 The following year, however, the board adopted a much more flexible approach in the case of a middle-class

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woman separated from her husband. In November 1885, the board received a letter from the Rev. A.P. Dogherty informing them that a Mrs Greene of Blackrock would be seeking admission to the workhouse, ‘being destitute, her husband, a barrister, worth about £600 a year, and from whom she is separated, having failed to allow her the amount fixed for her maintenance in August 1880, since 5th April last’. A few days later the clerk wrote to Henry Green to inform him that his wife had been granted outdoor relief and warning him that unless he made provision for his wife’s maintenance the board would proceed against him for recovery of the relief afforded. On 2 December the board again considered Mrs Greene’s case and decided to discontinue outdoor relief, and to offer her indoor relief ‘if she wishes’. It is clear, however, that there was little danger of her taking up this offer since at the same meeting the receipt of a letter from Mr Greene was recorded stating that his wife would get her allowance on 1 December.37 Knowing that neither the guardians nor her husband would wish to see her in the workhouse, Mrs Greene was able to use the threat of her entry to bring pressure to bear first on the guardians to grant her outdoor relief and then on her husband to support her.

Women and philanthropy There was a similar class bias in the treatment of applicants to charitable organisations. In her study of Protestant charities in Dublin, Walsh shows that applications from middle-class women were subject to different criteria from those from working-class women. Thus, while working-class widows needed to be actively seeking employment if they were to be regarded as eligible for assistance, middle-class widows did not. Moreover, applications from working-class women were treated with far more suspicion than those from middle-class women. The likelihood of deception on the part of working-class applicants was actively guarded against by investigation. This was not thought necessary in the case of middle-class women who were assumed to be telling the truth when describing their circumstances.38 Fears that poor people were abusing the relief system, and that indiscriminate and uncoordinated relief was fuelling an increase in crime and pauperism, prompted a review of welfare practices in both Britain and Ireland. The Charity Organisation Society was established in Britain in 1869 with the aim of restricting poor relief to the ‘deserving’ poor by means of exhaustive investigation of the character and circumstances of each applicant, the former being as important as the latter. The society itself does not appear to have been

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active in Ireland outside Belfast but its ideas were extremely influential, particularly amongst women. Writing in the Irish Review in 1912, the Cork Poor Law Guardian (PLG) Susanne Day observed that relieving officers were supposed to report fully on each outdoor relief applicant, advise on the course to be adopted and inform the board when assistance was no longer required or in some cases not deserved, but they rarely did so, ‘not so much [due] to the immaculate virtue of the poor, as to the multifariousness of his duties, which allow little time for supervision, and also the want on interest taken by the Board as such’. Supervision was often totally inadequate despite being vital for the economy and for the poor. A widow in receipt of outdoor relief could neglect her children, ‘but so long as she does not actively ill-treat them no-one looks on these as a sin against the community’.39 Day advocated a new breed of investigator who would not only distribute money but also be responsible for its proper use. Day was typical of reform-minded women in wishing to improve the quality of institutional care and to extend the boarding-out of children, but also to ensure that poor relief was administered in ways that promoted personal responsibility and self-reliance and discouraged immorality and intemperate living. Thus she urged ‘the advisability of offering relief in the Workhouse instead of outdoor relief to parents who wilfully neglect to send their children to school’, and condemned uncoordinated efforts to relieve problem families noting caustically, ‘I wonder why any working-man troubles to support a family when so many obliging institutions are willing to do it for him.’40 While eschewing party politics, Day presented the rise of nationalist tenant guardians as having held back reform. In her autobiographical novel, The Amazing Philanthropists, she portrayed nationalist guardians as blocking any proposed improvements to the poor law system, believing that there was no point in incurring unnecessary expense given the imminence of Home Rule, when ‘all the Workhouses will be razed to the ground, the poor law scrapped and paupers wafted on goodly incomes to a millennium of peace and plenty’.41 Class was, however, as important as politics in shaping her attitude to her colleagues. Writing about the standards of poor law administration, Day’s alter-ego comments: when you remember how and why the majority of Poor Law Guardians are elected, the wonder is not that they do so badly, but that they do so well. Many of them are quite poor . . . Yet they have large sums of money to handle . . . Ignorant, sometimes even illiterate, they are called on to decide questions affecting the lives of thousands

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of human beings, questions of public health, of sanitation, hygiene, hospital construction and management, of dietetics, of economics, of industry, of morality, and above all of education . . . Informed of serious over-crowding in the children’s hospital, the guardians are unmoved. Their attitude, according to Day, ‘is briefly this. “Sure our own children sleep four in a bed, so why not they too?” ’42 Day’s remarks may reflect changes in the social composition of poor law boards. Following local government reform in 1898 and the abolition of a property qualification for local councillors and poor law guardians, a significant number of labourers had been elected onto local bodies, particularly in urban areas. But they also echo the concerns voiced in earlier decades regarding the dangers of allowing the lower classes access to local administration. Calling attention to the lack of education and means amongst popularly elected representatives allowed the landed class to bolster their claim to social and political influence.

Maternalist welfare in Ireland In their commitment to the moral regeneration of society and to the idea of gendered citizenship, women such as Day exemplified what has been termed a maternalist approach to welfare.43 Central to this approach was the use of the family as a model for charitable and poor law administration whereby men and women worked together to provide for the physical and moral welfare of the poor. This vision was rooted firmly in class difference since it cast middle-class men and women in the role of parents and the poor in the role of children. It also allowed middle-class women to claim a place in local administration. Theresa Deane has noted that the English workhouse reformer Louisa Twining ‘used the model of domesticity not only to expose men’s inability to regulate the operations of the workhouse but also to create a space for women’s work as providers and managers’.44 Exactly the same could be said of Irish reformers who used domestic rhetoric to stress the need not only for women guardians but for women inspectors, workhouse doctors and relieving officers. Making the case for women guardians, campaigners stressed the benefits to be derived from their class as much as their gender. Indeed, Twining argued that it was only by encouraging suitable women to act as poor law guardians that the number of ‘superior’ and educated people working within the poor law could be increased.45 Isabella Tod had made a similar point in 1881, noting that since in many parts of Ireland,

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‘the number of educated people who are resident is small,’ allowing the ratepayers ‘to elect ladies as well as gentlemen will greatly increase the range of satisfactory choice’. For with new duties constantly being laid on boards of guardians, poor law administration, she observed, was work ‘requiring the most earnest energies of the most cultivated minds’.46 Welcoming the increased number of women elected to poor law boards under the 1898 local government act, Margaret Dockrell observed with some satisfaction that whilst the act had generally resulted in power passing from ‘the Unionists to the Nationalists, from Protestants to Catholics, from the educated, cultured, leisured classes to the traders, small farmers, and, in many cases, even to the labourers . . . the women who have been elected nearly all belong to the highly-educated class, and some of them are Unionists and Protestants’.47 The virtues of women guardians were middle-class virtues. Paying tribute to the work of Irish women guardians at a conference on poor law administration in 1900, the veteran moral and social reformer Anna Haslam claimed that the hundred or so women who had served as guardians since becoming eligible to stand for election in 1896 had ‘already rendered valuable service in their respective Unions, by their unfailing tact, good sense, discretion, and untiring vigilance’.48 Her aim, as she informed the vice regal commission on poor law reform a few years later, was to ensure that every board had a certain proportion of women guardians, thus facilitating a policy of home visiting. Haslam illustrated her point by citing the case of an old woman she had known to whom ‘three loaves of bread and a quart of milk were given’ once a week. ‘Of course she sold two of the loaves of bread. No woman would have sanctioned such a thing as that’. If women took up the question of outdoor relief, she maintained, ‘there would be a great saving, and certainly more kindness to the poor’.49 As guardian of both the stomachs of the poor and the pockets of the ratepayers, the middle-class woman was being constructed here as the lynch pin of responsible public welfare.

Conclusion Implicit in much of the criticism of nationalist local administration was the assumption that nationalist guardians were too close to the poor; that their own origins meant that they were unable to take a dispassionate view of applicants and their circumstances. In reality far from identifying with the poor, most nationalist guardians regarded them as members of a different species with their own culture, customs and requirements. At the same time, nationalists not unnaturally resented

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being patronised by philanthropic reformers. What is surprising is not that women such as Day were obstructed in their efforts to challenge established practices, but that they were treated with such courtesy and respect by their fellow guardians. Despite political and religious differences, radical guardians and welfare reformers had much in common in their attitudes to the poor whom they regarded as inherently untrustworthy and unreliable and thus unworthy of consultation regarding their own care. Welfare providers were united in their conviction that they knew what was best for the poor. Where disagreements arose such as over the use of outdoor relief, these were rooted in different interpretations of domestic and political economy, and divergent attitudes to the state. It is therefore inadequate to explain the actions of nationalist guardians as motivated by political ideology, or of women guardians as motivated by class or gender without reference to other kinds of motivation. As this chapter has sought to demonstrate, class was an important element of welfare policies but it cannot be studied in isolation. Social attitudes and welfare practices need to be contextualised. Only then can the origins of welfare agendas be determined and the way in which these shaped the welfare system understood.

Notes 1. For a concise summary, see Bernard Harris, The Origins of the British Welfare State (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 21–2. 2. The classic study is Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (London, 1984). 3. Maria Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 1995); Margaret H. Preston, Charitable Words: Women, Philanthropy and the Language of Charity in Nineteenth-Century Dublin (Westport, Conneticut, 2004); Oonagh Walsh, Anglican Women in Dublin: Philanthropy, Politics and Education in the Early Twentieth Century (Dublin, 2005). 4. Preston, Charitable Words, pp. 41–65; Walsh, Anglican Women in Dublin, p. 113. 5. Sir George Nicholls, A History of the Irish Poor Law (London, 1856), p. 165; Hansard 3, xxxix, 486, 492 (13 February 1837). 6. Freeman’s Journal, 1 March 1881; United Ireland, 4 February 1882. 7. William L. Feingold, The Revolt of the Tenantry: The Transformation of Local Government in Ireland 1872–1886 (Boston, MA, 1984), pp. 173–80. 8. Ibid., p. 223. 9. Quoted by Henry Robinson in evidence to the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Poor Law Guardians (Ireland) Bill . . ., Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP), 1884–85 (297), x, p. 310. 10. Report from the Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Administration of the Relief of the Poor in Ireland . . ., PP, 1861 (408), x, pp. 305–6. 11. Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Poor Law Guardians (Ireland) Bill . . ., p. 360. For further discussion of this issue, see Virginia Crossman,

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Middle-Class Attitudes in Post-Famine Ireland Politics, Pauperism and Power in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Manchester, 2006), pp. 41–2. Ibid., pp. 335, 325, 330. Ibid., p. 361. Letters from Ireland, 1886, by the Special Correspondent of The Times (London, 1887), p. 168. Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Poor Law Guardians (Ireland) Bill . . ., p. 330. George Pellew, In Castle and Cabin or Talks in Ireland in 1887 (London, 1888), p. 103. Report from the Select Committee on Poor Law Guardians, PP, 1878 (297), xvii, pp. 559–60. Feingold, Revolt of the Tenantry, pp. 178–9. The Nation, 27 November 1886. Virginia Crossman, The Poor Law in Ireland 1838–1948 (Dundalk, 2006), pp. 49–50. Hansard 3, clx, 145, 147 (24 July 1860). The Nation, 12 May 1860. Ibid., 27 March 1886. Munster News, 19 November 1887. Anon., The Irish Peasant: A Sociological Study by a Guardian of the Poor (1892), p. 69. Dublin Saturday Post, 3 November 1917. Belmullet Board of Guardians Minute Book, 18 December 1879, National Library of Ireland (hereafter NLI), MS12349, p. 411. Replies received from Relieving Officers as to administration of outdoor relief, Poor Law Reform Commission (Ireland), PP, 1906 [C. 3204], lii, pp. 490–8. Connaught Telegraph, 22 September, 13 October 1888. Kildare Observer, 4 June 1887. Packet, 27 April 1861; Irish Times, 29 April 1861: Cuttings in Larcom Papers, NLI, MS7780. Daily Express, 14 June 1861. Cork Examiner, 5 October 1889. Memorandum as to administration by local governing bodies in Ireland, 2 April 1892, National Archives of Ireland (hereafter NAI), Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers, 1892/4813. [Wexford] People, 15 December 1886. For a more detailed discussion of this episode, see Virginia Crossman, ‘The New Ross Workhouse riot of 1887: nationalism, class and the Irish poor laws’, Past and Present, 179 (2003), pp. 135–58. Rathdown Board of Guardians Minute Book, 24 December 1884, NAI, BG137/A84, p. 273. Ibid., 18, 25 November, 2 December 1885, NAI, BG137/A86, pp. 153, 170, 202. Walsh, Anglican Women in Dublin, pp. 108–9, 182–3, 191. Susanne R. Day, ‘The Crime Called Outdoor Relief’, Irish Review, 2 (April 1912), pp. 74–5. Susanne R. Day, The Amazing Philanthropists (London, 1916), p. 202. Ibid., p. 64.

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42. Ibid., p. 89. 43. See, for example, Harris, The Origins of the British Welfare State, pp. 22–3; Anne Digby, ‘Poverty, health and the politics of gender’, in Anne Digby and John Stewart (eds), Gender, Health and Welfare, (London, 1996), pp. 83–5. 44. Theresa Deane, ‘Late nineteenth-century philanthropy: the case of Louisa Twining’, in Digby and Stewart, Gender, Health and Welfare, p. 127. 45. Ibid., p. 128. 46. ‘The Place of Women in the Administration of the Irish Poor Law’, The Englishwoman’s Review, ciii (15 November 1881), p. 489. 47. Margaret Dockrell, ‘Irish women in local Government’, in Countess of Aberdeen (ed.), Women in Politics: The International Congress of Women, 1899 (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), pp. 87–9. 48. Papers read at a Conference of Women Poor Law Guardians and other Ladies at the Mansion House on the 19th of April, 1900 (Dublin, 1900), p. 6. 49. Poor Law Reform Commission (Ireland), p. 34.

8 The Industrial Elite in Ireland from the Industrial Revolution to the First World War Andy Bielenberg

Introduction Since Ireland remained relatively unindustrialised compared to Britain and the more developed European economies in the nineteenth century, the size of its industrial middle class remained small. Nonetheless, industrialisation proceeded in east Ulster, in particular, and, in a more limited way, at a localised level in other cities, towns and a few scattered industrial communities that typically developed around a single mill, factory or mine. The emergence of an industrial working class was the most significant social outcome of these developments. In all, there were about half a million people occupied and connected with industry in Ireland by the beginning of the twentieth century, when it accounted for roughly 20 per cent of GDP.1 The sizable group associated with Irish industry was as highly stratified socially as the agricultural and service sectors. This chapter focuses specifically on the industrial middle class, more particularly the industrial elite. Within Irish historiography, there is nothing comparable to Jurgen Kocka’s work on the business and cultural history of the industrial bourgeoisie in Germany.2 Caitriona Clear has produced a pathbreaking overview of Irish social history between the Great Famine and partition, which makes the important connection between social history and material culture (notably in agriculture), but it pays relatively little attention to the new social formations arising in Irish society as a consequence of industrial development.3 However, through various studies, we are now beginning to get a glimpse of some of the industrial communities that emerged in Ireland in this period, which provide some important insights into this relatively neglected group at the apex 148

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of industrial society.4 This chapter provides a preliminary analysis of various aspects of their lives including their origins, education and training, marriage links, philanthropic activity and politics, among other themes.

Origins The origins of the Irish industrial middle classes were extremely diverse. Some came from skilled artisan backgrounds, rising out of the working class. Bernard Hughes, who established the large baking and milling complex in Belfast, had served his time as a baker and then worked as operations manager before setting up his own establishment in 1840.5 In contrast, the McCanns, who established a bakery in Newry in 1837 (and others in Rostrevor, Dundalk and Navan), progressed into baking from flour milling and trading.6 Other enterprises were simply inherited. One of the oldest family businesses in Ireland was Rathborne’s candle factory in Dublin, which passed from one generation to the next from 1488 down to the First World War.7 The assets and craft skills accumulated in the Patterson family spade mill at Templepatrick, Co. Antrim, passed through five generations.8 The Cloney family of Old Ross, Co. Wexford, became the tenants of a corn mill and small farm at Mill Quarter in the first half of the eighteenth century and several generations of the family continued to work it through the nineteenth century.9 Lack of succession from one generation to the next brought about the demise of many Irish industrial enterprises throughout the period in question.10 The bleaching, finishing and marketing of linen in the eighteenth century provided a host of recruits to the industrial middle class, some of whom played a vital role in the process of industrialisation in the Ulster linen industry during the nineteenth century. Bleaching had become increasingly mechanised over the eighteenth century, as bleachers harnessed waterpower and chemicals (such as vitriol). Essentially, this marked the first phase of industrialisation in the Irish textile industry and bleachers consequently became one of the more powerful groups within the Irish industrial middle class. Finishing and marketing cloth were the only capital-intensive aspect of the linen industry due to the cost of equipment, rent, labour and the duration of the bleaching and marketing process.11 This enabled bleachers to accumulate capital and assets at the expense of domestic producers working further back in the production chain across the northern half of the island. While northern drapers and bleachers utilised credit from Dublin to purchase and market cloth during the eighteenth century, they were also drawing off

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London credit facilities, thus raising capital from outside the region.12 Bleachers effectively took control of the latter stages of production and the primary stages of marketing, which significantly increased their wealth and power, since these were the most profitable aspects of the industry.13 The industrialisation of bleaching and the resulting capital accumulation among this group was one of the most important developments within the Irish industrial middle class in the century prior to the successful adoption of wet spinning in Ireland in the late 1820s. Many of those who became engaged in industrial production had strong trade connections, with merchant capital providing the necessary start-up costs. David Dickson has shown that in 1800 the largest brewer, flour miller, woollen manufacturer and cotton manufacturer in Cork city had each made their initial capital in trade, and between the 1780s and 1810s significant amounts of merchant capital were transferred into distilling, brewing, paper making, linen manufacture and sail cloth production.14 Thomas Tobin, who took over and revived the Ballincollig Gunpowder Mills, was from a Liverpool merchant family.15 William Goulding, who established the large fertiliser company in Cork with his brother in 1846 (which went on to become the largest in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland), had been an oil and colour merchant.16 Murphy’s brewery in Cork city evolved from a partnership between five brothers whose family had built up a substantial business empire in the city as merchants and ship owners, notably in tea importing, but also in tanning and distilling.17 These instances suggest that the merchant community was vital, both in providing recruits to the emerging industrial elite and also in providing capital. In Belfast, by the end of the eighteenth century, an expanding selfconfident merchant community was also providing much of the capital for the port’s small but growing industrial base. Thomas Greg, one of the most successful eighteenth-century merchants, was the prime mover of the Downshire Pottery, also investing in the region’s textile and chemical industries.18 The MacAdam Brothers, who established the Soho Foundry in Belfast around 1834, were the sons of a hardware merchant and shop owner.19 Partnerships among the early Belfast cotton spinners also included significant merchant capital, but there was also a place for men with a good knowledge of technology; Nicholas Grimshaw (1747– 1805), the best known of the linen and cotton printers and a pioneer cotton spinner in east Ulster in the last decades of the eighteenth century, came from Lancashire where he had served an apprenticeship in the cotton trade. Nonetheless, the initial capital for this venture came from a wealthy Belfast wine merchant.20

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The gentry also became involved in the industrial sector, frequently because their estates contained valuable raw materials. John Lavillin Puxley, who inherited his father’s interest in Dunboy Castle and the Berehaven estate, was the key figure in establishing the copper mines around Allihies in west Cork in 1812, becoming the managing director for 40 years.21 When Richard Henry Prior Wandesforde took over his family’s interest in the coal mines around Castlecomer in Co Kilkenny in 1894, he personally invested in the mines and took full operational control.22 The Keanes who established the foundry and implement works in Cappoquin, Co. Waterford, in the early 1880s were the major landed family in the town.23 The Pierce family, in contrast, who had established the more successful foundry and agricultural machinery business in the town of Wexford (which subsequently took over the Cappoquin works), had in the previous generation run a blacksmith’s forge in Kilmore village in County Wexford.24 Evidently, industrialists came from right across the social spectrum. Many came from Britain and further afield. In shipbuilding, for example, Ritchie, the founder of the Belfast industry came from Scotland, Harland from England, Wolff was a German, while Clark came from Scotland, as did a host of influential pioneers in the Belfast engineering industry, including Combe, Mackie and Scrimgeour.25 Alexander Thom (1801–79), who established Thom’s Official Directory, came from Scotland.26 Likewise, the Barbour family brought the linen thread trade from Paisley.27 The Jamesons, who became one of Ireland’s most important distilling families, came from Scotland.28 By 1856, most of the 14 shirt making operations and agencies based in Derry were branches of larger British concerns based in London, Manchester and Glasgow.29 Immigrants with technical knowledge and experience derived from the major centres of British industry were a vital conduit of information of new industrial processes and innovations. Highly skilled positions also had a social and economic premium that was recognised by employers. The success of the Waterford Glassworks depended to a large extent on getting reputable glassmakers from Stourbridge in England, including John Hill, an overseer, who left the owners the formula for compounding glass.30 The Pughs, who established a glassworks in Dublin in the early 1850s, also came originally from Stourbridge.31 Many of these immigrants brought capital into the Irish industrial sector and a knowledge of selling through, or within, the British market. They contributed enormously to the starting up a number of Irish industries. McCutcheon has not been alone in arguing that for centuries east Ulster had formed ‘a cultural continuum’ with central Scotland and

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north-west England, ‘centred specifically’ on the ‘north Irish Sea’, and that many of the major industrial advances were contingent upon the import of men, materials and ideas from the Mersey and the Clyde.32 In reality, this relationship was apparent in many industrial firms across the island, who acquired machinery and managers and specialist technicians from the industrial districts in Britain. In the Irish woollen industry, for example, which was largely located outside ulster, many of the designers, dyers and foremen spinners were English or Scottish.33 At Malcomson’s large cotton mill at Portlaw, in County Waterford, there were so many Englishmen in the top levels of management and on the technical side living in close proximity that ‘English Row’ was the name ascribed to one cluster of dwellings.34 Down to 1896, the top two engineering positions in the Great Southern and Western Railway (the largest railway engineering works in Ireland) always went to Englishmen.35 From the 1890s, Guinness brewery followed the practice of only hiring brewers with scientific degrees from Oxford or Cambridge. Guinness also hired top class engineers and managers. These highly trained employees were frequently better educated than their employers and earned sufficiently high salaries to maintain respectably bourgeois lifestyles.36

Education The education and training of the sons of industrialists varied greatly. A directory for Ulster published in 1909 provides some revealing information on the education of a number of Ulster industrialists. Most appear to have received education up to second level at least, and the school in Ulster attended by the greatest number (nine) was Belfast Royal Academical Institution, with a slightly higher number going to secondary school in Britain. Seven were educated privately, a further three in Foyle College, Derry, two in Armagh Royal School, while others mentioned with a single pupil included Lurgan Model School, Ballymena Model School, Purdysburn School and Beattie’s School. Of the ten who acquired a third-level education, three went to Queen’s University in Belfast, two to Oxford, two to International College, Isleworth, while King’s College, London, the Wellington Academy and the Belfast Government School of Art were also mentioned.37 Ostensibly, there was no marked difference in education with the rest of the middle class. Learning on the job within the family business was probably the most common form of training for Irish industrialists of the second and subsequent generations. James Mackie (1864–1943) received an elementary education at Belfast Model School and began working around

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his father’s textile engineering works in Belfast aged 13, continuing his education at Queen Street Mechanics Institute, subsequently taking full control of the company on his father’s death when he was only 24 years old.38 James Nicholson Richardson (1846–1921) received his initial education at home and was subsequently sent to the Grove House School in Middlesex, 1858–62, beginning his apprenticeship in the family linen business in 1863, learning all aspects of the business on the job.39 A common way to further the training of younger family members with the future interests of the firm in mind was to place them in larger companies elsewhere after their schooling was over. John Andrews had worked in the great North Shore Mill in Liverpool during the period when roller milling was introduced and he frequently provided advice to the family flour milling business back in Comber, ultimately returning there in 1876 to run the mill.40 Clongowes figured prominently in the education of the sons of wealthy Catholic merchants and manufacturers in the south of Ireland. Martin Mahony (1764–1833), the Cork woollen manufacturer, sent both his sons there.41 James O’Mara, the Limerick bacon curer, had been sent to Clongowes in 1888, which he left aged 18 and then worked in all departments of the bacon factory.42 However, James J. Murphy, the senior partner of Murphy’s brewery in Cork sent three of his sons (who later ran the company) to Catholic public schools in England.43 John Lavallin Puxley, who started the Berehaven copper mines in 1812, sent his sons to Eton and his grandsons, who inherited the mines, were also schooled there.44 The education of the two Guinness brothers (the great-grandsons of the founder) Arthur and Edward provides a revealing contrast. Arthur attended Eton and married into the White’s of Bantry, an ascendancy family, distancing himself from the Dublin brewery. Eton in this case had evidently not proved to be the ideal environment to make provision for the brewery succession. The younger Edward Guinness, in contrast, was trained as an apprentice within the brewery from the age of 15; he did receive private tuition and later attended TCD.45 Similarly, William Pirrie (1847–1924), the great shipbuilder, was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution until the age of 15 in 1862, when he began serving his time as a premium apprentice at Harland and Wolff, rising quickly to become a partner by the age of 27.46 Both Pirrie and Guinness led their companies to the summit of their respective industries in global terms. It seems probable that their in-house training from an impressionable age was one important element in their subsequent business success, and it was evidently the most common way to train up the next generation of industrialists.

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Marriage networks There were significant marriage links between Irish industrial families. Taking Harland and Wolff, for example, Edward Harland was connected by marriage of a cousin into the Schwabe family who provided orders and finance in the early years of the firm, in addition to providing a marriage link to the Wolff family, who were also involved in the Belfast Ropeworks. The father of Edward Harland’s wife was related to the Gallahers (the great tobacco family). In the next generation at the shipyard, the family of William James Pirrie is equally illustrative. He married a first cousin, whose brother became a managing director in the shipyard. His sister married into the Andrews (the Comber milling family) and her son Thomas Andrews became the top naval architect for the firm, while he in turn married into the Barbour family in 1908. While Thomas’s brother (John Miller Andrews) became the second Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, the brother of his wife (Helen Reilly Barbour) became the Deputy Prime Minister (Sir John Milne Barbour).47 The great industrial families of Ulster, who were a central part of the political elite, were frequently closely linked by marriage in much the same way as the gentry. Harrison has unearthed a whole network of inter-marriage among Quaker milling families, which helped raise or retain capital for flour milling, also providing an exchange of expertise. Marriage could also bring capital into industry from other branches of trade.48 The Beale family, who developed the Monard spade mills near Cork city, married into a Quaker banking family, the Leckys, with whom they became engaged in iron shipbuilding.49 The Richardson linen manufacturing dynasty were connected by marriage into Munster Quakers engaged in both milling and cotton manufacture.50 These dense networks of inter-marriage reveal a canny and calculated retention and exchange of capital and knowledge among these families. We still have much to learn about the important role of women in these family networks and in the private sphere outside the largely male world of running industrial enterprises. If family networks provided one avenue to forming business alliances, it became more common for industrialists to establish formal associations to discuss issues of mutual interest in the trade during the second half of the nineteenth century. Intense competition in the British spirit market in the 1850s and 1860s, for example, led to the formation of two associations, which some Irish distillers became engaged in an attempt to restrict competition.51 Likewise, Irish flour millers had been engaged

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in the National Association of British and Irish Millers since it had been established in 1878, enabling millers to share knowledge. Although this association continued, the establishment of the South of Ireland Millers Association in 1886 and more particularly the Irish Millers Association in 1902 became the new focus of representation and co-operation within the Irish trade.52 The linen industry had a number of organisations to represent the interests of manufacturers; in 1921, these included the Flax Supply Association, Flax Spinners Association, Powerloom Manufacturers Association, Bleachers and Finishers Association, Linen Merchants Association and a host of others representing specific interest groups in the trade. This enabled the Irish industry to operate short-time agreements when trade was slack, curtailing production and reducing stockpiling, buying up bankrupt concerns to prevent new entrants increasing competition, or responding to trade union demands in a unified manner.53

Housing The housing and properties that the industrial elite built and lived in reveal much about one aspect of their culture. A country seat with fine views following the model laid down by the gentry was a desirable aspiration, though scaled down in many instances by many considerations not just relating to cost. The leading brewers in Cork in the nineteenth century, Murphy’s, Beamish and Crawford, generally lived in villas in the more fashionable suburbs to the north-east and the south-east of the city, or near Passage West, which could be accessed by the new suburban railway line in the second half of the nineteenth century.54 In contrast to the more detached and leisured lifestyle of the rural gentry, who could live happily on remote estates, for most members of the industrial middle class, desirable rural locations had to be balanced against the need to be relatively near their mill, factory or workshop. Many villas were inevitably built around the edges of the larger cities, ultimately creating refined low population density bourgeois suburbs with large mansions. In Belfast, the shipyard owners and directors provide a useful example here. Frank Workman of Workman and Clark lived in Malone, while George Clark lived up in Fortwilliam in north Belfast, while another director, Charles Allan, lived in Strandtown in outer east Belfast. Wolff lived nearby in another large house named the ‘Den’, while, not far off, Edward Harland built Ormiston, which was subsequently taken over by Pirrie (who added a nine-hole golf course for good measure). Other neighbouring industrialists included William

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Ewart, whose large house ‘Glenmachan’ had 27 rooms.55 However, one of the finest Irish Victorian mansions was Danesfort, on the Malone Road in Belfast, the house of Samuel Barbour (1830–75) and designed by William J. Barre.56 Emerging gentile suburbs containing such houses encroached on the countryside around Belfast, developing middle-class spaces away from the smoke and grime of the factories and the more densely populated working-class communities living in their shadow. Dispersed industries located in more rural contexts provided far better opportunities for developing more gentrified country seats and lifestyles. Rankin has surveyed many of the houses of the elite linen families in the Lagan and Bann valleys. While some of the larger manufacturers built in a style not unlike the landlords of the period, most of the houses were more modest in scale and design, though many of them were sizable.57 Families that became exceptionally wealthy frequently adopted gentry lifestyles, removing themselves entirely from the harsh industrial environments to which they owed their wealth. As the York Street Flax Spinning Co. was increasingly taken over by professional managers, John Mulholland, for example, purchased the Southwell estate in Downpatrick, Co. Down, and his connections with the dayto-day affairs of the business became increasingly distant. Reflecting the extent of this detachment, the Northern Whig noted, somewhat waspishly on his death in 1895, that ‘he has for the past quarter of a century been seen very little in Belfast’.58 For those industrial families that failed to achieve gentrification, it was still possible to cultivate the more leisured lifestyles of the gentry on weekends and holidays at least. The photographic evidences from houses in Rankin’s book on the linen families indicate that hunting, shooting and horse riding featured strongly in the social calendar and the symbolic world of these families.59 Professional managers who were key players in the major linen companies were part of this world; they were frequently well travelled and educated in the same social circles as the owners, and had lived in one or a number of the great cities of the western world marketing Irish linen. They lived in grand houses, socialised with the owners’ families and took key positions in the associations representing the employers’ interests in the linen industry, since they knew more about the industry than most. This is a mark of the knowledge they had and the social respect accorded to them. Owners knew well that their best interests depended on them and if they wanted to know what was going on in their business, they needed these men. Such knowledge constituted a form of wealth and this was socially recognised.

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Gentrification The line between the wealthier industrial middle class and the gentry was thin in places and became increasingly permeable in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some happily walked away from their industrial interests; when Francis Wise died in the 1880s (sometime after his family’s distillery had become part of the Cork Distillers Company), he left large estates in Cork and Kerry, and £1.6 million, having left the industrial middle class at the point he sold the distillery.60 The Powers, the Catholic distillers of County Wexford, were considered part of the Wexford gentry having purchased Edermine House in 1790, while the Alexanders, the large flour millers in County Carlow, achieved gentry status by industry as opposed to land ownership.61 Among the industrial elite, the Guinness family achieved the most spectacular degree of upward mobility in this period. Benjamin Lee Guinness (1798–1868) purchased a large estate in Cong under the Encumbered Estates legislation. Edward, his younger son, ultimately took full control of the growing brewery and amassed one of the greatest fortunes in Irish history by the time of his death. Nonetheless, he followed the example of his elder brother and father in philanthropic terms, but on a far larger scale in both Dublin and London. Like his elder sibling, he entered the peerage, eclipsing him in the social stakes since he became part of the circle of the Prince of Wales, in response to whose suggestion he purchased Elveden, a large estate not too far from London, which was suitable for entertaining British high society.62 Pirrie was perhaps the only other industrialist who had a similar stature to Edward Guinness in English social circles. He became a multimillionaire through his many investments in shipping. Like Guinness, he purchased a mansion in Belgrave Square in London and acquired a vast mansion close to London (Whitley Court in Surrey), moving between these properties and Belfast. He also subsequently entered the British peerage.63

Philanthropy Brewers and distillers seem to have figured particularly prominently as philanthropists in the south of Ireland, probably reflecting the fact that they were among the largest and wealthiest industrial employers in that part of Ireland. This particular interpretation might help to explain why the Guinness family, who owned by far the largest concern, provide the most dramatic Irish example of philanthropy, with major outlays in

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both Dublin and London.64 The brewer W.H. Crawford (1812–88) was the greatest nineteenth-century benefactor to Queen’s College, Cork, and the Cork School of Art, in addition to contributing to the costs of finishing St Finbarre’s Cathedral and a host of charities and institutions in Cork city, such as the Women and Children’s Hospital and the Protestant Incurables.65 The Murphy family, major brewers in the city, were equally supportive in making provision for Catholic institutions in Cork. Roe, the Dublin distiller, contributed £250,000 to renovate Christchurch Cathedral.66 Mary Anne Locke (nee Devereux), the wife of a Westmeath distiller, was instrumental in bringing the Sisters of Mercy to the town of Kilbeggan (with the help of her father, Nicholas Devereux), providing cash, land and labour to build and establish the convent.67 The Ewarts, the great linen manufacturers, figured largely among a number of textile mill proprietors in the support of Belfast charity. In recognition of his contribution on this front, William Ewart (who had been a city councillor and member of parliament) was made a baronet.68 The motivation behind philanthropic activity combined various elements of religious and civic commitment, including a sense of paternalism and a degree of self-interest in some cases. Philanthropy improved the chances of those who wished to enter parliament and increased the possibilities of a peerage for those with even higher aspirations.

Industrial villages Industrialists established a number of industrial villages in Ireland; the greatest concentration of these was associated with the Ulster linen industry. These included Annsborough established by the Murlands in 1800; Sion Mills by the Herdmans (1835); Dunbarton by Dunbar McMaster (the late 1830s); Bessbrook by the Richardsons (1847).69 The southern variants were also frequently associated with textiles; the Malcomsons initiated cotton production at Portlaw in 1825.70 Fellow Quakers, the Goodbodys, established the first jute factory in Ireland at Clara, Co. Offaly, in the early 1860s,71 while the Mahonys expanded their woollen mills at Blarney throughout the nineteenth century.72 Elsewhere, investments in the Irish copper mining and coal industry also led to the development of small mining communities, such as those established by the Puxleys in Allihies in west Cork, for example, or those on the Wandesforde estate in County Kilkenny. Hunt’s case study of Portlaw reveals how the Malcolmsons established a number of institutions to cater for the welfare and health of

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their workforce, promoting education and temperance, and not entirely for altruistic reasons, since both promoted production and profits. The family developed much of this village beside their great cotton factory over three generations between 1825 and its demise in 1876.73 There are many parallels between Portlaw and the large industrial town of Gilford/Dunbarton, the focus of Cohen’s case study. Hugh Dunbarr (1790–1847) was the prime mover in establishing this factory village in the 1830s. These ‘linen lords’ exerted a pervasive influence over the morphology of the town, also shaping its social institutions.74 John Grubb Richardson, the founder of Bessbrook in 1846, chose to locate the mill near Newry because ‘I had a great aversion to be responsible for a factory population in a large town like Belfast . . . [and it enabled] . . . us to control our people and do them good in every sense.’75 The paternalistic structures evident in these villages enabled these industrialists to preside over a disciplined factory culture like landlords over their estate villages. They virtually shaped these new urban landscapes, retaining ownership and control over public spaces and dwellings the workforce lived in, quite apart from their working lives. As in the rest of Europe, by the end of the nineteenth century a number of Irish industrialists had accumulated fortunes which matched and in a number of cases exceeded the wealth of the Irish aristocracy, who were at this point entering the early stages of terminal decline. The divisions between the two social classes, which had been more sharply drawn at the beginning of the nineteenth century, became more blurred in places throughout the nineteenth century as intermarriage and other types of social intercourse between the two circles accelerated in a way that was common all over Europe, and an upper stratum within the industrial middle class had effectively become gentrified by the end of the nineteenth century.76

The religious divide Evidence on the religious profile of the industrial middle class can be discerned with greater clarity from the 1861 census, which provides a sample of the religious profile of some industrial occupations associated with ownership and management. ‘Non-Catholic’ is taken to reflect the Protestant share, and occupations have been ordered to reflect those with the greatest Protestant share at the top and those with the highest Catholic share at the bottom. Most of the industrial occupations listed have an over-representation of non-Catholics.

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Table 8.1 Catholic and non-Catholic shares in certain industries in 1861. Total Sewed muslin 82 manufacturers Felt manufacturers 15 Linen manufacturers 372 Flax yarn manufacturers 11 Tabinet/poplin 10 manufacturer Factory overseers 226 Cotton manufacturers 11 Watch and clock makers 951 Newspapers∗ 236 Mill owners 105 Distillers 83 Mustard manufacturers 6 Cigar makers 6 Brewers 242 Earthenware 101 manufacturers Leather manufacturers 26 Woollen manufacturers 103 Builders and contractors 919 Rectifying distillers 14 Colliery contractor 11 Cloth manufacturers 9 Worsted/yarn 11 manufacturers Paper manufacturer 289 Bacon/provision 576 curer/factor Aerated/min water 94 makers Non-Catholics in total population Salt manufacturers 80 Maltsters 387

Catholics

%

Non-Catholics

%

3

4

79

96

2 66 2 2

13 18 18 20

13 306 9 8

87 82 82 80

62 4 389 107 48 38 3 3 122 54

28 36 41 45 46 46 50 50 50 53

158 7 562 129 57 45 3 3 120 47

72 64 59 55 54 54 50 50 50 47

15 61 566 9 7 6 8

58 59 62 64 64 67 73

11 42 353 5 4 3 3

42 41 38 36 36 33 27

210 425

73 74

79 151

27 26

71

76

23

24

70 360

88 93

10 27

22 12 7

Note: ∗ ‘newspapers’ includes proprietors, editors and reporters. Source: D.H. Akenson Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants 1815–1922 (Montreal, 1991).

The textile industry ownership and management group (other than woollens) appear to have been dominated by Protestants. The geographical concentration of the linen industry in the north-east partly explains this, but many managers and overseers in the textile trade also

Andy Bielenberg 161

came from Britain and, as such, would have been predominantly Protestant. The woollen industry, in contrast, was located in the south, so Catholic ownership – and employment in lower management – would have been much higher in that sector, though non-Catholics were still significantly over-represented. The newspaper industry at this point was still evidently dominated by non-Catholics. The food and drink sector appears to have been less exclusive than textiles, with stronger Catholic representation and even significant over-representation in the malting and salt trades. This reflects the greater concentration of the food and drink industries in the south. Overall, Table 8.1 implies that the industrial middle class was significantly more Protestant than Catholic at this point. Earlier evidence on ownership is more uneven in quality and limited in coverage. In the early 1820s, industrial ownership in Cork city, for example, appears to have been fairly evenly divided, reflecting the traditional strength of the Catholic merchant community, but also the prominent industrial presence of a much smaller Protestant community. The situation in the north-east was fundamentally different. Industry in Belfast in the 1820s appears to have been largely in Protestant ownership.77 By 1857, Catholics owned only 3 of the 55 linen mills in and around the city, while brewing and distilling industry also remained predominantly in Protestant hands,78 as were shipbuilding and engineering. Evidence on discrimination in terms of employment is difficult to assess. First, few manufacturers revealed their thinking on this matter as clearly as a Tyrone flax spinner in 1887, who candidly declared to a passing traveller that ‘I do not venture to have more than half my workmen Catholics; if I had more my mills would soon be closed, for the priests would make us stop work on saints’ days, and would insist on all the overseers being Catholics, by threatening to strike if we refused. Now we are independent of them.’79 The census for Ulster and Belfast provides the best overview on the balance of employment in confessional terms; in 1911, when Catholics accounted for just over 24 per cent of the population of Belfast, they accounted for 46 per cent of females in spinning and 28.6 per cent in weaving. This significant overrepresentation indicates that the incidence of Catholic employment was higher in the less desirable occupation of spinning. In the province of Ulster (in which Catholics accounted for 43.7 per cent of the population), Catholics accounted for 46.5 per cent of females engaged in spinning and 30 per cent of those in weaving, so they were significantly under-represented in weaving, as were Catholic males in both Belfast and Ulster.80

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The Industrial Elite in Ireland

Overall, the confessional balance in terms of employment was quite varied geographically and contingent on local circumstances. The more aggregated census data might disguise greater imbalances in employment at a local level. Only 20 per cent of the 3,000 employed in Ewart’s mill in Belfast were Catholic, while John Hughes’s mill in Sandy Row also hired a largely Protestant workforce; however, in Catholic West Belfast, enterprises such as Ross’s mill on the Falls’ Road employed nearly all Catholics.81 Hepburn suggests that employment in a workplace located in a community dominated by one side (in religious terms) tended to drift towards greater exclusivity. Those from the opposite side to the majority in some instances, at least, faced intimidation at work, which may also have been a disincentive to cross territorial boundaries. In this regard, Protestant women who were working in the Broadway mill in a Catholic area were as vulnerable as Catholic women working in Ewart’s. Both had to walk the line.82 The agency of the workforce, including foremen and managers in matters of hiring, also needs to be taken into account before judgement can be made on the role of employers in this matter. However, the Belfast 1911 census evidence for male employment in both shipbuilding and engineering reveals a more marked degree of exclusion, notably in shipbuilding, which registered a Catholic workforce of only about 7 to 9 per cent in the major occupations.83 The ethnic segregation of the city and the over-representation of Protestants in east Belfast was one factor, but exclusion through apprenticeship systems, expulsions in downturns or periods of political turmoil, or simply through foremen who discriminated all combined to keep down Catholic numbers. Harland and Wolff employed only 225 Catholics in the mid-1880s out of a total workforce of 3,000. In contrast, the firm of Combe and Barbour, which was located in a more ethnically mixed location, had a workforce that was 40 per cent Catholic.84 Ethnic imbalances were far more marked in male skilled tasks, more notably in shipbuilding.

