TOWARDS A SOCIAL HISTORY OF IRELAND
Jun 17th, 2007 by Conor McCabe
Two broad problems face social historians in Ireland.
One is the fact that almost all traditional document-based material relating to the poor and the working class - the stuff in the libraries and archives that historians use to write history - is material that is concerned with social problems, with the analysis of these problems, and with possible solutions to these problems. These include the reports into combinations, strikes, lockouts, and industrial disturbances, as well as reports into agrarian outrages, intimidation, boycotting, and general subversion.
In the nineteenth century we have poor law reports, slum surveys, charitable reports, newspaper accounts, government and royal commissions, housing committees, and health reports. All look at the working class from the outside, and derive their conclusions on the basis that the working class need to be given solutions to their problems. Helpless, feckless, and shoeless, they are the middle-class burden. Put simply, the poor only enter Irish history when they are pissing someone off.
In the twentieth century, particularly under the Free State and subsequent Republic, the methodology remains. The poor and the working class get written about when there is a reason to write about them - and that reason is almost always born out of a problem.
Now, a series of documents born out of a certain approach to a class of people do not automatically lead to a problem-based view of that class. However, in Ireland, the social historian is faced with one more problem: the majority of historians are middle-class, and see things through middle-class eyes. Let me explain with a couple of examples.
The following photograph is taken from “The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland”, published in 1989, and edited by R.F. Foster. The book itself is twenty eight years old: unfortunately, the insights remain.
The photograph itself tells us one thing: the historian, whose job it is to provide context for such an image, provides the following caption -
“THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE: A Dublin beggar of the 1950s, whose children probably have similar occupation today.”
what is it, apart from the author’s own prejudices, that allows such a conclusion? We know the woman is poor, and because she is poor she must have children? And because she is poor and has children, those children must be beggars as well? If she has children, they are not very good children, for they must be in their twenties or older by the look of the woman in the photograph, and yet they allow their own mother to beg on the streets.
All this from an outstretched hand to a slightly embarrassed passer-by?
The same book carries the following photograph as well.
The caption reads: “CROWDS LEAVING CATHOLIC MASS at Finglas, Dublin, in 1950, indicating heavy male presence, absence of contraception, and (less typically of Ireland) sunshine.”
Does this photograph really tell you about the absence of contraception? I’ve seen similar ones taken of middle-class lives that talk about the post-war “baby boom.” And what does a “heavy male presence” mean?
To me, this photograph says that Finglas in 1950 was a young place. There are no old people in this photograph. Most are in their twenties.
And what are the buntings for? This is a community, and a developing one at that.
And yet, lack of contraception, (as opposed to the more affirmative “baby boom”), and a heavy male presence are the terms of reference for the Oxford illustrated historian - the context s/he wished to provide for the photograph. Is that really what this photograph says? Any more than the old woman above says “inter-generational poverty”?
The culmination of a lack of primary source material and a middle-class bloc among Irish historians has led to a lot of crazy conclusions. But there is something that we can do - the most simple being the creation of a social archive for future historians to access and interpret. We have to start to see our own lives, our family photographs and personal stories, as parts of a wider narrative - one that unless the material is accessed, can only be told through the government reports that visit working class lives when working class lives break down.
One painfully embarrassing example from my own life.
OK. My Oxford illustrated friend is going to see this and think “lack of contraception”, but sure I know that anyway. And within itself it is nothing more than a vaguely sentimental photograph of a typical Dublin working class family in the 1970s. But, it is that sense of ordinariness that is important - that, when viewed against a couple of dozen other “typical” Dublin working class families, patterns emerge, narratives larger than the family unit begin to come into focus. Social forces appear, and fashions as well. Towards a true social history of Ireland.
