Dublin Opinion

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.