Politics While industrialists hardly figured as representatives in the House of Commons in the first third of the nineteenth century, they gradually began to enter parliament thereafter. Most appear to have supported the Liberal cause, including John McCance from a Lagan valley linen family, who was elected an MP in the last year of his life in 1835. The linen merchant William Kirk, who briefly sat for Newry between 1857 and

Andy Bielenberg 163

1858, was also a Liberal.85 In the south, distillers and brewers figured more prominently among elected members. James Power (a Dublin distiller) first took one of the County Wexford seats as a Liberal Repealer in 1835 and the Power family held it at various times down to the 1870s. In Wexford town, John Thomas Devereux (a maltster connected with the local distilling family) sat as a Liberal MP between 1847 and 1859, and the seat was taken over subsequently by Richard Joseph Devereux in the 1860s.86 Francis Bernard Beamish, a managing partner in Beamish and Crawford’s Brewery, occupied a seat for Cork city between 1837 and 1841 as a Liberal and, again, for a more prolonged period between 1853 and 1865.87 Richard Smithwick (a repealer) took the seat in Kilkenny city in a by-election in 1846, while John Francis Smithwick took the same seat as a home ruler in 1880 and 1885.88 John Arnott (who had industrial interests all over Britain and Ireland) had a brewery in Cork city, but was also able to lean on drapers who owed him favours in Kinsale, where he took the seat for the Liberals in 1859.89 Nicholas Dan Murphy, who ran the family tanyard in Blackpool (having previously been a solicitor), held one of the Cork city seats for the Liberals between 1865 and 1882; again, this may have owed much to his family connections with Murphy’s brewery.90 The great brewing and distilling dynasties could obviously be counted on to defend the interests of shopkeepers and publicans who sold alcohol and had sufficient property to form a sizable voting lobby in a period when the franchise was still narrow. The picture in the north was more mixed. Curiously, from early on, Belfast, in particular, contained a strong urban Tory support base among its craftsmen and industrialists.91 From the 1870s, a number of major Belfast industrialists supported the Conservative cause. The linen lord William Ewart (1817–89) was elected Conservative MP for Belfast in 1878, holding this seat until his death in 1889.92 John Mulholland took the tiny pocket borough of Downpatrick (his country seat) for the Conservatives and held it until 1885.93 Edward Harland, after a brief spell as Lord Mayor of Belfast between 1885 and 1887, became a Conservative MP for North Belfast in 1889 in a by-election (on the death of Ewart) and held this unopposed until his own death in 1895. Gustav Wolff was also elected unopposed as Conservative MP for East Belfast in four general elections between 1892 and 1910.94 George Smith Clark, one of the other great shipbuilders in Belfast, became a Unionist MP for East Belfast briefly between 1907 and 1910.95 At this stage, shipbuilders were by far the largest industrial employers in Ireland, so they could count on many of their predominantly unionist employees to vote for them,

164

The Industrial Elite in Ireland

despite some competition from those within the shipbuilding workforce who supported unionist candidates from the labour movement.96 In the south, two generations of the Guinness family won the Dublin city seat for the Conservatives (Benjamin Lee in 1865 and Arthur Edward in 1868 and 1874, though he was quickly struck off in the latter due to electoral improprieties).97 John Alexander, of the prominent Carlow milling family, won a seat for the Conservatives in the by-election of 1852 and in the general election of 1857,98 while William Goulding, the fertiliser manufacturer, won a seat for the Conservatives in a by-election in 1876.99 Conservatives also emerged victorious in a number of Ulster industrial villages after the 1860s, including Robert McBride in Dromore and John S. Brown in Edenderry, both with the support of a compliant factory workforce.100 Within the Liberal camp, the Richardsons (linen manufacturers) held the Lisburn (County Antrim) seat between 1853 and 1863, when John Doherty Barbour, a young scion of the other great manufacturing family in the town, successfully contested the seat, but was struck off when found guilty not only of the usual corrupt practice of treating, but of imprisoning 30 supporters of the opposition candidate. Aggressive ambition served him somewhat better in business.101 Other Liberal representatives drawn from textile families included the Whitworth family, who ran a cotton mill in Drogheda (County Louth), where they frequently took the seat between 1865 and 1880.102 Jonathan Pim, who ran a cotton spinning mill in Greenmount and other businesses in Dublin, was elected in 1865 and re-elected in 1868.103 Thomas Dickson, a linen manufacturer in Dungannon, took a seat there in 1874 and 1880, opposing any proposed reduction under the terms of the Factory Acts in working hours for factory operatives. Undoubtedly, the Factory Acts, which aimed to regulate trades to protect women and children in particular, were the most important legislation affecting industrial employers throughout this period. There was evidently a grave lack of concern for the welfare of children among industrial employers in the early 1830s, some employing children in the 5- to 7-year-old age group and, at this point, most Irish factory owners predictably opposed any extension of the powers of the Acts. By the mid-nineteenth century, only 30,000 operatives came under the terms of the Factory Acts in Ireland and the factory inspectors were relatively undemanding of employers. In the north-east, most of the larger factory owners complied, but as the Acts were extended to include smaller workshops and industries other than textiles in the 1860s and 1870s, non-compliance was more common among Irish employers.

Andy Bielenberg 165

Hours were cut to 12 in 1867, with the approval of most employers in the north-east at least, but clearly the terms of the legislation were flagrantly ignored in many industries, notably in smaller workshops, the sweated trades connected with clothing or seasonal industries. However, gradually the coverage and scope of the Factory Acts were successfully extended and employers were obliged to comply, despite their protestations about their claimed inability to compete with foreign industry where hours were longer. By 1914, about 250,000 employees in Ireland were covered by the terms of the Factory Acts and, in general, they improved conditions and safety for the working class at the expense of employers.104 Peter Gibbon has argued that political allegiances among linen manufacturers and other industrialists throughout Ulster between 1832 and 1886 leaned more towards the Liberals; those who favoured the Liberals included the Ross family, the Dunvilles, Duffins, Grimshaws, Sinclairs, Herdmans, Handcocks, McClures, Andrews, Browns, Richardsons and Barbours. He suggests that during the first 40 years of the nineteenth century when Whigs were locally dominant in Belfast, Whig supporters tended to come from the survivors and descendants of the United Irishmen, or the descendants of British textile manufacturers, while the Tory’s attracted more new blood in industries such as engineering.105 K.T. Hoppen concludes that Liberalism depended on ‘a rather inwardlooking collection of families engaged in the more entrepreneurially traditional textile business’.106 However, a list of the leaderships of both parties in Belfast in 1885 indicates a more even political mix than these conclusions imply.107 The cleavage among MPs at least within the industrial elite can be better explained by more tangible religious divisions across the island; most of the Conservatives of Irish extraction tended to be members of the Church of Ireland of which Arthur Guinness, John Mulholland and William Ewart were exemplars. The Liberal MPs constituted a more reformist alliance of Presbyterians and Catholics (until the 1880s), while immigrant industrialists from Britain fell into both camps. Predictably, the 1880s watershed in Irish politics is discernable among the industrial elite who thereafter identified with nationalism or unionism, bringing most Liberal and Conservative Protestant industrialists in Ulster into the unionist camp. The linen manufacturer James Nicholson Richardson of Bessbrook, for example, who took the county seat for Armagh for the Liberals in the 1880 election only remained active as an MP until 1884, but subsequently resurfaced as a unionist in the early 1890s (though not as an MP).108 Liberal unionists and Conservative unionists merged thereafter.

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The Industrial Elite in Ireland

On the nationalist side, the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) between the 1880s and 1910 contained a number of MPs engaged in industry, including the whiskey distillers Samuel Young (who sat for Cavan) and Major J.E. Jameson (for Clare), Belfast linen manufacturer Edward McHugh and John Morrogh, a Cork woollen manufacturer (and former director of de Beers).109 A number of these industrialists did not make a notable contribution to parliamentary debate, and may have been enlisted more for their financial support and their knowledge of trade. Members of the nationalist movement in west Clare, at least, found Jameson’s performance, in particular, distinctly underwhelming. One local party member went so far as to label him ‘a Tory in disguise and a trader whose main aim in Parliament was to sell his whiskey’.110

Newspapers The newspaper industry provided a promising avenue for advancement into the House of Commons for Irish nationalists from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and between 1895 and 1906 there were never less than six newspaper proprietors in the IPP and these were accompanied by a number of Irish MPs who were journalists.111 This group clearly had a stronger influence in political matters than proprietors in other industries. John Francis Maguire, who had established the Cork Examiner in 1841, won a seat in Dungarvan in 1852 for the new Independent Irish Party. When this collapsed, he joined the Liberals in 1859.112 In Dublin, the Freeman’s Journal was taken over by the Gray family in 1851 and became firmly associated with moderate constitutional nationalism.113 Edmund Dwyer Gray (who took over the paper in 1875) was elected as an MP for Tipperary in 1877 (subsequently sitting for Carlow in 1880, and Stephens Green in 1885), thus increasing the liberal nationalist influence of the paper. Gray also took over the Belfast Morning News in 1882. A rival nationalist paper was established in Belfast in 1891, the Irish News, whose chairman, Edward McHugh, was a Belfast linen and damask manufacturer who became the anti-Parnellite MP for South Armagh between 1892 and 1900.114 No less than 17 journalists were returned as MPs for the IPP in the 1885 election, which is indicative of the growing significance of the link between the press and Irish politics, which was stronger than in other parts of the United Kingdom. Between 1860 and 1911, over 14 per cent of all Irish nationalist MPs had an occupational association with the newspaper industry, compared to less than 2 per cent for Conservatives and 4 per cent for Liberals.115 Several leading figures in the IPP were, or once had been, journalists.

Andy Bielenberg 167

The Arnott family took over the Irish Times in 1873, the most important unionist paper in Dublin, while Lord Ardilaun took control of a stable of newspapers that included the more conservative unionist press in Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century, including the Mail, the Dublin Daily Express and Morning Mail.116 In Belfast, the Evening Telegraph (founded in 1870 by the Baird Brothers) started out as a Conservative paper, but it was in a good position to exploit the emergence of a more populist form of unionism from the 1880s. Thomas Moles, a reporter for the Telegraph from 1902 and chief leader writer from 1909, emerged as one of the stalwarts of unionism, becoming MP for the Ormeau division of Belfast between 1918 and 1922.117 As a stronger public sphere developed in Irish politics, the press increasingly engaged, reflected and resonated some of the major shifts in public opinion that transformed Irish politics in this period. As a consequence, proprietors of newspapers acquired a special status. The growing presence of the newspaper connection among Irish representatives in the House of Commons is indicative of the increasingly important role of the press in effecting changes in power relationships in Irish society.

Conclusion This brief survey has revealed a significant advance in the position of the Irish industrial middle class in the nineteenth century in terms of social status and power. They had been virtually excluded from parliamentary representation until the 1830s, from which point they became MPs in increasing numbers. This was symptomatic of the increasing representation of the middle classes throughout the United Kingdom. During the period in question, the elite industrialists appear to have successfully exploited their social standing and reputations, as good or large employers, to gain parliamentary representation. Smaller industrial employers were not generally elected, with the exception of newspaper proprietors. The increasingly grand houses of the industrial elite, in both rural and suburban contexts, provide another manifestation of their improved position in the social landscape. The chapter has demonstrated that the industrial middle class was recruited from a fairly wide social spectrum, which included a relatively high proportion of immigrants from Britain whose business and technical knowledge had been developed in the British industrial districts. Immigrants were far more significant in engineering than in the linen industry or the food and drink sector. The much larger number of industrial entrepreneurs in the Irish linen industry was drawn predominantly

168

The Industrial Elite in Ireland

from Irish Protestant stock. The industrial elite were reasonably well educated by the standards of the day, with a high share acquiring their education in Britain. However, the evidence collected here suggests that the type of education acquired was broadly similar to the rest of the Irish middle classes, so training on the job was the most important aspect of their education as far as their future career was concerned. Throughout the period in question, most industrial employers were small fry. The average number employed in works covered by the Factory Acts on the eve of the First World War was only around 20 persons.118 Small works dominated in the Irish industrial sector; they included master joiners, coach builders, tanners, printers who, on average, employed less than 20 people in 1871. Their social status was well below the owners of breweries and distilleries, which employed over 100 persons on average in 1871, or the flax mills with over 350, or iron shipyards with an average of over 630 on the payroll. The 1871 Factory Returns indicate that the largest employers in Ireland were the owners of shipyards, linen and cotton mills. The next cluster in terms of employment included breweries, distilleries, shirt factories, foundries and machine makers, paper mills, and bleaching, finishing and print works. Despite the small size of the average industrial works, between the 1870s and the 1920s, a number of very large industrial concerns emerged in Ireland, even by British standards. There is no dedicated case study of any of the larger Irish linen companies, the larger engineering works, the largest tobacco company or the rope works in Belfast, some of which were among the largest works of their type in the United Kingdom and globally. Ireland, according to Shaw’s listing, accounted for 8 of the top 100 manufacturing employers in the United Kingdom in 1907 (if Combe and Barbour is included, though it was part of a larger combine) and only one of these has had a study undertaken on its business history. The industrialists who ran these larger concerns tended to figure more prominently in Irish society and politics than the host of smaller employers below them in terms of wealth and social standing, with the exception of newspaper proprietors who were something of a special case. It is no coincidence that these two groups have figured prominently in this chapter.119 Although there were a number of Irish Catholic families within the industrial elite, and a multiplicity of smaller ones within the industrial middle class, Protestants were significantly over-represented in the ownership and management of Irish industry throughout the period in question. The geography of Irish industry partly explains this; most industrial concerns recorded in the 1871 factory returns were located in seven counties: Antrim, Down, Armagh, Derry, Tyrone, Dublin and

Andy Bielenberg 169

Cork.120 Therefore, the industrial elite could be found largely (though not exclusively) in these districts, since most lived close to their works. Moreover, Protestant domination of the Irish industrial sector cannot simply be explained as an Ulster regional story. Protestants were also over-represented in the ownership and management of the small southern Irish industrial sector, owning and running many of its largest companies for decades after partition.121 This aspect of the industrial elite is almost as striking as the dominance of Protestants in land ownership prior to the Land Acts. While the historically privileged position of Protestants in Ireland partly explains this, there were other factors.122 The importance of immigrant industrialists from Britain – almost all of whom were Protestants – has been noted in this chapter. To further advance our understanding of the Irish industrial middle class, we need more case studies of families for whom substantial business, family and autobiographical records have survived, which can be cross-referenced and analysed, so that their home, work and public lives can be brought into sharper focus than has been possible here. Diary and journal records might cast more light on their business ambitions or social aspirations, their recreational activity or their relationships with other family members. Such micro-level studies would help us to better understand how these Irish industrialists perceived their place in the world. Although in most cases industrial employers were a less visible social stratum in Irish society than landlords, for example, they became increasingly important not just in shaping economic activity associated with the industrial sector. As such, they need to be more fully incorporated into Irish social history and commerce, but also in shaping much of the built environment and the social world that emerged around their factories and mills. They also played an increasingly important role in Irish politics.

Notes 1. Andy Bielenberg ‘What happened to Irish industry after the British industrial revolution? Some evidence from the first UK Census of Production in 1907’, Economic History Review, vol. 61 (2008), pp. 820–41. For an economic history of Irish industry in this period, see Andy Bielenberg, Ireland and the Industrial Revolution: The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on Irish Industry, 1801–1922 (Routledge, 2009). 2. See Jurgen Kocka, Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society: Business, Labour and Bureaucracy in Modern Germany (New York, 1999). 3. Caitriona Clear, Social Change and Everyday Life in Ireland, 1850–1922 (Manchester, 2007). 4. See, for example, Betty Messenger, Picking Up the Linen Threads (Belfast, 1975), which is based on more recent oral testimony; Tom Hunt, Portlaw,

170

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

The Industrial Elite in Ireland County Waterford, 1825–76: Portrait of an Industrial Village and its Cotton Industry (Dublin, 2000); Marilyn Cohen, Linen, Family and Community in Tullylish, County Down, 1690–1914 (Dublin, 1997). Denis S. MacNeice, ‘Industrial villages of Ulster, 1800–1900’, in Peter Roebuck (ed.), Plantation to Partition: Essays in Honour of J. Leslie McCracken (Belfast, 1981), pp. 172– 90; Stephen A. Royle, ‘Industrialisation, urbanisation and urban society in post-Famine Ireland, c.1850–1921’, in Brian J. Graham and Lindsay Proudfoot (eds), An Historical Geography of Ireland (London, 1993), pp. 255–92; Anthony C. Hepburn and Brenda Collins, ‘Industrial society: the structure of Belfast, 1901’, in Roebuck, Plantation to Partition, pp. 210–28; M. Neill, ‘Homeworkers in Ulster, 1850–1911’, in Janice Holmes and Diane Urquhart (eds), Coming into the Light: The Work, Politics and Religion of Women in Ulster, 1840–1940 (Belfast, 1994), pp. 1–32. Jack Magee, Barney: Bernard Hughes of Belfast, 1808–1878 (Belfast, 2001). Peter Makem and Gerry Murphy, Five Generations of Baking in Newry, 1837– 1987 (Newry, 1988), pp. i–x. B. Neary, The Candle Factory: Five Hundred Years of Rathborne’s, Master Chandlers (Dublin, 1998), pp. 65–6. Andrew Gailey, ‘A family spade-making business in Co. Tyrone’ Folk Life, vol. 10 (1972), pp. 26–45. S. Cloney, ‘The Cloney Family of Co. Wexford’, in William Nolan and Kevin Whelan (eds), Wexford: History and Society (Dublin, 1987), pp. 325–40. The business developed by the pioneering figure in the Derry shirt industry, William Scott (1765–1858), declined rapidly after his retirement in 1850, as his sons lacked the necessary business acumen. See David L. Armstrong, The Growth of Industry in Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1999), p. 248. Leslie A. Clarkson, ‘The environment and dynamic of pre-factory industry in Northern Ireland’, in Pat Hudson (ed.), Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 252–67. London University Library, Ms 622, Evidence on State of Linen Industry in 1774. According to Payne, who gave evidence that many of the Irish manufacturers (presumably bleachers) ‘were people of good fortune, many of whom had resources here on the opulent factors in London’. David Dickson, ‘The place of Dublin in the eighteenth-century Irish economy’, in T.M. Devine and David Dickson (eds), Ireland and Scotland, 1600–1850 (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 182–4; William H. Crawford, Domestic Industry in Ireland (Dublin, 1972), p. 4; Conrad Gill, The Rise of the Irish Linen Industry (Oxford, 1925), p. 177. E.R.R. Green, The Industrial Archaeology of Co. Down (Belfast, 1963), p. 2; W.A. McCutcheon, The Industrial Archaeology of Northern Ireland (New Jersey, 1984), pp. 288–92; William H. Crawford, ‘Drapers and bleachers in the early Ulster linen industry’, in Paul Butel and Louis M. Cullen (eds), Négoce et Industrie en France et en Irelande Aux xviii et xix Siecles (Paris, 1980), pp. 113– 19; Jane Gray, ‘The Irish and Scottish linen industries in the eighteenth century: an incorporated comparison’, in Marilyn Cohen (ed.), The Warp of Ulster’s Past (New York, 1997), pp. 37–69. David Dickson ‘The Cork merchant community in the eighteenth century: a regional perspective’, in Butel and Cullen, Négoce et Industrie, p. 49.

Andy Bielenberg 171 15. A. Donaldson and J. Webb, Ballincollig Gunpowder Mills (Dublin, 2006), p. 27. 16. Mark Cooper and John Davis, The Irish Fertiliser Industry: A History (Dublin, 2004), p. 81. 17. Diarmuid Ó Drisceoil and Donal Ó Drisceoil, The Murphy’s Story (Cork, 1997), pp. 1–2, 32. In Dublin, Edward Byrne, a sugar refiner and distiller, was reputedly the richest merchant in the city at the end of the eighteenth century, having served an apprenticeship to a merchant. By 1792, Byrne (who was chairman of the general committee of Catholics of Ireland) was paying over £100,000 per annum to the revenue authorities, which provides some indication of the magnitude of his industrial and trading interests. Maureen Wall, ‘The rise of a Catholic middle class in eighteenth-century Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. xi, no. 42 (1958), pp. 107–8. 18. William H. Crawford, ‘The Belfast middle class in the late eighteenth century’, in David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), The United Irishmen (Dublin, 1993), pp. 62–73. On Greg, see Nini Rodgers, Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 1612–1865 (London, 2007), pp. 145–58. P. Francis, A Pottery by the Lagan (Belfast, 2001), pp. 5–6. 19. A.J. Hughes, Robert Shipboy MacAdam (1808–95): His Life and Times (Belfast, 1998), p. 2. 20. Robert Joy came from a family engaged in newspaper production and paper making, while his partner, McCabe, was a watchmaker, as was Lepper, who started a much larger cotton mill in Belfast in 1811. Watchmakers had the necessary mechanical knowledge. E.R.R. Green, ‘Belfast entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century’, in Butel and Cullen, Négoce et Industrie, pp. 137–42. On Grimshaw, see BPP, 1833, xxxv, Evidence taken before the Committee of the Irish House of Commons on the Subject of the Legislative Union, pp. 551–2. 21. R. Alan Williams, The Berehaven Copper Mines (Kenmare, 1993), pp. 31–2, 49. 22. Tom Lyng, Castlecomer Connections (Freshford, 1984), p. 250. 23. Patrick C. Power, History of Waterford (Dublin, 1990), pp. 186–7. 24. A.M. O’Sullivan, ‘Pierces of Wexford’, Journal of Wexford Historical Society, no. 16 (1996–7), pp. 126–42. 25. Joseph Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918 (Dublin, 1973), p. 19. 26. J.W. Hammond, ‘The founder of Thom’s Directory’, Dublin Historical Record, vol. viii, no 2 (1946), pp. 42–56. 27. E.R.R. Green, ‘Business organisation and the business class’, in J.C. Beckett and T.W. Moody (eds), Ulster since 1800 (London 1957), p. 116. 28. A.P. Baker, ‘John Jameson’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter DNB] (Oxford, 2004), vol. 29, p. 755. Jameson was the great-grandfather of Marconi, the inventor of wireless telegraphy. 29. Julie Ann Grew, The Derry Shirt Making Industry, 1831–1913’ (unpublished M.Phil., University of Ulster, 1987). 30. John M. Hearne, ‘Quaker enterprise and the Waterford glassworks, 1783– 1851’, Decies, vol. 54 (1998), pp. 31–2. 31. Dudley Westropp, Irish Glass (Dublin, 1978), p. 65.

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32. McCutcheon, The Industrial Archaeology of Northern Ireland, p. 267. 33. W. Cronin, ‘Memories of fifty years in the Irish woollen trade’, Capuchin Annual (1944), p. 95. 34. National Archives of Ireland; Griffiths Housebook, OL. 5.3393. 35. J.E. Chacksfield, The Coey/Cowie Brothers (Usk, 2003), p. 43. 36. S.R. Dennison and Oliver MacDonagh, Guinness, 1886–1939: From Incorporation to the Second World War (Cork, 1998), pp. 77–93. 37. R.M. Young, Belfast and the Province of Ulster in the 20th Century (Brighton, 1909). 38. David Johnson, ‘James Mackie’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), vol. 35, p. 640; R. Armstrong, Through the Ages in Newtown Abbey (Antrim, 1979), pp. 335–7. 39. Emily Boyle, ‘James Nicholson Richardson’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), vol. 46, pp. 814–5. 40. J. Burls, Nine Generations: A History of the Andrews Family, Millers of Comber (Belfast, 1958), pp. 156–7, 160–1. 41. S. Lee, ‘Mahony, Francis Sylvester’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004) vol. 36, p. 160. 42. Patricia Lavelle, James O’Mara; A Staunch Sinn Féiner 1873-1948 (Dublin, 1961), pp. 19, 27–8. He could do business in French, which he probably learnt in Clongowes, while on the continent. 43. Ó Drisceoil and Ó Drisceoil, The Murphy’s Story, p. 15. 44. Williams, The Berehaven Copper Mines, pp. 31–2, 43, 138, 145, 159. 45. Andy Bielenberg, ‘Late Victorian elite formation and philanthropy: the making of Edward Guinness’, Studia Hibernica, no. 32 (2002–3), pp. 134–7. 46. Michael Moss, ‘William James Pirrie’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), vol. 44, p. 413. 47. John R. Hume and Michael Moss, Shipbuilders to the World: 125 Years of Harland and Wolff, Belfast, 1861–1986 (Belfast, 1986), pp. 93–5. On Andrews, see S.F. Bullock, Thomas Andrews (Dublin, 1912). 48. Richard S. Harrison, ‘Irish Quakers in flour milling’, in Andy Bielenberg (ed.), Irish Flour Milling; A History, 600–2000 (Dublin, 2003), pp. 89–90. 49. Colin Rynne and Billy Wigham, A Life of Usefulness: Abraham Beale and the Monard Ironworks (Cork, 2000), pp. 1–11. 50. J.N. Richardson, Reminiscences of Friends in Ulster (Gloucester, 1911), pp. 42– 5, 53–5. 51. Ron B. Weir, ‘The patent still distillers and the role of competition’, in Louis M. Cullen and Tom C. Smout (eds), Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic and Social History (Edinburgh, 1977), pp. 139–142. 52. Glyn Jones, ‘The introduction and establishment of roller milling in Ireland 1875–1925’, in Andy Bielenberg (ed.), Irish Flour Milling (Dublin, 2004), pp. 107–124. 53. Philip Ollerenshaw, ‘Stagnation, war and depression: the UK linen industry, 1900–1950’, in Brenda Collins and Philip Ollerenshaw (eds), The European Linen Industry in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2003), pp. 285–304. In particular, see p. 301 for an outline of the various organisations in the linen industry in 1921. 54. Ó Drisceoil and Ó Drisceoil, The Murphy’s Story, p. 11; Angela M. Fahey, ‘Place and class in Cork’, in C.G. Buttimer and Patrick O’Flanagan (eds), Cork: History and Society (Dublin, 1993), p. 801.

Andy Bielenberg 173 55. R.T. Campbell and Stephen S. Royle, ‘East Belfast and the suburbanization of the North-West: County Down in the nineteenth century’, in William Nolan and Lindsay Proudfoot (eds), Down: History and Society (Dublin, 1997), pp. 651–4. 56. Kathleen Rankin, The Linen Houses of the Lagan Valley (Belfast, 2002), p. 56. 57. Ibid., p. 31, 128. 58. Leslie A. Clarkson, ‘John Mulholland’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), vol. 39, p. 701. 59. Rankin, Linen Houses of the Lagan, and also see her Linen Houses of the Bann Valley (Belfast, 2007). 60. E.B. Maguire, Irish Whiskey (Dublin, 1973), p. 375. 61. Art Kavanagh, The Wexford Gentry (Wexford, 1994), pp. 168–180; J. O’Toole, The Carlow Gentry (Carlow, 1993), pp. 4–6. 62. Bielenberg, ‘Late Victorian elite formation’, pp. 133–54. 63. Herbert Jefferson, Viscount Pirrie of Belfast (Belfast, 1948). 64. Bielenberg, ‘Late Victorian elite formation’, pp. 133–54; F.H.A. Aalen, The Iveagh Trust (Dublin, 1990); Peter Malpass, Housing, Philanthropy and the State: A History of the Guinness Trust (Bristol, 1998). 65. UCC College Archives; Council Minute Book no. 3, 1868–1882. Boole Library UCC Special Collections MP 855; Peter Murray, The Crawford Municipal Art Gallery (Cork, 1991), p. 4. 66. Maguire, Irish Whiskey, p. 339. 67. Andy Bielenberg, Locke’s Distillery (Dublin, 1993), pp. 50, 66. 68. A. Jordan, Who Cared? Charity in Victorian and Edwardian Belfast (Belfast, 1993), pp. 97–137, 200–37. 69. Macneice, ‘Industrial villages’, pp. 172–90. 70. Hunt, Portlaw. 71. D.B. Quinn, ‘Clara: a midland industrial town, 1900–1923’, in Timothy P. O Neill and William Nolan (eds), Offaly: History and Society (Dublin, 1998). 72. Colman O’Mahony, ‘Blarney Woollen Mills and the O’Mahony Family’, Old Blarney, no. 1 (1991), pp. 35–45. 73. Hunt, Portlaw. 74. Cohen, Linen, Family and Community in Tullylish. 75. Cited by Green, ‘Business organisation’, p. 115. This village was visited by Cadbury, the English Quaker, some years before he established Bournville; see Charlotte Fell-Smith, James Nicholson Richardson of Bessbrook (London, 1925), p. 49. 76. Kocka, Industrial Culture, p. 247. 77. British Library; Add.38,368 Liverpool Papers, Return of Irish Traders c. 1820. The industries in Belfast at this point included cotton spinning, cotton manufacture and calico printing, milling, brewing, rope making, vitriol manufacture, salt production, tanning, shipbuilding and printing. 78. Anthony C. Hepburn, A Past Apart: Studies in the History of Catholic Belfast, 1850–1950 (Belfast, 1996), p. 123, 149. 79. George Pellew, In Castle and Cabin or Talks in Ireland in 1887 (New York, 1888) pp. 240–3. 80. BPP 1912-13 cxvi, Census of Ireland 1911; Province of Ulster. 81. Hepburn, A Past Apart, p. 38.

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82. Catherine Hirst, Religion, Politics and Violence in Nineteenth Century Belfast (Dublin, 2002), pp. 17, 42, 159, 185. 83. BPP 1912-13 cxvi, Census of Ireland 1911; Province of Ulster, Belfast. 84. Peter Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism (Manchester, 1975), p. 85. 85. Rankin, Linen Houses of the Lagan, p. 179; Brian M. Walker, Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1801–1922 (Dublin, 1978), pp. 56, 61; Desmond Greer and James W. Nicholson, The Factory Acts in Ireland, 1802–1914 (Dublin, 2003), p. 43. 86. Maguire, Irish Whiskey, p. 363; Brian M. Walker, Parliamentary Election Results in Ireland, 1918–92 (Belfast, 1992), pp. 60, 66, 72, 105, 111–2. 87. C.T.M. Beamish, Beamish: A Genealogical Study of a Family in County Cork (London, 1950), p. 133. I would like to thank Adrian Beamish for this reference. Also, see Walker, Parliamentary Election Results (1978), p. 87. 88. Walker, Parliamentary Election Results (1978), pp. 74, 125, 133. 89. Ibid., p. 59. Marie-Louise Legg, ‘Sir John Arnott’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), vol. 2, p. 515. 90. Ó Drisceoil and Ó Drisceoil, The Murphy’s Story, pp. 7–8, 27. 91. Theodore Hoppen, Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland, 1832–1885 (Oxford, 1984), p. 307. 92. Leslie A. Clarkson, ‘Sir William Ewart’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), vol. 18, p. 815. 93. In 1892, he was raised to peerage as Baron Dunleath of Ballywater, Co. Down. Leslie A. Clarkson, ‘John Mulholland’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), p. 701. David Jeremy (ed.), Dictionary of Business Biography (London, 1985), vol. 4, pp. 374–7. 94. Jefferson, Pirrie, p. 52. Michael Moss ‘Edward Harland’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), p. 297. David Jeremy (ed.), Dictionary of Business Biography (London, 1985), vol. 3, p. 40; (1986), vol. 5, p. 858. Walker, Parliamentary Election Results. 95. Jeremy, Dictionary of Business Biography, vol. 1, pp. 683–5. 96. John W. Boyle, The Irish Labour Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, 1988), pp. 272–327. 97. Hoppen, Elections, pp. 52, 58–9, 84; Walker, Parliamentary Election Results (1978), p. 102, 116. 98. Walker, Parliamentary Election Results (1978), pp. 86, 89. 99. Ibid., pp. 121, 124. 100. Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism, pp. 115–6. 101. He later became chairman and managing director of William Barbour and Sons, which became the largest thread makers in the world and subsequently established the Linen Thread Company in 1898, a combine that dominated the world market for thread. Stephen S. Royle, ‘The Lisburn by-elections of 1863’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. xxv, no. 99 (1987), pp. 277–91; Rankin, Linen Houses of the Lagan, p. 42 102. Walker, Parliamentary Election Results (1992), pp. 102–24. 103. Richard S. Harrison, A Biographical Dictionary of Quakers (Dublin, 1997), pp. 83–4. 104. Greer and Nicholson, The Factory Acts, p. 52. 105. Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism, pp. 105–7. 106. Hoppen, Elections, p. 308.

Andy Bielenberg 175 107. Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism, p. 105. 108. Smith, James Nicholson Richardson, pp. 60–74. For an example of another flax spinner, see Hoppen, Elections, p. 273. 109. F.S.L. Lyons, The Irish Parliamentary Party, 1890–1910 (London, 1951), p. 169. 110. Kieran Sheedy, The Clare Elections (Dublin, 1993), p. 304. James O’Mara, the Limerick bacon curer, sat for the Irish Parliamentary Party in South Kilkenny in 1900, holding the seat in 1906. In 1918, he successfully ran for Sinn Féin, providing significant financial support, later becoming a Dáil deputy; see Patricia Lavelle, James O’Mara; Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland (Cambridge, 1999) pp. 177, 370, 379. 111. Lyons, The Irish Parliamentary Party, p. 174. 112. D. Steele, ‘John Francis Maguire’, Oxford DNB (Oxford, 2004), vol. 36, pp. 147–8. 113. Brian Inglis, The Freedom of the Press in Ireland, 1784–1841 (London, 1954), p. 240. 114. Eamon Phoenix (ed), A Century of Northern Life; the Irish News and 100 years of Ulster History 1890s–1990s (Belfast, 1995), pp. 10–18; Walker, Parliamentary Election Results (1978), p. 144. 115. Lance E. Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire (Cambridge, 1986), p. 253. 116. Hugh Oram, The Newspaper Book (Dublin, 1983), pp. 68, 89, 94. 117. Malcom Brodie, The Tele: A History of the Belfast Telegraph (Belfast, 1995), pp. 5–45; Marie-Louise Legg, Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press (Dublin, 1999), p. 78. 118. Greer and Nicholson, The Factory Acts, p. 377. 119. BPP, 1871, LXII, Return of the Manufacturing Establishments under the Factory and Workshop Regulation Act, pp. 179–97, 301–15; C. Shaw, ‘The large manufacturing employers of 1907’, Business History, vol. 25 (1983), pp. 42–60. The list curiously excludes Guinness; see P.L. Payne, ‘The emergence of the large scale company in Great Britain, 1870–1914’, Economic History Review, vol. 20 (1967) p. 539. 120. BPP, 1871, LXII, Return of the Manufacturing Establishments under the Factory and Workshop Regulation Act, pp. 179–97, 301–15. The factory returns in 1871 are not entirely comprehensive. They exclude grain mills, of which there were 1492 in Ireland in 1891; BPP, 1892, lxxxviii, Agricultural Statistics for Ireland for the Year, 1891, p. 26. Although most of these were small corn mills, the more substantial grain millers constituted a more widely dispersed group of the industrial elite, many of which were located outside the core industrial zones in the seven counties mentioned. 121. Kurt Bowen, Protestants in a Catholic State: Ireland’s Privileged Minority (Dublin, 1983), pp. 15, 91–2, 20. 122. For an article that places more weight on Protestant privilege alone, see Richard Jenkins, ‘Ethnicity and the rise of capitalism in Ulster’, in Richard Jenkins and Robin Ward (eds), Ethnic Communities in Business (Cambridge, 1984).

9 ‘Another Class’? Women’s Higher Education in Ireland, 1870–1909 Senia Pašeta

Dissension, denominationalism and deep division characterised the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debate about reform of higher education in Ireland. The establishment of the non-denominational Queen’s Colleges in 1845 marked the beginning of the protracted and sometimes bitter Irish University debate which claimed the attention of the most powerful forces in Ireland: the Catholic hierarchy, successive British governments and lobbyists of varied denominational and philosophical stripes, all of whom understood that its role in the development of the expanding Irish middle classes was a matter of the highest importance. Female activists were acutely aware of the impact on their academic and professional prospects of the university debate. Though their cause was seen by most as marginal, they nevertheless maintained a singleminded insistence on their right to all the educational privileges enjoyed by men. It is easy to forget how radical a claim this was. It is also easy to underestimate how difficult it was to maintain momentum over a period which witnessed some of the most significant political developments in modern Irish history. The university question was influenced profoundly by changing social, political and confessional considerations and the women’s movement adapted with it. It intersected with and attempted to negotiate and even sometimes to bypass some of them, especially the religious ones. It was able to do this, indeed it was obliged to do this, because the women’s education movement existed as a series of complementary interest groups rather than a single entity. These groups certainly interacted and maintained at all times a cordial and beneficial working relationship, but as in all other large feminist movements, especially the suffrage movement, they also had separate methods, agendas and aims. This chapter explores how these 176

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overlapped at times and why they were subjected to different influences and obstacles.

Secondary education for middle-class girls The introduction of the intermediate education system in 1878 marked a watershed in Irish educational history: it helped to raise academic standards and to regulate the entire Irish sector as a time when the demand for secondary education was outstripping supply. The numbers of candidates who presented themselves for intermediate examinations grew from just under 4,000 in 1879 to almost 12,000 in 1910,1 reflecting at least three important social trends: the significant expansion in the numbers of Catholics who were obtaining anything more than a primary school education; the growth in the numbers and standards of secondary schools, and the increasing number of girls who gained access to ‘superior’ education. Each of these trends was both a catalyst for and a by-product of the expansion of Ireland’s professional and commercial middle classes. The intermediate system focused more attention than ever on this sector of Irish society as the performance of middle-class schools became a frequent and often-heated subject of public discussion. Most commentators criticised the intermediate system for its emphasis on unhealthy competition, but the competitive nature of the system had some unexpected consequences, especially in the field of women’s education. Intermediate education was progressive in its inclusion of women on the same terms as men, but the debate which surrounded their inclusion revealed that education reform for women was both already underway and under close scrutiny. Cardinal Cullen made clear his disapproval of the proposal to include women in the 1878 Intermediate Education Bill, and it appears that this carried some weight as girls were in fact excluded from the parliamentary debate on it.2 Women were incorporated into the final Bill after fierce lobbying by a group led by the pioneering educationalists Isabella Tod and Margaret Byers.3 These women, like most of their fellow early campaigners, were Protestants and many, like Tod, had strong ties to the wider British feminist movement and were clearly influenced by the English High School movement. Byers founded the Ladies Collegiate School (later Victoria College) in Belfast in 1859 and Tod, who was active in the establishment of the Ladies Institute in the same city, was also instrumental in the foundation of the Ulster Schoolmistresses Association. A number of other schools for middle-class girls soon followed, about 70 being

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represented by the Central Association of Irish Schoolmistresses and other Ladies interested in Education (CAISM), founded in 1882.4 These women maintained links with their English counterparts through a number of periodicals and organisations including the Englishwomen’s Journal, edited by Emily Davies, and followed their lead in bringing attention to the need for middle-class women in particular to be educated in a manner which would allow them to support themselves.5 Tod was insistent that women’s education had to equip them to earn a living if they were not provided for by their families.6 This was one of the main reasons given by activists in support for women’s education, and particular emphasis was placed on the need to effectively train and instruct governesses and teachers. Not only was this seen as respectable employment for middle-class women, it was also deemed to be essential to the future prospects of women’s schools, colleges and eventual university entrance. Anne Jellicoe, co-founder of the Dublin branch of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, took a lead in this campaign, her ideas winning the support of Richard Chenevix Trench, Anglican Archbishop of Dublin and active supporter and teacher at the pioneering women’s college, Queen’s College, London. Their interest attracted wider support among Irish Anglicans who supported women’s education and led to the establishment of the Alexandra College for the Higher Education of Women in 1866. The development of Catholic women’s colleges followed an entirely different path, not least because they did not enjoy anywhere near the same kind of clerical or academic support from Catholic men, even after the hierarchy capitulated to some of the women’s demands. Neither could Catholic Ireland boast equivalents of Tod and Byers until women such as Mary Hayden became involved in the women’s movement as a result of their own educational experiences. The early Protestant activists were furthermore much more experienced in public speaking and campaigning, honing their political skills in their support for causes ranging from the abolition of the Contagious Diseases Acts to the inclusion of women in the local government franchise. Though Catholic men were at this time coming to dominate Irish political life, Catholic women had hardly begun to serve their political apprenticeships. The women’s education campaign provided an opportunity to do just that. In a very real sense, the crusade to improve girls’ education in convent schools was at least a decade behind the Protestant one. Irish convent schools had not been subjected to the same liberalising and progressive forces as had some of the Protestant establishments. The elite

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schools, those largely frequented by Catholic middle-class girls, were run in the main by French teaching orders, the majority of which had been introduced into Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century.7 Thus, while Protestant educationalists were establishing links with British activists and importing some of their ideas about girls’ education into Ireland through their schools, middle-class Catholic girls were exposed to French ideas, ideas which did not prioritise the equalisation of opportunities or curriculum for girls and boys, let alone preparation for university or professional life. These teaching orders of nuns certainly provided their students with a more solid grounding in numeracy and literacy than the vast majority of Irish girls could hope to receive, but while a curriculum which included dancing, music and needlework was clearly prized by the expanding Catholic middle classes, it penalised both the girls who wished to take intermediate examinations and their schools, as good performances in more academic subjects such as Greek and Latin attracted higher rewards from the Intermediate Board. As Mary Hayden lamented in her diary when reminiscing about her convent school education, ‘we had little bits of lots of things, some not very useful: while really useful things like Latin and Greek were entirely omitted. Then in respect to reading we were badly treated.’8 When William Delany of UCD was asked in 1885 why Catholic boys did so much better than Catholic girls in the intermediate examinations, he explained that ‘the people do not view with approval among Catholics, especially Catholic ecclesiastics who have the direction of a certain extent of the teaching, some of the subjects of the Intermediate Education Board’s examinations as suitable for girls’ education’. In fact, the schools of which he approved did not present themselves for examinations.9 It is difficult not to conclude that this opinion was far from exceptional.

