the 1920s the government maintained a strict hold on the public purse, balancing the budget with an almost penitential zeal. Despite the protectionism that the Sinn Féin party had espoused in the previous decade as part of its economic plans for an independent Irish Republic, few tariffs were raised to interfere with free trade. The economic nationalism of the prerevolutionary period gave way to a staid conservatism that did little to alter the economic landscape. The government maintained agricultural prices at a low level to the detriment of industrial development. Accordingly, in the 1920s there were only very modest increases in the numbers of men engaged in productive industry, and the national income rose slowly. The need to restrict government spending meant that many social problems remained unsolved. The slum tenements in the city of Dublin are a telling example. Frequently adduced as a scandalous manifestation of British misrule in Ireland (they deeply disturbed that English patriot, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, when he worked as a professor of classics in Dublin in the 1880s) and also frequently investigated by official bodies, the tenements of Dublin might well have provided the opportunity for a piece of showpiece reconstruction to a newly independent nationalistic government. In fact, the opportunity so afforded was ignored. Conditions remained desperate. The 1926 census showed that in the Free State over 800,000 people were living in overcrowded conditions (overcrowding being more than two persons per room), many of them in north Dublin City. In the state in 1926 there were 22,915 families living in overcrowded conditions in one-room dwellings, 39,615 families living in two rooms, and, telling statistics indeed, 24,849 persons, living in 2,761 families with nine persons in each, resided in two-room dwellings. Infant mortality figures in Dublin, drawn from the census, tell their own sorry tale. In North Dublin City the average death rate per 1,000 children between one and five years was 25.6, while in the more salubrious suburb of Drumcondra the figure was 7.7 per 1,000 children. A contemporary observer remarked that “the story these tables tell is sordid and terrible, and calls for immediate and drastic action.”4 In fact, no real action was taken until 1932, when a bill designed by the Fianna Fáil Minister for Local Government was introduced envisaging a central role for the government in alleviating the situation. Perhaps poor housing was so endemic a problem in Dublin in the 1920s that it was difficult to imagine a solution.
Other kinds of enterprise were within the imaginative scope of the Free State government of the 1920s. These were to have a considerable effect on social life, particularly in rural areas. In the absence of significant private investment in necessary projects, the Cumann na nGaedheal (the ruling party) administration slipped paradoxically into a kind of state intervention that was quite foreign to its ideological cast of mind. Such enterprises as the Agricultural Credit Corporation and the Electricity Supply Board were the first of the many institutions which, established by successive governments and eventually known as the semi-state bodies, ventured where private capital would not. Indeed, the construction between 1925 and 1929 of a large power station on the river Shannon, under the direction and control of the Electricity Supply Board, was one of the very few undertakings in the first decade of independence which might be said to represent a fulfilment of earlier separatist ambition.
It would be wrong, however, to attribute the devastating lack of cultural and social innovation in the first decades of Irish independence simply to the economic conditions of the country. Certainly the fact that at independence there was no self-confident national bourgeoisie with control over substantial wealth, and little chance that such a social class might develop, meant that the kinds of experiment a revolution sometimes generates simply did not take place. But pre-revolutionary experience had shown that artistic, social, and cultural vitality did not necessarily require great economic resources, since in a society almost equally afflicted by economic difficulties cultural life had flowered and social innovation been embarked upon. Indeed it was to those years of cultural and social activity and to the political and military exploits that accompanied them that the new state owed its existence.
An explanation for this social and cultural conservatism of the new state is, I believe, to be sought in the social composition of Irish society. The Ireland of twenty-six countries which comprised the Free State after the settlement of 1921 was an altogether more homogeneous society than any state would have been had it encompassed the whole of the island of Ireland. The six Northern counties which had been separated by the partition of 1920 from the rest of the country contained the island’s only large industrial centre where a large Presbyterian minority expressed its own distinctive unionist sense of an Irish identity. Episcopalian Anglo-Ireland, its social cohesion throughout the island fractured by partition, remained powerful only in the six counties of Northern Ireland. In the twenty-six counties the field lay open therefore for the Catholic nationalist majority to express its social and cultural will unimpeded by significant opposition from powerful minorities (in Chapter four of this section I discuss the fate of those who attempted opposition). When it is further recognized that much of the cultural flowering of earlier years had been the product of an invigorating clash between representatives of Anglo-Ireland (or those who thought of themselves as such) and an emergent nationalist Ireland at a time when it had seemed to sensitive and imaginative individuals that an independent future would require complex accommodations of Irish diversity,5 it can be readily understood why the foundation of the Irish Free State saw a reduction in adventurous social and cultural experiment. The social homogeneity of the twenty-six counties no longer demanded such imaginatively comprehensive visions.
When finally it is understood that this homogeneous Irish society of the twenty-six-county state was predominantly rural in complexion and that Irish rural life was marked by a profound continuity with the social patterns and attitudes of the latter half of the nineteenth century, then it becomes even clearer why independent Ireland was dominated by an overwhelming social and cultural conservatism. As Oliver MacDonagh remarked, peasant proprietorship, outcome of the land agitation of the previous century “more than any other single force…was responsible for the immobility of Ireland – politics apart – in the opening decades of the…century.”6 The revolution that dispatched the colonial power from the South of Ireland in 1922 had left the social order in the territory ceded to the new administration substantially intact. It was a social order largely composed of persons disinclined to contemplate any change other than the political change which independence represented.
The twenty-six counties of independent Ireland were indeed strikingly rural in the 1920s. In 1926, as the census recorded, 61 percent of the population lived outside towns or villages. In 1926 53 percent of the state’s recorded gainfully employed population were engaged in one way or another in agriculture (51,840 as employers, 217,433 on their own account, 263,738 as relatives assisting, 113,284 as employees, with 13,570 agricultural labourers unemployed). Only one-fifth of the farmers were employers of labour. A majority were farmers farming their land (which had mostly passed into their possession as a result of various land acts which had followed the Land War of the 1880s) on their own account or with the help of relatives. Roughly one-quarter of the persons engaged in agriculture depended for their livelihoods on farms of 1–15 acres, a further quarter on farms of 15–30 acres, with the rest occupied on farms of over 30 acres. Some 301,084 people were employed in various ways on farms of less than 30 acres; 121,820 on farms of 30–50 acres; 117,255 on farms of 50–100 acres; 61,155 on farms of 100–200 acres; and only 34,298 on farms of 200 acres and over. As can readily be seen from these figures, small and medium-sized farms were the predominant feature of Irish agriculture.
In this rural world, at least since the Famine years of the 1840s, two phenomena had been observable as aspects of the social organization of the countryside – a high average age of marriage accompanied by an extraordinary degree of apparent premarital chastity and the massive haemorrhage of emigration. Some simple statistics highlight these. The 1926 census revealed that in Ireland there was a larger proportion of unmarried persons of all ages than in any other country in which records were kept. In 1926 80 percent of all males between the ages of twenty-five and thirty years were unmarried, with 62 percent of males between thirty and thirty-five years, 50 percent of males between thirty-five and forty, and 26 percent of males between fifty-five and sixty-five also unmarried. The figures for women, while not quite so amazing, were also very high. In the age group 25–30