Introduction: ‘The Gnarled and Stony Clods of Townland’s Tip’: Galway in 1913

This study explores social and political change in Galway from 1913 to 1922 and examines how rural communities mediated the unprecedented upheaval of the revolutionary period. The period that has become known as the Irish revolution was traditionally perceived as an heroic phase in the Irish nation’s historic quest for national self-determination, culminating in the withdrawal of the Crown Forces and the victory of the revolutionary forces of the Republic. The struggle for independence was fought within a climate of insecurity and fear, however, and the uncertainty that the rise of militant nationalism engendered, fuelled political antagonism between an older, more respectable generation of nationalists and an impatient generation of young revolutionaries.

The under-articulated fault lines of rural society were frequently obscured in national political discourse by the unchallenged hegemony of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) and the distaste for sectional politics which the desire for nationalist solidarity inculcated. Political culture in Galway – as elsewhere in Ireland – was characterised by factionalism and the intensity of local political rivalries. For many nationalists, the rise of militant republicanism represented the primordial forces of anarchy and bloodshed, and rural communities were required to choose between the old and respectable, and the new, the young and the unknown. This study examines the uncertainty the republican campaign generated among ordinary nationalists which frequently manifested itself across generational cleavages between younger republicans and older generations of nationalists, an economic chasm between the rural poor and strong farmers and landowners, a political gulf between the urban world of the small town and its rural environs, and a sectarian rift between the small Protestant community and the Catholic majority.

The principal issues permeating scholarly investigation into the Irish revolution concern the extent to which ordinary people’s social and political aspirations evolved and the degree to which they found expression in the respective campaigns of the Irish Volunteers and Sinn Féin. The evolution of the struggle reflected the broader complexities of Irish society and the advance of violent nationalism defies a linear, national meta-narrative. A comprehensive study of events within diverse communities reveals many surprising and frequently awkward conclusions, which in retrospect, could not have been accommodated in the domain of conventional local history.

Political revolution fuelled a violent and traumatic period of turmoil and the social solidarity required by the leadership of nationalist Ireland partially obscured the complexity of a society characterised by divergent political traditions. To gain an appreciation of the formative dynamics of the Irish revolution, an analysis of the complex evolution of public opinion across diverse regions and communities is necessary. A coherent understanding of the nuances of local communities, events and personalities must be integrated into any survey of national transformations. A uniformity of experience of political upheaval across disparate regions cannot be assumed in a society where an intensely local sense of identity saw national events interpreted through distinctly local prisms of identity and allegiance. A failure to grasp the complex spectrum of regional distinctiveness reinforces an assumed meta-narrative, strengthening an imagined national narrative.

While nationalist political discourse before the rise of the Volunteers appeared fundamentally consensual, respectable and deferential, this apparent consensus concealed a complexity of allegiance and diversity of political tradition that found full expression in the rough and tumble of local politics. On a national level, malcontents on the nationalist fringe could be dismissed as deviant or insignificant within the culture of political complacency which the imminent arrival of Home Rule sustained. To extrapolate consensus between political elites into a similar political complacency at a local level, however, represents a failure to acknowledge the complex spectrum of political traditions that existed within Irish nationalism.

Counties Galway and Clare were exceptional in the opening decades of the twentieth century for the amount of violence over land. Initially, this book examines the nature and evolution of land agitation in the years prior to the emergence of militant republicanism. Only through a thorough examination of the capacity of agrarian groups to organise, agitate and mobilise at the beginning of this period can the later waves of agrarianism, facilitated by the rise of militant republicanism, be contextualised.

Pivotal developments that transformed nationalist Ireland were witnessed in 1914, invigorating the tradition of physical force and ultimately destroying the IPP. One of the many unforeseen casualties of the conflict, John Redmond’s party was ultimately a victim of its support for the British War effort. This study undertakes to examine the impact of the First World War, recruitment to the military, the political culture of the IPP and the evolution of the Irish Volunteers in the period before the 1916 Rising.

Within this context, the remarkable events of Easter Week 1916 in Galway are examined. In the historiography of Easter Week, events outside Dublin have, until recently, received scant attention and most standard works on the topic have focused solely on the capital. The national aspect of the 1916 Rising has been neglected to the detriment of a full appreciation of the aims of the Rebellion’s planners. A close analysis of events in Galway, where the enigmatic Liam Mellows was Volunteer organiser, illustrates the potential for popular mobilisation that existed outside the capital. The consequences for the three hundred men deported from the county in the aftermath of the Rebellion and for Liam Mellows, in particular, were significant.