The women’s university question In her important study of Anglican women in Dublin, Oonagh Walsh has argued that given that the major early educational reformers were Protestants, the campaign may have been generally expected to reflect the country’s religious divisions. But the activists, as she argues, in fact ‘presented a curiously neutral campaign in the sense that they attempted to eliminate any bias in terms of class, religion and even . . . gender’.10 This was possible because the movement’s central demand was that women attain complete equality with men in the education sector. This appears on the surface to be a simple enough

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ambition which could paper over or at least avoid obvious denominational differences, but it was undermined by the complexities of the broader university question. The fact that complete equality did not yet exist between male Catholic and Protestant students meant that white Protestant women could legitimately claim that they aspired to what had already been made available to their brothers, Catholic women had little precedent. In addition, the involvement of clerics from all the main churches in protecting the interests of their own establishments further complicated the demands of all female activists. Equality was a complex term whose definition depended in late nineteenth-century Ireland on one’s faith as much as on one’s class and gender. The women’s education campaign was certainly non-denominational, in so far as no one group attempted to claim more than any other on the grounds of religion and no group denounced the claims of others on the grounds that it had been discriminated against because of its religious beliefs. Very many attempts were made to emphasise the nondenominational and collective spirit of the broader movement,11 despite the fact that the movement began, and for some time remained, almost exclusively Protestant. But while female campaigners generally thought of themselves as ‘another class’ whose interests legislators ignored,12 they also thought of themselves, at times, as Protestants and Catholics for whom particular university settlements would be more suitable than others. The Royal University provided a way of bypassing some of these difficult questions as it allowed all women to compete with men within a system whose shortcomings were so obvious that a concerted and unified campaign could be launched by women of all denominational and political persuasions. Moreover, the Catholic hierarchy had given its blessing, albeit grudgingly, to the university scheme though not explicitly to women’s inclusion in it, making it possible for Catholic women to demand equality within what was considered by most to be, the inadequate and temporary Royal University. Activists nevertheless took up the challenge thrown down by the Royal University. They had learned their lesson from the near miss with the Intermediate Education Bill and were well prepared for the establishment of the Royal University. In 1879 the Society for School and University Education of Women in Ireland was founded, emphasising from its inception its non-denominational stand. As Isabella Tod wrote, It ought to reassure those who think education in Ireland too thorny a subject to touch, to see a body so representative, composed of Roman Catholics, Members of the Church of Ireland, Presbyterians,

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Unitarians, members of the Society of Friends, representing almost every large town in all the principal counties of Ireland, entirely agreed upon one important point – namely, that it is of vital moment to the welfare of the country that women shall have free access to the very best means of education, both scholastic and collegiate.13 But, though undoubtedly genuine, this collaboration could only ever be partial; the fact that Protestant activists had clearly had university entrance for women in their sights even before the foundation of the Royal University rendered cooperation difficult. Alexandra College’s close association with Trinity College and the support of a number of Trinity dons for women’s education made this even more problematic, given the Catholic hierarchy’s ongoing disapproval of the institution, a disapproval which became more rather than less acute over the period.14 Very few Protestants openly claimed that Catholics did not face discrimination in the university sector, though a number believed that some of it was self-induced as they refused to go to TCD or Queen’s. Protestant campaigners such as Alice Oldham made a point of emphasising that while Catholic men were disadvantaged, so too were women of both denominations,15 but the opening of TCD to women of all denominations – which she favoured – was hardly going to curtail Catholic objections to Trinity or of university degrees for women: two wrongs most certainly could not make a right in this instance. The Protestant schools once again led the way with the preparation for women for the Royal University. When asked in 1885 if any other Irish schools ‘worked along the same lines’ as her own, the principal of Alexandra College could only list Protestant establishments.16 In 1902, a similar question was answered by Henrietta White, the then principal of Alexandra, with reference to Loreto Dublin and St Mary’s University College, Dublin.17 The transformation of a number of Catholic women’s colleges was due largely, as has been well documented, by the demands made by Catholic parents and students who strategically played the sectarian card,18 and the unpalatable realisation that Protestant girls were outdoing their Catholic counterparts in the university’s examinations. As one anonymous author proclaimed, ‘very many Irish girls are resolved to secure a Higher Education and parents are resolved to encourage and to aid them’.19 Should a ‘Catholic Girton’ not be founded, parents would send their daughters to ‘godless and heretical colleges’.20 It is clear that many, including Mary Hayden who went to Alexandra College, did just that. By 1892, only 3 of the 152 female graduates of the Royal University listed a Catholic college on the degree

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lists, suggesting almost beyond doubt that academic Catholic girls did go to Protestant schools.21 Many also likely took up ‘expensive private grinding’22 in order to prepare for examinations, hardly surprising as the Royal University’s own 1884 report confirmed that ‘the condition of the great majority of girls’ schools throughout the country’ was not fit to educate aspirant university students.23 The pressure brought by lay Catholics on Catholic teaching orders, school managers and the hierarchy should not be underestimated as in some cases it entailed parents and their daughters actively flouting the wishes of the clergy and entering the Queen’s Colleges and Protestant schools in an effort to obtain higher education. In this way they followed in the footsteps of the Catholic men who studied at Trinity College and the Queen’s Colleges against the wishes of the clergy. This kind of rebellion, though restricted to a small number of middle- and upper-class Catholic families, was nonetheless one of the few instances where lay Catholics simply refused to follow social policy as decreed by the bishops. Given both the importance attached by the hierarchy to the university question and the unambiguous nature of its policy, the defiance of these Catholics was striking. The prospects for Catholic women were greatly enhanced with the opening of St Mary’s University College and High School in 1893 and the Loreto College in Stephen’s Green in the following year. They were the most exclusive academic establishments for Catholic women in Ireland, and were clearly established, as Mary Hayden insisted when giving evidence on behalf of St Mary’s at the Robertson Commission on University Education in 1902 to give Catholic women ‘the same opportunities as their Protestant sisters’.24 But although convent schools became enormously better at coaching girls for the intermediate examinations, they continued to lag behind when it came to university preparation, despite the growing numbers of Catholic women who entered the Royal University. These increasingly vocal women found that their complaints about their lack of access to adequate university teaching were likely to attract more derision than sympathy from the Catholic hierarchy and the Catholic community in general. One activist complained in 1888, for example, that the Freeman’s Journal – ‘the so-called leading Catholic organ in Ireland’ – had given only ‘lukewarm support’ to the case made Catholic university women.25 Given that the Freeman’s Journal constituted ‘enlightened opinion’ on women’s education, a committee of Catholic ‘lady students’ decided they must generate their own publicity through the publication of a pamphlet.26

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The Catholic hierarchy’s disapproval of women entering for the intermediate examinations and pursuing university degrees has been well documented, and perhaps overstated. Its attitude must be viewed in its own context and attempts to explain it in terms of Catholic dogma only are inadequate. The notion of equality for men and women was alien to all but a few radicals in the nineteenth century, and Protestant and Catholic campaigners faced similar opposition to their cause, much of it based around notions of women’s intellectual inferiority as well as the fear that an influx of female students would deprive their male counterparts of resources and – subsequently – professional employment. Many were also anxious about the potential for superior education to ‘unsex’ women and to compromise male students. Clerical opposition was nevertheless always bound to be more acute because of the combination of the clergy’s natural conservatism, the potential of the women’s demands to muddy the waters of the larger university debate, and a fundamentally incompatible understanding of the notion of equality. In common with feminist campaigners, the hierarchy had persistently based its campaign for university reform on the need for equality, but the equality on which they insisted was between Catholic and Protestant men and this meant the establishment of a Catholic university or university college which would be equal to Trinity. There simply was no precedent for such an institution. Catholic campaigners regularly pointed to Louvain as an example of an acceptable settlement, but the fact that it was almost the only model they could draw attention to highlighted just how outmoded denominational university education was in late nineteenth-century Europe. It is difficult to see how there could have been any room in this outdated scheme for women, even if the hierarchy had been sympathetic to feminist demands.

Trinity College, Dublin In the early years of the twentieth century, the university question entered its final and most contentious phase. Royal Commissions on university education in 1902–3 and on Trinity College in 1906–7 allowed activists public platforms from which to make their views more widely known, a change of government injected a new urgency into deliberations and a number of ‘final’ university settlements were proposed, opposed and debated until the National University of Ireland was finally established in 1909. Overarching all of this was the perception

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that a settlement was imminent; this revitalised the seemingly atrophied university debate and many more lay people became involved. This lay involvement was possible because of the existence by then of an articulate, influential and frustrated generation of Catholic Royal University graduates who felt that they had been disadvantaged during their own university careers, and by a sense of utter frustration at the failure of the hierarchy, the Irish party and British statesmen to find an acceptable and lasting solution. Activist women responded to this by founding in 1902, the Irish Association of Women Graduates and Candidate Graduates (IAWG), an organisation which they insisted was ‘non-sectarian, nonpolitical . . . thoroughly representative, and free from every kind of party bias’.27 The non-denominational stance was a continuation of wellaccepted practice, and their pledge to remain non-aligned to party, university settlement or creed underlined their independence: The association . . . will watch over the case for the women-graduates, in the present crisis of University Education, and without taking sides either for a Catholic University, a National University, or continuation of the Royal, will endeavour in the event whichever scheme is finally adopted to obtain the best advantages possible for the women-graduates. The Association is the organ of no College or Institution.28 The IAWG was important because it represented a shift from the old guard of educational campaigners including Tod and Byers, to a newer generation which was led by brilliant women including Mary Hayden, Agnes O’Farrelly and Alice Oldham, all Royal University graduates and educationalists whose careers had been hindered by discrimination in the education field. It was particularly important for the Catholic graduates who joined because Catholic opinion on the university question had hitherto been represented almost exclusively by the clergy: even teaching nuns had had little public input into the debate because they were not permitted to join organisations like the CAISM and did not otherwise speak publicly on the issue. It was also a genuinely ‘mixed’ group: Alice Oldham, a Protestant, became the first president and Mary Hayden, a Catholic whose father had taught at the Catholic University, became vice-president. By 1907, the organisation claimed about 150 members, graduates of both the Royal and Dublin Universities among them, and it continued to profess its status as ‘widely representative of women’s interests’.29

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Oldham had in fact been one of the most active members of the CAISM, but her loyalty shifted to the IAWG which, through its broader appeal to all women graduates and because of its refusal to back a scheme which supported the recognition of women’s schools as university colleges, rendered it more radical than the CAISM. She was in deep disagreement with Henrietta White, principal of Alexandra College, who favoured her institution’s recognition as a university college of the University of Dublin.30 The IAWG was adamant that men and women must be educated together if women’s degrees were to have the same value as men’s. The IAWG’s witnesses told the Robertson Commission in 1902 very plainly that they did not want ‘women shut up in Women’s Colleges’, and emphasised the amateurish and infantilising atmosphere in the institutions in which both university and school teaching took place.31 In this the organisation was opposed by the bulk of the leading women’s colleges, Protestant and Catholic, which supported the continuance of women’s colleges within any new university scheme. The contrary view expressed by the graduates of these very colleges is another indication of the shift which opening up between the new and the older generation of women activists. Agitation, planning and consultation on a permanent and equitable settlement of the university question continued during the entire period of the Royal University’s existence, but there is very little evidence to suggest that the question of where women would fit into such a scheme was ever seriously considered by any of the major interested parties. The general idea of an acceptable settlement continued to centre on the principle of equality between men and the establishment of some kind of new university or university college, which would effectively serve as the Catholic equivalent to the University of Dublin or Trinity College. The position of women within this kind of settlement was unclear. Both the CAISM and the IAWG wrote to Trinity’s board in 1902, urging it to open the college to women.32 The college had launched its ‘Examinations for Women’ in 1870, but conceded no further concessions to female education, even after being presented by a memorial signed by over 10,000 ‘Irish upper and upper middle-class women’ in 1892.33 It was slightly let off the hook after 1879 when the bulk of academic women voted with their feet and opted for an actual degree course at the Royal University, but years of often quiet but relentless campaigning from the CAISM and some progressive and sympathetic Trinity dons, many connected to Alexandra College, followed. The college’s eventual change of mind in 1904 undoubtedly owed much to this persistent pressure, but it was also due to the death of several Trinity

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diehards by the early years of the twentieth century, and could, more cynically, be seen as a form of self-protection. It is quite likely that one of the motivations for admitting women to Trinity was to block, for once and for all, the attempt to establish a women’s college within the University of Dublin, despite the fact that this was the model adopted at Cambridge and Oxford, the universities which Trinity saw as its counterparts. Some dons certainly preferred this arrangement, but it may have opened the way for the establishment of a third college, perhaps a Catholic one, and the TCD fellowship was unanimous in its repudiation of that. The fact that this was the university solution by then favoured by Archbishop William Walsh surely influenced this position.34 In 1902, Henrietta White lamented that she had ‘no reason to hope’ that Trinity would admit women.35 This suggests – as does the absence of a reference to Trinity in the IAWG statement – that the college’s turn around in 1904 came as something of a surprise to many observers, even to some who had better connections to Trinity than most. The opening of Trinity to women undoubtedly came as something of a relief to a number of Protestant women who, like Alice Oldham and Henrietta White, doubted the appeal to Protestant women of a Catholic university.36 Oldham professed a preference for the Royal University to have affiliated to it endowed Protestant and Catholic colleges, suggesting both that the TCD decision came as a real surprise and that the inevitability that a settlement acceptable to all must in the end be denominational was recognised even by the most progressive education activists.37 Had the Royal University been replaced by a Catholic institution in a final settlement, Protestant women, especially those in Dublin, would have been left with even less choice than they had had under the Royal University. Neither woman condemned the foundation of a Catholic university for Catholics, but, as White explained, it was unlikely that Protestant parents would approve of their daughters going to a Catholic university.38 Interestingly, they appeared to have no such misgivings about Catholic women going to Alexandra College or to TCD, a view generally mirrored by the statements of Catholic female campaigners who similarly failed to denounce the women who went to Alexandra, the Queen’s Colleges or their equivalents. Catholic women activists did not tend to demand the establishment of a Catholic university as a viable solution to the question of equality for women within the Irish university sector, no doubt largely because their bishops gave virtually no support to their claims and the prospect of equality within a Catholic university thus looked extremely dim. Women like Mary Hayden, who had first-hand experience of prejudice

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at the hands – she believed – of no less a prominent Catholic educationalist than William Delany, were unlikely to look to a Catholic university as a likely answer to their demands for parity.39 Catholic women, when they joined specific Catholic groups or even when they spoke out as individuals, were in fact less likely than Protestants to make demands which would specifically benefit women of their own church. They did not, for example, make a case about the unsuitability of Trinity College for Catholic women, at least not publicly, and supported the opening of the college as a step forward for the general women’s education movement. This is perhaps because it was unlikely that many Catholic women would flout the wishes of the clergy and enter Trinity, even if they could afford to, but also because in the early years of the twentieth century, there was no guarantee that a better arrangement would be made available to women students in the Royal or any new university. The dogged refusal of UCD to admit women underlined this point. Catholic women made up 9 per cent of the total number of women at TCD between 1904 and 1924,40 a not insubstantial number, given clerical disapproval. These women followed in the footsteps of the Catholic men who had gone to the college in the face of the clerical ‘ban’: interestingly, the proportion of Catholic men and women at the college during this period was similar. Their decision to go to Trinity was almost certainly not taken lightly and there was little precedent for them, the important exception being the determination of an earlier generation of Catholic women to go to academically superior Protestant schools. They undoubtedly shared a similar class background as the exclusive Protestant schools and Trinity College were well beyond the reach of most students. The political and academic stand they took in going to Trinity, especially as the Royal University was available to them, should not be underestimated. It must be viewed both in the context of the hierarchy’s long-standing antipathy to TCD and in terms of the particularly sour state of relations between them in the very early years of the twentieth century. Having heard evidence of all major parties, the commissioners in 1902 deemed the possibility of Catholics and Protestants mixing willingly in a common university ‘unrealistic’.41 While Walsh and other prominent Catholics advocated the establishment of a Catholic college within the University of Dublin, TCD rejected the scheme uncategorically and its supporters launched a ‘Hands off Trinity’ campaign. This very public and at times fractious campaign did nothing to assuage the doubts of Catholics, the majority of whom remained adamant in

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their refusal to accept that Trinity could be amended in a way which would make it acceptable to Catholics. The Catholic Laymen’s Committee, an organisation which initially backed the two college scheme before switching its support to a modified TCD, was the only Catholic organisation which openly expressed support for a scheme not sanctioned by the bishops. They felt the full force of Catholic disapproval, both from Walsh who would not tolerate its meddling in the politics of the university question42 and from organisations such as the Catholic Undergraduates and Graduates Association which expressed its neutrality on the question of a final settlement but which nevertheless stated its opposition to ‘mixed education’, described TCD as a failure and advocated the two college scheme.43 The Catholic women who went to Trinity after 1904 thus did so at a time when Catholic opinion was firmly anti-Trinity and, at best, neutral on the question of university education for women. It was surely not an easy beginning.

University College, Dublin The final and in many ways most difficult hurdle for women activists was University College, Dublin. UCD was symbolically and practically important because it was the only Dublin institution affiliated to the Royal University which boasted any sort of collegiate life. When Margaret Tierney Downes, a Catholic Royal University student, moved to Dublin in 1888, she found that the facilities she had enjoyed as a student at Queen’s College, Cork, had no equivalent in Dublin. Queen’s College, Belfast, had admitted women to its honours classes from 1882, and to medical classes from 1889; the Cork college followed suit in 1886. The Galway college admitted women in 1888, but F. J. McCormack, the local Catholic bishop, strongly censured this, having a declaration forbidding girls to attend the college read in all Catholic churches in his dioceses.44 Queen’s Belfast was proud of its record on female education45 and was probably the most progressive of all Irish university colleges. To encourage the establishment of similar facilities in Dublin, Tierney Downes organised a petition among Catholic graduates and undergraduates, but the Royal University Senate, although sympathetic, could not force University College authorities to allow women to attend the fellows’ lectures in the college.46 Although University College struggled under its own disadvantages, there was no other genuine college option for Catholic women as Royal University fellows only gave lectures at University College and the Cecilia Street Medical School in Dublin. Attendance at classes of University-appointed fellows and tutors proved a large advantage when

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preparing for examinations. The desire to participate in a collegiate life also motivated women hoping to enrol at UCD, but the college stood firm, even after TCD had opened its doors to women. Campaigners, who advocated the concurrent education of men and women, were infuriated by William Delany’s refusal to bow to their demands. The IAWG further pressed the issue of mixed education, targeting the recalcitrant and increasingly outdated UCD. The irony that the college which was seen to be at the centre of the drive for Irish educational equality was also the last institution to hold out on admitting women was not lost on them. Delany, who claimed he was not hostile to equal rights, argued that women could not be admitted to the lectures in the college because of the lack of accommodation. He rejected the proposal of female undergraduates that they be permitted to attend lectures at the college in 1882. Although sympathetic, the university’s senate, which the women also approached, could not force Delany to act, offering instead the use of university rooms for fellows who agreed to repeat their lectures to women. This unsatisfactory arrangement lasted only a few years as many fellows disliked repeating their lectures, while others charged fees which women could not afford.47 In 1886, Delany permitted some of the college fellows to repeat their lectures to female students in the buildings of the Royal University, believing this arrangement preferable to the co-education of men and women in his own college. Several UCD fellows also began to lecture in the Loreto College for women until, finally in 1901, Delany allowed women to attend fellows’ lectures in University College. This reform benefited second and third arts students, mainly drawn from St Mary’s and Loreto; first-year students were excluded from college lectures. The establishment of the IAWG the following year ensured that pressure was kept on Delany, but not even a memorial, presented to Delany in 1904 which emphasised the fact that Catholic women were now particularly disadvantaged, persuaded him to allow women to become full members of college: And whereas this serves to accentuate the disabilities of Irish Catholic women in respect of higher education, in as much as while debarred from attending the Queen’s Colleges and Trinity College, they find no provision made for their instruction in the ordinary university courses at the University College.48 UCD at this time was a hot-bed of student politics and feminism was high on the radical agenda of a number of students. The former UCD student and college registrar, Francis Sheehy Skeffington, had helped

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to draft the 1904 letter to Delany and having been told by the Rector that an officer of the college should not promote opposition policy, he resigned, stating: I cannot, however, admit that my conduct, in drafting and processing signatures to a Memorial praying for the admission of women to University College was in any way inconsistent with my office . . . and that the admission of women to TCD, creating a new situation, had intensified the need for University College, for the sake of its own prestige, should prove to be no less progressive.49 Despite ongoing pressure on UCD officials, the college held out against the admission of women, clearly disadvantaging Catholic women and emphasising that ideas of equality remained contested within the university debate. While arrangements for Catholic women to sit intermediate examinations had been conceded 20 years earlier in a spirit of competition with Protestants, arrangements which would allow women to learn and compete alongside Catholic men, even in an institution with a Catholic atmosphere, could not be sanctioned. It was not until the passing of the National University of Ireland Bill in 1908 that women began to be integrated as full members of the college, even then only after the clergy’s preferred establishment of separate women’s colleges had not succeeded.

Conclusion In a path-breaking article, Anne O’Connor carefully charted the campaign to open university education to Irish women, and concluded that ‘the women involved in the movement between 1873 and 1909 were no radical revolutionaries dedicated to breaking the bourgeois mould of the educational or social structures of their society’.50 It would perhaps be going too far to call these women revolutionaries, but they were certainly radical, particularly the Catholics among them, for their consistent attempts to highlight their unpopular cause and for their refusal to conform to clerical opinion. It is vital to remember that they formed a tiny minority in Irish society, and were widely viewed as eccentric at best, unnatural at worst. Even after they won admission to Trinity and University College, they were seen by many as interlopers who had upset the natural order of the colleges.51 Because female educational activists, especially the earlier generation of them, conducted a largely orderly and rational campaign, the radical

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nature of their demands has perhaps been underplayed. Campaigners themselves were careful to emphasise the respectable nature of their demands and to link women’s higher education with such socially desirable outcomes as improvements in family life, motherhood and the education of children. But campaigners frequently discussed women’s access to higher education concurrently with employment opportunities, reflecting the changing employment opportunities for middle-class women and women’s determination to have them. The demand for equality in education and employment within the universities – with the church, the most male of all nineteenth-century institutions – similarly represented a genuine challenge to the accepted structure of society. The ability of the women’s groups to make such a challenge was all the more striking because, despite consisting of a number of devout women whose religious beliefs informed their political activity, it largely avoided entering into the increasingly partisan nature of the university debate. Particular aspects of the women’s campaign were clearly informed by religious considerations, but this did not spill over into sectarianism. It was one of the few overtly political groupings which managed to avoid this, both within the wider university debate and within nineteenthand early twentieth-century society more broadly.

Notes 1. Report of the Intermediate Education Board for Ireland for the Year 1879, British Parliamentary Papers (BPP), vol. 23, p. 8; and Report of the Intermediate Education Board for Ireland for the Year 1910, BPP, vol. 25, 1910, p. iv. 2. Helen Blackburn, ‘Obituary of Isabella Tod’, Englishwomen’s Review, no. 3 (1897), p. 61; and Anne V. O’Connor, ‘Education in nineteenth-century Ireland’, in Angela Bourke et al. (eds), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume V: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Cork, 2002), p. 652. 3. Ibid. 4. A. V. O’Connor, ‘The revolution in girls’ secondary education in Ireland, 1860–1910, in Mary Cullen (ed.), Girls Don’t do Honours: Irish Women in Education in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries (Dublin, 1987), p. 32. 5. Deirdre Raftery, ‘The higher education of women in Ireland, 1860–1904’, in Susan M. Parkes (ed.), A Danger to the Men: A History of Women in Trinity College Dublin, 1904–2004 (Dublin, 2004), p. 8. 6. Blackburn, ‘Tod’, p. 59. 7. Raftery, ‘Higher education of women’, pp. 11–12; and O’Connor, ‘Education’, p. 650. 8. Diary of Mary Hayden, 15 September 1880, MS 16, 269, National Library of Ireland (NLI).

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9. Educational Endowments (Ireland) Commission, 1885–86, BPP, vol. xxvi, 1886, p. 789. 10. Oonagh Walsh, Anglican Women in Dublin: Philanthropy, Politics and Education in the Early Twentieth Century (Dublin, 2005), p. 51. 11. Senia Pašeta, Before the Revolution: Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Elite, 1879–1922 (Cork, 1999), pp. 114–15. 12. Alice Oldham, ‘Women and the Irish university question’, New Ireland Review, vol. xi (1897), p. 257. 13. Isabella Tod, ‘Higher education of women in Ireland’, Englishwomen’s Review, no. lxxxvii (1880), p. 291. 14. Senia Pašeta, ‘Trinity College, Dublin, and the Education of Irish Catholic, 1873–1908’, Studia Hibernica, no. 30 (1998–9), pp. 16–17; Senia Pašeta, ‘The Catholic hierarchy and the Irish university question, 1880–1908’, History, vol. 85, no. 278 (2000), pp. 275–6. 15. Oldham, ‘Women’, p. 263. 16. Educational Endowments (Ireland) Commission, 1885–86, BPP, vol. 26, 1886, p. 151. 17. Royal Commission on University Education (RCUE), BPP, vol. 31, 1902, p. 210. 18. Walsh, Anglican Women in Dublin, p. 59. See also Eibhlín Breathnach, ‘Charting new waters: women’s experience in higher education, 1879–1908’, in Cullen, Girls Don’t do Honours, pp. 68–9. 19. Anon, ‘Women’s higher education in Ireland’, Lyceum, vol. vi (1893), p. 143. 20. Ibid., p. 142. 21. O’Connor, ‘Revolution’, pp. 68–9. 22. Margaret Tierney Downes, The Case of the Catholic Lady Students of the Royal University Stated (Dublin, 1888), p. 13. 23. Third Report of the Royal University of Ireland, BPP, vol. 25, 1884–5, p. 801. 24. RCUE, vol. 32, p. 358. 25. Tierney Downes, The Case, p. 16. 26. Ibid., p. 19. 27. St Stephen’s, vol. I, no. 6 (1902), p. 114. 28. Ibid. 29. IAWG to A. McDonnell, 28 February 1902, minutes of the National University Women’s Graduates Association (originally the IAWG), NUWGA 1/3 9, UCD. 30. Lucinda Thomson, ‘The campaign for admission, 1870–1904’ in Parkes, Danger to the Men, p. 45. 31. RCUE, vol. 32, pp. 319, 320. 32. Thomson, ‘The campaign for admission’, pp. 48–50. 33. Oldham, ‘Women’, p. 260. 34. Pašeta, ‘The Catholic hierarchy’, pp. 275–6. 35. RCUE, vol. 31, p. 211. 36. Walsh, Anglican Women in Dublin, p. 76. 37. RCUE, vol. 31, p. 219. 38. RCUE, vol. 31, p. 210. 39. Pašeta, Before the Revolution, p. 90. 40. Walsh, p. 77. 41. RCUE, Final Report of the Commissioners, vol. 32, 1903, p. 34.

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42. Pašeta, ‘Trinity College’, pp. 16–17. 43. Evidence of William Magennis, Royal Commission on TCD, and the University of Dublin, BPP, vol. 41, 1907, pp. 183, 185–8. See also minutes of the Catholic Graduates and Undergraduates Association, 27 January 1905 and 2 February 1905, Curran Collection, UCD. 44. Breathnach, ‘Charting new waters’, pp. 59–60. 45. Evidence of Thomas Hamilton, Pres of QUB, RC, 1902, vol. 31, p. 60. 46. Tierney Downes, The Case, p. 13. 47. Breathnach, ‘Charting new waters’, p. 61. 48. Draft of memorial to William Delany, 1904, Sheehy Skeffington Papers, MS 21, 641 (i), NLI. 49. Francis Sheehy Skeffington to William Delany, Ibid, 1 June 1904. 50. O’Connor, ‘Revolution’, p. 77. 51. Evidence of Miss Gwynn, Royal Commission on TCD, and the University of Dublin, BPP, vol. 56, 1906, p. 115.

10 Class, Nation, Gender and Self: Katharine Tynan and the Construction of Political Identities, 1880–1930 Aurelia L. S. Annat

Introduction A critical impetus in women’s history since the 1970s has been reconceptualising the subject matter and structure of academic narratives about the past and its literature. Katharine Tynan’s writing easily lends itself to this agenda and scholarly interest in it has grown alongside the women’s studies movement. As a widely popular Irish female writer, whose career spanned from 1885 until her death in 1931, Katharine Tynan influenced English as well as Irish public opinion throughout the politically charged years which culminated in the Irish Free State and the enfranchisement of women over 21. Initially, she established herself as a poetess with Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems (1885), but she was both versatile and prolific and her output includes anthologies, autobiography, over 100 novels and a mass of journalism. Yet while Tynan’s publications were critically acclaimed at the height of her career, the corpus of her work was later discarded by a modernist canon that judged it naive and patchy at best, inconsequential and populist at worst. However, it has more recently been rehabilitated within feminist and postmodernist paradigms, applying different criteria to judge its relevance. Presenting social and political opinions from a personal and feminine perspective, Tynan’s work has answered to fashionable dictates again. However, her distinctively gendered voice subverts the categories used to interpret it. Tynan was insufficiently ideologically minded to be defined precisely in terms of feminism, nationalism or class; attempts to do so sacrifice her mentalité 194

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to caricature. To apprehend her mentalité, and reveal the significance of her writing for Irish historical studies, requires a subtly different set of discourses. This is an essay in that direction, as well as a contribution to the emergent fields of Irishwomen’s literary history and women’s history in Ireland, and the ongoing project of recovering the voices of modern Irish women. Themes of gender, nation and social status structured both Tynan’s life and work. However, her ideas are disjointed, scattered throughout her writings, and were modified as time and politics effected transformations upon both her and her world. As such, they have been used to support contradictory interpretations located in a system of absolute positions: feminist or hearth-angel, nationalist or imperialist. I will use Tynan’s private papers and published non-fiction to excavate these themes as they were played out in her writing as a series of political identities which were guided, but not governed, by contemporary conventions and ideologies. Tynan’s active participation in political movements was never great, and after her marriage and relocation to England in 1893 her politics were expressed almost entirely through text. Yet she exemplifies the later feminist claim that ‘the personal is political’ and illustrates the extent to which various political discourses (such as those of class, gender and nation) combined to structure ‘lay’ lives. By particularising Tynan’s experience of identity, it is possible to unfold the relationship between an individual’s political and personal consciousness, and examine how these combine to form, and reform, concepts of class, nation, gender and self.

Gender Tynan’s identification of herself as an Irish Catholic woman forms the keynote of much of her writing, both private and published. Yet her construction of a gendered identity was contingent, relating to dynamic discourses of femininity, feminism and class. Her position, while rooted in traditional nineteenth-century values, responded to the conditions and opportunities that the modern era presented. She undoubtedly took pride in being Mrs Henry Hinkson and was a doting mother to the couple’s three children – Toby, Patrick and Pamela – and dedicated much of her literature to describing domestic joys and duties. Pamela would later describe her mother as ‘one of those women born for warm homemaking’.1 In this Tynan subscribed to respectable middle-class standards of femininity. Yet, by her own account, her conformity was imperfect. Her domesticity disguised a

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life recalled by Monk Gibbon as spent much on the move,2 and from an early age she disdained female inactivity and the limitations of a purely domestic domain. In her first volume of autobiography, TwentyFive Years (1913), she admits to being hopelessly unconcerned about housework in her youth,3 and recollects a tomboy existence: a ‘free life’, roaming the fields around her home, Whitehall, in Clondalkin.4 In Norah Tynan O’Mahony’s 1931 memorial to her sister, she recollected that while Andrew Tynan (their father) considered it a disgrace for his daughters to take employment outside the house, ‘in those days of enforced feminine seclusion at home’, ‘Katie’ brought in an impressive steady income of several hundred pounds a year through her writing.5 Norah narrated one of her sisters remarking philosophically, ‘where’s the virtue in darning stockings when one can earn money to pay some really needy person for mending them!’6 Andrew Tynan was an affluent gentleman cattle farmer, employing an army of farm labourers and domestic staff.7 Nevertheless, Tynan’s upbringing was not typically middle class. Her background was that of the privileged rural Catholic bourgeoisie, but it did not conform with contemporary English notions of ‘middle classness’. If she came to belong to that category, it was by dint of her own labour, not her father’s. Her success as a poet gave her the status and financial independence to challenge the perimeters of her childhood environment, both physically and socially. She travelled frequently to London, alone, and displayed self-assurance and emancipation in establishing a social network of friends and literary contacts. On one trip, determined to accept an invitation to visit the elderly poet and physician, Thomas Gordon Hake, and frustrated in her attempts to find an occasion when her friend the Catholic writer Alice Meynell might chaperone her, Tynan eventually told Hake that she would come alone, having already assured him, ‘I shall be able to find my own way to you quite easily. I flatter myself on a way of finding out places . . ..’8 With her metropolitan experience, her cultural interests, literary connections and conspicuous consumption of London merchandise (including the purchase of fashionable if ill-fitting hats for her sisters back at home9 ), she set herself apart from her siblings. Alone of her sisters she accompanied Andrew Tynan to the theatre in Dublin.10 In 1887, a young (Protestant) Douglas Hyde confided his embarrassment at showing Tynan and one of her sisters around Trinity College to his diary: ‘Katherine was all right but her sister was a sight,’ he wrote. In an earlier entry, he had observed that the entire Tynan family possessed a ‘frightful brogue’.11 Tynan’s early career exposes the middle class of this period in the British Isles as a matrix of various and stratified elements, differentiated by

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national and religious among other differences, and discrete but not impermeable. Tynan’s marriage in 1893 to Henry Hinkson, a Protestant Irishman educated at Trinity College, secured her migration from Whitehall and the social status it represented. Significantly, the wedding took place in London, where the Hinksons then settled. Tynan’s literary career continued to support a middle-class identity confirmed by her roles as wife and mother, even as it (paradoxically) liberated her from the normative construct of leisured female domesticity. As if to confound the example of her mother, who she once dismissed as ‘the mid-Victorian woman’ who would stay at home, engrossed by her occupation as mother of 11,12 Tynan demonstrated a seemingly limitless capacity for work. This was pointedly represented in her memoirs as unaffected by marriage or motherhood. ‘I am such a hewer of wood & drawer of water,’ she once told Mrs G. K. Chesterton.13 In her biography of Tynan, Fallon underlines how exceptional it was for a woman to be self-supporting on the proceeds of her own writing at this time.14 Writing was, however, a typically middle-class occupation and as such affirmed her middle-class credentials.15 Tynan’s labour was also crucial for the Hinkson family finances, since they appear to have lived to the limit of their income even in prosperous times. In 1908, Peter van de Kamp has observed, Tynan’s average annual income was over £60,000 in late-twentiethcentury currency, yet the Hinksons returned to Ireland in 1911 because of lack of funds.16 Even in the lean years of the Great War, which saw the impoverishment of many writers and a slump in Tynan’s earnings, Henry Hinkson’s salary as Resident Magistrate for Mayo was almost matched by his wife’s. Nonetheless, this reduction had serious ramifications for the family’s way of life and Tynan was driven to seek a handout from the Royal Literary Fund.17 Sudden widowhood in 1919 did not inhibit her literary output for long, although changing fashions diminished the popularity of her writing, and consequently her income.18 At the end, in early 1931, Pamela was obliged to appeal for subscriptions to assist with the cost of nursing care for her mother.19 The evidence of Tynan’s youth implies a sensibility unsatisfied with rural provincialism and conventional femininity, yet as a married woman in London she would trade on these tropes to define her identity and advance her literary status. Similarly, her early association with nationalist politics was displaced by a more circumspect political identity. In the 1880s and early 1990s she was actively involved in the nationalist cause. An ardent Home Ruler and Parnellite, she accompanied W. B. Yeats to at least one meeting of Oldham’s Protestant Home

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Rule association,20 and was, according to Norah, an enthusiastic member of Anna Parnell’s Ladies Land League.21 Tynan later distanced herself from this organisation,22 but maintained that her involvement was a sincere demonstration of nationalist feeling. ‘The Land League in those days,’ she wrote, ‘was the expression of the Nationalist spirit in Ireland. I think a good many of us felt the uninspiringness of it, but there it was! And there was always Mr Parnell and the other leaders to inspire us.’23 Writing to D. J. O’Donoghue in early 1893, Tynan claimed to be behind on review work because of the Meath Elections and Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill, introduced on February 13, although she did not elaborate on what her involvement entailed.24 Her marriage later that year signalled the curtailment of such active participation in politics. While she continued to be politically engaged through her writing, she does not seem to have chosen to reconcile active involvement with her roles as a middle-class wife, mother and writer. Thus, while in the early 1900s she was moved to speak out publicly in support of women’s suffrage, she never contributed actively to the movement. Writing to The Times in 1906, when militant suffragism was starting to gather the momentum which would carry it towards the violence of 1912 and 1913,25 Tynan was shocked that suffragists were treated as criminals in prison and, in a statement which speaks eloquently of her conception of gender and class, she asserted: ‘the gentlemen of the Press have made them suffer that martyrdom of being made ridiculous, which is one of the worst martyrdoms to a sensitive and dignified woman.’ It was enough to convert her: ‘I have never hitherto desired a vote, but these doings make me think. I ask myself why my gardener should have a vote and I not have one?’26 If she promoted middle-class women’s access to the political arena, she maintained that their primary duty lay at home. In 1924, writing for The Voice of Ireland (described by Caitriona Clear as a ‘showcase publication’ of the new Free State27 ), Tynan accepted women’s place in politics but regretted what she saw as Irish women’s contempt for and inefficient management of ‘housecraft’. She declared: ‘The need of our nation . . . is not for the Amazon. It is for the conservative woman, careful for all the sanctities, all the securities, all the safeguards of the House of Life.’28 While Tynan embraced elements of the ‘new woman’, she endorsed the conventions of femininity. They formed the basis of much of her literature and configured her representations of Irish womanhood. This is evident in portraits of friends such as Mary Gill, ‘the most tender and devoted of wives and mothers’, with her ‘beautiful, soft, warm manner; that manner which is the happy prerogative of Irishwomen’.29 As an

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extension of this, Tynan was committed to the centrality of marriage at every level of society and drew attention to social factors inhibiting it. In the early 1900s she was concerned about farmers’ tendency to marry later and the commercialism of marriage in parts of rural Ireland, reporting (for example) the lament of a handsome female draper’s shop assistant in Cork that ‘no one could hope to get married in Youghal, unless one had £300 to buy an old “widda-man”.’30 In 1922, she wrote to the English Times about middle-class women’s marital prospects, worsened by the First World War and then the exodus of men seeking employment in the post-war depression. ‘The young women of the present’, she claimed, wanted to work. ‘They have tasted the sweets of work and independence, and they know the fruits of idleness – sickliness, discontent, dreariness, dishonesty, meanness.’ At the same time she called for this class of women to follow men out to the colonies rather than be left unmarried and unemployed.31 ‘I am,’ she claimed unequivocally, ‘an old fashioned person and I come back to the question of marriage . . . if so many of the best of the young men are going, [to the Colonies] let them not go unaccompanied to loneliness, or worse.’32 Tynan’s femaleness, while moulded by contemporary gender discourses, was response to her unfolding individual circumstances. In promoting women’s suffrage and access to the labour market alongside matrimony and women’s domestic responsibilities, she prefigured the new feminism of the 1920s, which recognised sexual difference and called for protective legislation that would safeguard women’s maternal role in society.33 The impression of (sometimes covert) feminism suggested throughout Tynan’s career is perhaps better interpreted as her appreciation of alternatives to the stereotypical traditional domestic female role, an attitude unstructured by any specific political agenda but instructed by a political temperament which sensitised her to contemporary reformations of gender and class.

