Land questions in modern Ireland

Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley, Tony Varley, Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784993535
  9780719078804
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526111425
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This collection of essays explores the nature and dynamics of Ireland's land questions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and also the ways in which the Irish land question has been written about by historians.

The book makes a vital contribution to the study of historiography by including for the first time the reflections of a group of prominent historians on their earlier work. These historians consider their influences and how their views have changed since the publication of their books, so that these essays provide an ethnographic study of historians' thoughts on the shelf-life of books exploring the way history is made.

The book will be of interest to historians of modern Ireland, and those interested in the revisionist debate in Ireland, as well as to sociologists and anthropologists studying Ireland or rural societies.

III
New research

8

Heather Laird: Decentring the Irish Land War: women, politics and the private sphere

The dominant Irish historical narrative, at its most basic, sees the history of Ireland since the beginning of the nineteenth century as a series of revolts and risings which posed a direct challenge to the colonial state with lulls in between. This narrative is underpinned by a narrow notion of the political, with events and actions only considered historically signifi-cant if they affect the structures of organized politics relating to the sphere of the state. The historical writings which seek to challenge the parameters of this dominant narrative by focusing attention on what James C. Scott refers to in Weapons of the Weak as ‘everyday’ forms of resistance are generally considered to belong to social as opposed to political history.¹ For the Indian historian and postcolonial scholar Ranajit Guha, a distinction between ‘political’ resistance, which directly impacts on the state, and ‘social’ resistance, which operates outside the domain of the state, is symptomatic of a state-centred historiography that condemns certain sectors of the population to political and historical insignificance.² The Subaltern Studies Collective, of which Guha is a founder member, believe that such suppressed histories can only be restored if the political arena is extended outside the structures of the state.

In historical accounts of Ireland in which the political is defined purely in terms of that which directly affects the state, and historical change is believed to be powered by these narrowly defined political forces, women, who were for the most part excluded from formal male political culture, tend to be assigned a marginal role. State-centred histories, in other words, are invariably patriarchal histories. One of the means employed to counteract this marginalization is to seek out examples of ‘exceptional’ women who did operate in the arena of the state, or close to it, and focus attention on them. This strategy, which most commonly takes the form of the biographical study,³ could be categorized, with reference to the feminist historian Gerda Lerner, as ‘compensatory history’ in that it is concerned with inserting ‘notable women’, who have ‘achieved’ in the same way men who are deemed ‘notable’ have achieved, into the ‘empty spaces’ of mainstream historiography.⁴ While scholarship of this kind reminds us of the impressive contribution that women like Constance Markievicz made to Irish society, it fails to challenge the values and structures of the historiography it is supplementing. In this chapter, I will demonstrate, with reference to women and agrarian unrest in the 1880s land agitation, that an historical framework which decentres familiar notions of power and the political and, consequently, expands the category of the historically relevant brings women in from the margins of Irish history.

In state-centred Irish historiography, the impetus for the transformations that took place in the Irish land system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is traced, in its nationalist variations, to the words and actions of the nationalist leadership and, in its revisionist variations,⁵ to the words and actions of the colonial government. Nationalist and revisionist historiographies, therefore, while ideologically opposed, are both based on the assumption that the driving forces of historical change are to be found within the realm of public power. That some of those working within the field of Irish women’s history share this assumption is evidenced by Margaret Ward’s claim that members of the Ladies’ Land League who were denied ‘prominent positions in [...] political circles’ were ‘denied access to the “front”’ of the Land War.⁶ It would appear that the ‘front’ of this war for Ward, as for many nationalist and revisionist historians, is to be situated in the public sphere of organized politics.

Contemporary accounts of the Land War suggest, however, that its ‘front’ may be more accurately located within the domain of everyday life. In November 1881, the Leinster Leader reported on a series of events in County Carlow that followed the refusal of a member of the Clonmore branch of the Land League, James Carty, to pay his rent. Having been informed that Carty’s crops were to be confiscated and sold,⁷ three thousand women and men, many of whom had to be turned away, are said to have gathered in the fields to save his potatoes and turnips. When the work was completed, this ‘army’ of labourers are reported as having ‘marched in processional order to Clonmore, a distance of two miles’, shouldering ‘their forks, shovels, and spades, as if they were weapons of defence’.⁸

Men and women like those who marched to Clonmore carrying their farming implements as if they were rifles dictated the terms by which the Land War would be fought and ensured that the British army spent much of that war performing what army superiors considered to be inappropriate tasks. In the case of a tenant farmer like James Carty who was refusing to pay his rent, British army units might be involved in the confiscation of animals and crops. Troops were called on in Queen’s County (now County Laois) in May 1881, for example, to prevent a crowd of over 400 people disrupting the seizure of a herd of cattle.⁹ In Ireland under the Land League , Clifford Lloyd, who in 1881 had been assigned to the newly established position of special resident magistrate, described a week-long expedition for the seizure of stock. Included in the expedition were an agent, a sheriff, ‘sixty men of the 48th, under Captain Bell, sixty men of the RIC, thirty horses, and six army service-wagons, carrying the bedding, food, and necessaries for the week’.¹⁰ Lloyd tells us that as soon as they were seen approaching, church bells were rung and the cattle they had come to seize were hidden in old sheds or driven up the sides of mountains. On some such occasions, the expedition was forced to retire, ‘amidst the jeers of the groups of men and women who had collected in the fields’.¹¹ According to Lloyd, a sheriff embarking on this task in Kilmallock requested a force ‘made up of a squadron of the Greys, detachments of the 25th, 48th, and 57th Regiments and Transport Corps, which, with about 200 of the RIC, make a total of about 500 men’.¹²

