Marriage was a complicated process in which a matchmaker played a part in the subtle economic valuations that were necessary before the favoured son who would inherit the farm could be allowed to introduce a new bride to the household. Sometimes the introduction of the new woman to the household was effected at the moment when it was possible for the farmer to hand over the main responsibility for the farm to his heir (the old age pension allowed for this possibility when the farmer turned seventy), and when this occurred it was perhaps easier to avoid the tensions which must often have developed between mother and daughter-in-law. The centre of the house was the kitchen, and when the old couple “retired”, they ceased sleeping in that room and moved to a small room at the west of the house, where the family heirlooms, pictures, and religious symbols were displayed. As the anthropologists report, “They move in among the symbols of family unity, among the religious symbols of the house, into surroundings of a certain religious or sacred character.”12 Their hierarchical position was maintained. The father could still occupy the nearest chair to the fire with the older men when they came to visit, and the old couple achieved an almost patriarchal status as the grandchildren were born. The society was strictly hierarchical, and the family unit was its fundamental organizing principle.
Co-operation in farming work between different farmers did exist in a system known as “cooring,” but this was not a sign of any collectivist impulse. Rather, it was a deeply felt system of obligation in the exchange of services and implements between individual households. The only interruption to this strictly familist social system was the help proffered to individuals who could not be expected to reciprocate in any way. A widow, for example, trying to keep her farm together with the help of hired hands, could expect a local family to help her out at harvest time, but again the impulse was not at all collectivist, but, in such instances, charitable. In Arensberg and Kimball’s succinct summary, ‘Economic endeavour, both upon the individual farms and in the form of co-operation between farms, is controlled through the operation of social forces springing from the family.”13
The sons and daughters who could find no significant role in this system had a limited number of choices open to them. They might seek jobs in a nearby town, they might aspire to join one of the professions, or they might emigrate. An option firmly closed to them was the choice of finding a fulfiling role at home, for by the 1920s it was increasingly unlikely that they could final rural occupations that would allow them to stay in the district of their birth. Many of the rural trades and crafts that had flourished in nineteenth-century Ireland had declined in the face of competition from mass-produced goods, and the craftsmen and women of the countryside instead of being absorbed, as such people were in other European countries, by an industrial revolution in which their technical abilities were useful, had been forced into emigration. So even if the sons and daughters of farmers had been willing to accept the loss of social status entailed in following a rural trade, the opportunities to do so were rapidly diminishing and a future as a craftsman or craftswoman would have seemed as bleak as that of an unmarried son or daughter about the farm.
A job in the town usually meant the grocery trade to which a young man became indentured as an assistant until such time as he was able to set up business on his own account, often upon marriage to a farmer’s daughter. The farmer helped with the initial capital required in the form of a dowry. Daughters were also so indentured and might have hoped in time to make a sound marriage within the trade. As exact an awareness of economic responsibilities attended the marital arrangements in the world of provisions and weighing scales as it did in the world of acreage and cattle. The values and familist social structures of the farm world were transferred to the shop and town, thereby ensuring that the cultural and political influence of the small and strong farmers in the country was augmented by that of the grocers and small traders of the town.
For those sons and daughters of farmers who chose to enter one of the professions through attendance at a seminary, at a college of the National University, or at a teachers’ training college, the chances were slim that they could make their lives in their native parishes or indeed that they could even pursue their careers in a rural setting. By the 1920s only a few opportunities remained for a rural professional life in the priesthood and in the legal, medical, and teaching professions. If a boy or a girl wished to avoid emigration, a move to an Irish town or city was almost imperative where, in the trades, professions, and state service, they bore with them the values so indelibly etched upon their personalities by a rural Irish childhood.
The combined force of these two social groups in modern Ireland, the farmers and the tradesmen, together with such of their offspring as could find roles in the professions, was enormously influential in fashioning the political, social, and cultural moulds of the independent state. Their economic prudence, their necessarily puritanical, repressive sexual mores and nationalistic conservatism, encouraged by a priesthood and hierarchy drawn considerably from their number, largely determined the kind of country which emerged in the first decades of independence.
The role of the Irish Catholic church in directing Irish life into the narrow channels of a Jansenistic puritanism has, as was mentioned, been proffered by commentators as one explanation for the fact that so many people for so long in Ireland were able to behave as if those troublesome but exhilarating manifestations of human nature, passion, sexual aspiration, and the erotic principle itself, had been quite excised from the Irish experience. While social historians have been able to provide alternative, rather more credible accounts of a process whereby a society of farmers and shopkeepers developed, resolutely determined to restrain sexuality in the interests of economic realism, the contribution of the church as the institution which aided the process must also be assessed.
A study of the main developments within Irish Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a prerequisite for any informed understanding of the social and cultural history of modern Ireland. The great nineteenth-century struggles in the Irish church between the centralizing, apparently ultramontanist party led by that organizational genius, the first Irish Cardinal, Paul Cullen, and older, local, more independent forms of Catholicism had been resolved in favour of a church loyal to Rome. Concurrent with this political conflict within the nineteenth-century Irish Catholic church had occurred a remarkable devotional revolution whereby continental expressions of piety were introduced to an Ireland which adopted them with an astonishing enthusiasm, so that the texture of modern Irish religious life owes much to the period 1850–75 when that revolution was in large part effected. It was in those twenty-five years that the great mass of Irishmen and women were confirmed in loyalty to the modern Roman church and were provided with the symbols and institutions which might maintain and express that loyalty, which was a source of wonder to many a commentator on modern Irish affairs. The celebration of the mass was regularized (in pre-Famine Ireland the shortage of churches had led to a practice known as “stations”, whereby the priest celebrated mass in various houses in his parish), and new devotions were introduced – the rosary, forty hours, perpetual adoration, novenas, blessed altars, Via Crucis, benediction, vespers, devotion to the Sacred Heart and to the Immaculate Conception, jubilees, triduums, pilgrimages, shrines, processions, and retreats. It was the period when popular piety began to express itself in beads, scapulars, religious medals, and holy pictures, and open religious feeling, as one historian has commented, was “organized in order to communalize and regularize practice under a spiritual director.”14 This organization included societies, confraternities, and sodalities. A programme of church-building was undertaken (in 1865 there were 1,842 churches, in 1906 2,417),15 and sound investments were made in land and property so that by the beginning of our period, reflecting on the piety of the people and on the rich inheritance of buildings and investment bequeathed by the nineteenth-century church, it should have been possible for the Irish hierarchy to feel serenely confident about its position in Irish life.
The hierarchy in the first few years of the Irish Free State, despite the inheritance of the nineteenth century, was nevertheless rather pessimistic about the future. The troubled years from 1912 to 1923 had often placed the hierarchy in very difficult political positions. During the Civil War the bishops had antagonized the republicans through