Nation Tynan’s political identity was circumscribed by concepts of gender and class, and by her literary interests. Born in 1861 into a literary Catholic household, she was profoundly influenced by the mid-nineteenthcentury romantic nationalism of Young Ireland and their ethos of synthesising cultural and political revolution.34 Her father, she tells us, had belonged to a Mitchel Club in his youth and was an ardent nationalist. ‘He adored the men of ’48,’ she wrote. His interests guided Tynan’s early reading. ‘I read Davis, Duffy’s Spirit of the Nation, D’Arcy Magee and

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Meagher of the Sword. A good deal of it was indifferent reading from an artistic point of view,’ she reminisced.35 Brought up on this diet, and having established her place at the core of a circle of Dublin poets with nationalist politics, she contributed energetically to the beginnings of the Irish Literary Revival, already emergent in the 1880s.36 Already herself an independently successful poet, with W. B. Yeats she took a lead in bringing out one of the seminal works of the Irish Renaissance, Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888), and evidently identified herself with this reinvention of Young Ireland. In 1890, on being given a copy of A Short Life of Thomas Davis (1890) by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, she sent back ‘ten thousand thanks’ and declared: ‘There is no such inspiring name as yours to us of younger Ireland.’37 Tynan’s political and literary networks in Ireland during these years brought her into contact with Fenians who perpetuated the revolutionary tradition that Young Ireland had sustained. She was close to John O’Leary and knew Charles Kickham,38 the two most influential of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) intransigents, who in the 1870s resisted participation in the constitutionalism of Isaac Butt’s Home Rule campaign.39 Through the Ladies Land League she also knew Michael Davitt, and in 1883 she and her father visited him weekly while he was imprisoned in Kilmainham for 6 months.40 If Tynan’s retrospective accounts of the 1880s implicate her identity in a paradigm of revolutionary Ireland, they simultaneously worked to remove both her and her father from the physical force tradition. Writing for English as well as Irish audiences, against a background of growing Anglophobia in Ireland, Tynan’s memoirs distance her from radical Fenian nationalism. In Twenty-Five Years (1913) she professed distaste for the Land League and assured her readers that Andrew Tynan was more in sympathy with Isaac Butt’s movement that ‘anything agrarian’.41 Later in this volume she declared: ‘I was very young, very simple, very enthusiastic, crammed to the lips with patriotic ardours, but just as much in sympathy with dynamite as any English person.’42 Her reminiscences of this period also advance the impression of a nationalism complicated by ambivalence. Describing the ‘frantic Irishism’ of one of her English hosts, Tynan confessed: ‘I was an Irish idyllist at that time, but even I could not go the length of believing that everything Irish was snow-white.’43 Her admissions to being ‘very frivolous then’ belie a nuanced nationalism out of keeping with that of her more radical friends. Believing that Ellen O’Leary secretly found her lacking in ‘the concentrated patriotism . . . that she looked for’, Tynan explained: ‘I think it was because I had arrived at a wider outlook and opportunities than fell to Rose Kavanagh, who was her ideal

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of young womanhood . . . Ellen O’Leary feared my flights into other air than Ireland’s, my growing circle of friends, my successes even, lest they should deprive Ireland of whatever I had to give her.’44 Even before her marriage and relocation to England, Tynan’s ambitions had broadened her national affiliations. Aware that success in London was vital to her literary career, she refused to restrict the locus of her identity to Ireland. Early on she had chosen a British identity, which she reinforced in retrospect by emphasising the liberal constitutionalism of her politics. Despite this, romantic nationalism shaped her literary discourse and the racial, historical and allegorical images of Ireland that it communicated. Tynan drew heavily on the canonical cult of the rebel-hero and the trope of Irish history as a narrative of resistance to British rule. Telling Edmund Downey about Katharine Tynan’s Book of Irish History (1918) she declared, ‘Every chapter of Irish history left her bleeding & broken but the opening of the new chapter found her renewed again.’45 Associated with the nationalist story of Ireland’s past was a narrative of race. Throughout the nineteenth century, racial and national discourses became increasingly synonymous.46 Tynan’s construction of race responded to a racial stadialism well-entrenched by the mid-1800s, which had structured post-Union didactic representations of the Irish.47 Her attempts to define the Irish through her historical writing and comparative stereotypes (the ‘Celt’, the ‘Anglo-Irish’ and the ‘Saxon’) were driven by a nationalist agenda which aimed to reconfigure Irish character by rupturing the British stadialist signification of the Irish as inferior: regional, primitive and barbaric. The introduction to her history depicts pre-Christian Ireland as a place of art, civilisation and order, of gentle warriors and chivalrous pagans.48 Her racial accounts almost always promote the ‘Irish-Irish’ to the detriment of the English or Anglo-Irish; in Twenty-Five Years the Anglo-Irish are an unappealing admixture of the worst of the English and Irish.49 She also presented Ireland as a place through comparison with England, frequently employing a vocabulary of gendered symbols or characteristics.50 Tynan’s depictions of a feminised Ireland followed the age-old convention that invoked Ireland as maid, mother and hag,51 but in particular they emulated patriotic nineteenth-century romantic literature, which had appropriated this trope.52 It is likely too that Tynan was influenced by the maiden symbolising Ireland in the Jacobite aisling. She shared Jacobite sympathies with her husband, her father and bother-in-law John O’Mahony (Norah’s husband),53 and was knowledgeable about Jacobite songs.54 Tynan’s references to her Jacobitism complicate her Britishness and answer to her Catholicism. For instance she recounts how, in the Mayo years of Henry’s Resident Magistracy, which were apparently short on

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amusement,55 the Hinksons diverted themselves by singing Jacobite songs or pretending to drink to ‘the King over the Water’ in order to provoke their Protestant Anglo-Irish friend, ‘Jack’ Milling, into ‘a fine rage with us and our rebelly opinions’.56 In Tynan’s portrait of Milling, his Britishness and inability to suit the West of Ireland is underlined by his antipathy towards Jacobitism, even as the Hinksons’ Irishness is fortified by their contrasting sympathies.57 For Andrew Tynan and his daughter, Jacobitism was also explicitly linked to Charles Stewart Parnell’s Messianic role as the one who would save Ireland from its false government. Tynan’s autobiography narrates how, in the years of his eminence, Parnell was associated with the Stuart cause by his followers. ‘For the first time we had a King for whom the sacrifice of life itself would not have been a hard thing. “Charlie is my darling,” we used to say as we lived over again the Jacobite passion of loyalty for our born King of men.’58 This association between Parnell and Charles Edward Stuart was clinched by their conformity to the archetype of noble failure, which fitted them into the trope of Ireland’s hopeless struggle against oppression. For Tynan, the national spirit thrived in the futility of the fight. Much later, as the Anglo-Irish war gave way to civil war, she declared of the Irish, ‘it must be a losing or a Lost Cause to inspire our utmost devotion . . . our Queen must be in chains to win the heart out of our breast.’59 The 1798 rebellion was held by Tynan, as by so many of her generation, as a particularly heroic episode in this narrative of futile opposition. Reacting to the gradual haemorrhage of memories of 1798, the approach of the centenary prompted a body of works that sought to reverse this process. The centennial movement began as early as 1879.60 The 1798 rebellion was already inspiring Tynan’s fiction by 188961 and her non-fiction certainly contributed to the rash of centennial commemorative literature.62 The doomed Lord Edward, ‘the bright, the beautiful, the immortally young’,63 commanded a peculiar hold over Tynan’s imagination, and was the object of an unashamed hero-worship as intense as that she professed for Parnell.64 Over a decade later, Tynan still worried that remembrance of 1798 was ebbing, unchecked. In Peeps at Many Lands: Ireland she subtly encouraged her readers to delve into Rebellion literature by describing an enticing selection.65 Subsequently, she produced Lord Edward: A Study in Romance (1916), a historical novel that culminated in the 1798 rebellion. Tynan’s representations of 1798 echo the refrain of the radical nationalist narratives of Young Ireland and later Fenian journalism, which represented it as a heroic rising against the perfidious and oppressive

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British regime,66 but in her own time she had looked for constitutional revolution under the aegis of the British Empire. This is not to exclude the combative element of her nationalism. It was as intrinsic to her constitutionalism as her Irishness was to her British identity. Influenced by Parnell’s example, she sought leadership capable of transmuting national spirit into Irish independence through legal reform. She found it in Lord Edwards’s great-great-grandson,67 George Wyndham, ‘who seemed to me Lord Edward come to life again’.68 Wyndham justified Tynan’s admiration by transforming the circumstances of the Irish peasantry through the ‘great’ Land Act of 1903,69 before being driven out of office as Chief Secretary in 1904. Redmond, who had succeeded Parnell as Leader of the Parnellite minority faction and headed the reconstituted Irish Party of 1900, did not inspire her. Her literary portrait of him for Memories (1924) echoed notes of the unpopularity with which he was viewed after the Easter Rising and the later success of Sinn Féin. She implicitly criticised what she perceived to be his bloodless constitutionalism and his easy incorporation into Westminster.70 With the outbreak of the Great War, she argued, it was this and his lack of statesmanship which prevented him from bargaining successfully for the settlement of Home Rule.71 ‘He had no genius of leadership,’ she reminisced.72 These views accord with those she privately expressed at the time.73 Tynan’s middle-class sensibility precluded socialist sympathies, yet her dynamic depictions of Jim Larkin and James Connolly contrast strikingly with her portrait of Redmond. She describes Larkin running heroically with a flaming torch, inflaming city and countryside. This, she averred, ‘was the beginning of the revolution’,74 for the 1913 Irish Transport and General Workers Union strike in Dublin, which escalated into a general lock-out, was (she wrote) ‘the genesis of the Easter Week, 1916, Rebellion’.75 ‘Behind’ Larkin, she observed, was Connolly: ‘a born leader of men, a most extraordinary man’.76 If Tynan’s non-fiction tended to sentimentalise the poor, she did not shirk from depicting the conditions of poverty.77 Her recognition of deprivation in Ireland is absorbed into her account of the impact of labour politics on the class into which she was raised, apparently accepting that change was due and would recognise no distinction. ‘The farmers and their wives and daughters, who had lived in easy comfort,’ she observed, ‘were as grieved and angry as the families of the good landlords when their social order came tumbling about their heads.’78 Tynan’s fiction described privation ameliorated through, rather than at the cost of, the social hierarchy,79 but the journalist in her observed the realities of political and social change.

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Empire Assimilation into English middle-class culture undoubtedly informed Tynan’s politics even as it delineated her social context. When the Hinksons returned to Ireland in 1911, they had new friends. ‘We returned to the Anglo-Irish having gone away from the Celts,’ she remarked in Years of the Shadow (1919), ‘and the Anglo-Irish of the suburbs . . . are very often remarkably like the same class in England.’80 Anne Coleman has suggested that Tynan’s middle-class British identity left her uninterested in nationalism, but this glosses over Tynan’s own construction of Irish nationalism.81 Nonetheless, as Ireland struggled towards political independence, she chose to be marginalised rather than abandon her British identity. Even in the troubled latter years of Henry’s Resident Magistracy, the Hinksons upheld British authority in the West of Ireland. Henry’s death in January 1919, about a month after Sinn Féin’s overwhelming electoral victory, saved him from having to choose between loyalty to the British government that he represented and support of Dáil Éireann.82 Perhaps he would have chosen the former. In 1905, he told Clement Shorter, ‘I fought my corner & followed Parnell . . . The most we nationalists desire is Grattan’s Parliament & that Parliament acknowledged the King of Gt Britain as King of Ireland, so I lift my glass to the King of Gt Britain & Ireland.’83 While Henry’s perspective was undoubtedly informed by his Protestantism (in 1910 he wrote as a Protestant Home Ruler to The Times, describing himself as ‘a Conservative and an Irish Protestant descended from Ulster Protestants on the one side and from Wicklow Orangemen on the other’84 ), his loyalties have implications for understanding Tynan’s position. Such monarchism contrasted sharply with republican anti-imperialism galvanised by the Boer War and expressed through public protests against the visits paid by Queen Victoria in 1900 and her son in 1903.85 Yet writing Middle Years from her home in Mayo, as the First World War wore on and nationalist separatism fermented into revolution in Dublin, Tynan emotively described the elderly Victoria writing in her own hand to those who grieved officers lost in action in the Boer War. ‘She had great qualities, the old Queen . . . There was something about her of the Divine Right, of the great days.’86 The implications of this would not have been lost upon her British audience, reading the book after its publication in 1916. It also held personal significance for Tynan, whose main contribution to the war effort (consistent with her repudiation of political activism) was writing letters of condolence.87 Tynan’s several volumes of war poetry88

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were a public extension of this work, and the incredibly popular poem ‘Flower of Youth’ was printed individually specifically for this purpose.89 In both her published and personal writings, Tynan wholeheartedly supported the British war effort. Both her sons enlisted: Toby joined the army at the end of 1915 and in May 1916, at the age of 17; Tynan’s younger son ‘Bunny’ (Patrick) was accepted into Sandhurst. She told Edmund Downey, ‘One could not bear to have a son who wished to stay.’90 She looked to the Irish sacrifice of life to heal the breach between the Irish and English. In a letter of complaint about some verses published in the Spectator that were ‘full of contemptuous dislike & misjudgement of the mere Irish’, Tynan told the editor: ‘this war . . . is ours as well as yours.’ For her, the publication of such inflammatory material was ‘pitiable now when Mr. Redmond is straining ever nerve in the recruiting . . .’91 She also protested to Denis Gwynn about the proGermanism of New Ireland,92 and explained, ‘I don’t think I’m exactly pro-English . . . But it seems to me that the very pick of our men have gone to the War, and it is pro-the noble companionship that I feel most strongly.’93 ‘One country was not enough for her,’ Monk Gibbon declared, ‘she needed two. She remained steadfastly loyal to Ireland, yet scrupulously fair to England.’94 After Henry’s death, as political tensions in Ireland intensified and violence escalated in the years following the war, Tynan stayed in Ireland only intermittently, residing mostly in England, Germany and France. Private letters in the early 1920s often mentioned the possibility of living in Ireland again, but only to describe the unsuitability of such a move.95 Kelly Lynch has argued that it was ‘impossible’ for Tynan to reside in Ireland at this time because of her political neutrality.96 Yet, perhaps Tynan was not so much neutral as unable to reconcile herself to the extremism of Republicanism. She was a conflation of Irish nationalist and British subject and does not seem to have entertained this as a dual nationality. As Ireland increasingly distanced itself from a British identity, she must have found her position increasingly uncomfortable. While she mourned the loss of the British Ireland that she had grown up in, she recognised that the hopes for an independent Ireland towards which so much of her own and her generation’s energies had been directed, were finally being fulfilled, after a fashion. During the civil war, Tynan (predictably) supported the Free State and made Michael Collins the object of her capacity for hero-worship, albeit more reservedly than in the case of Parnell.97 In 1922, she expressed the belief (based on her experience) ‘that 90 per cent of Ireland is for peace – hungering and

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thirsting for peace. The remaining 10 – roughly again – are young, without responsibilities, and they have got the revolvers.’ For Tynan, these self-indulgent intransigents were a disruptive minority; infected by warfever, unlike those who fought in the ‘European War’ they were not sated by it. Republicanism was ‘their crowded hour of glorious life’. She was also affronted by their appropriation of Irish identity: ‘the violent young have snatched our Ireland from us, as though we had no right to her,’ she complained.98 In July 1922, writing from Germany to Shorter she declared, ‘I am sure you feel with us that Collins had to save the country from anarchy, & the quicker & sharper, the blow the better. I am very glad the Free State troops stood firm.’99 Yet an ironic juxtaposition of two articles published in the English Times only a few weeks later highlights the inner tensions of Tynan’s political position. Next to a piece by her lamenting the passing of the Resident Magistrate and other examples of the British infrastructure in Ireland was an account of Collins’s funeral. In her article she had written: ‘In these latter days in Ireland one is always saying good-bye to something or other which has become dear from long usage, if nothing else. The Irish gentry are gone or going. The Irish regiments are gone. Yesterday it was the R.I.C. Today it is the resident magistracy . . . To one who hungers and thirsts for stability in this shifting world it is all very strange and disconcerting.’100

Conclusion: Politics and Self The political transfiguration of Ireland did not result in the realisation of Tynan’s vision of an independent Irish nation. In 1924, Tynan described herself to Clement Shorter as ‘utterly disillusioned’.101 Her career, marriage and political stance had accorded her a middle-class status removed from her rural background and rooted her in a British context. The Hinksons belonged to the Irish middle-class intelligentsia (both Catholic and Protestant) who looked to home rule to confirm upon them a secure place in Ireland’s future.102 When, in middle age, they returned to Ireland and Henry took up his Resident Magistracy, it was this that shaped their expectations. Tynan’s hopes were shattered by the impact of the First World War upon Irish politics and by Henry’s death, barely 2 months after peace was declared. The potential significance of Tynan’s writings for understanding Irish political life in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century has been largely overlooked. This is partly because she was not actively or directly concerned with movements such as the modern Irish fight for Independence or the campaign for female suffrage. It is also because her politicised views were convoluted and sometimes contradictory, reacting to personal and

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political change without following a prescribed ideology, and as such do not represent a defined position. Yet as a prolific letter writer, popular author and widely published journalist, Tynan’s writings effected considerable influence upon the imagining of Ireland and contemporary political issues. She was, consequently, engaged politically through her narratives. Ultimately, her politics, although they were fabricated from discourses of class, gender and national identity, remained unfettered by specific doctrines, and remind us that identity is inevitably contingent on self.

Notes 1. Pamela Hinkson, ‘The friendship of Yeats and Katharine Tynan. I: early days of the Irish Literary Revival’ The Fortnightly, vol. 174 (1953), p. 255. 2. Monk Gibbon (ed.), The Poems of Katherine Tynan (Dublin, 1963), p. 1. 3. Katharine Tynan, Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences (London, 1913), pp. 64–5. 4. Ibid., p. 62. 5. Norah Tynan O’Mahony, ‘Katharine Tynan’s girlhood’ Irish Monthly, vol. 59, no. 696 (1931), pp. 359, 362. 6. Ibid., p. 360. 7. Ibid., p. 358. 8. Tynan to Doctor Hake, letters dated 30 November 1885, 8 December 1885, and 26 January 1886, Add. 49469, Dr T. Gordon Hake Papers, British Library, London. 9. O’Mahony, ‘Katharine Tynan’s girlhood’, p. 362. 10. Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, p. 66; Katharine Tynan, Memories (London, 1924), pp. 399–400. 11. Dominic Daly, The Young Douglas Hyde: The Dawn of the Irish Revolution and Renaissance, 1874–1893 (Dublin, 1974), pp. 87–8. 12. Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, p. 27; see also Ann Connerton Fallon, Katharine Tynan (Boston, 1979), pp. 16–17. 13. Tynan Hinkson to Mrs Chesterton, letter dated 20 November 1913, f. 119, Add 73240, G. K. Chesterton Papers, British Library, London. 14. Fallon, Katharine Tynan, pp. 9, 173. 15. Jean Halladay identifies all eight of the poets analysed by her as products of the middle class, and all but one used journalism to support themselves, Eight Late Victorian Poets Shaping the Artistic Sensibility of an Age: Alice Meynell, John Davidson, Francis Thompson, Mary Coleridge, Katharine Tynan, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson (Lewiston, Queensland and Lampeter, 1993), p. 125. 16. Peter van de Kamp, ‘Tynan [married name Hinkson] Katharine (1859–1931)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). 17. Application from Tynan to the Royal Literary Fund, London, dated 31 January 1917, and letter from Tynan to A. Llewelyn Roberts, Secretary for the Fund, dated 22 January 1917, MS 1077/124 (Case File 3028), Archives of the Royal Literary Fund, British Library, London. 18. Although her poetry became less profitable to publish, she did maintain success with her novels. Susan Schreibman, ‘Katharine Tynan (1859–1931)’

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19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Class, Nation, Gender and Self in Abigail Burnham Bloom (ed.) Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (London, 2000), p. 391. File entitled: ‘Letters relating to subscription for Katharine Tynan’ Walter de la Mare Papers [uncatalogued], Bodleian Library, Oxford. Hinkson, ‘The friendship of Yeats and Katharine Tynan. I’ The Fortnightly, vol. 174, (1953), p. 262. See also R. F. Foster for Yeats’s connection to Oldham and a reference to the Club: W. B. Yeats: A Life. I. The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1998), p. 41. O’Mahony, ‘Katharine Tynan’s girlhood’, p. 362. Tynan, Memories, pp. 12–3; Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, pp. 71, 75, 79, 99; Katharine Tynan, The Years of the Shadow (London, 1919), p. 63. Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, p. 81. Tynan to D. J. O’Donoghue, letters dated 18 February 1893, LA15/1619; 16 March 1893, LA 15/1626, D. J. O’Donoghue Papers, UCD, Dublin. Martin Pugh, The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage 1866–1914 (Oxford, 2000), p. 188. Katharine Tynan, letter to the editor of The Times, 1 November 1906; see also Katharine Tynan, Years of the Shadow (London 1919), p. 109. Caitriona Clear, Women of the House: Women’s Household Work in Ireland, 1922–1961 (Dublin, 2000), p. 27. Katharine Tynan, ‘A trumpet call to Irish women’ in William G. FitzGerald (ed.), The Voice of Ireland (Dublin, 1924), pp. 171, 174. See also Clear, Women of the House, pp. 27–45, for perceptions of women, domesticity and public life in Ireland 1923–43. Katharine Tynan, A Little Book for Mary Gill’s Friends (Harting, 1906), pp. 3, 4; see also Katharine Tynan, ‘Frances Wynne: a memory’ in Frances Wynne (ed.), Whisper! (London, 1908), pp. 7–9. Katharine Tynan, Peeps at Many Lands: Ireland (London, 1909), p. 55; probably the same encounter is used to similar effect in Katharine Tynan, ‘Irish types and traits’ Magazine of Art, vol. 15 (1891–2), pp. 211–2. Katharine Tynan, ‘Our daughters future’ in The Times, 11 April 1922. Ibid., 1 May 1922. Susan Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (New Jersey, 1993), pp. 116–25. Tynan quoted from T.P.’s Weekly describing her father’s bibliophilia, Irish Book Lover, vol. 4, no. 7, (1913), pp. 127–8. Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, p. 41. The emergence of the national literary movement in the 1880s was recognised by Herbert Howarth, The Irish Writers, 1880–1940: Literature Under Parnell’s Star (London, 1958), p. 5, see also R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. I. The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1998), p. 41. Tynan to Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, letter dated 16 June 1890, MS.8005 (34) Gavan Duffy Papers, NLI, Dublin. Tynan, Memories (London, 1924), pp. 166–7. R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82 (Dublin 1998), p. 204. Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, p. 99. Ibid., pp. 71–2. Ibid., p. 134.

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43. The host was Reverend Henry Stuart Fagan. Ibid., p. 118. 44. Tynan, Memories, p. 95. 45. Tynan to Edmund Downey, letter dated 1 February 1917, MS.10,027 Edmund Downey Papers, National Library of Ireland, Dublin. 46. Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork, 1996), pp. 22–3. 47. Kevin Whelan, ‘Writing Ireland: Reading England’ in Glenn Hooper and Leon Litvack (eds), Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity (Dublin, 2000), pp. 185–98. 48. Katharine Tynan, Katharine Tynan’s Book of Irish History (Dublin and Belfast, 1918), pp. 5–9. 49. Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, p. 144; see also p. 69. 50. Tynan, Peeps at Many Lands: Ireland, pp. 23–4; see also Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, p. 63. 51. On the use of female imagery to represent Ireland, see for example Rosalind Clark, The Great Queens: Irish Goddesses from the Morrígan to Cathleen Ní Houlihan, Irish Literary Studies 34 (Gerrards Cross, 1991); C. L. Innes, Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, 1880–1935 (Athens, 1993); Scott Brewster, Virginia Crossman, Fiona Beckett and David Alderson (eds), Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (London, 1999). 52. For the creation of political romantic literary representations of Ireland in a gendered form in the 1800s, see Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, p. 54, and Mary Helen Thuente, ‘The folklore of Irish nationalism’ in Thomas E. Hachey and Lawrence J. McCaffrey (eds), Perspectives on Irish Nationalism (Kentucky, 1989), pp. 53–4. 53. For the resurgence of Jacobitism in the late 1800s, see Ian Fletcher, W.B. Yeats and his Contemporaries (Brighton, 1987), pp. 83–123. 54. Tynan to John O’Leary, letter dated 16 March 1893, LA15/1626 D. J. O’Donoghue Papers, University College Dublin, Dublin; Katharine Tynan, A Little Book for John O’Mahony’s Friends (Harting, 1906), pp. 4–5; K. Tynan to James Nicol Dunn, letter dated 18 April 1889, MS.10,657(2), National Library of Ireland, Dublin. 55. Katharine Tynan, The Wandering Years (London, 1922), pp. 28–30. 56. Ibid., p. 51. 57. Ibid., p. 51. For information about John Charles Milling (1873–1919) see Penny Bonsall, The Irish RMs: The Resident Magistrates in the British Administration in Ireland (Dublin, 1997), pp. 134–53. 58. Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, p. 336; see also Tynan, The Middle Years, p. 101. 59. Tynan, The Wandering Years, pp. 127–8; see also Katharine Tynan, ‘William Butler Yeats,’ interview in the Sketch, 4 (29 November 1893), transcribed by Carolyn Holdsworth, in ‘ “Shelley Plain”: Yeats and Katharine Tynan,’ in Richard J. Finneran (ed.), Yeats Annual No. 2 (London and Basingstoke, 1983), p. 87. 60. R. F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London, 2002), pp. 219–22. 61. For example, her short story: Katharine Tynan, ‘A girl’s stratagem’ Merry England, no. 71 (1889), pp. 349–61.

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62. Louise Imogen Guiney to Tynan, letters dated 20 March 1897 and 26 March 1897 KTH 1/360/16a-b and KTH 1/360/18a, Tynan/Hinkson Collection, John Rylands Library, Manchester. 63. Tynan, Twenty-Five Years, p. 3. 64. Ibid., p. 86; Tynan, The Middle Years, p. 184; see also Katharine Tynan, Lord Edward (London, 1916). 65. Tynan, Peeps at Many Lands: Ireland, pp. 41–3. 66. Foster, The Irish Story, pp. 216–17. 67. ‘Notices of new books: Lord Edward’ the Irish Book Lover, vol. 9, nos. 9–10 (1917), p. 112. 68. Tynan, The Middle Years, p. 226. 69. Ibid., p. 224. 70. Tynan, Memories, pp. 67–8. 71. Ibid., p. 71. 72. Ibid., p. 73. 73. Tynan to Edmund Downey, letter dated 1 February 1917, MS.10,027 Edmund Downey Papers, National Library of Ireland, Dublin. 74. Tynan, The Years of the Shadow, pp. 7–8. 75. Ibid., p. 74. 76. Ibid., p. 78. 77. Ibid., pp. 7–8, pp. 74–8; Tynan, Peeps at Many Lands: Ireland, pp. 4–5; Tynan, ‘A trumpet call to Irish women’ in FitzGerald (ed.), The Voice of Ireland, pp. 172–3. 78. Tynan, The Years of the Shadow, p. 8. 79. Katherine Sutherland observes that while Tynan’s novels expresses sympathy for the poor, Tynan advocated ‘a system of charity and noblesse oblige as the solution to poverty’, ‘Katharine Tynan’ in George M. Johnson (ed.), Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 153 (Detroit, 1995), p. 310. 80. Tynan, The Years of the Shadow, p. 1. 81. Colman has claimed that Tynan’s middle classness and Britishness ‘may explain why she was not attracted to Irish Nationalism’. Anne Coleman, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Poets (Galway, 1996), p. 221. 82. For the political position of Resident Magistrates in the Anglo-Irish war, see Bonsall, The Irish RMs, pp. 110–15. 83. Hinkson to Shorter, letter dated 12 December 1905, BC Shorter Correspondence, Clement Shorter Papers, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 84. Henry Hinkson ‘The position of Protestants under home rule’, letter to The Times, 27 December 1910. 85. James Murphy has described how nationalist perceptions of the British monarchy changed through the course of the nineteenth century in ‘Fashioning the famine queen’ in Peter Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 15–17. See also: Senia Pašeta, ‘Nationalist responses to two royal visits to Ireland, 1900 and 1903’ Irish Historical Studies, vol. xxxi, no. 124 (1999), pp. 488–504; P. J. Matthews, ‘Stirring up disloyalty: the Boer War, the Irish Literary Theatre and the emergence of a new separatism’ Irish University Review, vol. 33, no. 1 (2003), pp. 99–116. 86. Tynan, The Middle Years, p. 221.

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87. May Sinclair to Tynan, letter dated 27 December 1915, KTH 1/900/71a Tynan/Hinkson Collection, John Rylands Library, Manchester; see also Tynan, Years of the Shadow, p. 176; Tynan to Denis Gwynn, letter dated 11 Sept 1915, MS.10,737 Francis Bourke Collection, National Library of Ireland, Dublin. 88. Katharine Tynan, Flower of Youth: Poems in War-Time (London, 1915); The Holy War (London, 1916); Late Songs (London, 1917); Herb o’ Grace: Poems in War-Time (London, 1918). 89. Tynan refers to this in Years of the Shadow, pp. 175–6, and Tynan to Mrs Weigell, letter dated 3 August 1915, MS.21,700, unspecified collection NLI, Dublin. See also Sidgwick & Jackson to Tynan, letter dated 12 April 1915, Letter Book 32. For the donation of proceeds to the Red Cross Hospital, see Sidgwick & Jackson to Tynan, letters dated 3 May 1915, Letter Book 33, and 17 March 1916, Letter Book 36, MS Sidgwick & Jackson, Bodleian Library, Oxford. For information about more conventional voluntary war work by women, including their contribution to the Red Cross, see Eileen Reilly, ‘Women and voluntary war work’ in Adrian Gregory and Senia Pašeta (eds), Ireland and the Great War: ‘A War to Unite Us All?’ (Manchester, 2002), pp. 49–72. 90. Tynan to Edmund Downey, letter dated 22 February 1916, MS.10,027, Edmund Downey Papers, NLI, Dublin. 91. ‘Diary Volume A: A Woman’s Notes in Wartime by Katharine Tynan Hinkson’, unpublished diary, Tynan/Hinkson Papers, John Rylands University Library, Manchester, p. 37. 92. Tynan to Denis Gwynn, letter dated 11 Sept 1915, MS.10,737, Francis Bourke Collection of Letters, NLI, Dublin. 93. Tynan to Denis Gwynn, letter dated 6 October 1915, MS.10,737, Francis Bourke Collection of Letters, NLI, Dublin. 94. Monk Gibbon (ed.), The Poems of Katherine Tynan (Dublin, 1963), p. 2. 95. Tynan Hinkson to Mr de la Mare, letter dated 19 August 1922, Walter de la Mare Papers [uncatalogued], Bodleian Library, Oxford; Tynan to Clement Shorter, letters dated 8 May 1923, 4 December 1922, BC Shorter Correspondence, Clement Shorter Papers, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 96. M. Kelly Lynch, ‘Tynan, Katharine,’ in Robert Hogan (ed.), Dictionary of Irish Literature: Revised and Expanded Edition. M-Z (London, 1996), p. 1208. 97. For an unequivocal declaration that she was a ‘Free Stater’, see Tynan Hinkson to Clement, letter dated 4 December 1922, BC Shorter Correspondence, Clement Shorter Papers, Brotherton Library, Leeds. For Collins, see Tynan, The Wandering Years, pp. 203–4. 98. Katharine Tynan, ‘The tyrannies of Ireland: youth and the revolver’, The Times, 16 May 1922. 99. Tynan Hinkson to Clement, letter dated 8 July 1922, BC Shorter Correspondence, Clement Shorter Papers, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 100. Katharine Tynan, ‘The Resident Magistrate’, The Times, 28 August 1922. 101. Tynan to Clement Shorter, letter dated 25 February 1924, BC Shorter Correspondence, Clement Shorter Papers, Brotherton Library, Leeds. 102. Senia Pašeta, Before the Revolution: Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Elite, 1879–1922 (Cork, 1999).

11 Leadership, the Middle Classes and Ulster Unionism since the Late-Nineteenth Century N. C. Fleming

It is generally observed by scholars and commentators that the so-called middle class took control of Ulster unionism in the early twentieth century – and abandoned it, and politics generally, from the outbreak of political violence in the late 1960s.1 Put like this, it is an intriguing juxtaposition, but it is not appropriate, for reasons this essay attempts to outline. Such a task, of course, is fraught with pitfalls. Theorists have long questioned how historians apply ‘class’ as an analytical tool and not many scholars have given serious attention to Ulster unionism. If these are considerable obstacles, then they are not impassable. First, the assumptions on which this essay is based are drawn from the modernisation model of social change. The rationale for adopting this approach is provided by Joseph Lee, who, in applying the term to his own work, hoped that it ‘may prove immune to the parochial preoccupations implicit in equally elusive and more emotive concepts’.2 Second, the modernisation model, after Max Weber, argues that social change leads to political change, enabling this essay to focus on class and leadership. Third, this aim allows the essay to utilise existing scholarship on Ulster unionism, most of which concentrates on those who led the movement. It is argued here that the changing make-up, political participation and function of the middle classes had a significant impact on the leadership of Ulster unionism. This is not to deny or subvert previous rationalisations of Unionist political behaviour. Rather, it is suggested here that existing historical studies of Unionist high politics and identity can be complemented with an attempt at examining the effect of social change on the leadership. For this purpose, ‘leadership’ includes the party leader, his cabinet of senior ministers and the parliament of Northern Ireland. It also includes Unionist MPs at Westminster, but only 212

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when they were politically relevant, that is, in the periods before and after the existence of a parliament at Belfast.3 Examining the role of parliamentarians recognises that leadership is not merely about taking decisions at the top. Backbench MPs are, after all, leading figures in their constituencies, and their support, or at least acquiescence, is required by the party leader. Equally, why a person or social group is assumed to have the qualities of leadership, locally and nationally, is also relevant, as is how they exercise it, in private and in public. Patrick Buckland’s landmark 1973 study of Ulster unionism avoided class analysis, but subsequent studies have addressed it, albeit focusing on unionism’s first phase of organisation (c. 1884–1904), when class tensions and alliances were instrumental in shaping the movement. Peter Gibbon, applying a Marxist approach, argued that the bourgeoisie assumed control of unionism in the early 1890s.4 Alvin Jackson, however, rejected this by demonstrating that it is not possible to talk of a middle-class takeover until the formation of the Ulster Unionist Council in 1904–5, and the mass mobilisation of 1912 in response to the third home rule bill.5 Comparatively little, however, has been written about the middle classes and Ulster unionism outside this period, except to say that ‘they’ have remained in control ever since ‘their’ takeover in 1904, or, if you prefer, 1892. The problem with this is that the middle classes changed in composition considerably in the decades that followed. The late-Victorian middle class – those who derived their income from business or the professions, and who owned property – were by the inter-war years considered an ‘upper middle class’, or even ‘upper class’, many working-class people having been subsumed into the middling sort by a significant expansion in non-manual jobs.6 This pattern of social mobility has been repeated ever since, leading some to conclude that ‘we are all middle class now’ and that class has ceased to be a meaningful analytical tool. This development confirms that whereas ‘class’ once shaped politics, its dwindling relevance in recent decades having created difficulties for political parties wedded to the old class model. This is more obvious in the British context, particularly for Labour, but this essay argues it is equally applicable to the study of Ulster unionism.

Landlords and the middle class in nineteenth-century unionism Throughout the nineteenth century a variety of activists attempted to harness pan-Protestantism for political purposes, particularly in Ulster

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where non-Catholics made up around half of the province’s population. The most successful instances of this occurred in the late 1820s, in opposition to Daniel O’Connell, and in 1886, in opposition to W. E. Gladstone’s first home rule bill. The deep sense of crisis generated by these two events encouraged Protestants of all classes and denominations to bury their differences. The temporary nature of the earlier alliance allowed pan-Protestantism to unravel as Irish politics returned to localised preoccupations, so that even in the 1870s, when Isaac Butt’s home rule party was making significant advances in south and west Ireland, Liberals and Tories in the northeast continued to oppose each other in urban and rural Ulster. Both parties received support across Ulster, drawing their leaders from land, industry and the professions. In the early 1880s, the Liberals were strongest among Presbyterian farmers and businessmen; their leadership drawn from the latter. Conservatives also attracted significant Presbyterian support, but they were strongest among Anglicans of all classes. In rural Ulster, their leadership, as it was across Ireland, was supplied by the landed elite. In Belfast, however, the Tory party was cut from a different cloth. As with the rest of the United Kingdom, urban politics in Ulster was the preserve of wealthy businessmen and professionals, many of whom over time had abandoned their affiliations to the dissenting churches and Liberalism. The urban middle class had come to regard city and town halls as their source of political satisfaction and reward, not least because of the heavy costs of being an MP and the slim chances of obtaining ministerial office.7 The privileged position of middle-class burghers became less certain following the extension in 1868 of the electoral franchise in parliamentary boroughs. In Belfast, it prompted the predominantly Tory bourgeoisie to accommodate politically the city’s loyalist working classes, with businessmen patronising the Orange Order and proletarian representatives included in party committees.8 In a like manner, a relatively cordial rapport was maintained between the city fathers and Ulster’s landed elite, not least because each avoided interfering in the other’s patch. This facilitated the cultivation of good relations between the two social groups for mutual political, social and economic advantage, a process described by F. M. L. Thompson as ‘aristocratic embrace’.9 Belfast Tories, therefore, supported landlords in the frontier counties during the 1883 ‘Invasion of Ulster’, precipitating an influx of privileged members into the Orange Order in both areas, thereby strengthening political bonds between Protestants of all classes and localities. In contrast, the Ulster Liberals found themselves caught

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between opposing Parnellite land agitation and supporting many of its demands. Struggling to maintain their loyalist credentials, just as the electoral franchise was further extended in 1884, the Liberals were dealt a death blow immediately before the 1885 general election by the ‘Hawarden Kite’. This aided the efforts of Ulster Tories – in particular their energetic professional organiser, E. S. Finnigan – and nationalists in squeezing the Liberal vote to the point that not one Liberal was returned.10 The result of these developments was that landlords, mainly representing Ulster, were effectively the leaders of Irish loyalism. They made up half of the 18 MPs who in January 1886 formed an Irish loyalist parliamentary party. Along with a pool of support back home, they organised and presided over events and associations to harness popular loyalist feeling and engender a greater sense of pan-Protestantism. The middle class was not absent from the leadership at this stage, but it was at a distinct disadvantage. Only two industrialists represented Ulster constituencies, a fall from four at the previous general election in 1880. And although six lawyers were again returned, their presence cannot necessarily be assumed to mark the progress of the middle class; barristers, especially those with political ambitions, had served landlordism well in the past, and strong familial connections existed between the land and the bar, such as the loyalist MP, W. G. Ellison-Macartney.11 Their Liberal contemporaries certainly took no comfort from this legal cohort, but with their erstwhile hero Gladstone pressing ahead with a home rule bill, and Liberal-Unionists in Britain working closely with the Conservatives they had little choice other than to reconcile themselves to the situation, at least in the short term. Having accepted Tory suzerainty, albeit as an impermanent feature, Liberals began to make their influence felt within unionism. The main beneficiaries of this, at least at the level of leadership, were the increasing numbers of professionals, industrialists and merchants returned to Westminster at subsequent general elections. This was not merely a matter of agitating for place. Landlords had assumed a demanding and unrewarding position in claiming to speak for a movement that embraced Liberal tenant farmers, industrialists and skilled and unskilled labour. The party leader, Edward Saunderson, struggled on many occasions to support land reforms that benefited a sizable constituency within unionism, and landlord MPs were further hamstrung by an inability to deal with complicated legislation, which left them reliant on their colleagues in the legal profession.12 The strain of leadership felt by representatives from the landed elite occurred just as leading

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bourgeois families were shaking off a hitherto prevalent reluctance to enter national politics. This saw the percentage share of industrialist and merchant loyalist MPs rise from 11 per cent in 1885 to 50 per cent at the 1906 general election. In this ascent, they even outpaced professionals, who in 1892 had overtaken landlords as the dominant occupational group in the parliamentary party. If the landed elite were a diminishing force at the highest ranks of Ulster unionism, then at no point was a decisive blow inflicted on them by the middle class. Instead, each cast themselves as joint custodians of unionism, a mutual recognition that contributed significantly to the movement’s unity and finances. This process is first evident in 1891, in the efforts to resurrect and enhance the organisation of unionism in southern Ireland and Ulster. In the case of the latter, an executive committee of landlords, industrialists and working-class delegates met to organise a massive ‘Ulster Convention’ for the following year. On 17 June 1892, 12,000 people gathered at the convention to hear a range of speakers on four separate platforms. Represented almost equally, landlords and industrialists – such as lords Erne and Caledon, the Belfast Tories Sir William Ewart and Sir Edward Harland, and the Liberal Thomas Sinclair – countered their enemies’ suggestion that Irish unionism, particularly in Ulster, was a mere landlord party.13 At the same time, their combined presence emphasised to all gathered before them that landlords and their bourgeois allies were the natural leaders of loyalist Ulster.

Increasing influence of the middle class The steadily increasing importance of the middle class within the Irish Unionist movement mirrored contemporaneous developments within the British Unionist and Liberal parties. In all three cases the most prestigious posts were still claimed by the landed elite, but it was on the understanding that they did not prioritise their own interests, and that the middle class had a presence in the parties’ highest councils. Saunderson, who remained leader of the Irish Unionists until his death in 1906, was therefore obliged to temper his ambivalent attitude to land reform and lend his support to the 1898 Local Government bill, giving the Irish rural middle class a powerful voice in new county councils. If the movement was recognising the increasing status of the middle class, it nevertheless remained antiquated and unprofessional in its organisation and make-up. At first, this only seemed to harm landlord parliamentarians, with several of them challenged in their constituencies for the

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first time, at the 1900 general election, by rival loyalist candidates. But the discontent expressed openly on this occasion only increased in frequency in the years that immediately followed. Its chief spokesman was Thomas Sloan, firebrand leader of the plebeian Belfast Protestant Association, whose anti-elite invective threatened not only the unity but also the authority of unionism in Ulster. Sloan’s militancy was nothing new, but the recent expansion of the Orange Order gave him a greater potential pool of adherents, and his anti-establishment attitude challenged not only landlord MPs, but also the industrial and professional middle-class. This group had to protect its interests in such a way as to ensure that Unionist cross-class solidarity remained intact. The ideal opportunity was provided by the 1904 ‘Devolution Crisis’, for it allowed nine Irish Unionist MPs to attribute the reason for radical organisational change to an external factor: the unreliability of English politicians to safeguard loyalists from a Catholicdominated national assembly. These MPs seized the initiative by calling a series of meetings in the autumn of 1904 to ‘discuss the advisability of founding a central Ulster association’.14 The key figures in this episode came from business and the professions, but all had a history of supporting landlords. They included the barrister William Moore MP, and his parliamentary colleagues Charles Craig and J. B. Lonsdale, both of whom hailed from wealthy family-business backgrounds.15 The organisation they voted into existence on 2 December 1904, the Ulster Unionist Council (UUC), did not disrupt the existing hierarchy of unionism. Rather, it legitimised it through the creation of a council of several hundred – committing a great range of delegates to one decisionmaking body – and ensuring that the ruling committee was controlled by activists from the middle class and landed elite. With Ulster unionism safely bureaucratised, the middle class had no need to remove Saunderson from the leadership. Even after his death, they appointed another landlord, the English Tory Walter Long, as the leader of their parliamentary party. With constituency associations across Ulster established on a permanent footing, delivering a more professional approach to political activism, the UUC steadily marginalised Sloanite opposition, eclipsing him entirely just as unionism prepared itself for its greatest test of resolve: the third home rule bill. When Long resigned in 1910, the UUC leadership replaced him with Sir Edward Carson. Born and raised in Dublin, Carson was an unconventional choice for an increasingly regionalised movement, but the King’s Counsel and one-time solicitor-general was chosen for his gifts as an orator and advocate, professional qualities that were urgently needed

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if the UUC sought to control its supporters and spar effectively with opponents in parliament. The pressing need for this arose out of the budget and constitutional crises of 1909–10, and it was paralleled in the Conservative party by the appointment of its first middle-class leader, Andrew Bonar Law. Carson, however, was not selected to personally provide a blueprint for success; his appointment and much of his subsequent actions were the work of James Craig, younger brother of Charles, and Carson’s eventual successor.16 In this sense, Carson occupied a decorative role in the movement similar to that of his two predecessors, the main difference being that Carson could better articulate, justify and legitimise Ulster unionism in the eyes of its natural supporters and British observers. This was achieved in some measure through the organisation from 1912 of mass rallies and displays of strength, the increasing frequency of which helped to create a sense of loyalist solidarity and bolster the Unionist leadership. Concern about the latter was a reaction to the obvious determination of some grassroots loyalists to oppose home rule through voluntary drilling. The UUC attempted to harness and control this disparate mobilisation, creating in 1913 the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). However, recent research suggests that the command structures and organisation of the UVF were not effective.17 This not only challenges the notion of a UVF universally led by the gentry, but also demonstrates the noticeable absence of the middle class. In the case of shopkeepers and small businessmen, it seems the threat of a nationalist boycott was enough to make many refuse prominent roles within the UVF. The upper middle class was similarly conspicuous in its absence, although the financial help of some cannot be ignored. However fashioned the image of Unionist solidarity in this period, the leadership were able to use it to their considerable advantage in negotiations before, during and after the First World War. It ensured they remained in control of the UUC, despite occasional rumbles of discontent, and that they were granted, by default, a devolved parliament within the United Kingdom for the six northeastern counties of Ireland. But the very success of Ulster unionism in this period, and the strategy adopted by its largely middle-class command, would in the long run undermine the movement and its leaders, by making them reliant on populist policies that deepened divisions in Ulster, and which promoted a sense of complacency among Unionists that ill-prepared them for future structural changes in Ulster’s society and economy. In the meantime, as the government of Northern Ireland, Unionist leaders made the most of what they had.