On the occasions when farm stock was successfully seized, army units might be drafted in to help transport the confiscated stock to a sheriff’s sale and to ensure that the sale itself proceeded unimpeded. Soldiers attempted to confiscate vehicles to transport crops and animals to a sheriff’s sale near Edenderry at the beginning of January 1882, for example, but found their efforts thwarted as ‘drivers escaped by galloping at full speed’.¹³ By the end of 1881 and the beginning of 1882, sheriff’s sales had become one of the main ‘battlefields’ of the Land War. The Freeman’s Journal , reporting on a sheriff’s sale that took place on Lord Mayo’s estate in December 1881, stated that there was a ‘large assembly of people, and their numbers were momentarily increased by the ringing of chapel bells in the district and the blowing of horns’.¹⁴ Amidst the haycocks, ‘decorated with pictures taken from the Weekly Freeman of Davitt, Parnell and Dillon’, that were put up for auction, a woman ‘opened a bag of feathers and […] thickly coated the uniform of the police’.¹⁵ In the same month, there were no bidders for cattle belonging to Mary Cole at a sheriff’s sale held in Trimblestown that was heavily attended by members of the Ladies’ Land League. The sale was subsequently adjourned.¹⁶

British army units, in other words, spent much of the Land War engaged in duties that under ordinary circumstances would have been considered within the realm of the civil forces.¹⁷ As pointed out by Donal O’Sullivan in his history of policing in Ireland, it was not uncommon at this time to see ‘two neat, well-turned-out Guardsmen, in white jackets, deep in the mountains of Kerry, protecting a herdsman on an evicted farm’.¹⁸ Moreover, according to one contemporary commentator, the RIC as they operated in Ireland during the period of the Land War were not policemen in the conventional sense of the term: ‘They are armed and drilled soldiers; armed with muskets, buck-shot, and bayonets, and under military discipline’.¹⁹ The British government’s appointment of an auxiliary force drawn mainly from the army reserve in December 1881 to assist the RIC in the day-to-day policing of rural Ireland was a tacit acknowledgement that the Land War was being fought in the civil domain. Consequently, the arena that Margaret Ward has argued women’s activities were for the most part confined to during the Land War was in actuality the site of the ‘front’ of the war.

Anti-eviction agitation

Contemporary and subsequent writings on the 1880s land agitation point to the centrality of women to one of the Land War’s key combat zones: evictions and their disruption. Verbal taunts, scalding water, boiling gruel, burning turf, manure, mud, rocks and sticks were some of the weapons employed by rural women against process servers armed with eviction notices and protected by the police and military. In the early stages of the Land War, it was reported that a process server in County Mayo ‘had a narrow escape’ at Newton Clogher, when he was chased by ‘about one hundred’ women armed with ‘tongs, sticks, stones, etc’.²⁰ Around the same time, a land agent to Sir Arthur Guinness was ‘warmly received by a young woman named Noonan, who, it appears, was not content with giving him the contents of a bucket of boiling water until she let the empty vessel fly at his cranium’.²¹ In The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland , Michael Davitt gave an account of events he witnessed during a trip to the village of Carraroe in County Galway in January 1880. These events, which have since being termed the ‘Battle of Carraroe’, centred on an attempt by a local process server, who was accompanied by Sub-Inspector Gibbons and a contingent of police, to serve eviction notices on tenant farmers living on Thomas Kirwan’s estate. When the process server, a man named Fenton, approached the home of Mr Faherty, he was ‘set upon by the women and the process snatched from his hand and torn to pieces. A skirmish ensued in which a few bayonet wounds were received by boys and women, but the body of men, who marched as “lookers-on,” took no part in the first onset’. Fenton, still accompanied by the police, subsequently attempted to serve a process on Mrs Mackle, who ‘succeeded in throwing a shovelful of burning turf upon Sub-Inspector Gibbons, and thereby driving him from the house’.²²

When David Sears, a local process server with a bodyguard of 17 constables, attempted to serve eviction notices the following September on tenant farmers on an estate near Lough Mask that was owned by Lord Erne and managed by Captain Charles Boycott, a woman named Mrs Fitzmorris, who refused to accept the writ that Sears was presenting to her, waved a red flag to warn the inhabitants of the nearby cabins of his approach. The women who gathered as a result of this signal are said to have ‘descended on David Sears and the constabulary, pelting them with mud, stones and manure, stopping them from serving the remaining notices and eventually driving them to seek shelter in Lough Mask House’.²³ According to Joyce Marlow, Captain Boycott, who was out for the day, returned in the evening to find ‘Sears...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction and acknowledgements
• I: Surveys
• II: Reflections
• III: New research
• Index