In Galway as elsewhere, Sinn Féin decisively defeated the IPP in the 1918 General Election and their success was driven by a series of political and economic factors, of which, the War was the formative catalyst. The veteran leaders of Galway’s political establishment faced a younger, more energetic cadre of opponents, many of whom had been incarcerated for their political beliefs. The political and economic developments that facilitated the rise of Sinn Féin and the Volunteers before the outbreak of the War of Independence are the next factors considered.

The Independence struggle in Galway was characterised by a campaign of attrition by the Volunteers against the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), and by the Crown Forces against the civilian population in general, including members of the Volunteers. In terms of the regional distribution of republican activity, a key theme of the literature has been the disparate regional variations between active and non-active areas. A spatial differentiation in terms of violence emerged in Galway as the Volunteers in the north of the county, along with those in the western districts of Connemara, carried out the bulk of attacks on the Crown Forces while the towns, and parts of the east of the county remained relatively unaffected by violence. In considering this, the factors that contributed to the emergence of active republican areas and the evolution of guerrilla warfare are explored.

Following on from this, the book examines the impact of the Crown Forces in Galway and the experience of local communities in the face of unprecedented violence. The conduct of the Crown Forces in Galway matches that of some of the most active areas in Ireland, in terms of the extreme nature of the violence perpetrated on civilians and republicans alike. In Galway, the violence of the police outweighed the threat the Volunteers represented, and a sustained republican campaign proved problematic. The reckless behaviour of the Crown Forces played a formative role in conditioning the response of both the Volunteers and the wider community to the independence struggle.

The experience of the southern Protestant community during the years 1918–22 was undoubtedly negative and accelerated the pre-existing trend of migration of Irish Protestants to Britain and further afield. In this respect, Donald L. Horowitz has noted that in periods of political upheaval, ethnic tension is often at the root of violence that results in killings, appropriation of resources and the flight of large numbers of people.¹ The experience of the Protestant community in Galway during the revolution and the degree to which hostility towards the minority community surfaced during the period are the last issues to be explored. Few European states in the modern era have been impervious to ethnic conflict; however, even in divided societies, communal conflict cannot be reduced to the common denominator of ethnic or religious ties and there are always a range of issues at play including class resentment and historical grievance.

‘Ireland’s Fighting Story’

Popular perceptions of the independence struggle were influenced in the early decades of the Free State by the publication of combatants’ accounts that focused on what author Desmond Ryan termed ‘the spirit of the struggle for Independence at the height of its glory, with all the incalculable fire of 1916 behind it and a rose misted future before it’.² Accounts of the exploits of republican leaders such as Dan Breen and Tom Barry displayed similar motifs with a common emphasis on the dangers faced by the Volunteers, the heroism of their sacrifice, the cowardice of the Crown Forces and the magnanimity of a united nationalist people.³ The paradigm of ‘Ireland’s Fighting Story’ could rejuvenate the questionable record of areas that had remained relatively dormant during the conflict as combatants sought retrospectively to defend their revolutionary credentials in print.⁴

The historical re-interpretation of the era that began in the 1960s was preceded by writers with first-hand experience of the revolution who had fundamentally questioned many popularly held assumptions. While these works tended towards hagiography, there are many valuable insights to be found in combatants’ accounts and Peadar O’Donnell, Liam Mellows and Ernie O’Malley, in particular, left detailed accounts of seminal events, that despite garnering popular appeal, present nuanced analyses of the period.⁵ Based on their own experiences, these writers questioned seminal nationalist assumptions regarding the degree of popular support for the Volunteers, the character of the republican leadership and the evolution of Sinn Féin. Conscious of the role of social class during the revolution, O’Donnell believed the movement exploited the rural poor, ‘as the tyrannical aspects of the [British] conquest were declared outside the scope of the struggle’.⁶ Likewise, Mellows wrote, ‘Sinn Féin, while nominally, a nationalist party was, in fact, a bourgeois party.’⁷ Ernie O’Malley was later to write bitterly of the lack of popular support for the republican cause, noting, ‘There is no idea of honour, an indefinite sense of playing the game, no real courage and not sufficient bulldog grit.’⁸