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The experience of government Casting themselves as the custodians of unionism, the middle class reaped the benefits by dominating the government and parliament established at Belfast in June 1921. Although Craig’s first cabinet contained a cross section of the Unionist elite, claims to public office still outweighed professional competence. H.M. Pollock, a company director and former president of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce, was appointed Minister of Finance, and was the only minister with a professional background that qualified him for his post. He was joined around the cabinet table by John M. Andrews, a company director and minor landowner whom Craig chose as his Minister of Labour. The solicitor and one-time UUC secretary, Richard Dawson Bates, took Home Affairs. Landowners were appointed to the remaining two posts of agriculture and education. Craig held the premiership until his death in November 1940. He made only six additional appointments to his cabinet, to replace outgoing or reshuffled ministers: J. M. Barbour, a company director, in 1925; Viscount Charlemont, a landowner, in 1926; Basil Brooke, a landowner, in 1933; David Shillington, proprietor of a general merchant’s shop, in 1937; J. H. Robb, a lawyer, also in 1937; and J. F. Gordon, a flax manager, in 1938. The contrast in the social status of Craig’s first appointments and those made later in his premiership is stark. It reflects, no doubt, the existence of backbench criticism over his appointment of Charlemont, but also, more significantly, the need for his vanguard to acknowledge the middle class, a broadening social group no longer restricted to the large employer and banker, but now extended to include the everexpanding ranks of salaried employees required by the post-war state and economy. Like the government, the House of Commons remained a bastion of the upper middle class, particularly business and the professions. This was compensated by the Senate, in effect, a repository for those groups the upper middle class sought to appease (while at the same time limiting their scope for interfering in the legislative process). Around half the 115 senators elected by the House of Commons during the lifetime of the devolved parliament were small businessmen. Alongside them sat a disproportionate number of landowners and a significant, though hardly representative, number of unskilled and skilled workers. This arrangement of selective inclusion made it unlikely that constituency association selection committees would choose a parliamentary candidate outside the professions and business. Out of the 161

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MPs elected to Stormont from 1921 to 1969, 55 were higher professionals, 55 managerial and executive and only 18 ‘agrarians’, a group that included both the landed elite and farmers.18 The success of businessmen MPs at the 1906 Westminster general election had clearly made a lasting mark on the Unionist party, and the return of so many in the 1920s and 1930s was due in part to a campaign by the Belfast Chamber of Commerce to elect ‘competent’ businessmen.19 However, the poor economic performance of Northern Ireland, and other developments outlined below, contributed gradually to a reduction in their strength; from a high of 43 per cent of MPs in 1921, and 41 per cent in 1949, to 22 per cent in 1969. This trend also reflected the changing composition of the middle classes and, as a consequence, the socio-economic backgrounds from which politicians were drawn. During the same period, the higher professions increased their presence, from 23 per cent in 1921, to 33 per cent in 1969. And, although the progress of the lower professions was initially less remarkable, remaining at 5 per cent, it experienced a sharp rise to 11 per cent in 1969.20 The failure of a parliament of businessmen to tackle economic decline was not unique to Northern Ireland, but was exacerbated there by the Ulster Unionists’ reliance on populist policies and the closeness of the regional parliament to its electors.21 The need to maintain unionist unity meant that the conservative economic outlook of small businessmen and farmers had a disproportionate influence on policy, despite the marginalisation of their kind to the Senate. Their periodic campaigns to cut government ‘waste’ were dutifully taken up in the House of Commons, although Unionist MPs betrayed their own instincts by also calling for industry to receive greater assistance from the state.22 These contradictory demands, according to two economists at Queen’s University in 1955, were a product of the parliament’s inability ‘to make use of any of those techniques by which separate countries follow a policy of economic independence’.23 Widespread frustration with this situation led the former Westminster Unionist MP, W. J. Stewart, a company director, to form the Progressive Unionist Party in the late 1930s. His calls for a more interventionist approach to economic and social problems earned his party 47,888 votes at the 1938 Stormont general election. The variation of businesses in Northern Ireland, the need for MPs to articulate the concerns of small businesses and the determination of Unionists to maintain a devolved parliament combined to make it difficult for any clear and consistent economic policy to emerge, other than

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a dependency on the British exchequer. The Second World War did little to improve this situation, despite providing a much-needed boost to heavy industry, for the high yield it required could not be fully satisfied, and wartime controls heightened tensions between the government and small businessmen and farmers. When, therefore, the 69-year-old Andrews succeeded Craig as premier in 1940, he inherited mounting criticism of a party in government for almost two decades. A series of by-election defeats in solidly Unionist constituencies, and his government’s fatal neglect of Belfast’s air defences, contributed to his downfall in May 1943. These events also ensured that he was succeeded by the younger and more dynamic Minister of Commerce, Sir Basil Brooke.

The difficulties of power At first glance, Brooke’s appointment appears to be a reversal of the modernisation process, a baronet replacing an industrialist. However, Brooke achieved his premiership in much the same way that Winston Churchill had 3 years before: through a reputation for resolute wartime leadership. Brooke emphasised his claim by appointing an atypically well-qualified team to his cabinet. The Ministry of Finance was given to Maynard Sinclair, previously an employee at Eagle Star Insurance; Home Affairs to the barrister William Lowry; Education to a professor of theology, Robert Corkey; Agriculture to the Rev. Robert Moore, one-time president of the Ulster Farmers’ Union; and Labour to the former shipwright William Grant. And in a pale imitation of the British wartime coalition, Brooke appointed to Public Security the former Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) MP, Harry Midgley. The new prime minister restored confidence in the party and his government. To ensure this continued he and his cabinet adopted a threefold strategy of party revitalisation, welfare reform and populism. The party’s wartime by-election losses and the ongoing conflict ensured that party reform came first. The recently appointed UUC secretary, William Douglas, devoted his considerable experience and energy to revitalising the movement, implementing the recommendations of younger members such as J. O. Bailie; both men had a professional background in politics, Bailie succeeding Douglas in 1963. But, as a process of revitalisation rather than reform, the party remained vulnerable to popular excesses. The demand for the extension of the welfare state to the province, despite its Labour provenance, was intended to secure the Union and

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the hegemony of the Unionist leadership. Nevertheless, it was a strategy fraught with problems. On the one hand, it caused considerable unease among middle-class Unionist MPs and supporters. On the other, it increased the party’s subservience to populism, and in ways that were not foreseen, reducing further its ability to take decisive action that might help preserve the constitutional status quo and tackle economic decline. Middle-class hostility to the welfare state was not based solely on fears of higher taxation. Unionist MPs, after all, had voted for welfare legislation in the past. What was different in the late 1940s was that Unionists were in effect implementing Labour policy, despite having attacked the party at the 1945 general election, and at every previous election since 1918. Labour was as much a hereditary enemy as Irish nationalism, and many feared that the leftward drift of British and Unionist policy would give a boost to the NILP, thereby endangering the very existence of Northern Ireland by splitting the Protestant vote. This was not an entirely irrational fear. At Stormont elections, the Ulster Unionists usually polled around 50 per cent of votes cast, a figure easily vulnerable to upsets such as in 1933, when it plummeted to 44 per cent. In the past, Unionist leaders tried to limit the effect of such occurrences through gerrymandering, and by imitating welfare reforms passed by the National Government. In this sense, Brooke’s strategy in the late 1940s was not as innovative at it at first seemed, but the sheer scale of what he undertook, and the increasing sectarian tensions of the period, meant that it had unintended consequences that did much to harm the leadership of, and increase divisions within, the middle classes.

Populism and Unionist politics If the bulk of the Unionist party reluctantly backed Brooke’s welfare policy, just like their Conservative cousins at Westminster, then some found a way of criticising them that proved popular among militant Protestants. These largely working-class Unionists were obviously pleased with the National Health Service and similar provisions, but they were displeased that these British benefits were shared with ‘disloyal’ nationalists, allowing some right-wing MPs to half-articulate their opposition to the welfare state and yet gain a popular following. In the short term, their fuelling of sectarian tensions benefited the government, helping Brooke turn the Anti-Partition campaign of the late 1940s to his advantage by making the 1949 Stormont election a border poll, securing the party’s highest vote since 1921. Brooke’s brief

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attempt thereafter to face down right-wing critics within his party was by the early 1950s cut short as the threat of the Anti-Partition campaign receded. At the 1953 Stormont election, the party’s vote fell from 237,461 to 125,379. In one notable contest, the independent Unionist, Norman Porter, director of the Protestant Evangelical Society, took by 345 votes the seat of the progressive Minister of Education, Colonel Samuel Hall-Thompson. Brooke responded to this bloody nose by attempting to appease militant Protestantism, his most notable concession being the controversial Flags and Emblems Act of 1954. But if this strategy was an attempt to arrest the growth of independent loyalism, then it only further alienated many middle-class Unionists and undermined their authority generally. Not only was it viewed by some as distasteful, but its enactment served to remind many that their provincial parliament was relatively powerless to halt economic decline. Upper-middle-class confidence was further eroded, along with aristocratic noblesse-oblige, by the success of the welfare state, removing both groups’ popular claims to authority, and increasing vastly the number of lower-middle-class professionals and their ethos of state intervention. The resulting apathy is likely to have contributed to the loss of almost 20,000 votes at the 1958 Stormont election. Brooke became concerned that his party was not attracting ‘competent’ candidates, but the situation was so dire that far from trying to recruit new blood, the premier’s energies’, according to Graham Walker, were to a great extent absorbed by the task of persuading the talented people there were, such as government ministers Brian Maginess and Dehra Parker, to remain in politics’.24 Out of this emerged a more coherent critique of the state and Unionist party. Brooke’s decision in 1955 to suppress a highly critical report on the province’s economy confirmed for many educated and progressive Unionists the pressing need for change. Their concerns were most eloquently expressed in the provocatively titled Ulster under Home Rule, a 1955 collection of essays published by Oxford University Press. Containing contributions from leading scholars of economics, politics and history, all based at either Queen’s or Oxford, the book filled the gap left by the suppressed report. Around the same time, the province’s renaissance men, poets such as W. R. Rodgers and John Hewitt, articulated an ‘alternative vision’ of Ulster Protestant identity, drawing inspiration from the past to argue for a more socially inclusive future, a view that stood in stark contrast to the government’s appeasement of loyalist populism.25 These academic and literary interventions helped produce a liberal consensus among sections of the Unionist middle classes. It was an outlook encouraged by contemporaneous developments in Britain

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where a sea change in mood helped undermine Harold Macmillan’s Tory government. In the de facto one-party state of Northern Ireland, this did not so much bring down the government as replace an ailing Brooke in 1963 with a younger aristocrat, Terence O’Neill.

The leadership of Terence O’Neill O’Neill’s appointment as prime minister on 25 March 1963, like that of Brooke 20 years before, appears anomalous for a party seeking to modernise. But it is more explicable given his reputation as a technocrat and the intrigue that surrounded his appointment. Asked by the Governor of Northern Ireland who should succeed Brooke, the chief whip, William Craig, a small-town solicitor and one-time grammar schoolboy, took soundings in the party and recommended O’Neill, an old Etonian and Irish Guardsman. O’Neill’s main rival, Brian Faulkner, son of a self-made and socially aspiring businessman, was perceived by his peers as too ambitious and beholden to traditional unionism. In contrast, his aristocratic rival ‘seized upon a crisis in unionist confidence to position himself as the best alternative to Brookeborough’.26 Even if, as Feargal Cochrane has suggested, Craig engineered O’Neill’s appointment for more selfish purposes, the new prime minister quickly seized the agenda, and gained widespread support, by implementing long-hoped-for schemes of economic reform.27 O’Neill’s twin strategy of economic reform and building constructive relations with the nationalist minority was designed, it has been argued, to ‘steal the NILP’s technocratic, economically modernising clothes’.28 Through this he hoped to encourage investment in Northern Ireland, believing that this would be buoyed up by, and contribute to, the improvement of relations between Protestants and Catholics. Given that the middle classes were likely to benefit first from any economic improvement, and the existence of a progressive consensus about the need for modernisation, O’Neill believed he could rely on the middle classes for support. As the Ulster journalist John Cole noted in May 1969: ‘Whatever coolness there might be in the Unionist party to the Prime Minister’s liberal policies . . . hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens showed that they were bored, frightened or offended by the revival of old hatreds and feuds.’29 For many observers, this was exemplified by O’Neill’s first Stormont election, in 1965, which heralded a reversal in the party’s electoral fortunes, with an increase of almost 50,000 Unionist votes on the previous 147,629, and confirmed at the

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1969 election by the massive rallying of middle-class support for the by then beleaguered premier. O’Neill’s apparent success infact spawned his downfall. Like Sloan and other demagogues before him, the Rev. Ian Paisley emerged as the chief critic of the Unionist leadership, appealing to a Protestant working class that felt politically undermined. Having won concessions from Brooke’s government in the 1950s, militant Protestantism reacted angrily to O’Neill’s modernisation programme, particularly his attempts to reach out to the Catholic minority, and his summit diplomacy to end Ireland’s ‘mini cold war’.30 Protestant working-class discontent was further inflamed by the growing prominence of what they regarded as a republican-inspired civil rights movement and O’Neill’s willingness to grant limited concessions to this campaign. Paisley was able to muster sizeable demonstrations of disaffection, and although the prime minister was unable to rely on the middle classes to appear on the streets in similar displays, he believed that television would help him reach out beyond his parliamentary party to Cole’s ‘bored ordinary citizens’. O’Neill was also aided by Jack Sayers, the progressive and impeccably middle-class editor of the Belfast Telegraph and contributor to Ulster under Home Rule.31 It was a risky strategy, as demonstrated in 1925 by the failure of Lord Londonderry to gain the support of parents and teachers for his education reforms, but society in Northern Ireland had changed significantly.32 The middle classes were considerably larger in composition, a better-educated workforce sought employment in newer, technologybased industries and many more people owned their own homes. O’Neill’s use of broadcast media to some extent circumvented his aloof manner, a characteristic that particularly infuriated Paisleyites, and contributed to his personal victory at the February 1969 Stormont election, when the Ulster Unionists scored their largest ever vote. Admittedly, anti-O’Neill candidates took 115,271 out of the 269,591 votes cast for Ulster Unionists, but another 72,120 voted for independent pro-O’Neill Unionists, giving the prime minister a total of 226,440, a victory for O’Neill, but at the cost of exposing deep fissures within unionism. Middle class support for O’Neill had risen considerably in the wake of his statesmanlike television broadcast on 9 December 1968 – in which he appealed for calm to a public increasingly used to political violence – and the clash on 4 January 1969 between militant loyalists and Peoples’ Democracy marchers near Derry. According to the leading party figure, J. O. Bailie, recent improvements in the party’s electoral fortunes, and endorsement of O’Neill, were

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attributable to the hitherto apathetic middle classes. He rejoiced at what he regarded as a rush to join the Unionist party, ‘mainly business and professional types’, and the return of 77,836 coupons endorsing the prime minister printed by the Belfast Telegraph.33 But Bailie’s enthusiasm overplayed middle-class support for O’Neill. It was far from universal, and more conservative and reactionary elements openly coalesced around alternative leaders such as William Craig and Faulkner, shunning Paisley’s largely plebeian support base.34 Moreover, the support given to O’Neill failed to withstand the emergence of the ‘Troubles’ and by April 1969 he was compelled to resign.

After O’Neill The fall of O’Neill, and the wholesale retreat of unionism into defensive policies, has for many marked the permanent fracturing of the movement, and its political disarray in the decades that followed. Ideological differences between rival wings were certainly a major reason for this, but so too were changes in the social structure. This has not gone unnoticed by scholars, but attention has tended to focus on the demise of working-class employment and institutions, and the flight of the gentry from active politics. Almost nothing is said about the everexpanding and diversified middle classes. The very structures of Ulster unionism were originally intended to contain all social classes, allowing its wealthy leaders to maintain their authority over a diverse yet discrete range of opinion and backgrounds. However, the emergence of openly expressed class and ideological divisions within unionism from the 1950s undermined the UUC, and grew more pronounced and variegated in the decade that followed. The ultimate victory of reactionary unionism in the early 1970s did not, as its proponents assumed, make unionism stronger, for it was achieved in the context of destabilising sectarian violence, and led many Unionists from the middle classes to abandon political activism altogether. This process was facilitated and encouraged by ‘direct rule’, under which many middle-class people, Protestants and Catholics, enjoyed the benefits of an expanding state sector that provided stable employment and economic largess. For, in contrast to the Thatcher government’s policies in Britain, in Northern Ireland it ‘held to the view that fiscal benevolence is required to promote those social conditions deemed conducive to the formation of a durable political settlement’.35 The benefits of direct rule were so apparent that many middle-class Unionist politicians, now in reduced circumstances at Westminster, came to regard

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it as preferable to the return of Stormont. Nevertheless, when in 1998 the Ulster Unionist party succeeded in placing a devolved assembly at the heart of the institutions established by Good Friday Agreement, its leader David Trimble, and the British prime minister, Tony Blair, openly sought backing from the apathetic Protestant middle class, and appeared to receive it when the Agreement was approved at a referendum, the turnout being 81.1 per cent, with 71.1 per cent voting in favour.36 Problems with the implementation of the Agreement have seen the middle-class electors retreat, leaving the Ulster Unionists in financial dire straits, and Paisley’s Democratic Unionists for the first time in the ascendant.37

Conclusion This essay argues that is possible to accompany previous rationalisations of Ulster Unionist political behaviour, particularly at the level of leadership, with an analysis of the changing nature of the middle class: the social group that apparently remained firmly in charge of unionism throughout the twentieth century. In such an account, changes in the make-up, political participation and function of the middle classes have to be acknowledged. When they are, it is possible to observe the effect of social change on the leadership. This essay is an attempt at doing just this, but what is really required is further research on those who voted for the Unionist party, those who constituted its membership, and the many local and provincial men and women who aspired to lead their community.

Notes 1. ‘Who will contest this shameless injustice?’, Belfast Telegraph, 11 August 2006; Brian Kennaway, The Orange Order: A Tradition Betrayed (London, 2006), pp. 14–15, 63. 2. Joseph Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848–1918 (Dublin, 1973), ‘Preface’. 3. John F. Harbinson, The Ulster Unionist Party, 1882–1973: Its Development and Organisation (Belfast, 1973), pp. 97–106. 4. Patrick Buckland, Irish Unionism: 2: Ulster Unionism and the Origins of Northern Ireland 1886–1922 (Dublin, 1973); Peter Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism: The Formation of Popular Protestant Politics and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Manchester, 1975), pp. 143–46. 5. Alvin Jackson, The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists and the House of Commons, 1884–1911 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 5–6.

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6. See Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell, Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl (London, 2003). 7. John Garrard, ‘The middle classes and nineteenth century national and local politics’, in John Garrard, David Jary, Michael Goldsmith and Adrian Oldfield (eds), The Middle Classes in Politics (Farnborough, 1978), pp. 35–66. 8. Henry Patterson, Class Conflict and Sectarianism: The Protestant Working Class and the Belfast Labour Movement, 1868–1920 (Belfast, 1980), pp. 1–18. 9. F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Britain’, in David Spring (ed.), European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1977), p. 6; Ian Budge and Cornelius O’Leary, Belfast: Approach to Crisis (London, 1973), ch. 1–3. 10. Brian Walker, ‘Finnigan’s awake: E.S. Finnigan and Ulster politics, 1874– 1892’, New Hibernia Review, 4 (2000), pp. 66–84. 11. Jackson, Ulster Party, p. 165. All figures taken from Jackson unless otherwise indicated. 12. Alvin Jackson, Colonel Edward Saunderson: Land and Loyalty in Victorian Ireland (Oxford, 1995), pp. 95–142. 13. ‘Anti-Home Rule conference at Belfast’, The Times, 9 April 1892; Harbinson, Unionist Party, pp. 16–19. 14. Belfast News Letter, 27 and 29 September, 24 October 1904. 15. Brian Walker, ‘Actions and views: John Brownlee Lonsdale, Unionist MP, 1900–18 and party leader, 1916–18’, in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds), The Ulster Crisis, 1885–1921 (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 128–45. 16. Andrew Gailey, ‘King Carson: an essay on the invention of leadership’, Irish Historical Studies, 30 (1996), pp. 66–87. 17. Timothy Bowman, ‘The Ulster Volunteer Force, 1912–1920: new perspectives’, in Boyce and O’Day, Ulster Crisis, pp. 247–58. 18. Harbinson, Unionist Party, pp. 109, 122–28. 19. Philip Ollerenshaw, ‘Businessmen and the development of Ulster unionism, 1886–1921’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 28, 1 (2000), p. 13. 20. Harbinson, Unionist Party, p. 111. 21. Patrick Buckland, The Factory of Grievances: Devolved Government in Northern Ireland 1921–39 (Dublin, 1979), pp. 2–3. 22. John E. Sayers, ‘The political parties and the social background’, in Thomas Wilson (ed.), Ulster under Home Rule: A Study of the Political and Economic Problems of Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1955), pp. 65–66. 23. K. S. Isles and N. Cuthbert, ‘Economic policy’, in Wilson, Ulster under Home Rule, pp. 137–82. 24. Graham Walker, A History of the Ulster Unionist Party: Protest, Pragmatism and Pessimism (Manchester, 2004), pp. 122–23. 25. Gillian McIntosh, The Force of Culture: Unionist Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Cork, 1999), pp. 180–206. 26. Marc Mulholland, Northern Ireland at the Crossroads: Ulster Unionism in the O’Neill Years, 1960–9 (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 202. 27. Feargal Cochrane, ‘ “Meddling at the crossroads”: the decline and fall of Terence O’Neill within the Unionist community’, in Richard English and Graham Walker (eds), Unionism in Modern Ireland: New Perspectives on Politics and Culture (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 153. 28. Mulholland, Northern Ireland, p. 199.

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29. John Cole, ‘Introduction’, in Terence O’Neill, Ulster at the Crossroads (London, 1969), p. 24. 30. Article by Terence O’Neill, The Times, 28 April 1967. 31. Andrew Gailey, Crying in the Wilderness: Jack Sayers: A Liberal Editor in Ulster, 1939–69 (Belfast, 1995), p. 4. 32. N. C. Fleming, The Marquess of Londonderry: Aristocracy, Power and Politics in Britain and Ireland (London, 2005), ch. 4. 33. Quoted in Mulholland, Northern Ireland, pp. 172–73. 34. A noteworthy fictionalised account of such posturing is provided by Roy Bradford, The Last Ditch (Dundonald, 1981). 35. Colin Coulter, ‘Direct rule and the Unionist middle classes’, in English and Walker, Unionism, p. 173. 36. ‘Frenetic burst designed to sway waverers’, The Times, 22 May 1998. 37. ‘Cash-hit Ulster Unionists deny plan to sell party HQ’, Belfast Telegraph, 27 July 2006.

12 William Martin Murphy, the Irish Independent and Middle-Class Politics, 1905–19 Patrick Maume

Introduction: The Independent and middle-class nationalism The Irish nationalist movement in the later decades of the Union was a cross-class coalition, many of whose components thought themselves imperfectly represented by the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP). Nationalist advocacy of state-led development (linked to the view that an Irish state, widely accepted and responsible to the people, would function more effectively) is often seen as proto-socialist, but it could also reflect belief in a minimalist state. The view of the Dublin Castle administration as a corrupt ancien regime, maintained by overmanned and expensive security forces and by wasteful and ineffective attempts at crowd-pleasing and patronage to undeserving patricians and corruptible ‘patriots’, could inspire a middle-class tax revolt by relatively self-sufficient small farmers and local businessmen seeing taxation and government intervention as inherently corrupt and wasteful. The Irish Independent under William Martin Murphy was the voice of middle-class nationalism in several ways. Murphy’s alignment with T.M. Healy linked it to collaborationist Catholic elites pursuing brokerage with the powers-that-be, but this constituency was too small to sustain a successful newspaper (as Murphy discovered when the paper was edited by the Healyite Catholic imperialist W.F. Dennehy in 1900–04). The success of the re-launched Independent after 1905 rested on its appeal to wider mentalities which might be called middle-class; the growing consumer public attracted to a cheap paper which offered condensed news and entertainment rather than the lengthy reported speeches and party-line editorials of the Freeman’s Journal, and whose profitability rested less on politically motivated readers and patronage 230

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than on offering advertisers a mass readership. Its advocacy of low-tax policies, its distrust of government spending and belief that the endemic poverty of rural society and urban slums could only be dealt with by free enterprise and charitable appeals, its suspicion that the Irish Party leadership were incompetent, irresponsible and corrupt reflected the fears of elements within the nationalist coalition reaching far beyond Healyism or other dissident splinter groups.

Precursors: Parnellite and Healyite The origins of the Murphy Independent go back to the Parnell Split, when the dominant nationalist daily, the Freeman’s Journal (run by the Gray family), initially sided with Parnell. Defecting journalists set up the National Press, financed by William Martin Murphy, dominated by T.M. Healy and aggressively promoted by Healy’s clerical supporters. The Freeman’s circulation collapsed and it switched to the Dillonite faction of the Anti-Parnellites. Parnellite employees left for the Parnellite Irish Daily Independent, which appeared in December 1891. In 1893, the National Press merged with the Freeman. A struggle for control ended with the Gray shareholding passing to the Dillonite parliamentarians and the ejection of Healyite board members. The Healyites retreated to the weekly Irish Catholic, founded by W.F. Dennehy in 1888 after purchasing the old weekly Nation. (Dennehy combined aggressive pietism with reactionary politics; his takeover of the Nation produced a lockout of the printers’ union which lasted 2 years and was only resolved through mediation by William Martin Murphy.) In 1897, they revived the Nation as a daily edited by Dennehy; Murphy was its financial mainstay.1 The Parnellite Independent was chronically undercapitalised; it suffered from the Parnellites’ minority status, clerical boycotts, paying salaries to Parnellite MPs and general political lassitude after the defeat of Gladstone’s Second Home Rule Bill (1893). In the late 1890s, Healyites and Parnellites drew closer together. In part this reflected the fact that neither group favoured a continued alliance with the Liberal Party, as the Dillonites did. (Healyites and Parnellites joined some Unionists in a protest campaign against alleged overtaxation of Ireland while Dillonites stayed aloof; both groups emphasised Liberal hostility to Catholic schools in Britain.) Murphy also seemed the only buyer who might take the Independent before its collapse bankrupted the Parnellite leadership. In August 1900, as the parliamentary factions reunited under grassroots pressure from the agrarian United Irish League (UIL),

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the Independent entered receivership. Murphy bought it at Redmond’s request, but Redmond could not prevent the UIL unseating most Healyite MPs at the general election a few months later.2

A Healyite paper: The Independent and Nation Murphy merged the Independent and Nation with Dennehy as editor. Murphy took relatively little interest in the content of the paper; he underwrote it as a political service to Healy. The Independent and Nation criticised municipalised services and railway nationalisation, favoured by the IPP;3 it argued these were costly and inefficient, and better provided by businessmen such as Murphy.4 Dennehy regularly complained about Catholic under-representation in the public service, but the paper distanced itself from populist boycott campaigns against firms which discriminated against Catholics. (Supporters of these campaigns, such as D.P. Moran, linked this to Murphy’s interests in such firms as the allegedly discriminatory Great Southern Railway.) At first, the Independent and Nation supported the Party and the UIL land campaign. It suggested crowds should arm themselves with sticks against police baton charges, and complained UIL activists were jailed for imitating trade unionists.5 The 1902 Education Act, which provided state funds for church schools in Britain and was fiercely opposed by the Liberals, made the Independent and Nation more openly critical of the Party, accused of muting its support for Catholic education to appease Godless Radicals.6 When a conference of tenant and landlord representatives brokered a compromise land settlement implemented by the 1903 Wyndham Land Act, the Independent and Nation predicted financial difficulties.7 As John Dillon and the Freeman’s Journal attacked the Land Act, the paper grew more conciliatory towards it.8 Edward VII visited Dublin soon after the Land Act; Murphy organised a welcoming committee and the Independent and Nation denounced the Corporation’s rejection of a loyal address.9 A new Murphy project inspired these approaches. The Independent and Nation followed the Land Conference by calling for an Industrial Conference, to address urban unemployment. At the conference (April 1903) Murphy lamented the scarcity of enterprise and energy in Ireland10 and announced an International Industrial Exhibition in Dublin; during the royal visit, he secured the king as patron. Irish Irelanders denounced the Exhibition, and Murphy as its prime mover, as encouraging foreign firms to dump imports; these critics advocated a National Exhibition of Irish industries. This reflected the long-standing hostility of the forces represented

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by Griffith and Moran to Murphy, a hostility obscured by their later denunciations of the trade unionist James Larkin. Both were ‘producerists’, suspicious of service industries, imports, consumerism and Murphy’s ‘de-nationalising, betting, murder and outrage snippet daily’11 as draining Ireland’s productive resources. Murphy called them stooges of the Freeman: ‘humbugs and faddists’ advocating ‘rigid insularity’.12 A cartoon depicted a ‘Dublin workingman’ chastising the Freeman for endangering employment.13 The Exhibition took place in 1907. Irish Irelanders claimed it made a loss; but it advanced Murphy’s leadership of the Dublin business community.

The new Independent and the Liberal Alliance By early 1904, Murphy had lost £20,000 on the paper.14 While seeking buyers, Murphy hired two experts to assess the paper’s development potential. In July 1904, after a favourable report, he decided to re-develop the paper himself and formed the present-day Independent company.15 In winding-up the old company, Murphy returned the Irish Catholic to Dennehy, ending his formal connection with the Independent group (though Dennehy remained a close associate, publishing vitriolic attacks on Larkin). T.R. Harrington succeeded him.16 New offices were acquired and equipped; Murphy spent £50,000 on the relaunch. The ‘new’ Independent appeared on 2 January 1905, priced at a halfpenny. It employed as many sub-editors as all other Dublin newspapers put together to implement new techniques of news condensation and selection.17 The first issue sold about 50,000 copies. Circulation settled around 25,000 after 6 weeks, outdistancing the Freeman.18 Improved delivery service allowed many areas which had only seen Dublin dailies in the late afternoon to receive the Independent in the morning.19 Thomas Grehan, the advertising manager, pioneered new techniques of visual presentation. The development of a mass consumer advertising market was crucial in allowing newspapers to flourish without the support of a political party. (Potential advertisers had suspected the readership of a cheap newspaper would not make worthwhile customers; many businessmen saw advertising as vulgar and disreputable.20 ) In November 1909 the Independent became the first European newspaper group to produce audited net circulation figures. The re-launch of the Independent was accompanied by a certain depoliticisation. Editorials carefully avoided provoking a Party boycott, though news coverage was slanted against the Party. The Independent claimed credit for helping defeat the 1907 Irish Council Bill (which

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offered limited devolution).21 The paper portrayed Dublin Castle as full of overpaid bureaucrats engaged in far-fetched and expensive schemes, and satirised the acquisition of official positions by Freeman staff associated with the Irish Party.22 It advised the Irish vote in Britain should be cast against Liberal candidates at by-elections after the prohibition of a Catholic Eucharistic procession in London.23 The paper welcomed old age pensions,24 but highlighted conflicts between local pensions committees and government-employed pensions officers over claimants’ qualifications. When take-up proved more extensive than anticipated it alleged the government was trying to evade its commitment and would load Ireland with further taxes.25 In 1909, the paper criticised John Redmond’s failure to offer all-out opposition to Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ – ‘atrocious highway robbery’.26 It claimed figures showing Ireland was run at a loss were concocted by the Treasury to justify further taxation.27 Chief leader-writer and financial expert Con Lehane warned land tax and estate duty might affect Irish peasant proprietors.28 The Independent’s Budget coverage strengthened Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin and the dissidents around William O’Brien and Healy, but avoided explicit support. The National Secretary of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), John Dillon Nugent (later allied to Murphy in the 1913 lock-out), complained about the Independent’s printing anti-AOH letters during the January 1910 election.29 After the election the Independent criticised Redmond for supporting the Budget in return for promises on the Lords’ Veto.30 When the Independent claimed in 1911 that the Party had been divided over boycotting the coronation of George V, many local bodies censured the paper. The Independent, however, was now such an attractive advertising medium that this had little impact. In summer 1913 the Party circulated Irish local authorities asking them to favour the Freeman. The Independent highlighted the Baltinglass Poor Law Guardians’ statement that the Freeman was greatly inferior to the Independent.31 After the abolition of the Lords’ Veto and announcement of a new Home Rule Bill, the Independent kept up criticisms of the Liberal Alliance. Murphy was impressed by Erskine Childers’s The Framework of Home Rule, advocating dominion status.32 The Independent complained the complicated financial machinery of the Home Rule Bill would breed fiscal irresponsibility and Anglo-Irish disputes. Murphy also feared reduced Irish representation at Westminster would leave Ireland under-represented on fiscal matters. Although Partition (which Murphy thought a national and personal humiliation) emerged as focus of this

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critique in 1914,33 it was preceded by complaints that the Irish Party allowed the Liberals to sacrifice Irish financial interests to benefit their British supporters. When the Liberal government devoted its first year after passing the Parliament Act to national insurance, the Independent published detailed financial criticisms by Lehane and blamed the Irish Party for not securing amendments.34 When the Freeman defended the government’s quarantining Irish cattle because of local foot-and-mouth outbreaks, the Independent commented: This tender solicitude . . . for . . . the interests of the English and Scottish stock-raisers is truly touching . . . Irish farmers and exporters . . . perhaps . . . do not know their own business, and will be prepared to receive instruction . . . from the Freeman’s Journal.35

Fighting Larkin Murphy’s labour relations strategy focused on maintaining good relations with craft unions representing skilled workers, which accepted the view that Irish workmen and employers shared a common interest and workmen should expect ‘fair’ treatment if loyal. (Unskilled workers were more biddable and expendable.) In 1905, the new company granted a week’s paid holidays to printers and compositors, given by no other Dublin printing house. The concession was year-by-year with renewal at Murphy’s discretion, typifying his combination of ostentatious philanthropy and implicit threats. In 1910 and 1911, P.J. McGrath, head of the Independent chapel of the Dublin Typographical Provident Society (DTPS), presented Murphy with addresses to celebrate the paper’s profitability. These emphasised the paid holidays ‘an inestimable boon’ and ‘the spirit of fairness with which he had ever met them in Trades Union matters’. Murphy replied with characteristic bluntness: Their employment would have been upset if the venture had been a failure . . . if it had been there was no one likely to start a daily newspaper in Dublin for many years to come.36 The DTPS, which enforced a 7-year apprenticeship and tried to restrict entry to family members, stood at the opposite end of the craft hierarchy from Larkin’s followers. In October 1911, they thanked management for ‘a very handsome sum in aid of the funds of the mutual benefit society attached to our chapel’.37 (Like other craft unions, the DTPS paid benefits to out-of-work members and provided funeral expenses.) Even so,

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according to Larkin, 28 of 56 Independent DTPS members initially wanted to join the 1913 strike but were dissuaded. Murphy subsequently contrasted Larkinism with the DTPS, ‘the gentlemen of the Press’. McGrath publicly praised Murphy’s treatment of DTPS members.38 James Larkin arrived in Ireland in 1907. In 1909 he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU). Accounts of the conflict between Larkin and Murphy emphasise the climactic 1913– 14 struggle, but this was the last battle in a longer war. Larkin dated the Independent’s ‘foul and vicious statements’ against him to mid-1909 (possibly over a Cork lock-out, which the Independent frequently recalled as an example to Dublin businessmen).39 Conflict intensified in August 1911 with a strike-wave, including a newsboys’ strike over returned copies of the Evening Herald40 and a rail strike which handicapped distribution of the papers.41 The railway strike ended in a union climbdown. The Financial Times praised the role of Murphy and the Independent;42 the Irish Worker declared the ‘sterling service’ of Murphy ‘won’t be forgotten while he and his lying sheets exist’.43 Murphy raised his tramwaymen’s wages and shortened their hours as a precaution (their loyal address was duly publicised).44 At Christmas 1911, the Dublin Dickens Fellowship, inspired by Independent manager W.T. Brewster, organised a Newsboys’ Christmas Dinner; the Irish Worker compared Brewster to the Dickensian hypocrite Mr. Pecksniff.45 From 1905, Murphy had systematised the paper’s dealings with newsboys, appointing ‘shoppers’ who sold the papers to newsboys and supervised them. His son and daughter Lady Chance founded a newsboys’ club.46 In 1905, the Evening Herald established a fund to provide boots for newsboys.47 (The Irish Worker accused the Independent of charging the fund for printing work.) The 50th anniversary edition of the Independent praised Murphy’s treatment of newsboys, while ignoring the 1911 and 1913 strikes. Larkin’s weekly Irish Worker imitated earlier nationalists in abandoning verbal decorum to dispel deference. Highlighting the eviction of striking West Clare Railway employers from company cottages in 1910, it denounced Murphy ‘the industrial octopus, owner of the ad sheet yclept the Independent’48 and Harrington ‘felonsetter . . . Murphy’s deputy-editor’.49 Murphy claimed accusations by strike supporters (including local priests) were misrepresentations – some strikers allegedly used violence and tried to sabotage the railway.50 The Irish Worker reiterated Irish Ireland complaints that the Independent papers advertised ‘specials from Newmarket, designs from London, and overweight margarine from Somerset’51 as well as exposing sweated

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labour and harsh discipline.52 It urged readers to boycott ‘the betting Herald and wobbling Independent . . . five miles of lies’.53 Advertisements boasted that each issue used 5 miles of paper. The Independent printed condemnations of the 1911 strike by Catholic bishops54 and complaints by Belfast trade unionist Mary Galway about James Connolly’s role in a Belfast mill-girls’ strike.55 The prominent ‘faith and fatherland’ writer Fr. P.F. Kavanagh (who complained ITGWU strikers in Wexford would not accept clergy as mediators)56 declared ‘an Irish paper’ worse than any British paper; it was sinful to buy, read, or circulate it.57 The Irish Worker protested; the Independent accused it of attacking a priest for condemning obscene literature. Moralist hostility to British Press sensationalism strengthened nationalist newspapers against imported competitors. When ‘Vigilance Committees’ dominated by Catholic activists launched a ‘Good Literature Crusade’ in 1911, picketing newsagents and burning ‘smutty’ English newspapers at railway stations, the Independent was supportive;58 it found Larkin could deploy this precedent. The Irish Worker contrasted these pious professions with the Evening Herald’s sensational coverage of divorce cases, and enquired why Fr. Myles Ronan, a Vigilance Committee activist who denounced the ITGWU in the Independent, ignored such transgressions.59 Ronan promptly called on Irish newspapers to ignore Divorce Court proceedings.60 The Independent complained some people ignored the business constraints of running a newspaper.61 In February 1912, Murphy became President of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, partly because of his resistance to the 1911 strikes.62 Murphy advised the Chamber of Commerce in January 1913 to raise wages to match food prices; the Independent declared this would defeat Larkin.63 The Dublin business community was dominated by Protestants and Unionists; some of Murphy’s criticisms of his allies reflect his self-image as a self-made man fighting his way into a complacent establishment, while Larkinites retaliated to clerical denunciations by attacking Murphy as leading ‘Freemason’ employers against Catholic workers. Early in 1913 new strikes broke out on the Dublin docks. The Independent accused the ITGWU of intimidation64 and ‘leading the workers to ruin’.65 Larkin’s Irish Worker stepped up attacks on Murphy from May. In July Murphy and Larkin addressed separate midnight meetings of tramwaymen. On 19 August Murphy personally told Independent despatch room employees to leave the ITGWU; about half walked out. The ITGWU picketed the Independent and blacked deliveries. Tramway company parcel staff, who refused to handle the papers, were locked

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out. The papers were delivered in Independent vans, sometimes under attack;66 the ITGWU ordered newsboys to boycott the papers. Brewster offered £10 for the conviction of anyone intimidating newsagents.67 The ITGWU called out tramway members on 26 August. The editorial on the third day of the strike devoted only half its length to the ‘ludicrous result’ before turning to the Horse Show.68 (Underestimating the determination of the strikers became a recurrent feature of Independent coverage.) The ITGWU ‘blacked’ Eason’s distributing agency for refusing to drop the Independent, extending the ban to shipping companies which handled Eason’s goods. An editorial proclaimed the ‘demagogue’ must be finished off.69 Larkin claimed victory: ‘If the members of the Vigilance Committee have a right to go into a shop and boycott newsvendors, . . . we have’; he highlighted the Herald’s publication of a letter about prostitution and threatened ‘to go to Murphy’s office, and pull it down brick by brick’.70 The police prosecuted Larkin for incitement. Murphy wrote to the Independent to deny responsibility for this ‘cheap martyrdom’.71 Both sides fought to make uncommitted opinion realise compromise was futile. The Independent accused the Freeman (initially less hostile to the ITGWU) of encouraging anarchists to damage a competitor.72 Both sides attacked the Irish Party leadership for non-involvement. The fugitive Larkin’s appearance to address a banned meeting at O’Connell Street on 31 August produced indiscriminate police baton charges; Independent editorialists declared the crowds ‘the criminal offscouring of the slums’.73 Larkin complained this showed the authorities backed the employers; Murphy privately complained he experienced difficulty in getting the government to secure his property against illegal assault, and thought they failed to support the police because of the British Labour vote. The Independent complained the mediators of the government-sponsored Askwith commission (which allowed Larkin to cross-examine Murphy) treated the ITGWU, ‘a pirate ship sailing under false colours’, as a legitimate trade union.74 The paper did accept that the employers’ tactics would be unjustified against a legitimate trade union.75 Strike news covered two pages daily, prefaced by such statements as ‘The determination of the employers of Dublin to save the trade and commerce of the city from the despotism of Larkinism is growing daily.’76 Accounts of destitution were headed ‘Fruits of Larkinism’.77 The employers were suffering ‘the heaviest losses . . . Can it be imagined that business men are . . . losing trade which they may not be able to regain for years . . . for the pleasure of keeping their workers out of

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employment?’ Larkinite victory would reduce employers ‘to penury and death for want of bread’.78 Signs of strikers’ declining morale were emphasised or invented.79 When Connolly was released after a brief hunger-strike, one reporter allegedly overheard complaints ‘tis we that are on hunger-strike’. Another reporter claimed an ITGWU activist predicted the defeat of clericalism in Bray; the Independent refused to accept his denial.80 Cartoonists depicted Larkin as cloven-hoofed Mephistopheles luring a ‘deluded worker’.81 The Independent claimed ‘a well-known labour leader’ used advance knowledge of strikes to speculate on the stock market. Larkin’s haphazard administration of union affairs was highlighted, implying personal dishonesty and the fate of the economy under syndicalism. ‘Irishmen are welcoming Larkin as formerly they welcomed Strongbow,’ wrote the conservative Sinn Féiner John Sweetman.82 The Independent associated Larkin and Connolly with syndicalists across Europe.83 Anti-Christian statements by socialists elsewhere were quoted as ‘proof’ of Larkin’s hidden agenda.84 One priest called Larkin un-Catholic for denying employers derived authority from God.85 The Independent capitalised on Dora Montefiore’s attempt to take strikers’ children to Britain; it highlighted the interception of children at the port and railway stations by Catholic activists shouting ‘Down with Larkin the Souper’,86 and printed letters from a Liverpool priest claiming the children were sent to state (not Catholic) schools.87 Larkin ‘the Chief’ consciously invoked Dublin Parnellite and Fenian traditions. He frequently equated press attacks on him with those on Parnell. The Independent published Larkin’s more reckless statements in boldface headed ‘Larkinisms’.88 The Independent promoted the Toiler, an anti-Larkin paper edited by former labour activist P.J. McIntyre (probably subsidised by Murphy), as evidence of anti-Larkin sentiment. Much conservative nationalist opinion rallied to Murphy (including Griffith, Moran and Nugent’s AOH). Balrothery Poor Law Guardians (representing farmers in North County Dublin where the ITGWU organised agricultural labourers’ strikes for higher wages at harvest time) transferred advertising from the Independent in response to the Irish Party request to support the Freeman. Now they congratulated Murphy and divided advertisements between Freeman and Independent.89 Advocates of compromise were excoriated as ‘cheapjack pacificators’.90 Tom Kettle’s involvement with the Peace Committee was ridiculed as a ‘superior soul’ trying to offset unpopularity caused by his family’s resistance to the farm labourers.91 (The Independent interviewed strike-breaking Kettle relatives and published an anti-strike letter by his father declaring none of this would have happened had Parnell lived.92 )