This is not a call for a sentimental approach to history - rather, it is a call for the realization that our own lives, and our own past, have a historical worth, a historical depth that we are not always aware of. We need a true social history in Ireland - not just the shopkeepers and the civil servants, talking about themselves, and talking about us.
i am looking for information on the finglas horse show it took place before the dublin horse show around 1953 to 1962 at kildonan house can you please help
thank you. colum
Interesting comments on the- outsider- looking- in middle class and academic way of viewing the working class when writing history. I like particularly your comments on misleading captions attached to period photographs. People with social and political agendas can mis-convey the contemporary content of photos to suit their discourse conclusions. For some decades now, groups interested in promoting third world-first world just relations have been concerned about the images of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America used in the mass media and how, for instance, the repetitious starving potbellied child photo from Africa reinforces affluent society stereotypes of indolence, helplessness and and genetic ignorance. You are on to something important. Keep at it.
Hi Colum, I don’t know anything about the Finglas horse fairs, but I’m doing a small oral history project out in Finglas at the moment, so what I’ll do is incorporate it into my questions and sure see what happens.
Gar, thanks very much for the comment.
Hi,
I researching to find out if there was a particular Castle located in the Finglas / Cabra area. Its possible it was called Cabra Castle, someone has mentioned to me that there are old ruins at Pelletstown near were the Tolka river passes under the bridge. We would be talking about a 16th century building I think.
thanks a million,
Pat
Hi Pat,
there are loads of castles and fortified houses in the greater Finglas/Cabra area. Look at www.archaeology.ie and click on the Monuments Database button on the right. Click that you accept the usual terms and conditions stuff. A map will appear, so drag the map to the area you want, zoom in and each red dot is an archaeological monument. To see what each dot represents, click the i button on the toolbar above, wait a minute and text will come up on the right hand side of your screen, with a code, a name and a very brief classification of the site.
You’re probably talking about the castle at Finglaswood, DU014-76001, just north of the river closer to Cabra? Pelletstown castle DU014-074 is to the west and there has been a certain amount of pre-development archaeological work undertaken there by Margaret Gowen & Co. I can point you towards where you’d get more information on either site if you’re interested…
As always when discussing class, Conor’s original post is very interesting for us non-sociologists. Class is something that’s been traditionally ignored by most Irish archaeologists, certainly in their profession if not their praxis. Those of us engaged in historical archaeology (often theoretically confused with post-medieval archaeology) and especially those of us researching and even excavating what’s becoming known as the archaeology of the contemporary past, tend on the other hand, to posit class very centrally in our arguement. The best advocates tend to be from the libertarian/anarchist tradition (he wrote modestly!). Lots of reasons for this, which I won’t go into, but some of us are getting up a blog on the topic in the near future. We’ll keep you posted.
But back to Conor’s post… there’s even a greater reason to see class issues blanked out of archaeology, due to the poor preservation of the evidence. There’s no poverty of material there though and we’re to be criticised as a profession for our continued failure to address the boxes of stuff we’ve collected over the years, yet alone bring new interpretations and angles to the issue. It’s no surprise so to see ‘respected’ historical accounts such as Foster’s completely misinterpret the bleedin’ obvious. But there you go.
How’s the housing estate project going? Are there different types of houses within the one development? Our estate was built just after the Civil War, with the houses accommodating government supporters. It’s still quite FG in its complexion, with a TD and a councillor from living on the estate. Plywood mini-billboards are erected in gardens at election time, with a single FF interloper observed once in the past 10 years. It always surprises me how popular FG remain on the estate (which at this stage must be half and half, natives to newcomers like ourselves). I’m gonna try and run an archaeological project on the estate this election coming, looking at material culture, class and space… to try and answer this from another perspective, if anyone’s interested in getting involved?
I’m looking forward to the libertarian/anarchist blog, anarchaeologist, please let us know when it’s up and running. As regards the housing estate project, I’m afraid it’s been subsumed by a larger project, a Marxist reading of the Irish economy, 1860 to 1975. In order to look at class relations on the island, I need to analyze the economic relations which underpin the Irish class dynamic. That means looking at agriculture, especially the cattle industry. I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t be able to look at housing in class terms until I’d cracked the broad strokes of economic class relations. Oh well.