The academic assessment of the Irish revolution evolved considerably in the 1960s with the publication of a number of important reinterpretations.⁹ Historians such as F.X. Martin, William Irwin Thompson and F.S.L. Lyons questioned the degree to which interpretations of the period had been influenced by retrospective romanticism and the inherent necessities of nation building. The so-called revisionist approach sought to detach, as it was perceived, historical myths from reality, irrespective of nationalist sensitivities. The emerging historical orthodoxy fundamentally questioned the a priori assumptions surrounding the period with the reputations, abilities and rationale of the republican leadership subjected to unprecedented historical scrutiny. Thereafter, historians became less deferential, immeasurably more sceptical and fundamentally more dispassionate.

Ernest Rumpf and Anthony Hepburn’s pioneering study Nationalism and Socialism in Twentieth Century Ireland represented a landmark in the academic investigation of the distribution of revolutionary violence.¹⁰ Rather than analysing Irish nationalism in terms of its own rhetoric, they stressed the diversity of variables: geographic, agricultural, economic and cultural which accounted for the emergence and pattern of revolutionary violence. While some of their conclusions have since been challenged, Rumpf and Hepburn’s approach, along with the bulk of their findings, have had a profound influence on later historians.

The influence of this new historical approach, combined with the pioneering methodology of Rumpf and Hepburn, is most evident in the work of historian, David Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick’s seminal article, ‘The Geography of Irish Nationalism’, expanded the statistical analysis pioneered by Rumpf to examine three major manifestations of nationalism: violence, voting and participation in political organisations.¹¹ Employing a range of statistical data including, judicial statistics, election results and the Crime Special Branch statistics of the RIC, Fitzpatrick provided a more thorough analysis of the variety of republican activity than had previously been produced. He later employed his statistical approach and scepticism of the existing historiography to produce a major account of the revolution in a single county. Politics and Irish Life 1913–1921: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution examined the revolution in County Clare and was the first major analysis to challenge the common assumption that the rise of militant nationalism represented a fundamental and radical break with the constitutional tradition of the IPP and its local organisation, the United Irish League.¹² Fitzpatrick highlighted the profound continuity between the manipulation of social discontent and the romantic attachment to violent radicalism by the IPP and the complementary tactics of the ‘new’ revolutionaries.

The ‘so-called revolution’ thesis influenced a new generation of historians who emphasised the emasculation of radical social forces within the militant tradition that was most apparent in the revolutionaries’ commitment to property values and their conservative stance on social reform.¹³ Fitzpatrick’s study emphasised the profoundly local nature of the revolutionary experience and his conclusion that only detailed local studies can establish the complex realities of the revolution was taken up by a number of younger historians. Peter Hart in Cork, Michael Farry in Sligo, Marie Coleman in Longford, John O’Callaghan in Limerick and Joost Augusteijn in a range of counties have all examined the nature of political and social upheaval during the period.¹⁴ In recent years, Four Courts Press has launched an ambitious scheme to produce a case study of the revolution in each Irish county. The proliferation of regional studies of the revolution has been complemented by the recent publication of a range of thematic studies which have reconfigured the Irish experience of the First World War as central to a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of Irish nationalism.¹⁵ An unprecedented popular interest in the experience of Irish soldiers who fought for Britain and the experience of ex-servicemen in Ireland has been mirrored by the realisation that an historical understanding of the experience of the Protestant minority in the South of Ireland is a crucial component in developing a comprehensive analysis of the nature of the revolution. Peter Hart’s assessment of the experience of Protestants in Cork has generated much controversy but the legacy of his work lies in making the experience of the minority communities a subject of close historical scrutiny.

Despite the body of academic work published over the last two decades, Fitzpatrick’s conclusions about the links between separatism and social change merit re-examination in the context of the varying degrees of support for political violence that existed in different regions. Political change can only be comprehensively analysed within the local milieu of conflicting voices, contested interpretations and disparate expectations through which political change and social unrest were mediated. To study patterns of upheaval and change in isolation or simply as components of larger forces of change is to underestimate the true complexity of Irish nationalism. Fitzpatrick’s conclusions regarding the degree of continuity between the IPP and Sinn Féin has attracted both supporters and detractors and he has subsequently been critical of historians ‘hankering after lost opportunities for social revolution’.¹⁶ Fergus Campbell challenged Fitzpatrick’s analysis of continuity and change by examining the intersection between political and agrarian conflict in County Galway.¹⁷ Campbell emphasised the key influence of the radical tradition as being of paramount importance in shaping events and public opinion, as opposed to the elitism of the constitutional traditions of the IPP. Campbell’s pioneering work on Galway has been instrumental in highlighting the primacy of land hunger as a salient catalyst for political change.