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North inner-city alderman and pharmacist J.C. MacWalter quoted Pope Leo XIII in denouncing Murphy’s threat to starve out strikers and advised him to share profits with workers: Harrington asked would MacWalter share his own profits.93 Francis Sheehy Skeffington compared employers to Roman persecutors of Christianity; he agreed with the Independent about ‘the futility of . . . truce, conference or compromise’. Harrington accused him of encouraging ‘denizens of the slums and alleys . . . to go forth and molest peaceful citizens, damage property and loot . . . who takes Mr. Sheehy-Skeffington seriously?’94 When food-aid from British unions arrived, the Independent accused them of encouraging Irish strikes to safeguard British jobs and undermining Irish shopkeepers.95 The Independent noted British labour leaders supported tactics in Dublin they opposed in Britain.96 As Larkin toured Britain trying to rouse rank-and-file trade unionists, the Independent gleefully recorded complaints by British labour leaders.97 As the strike petered out in January 1914, the Independent declared Larkinism dead. Larkin’s departure for America was derided: ‘Close on 2,000 of his followers have enlisted during the past few months. Many of these are the victims of last year’s “fiery cross”.’98

War, Rising and Sinn Féin As part of its growing concern over partition, the Independent encouraged the Irish Volunteers when the Irish Party leadership was trying to contain them. Its tone grew angrier as the Government offered concessions, until it rallied behind the war effort. War permanently boosted the Independent’s circulation. By 1915, it made a profit of £15,000 per annum; by 1918 the profit reached £40,000.99 Its practice of tabulating and abridging news prepared it for wartime restrictions on space and newsprint.100 The Weekly Independent declared Ireland’s trade depended on British victory; MacNeillite secession would merely weaken the Volunteers.101 ‘The longer [war] lasts, the greater will be the financial burden . . . everyone of us will have to bear . . . It cannot be ended quickly unless the demand for more men is met without delay.’102 Several junior members of staff (and relatives of senior members) joined up. Murphy chaired a Red Cross hospital103 and wrote to a Bantry recruiting meeting advising farmers’ sons to join up.104 Readers were told recruitment safeguarded Ireland against conscription.105 The paper exhorted readers to invest in war loans, reminding them German victory would be more costly.106 The Independent backed calls for increased food production; Murphy publicised his tillage endeavours.107

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As the war dragged on Murphy’s views on Party incompetence re-emerged. The Independent suggested the defeat of an official candidate in a by-election showed the Party had lost touch with public opinion.108 In June 1915, Harrington protested Murphy might cause ‘untold injury’ by inflicting his political views on the paper.109 The Independent repeatedly complained that Ireland paid war tax without receiving proportionate contracts.110 It called Lloyd George’s attempt to increase taxation on brewing and distilling a sop to the Liberals’ Nonconformist backers; production problems were not caused by Irish brewers and distillers but by drunken British workers.111 A British Chancellor imposing taxes opposed by Irish representatives set a bad precedent. A nationwide campaign produced temporary withdrawal of the taxes; Murphy spoke forcefully in the Dublin Chamber of Commerce. At the beginning of 1916 the Independent joined the campaign by Sinn Féiners and Party dissidents against reducing Irish education grants. Once again, Murphy addressed the Chamber of Commerce, and his editorial writers claimed credit for saving the grants.112 The Independent offices were near the centre of the Easter Week fighting. Harrington and other staffers regularly visited them until Thursday.113 Two prominent staff members witnessed ‘a disgraceful incident’ at Taafe’s Outfitters in O’Connell Street. ‘A looter went inside . . . [someone] being heard to ask for No. 14 collars’. A post-Rising editorial noted: ‘During the newsboys’ strike [1911], the Larkin strike, and the recent revolutionary rising the looters, who belong to no party and take advantage of every disturbance to plunder, emerged from their slums in force and did as much damage as they could.’114 On Thursday, eight rebels occupied the offices, retaining possession until Saturday evening.115 (They were sent by James Connolly, who received his leg wound returning from Middle Abbey Street.116 ) On 1 May, Murphy composed a memorandum for Harrington, declaring blame for the Rising lay with the Liberal Government which bought the Redmondites and hindered policemen doing their duty. Murphy concluded all Volunteer forces should be disarmed.117 Most of this memorandum was incorporated into editorials. Murphy’s principal concern thereafter was organising an association of property-owners to lobby for compensation, vociferously supported by the Independent.118 On 31 May, Murphy led a delegation to London.119 On Thursday, 4 May, Harrington’s first post-Rising editorial compared the ruins of Dublin to devastated Belgium. The rebels were agents of ‘the common enemy . . . not to free Ireland, but to help Germany’. The ‘insane and criminal rising’ would have doomed Ireland’s hopes but

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for the ‘splendid part’ played by Irish soldiers. The paper ‘cared little what is to become of the leaders’ but advocated mercy for ‘dupes’. It appealed to the Government to indemnify Dubliners, like victims of enemy raids on Britain. The paper emphasised the rising as ‘the backwash of the Larkin movement’. As early as 5 May the London correspondent distinguished physical-force separatists provoked by Carson from ‘the section . . . actuated solely by . . . anarchical syndicalism’.120 On 10 May, as hints of clemency multiplied, the Independent reiterated: We do not think that extreme severity should be generally applied . . . [except for] some of the ringleaders, instigators, and fomentors not yet dealt with . . . If these men are treated with too great leniency they will take it as an indication of weakness on the part of the Government.121 On 12 May, after advocating general disarmament and agreeing martial law had been applied too harshly, the writer reiterated that leaders ‘undealt with’ should not escape.122 The 10 May editorial was written by Harrington and Lehane; Murphy later disclaimed responsibility.123 The papers demanded official inquiries into killings of uninvolved civilians, though it hedged its bets: ‘The troops . . . were regarded by the general body of the citizens as deliverers . . . seeing their comrades fall victim to the bullets of the concealed snipers . . . they could hardly be expected to keep smiling.’124 The Independent was particularly concerned over the fate of P.J. McIntyre of the Toiler, shot by the demented Captain Bowen-Colthurst. ‘Mr. M’Intyre and his paper opposed Larkinism and the Citizen Army and supported recruiting,’ it protested.125 The Independent was scathing on the Rebellion Commission’s revelations: ‘Are there any depths of ineptitude and absurdity yet to plumb in the recent history of Dublin Castle rule?’ it enquired. The paper echoed Murphy’s view that Redmondite ‘subservience and jobseeking’ stimulated rebellion, as in 1848 and 1867.126 The Independent claimed support for the separatists reflected realisation that Home Rule could not prevent over-taxation.127 It protested that Asquith consulted the politicians and ‘the remains of the Irish administration which landed us in the mess’ while ignoring nationalist businessmen ‘who have practically no representation in Parliament’.128 It shared the general post-Rising perception that Castle government could never be resurrected. When the Irish Party reluctantly accepted a government scheme for immediate Home Rule with six-county partition, the Independent led the opposition. Past statements by Redmond

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and his lieutenants declaring partition ‘an abomination and a blasphemy’ were reprinted with the prominence previously reserved for ‘Larkinisms’.129 After the collapse of the attempted compromise, the Independent campaigned for all-Ireland Dominion Home Rule while Murphy tried to convert the British political elite to the same cause, negotiating with Chief Secretary H.E. Duke and establishing contacts with Northcliffe. In June 1917 Murphy in the Independent debated Home Rule finance with the Party financial expert J.J. Clancy in the Freeman.130 The Independent echoed Sinn Féin accusations that the crumbling Freeman (‘the government organ’) was kept alive by state subsidies. It declared the electorate were voting not so much for Sinn Féin as against Irish Party mismanagement; nobody could do worse.131 The Independent complained that the British press publicised unrest in Ireland while playing down Labour unrest in Britain.132 It took particular satisfaction in the arrest and imprisonment for sedition of ‘Larkin, the Kaiser’s Friend’ in America. The paper highlighted rising prices. An ominous feature of the Weekly Independent in February and March 1918 was a series of articles on the Great Famine. Many Sinn Féin activists acknowledged the Independent assisted them by its criticisms of the Irish Party and publication (censorship allowing) of reasonably accurate summaries of Sinn Féin speeches. They saw the paper itself, however, as contemptibly opportunistic; increased readership did not translate into political influence. Murphy’s revival of Healyite elite brokerage proved no more successful. He advocated Dominion Home Rule at the 1917–18 Irish Convention but found himself largely isolated. Even as the British government further alienated Irish opinion by trying to impose conscription, Murphy tried to keep open channels to the administration. The Independent was fiercely anti-conscription, proclaiming that while not pro-German it would always resist British aggression.133 Privately Murphy feared the failure of voluntary recruiting would damage Ireland in the eyes of world opinion: It is a pity that some section of the Irish Party . . . did not break away and proclaim for Dominion Home Rule in time – Now there is no choice between the old gang and Sinn Féin left to the Electors.134 During the 1918 election campaign, the Independent contented itself with dismissing the Irish Party as incorrigible while hoping Sinn Féin might accept a reasonable compromise. The Independent criticised

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St. Patrick’s Division of Dublin for electing Countess Markievicz, whose sanity it questioned.135

Epilogue: Murphy’s legacy William Martin Murphy died on 26 June 1919; his son, Captain William Lombard Murphy, of the Royal Army Medical Corps, became chairman of Independent Newspapers.136 The paper continued to advocate dominion status, criticising the republican declarations at the inauguration of the First Dáil. The paper simultaneously denounced the Soloheadbeg killings,137 and published condemnations by various local bodies (some blaming government provocateurs).138 The Independent thought the Lloyd George coalition inherently unstable, increasing taxation and bureaucracy through short-term vote-buying.139 It denounced the ‘demoralising scheme of donation benefit for unemployed persons’ as ‘a premium on idleness’.140 Irish labour unrest provoked language reminiscent of 1913.141 When the Irish Republican Army (IRA) began to assassinate political detectives from the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s ‘G’ division, the Independent denounced these ‘dastardly murders’, commemorating the zeal of Detective-Sergeant Barton against Larkinite rioters and 1916 looters.142 At one point, the paper suggested respectable citizens should form self-defence committees.143 In December 1919 after an editorial condemning the IRA ambush on the Lord-Lieutenant the paper’s offices were wrecked. In August 1920, however, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) County Inspector for West Galway complained ‘the mainstay of the Sinn Féin movement in this County is the Irish Daily Independent.’144 The paper’s changing tone during 1920 reflected increasing government reprisals and the alienation of nationalist opinion. Its overall editorial position was close to Bishop Cohalan of Cork, who supported Sinn Féin in 1918 but condemned violence. Meanwhile, several employees145 (including the Independent’s chief proofreader146 ) were IRA activists. The Independent hailed the Treaty settlement as vindicating William Martin Murphy, and rallied support for it in a manner reminiscent of its campaign against Larkin; meanwhile, Earon de Valera and other republicans claimed its advocacy of dominion status helped to undermine the ‘republic’ by weakening the popular will. The civil war was greeted with lamentations that Irishmen, after denouncing British overtaxation and the draining of capital by absentee landlords, were now imposing a similar burden on themselves. Even the fiscal rigour of the Cosgrave government was not stringent enough for the Independent editorial

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writers, who accused them of multiplying bureaucrats at the taxpayers’ expense, as once they had blamed Dublin Castle. Larkin’s return to Ireland and the bitter demarcation disputes between the ITGWU and his breakaway Workers’ Union of Ireland were similarly presented as proof that Murphy had been right in opposing this destructive figure. In the first decades of the new state, the Independent continued to flourish as a consumerist paper, whose main rival saw itself as the official organ of a party (the Irish Press in this respect taking the place of the Freeman, which was finally absorbed by the Independent in 1924). For much of this period, Fianna Fáil, like the Irish Party, saw the Independent as its most dangerous political opponent, yet the paper’s readership did not translate into success for its favoured politicians against more populist opponents whom it denounced for promoting a dependency mentality. Only in the 1960s did the paper’s advocacy of minimal taxation, its version of Catholic respectability and its support for cultural protectionism against the English popular press (by which it was so strongly influenced) transmute under the influence of a changing Ireland and a changing middle class.

Notes 1. Independent, 29 March, 10 July 1894. 2. For a fuller account of the Independent’s early history see Patrick Maume, ‘The Irish Independent and Empire, 1891–1919’ in Simon Potter (ed.) Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire c.1857–1921 (Dublin, 2004), pp. 124–42. 3. Irish Weekly Independent [hereafter I.W.I.], 17 May 1902. 4. I.W.I., 3, 17 September, 1 October 1910. 5. I.W.I., 21 June 1902. 6. I.W.I., 29 November, 20 December 1902. 7. I.W.I., 21 March 1903. 8. I.W.I., 9, 16, 23 January 1904. 9. I.W.I., 11, 18 July 1903. 10. I.W.I., 3 January, 18 April 1903. 11. Leader, 9 January 1909. 12. I.W.I., 12 March 1904. 13. I.W.I., 2 April 1904. 14. I.W.I., 1 January 1910. 15. I.W.I., 18 February 1905. 16. Independent, 25 September 1937. 17. I.W.I., 12 November 1904. 18. I.W.I., 12, 19 August 1905. 19. Hugh Oram, The Newspaper Book (Dublin, 1986), pp. 108–9; Michael Wheatley, Nationalism and the Irish Party: Provincial Ireland, 1910–1916 (Oxford, 2005).

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20. Hugh Oram, The Advertising Book (Dublin, 1986), pp. 29–31, 386, 392; I.W.I., 30 October 1943, 23 November 1912. 21. I.W.I., 11, 18, 25 May 1907. 22. I.W.I., 2 October 1910. 23. I.W.I., 19, 26 September, 3 October 1908. 24. I.W.I., 26 December 1908. 25. I.W.I., 7 August 1909. 26. I.W.I., 8, 29 May, 5 June 1909. 27. I.W.I., 12 June 1909, 28 August, 25 September 1910. 28. I.W.I., 26 February 1910, 18 September. 29. I.W.I., 19 February 1910. 30. I.W.I., 23 April 1910. 31. I.W.I., 30 August, 6, 13 September 1913. 32. I.W.I., 9 March, 25 May 1912. 33. For the Ulster issue, see Patrick Maume, ‘The Irish Independent and the Ulster Crisis 1912–21’ in Alan O’Day and D.G. Boyce (eds), The Ulster Crisis, 1885– 1921 (London, 2006), pp. 202–28. 34. I.W.I., 20 April 1912. 35. I.W.I., 4 January 1913. 36. I.W.I., 1 January 1910, 10 June 1911. 37. I.W.I., 7 October 1911. 38. I.W.I., 13 December 1913. 39. Independent, 4 October 1913. 40. Irish Worker, 26 August 1911. 41. I.W. I., 28 October, 4 November 1911. 42. I.W.I., 7 October 1911. 43. Irish Worker, 7 October 1911. 44. I.W.I., 21 October 1911. 45. Irish Worker, 23 December 1911. 46. Independent, 20 June 1922. 47. I.W.I., 11 November 1905. 48. Irish Worker, 17 June 1911. 49. Irish Worker, 7 October 1911. 50. I.W.I., 17 September, 7 October 1910. 51. Irish Worker, 17 June 1911. 52. Irish Worker, 15 July, 27 September 1911. 53. Irish Worker, 30 September 1911. 54. I.W.I., 14 October 1911. 55. I.W.I., 7 October 1911. 56. I.W.I., 4 November 1911. 57. I.W.I., 3 February 1913. 58. I.W.I., 14, 21 October 1911, 6 July 1912. 59. Irish Worker, 21 October, 4, 11 November 1911. 60. I.W.I., 11 November 1911. 61. I.W.I., 19 October 1912; Ronan obituary in I.W.I., 9 April 1959. 62. I.W.I., 17 February 1912. 63. I.W.I., 1 February 1913. 64. I.W.I., 15, 22 February 1913. 65. I.W.I., 5 April 1913.

Patrick Maume 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

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Independent, 2 September 1913. Independent, 29 August, 23 September 1913. Independent, 29 August 1913. I.W.I., 30 August 1913. Official account of the dispute CO 904/158/3, Public Record Office, Kew. Independent, 29 August 1913. I.W.I., 15 November 1913. Independent, 2 September 1913. I.W.I., 15 November 1913. Independent, 9 October 1913. Independent, 5 September 1913. See, for example, Independent, 22, 23, 24 September 1913. Independent, 9 October 1913. Ibid. Independent, 11, 13 October 1913. I.W.I., 8 November 1913. Independent, 9 October 1913. Independent, 23 September 1913. Independent, 27 September, 8 October 1913. Independent, 7 October 1913. I.W.I., 1 November 1913. Independent, 5 December 1913. Independent, 13 October 1913. I.W.I., 4 October 1913. I.W.I., 6, 13 September 1913. Independent, 8, 13 October 1913. Independent, 9 October 1913, p. 5; 8 October, p. 6. Independent, 3, 5 September 1913. Independent, 5 September 1913. Independent, 11 October 1913. Independent, 6, 7, 9 October 1913. Independent, 24 November 1913. Independent, 22 October 1914. Frank Callanan, T.M. Healy (Cork, 1996), p. 484. Oram, The Advertising Book, p. 33. I.W.I., 3 October 1914; Independent, 5 October 1914. Independent, 22 October 1914. I.W.I., 27 March, 17 April 1915. I.W.I., 29 May 1915. I.W.I., 20, 27 November 1915. I.W.I., 26 June 1915. I.W.I., 4 September 1915. Independent, 10 December 1914. Quoted in Callanan, Healy, p. 485. I.W.I., 24 July 1915. Independent, 17 April 1916. I.W.I., 22, 29 January 1916. Independent, 5 May 1916. Independent, 19 May 1916.

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115. Oram, Newspaper Book, pp. 123–9; Independent, 5 May 1916. 116. Donal Nevin, James Connolly: ‘A Full Life’ (Dublin, 2005), pp. 653–4. 117. Murphy to Harrington, 1 May 1916, Harrington Papers 4/5, National Archives of Ireland (NAI). 118. Independent, 8 May 1916. 119. Independent, 9, 20 May, 1 June 1916; for a sample editorial, see I.W.I., 29 April, 6, 13 May 1916. 120. Independent, 8 May 1916. 121. Independent, 10 May 1916. 122. Independent, 12 May 1916. 123. 1922 Republican leaflet in William O’Brien Collection, National Library of Ireland (may derive from Weekly Independent editor P.J. Lynch, who became a Republican propagandist). Murphy to Harrington, 4 September 1916, Harrington Papers, NAI 4/17, refers to ‘your article’. See Callanan, Healy, for Murphy’s denials of responsibility. 124. Independent, 18 May 1916. 125. I.W.I., 20 May 1916; Independent, 15, 23, 27 May 1916; obituary in Independent, 20 May 1916. 126. Independent, 23, 26, 30 May 1916; I.W.I., 27 May 1916. 127. Independent, 22 May 1916. 128. Independent, 15 May 1916. 129. Independent, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 June 1916. 130. I.W.I., 7, 28 April 1917. 131. I.W.I., 18 August 1917. 132. I.W.I., 20 October 1917. 133. I.W.I., 25 May 1918. 134. Murphy to Harrington, 19 October 1918, Harrington Papers 1052/4/46, NAI. 135. Independent, 30 December 1918. 136. I.W.I., 16 January 1943; Independent 11 January 1943. 137. I.W.I., 25 January 1919. 138. I.W.I., 1, 8 February 1919. 139. I.W.I., 12 July 1919. 140. I.W.I., 18 January 1919. 141. I.W.I., 25 October 1919. 142. I.W.I., 6 December 1919. 143. I.W.I., 17 January 1920. 144. Quoted in Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916–23 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 264. 145. I.W.I., 7 January 1960. 146. Oram, Newspaper Book, pp. 139–40.

13 Planning and Philanthropy: Travellers and Class Boundaries in Urban Ireland, 1930–75 Aoife Bhreatnach

Introduction In 1960, the Irish government established a commission to investigate the lives and habits of a group categorised as ‘itinerants’ with the intention of discovering how their lifestyle could be changed so as to prevent conflict with the majority ‘settled’ population. Although the nomadic minority called themselves ‘Travellers’, and were commonly known as ‘tinkers’, the official term for the group became ‘itinerant’ until the publication of another report brought ‘Travelling People’ to the fore.1 The Report of the Commission on Itinerancy recommended settlement and an end to travelling for a group who were not recognised as ethnically distinct from the Irish population as a whole, but who were, paradoxically, an easily recognisable group set apart from the housed, settled population.2 Their nomadic lifestyle and the accompanying horses, caravans and tents were deemed their most distinguishing feature by the commission, which expected settlement to bring an end to conflict between Travellers and settled people.3 Once horses no longer illicitly grazed farmer’s land, and when roadside campsites without sanitation disappeared, social harmony would prevail, or so the commission believed. Settlement, placing Travellers in houses or on public campsites, was a popular solution among settled people, who did not challenge the policy. Indeed, the commission received submissions from individuals, public bodies, charities and representative organisations, all advocating settlement in order to end the ‘itinerant problem’.4 However, even within the commission’s report itself, there were hints that such a policy would meet considerable popular resistance. Previous attempts by local authorities to house Travellers 249

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had provoked uproar from settled people, some of whom refused tenancies in public housing estates when Travellers were also accommodated.5 The roots of class hostility and the status anxiety underpinning such hatred will be explored in this chapter. Why the issue of Traveller accommodation created social conflict in urban Ireland, and how it was mediated by local government and voluntary bodies will also be examined here. In addition, the influence of public housing on the urban environment and conceptualisations of social geography, which dominated urban society, will be discussed. Most importantly, the definitions and popular understandings of class in Irish society will be investigated. Here, class is expressed spatially; class concerns moulded the built environment to reflect and sustain social distance. Class was not just an objective social reality, measured in income difference, educational attainment or occupation, but was a form of social organisation that expressed itself in the structure of urban space. In excluding Travellers, a marginalised and tiny minority, from urban environments, citizens of towns and cities engaged with local authorities and voluntary organisations to ensure their spatial relationships echoed the class hierarchies of Irish life. What emerges here is a surprising level of both conflict and consensus around the issue of Travellers living in urban areas. Studying the historical relationship between the settled and Traveller population in an urban environment is itself a challenge to a potent popular belief that Travellers belong ‘traditionally’ in rural Ireland. Scholars endorsed this belief, asserting that, in response to the postwar decline of rural handicrafts and the tin trade, Travellers dramatically changed their accommodation patterns, abandoning the countryside for extended periods spent on the fringes of urban areas.6 The ‘urbanisation’ theory assumed that Travellers were uniquely rural, although there is little evidence that country people agreed with this interpretation. In their classic study of rural County Clare, Arensberg and Kimball commented that Travellers, or ‘tinkers’, belonged to an ‘outcast lowest class’ with loyalties to the towns, visiting country areas for short periods of time and with ‘predatory’ intentions.7 The perception of Travellers as an urban public problem in the post-war period does not preclude their presence in Irish towns and cities before 1945. Indeed, evidence from as early as 1934 shows that nomads were living in Dublin city centre. It would be more constructive to conceptualise the presence of Travellers in urban areas in the context of changes in the relative visibility of the group. Since settled people (administrators, politicians, homeowners, tenants) noted their presence, how social change affected the majority must be understood. In any case, documenting change in Traveller

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society would challenge even the most methodologically creative historian, who would struggle to locate a geographically dispersed, illiterate and marginal community numbering approximately 7,000 people.8

Urban change and physical proximity The changes in the urban environment that occurred in the 1930s had a profound effect on the lives and relationships of urban dwellers. Slum clearance by local government was given firm legislative endorsement in 1931, while the planning system was established in 1934 by the Town and Regional Planning Act. Social interventions by local authorities had a significant impact on urban living. The Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1931 extended government assistance to those in greatest need – urban slum dwellers. The Act of 1931, which conclusively linked public health with housing, signalled a major policy shift. The ill-health, long understood to be a consequence of poor living conditions, was finally deemed unacceptable by the government. Slum clearance aimed to eradicate disease: a precondition for generous government funding was that a Medical Officer of Health declare whole streets ‘unhealthy’. Once the Medical Officer of Health certified properties as ‘unfit for human habitation’,9 local authorities could acquire land in and adjacent to an unsanitary area with a Compulsory Purchase Order.10 This legislation encouraged demolition since public housing for families from substandard but not ‘unfit’ housing secured funding of only one third, as opposed to two thirds if the former residence was destroyed.11 Thus, professional men in positions of administrative power determined the living conditions of whole communities. Inner-city communities were undermined once their population had moved to garden suburbs on the fringes of urban areas. One Cork city dweller keenly remembered a sense of helplessness, The people had to move. They had no option, no back-up. Who was going to fight for them? When you’re poor, you’ll find very few friends, especially people of influence . . . Within 20 years, the Middle Parish was levelled off, nearly completely, so that 25,000 people dropped to about 1,000. The city centre lost its vibrancy. It became a cold, heartless place.12 In Cork city, where 614 houses were built between 1922 and 1933, the new legislation enabling slum clearance had a dramatic effect. From 1932 to 1944, 2,044 houses were constructed.13 In Dublin there was

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a boom in housing construction between 1933 and 1938,14 while the national figures for new houses built by local authorities jumped from 759 in 1930–1 to 6,734 in 1933–4. However, wartime shortages curbed the housing programme; in 1942–3 just 1,771 new houses were built.15 Although families eagerly sought tenancies, the rehousing process was disruptive and difficult for many. Charities provided beds and furniture for tenants with few possessions, and tried to ameliorate the loneliness arising from the break-up of local communities.16 In Cork, tenants complained of the remoteness of the new suburban estates, Churchfield and Fair Hill, from the city centre and their employment, while some slum dwellers refused suburban homes, hoping to secure tenancies in the rebuilt inner city.17 Rev. R.J. Dalton wrote about the ‘natives of Cork’ adapting to the disappearance of old neighbourhoods; ‘They pine for the old friendliness and the gossip and the lost homeliness; and it is not strange and unintelligible that many of them find their way back to the squalor and the friendliness of their old homes.’18 Inner-city housing was insalubrious but, for some, plumbing was insufficient compensation for the social life destroyed by slum clearance. One County Medical Officer, Dr Michael Flynn in Westmeath, believed that the demolition of cheap, private, rental accommodation restricted Travellers’ opportunities for voluntary settlement.19 For not all Travellers were on the roads all the time: elderly Travellers moved into housing or institutional care; families made sporadic attempts at settlement; and living in rooms or a house for the winter months was common.20 Nan Joyce mused on the curious situation of Travellers without a fixed abode who nevertheless returned to the same place every winter: ‘we always ended up there no matter where we came from because Belfast was like our home to us. Wherever you’re reared you’re always longing to go back there.’21 In County Cork, Travellers lived seasonally in the lanes of towns such as Bantry, Dunmanway and Bandon.22 Old Chapel Lane, in Rathkeale County Limerick, strongly associated with Traveller settlement, was condemned by the Board of Health as unfit for human habitation.23 The crowded lanes and alleyways that offered cheap, short-term or seasonal accommodation for Travellers vanished in slum clearance programmes. One former resident recalled lanes that were ‘teeming, teeming with people . . . Some of them houses were so small they’d say you could stick your hand down the chimney and pull a tea cup off the table.’24 The term ‘lane’ was itself a significant class signifier. One study on residential segregation in Cork city found that from 1901 to 1946, 36 per cent of streets with a high proportion of lower-class residents contained the ‘lane’ suffix.25 Travellers occupying

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houses in the lanes therefore lived in close quarters to the urban working class. It would be foolish to equate physical proximity with social equality or tolerance, but Travellers and certain classes of the settled population lived closely in urban areas. Local authority building programmes begun in the 1930s eradicated areas in towns and cities where both communities lived side by side. Official procedures for housing applications also considerably disadvantaged Travellers who were disproportionately illiterate; in December 1960 just 783 Travellers, out of a total of 4809 over the age of 6 years, were literate.26

Public housing planning as power Some local authorities made conscious efforts to house Travellers using slum clearance legislation. St Mel’s Terrace, in Athlone, County Westmeath, was built in 1933, and housed 31 families ‘the majority of which were semi-settled Travellers who had been living in shanties and rundown cottages on the edge of town’. St Mel’s and a similar terrace in Tralee, County Kerry, had the largest concentrations of Travellers in one neighbourhood in the country. From 1933 to 1972, 85 families, mostly Travellers, lived in St Mel’s.27 This was three or four times the usual turnover for public housing. Reasons for this turnover varied: some families transferred to other public housing but many returned to the road or emigrated to England. Clearly, ‘housed’ Travellers did not necessarily view themselves as ‘settled’. Travellers living in the terrace did not participate in the activities and institutions of the settled community, but this was considered to be largely the fault of settled people who discouraged their attendance. St Mel’s tenants did not have any close friends outside the terrace, except among their own relations, and several of the families in the terrace were heavily intermarried.28 In Mullingar, County Westmeath, a different approach was taken to housing Travellers. Unlike in Athlone, no more than seven families were housed in any one street. The County Medical Officer, Dr Michael Flynn, helped house 32 of Mullingar’s 41 resident Traveller families. The experiment was deemed a success in that 25 families owned their own houses and all the children were attending school.29 While the Travellers made strides towards respectability and the conventions of the majority community, they were not personally close to settled people: ‘no one has yet forgotten that they were once “tinkers” ’. Mullingar Travellers restricted ‘their close relationships to other Travellers in the town’.30 Sean Maher remembered how his mother suffered intense loneliness in a Kildare town: ‘none of the neighbours would even talk to her, let alone come

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into our house for a visit or a cup of tea. To the townspeople we were dirty, begging tinkers and no respectable person would visit us.’31 This attitude prevailed in most urban areas, where local authorities had no compunction about refusing to house Travellers. In Galway city, a family was removed from the housing list ‘on the basis that the Borough Council were not prepared to house families of the itinerant class’.32 Even those Travellers who gave up nomadism and were gainfully employed found it difficult to secure housing. Brendan Corish TD told the Dáil that ‘I know tinkers, itinerants, or whatever you like to call them, who have tried to stay put, who have got themselves jobs in factories or on building sites and who for years have been refused houses by local authorities.’33 Apart from the notable exceptions cited above, public housing schemes almost entirely excluded Travellers. At the behest of medical officers, local authority politicians and bureaucrats, the new suburban estates, and the attendant demolition of inner-city slums recast the urban landscape, reordering the social relationships between urban dwellers. Alison Ravetz described the similar policies followed in Britain as a social experiment, or ‘a cultural transfer amounting to a cultural colonisation: a vision forged by one section of society for application to another, for whom it might be, more or less, acceptable and appropriate.’34 The power of planners to influence daily life in the new estates was certainly immense. In Cork city, people moved from tenements surrounded by the ‘offensive trades’ of bone boiler and tripe maker to a suburban environment in Gurranabraher where such factories were forbidden.35 Across the country, rehoused slum dwellers were decanted from congested centres characterised by a mixture of residential and industrial activity to estates that were entirely residential. In Dublin city, tenants sought small workshops to continue to operate businesses that had been located in tenement basements. Although Dublin Corporation officials were sympathetic, planning regulations forbade such development. Council tenants in Nenagh, County Tipperary, were forbidden from keeping pigs in their back gardens.36 A form of urban living, where residential, industrial and commercial activities were carried on in the same street or building, was eradicated in the suburban public housing estates built after the 1930s. But it would be unwise to see the power relationship between tenants and planners as entirely one-sided. People manipulated the allocation of tenancies, often returning to the slums in order to apply for more suitable accommodation.37 Mindful of their powerlessness at the beginning of slum clearance programmes, tenants reacted by mobilising to improve their new communities.38 In

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Cork city, an advocacy organisation, called the Cork Corporation Tenants Protection and Development Association, was formed to lobby the public landlord on all issues, from rental systems to Traveller campsites. While the representative nature of such groups is ill-understood, their formation suggests that residents, who received their tenancies through a bureaucratic process that defined and validated their claims, well understood how to articulate their rights. Tenants, both prospective and actual, were also convinced of the power of a ‘good word’, lobbying both officials and politicians in pursuit of their goals.39 Fortuitously, just as local authorities became landlords, the local government franchise was extended to all in 1935.40 Public housing tenants were now voters, with opinions that politicians ignored at their peril. Therefore, the provision of local authority housing and the changing urban environment it entailed politicised the urban working class. Tenants were anxious to distance themselves, both physically and socially, from Travellers who were firmly allocated the lowest place in an urban class structure increasingly defined by access to public services. Travellers’ exclusion from Irish society was based on what the Commission on Itinerancy in 1963 found to be an ‘uncharacteristic’ level of hostility.41 [I]n nearly all areas, itinerants [Travellers] are despised as inferior beings and are regarded as the dregs of society. Many feel they would demean themselves by associating with them. Their presence is considered to lower the tone of a neighbourhood and those who live in that neighbourhood are seldom satisfied until the itinerants have been moved on. There have been actual and threatened rent strikes by local authority tenants to enforce action to have itinerants moved from the neighbourhood of their houses.42 Travellers who secured a local authority tenancy were no more welcome than those camping on the roadside: Sean Maher recalled, ‘in the town where we lived we were not wanted.’43 Far from being passive objects of local government reform efforts, public housing tenants forced their landlord and public representatives to heed their views. In the 1960s and 1970s, this political power considerably influenced the Traveller accommodation policy of local authorities, as will be discussed below.

Charities and resistance to local authorities Denied housing by local authorities and shunned by middle-class and working-class communities, the only organisations willing to aid

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Travellers were lay and Catholic charities, particularly the Society of the St Vincent de Paul and the Legion of Mary. Although the St Vincent de Paul was exclusively male until 1962,44 it shared members with the mixed-gender Legion of Mary, whose founder, Frank Duff, had started his social work with the Society.45 Work with Travellers and Gypsies was ‘a comparatively small part of the Legion’s work’,46 forming part of a remit that sought to ‘work for the last ones of Christ’,47 by seeking out the ‘derelict or abandoned classes’.48 Chief among these neglected groups were homeless men and women who were catered for in two Dublin city centre hostels, Morning Star (founded in 1924) and Sancta Maria (established in 1927) respectively. Because Travellers were not homeless in the strict sense, the Legion sought to bring religious education rather than housing to nomadic families. The St Vincent de Paul was a long-established nationwide body, whose fundamental tenet was the visitation of the poor in their homes by the ‘brothers’ as its members were known.49 An indication of its importance was the appointment of its President, Sir Joseph Glynn, to the commission examining the relief of the sick, destitute and insane poor in 1925.50 On a pragmatic level, the strength of St Vincent de Paul society was, and continues to be, its ability to respond to changing circumstances. Comprehensive schemes of special works were offered according to supply and demand: penny savings banks, coal distribution, clothes and boots distribution, allotments, night shelters for the homeless, an orphanage, missions to seamen, visitation in hospitals and county homes, distribution of catholic literature, night classes and religious instruction.51 Aid offered to Travellers and Gypsies was just a small part of the Society’s work. The Society was a reactive organisation who responded to social needs unaddressed by the state, thus illuminating the shortcomings of public policy and administration. While the Society’s membership has never been analysed according to occupation or income, they were drawn from the same professional, middle-class background as politicians, civil and public servants. Only those with steady incomes and leisure time could dedicate time and money to charity. The money distributed by the Society was mostly raised from among its own members: brothers placed donations in a bag that circulated at each conference meeting. The brothers of the St Vincent de Paul were therefore socially comparable to the men who administered local authorities. But because of its charitable aims, the Society reacted to Travellers in a fundamentally different way to the local administrators who were forced to heed the vociferous objections of public housing tenants to Travellers.

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Work with caravan dwellers began in Dublin city in 1931, with a committee for gypsy visitation, St John Francis Reggis, established in 1932. The ‘gypsies’ of the committee title certainly included Welsh Anglo-Romanies, but Travellers were also among those visited by the brothers. Although the committee was initially reluctant to offer material aid, focusing instead on adherence to the sacraments of the Church, by 1936 this attitude had softened. Assistance was offered when the wage earner was ill, for purchase of horses, for wood to build wagons or for clothing, boots and marriage fees.52 A cash grant for a horse and wagon was given to a mother and five children who had been forced to live in halls.53 When sick or unemployed, Travellers often had no other source of support; ‘[they] have no assistance from the state or otherwise, they are left absolutely destitute.’54 Local authorities that distributed welfare payments had excluded Travellers from the welfare community.55 Even Traveller children with physical or mental handicap found it difficult to enter institutional care; one family needed the intervention of the St Vincent de Paul before a local authority would pay for the care of a deaf and dumb child.56 Without the Society, Travellers would have had very little access to state services. The brothers also tried to protect caravan dwellers from eviction, but with limited success. In 1934, Dublin Corporation evicted a large number of families encamped in the city centre, in spite of the brothers’ efforts to prevent it.57 In January of that year, the corporation served a compulsory purchase order, which acquired 54 separate properties, 49 of which were described as ‘waste ground’.58 The compulsory purchase order may have specifically targeted land occupied by Travellers, securing their eviction while simultaneously securing property for the housing needs of the city’s population. In 1938, the brothers once more intervened when families received peremptory notices to quit their campsites.59 Preventing the corporation from breaking up established campsites in the inner city was not successful however. In 1947, Dublin Corporation closed ‘many yards and open spaces within the city which had been frequented by travelling people, driving most of them to camps in the suburbs’.60 The deliberate exclusion of Travellers from the city continued in 1948, and families were forced to establish temporary camps in the fringes of Dublin.61 The documentary record was silent on why the corporation closed yards used by Travellers. Whether the clearance of Travellers from the city centre was an unintended consequence of urban redevelopment or an opportunistic use of the Corporation’s powers is hard to say. What clearly emerges, however, is the resistance offered by the brothers of the St Vincent de Paul to Dublin Corporation.

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Although both brothers and administrators could safely be described as ‘middle class’, their positions on the treatment of Travellers by local government indicate that a simple class consensus did not exist on this social issue. The brothers played an important intermediary role between Travellers and bureaucracy; in addition to opposing the corporation, brothers provided secretarial services, writing to trace missing relatives62 and contacting parishes in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales for baptism and marriage certificates.63 As a mostly illiterate population, Travellers depended on these services to secure important information and protect their interests. By intervening on behalf of caravan dwellers, members of the Society of St Vincent de Paul demonstrated that class membership did not imply a monolithic social vision. The divergent actions of Dublin Corporation and the Society show that the characterisation of Irish society as dominated by an anti-Traveller nationalism arising from a ‘hegemonic bourgeois culture’ needs significant qualification.64 Jim MacLaughlin argues that the middle class – creators of the nation and possessors of capital – inevitably denigrate and suppress nomadism. Yet, there were middle-class members of the St Vincent de Paul who supported the pursuit of a nomadic lifestyle.