Your point about the FG houses, though, is quite interesting. There’s an Irish historical truism that CnaG/FG didn’t spend any money on housing, when in fact it built almost as many houses during the 1920s as FF did during the 1930s. The difference was in who the houses were intended for. And that idea you have for an archeological project on your estate is a brilliant one. It’s needed as well.
Those captions are probably by David Fitzpatrick, who wrote the chapter on the twentieth century in the Oxford book. His father was Brian Fitzpatrick, one of the main socialist historians of Australia, writer of books like A Short History of the Australian Labor Movement (1940), and advisor to the trade union movement there.
http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A140191b.htm
http://www.history.unimelb.edu.au/Fitzpatrick/bibliography.html
I doubt if those who’ve had David Fitzpatrick as a supervisor would declare him a socialist! Although the fact that he’s a liberal social historian makes him a communist in relation to some of his Irish peers.
Fitzpatrick is an interesting enough character in his own right. He wrote an excellent and readable account of the 1913-21 period in Clare, which he called Politics and Irish Life. Provincial Experience of War and Revolution which confused many by not referring in its title to either Clare or the physical conflict central to the book.
His approach is somewhat anthropological, dividing the participants into several groups: the Forces of the Crown, Protestants and Unionists, and Home Rulers representing the ‘old politics’ with Sinn Féiners, Revolutionary Administrators and Guerilla Fighters representing the ‘new’. A final chapter takes a step backwards and investigates Separatism and Social Change (if memory serves).
He famously admits that his particular approach would not work for the Civil War period, preferring to leave it to future students of chaos. It’s a challenge many local historians have taken up over the years, with Connacht being particularly well covered.
Peter Hart worked under him in the ’80s and is referenced in the preface. Fitzpatrick went on to spearhead studies into Ireland’s participation in WW1 and was perhaps unfairly criticised for being partisan and ‘anti-nationalist’. It’s interesting that a colleague, John Horne now appears to have taken over the mantle, with the Irish Times and the RIA in tow. Fitzpatrick’s former contact in the paper of record was of course Kevin Myers, who, more latterly along with Joe Duffy have done a lot to alienate those with a genuine interest in the history of working class life in Ireland, lives surely dominated in urban and garrisoned areas by service in the British Army?
Fitzpatrick was a good enough supervisor, if a bit indifferent… I wouldn’t have called him a leftie by any stretch though. I’ve often wondered if he defends Peter Hart’s unusual research methods and refusal to discuss publicly the Kilmichael issue (which to be honest has blighted what promised to be an interesting career).
Hey Julie!
That’s an interesting story. I think you’re spot on in the direction you’re taking this and I hope you try to get it published. Have you looked at the 1851 Census and Chart’s Index of Heads of Households for earlier stuff on the families? If they’re from the South City, they mightn’t necessarily have gone to the Richmond, which is on the northside.
I’ve been trying to do similar research on a workhouse in county Clare. The records do exist but nobody seems to know where. Again resistance to their opening is centred on a perhaps misplaced sympathy with the wishes of the inmates’ families, still there in the community, blissfully unaware (for the time being) that this stuff survives somewhere in a dusty back room. The great unconsulted.
It’s an interesting issue and perhaps illustrative of today’s urban-rural divide, where the release of such records would surely have a greater impact on a rural community than on a now-dispersed urban one.
I don’t quite get from your post if you’re having problems accessing the material in TCD, but I’m assuming you are. It may be that it remains uncatalogued, due to lack of funding or staffing; there may indeed be ethical reasons for its inaccessibility to do with the wishes of surviving families. Depression and other similar illnesses are still taboo over here, it’s still a touchy subject. It doesn’t come across from the library post though that there might be problems accessing the material, you’re simply asked to contact Jason McElligott by email, which is fair enough!
As someone who engages with the library in TCD on a weekly basis, it perhaps the only institution left in the city where one’s business can be conducted in a pleasurable and unstressful atmosphere. I’m sure they’ll be reasonable!
Anyway, let us know how you get on?