County Galway in 1913

The west of Ireland where the Irish Volunteers were founded in 1913 was a conservative society where hardship and the daily struggle to provide food and clothing dominated most families’ lives. As a single county, Galway provides a compelling case study of the period as the cultural, linguistic and economic diversity within the county contributed to a remarkably complex social structure. Galway was an overwhelmingly rural society and the vast majority of people were either directly or indirectly reliant on agriculture for their livelihoods. The apparent uniformity of country life, however, concealed deeply divergent cultural and economic realities. Galway, west of Lough Corrib, comprised an extreme physical landscape of mountains, lakes and bog. Clifden, an English-speaking market town, was the only town in west Galway, with the majority of people surviving in conditions of abject poverty in small coastal communities scattered along the shores of Galway Bay. The vast majority of the county’s Irish speakers lived in west Galway and in 1911, 7,811 people still spoke no English at all.¹⁸ The largest villages in west Galway, Spiddal, Carraroe, Rosmuc, Roundstone and Oughterard relied on remittances from America to supplement meagre incomes from fishing and subsistence farming. The uniqueness of these communities and their exceptional cultural, environmental and economic realities were wholly distinct from the social and economic realities in the east of the county.

While travellers to the west coast marvelled at the immense natural wonders of the region, the prevalence of dire poverty that haunted Connemara had barely eased during the decades that preceded independence. Sinn Féin member, Patrick Moylett, recalled that in north Connemara, ‘the horrifying scenes of desolation and death of the famine years were not quite half a life time past and their marks were still visible on the living. They were etched deep on the minds and hearts of the people and sculpted on their features.’¹⁹ A government committee investigating economic conditions was informed in 1907 that parish committees of the Congested Districts Board were ‘gradually destroying the once all prevalent custom of keeping horses, pigs and cattle in dwelling houses but poor sanitation remained a health problem’.²⁰ A witness to the committee ‘did not think Spiddal exceptionally unhealthy as regards manure heaps, but perhaps it was in as far as houses were huddled together, making sanitation and cleanliness difficult. The district had rather a bad name but typhus had always come from Galway.’²¹ The same report described the people of Letterfrack as living ‘in a state of desolation’²² while at Oughterard ‘the barest necessities of life could, in many instances, not be obtained from land alone and the people were largely dependent on help from friends in America’.²³ The drain of the young through emigration decimated western communities, as one witnessed testified, ‘the able bodied emigrating, the weak and sickly remaining’.²⁴ In 1907, children in the Carna district regularly came to school without food for their midday meal, not eating from their breakfast until five o’clock in the evening, as ‘there was little milk in the district and many of the children had none during the winter’.²⁵ ‘The feeding of school children would enable them to learn better,’ the government was told, but was problematic as ‘it touched their pride’.²⁶ ‘Shopkeepers took advantage of the general poverty,’ the committee was informed, ‘and it was they who filled the bench and the public boards and they who were able to compel their debtors to vote for them.’²⁷ Many large landowners resisted notions of social progress and landlord Henry Burke declared, ‘If the labouring classes were raised by means of education and grants of houses and plots of ground, it would be at the expense of the industrious farmer … one class could not be raised without lowering another by artificial means.’²⁸ A remarkable number of people still lived on the many islands scattered off the Connemara coast.²⁹ In 1911, there were 2,679 people living on the Aran Islands, Gorumna Island sustained 1,540 people, with 801 living on Lettermore and 460 on Lettermullen. Off the north Connemara coast, Inishbofin sustained a population of 691 people, with 110 living on nearby Inishshark. Pressure for land saw islands in Lough Corrib sustaining small communities including eleven houses on Inchiquin Island and ten on Inishmacatreer.