Contradictory attitudes to ‘assimilation’ After the publication of the Report of the Commission on Itinerancy in 1963, the conflict within, and between, the middle class and the working class on Traveller campsites moved from the fringes of Irish social policy to occupy a central place in urban politics. The commission made many recommendations, from more rigorous law enforcement to the provision of housing and halting sites for Travellers. The report stated that all policies aiming to help Travellers or deal with problems they caused ‘should always have as their aim the eventual absorption of the itinerants into the general community’.65 Settlement, in one form or another, would lead to such assimilation. Nonetheless, the commission acknowledged that the majority, settled population often feared and hated Travellers; even those who regarded them ‘as “God’s poor” would not care to have them living permanently in their own district’.66 Yet, relations were not uniformly bad: ‘local itinerants’ who were well known to the settled population were often regarded as ‘decent inoffensive people’.67 Since the extent of social distance between Travellers and settled people varied, the commission optimistically concluded that closer contact would facilitate improved relations between the two groups.68 Many

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submissions received by the commission from the settled population seemed to support increased contact, since all uniformly advocated settlement. However, the commission astutely realised that ‘it is quite clear that many of the settled population will be very slow to accept this [settlement], particularly if it is to take place in their areas.’69 The paradox of demanding settlement but refusing to countenance living near Travellers illustrated that many people who sought the eradication of social difference did not truly believe it could be achieved. In the course of its deliberations, the commission had come to realise that attitudes towards Travellers were contradictory, since advocating settlement was not the same as living next door to Travellers. Nonetheless, a detailed outline of how settlement (housing and campsites) could be achieved was set out in the commission’s report. Permanent campsites, called halting sites, were ‘only the first step of stabilisation in a policy aimed at eventual housing of the families using the sites. The sites might also serve as clearing stations for the housing of itinerants where the overall demand for houses necessitates a waiting list.’70 Campsites were not intended to offer permanent residency for Travellers, as the final object of the absorption programme was settlement in houses. While accommodation would be financed and built by local government, the role envisaged for voluntary organisations was significant. At a local level, voluntary workers would try to bridge the gap between Travellers and settled people. Committees interested in Traveller settlement would be formed from branches of existing charitable organisations (the Legion of Mary or the St Vincent de Paul) or from parish committees including representatives of farmers’ organisations, trade unions and Irish Countrywoman’s Association guilds. Committee members would visit newly settled families to encourage them to persist with the experiment. Such visitation would help overcome problems encountered by Travellers adapting to unfamiliar surroundings and habits.71 These committees would minister to Travellers as charity cases, so their participation was not envisaged. Local groups would also take on a more onerous task: promoting good relations between Travellers and settled people. The commission admitted that this work would not be easy and would depend upon ‘dedicated personnel and sustained effort’.72 It was hoped that these voluntary organisations would be supported by ‘trained welfare officers whose services would be made available to them by the Minister or the local authority’.73 Thus, the commission recommended voluntary committees as bridges between the two communities, helping Travellers to negotiate bureaucracy and the social mores of settled society, while countering hostility

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from settled people. The commission’s report marked a new approach to voluntary organisations and state welfare support.74 The Traveller settlement policy would marry the flexibility and humanity of charity with the funding resources and legal machinery of the state. However, because of the failure of local authorities to provide even basic facilities for Travellers, voluntary efforts assumed greater importance in the Traveller settlement policy than was originally intended. When Cork Corporation attempted to build sites or give tenancies to Travellers, it faced implacable opposition from working-class and middle-class neighbourhoods whose class identities were threatened by the proximity of Travellers. How and why the implementation of the settlement policy failed is best illustrated by a close study of Cork city’s experience. When Cork Corporation received a memorandum from the Department of Local Government on the recommendations of the Commission on Itinerancy, the City Manager was asked to report on measures to implement settlement proposals.75 In February 1965, officials submitted to the corporation plans for a campsite in Churchfield, a public housing suburb on the north side of the city.76 Residents of Churchfield swiftly mobilised to protest at the location of the campsite in their area.77 When the Housing Committee considered the proposal, they rejected it, asking that ‘the officers examine the matter again and make suggestions for the provision of a suitable alternative site in the city or within 5 miles of its perimeter’.78 Corporation officials had been overruled by local tenants and their public representatives. As the commission had anticipated, opposition from residents to Traveller accommodation was fierce. This was hardly surprising given the experience of local authorities who had attempted to house Travellers before the settlement programme was adopted. In November 1965, the City Manager and city officials placed a plan before the city council, proposing that campsites be established in three locations on the north side of the city, all close to public housing developments. When the council of the corporation considered the report, Alderman Allen’s contribution highlighted the class implications of the sites chosen. Allen, a north-side councillor, suggested that campsites be located in the Blackrock and Model Farm Road areas, which were south-side, well-heeled Cork middle-class suburbs. However, the elected councillors did not agree to this amendment and approved the locations proposed by the Manager.79 As well as the campsites, the Manager had also asked the corporation to ‘agree in principle to grant tenancies of its houses to itinerants who are regarded as suitable for housing’.80 Travellers had received corporation tenancies prior to the settlement

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programme, an ‘experiment’ described as a mixed success.81 Interestingly, the Manager sought agreement ‘in principle’ suggesting that the corporation would be asked to agree to each individual tenancy. This would have been a significant deviation from normal practice, since tenancies were allocated by housing officials rather than elected representatives.82 In January 1966, Alderman Allen protested that ‘Preference for rehousing should not be given to itinerants over citizens who had been waiting rehousing for a considerable time.’83 The plans to settle four families in the city centre failed because of the concerted opposition of local residents and business people who forced the corporation to compromise and house only two families.84 Cork Corporation struggled with the contradiction at the heart of settled people’s attitudes towards Travellers; calls for the ‘itinerant problem’ to be eradicated turned to vociferous objection when settlement, and by implication, assimilation, was proposed in their area. Both middle-class and working-class communities in Cork city refused to accept campsites or housed Travellers in their areas. Working-class opposition was especially acute. The coordinated settlement programme offered Travellers equality with, or even priority over, working-class demands for public housing and services. For local authority tenants who had carefully distanced themselves from Travellers – their former slum neighbours – this extension of welfare and community to the outcast class had to be resisted. Class identity for the respectable working class living in (publicly owned) garden suburbs partly depended upon the distinction made between local authority tenants and Travellers. However, middle-class opposition to a proposed campsite in 1968 revealed that not all Cork city residents made such a distinction. For homeowners on the south side of the city, Travellers and local authority tenants were part of the same class and unwanted within middle-class residential areas.

‘More consideration must be given to the man who owned his house’ Such was the strength of opposition to three proposed halting sites in Cork city 1968 that the Department of Local Government held a sworn inquiry into the compulsory purchase orders made by Cork Corporation for land in Ballyvolane, a north-side suburb defined by large public housing estates, and Bishopstown, a south-side suburb dominated by private housing. The City Manager, Walter McEvilly, told the inquiry that the corporation had turned to compulsory purchase orders because it had concluded that sites for Traveller accommodation could not be

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obtained by agreement. The halting sites were part of the city’s plan for accommodating Travellers; by May 1968, it had already housed 13 families.85 Though residents from both parts of the city objected, Bishopstown householders were the only group to hire a solicitor to state their case. Charles Hennessy represented the Melbourne Estate Residents Association and the 300 members of the Bishopstown Development Association. Hennessy asked the Manager to agree that the value of property in an area with a halting site would be lowered. McEvilly insisted that the camp would not constitute a ‘nuisance’ because it would be under control and well supervised. He told the inquiry that Travellers on sites were eventually destined for public housing, as the Commission on Itinerancy had envisaged. McEvilly further stated that there was no corporation housing in Bishopstown and there were no plans to develop public housing estates there. The line of questioning adopted by Hennessy revealed, in a frank and forthright manner, the deep class consciousness engendered by public and private housing schemes. He suggested that ‘it might be a much better proposition to place the camp nearer the corporation housing estates for which they were eventually destined.’ When the Manager replied that it made no difference, Hennessy pointed out that Bishopstown was ‘the greatest scheme of middle-class housing in Cork: there were 20 separate estates with over 2,000 houses.’ He suggested that ‘more consideration must be given to the man who owned his house, buying it on a loan, than to a corporation tenant with no commitment other than paying his rent every week.’ Since this was a public inquiry, public tenants objecting to the halting site in their area were undoubtedly present to hear this. McEvilly did not agree with Hennessy, arguing it was not right to suggest that corporation tenants deserved less consideration. Hennessy then posed a remarkable question: ‘Everyone deserves well, but who deserves most?’ His clients certainly believed that their interests were inherently more important than those of public housing tenants. Hennessy proposed that halting sites be built adjacent to public housing rather than homeowners who ‘might in six months time have to sell them’. Furthermore, as Travellers would eventually live in public housing, it was more appropriate to place caravan sites in ‘those areas’.86 Hennessy was articulating solid middle-class opinion which equated the spatial organisation of the city with its class boundaries.87 For Bishopstown residents, placing a halting site in Ballyvolane was the natural choice because it was on the north side of the city, adjacent to public housing estates. South-side home owners could not be expected to live near Travellers who were allocated the lowest rung on the social ladder.

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Their objections were successful: no halting site was built in Bishopstown, and out of the three proposed sites, only one was built by 1970.88 Cork city was not unique: urban residents successfully prevented halting sites being built in Ennis, County Clare.89 By 1970, just four urban authorities had provided accommodation for 85 families.90

Speaking for Travellers Yet the middle class was not united in its opposition to Traveller settlement. Voluntary efforts led by the charitably inclined middle class, which was anticipated by the Commission on Itinerancy, proved to be an important aspect of the settlement policy. In 1965, the Dublin Itinerant Settlement Committee was established by Victor Bewley,91 Lady Eleanor Wicklow92 and Fr Thomas Fehily, who had been a member of the Commission on Itinerancy. When the committee met with Dublin County Council officials in 1965, they were informed that 12 sites had been proposed, but that all had been abandoned due to public protest.93 However, the opposition of local councils to Traveller accommodation soon became clear and Fr Fehily realised that voluntary work was the only way to circumvent official intransigence.94 With Victor Bewley, Fr Fehily travelled the country establishing settlement committees and publicising the idea of Traveller settlement.95 In 1969, the Irish Council for Itinerant Settlement, an executive committee and supervisory body, was established to coordinate the work of local committees, called Itinerant Settlement Committees (ISCs).96 The nationwide character of the movement is worth stressing: after 1967, 15 voluntary committees were established in 13 counties.97 However, these committees were not united on the most appropriate way to settle Travellers. The Irish Council and 75 per cent of local committees believed in placing families on serviced campsites before offering them housing. The site was therefore ‘an indispensable first step on the way to conventional housing’.98 By 1974, over 300 families were settled on 70 sites across the country.99 A quarter of settlement committees favoured housing over sites, believing that the physical isolation of sites prevented Travellers integrating with the settled community. Between 1965 and 1974, 150 families were housed.100 Committees favouring direct housing over site provision were based outside the major urban centres.101 Despite this difference of opinion, the ISCs achieved significant results. Between 1965 and 1974, ISCs created or found accommodation for over one-third of the Traveller population.102 The Society of the St Vincent de Paul was strongly represented on ISCs. Given the organisation’s previous work with Travellers, it is likely that

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members of the Legion of Mary also joined in large numbers. In 1966, the St Vincent de Paul assessed its ‘modest contribution to the itinerancy problem’. It was estimated that it provided housing for 50 families, while cooperating with other organisations in the provision of education for Traveller children. Several conferences were devoted exclusively to such work.103 In 1968, a new conference was established in Longford to work exclusively with Travellers.104 Thus, in addition to committees linked to Irish Council for Itinerant Settlement, there were dedicated conferences of the St Vincent de Paul helping to settle Travellers. In 1969, a survey revealed the extent of the Society’s participation in the settlement movement. In a number of areas, Itinerant Settlement Committees were entirely composed of its [SVP] members and in most places Society was strongly represented on these Committees. The members bore the brunt of local opposition to settlement proposals, but it was encouraging to learn that they stood up and were counted in the cause of justice for a suffering and unpopular group of people.105 The charitable nature of the Traveller-settled relationship in the 1960s may now appear unequal, but the importance of mobilising vocal support for Travellers among the settled community was the reason settlement committees were formed. Voluntary organisations provided unpaid social workers and supporters of Traveller accommodation. Gmelch and Gmelch noted that ‘Some ISCs spend as much time selling settlement to the Irish community as they do working with Travellers.’106 This work was an essential part of their success and probably reduced the opposition to local authority plans. Fr Fehily believes that settlement committees became pioneers by accident, making decisions because government bodies refused to take the initial steps.107 In addition to housing and site provision, ISCs helped organise educational facilities for Traveller children. Nationwide, from 1965 to 1974, ISCs organised 17 special classes and six special schools. Some committees purchased buses to transport children from scattered roadside camps and sites to school.108 Middle-class men and women who were active in charitable organisations, therefore, played an important mediatory role in Traveller-settled relations, trying to convince members of their own class and other classes that Travellers deserved public services and basic facilities. Working opposite the middle-class men and women who administered local councils and corporations unwilling, and unable, to provide such services, their actions provide a significant counterpoint

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to theories that suggest that anti-Traveller thought was unchallenged in middle-class Ireland.

Conclusion The social effect of the slum clearance programmes initiated in the 1930s deserves serious attention because local government schemes transformed urban areas. The ‘unhealthy’ lanes and alleys where Travellers could – intermittently or seasonally – rent cheap accommodation vanished under a tide of compulsory acquisition and demolition. Relocation was often a traumatic experience for slum dwellers, who suffered social dislocation and financial hardship in the new estates. Nonetheless, tenants were determined to exert their power over the new landlord, the democratically accountable local authority. The proximity of Traveller encampments offended the sensibilities of new communities eager to embrace the status markers of front gardens and semi-detached housing, and suffering from an equivalent fear of their dirty and overcrowded past. For the upwardly mobile working class, Travellers now represented the lowest class in Irish society. Their status was threatened by the government-sponsored settlement programme, which gave Travellers the same social standing as tenants of public housing. Extending social welfare services and housing to Travellers, who, as a group, were among the last in Irish society whose entitlement to assistance was recognised, profoundly challenged the class status of the urban working class. The belief among middle-class homeowners that public authority tenants and Travellers should live side by side elided the difference between the two communities. When the solicitor Charles Hennessy equated Traveller accommodation with ‘those areas’, he was expressing a middleclass view of Cork city’s urban geography, an opinion flatly contradicted by the working-class opposition to halting sites and settlement. Faced with determined opposition from voters, local authorities left the task of accommodating Travellers to the voluntary sector. The implementation of the settlement policy depended upon voluntary organisations, who were willing to face down the opposition of other settled people and local politicians. The class affiliations of ISC members cannot be objectively described but, drawing heavily as they did from the St Vincent de Paul and the Legion of Mary, we can presume that ISCs were largely middle class in composition. The ‘influential and relatively welloff’ members of the Galway ISC believed that Traveller accommodation ‘represented a necessary, and long overdue, national duty consistent with the goals of a modernising Catholic city and country’.109 Few

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seemed to share this view; indeed, plans for halting sites and housing faced determined opposition from a middle class anxious to preserve the spatial segregation between public tenants and homeowners, and from a working class bent on distinguishing itself from the Travelling community.

Acknowledgement The author acknowledges the support of an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

Notes 1. Report of the Travelling People Review Body (Dublin, 1983). 2. Report of the Commission on Itinerancy (Dublin, 1963) [Hereafter cited as Commission on Itinerancy]. 3. Ibid., p. 54. 4. Ibid., pp. 102–3. 5. Ibid., p. 60. 6. George Gmelch, The Irish Tinkers: The Urbanization of an Itinerant People (California, 1977), p. 3. 7. Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge, MA, 1940), p. 274. 8. On 10 September 1956, 7148 Travellers were counted by the police force, while 5880 were counted on 1 June 1961: Commission on Itinerancy, Appendix II. 9. Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1931, Section 2(1). 10. Ibid., Sections 7 and 15. 11. Ibid., Section 64. 12. Michael Verdon, Shawlies, Echo Boys, the Marsh and the Lanes: Old Cork Remembered (Dublin, 1993), pp. 65–6. 13. Note, undated, CP/Files/42, Cork Archives Institute [hereafter CAI]. 14. Ruth McManus, Dublin 1910–40; Shaping the City and Suburbs (Dublin, 2002), p. 111. 15. Report of the Department of Local Government and Public Health, various years. 16. Report of the Annual Meeting of Presidents with the Council of Ireland 1936, pp. 18–19, Society of St Vincent de Paul [hereafter SSVP]. 17. Report of General Purposes Committee 14 April 1958, in Minutes of the County Borough Council Meeting, 22 April 1958, p. 466, CP/C/A 20, CAI. 18. R.J. Dalton, ‘The slum problem in Cork’ in B.G. MacCarthy (ed.) Some Problems of Child Welfare: University and Labour Series No. 6 (Cork, 1945), p. 73. 19. Interview with the author, Dr Michael Flynn, 2 February 2001. 20. Sharon Gmelch, Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman (London, 1986), pp. 31–2, 77, 86; Nan Joyce and Anna Farmar, Traveller: An Autobiography (Dublin, 1985), p. 22; Sean Maher, Road to God Knows Where: A Memoir of a Travelling Boyhood (Dublin, 1998), p. 10; Commission on Itinerancy, p. 58.

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21. Joyce and Farmer, Traveller, p. 27. 22. Irish Folklore Collection, Main Manuscript Collection 1255, p. 69, University College Dublin [hereafter IFC, UCD]. I am grateful to the Head of the Folklore Department for permission to quote from this material. 23. Patrick J. O’Connor, All Ireland Is in and about Rathkeale (Newcastlewest, Co. Limerick, 1996), p. 140. 24. Verdon, Shawlies, p. 45. 25. Michael Lennon, ‘Residential Segregation in Cork city 1901–46’ (Unpublished thesis, Department of Geography, University College, Cork, 2000), p. 121. The term ‘lower-class’ was applied to those families where the male head of the family was an unskilled labourer. 26. Commission on Itinerancy, p. 64. 27. Luan P. Cuffe and George J. Gmelch, ‘Housing as a factor in social integration: the Traveller in Ireland’ (Unpublished report, April 1972), p. 12, Traveller Resource Centre, Dublin. 28. Cuffe and Gmelch, ‘Housing as a factor in social integration’, p. 15. 29. Ibid., p. 17. 30. Ibid., p. 18. 31. Maher, Road to God Knows Where, p. 17. 32. Jane Helleiner, Irish Travellers: Racism and the Politics of Culture (Toronto and London, 2000), p. 56. 33. Dáil Éireann Debates, vol. 182, col. 512 (1 June 1960). 34. Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (London, 2001), p. 5. 35. Aoife Bhreatnach, Becoming Conspicuous: Irish Travellers, Society and the State, 1922–70 (Dublin, 2006), pp. 53–4. 36. Mary E. Daly, The Buffer State: The Historical Roots of the Department of the Environment (Dublin, 1997), p. 341. 37. Report of General Purposes Committee 5 August 1958, in Minutes of the Meeting of the County Borough Council, 12 August 1958, 529–30, CP/C/A 20, CAI; McManus, Dublin, 1910–40, pp. 155, 160. 38. The formation of community groups and residents’ associations in Ireland awaits study, but the dynamics of such relationships in Britain have been explored. See Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture, pp. 137–56. 39. McManus, Dublin, 1910–40, pp. 155, 157. 40. Under the Local Government (Extension of Franchise) Act 1935, any Irish citizen over the age of 21 was entitled to vote in the area where he/she was ordinarily resident. 41. Commission on Itinerancy, p. 104. 42. Ibid., p. 102. 43. Maher, Road to God Knows Where, p. 17. 44. The first female conference was established in Galway in 1962, Annual Report of the Superior Council of Ireland 1965 (Dublin, 1965), p. 1, SSVP. 45. Leon Ó Broin, Just Like Yesterday: An Autobiography (Dublin, n.d.), pp. 127–30. 46. Cecily Rosemary Hallack, The Legion of Mary (5th edition, London, 1950), p. 157. For a description of missionary work among ‘gypsies or tinkers’, see pp. 157–61. 47. The Legion of Mary (Dublin, 1937), p. 197.

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48. Ibid., p. 199. 49. In 1833, Frederick Ozanam, a Catholic student in the University of Paris, founded the Society of St Vincent de Paul. St Vincent de Paul is the patron saint of the poor and the Society sought to aid the poor by visiting their homes. The first conference in Ireland was established in 1844. The Society was composed of conferences located in parishes. Conference reported directly to the Council of Ireland or to Particular Councils established at diocesan level. Today the parish conference remains though the other structures were reformed in the 1960s and 1970s. See Report of the Task Force Approved by the President to Consider the Role and Structure of the Council of Ireland February 1978 (Dublin, 1978), SSVP. 50. Glynn also sat on the committee of inquiry into Health Insurance and Medical Services. See Interim Report of Committee of Inquiry into Health Insurance and Medical Services (Dublin, 1925). 51. For an overview of special works see St Vincent’s Glasnevin, Centenary Record, 1856–1956 (Dublin, 1956) pp. 15–16. 52. Report of the Council of Ireland 1936, pp. 171–2, SSVP. 53. Report of the Council of Ireland 1937, pp. 174–5, SSVP. 54. Report of the Council of Ireland 1942, p. 141, SSVP. Also, Report of the Council of Ireland 1947, p. 77, SSVP. 55. For more see Bhreatnach, Becoming Conspicuous, pp. 81–3. 56. Report of the Council of Ireland 1948, p. 77, SSVP. 57. Report of the Council of Ireland 1934, pp. 147–8, SSVP. 58. Schedule of the Compulsory Purchase Order 1933, pp. 39–49, Minutes of the Municipal Council of the City of Dublin, 1934, Dublin City Archives. 59. Report of the Council of Ireland 1937, p.175, SSVP. 60. Report of the Council of Ireland 1947, p. 77, SSVP. 61. Report of the Council of Ireland 1948, p. 77, SSVP. 62. Report of the Council of Ireland 1937, pp. 174–5, SSVP. 63. Report of the Council of Ireland 1938, p. 157, SSVP. 64. Jim MacLaughlin, Irish Travellers: Whose History? Whose Country? (Cork, 1995), p. 28. 65. Commission on Itinerancy, p. 106. 66. Ibid., p. 102. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., p. 103. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., pp. 55–6. 71. Ibid., p. 108. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. 74. For more on this see Bhreatnach, Becoming Conspicuous, pp. 117–20. 75. Report of the Housing Committee, 3 November 1964, 429, in Minutes of Meeting of the County Borough Council, 10 November 1964, CP/C/A 22, CAI. 76. Report of the General Purposes Committee, 16 March 1965, 492, in Minutes of Meeting of the County Borough Council, 23 March 1965, CP/C/A 22, CAI. 77. Minutes of the Quarterly Meeting of the County Borough Council, 13 April 1965, 497, CP/C/A 22, CAI.

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78. Report of the Housing Committee, 6 April 1965, 501, in Minutes of Meeting of County Borough Council, 13 April 1965, CP/C/A 22, CAI. 79. Minutes of the Meeting of the County Borough Council, 14 December 1965, 629, CP/C/A 22, CAI. 80. Report of the Housing Committee, 2 November 1965, 608, in Minutes of the Meeting of the County Borough Council, 9 November 1965, CP/C/A 22, CAI. 81. Minutes of the Meeting of the County Borough Council, 25 January 1966, p. 15, CP/C/A 23, CAI. 82. In 1938, the interference of elected representatives in housing allocation was a problem in Dublin city; see McManus, Dublin, 1910–40, p. 157. The managerial system of local government was intended to eradicate the veniality and corruption seen as endemic to local government. See Eunan O’Halpin, ‘The origins of City and County Management’ in City and County Managers’ Association, City and County Management, 1929–90: A Retrospective (Dublin, 1991), pp. 1–20. 83. Minutes of the Meeting of the County Borough Council, 25 January 1966, 15, CP/C/A 23, CAI. 84. Report of the General Purposes Committee, 7 February 1967, 188, CP/C/A 23, CAI. 85. Irish Times, 22 May 1968. 86. Irish Times, 23 May 1968. 87. Bishopstown remained overwhelmingly middle class until Cork Corporation built 200 houses in 1974. Richard Henchion, Bishopstown, Wilton and Glasheen: A Picture of Life in the Three Western Suburbs of Cork from Early Days to Modern Times (Cork, 2001), p. 66. 88. Dáil Éireann Debates, vol. 244, cols 297–8 (5 February 1970). 89. Bryan Fanning, Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (Manchester, 2002), pp. 113–51. 90. Dáil Éireann Debates, vol. 224, cols 297–8 (5 February 1970). 91. Victor Bewley was a Quaker and a member of the family that ran the famous Bewley Cafés in Dublin. His voluntary work was extensive though his involvement with Travellers was his most public activity. See Fiona Murdoch, Victor Bewley’s Memoirs (Dublin, 2002), pp. 61–73. 92. Eleanor Clonmore, Countess of Wicklow, was described as ‘one of the leading figures in post-war Irish public affairs of her generation’. She was a Labour Party senator and a prominent campaigner on housing, social issues and Northern Ireland. See her obituary in the Sunday Tribune, 9 March 1997. Thanks to Niall Keogh for this reference. 93. Murdoch, Victor Bewley’s Memoirs, p. 65. 94. Interview with the author, Fr Thomas Fehily, 8 May 2001. 95. Murdoch, Victor Bewley’s Memoirs, p. 64; Interview with the author, Fr Thomas Fehily, 8 May 2001. 96. Sharon B. Gmelch and George Gmelch, ‘The itinerant settlement movement’, Studies, vol. 63 (Spring 1974), p. 2. 97. Information provided by Miss Murnaghan to the Northern Irish House of Commons. Northern Ireland Commons Debates, vol. 69, cols. 1472–3 (22 May 1968). 98. Gmelch and Gmelch, ‘The itinerant settlement movement’, p. 3. 99. Ibid., p. 3.

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100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 3. Report of the Council of Ireland 1966, p. 3, SSVP. The conference was called St Benedict Joseph Labre, after the Beggar of Perpetual Adoration, patron saint of the homeless. Report of the Council of Ireland 1968, p. 9, SSVP. Report of the Council of Ireland 1969, p. 2. Gmelch and Gmelch, ‘The itinerant settlement movement’, p. 8. Interview with the author, Fr Thomas Fehily, 8 May 2001. Gmelch and Gmelch, ‘The itinerant settlement movement’, p. 11. Helleiner, Irish Travellers, pp. 82–3.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

14 ‘The Stupid Propaganda of the Calamity Mongers’?: The Middle Class and Irish Politics, 1945–97 Diarmaid Ferriter

Introduction In January 1969, Eamon de Valera, the ailing 86-year-old president of the Republic of Ireland, was guided into the Mansion House in Dublin in order to address both houses of the Oireachtas. History was in the making, as never before had a president invoked this constitutional privilege. The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of the meeting of the first Dáil in January 1919. De Valera’s address was short, bland and difficult to hear, as the acoustics in the Mansion House were poor. National ideals, he stressed, had lost none of their virtue, neither had the legacy of ‘the heroes of Easter Week 1916’. While articulating the need to work closely with other countries, he also asserted: ‘A great deal is said about internationalism and so on, and some people think that the small nations have nothing to look forward to except to be brushed aside or absorbed by great powers. I do not at all agree with that opinion.’1 More interesting and significant than de Valera’s inaudible address were the protests and scuffles that went on both within and outside the Mansion House. This was, after all, 1969, the end of a decade of protest, and many believed de Valera’s generation had been in power too long and failed to deliver on their political promises. In the Mansion House, as a member of the ‘distinguished audience’ was Joseph Clarke, a veteran republican who had fought in 1916. De Valera had barely commenced when Clarke, leaning on his crutches, interjected the following, breaking not only with decorum, but also with the Irish language-only rule: ‘The programme of the old Dáil has never been implemented! This is a mockery! There are people on hunger strike in Mountjoy. The housing of the people . . ..’ Clarke couldn’t finish his protest, as he was pounced 271

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on by the ushers, who took his crutches and moved him outside, where they gave him back his crutches and sent him on his way. Ironically, Clarke had served as an usher at the meeting of the first Dáil in 1919. De Valera, it was subsequently reported, did not seem to hear the protest (he certainly would not have seen it, being virtually blind).2 Clarke’s protest was a reference to the housing crisis of Dublin in the 1960s that had prompted increasingly militant action by the Dublin Housing Action Committee (DHAC), a socialist and republican protest group. One of their members, Denis Dennehy, had recently been imprisoned for squatting in a house in Mountjoy Square in Dublin’s inner city. On the same day as Clarke’s theatrics, the DHAC picketed the General Post Office and protested outside the Pro-Cathedral. Others protested against the failure of the government to protect and promote the Irish language. Up to 2,000 students from Democratic Action also protested in Dublin that day, demanding free education for all, and held aloft placards that included ‘50th ANNIVERSARY OF HOMELESS FAMILIES AND ENFORCED DIVORCE (EMIGRATION)’ and ‘CLASSLESS SOCIETY? BALLYFERMOT, FOXROCK’. No doubt the students felt very international that day, echoing the wider culture of student protests, not to mention the tumultuous events that were going on in Northern Ireland. Later the same day, De Valera met the British Ambassador to Ireland, Sir Andrew Gilchrist. They shook hands, and the ambassador said, ‘Mr President, I want you to realise that this time the British are with you.’ According to Liam Mac Gabhann, a contemporary Irish Times journalist, this comment took on an added resonance, given that clearly ‘some of the Irish without the walls were not’.3 The Irish ‘without the walls’ were articulating an understandable frustration at the end of a decade in which middle-class interests and values had been further entrenched in Irish politics. Some lamented the fact that Fianna Fáil, fond of describing itself as the ‘real Irish Labour Party’ in previous decades, was now associated with unbridled capitalism, as witnessed by the courting of business interests and builders and the somewhat shady activities of the group Taca (an Irish word, meaning support), who organised meetings in which businessmen were given access to ministers in return for contributions to party (and personal) coffers. As Stephen Collins wrote in his history of Fianna Fáil, published in 2001: By the early 1960s the links between the party and business had become a bit too close for comfort, even in the eyes of many of its own supporters. The establishment of an organisation called

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Taca institutionalised the links between Fianna Fáil and business, particularly the building industry . . . the motto ‘all things being equal, the Fianna Fáil man gets the job’ is attributed to a number of leading figures including Seán Moylan and Donogh O’Malley, and it undoubtedly reflected a cast of mind which had become established at certain levels in the party. There might have been some justification for it in the circumstances of the 1930s, when the party represented the have-nots, but increasingly in the 1960s it became a cloak for something else.4 As internal government documents began to be released in Ireland in the 1990s under the National Archives’ 30-year rule, it provided an opportunity to examine the extent to which this led to any soulsearching within Fianna Fáil, which had partly achieved its electoral dominance by securing a significant allegiance from working-class voters. Not all the senior members of the party were happy in the 1960s with the direction in which the party was going. There has been a tendency to overlook these divisions and focus instead on the splits within the party caused by the Arms Crisis of 1970 when dismissals and court cases engulfed the party and an internal battle was being fought over how to respond to the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But senior ministers like Kevin Boland had made it clear in the mid-1960s that they were becoming uncomfortable with the party’s association with the middle and upper-middle classes. In January 1965, for example, Boland wrote to the Minister for Finance that there was ‘a general feeling that we have not paid sufficient attention to the weaker sections of the community and that there has not been an equitable distribution of the increased prosperity to which we point as an achievement’. The Department of Finance accused him of attempting to undermine economic expansion with his complaints, to which he responded, ‘I assure you that my suggestion that after 8 years spent in promoting economic expansion something reasonably substantial should now be done for social welfare is not an effort to wreck the Second Programme for Economic Expansion.’5 He insisted that payments under social assistance schemes were inadequate.

Post-war politics Boland’s reference to ‘the weaker sections of the community’ being left behind pointed to a consistent failure of the middle-class political establishment after the second world war to tackle inequality in Irish life.

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At the end of the war, in a debate in the Irish senate, a representative from Trinity College, Professor William Fearon, suggested that Ireland would no longer remain untouched by political and social developments on the continent: ‘I think we have learned our history lesson. I respectfully suggest that we should learn that we are not an island outpost on the Atlantic, but part of the great family of nations. Justice, our geographical position and commerce should make us appreciate that our partnership is linked up with other nations; that we are linked up with their welfare.’ Any hope, however, that the post-war period would witness Ireland embracing the welfare state or imitating the social-democratic forms of government in vogue on the continent was soon dashed. It was significant that one of the electoral challenges facing Fianna Fáil in the immediate post-war period was from Clann na Poblachta (CNP), a political party formed in 1946 that promised a return to the ‘welfarism’ espoused by Fianna Fáil in the 1930s. But the experiences of CNP, who won ten seats in the 1948 election that forced Fianna Fail out of power, and participated in coalition government until 1951, were chastening. Part of the problem was that there were too many disparate elements in the party to satisfy, and it was unclear what exactly they stood for. The party had made a film showing the need for political change in Ireland which made it clear that the civil-war issues would no longer dominate election campaigns – the film put a spotlight on the tenement slums, and highlighted forced emigration and uncontrolled tuberculosis. But how would these issues be tackled and what middle-class sensibilities would have to be trampled on in the process? Answering that satisfactorily was part of the problem for CNP. In reflecting on those early days of the party in his powerful but caustic and self-serving memoir, Noel Browne, who was elected a TD (Teachta Dála) for CNP in 1948 and appointed Minister for Health, recalled with disdain: The Party’s Ard Fhéis failed to establish a properly structured organisation, with clearly defined radical, social and economic policies. It merely emphasised the party’s utopian woolliness and reflected MacBride’s tenuous understanding of political, economic and philosophical problems. For instance, under social services the party promised that ‘a national monetary authority will be established, whose function will be to create currency and credit for the economic needs of full employment, and full production, and to provide credits, free of interest, for full employment and national development’. Clearly the printing press, at least, would be busy. Section five went

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on: ‘the means of production and distribution of commodities, essential to the life of the people, shall be so organised and controlled as to ensure a fair distribution’. This was a worthy platitude, no more.6 Were CNP urban liberals, rural radicals, socialists or all three? These questions were never fully resolved because of the implosion of the party; the personality clashes between Noel Browne and Sean MacBride and the Mother and Child Crisis, which have been well documented.7 The conflict over improved maternity and child welfare was a class conflict as much as anything else, in which the interests of the medical profession prevailed, particularly the view expressed by Catholic extremist Dr James McPolin, that the scheme had to be defeated ‘on the grounds that it obliterated a whole section of private practice for doctors’.8 Hopes of a new political dawn had been well shattered by the early 1950s.

The 1950s The unfortunate reality was that the 1950s was a decade in which the response of the middle-class establishment to Ireland’s social and economic malaise was entirely ineffectual. This was partly a product of scare mongering about socialist politics, sponsored by the Catholic Church, the larger political parties and the middle-class professions, and involved a denial that Ireland was a very poor country. Those intent on invoking class politics were depicted as foreign-influenced and dangerous radicals, and the Fianna Fáil hierarchy seemed more concerned with American dollars than with the sufferings of an Irish underclass. In the 1950s, borrowed American dollars were of crucial importance to the post-war Irish economy, but they came at a price, and those who paid the biggest penalty were the poorest. Seán MacEntee, Minister for Finance in 1953, blamed the huge unemployment problem in Ireland on foreign borrowing: ‘It would be very much better if these people were employed, but when the first demand on the economy was to meet interest owed to the US, some elements of the population were bound to suffer,’ he was quoted as saying in the Dublin Evening Mail newspaper.9 And suffer they did. Those with a family, even with 10 children, who could not find employment, were entitled to maximum unemployment benefit of 50 shillings a week, while unemployment assistance was 38 shillings a week. To put these figures into some perspective, a pound of butter in Dublin in 1953 cost 4 shillings and 3 pence. Families simply could not afford

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to eat the high protein food that was needed to keep them healthy and lived on a diet of bread, margarine and tea. The Dublin Unemployed Association (DUA), the story of which was recorded by the historian Evanne Kilmurray in 1988, repeatedly highlighted these difficulties. The DUA was launched outside the Werburgh Street Labour exchange in Dublin in 1954 under the chairmanship of political activist Tom Pearle. Obviously, the Association was demanding jobs, but it was also insisting on more protection for those living in poverty – better benefits, the reintroduction of food subsidies and the provision of relief work, a small amount of which was subsequently provided by Dublin Corporation. DUA members were often battered off the streets by Gardaí and were denounced in a smear campaign by the Catholic Standard newspaper, which thrived on the ‘Red Scare’. One member of the DUA responded curtly: ‘If it is Communism to protest for three meals a day, then we are all Reds.’ The DUA revealed individual cases of extraordinary hardship, as recounted by Kilmurray: One such case was that of a mother of 3 children who had approached the association for help. Her husband was suffering from acute heart trouble and had been removed to St Kevin’s hospital in a dying condition. She had been in receipt of 37 shillings 6 pence home assistance. The relieving officer had heard of her husband going into hospital, had come to the house and told her she would be cut down to 35 shillings as she had one less mouth to feed. The woman was distraught – the cut was a deathblow. She paid 6 shillings rent, 2 shillings insurance, 4 shillings gas, 4 shillings bus fare to visit her husband and bought cigarettes and tea to him. She was left with 19 shillings a week to feed and clothe herself and 3 children. She had never bought coal.10 There was frequently a denial about the extent of this suffering. For example, in 1951, a contributor to the Jesuit publication Studies exemplified the tendency to bury the head in the sand, in order not to talk the country into crisis: Poverty fifty years ago was real, now it is comparative . . . the poor are still with us, but actual destitution if it is still to be found in Ireland is rare and avoidable . . . unless we are deliberately determined to drift into communist slavery let us strop repeating the stupid propaganda of the calamity mongers who, day in day out, declare that we were never so badly off as we are now, when, in actual fact, we are

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more fortunate than most nations and have the power to continue advancing if we have the will.11 It would be difficult to find a more blatant example of middle-class denial. The obvious alternative to fighting the middle class politically was to emigrate. Between 1951 and 1961, 500,000 emigrated. In 1957 alone, the figure was 60,000. While it is true that these figures caused alarm, there was far too much attention devoted to the issue of the supposed moral and spiritual threats that existed to Irish people once they left, than the impact it was having at home. The Report of the Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems (1956) was a worthy exercise, but there was not enough attention given to the impact of emigration as a form of exclusion at familial and national level. Many of the dispossessed Irish found an enjoyable anonymity and little preoccupation with their class background once they were abroad. One such emigrant, Bernadette Fahey, who fled abuse in an Irish institution for children, summed this feeling up well: I left Ireland for several reasons, chief amongst which was the feeling that I didn’t belong to anyone, anything or anywhere. I was also sick and tired of being asked where I came from and who I was. In common with hundreds of others who were raised in orphanages, I was ashamed of my past and did all in my power to hide it. England was a useful place to evade these issues. It was less parochial. People were happy enough to know which country you came from and leave it at that. For that reason alone it became the safe haven of thousands of orphans who couldn’t bare the daily pressures that Irish society put on them. We were constantly confronted with our lack of roots and identity. This was extremely painful in a society that laid so much emphasis on one’s family pedigree, place of birth and religious persuasion. These were the barometers by which individuals, families and groups were acceptable or not.12 At home, the Garda Commissioner wrote an extraordinary letter to the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, in 1956 that provided a measure of the inadequacy of the official response to emigration. It contained the view that there were only two categories of emigrants: ‘those who did not accept Irish institutions and laws, and preferred to live elsewhere and finally, those whose forbears were driven to the mountains and bogs by Cromwell and who have been living on uneconomic holdings’.13

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The 1960s Undoubtedly, there was more impatience with these lazy middle-class assumptions by the 1960s and 1970s, though, as outlined above in relation to Fianna Fáil, this did not stop middle-class values dominating political discourse and action. As Kieran Allen has pointed out, ‘the welcome for the multinationals was overwhelming, and any action against them was viewed as akin to national sabotage.’ This was a shared perspective between Fianna Fáil and trade union leaders, and the newly created Irish Congress of Trade Unions refused to affiliate to the Labour party. It was thus not something ‘imposed on a reluctant bourgeoisie’ as has been argued in some earlier studies of Lemass.14 Allen suggested the labour and trade union movement was in the 1960s being pushed in two contradictory directions, wanting higher wages and improved working conditions but also, like Fianna Fáil, embracing development and the battle for exports: They often swung between the demands made on them as social partners of the government and a desire to stay in touch with their members. As the 1960s progressed, these conflicting pressures were stretched to ‘breaking point’. In response, the Labour Party reacted to growing militancy with an increasingly shrill plea for ‘normalisation’ and ‘as always the Labour Party proved that its own conservatism was the best ally Fianna Fáil had’.15 Nor was Fianna Fáil in its capitalist comfort zone going to be unduly perturbed by a hoped-for resurgent, left of centre Fine Gael, despite the attempts by the modernisers within the party. In his memoirs, Garret FitzGerald recalls that, by the middle of the 1960s, he had abandoned the clericalism and conservatism of his youth, and ‘instead of rejecting liberalism and socialism, I was concerned to incorporate them into an integrated Irish philosophy of life.’ He was particularly concerned with the incompatibility of the accumulation and transmission of substantial volumes of property by inheritance with the attainment of equality of opportunity in society. He duly criticised the Catholic church’s excessive emphasis on the right to own private property ‘which no-one in this all too bourgeois island challenges’, suggesting that it might be ‘even more appropriate to emphasise the corrupting power of property whose effects are at times glaringly evident among our farming community and among the middle classes . . . besides these materialistic preoccupations even the bitterness of members of the working classes – and surprisingly

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few are bitter – appear in a favourable light.’ FitzGerald’s solution to the problem of inequality was not radical social change through revolution, because it would disrupt a small open economy that was dependent on an ability to compete in small open markets, but wealth tax, capital gains tax and education ‘to change social attitudes in the direction of equity’.16 Declan Costello, another younger member of Fine Gael, harboured similar views and sought to infuse the Fine Gael party with a new momentum. In the 1950s, along with Tom O’Higgins, he had established the Fine Gael Research and Information Centre, which, among other things, argued that since the private sector was not capable of driving economic development, the public sector would have to intervene on an ever-increasing scale. The public sector had to be transformed to do this effectively, they argued, and the banks needed to play an ‘active’ rather than ‘frustrating’ part in aiding economic growth – growth which had a strong social as well as economic dimension.17 As pointed out by Maurice Manning in 2006: These views were not well received by the then leadership of James Dillon and, in particular, by Gerard Sweetman, a powerful and immensely able figure of vigorously conservative views on economic and fiscal matters. In the end, however, this clash was to lead to the adoption by Fine Gael of the Just Society programme less than a decade later. In the short term, however, Declan Costello failed to bring Fine Gael with him. He was seen by some of his colleagues as a dangerous socialist, by others as impractical and most damagingly of all – an academic. It took two stunning by-election defeats – Cork and Kildare – in 1964 to bring the Costello agenda back to the fore in Fine Gael. By today’s standards there was little that was alarming in his proposals, but their emphasis on modernisation and professionalism on formulating economic, social and cultural policies influenced by Christian social principles, the continuing emphasis on a strong social component to economic development and the need to work effectively for an alliance with Labour all combined to galvanise Fine Gael into its first real policy debate in decades – and one that Costello, backed by Tom O’Higgins and Liam Cosgrave – won.18 During the 1965 general election, there was some enthusiasm for these policies, particularly among the young, and it did much to pave the way for Garret FitzGerald’s future leadership for the party, from 1977 onwards. But there was no real success in cementing an alliance between

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Fine Gael and Labour and no real inroads in terms of shaking off the image of Fine Gael as a party for the middle-class. Some members of Fianna Fáil were keen to emphasise this notion of Fine Gael as a party supported by the well-off. Very early in his career, in a letter to Seán Lemass, for whom he had a great fondness and respect, Charles Haughey insisted on the need for Fianna Fáil to refer to Fine Gael as ‘a right-wing conservative party’.19

The 1970s Although comparatively little has been written by historians about Ireland in the post-1970 period, partly because under Ireland’s National Archive Act of 1986 state files can only be released after 30 years, certain themes are discernible. The state papers released concerning the Fine-Gael labour coalition from 1973 to 1977 reveal a government understandably preoccupied with the security of the state rather than social equality, but there were important strides made in relation to social welfare. According to Stephen Collins: Welfare expenditure as a percentage of GNP rose from 6.5 to 10.5 per cent during the lifetime of the coalition. Most benefits rose by 125 per cent, well over the rate of increase in both wages and prices. The qualifying age for the old age pension was brought down from 70 to 66 and groups like unmarried mothers and prisoners’ wives received allowances for the first time. Cosgrave went on record after the start of the oil crisis to say that the poor were not going to bear the brunt of the problem and he was true to his word. The political return to the coalition for all its concern for social welfare was absolutely zero. Richie Ryan [Fine Gael Minister for Finance] recalls the tempestuous arguments he used to have with the late Frank Cluskey [Labour minister] around the cabinet table over the scale of the welfare increases being sought by Labour. He chuckles at the memory of meeting Cluskey for the first time after the 1977 election debacle: ‘Jayzus Richie, you were right. You always said we’d get no fucking thanks for all the welfare increases’ was the Labour man’s blunt assessment.20 When it came to the issue of a wealth tax, Fine Gael’s middle-class supporters became nervous. Many of Liam Cosgrave’s well-heeled constituents were horrified at the government’s plans to introduce a wealth or capital gains tax in 1974. According to files from the Department

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of the Taoiseach, Fianna Fáil had considered this issue in 1970, when the Minister for Finance accepted that ‘a case exists in principle for the taxation of wealth’ in order to ‘secure a more acceptable relationship between different categories of income’, but it was subsequently withdrawn from the cabinet agenda. In 1974, the Minister for Finance, Richie Ryan, returned to the issue in the context of the publication of a White Paper on capital taxation. There was considerable unease on the part of Fine Gael supporters about this question – in February 1974, Dr Edward More, Bishop of Kilmore, Elphin and Ardagh, wrote to Cosgrave and warned him to tread carefully and not adopt the ‘doctrinaire’ approach of the Labour Party to such issues (which was ironic given that the originator of the idea was Garret FitzGerald, who had been trying to get it accepted by Fine Gael as far back as the mid-1960s). Senator Alexis Fitzgerald, the prominent solicitor, was more blunt in appealing to Cosgrave ‘not to sell out to Labour’, and warned that accountants and bankers would advise clients to look abroad for investment opportunities in the event of a capital gains tax. Cosgrave’s constituents in the Stillorgan and Blackrock areas of County Dublin felt likewise, as did Redmond Gallagher of the Ballygoran Stud, who pleaded with Cosgrave not to allow it ‘as you are personally so interested in the blood-stock industry’. John Bruton, who was parliamentary secretary to the Minister for Education, was on the receiving end of protests from wealthy farmers, and alerted Cosgrave to the feeling that the tax idea had ‘fundamentally shaken the confidence of our supporters’, and that it would damage his electoral prospects due to his strong family connections with the Irish Farmers Association, who ‘played no small part in my election to the Dáil’. Another letter, representative of the views of many, was sent to Cosgrave by John and Ned McGuire: Since we sold Brown Thomas [fashionable city-centre department store] both he and I have been living on capital, because as the law stood up to now as regards death duties, under the best legal advisers we both had created trusts for our families in a perfectly legal and accepted manner. Not only the McGuire family but many people like us and people who trusted in Fine Gael as a solid and reliable party for people who had created property by hard work and service to the community are shocked . . . we have been responsible for the employment of thousands and thousands of Irish people . . . there is alarm and consternation among decent people who expected better from a Fine Gael government that so many of us looked forward to and

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worked for so long to put in power. I am well aware that nowadays one must accept the fact that people of property, even moderate property, are living with ever creeping socialism which aims at the destruction and confiscation by taxation and other means, of their effects and privacy, but the present white paper proposals, at least as far as I am concerned, are instant social infringement and confiscation of property. The government’s standard response to such correspondence was that a system of capital taxation to replace estate duties (as outlined in the White Paper) was in response to demands for a system which would enable people to pay capital tax by instalments over a lifetime, instead of obliging their next-of-kin ‘to surrender a substantial slice of the family estate once or twice in a generation’. In his correspondence with Cosgrave in April, Richie Ryan was unapologetic, arguing that there was considerable avoidance and evasion of death duties, and that the state needed to recoup the loss of £13 million annually as a result of this. He also derided the ‘highly emotional reaction’ to one proposal for a wealth tax on property valued in excess of £50,000 at rates of from 1.5 to 2.5 per cent: ‘For instance, some commentators have estimated that [the proposed tax] would yield £100 million annually. If this estimate is a correct one it means that there must be £4,000 million of wealth in private hands in this country conferring no benefit on the community and unknown to the Revenue Commissioners . . . of course there is nothing radical or “out left” in our proposals. As the white paper indicates, all other progressive democracies have patterns of taxation of wealth on lines similar to those proposed by us’. The tax was introduced in 1975, levied at 1 per cent of the value of assets in excess of £100,000. The family home was exempt, as were bloodstock, livestock and pension rights. Fianna Fáil abolished the tax in 1977.21

The 1980s Fianna Fáil decisively won the general election of 1977 as a result of a populist, dishonest give-away manifesto that did enormous damage to Irish politics and the economy for the next decade, while the poverty of Ireland became even more pronounced when compared to Ireland’s counterparts in the European Economic Community (EEC). In April 1980, it was pointed out in Magill magazine that social inequality was greater in Ireland than any other country in the EEC. Nearly 800,000 people, of whom over one third were children, were exclusively or

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largely dependent on weekly social welfare or health board payments – the proportion of total income which went to the poorest 30 per cent was smaller in Ireland than elsewhere in the EEC, while the richest 30 per cent in Ireland got a higher proportion of total income than the EEC average.22 The most recent history of Ireland since the Second World War, by Henry Patterson, blames Jack Lynch for being an incompetent government leader (‘if one individual has to be singled out as responsible for the crisis years of the early 1980s, then it would have to be Jack Lynch’) and praises the Fine Gael Labour coalition of 1982–87 for undoing much of the damage, by reducing inflation and the Exchequer borrowing requirement, though with a reduction in real personal income, ‘the cost was high for many of Labour’s traditional supporters.’23 Politics during this era was dominated by a resurgent Fine Gael that appealed to the liberal middle class and, after 1979, Lynch’s successor as leader of Fianna Fáil, Charles Haughey, whose quest for an overall majority, combined with despair about the country’s finances, led to much political instability. Haughey’s vast accumulation of personal wealth continued to be unexplained; nor was there much probing of his own ideology, or lack of ideology. His collected speeches contain criticisms of socialism as ‘an alien gospel’ that was inherently un-Irish.24 However, he had no qualms, it seems, about free loans for himself, and one of the greatest mistakes of his ministerial career, often overlooked, was a ridiculously generous deal for hospital consultants when he was Minister for Health in 1978, allowing them to use public hospitals to carry on their private practice on their own terms. ‘We have great and aspiring social objectives’ was a phrase he used more than once, but he did not deliver on these in any comprehensive way. Had he remained a reforming minister (as he revealed himself to be in the 1960s), he may well have been able to deliver more, but his winning of the leadership of Fianna Fáil in 1979 ensured that his priorities lay elsewhere. In terms of government policy, he discovered fiscal rectitude late in life (but only in relation to the national finances after 1987, and much credit must be given to Alan Dukes for supporting the policies as leader of the Opposition), and historians of the future may well point to the reduction of the national debt in the late 1980s and early 1990s as being a crucial turning point and laying the groundwork for the Celtic Tiger boom. However, the creation of a more solvent and ultimately wealthy society was not matched by any determination to redistribute those riches or tackle the fundamental inequalities of Irish society, which can be legitimately seen as Haughey’s greatest failure. He

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remained, first and foremost, a champion of the middle class while in government. When the secrets of Haughey’s personal finances were uncovered, there was an understandable preoccupation with his corruption, yet journalist Vincent Browne argued trenchantly after his death in the summer of 2006 that ‘the focus on personal corruption on the part of individual politicians obscured a more fundamental corruption: the use of State power to enrich the already rich and to impoverish the already poor; or at least the failure to use the coercive resources of the State to redistribute wealth, income, power and resources and respect in a fair way.’25 This was particularly true in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985, Fianna Fáil dissidents formed a new party, the Progressive Democrats (PD), who committed themselves to liberal economic and social policies, and were able to take great advantage of the Dáil’s arithmetic, serving in coalition from 1989 to 1992 and from 1997 to 2007. Ultimately, however, it was not concerned with appealing to a majority of the electorate; it was a decidedly middle-class party that focused on tax cuts for the wealthier. In this regard, it was highly revealing that in 1987, the core group of PD strategists was ‘entirely made up of people working in senior management positions’.26 But whatever about new political parties, change often came, not from the initiatives of the political establishment, because they were so timid, but as a result of decisions of the Supreme Court, which occasionally forced an overwhelmingly conservative middle-class political establishment to liberalise Irish society, seen in such areas as contraception and homosexuality. One result of the various battles over social and moral issues fought in the 1980s, or the ‘politics of denial and cultural defence’ referred to by Tom Garvin,27 was a belief that political change was more likely to come from outside of politics. Political parties, burnt by the emotiveness of the referenda on divorce and abortion, and the dense legalities of proposals relating to personal morality, deliberately avoided confronting contentious issues in Irish society and allowed the courts to do the work for them. As pointed out by Finola Kennedy, governments were happy to avoid taking responsibility for the welfare of families until they were ‘left with no option due to a decision of the courts’.28 Ann Marie Hourihane, a journalist who was involved in the 1983 abortion referendum, observed: To me, one of the biggest results of the amendment was that parliamentary politics lost its thrust. Ever since, social change has come from outside the Dáil and the politicians have been running after the

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public. I think that’s one of the big changes. The Dáil never got to grips with this – it disgraced itself. The momentum moved outside the Dail to the courts, the tribunals . . . .29 Politicians instead began to focus on one overriding theme – wealth creation – and the consensus built around this was to mark the ultimate triumph of the middle class in Irish politics.

The 1990s Mary Robinson’s successful campaign to be elected president in 1990 seemed to hold out the possibility of this consensus being challenged. Her strategy revealed a determination to give political attention to the victims of middle-class Ireland’s indifference. Ironically, to win the election, Robinson, with a track record in feminist and socialist political activism, first had to make herself acceptable to middle-class Ireland, and her willingness to take on board the advice of political strategist Eoghan Harris, who had urged her to re-invent herself as a moderate liberal in order to appeal to Catholic middle-class Ireland, paid dividends. As a journalist covering her campaign, John Waters perceptively observed (in his book Jiving at the Crossroads) that the key to her success in 1990 was her contention that in moving towards a ‘new Ireland’, it was neither necessary nor advisable to leave ‘the old Ireland’ behind. One thing in particular that she said to him, in an unpublished interview, ‘made sense of all the seemingly contradictory things she had said elsewhere, about Catholicism, about socialism, about progressive politics, about the view the Irish people need to have of themselves. “I’m a Catholic from Mayo”, she said, “there’s nothing about that Ireland that I don’t know. So it’s me. I understand it from within and I want to develop it on, but in the way that one would want to develop oneself, almost. I don’t repudiate so much as want to coax along into a different world”.’30 Nonetheless, as president, she highlighted the excluded and the dispossessed, which did not always go down well with her political peers. Robinson made her second and final address to the houses of the Oireachtas in February 1995, on the theme ‘cherishing the Irish Diaspora’. It was a well-crafted speech, though overly long. Much of her audience did not like it. In an uncharacteristically frank assessment, Bertie Ahern, then leader of the Opposition, called it ‘a terribly boring speech and everyone in the Dáil nearly fell asleep’. Robinson was

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conscious that it was not going down well. ‘I felt it as I was speaking’, she told her official biographers, ‘I felt there was a resistance . . . I have rarely spoken to a less responsive audience.’31 Not for the first or last time, Robinson spoke of the need for a broader, more inclusive Irish identity, an Irishness that should ‘reach out to everyone’. Her presidency thus far had certainly reached out, not just to the women’s and community groups at home, but also well beyond that. Her speech on the Diaspora had a political edge because of its relevance to something that was causing contemporary debate – the treatment of Irish emigrants; whether there was an onus on Irish governments to contribute to their welfare, and whether they should be allowed to vote in Irish senate elections. ‘We cannot have it both ways’, she said, ‘we cannot want a complex present and still yearn for a simple past.’ She quoted playwright Tom Murphy (whose work is often a savage indictment of the creation of a dispossessed class of Irish people), and Eavan Boland’s poem ‘The Emigrant Irish’: ‘like oil lamps, we put them out the back, of our houses, of our minds.’32 The address was a rebuke, a rapping of the collective national knuckles. It was vintage Robinson, treating of Ireland old and new, and it delighted Fr Paul Byrne of the Episcopal Commission for Emigrants. The church, after all, had been virtually alone historically, in caring for the welfare of Irish emigrants. Robinson generated much publicity, but much of what she did was symbolic and, because of the limited political powers of the Irish president, her term of office from 1990 to 1997 did not lead to a breakthrough for the Left in Irish politics. Middle-class Ireland was happy to allow her champion the dispossessed because it eased their consciences but did not affect their bulging wallets. Irish politics in the 1990s remained conservative. Fergus Finlay, an advisor to the Labour Party while they were in power with Fianna Fáil (1992–4) and with Fine Gael (1994–7), maintained that the period 1993–7 was ‘one of the most productive periods of government that Ireland has ever seen’.33 Interestingly, he also noted that Dick Spring, the leader of the Labour Party during that era, has ‘always been unwilling to articulate the sense of vision and commitment that’s in his gut’. This self-serving assessment could be read in another way – Labour did not articulate its gut feeling because it would scare the middle class with talk of higher taxes. The performance of Labour in government may have been competent, but it certainly did not mark them out as champions of the underdog in Irish society.34 As pointed out by journalist Vincent Browne, ‘the last time Labour was in government, from 1992 to 1997, it oversaw the emergence of the new inequality. Budget after budget of the governments

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of that period, including those when Ruairí Quinn was minister for Finance, favoured the rich over the poor.’35

Conclusion In truth, there was very little that divided the main political parties when it came to economic and social policy from the late 1980s onwards. The century ended with Ireland basking in being the envy of Europe due to the phenomenal success of what was dubbed the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy, which, in stark contrast to the relative decline of the economy since independence, witnessed Ireland as one of the fastest growing economies in the world. From 1987 until the end of the century, economic growth (GNP) averaged over 5 per cent, while in some years growth was over 10 per cent. In a single decade, the growth in employment stood at an astonishing 20 per cent. Despite this, the extent to which governments succeeded in combating poverty and the class inequities in Irish society is seriously open to the question, as the gap between rich and poor continued to be blatant and Ireland’s health, child-care, housing and transport problems were not solved. The last general election of the twentieth century was fought in 1997; the main argument of the campaign was that taxation of the middle class was an unacceptable form of persecution. According to Dick Walsh, then political correspondent with the Irish Times, this election ‘which really was about fairness, public service and the nature of society, ended with a lop-sided populist appeal which reduced all issues to one: Tax Reductions at any cost.’36 The priority now, it seemed, was not redistribution or equality, but deciding who would manage the wealth most effectively to benefit the middle class. Indeed, it is one of the great ironies of the twentieth century, and another illustration of the triumph of materialism, that the Irish social revolution of the late nineteenth century, in which the political and social power of landowners was broken by their tenants, was replaced 100 years later by a class of landowners and speculators who were to exercise their domination of land and the Irish economy in an even more invidious way than some of the most wretched nineteenth-century landlords.

Notes 1. Irish Times, 22 January 1969. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid.

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4. Stephen Collins, The Power Game: Ireland under Fianna Fáil (Dublin, 2001), p. 22 5. National Archives of Ireland (NAI), DT (Department of Taoiseach) 97/6/85 Kevin Boland to Seamus O’Ríain, 15 January 1965. 6. Noel Browne, Against the Tide (Dublin, 1986), p. 98. 7. John H. Whyte, Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923–70 (Dublin, 1971) and Ruth Barrington, Health, Medicine and Politics in Ireland, 1900–1970 (Dublin, 1987). 8. Finola Kennedy, From Cottage to Creche: Family Change in Ireland (Dublin, 2001), p. 198. 9. Evanne Kilmurray, Fight, Starve or Emigrate (Dublin, 1988), pp. 9–30. 10. Ibid. 11. Séamus O’Farrell, ‘The changing pattern of Irish life’, Studies, vol. 40, December 1951, pp. 428–36. 12. Bernadette Fahey, Freedom of Angels: Surviving Goldenbridge Orphanage (Dublin, 1999), p. 194. 13. NAI, DT 11582, Irish Labour Emigration, 23 October 1956. 14. Kieran Allen, Fianna Fáil and Irish Labour: 1926 to the Present (London, 1997), p. 109. Also, see Paul Bew and Henry Patterson, Sean Lemass and the Making of Modern Ireland (Dublin, 1982). 15. Allen, Fianna Fáil, pp. 121–48. 16. Garret FitzGerald, All in a Life: An Autobiography (Dublin, 1991), pp. 66–8. 17. See article by Maurice Manning, ‘A life of singular achievement in politics and law’, Irish Times, 1 August 2006. 18. Ibid. 19. John Horgan, Seán Lemass: The Enigmatic Patriot (Dublin, 1997), p. 203. 20. Stephen Collins, The Cosgrave Legacy (Dublin, 1996) pp. 141–9, 158. 21. All quotations above are from NAI, DT, 2005/7/292, ‘Wealth Tax’, 22 October 1970, 12 March 1974 and 25 March 1974. 22. Magill, April 1980. 23. Henry Patterson, Ireland since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict (London, 2006), pp. 273–85. 24. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900–2000 (London, 2004), p. 697 25. Irish Times, 6 September 2006. 26. Magill, January 1987. 27. Tom Garvin, ‘The politics of denial and cultural defence: the referenda of 1983 and 1986 in context’, Irish Review, no. 3, 1988, pp. 1–8. 28. Kennedy, From Cottage to Creche, p. 39 29. See Diarmaid Ferriter, What if? Alternative views of Twentieth Century Ireland (Dublin, 2006), pp. 14–29. 30. John Waters, Jiving at the Crossroads (Belfast, 1991), p. 9. 31. Helen Burke and Olivia O’Leary, Mary Robinson: The Authorised Biography (London, 1998), pp. 201ff. 32. Irish Times, 3 February 1995. 33. Fergus Finlay, Snakes and Ladders (Dublin, 1998), p. 328. 34. Ferriter, Transformation of Ireland, p. 101. 35. Irish Times, 6 September 2006. 36. Irish Times, 27 April 2002.

Index

Aberdeen, Lady, 111 Age of Reason (Paine), 31 Ahern, Bertie, 285 Alexander, John, 164 Alexandra College, 178, 181, 185–6 Allan, Charles, 155 Allen, Alderman, 260–1 Allen, Kieran, 278 Allen, W., 56 Amazing Philanthropists, The (Day), 142 American War of Independence, 25, 73 Anchor Brewery, 73 Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), 234, 239 Andrews, John, 153 Andrews, John M., 219, 221 Andrews, Thomas, 154 An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness (Thompson), 35–6 Annat, Aurelia, 5 anthropology, 2 Antrim, 10, 149, 164, 169 Appeal of one Half the Human Race (Thompson), 14, 21, 35 Ardilaun, Lord, 167 Armagh, 101, 152, 165–6, 169 Armagh Royal School, 152 Arms Crisis (1969–70), 273 Arnott family, 167 Arnott, Sir John, 136 Association for the Suppression of Duelling, 102 Bailie, J.O., 221, 225–6 Baird Brothers, 167 Ballincollig Gunpowder Mills, 150 Ballymena, Co. Antrim, 152 Balrothery Poor Law Guardians, 239

Baltinglass Poor Law Guardians, 234 Barbour family, 151, 154, 156, 162, 168 Barbour, John Doherty, 164 Barbour, John M., 219 Barton, Detective-Sergeant, 244 Bates, Richard Dawson, 219 Beale family, 154 Beamish and Crawford Brewery, 155 Beamish, Francis Bernard, 163 Belfast, 26–7, 41, 109, 142, 149–59, 161–3, 165–8, 177, 188, 213–14, 216–17, 219–21, 225–6, 237, 252 Belfast Chamber of Commerce, 219–20 Belfast Morning News, 166 Belfast Protestant Association, 217 Belfast Ropeworks, 154 Belfast Royal Academical Institution, 152 Belfast Telegraph, 225–6 Belmullet Board of Guardians, 138 Benevolent Society (Cork), 30–1 Bentham, Jeremy, 24, 35 Bewley, Victor, 263 Bhreatnach, Aoife, 5 Bielenberg, Andy, 5 Bishopstown Development Association, 262 Blair, Tony, 227 Boer War, 204 Boland, Eavan, 286 Boland, Kevin, 273 Bourdieu, Pierre, 24 Bourke, Richard, 134–5 Bowen-Colthurst, Captain, 242 Boyd, Alexander, 101 Boyle, Richard, 26 Boyton, Rev. Charles, 80 Bracken, Thomas, 52–3 Brooke, Basil, 219, 221–5 Brown, John S., 164

289

290

Index

Browne, Noel, 274–5 Browne, Vincent, 284, 286 Brunswick Club, 67, 80 Bruton, John, 281 Buckland, Patrick, 213 Burke, Edmund, 9–10 Burrowes, Peter, 9 Butler, Simon, 13 Butt, Isaac, 200, 214 Byers, Margaret, 177–8, 184 Byrne, Edward, 9, 12, 14 Byrne, Fr Paul, 286 Byrne, John, 73 Cahirciveen Board of Guardians, 134 Callaghan, Gerard, 39 Campbell, Arthur, 59 Campbell, Major Alexander, 101 Carbry, Christopher, 52, 56, 59 Carey, William Paulet, 14–18 Carlow, County, 157, 164, 166 Carson, Sir Edward, 217–18, 242 Castlebar Board of Guardians, 135 Castlereagh, Lord, 9 Catholic Association, 49, 66–7, 77–83 Catholic Committee, 9–12, 14, 16 Catholic Laymen’s Committee, 188 Catholic Relief Act, 12 Catholic Rent, 54, 77 Catholic Society, 10 Catholic Standard, 276 Catholic University, 184 ‘Celtic Tiger’, 283, 287 Central Association of Irish Schoolmistresses and other Ladies Interested In Education (CAISM), 178, 184–5 Charity Organisation Society, 141 Charlemont, Viscount, 219 chartism, 16 Chesterfield, Lord, 89 Childers, Erskine, 234 Churchill, Winston, 221 Claeys, Gregory, 21, 38 Clann na Poblachta (CNP), 274–5 Clarke, Joseph, 271 Clark, George Smith, 163 Clear, Caitriona, 148, 198 Cloncurry, Lord, 15

Cloney family, 149 Cloney, Thomas, 77 Cluskey, Frank, 280 Coffy, John, 53 Cohalan, Bishop, 244 Cole, John, 224 Coleman, Anne, 204 Colley, Linda, 2 Collins, Michael, 205–6 Collins, Stephen, 272, 280 Connolly, James, 21, 41, 203, 237, 239, 241 Conran, Patrick, 53, 57 Constitution, The (Cork), 39 Contagious Diseases Acts, 178 Coogan, Michael, 59 Corfield, Penelope, 8 Corish, Brendan, 254 Cork, 4, 21–2, 25–35, 37–41, 67, 73, 82, 84, 95, 109–11, 113–14, 116–23, 136, 142, 150–1, 153–5, 157–8, 161, 163, 166, 169, 188, 199, 236, 244, 251–2, 254–5, 260–3, 265, 279 Cork Distillers Company, 157 Cork Examiner, 166 Corkey, Robert, 221 Cork Institution, 32, 34 Cork Literary and Philosophical Society, 34 Cork Mercantile Chronicle, 39 Cork Southern Reporter, 34 Cork Trades Association, 41 Cosgrave, Liam, 279–82 Cosgrave, William, 244 Costello, Declan, 279 Costello, John A., 277 County and City of Cork Liberal Club, 40 Craig, Charles, 217–18 Craig, Edward, 42 Craig, James, 218–19, 221, 224–6 Craig, William, 224 Cronin, Maura, 4 Crossman, Virginia, 4 Cuffe, Lady, 117, 119 Cullen, Cardinal Paul, 177 Cusack, Michael, 42

Index 291 Dáil Eireann, 204, 244, 254, 271–2, 281, 284–5 Das Kapital (Marx), 22 Davies, Emily, 178 Davis, Thomas, 199–200 Davitt, Michael, 137, 200 Davys, Francis, 53 Day, Susanne, 142–3, 145 Deane, Theresa, 143 Defenders, 15 Delany, William, 179, 187, 189–90 Democratic Action, 272 Democratic Unionist Party, 227 Dennehy, Denis, 272 Dennehy, W.F., 230–3 D’Esterre, John, 101 De Valera, Eamon, 244, 271–2 Devereux, John Thomas, 163 Devereux, Nicholas, 158 Devereux, Richard Joseph, 163 Dickson, David, 26, 150 Dickson, Thomas, 164 Dillon, James, 279 Dillon, John, 232 Dockrell, Margaret, 144 Donohoe, Anne, 140 Donoughmore, Lord, 73 Donovan, Aggie, 117 Donovan, Daniel, 37, 41 Dooley, Dolores, 22 Dorman, Sarah, 33 Dorman, Thomas, 33 Douthat, Elizabeth, 34 Douthat, Mary, 34 Dowdall, Luke, 52, 57 Dowd, Cormac, 54 Dowling, John, 56 Downes, Margaret Tierney, 188 Downey, Edmund, 201, 205 Downshire Pottery, 150 Drennan, William, 10, 14–15 Drummond, Thomas, 56 Dublin, 3, 5, 9–17, 25–7, 52, 56, 67, 69, 71–7, 79, 81–3, 94–7, 101–2, 109, 141, 149, 151, 153, 157–8, 163–4, 166–7, 169, 178–9, 181, 183–8, 196, 200, 203–4, 217, 230, 232–42, 244–5, 250–1, 254, 256–8, 263, 271–2, 275–6, 281

Dublin Chamber of Commerce, 237, 241 Dublin Daily Express, 167 Dublin Dickens Fellowship, 236 Dublin Evening Mail, 77, 275 Dublin Evening Post, 69, 71–3 Dublin Housing Action Committee, 272 Dublin Itinerant Settlement Committee, 263 Dublin Journal, 69, 71–3, 75–7 Dublin Metropolitan Police, 244 Dublin Typographical Provident Society, 235–6 Dublin Unemployed Association, 276 Dublin Weekly Messenger, 75 Duddy, Thomas, 22 Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 61, 200 Dukes, Alan, 283 Dunbarr, Hugh, 159 Durey, Michael, 13 Dwyer, James, 81 Dwyer, John, 59–60 Eagleton, Terry, 21 Easter Rising (1916), 203, 241, 271 Edgeworth, Maria, 51, 55 Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford, 60, 82 Education Act (1902), 232 Edward VII, 232 Elliott, Marianne, 9 Emmet, Thomas Addis, 14 Engels, Friedrich, 48 Englishwomen’s Journal, 178 Ennis, Co. Clare, 82, 263 Episcopal Commission, 286 European Economic Community (EEC), 282–3 Evening Herald, 236–7 Evening Mail, 77–8, 275 Evening Post, 69, 71–3, 83 Evening Telegraph, 167 Ewart’s Mill, 158, 162 Ewart, William, 156, 158, 163, 165, 216 Factory Acts, 164–5, 168 Fahey, Bernadette, 277 Farrell, John, 59

292

Index

Faulkner, Brian, 224, 226 Fearon, William, 274 Fehily, Fr Thomas, 263–4 Feingold, William, 57, 133, 135 fenians, 200, 202 Ferriter, Diarmaid, 5 Fianna Fáil, 245, 272–5, 278, 280–4, 286 Financial Times, 236 Fine Gael, 278–81, 283, 286 Finlay, Fergus, 286 First World War, 117, 119, 149, 168, 197, 199, 203–4, 206, 218 Fitzgerald, Alexis, 281 FitzGerald, Garret, 278–9, 281 Fitzgerald, Lord Edward, 15–16, 281 Flags and Emblems Act (1954), 223 Flax Spinners Association, 155 Flax Supply Association, 155 Fleming, Neil C., 5 Flood, Edward, 59 Flood, Henry, 25 Flynn, Dr Michael, 252–3 Ford, William, 80–1 Fox, Charles, 55 France, 22–3, 25, 28–9, 37, 77, 93, 98, 205 Freeholder, The (Cork), 38 Freeman’s Journal, 69–72, 79, 81, 97, 166, 182, 230–1, 235 French, Percy, 113 French Revolution, 8, 29, 100 Friendly Club, 27, 33 Gallagher, Redmond, 281 Galway, 138, 188, 244, 254, 265 Galway, Mary, 237 Garvin, Tom, 284 George, David Lloyd, 234, 241, 244 George II, 96 George III, 68 Gibbon, Monk, 196, 205 Gibbon, Peter, 165, 213 Giffard, John, 69, 71, 74–7 Gilchrist, Sir Andrew, 272 Gill, Mary, 198 Glynn, Sir Joseph, 256 Good Friday Agreement, 227 Good Literature Crusade, 237

Goulburn, Henry, 78 Goulding, William, 150, 164 Granard Trades Political Union, 52 Grant, William, 221 Grattan, Henry, 25, 54, 68–9, 71, 204 Gray, Edmund Dwyer, 166 Great Famine (1845–50), 108, 148, 243 Greg, Thomas, 150 Grehan, Thomas, 233 Griffith, Arthur, 232, 234, 239 Grimshaw, Nicholas, 150 Guinness family, 72, 152–3, 157, 164–5 Gwynn, Denis, 205 habitus (Bourdieu), 24–5 Hake, Thomas Gordon, 196 Halligan, John, 59 Hall-Thompson, Colonel Samuel, 223 Harland & Wolff, 151, 153–4, 162 Harland, Edward, 154–5, 163, 216 Harris, Eoghan, 285 Harris, Joseph, 139 Haslam, Anna, 144 Haughey, Charles J., 280, 283–4 ‘Hawarden Kite’, 215 Hayden, Mary, 178–9, 181–2, 184, 187 Healy, Mary, 117, 119 Healy, Timothy M., 230–2, 234 Hely-Hutchinson, Christopher, 40 Hely-Hutchinson, John, 40 Hennessy, Charles, 262, 265 Hennessy, J.P., 136 Hetherington, Thomas, 70 Hewitt, John, 223 Hibernian Journal, 97 Hibernian Sunday School Society, 100 Higgins, Bishop, 52, 61 Hill, Jacqueline, 4 Hincks, Rev. Thomas Dix, 31–2 Hinkson, Henry, 195, 197 historiography, 1–2, 5 Hobsbawn, Eric, 48 Home Rule Bill (1893), 198, 231 Hope, James, 16–18 Horan, Malachy, 121 Hourihane, Ann Marie, 284 Hughes, Bernard, 149

Index 293 Hughes, John, 162 Hyde, Douglas, 196, 221 Independent Irish Party, 166 Independent Newspapers, 244 Intermediate Education Act (1878), 114 Intermediate Education Bill (1878), 177, 180 Intermediate Education Board, 179 International Industrial Exhibition, 232 Irish Association of Women Graduates (IAWG), 184–6, 189 Irish Citizen Army, 242 Irish Congress of Trade Unions, 278 Irish Convention (1917–18), 243 Irish Council Bill (1907), 233 Irish Countrywomen’s Association, 122, 259 Irish Daily Independent, 231, 244 Irish Farmers’ Association, 281 Irish Labour Party, 272, 278, 281, 286 Irish Land League, 133, 198, 200 Irish Millers’ Association, 155 Irish Municipal Reform Act (1840), 58 Irish News, 166 Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), 166, 230, 232 Irish Party, 166, 203, 231, 234–5, 238–40, 242–3, 245 Irish Poor Law Act (1838), 56 Irish Press, 245 Irish Privy Council, 93 Irish Republican Army, 244 Irish Republican Brotherhood, 200 Irish Review, 142 Irish Times, 167, 272, 287 Irish Transport & General Workers Union (ITGWU), 203, 236–9, 245 Irish Worker, 236–7 Itinerant Settlement Committees, 263–4 Jackson, Alvin, 213 Jackson, Henry, 15–16 Jellicoe, Anne, 178 Joyce, Nan, 252

Kanturk, Co. Cork, 140 Kavanagh, Fr P.F., 237 Keenan, Bryan, 53 Kelly, James, 4 Kenmare, Lord, 11 Kenna, Michael, 59 Kennedy, Finola, 284 Kennedy, Rev. Thomas, 59–60 Keogh, John, 8, 11–14 Keon, Patrick, 56, 58–9 Kerry, County, 11, 111, 157, 253 Kettle, Thomas, 239 Kickham, Charles J., 200 Kilkenny, County, 73, 77, 108, 117–19, 151, 158, 163 King, Abraham Bradley, 69 Kirk, William, 162 Kocka, Jurgen, 148 Labor Rewarded (Thompson), 36 Ladies’ Land League, 198, 200 Land Act (1903), 203, 232 Lane, Fintan, 4 Langford, Paul, 91 Larkin, Emmet, 48 Larkin, James, 203, 233, 235–45 Law, Andrew Bonar, 218 Lawless, John, 82 Lawless, Valentine, 15 Lee, J.J., 33, 212 Legion of Mary, 264 Lehane, Con, 234–5, 242 Lemass, Seán, 278, 280 Leonard, Michael, 53 Leo XIII, Pope, 240 Lerner, Gerda, 3 Liberal Registry Club, 57 Limerick, 11, 95, 109–10, 112–17, 121, 123–4, 153, 252 Linen Merchants’ Association, 155 Listowel, Co. Kerry, 134 Literary Revival, 200 Liverpool, Lord, 68 Llandaff, Lord, 73 Local Government Act (1898), 57 Locke, Mary Anne, 158 Londonderry, Lord, 225 London Hibernian Society, 99 Longford Journal, 59

294

Index

Longford Political Trades Union, 51 Long, Walter, 217 Louth, County, 79, 82, 164 Lovett, William, 38 Lowry, William, 221 Lurgan, Co. Armagh, 152 Lydon, Thomas, 138 Lynch, Jack, 283 Lynch, Patricia, 118–19 MacAdam Brothers, 150 MacBride, Seán, 274–5 MacCormac, Henry, 41 MacEntee, Seán, 275 Mac Gabhann, Liam, 272 Mackie, James, 152 MacLaughlin, Jim, 258 Macmillan, Harold, 224 Madden, R.R., 16 Madden, Samuel, 97 Magee, Archbishop, 81 Magee, John, 69 Magee, John, 69, 83 Maginess, Brian, 223 Maguire, Fr Thomas, 78–9 Maguire, John Francis, 166 Maher, Sean, 253, 255 Mahony, Martin, 153 Mandeville, Bernard, 92 Manning, Maurice, 279 Markievicz, Countess, 244 Marxism, 2–3, 13, 18, 21–2, 23–4, 213 Marx, Karl, 21–2 Masterson, John, 54 Maume, Patrick, 5 Maxwell, Henry, 55 Maxwell, Owen, 57 Mayne, Edward, 101 Mayo, County, 111, 135, 197, 201, 204, 285 McBride, Robert, 164 McCance, John, 162 McCormack, F.J., 188 McCormack, Richard, 16 McCracken, Henry Joy, 16 McEvilly, Walter, 261–2 McGarrahan, Bartholomew, 78 McGaver, Nicholas, 57 McGaver, Patrick, 59

McGuire, Ned, 281 McHugh, Edward, 166 McKenna, Dr Theobald, 10–11, 13 McKenna, Francis, 137 McLoughlin, James, 139 McMaster, Dunbar, 158 McPolin, Dr James, 275 Meynell, Alice, 196 Midgley, Harry, 221 Miller, David W., 25 Miller, James, 78 Miller, Kerby, 100 Milliken, Thomas, 78–9 Mill, John Stuart, 21 Mills, John, 70 Mitchel Club, 199 Moles, Thomas, 167 Montefiore, Dora, 239 Moore, Rev. Robert, 221 Moore, William, 215, 217 More, Bishop Edward, 281 Morning Mail, 167 Morning Star, 256 Morris, Apollos, 32 Morrogh, John, 166 Mountgarret, Lord, 13 Moylan, Seán, 273 Mulholland, John, 156, 163, 165 Mullingar, County Westmeath, 253 Mulloy, John, 54 Mulvihill, William, 53 Murphy, James J., 153, 155, 158 Murphy, Nicholas Dan, 163 Murphy’s Brewery, 151 Murphy, Tom, 286 Murphy, William Lombard, 244 Murphy, William Martin, 5, 230–45 Murray, John, 59 Murrough-Bernard, Sr Arsenius, 111 musical bands, 109 Nation, The, 136–7, 199, 231–2 National Exhibition, 232 National Health Service, 222 National League, 133 National Press, 231 New Ross, Co. Wexford, 140 Nicholls, George, 132, 134 Nichols, Simon, 51–2, 57, 59

Index 295 Northern Ireland, 154, 212, 220–2, 224–6, 258, 272–3 Northern Ireland Labour Party, 221–2, 224 Northern Star, 17 Northern Whig, 156 Nous, John, 59 Nugent, John Dillon, 234 O’Beirne, Alexander, 56 O’Brien, Kate, 111 O’Brien, Sissy, 114, 123 O’Brien, William, 234 O’Connell, Daniel, 40, 48–9, 51, 54, 58–9, 61, 76–7, 79–82, 101–2, 214 O’Connor, Anne, 190 O’Connor, Arthur, 15 O’Connor, Roger, 29 O’Donnell, Sir Richard, 134 O’Donoghue, D.J., 198 O’Donoghue, Rev. J, 59 O’Faolain, Seán, 114 O’Farrelly, Agnes, 184 O’Ferrall, Fergus, 4 O’Gorman, Nicholas Purcell, 81 O’Gorman, Richard, 81 Ó Grada, Cormac, 33 O’Grady, Standish, 41, 102 O’Higgins, Tom, 279 Oldham, Alice, 181, 184–6, 197 O’Leary, Ellen, 200–1 O’Leary, Fr Arthur, 80 O’Leary, John, 200 O’Mahony, John, 201 O’Mahony, Norah Tynan, 196, 201 O’Malley, Donogh, 273 O’Mara, James, 153 O’Neill, Terence, 224–6 Orange Order, 79, 214, 217 Ouzel Gallery Society, 96 Owen, Robert, 24, 35, 37–8, 41 Oxford University Press, 223 Paine, Thomas, 15, 31 Paisley, Rev. Ian, 225–7 Paisley (Scotland), 151 Pankhurst, Richard, 22 Parker, Dehra, 223

Parnell, Charles Stewart, 133, 198, 202–5, 231, 239 Parnell Split, 231 Paseta, Senia, 5 Passage West, Co. Cork, 155 Patterson family, 149 Patterson, Henry, 283 Pearle, Tom, 276 Peel, Sir Robert, 34, 78, 101 Phillips, Patrick, 59 Pierce family, 151 Pim, Jonathan, 164 Pirrie, William James, 153–5, 157 Porter, Norman, 223 Porter, Rev. James, 17 postmodernism, 3 Power, James, 163 Powerloom Manufacturers’ Association, 155 Practical Directions (Thompson), 36 Practical Education for the South of Ireland (Thompson), 34 Preston, Margaret, 132 Prittie, Francis, 73 Progressive Democrats (PDs), 284 Progressive Unionist Party, 220 Protestant Evangelical Society, 223 Protestant Home Rule Association, 197 Protestant Orphan Society, 111 public houses, 120 Puxley, John L., 151, 153 Quakers, 67, 154, 158 Quinn, Michael, 59 Quinn, Ruairi, 287 Rathkeale, Co. Limerick, 252 Ravetz, Alison, 254 Rawdon, George, 70 Red Cross, 240 ‘Red Scare’, 276 Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland (Madden), 97 Reform Act (1832), 90 Reggis, St John Francis, 257 Reilly, Joseph, 52 Ricardo, David, 35 Richardson family, 165 Richardson, James Nicholson, 153

296

Index

Richardson, John Grubb, 159 Rights of Man, The (Paine), 15 Robertson Commission on University Education, 182, 185 Roche, Sir Boyle, 12–13 Rock, James, 56 Rooney, Edward, 52–3, 56–7 Rourke, James Halpin, 54 Rowan, Archibald Hamilton, 13 Royal Army Medical Corps, 244 Royal Belfast Academical Institution, 153 Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), 114, 244 Royal Literary Fund, 197 Russell, Lord John, 132 Russell, Thomas, 8, 16, 98 Ryan, Richie, 280–2 St Vincent de Paul Society (SVP), 264 Saunderson, Edward, 215–17 Sayers, Jack, 225 Scully, Denys, 77 Second World War, 221, 283 Shanly, Michael, 53 ‘shawlies’, 120 Shaw, Robert, 71 Sheahan, Thomas, 39, 41 Sheehy Skeffington, Francis, 189, 240 Shillington, David, 219 Shorter, Clement, 204, 206 Simms, Brendan, 17 Simpson, Sub-Inspector, 53 Sinclair, Maynard, 221 Sinclair, Thomas, 216 Sinn Féin, 203–4, 234, 240, 243–4 Skelly, Michael, 59 Slevin, John, 53 Sloan, Thomas, 217, 225 Small Differences (Akenson), 160 Smith, Charles, 59 Smith, Daniel, 59 Smithwick, John Francis, 163 Smithwick, Richard, 163 Society for Discountenancing Vice, 99 sociology, 2, 24 Southern Reporter, 34, 39 Spaight, George, 134 sporting clubs, 109

Spring, Dick, 286 Stack, Rev. Joseph, 80 Stamp Act, 9 Stephens, Samuel, 71 Stuart, Charles Edward, 202 Sullivan, Pat, 53 Sunday schools, 99 Sweetman, Gerard, 279 Sweetman, John, 239 Swiney, John, 30 Tandy, James Napper, 73 Teignmouth, Lord, 102 Ternan, James, 52, 55 Thompson, John, 26–33 Thompson, Lydia, 29 Thompson, William, 4–5, 21–42 Times, The, 134 Tipperary, County, 73, 166, 254 Tithe Composition Acts, 50 Tobin, Thomas, 150 Tod, Isabella, 143, 177–8, 180, 184 Tone, Theobald Wolfe, 8–10, 13 Tormy, Hugh, 53 Town and Regional Planning Act (1934), 251 Travellers, 250, 252–3, 255, 257–61, 263–5 Trench, Archbishop Richard Chenevix, 178 Trimble, David, 227 Tuite, John, 59 Twining, Louisa, 143 Tynan, Katherine, 5, 194–207 Ulster Convention, 216 Ulster Farmers’ Union, 221 Ulster Schoolmistresses’ Association, 177 Ulster Unionist Council (UUC), 213, 217–19, 221, 226 Ulster Volunteer Force, 218 United Ireland, 133 United Irish League (UIL), 231–2 United Irishmen, 1, 3, 9–10, 13–17, 29–30, 74, 98, 165 United Irishwomen, 122 urbanisation, 107

Index 297 Vandeleur, John Scott, 40 Vigilance Committees, 237–8 Villiers Stuart, Henry, 78 Volunteers, 14, 25–6, 29, 98, 240 Wahrman, Dror, 91 Wall, Maureen, 11 Walsh, Archbishop William, 186–8 Walsh, Dick, 287 Walsh, Oonagh, 132, 141, 179 Wandesforde family, 158 Wandesforde, Richard Henry Prior, 151 Warren, Nathaniel, 74, 76 Waterford, County, 67, 78, 95, 107, 109, 114–16, 118, 120, 123–4, 151–2 Waters, John, 285 Weber, Max, 212 Weekly Independent, 240, 243 Westmeath, County, 158, 252–3

Wexford, County, 67, 149, 151, 157, 163, 237 Wheeler, Anna, 35, 47 Whelan, Kevin, 48, 61 White family, 153 White, Henrietta, 181, 185–6 White, Henry, 58 White, Lefroy, 58 White, Luke, 54–5, 58 Wicklow, County, 204, 263 Wicklow, Lady Eleanor, 263 Wilson, Robert, 57 Wise, Francis, 157 Without My Cloak (O’Brien), 111 Wolff, Gustav, 163 Workers’ Union of Ireland (WUI), 245 Wyndham, George, 203, 232 Wyse, Thomas, 67, 73, 80 Young, Arthur, 33 Young Irelanders, 199–200, 202 Young, Samuel, 166