For many people in east Galway, the west of the county remained an impenetrable and far-off place of which they knew little. Disinterest and a general lack of comprehension of social conditions on the west coast manifested itself in the conspicuous absence of sustained coverage in Galway newspapers of the dire poverty that characterised the western seaboard. An important connection between the two districts came from the pervasiveness of spailpín workers as a source of cheap agricultural labour for farmers in the east. Spailpín labourers made their way from Connemara to hiring fairs in towns such as Athenry and Loughrea to be hired as seasonal farm workers at harvest time. They slept in outhouses and barns and collected their pittance after backbreaking toil. The legacy of the spailpín system lay in the humiliation that the hiring fair represented to western communities where the young dreamed of Boston and New York and escape from servitude. In his short story ‘The Year 1912’, Máirtín Ó Cadhain wrote of the seminal importance of emigration to the people of Connemara, ‘a race whose guardian angel was the American trunk, whose guiding star was the exile ship, whose Red Sea was the Atlantic’.³⁰

East Galway is popularly conceived of in terms of north and south, with an imaginary frontier stretching from Galway town to Ballinasloe and the banks of the Shannon. Galway town remained the ‘capital’ of the west despite its waning economic fortunes over previous centuries and by the turn of the century, as John Cunningham has noted ‘Galway entered the 20th century at a low ebb, its population falling, its economy declining, its buildings collapsing. The “Citie of the Tribes” was no longer officially a city and its so-called tribes, with their fortunes and influence, were thoroughly dispersed.’³¹ The town was not without its charms, however, as an American visitor wrote in 1913:

We found the streets crowded, next morning, with the most picturesque people we had seen anywhere in Ireland, for it was Saturday and so market day, and the country-folk had gathered in from many miles around. The men were for the most part buttoned up in cutaways of stiff frieze, nearly as hard and unyielding as iron; and the women, almost without exception, wore bright red skirts, made of fuzzy homespun flannel, which they had themselves woven from wool dyed with crimson.³²

Galway town contained the county’s only industries with the urban poor finding employment in the docks, the fertiliser factory, McDonogh’s timber mills and in the town’s relatively large commercial sector. The town’s merchants retained grand notions of the importance of their city and a self-consciously cosmopolitan elite composed of a coterie of merchant families held sway in civic life. The extraordinary figure of Mártín Mór McDonogh dominated commerce and public life, as Cunningham notes, ‘Gruff, overbearing and arrogant, Mártín Mór dominated the town’s economic life, and directed its civic affairs through his membership of the Urban Council, of the Harbour Board, of the Galway Race Committee. He was very much the public face of the town.’³³

The people of the Claddagh, a small Irish- and English-speaking village ‘down west’ of the town centre, continued to enjoy ancestral rights to fish along the Galway coast and the Claddagh fleet and the fish market at the Spanish Arch contributed to the often raucous atmosphere in the town. A quintessential garrison town, Renmore Barracks was the home of the Connaught Rangers and the officer class mixed with the town’s social elite, adding a martial air to the pretensions of commercial society. While the docks were an important centre for the economy, they had declined in importance as a major port and in 1913, only 168 vessels arrived at Galway docks, a significantly smaller number than the ports of Limerick (549 vessels) or Sligo (483 vessels).³⁴ Saturday was the town’s busy day with street traders, publicans and ‘spirit dealers’ dependent on the trade of country people coming to market.³⁵

As outlined in Table 1, Irish speakers were concentrated in the west of the county and the nature of the cleavage between the English-speaking east and the Irish- and English-speaking west is apparent, with 4,375 speakers of Irish only in the Oughterard district of west Galway, compared to a mere eight in the urban district of Ballinasloe. In the ten years before the 1911 census, the population of speakers of Irish only in the county dropped by almost a quarter from 9,443 to 7,811. The decline of the language in west Galway had been ongoing for many decades and was vividly recalled in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s short story, ‘The Gnarled And Stony Clods Of Townland’s Tip’ where the elderly Peits ponders the ‘unbearable burden of having to spend what was left of his days among a generation of people who were alien to him and his traditional style. He understood in the depths of his old and lucid love that he was the last and late survivor of his people.’³⁶

Popular perceptions of the west in the early twentieth century were heavily influenced by the accomplishments of the Celtic revival and the endeavours of Anglo-Irish figures such as Galway landowners, Edward Martyn and Lady Gregory. Their championing of the dignity of the rural poor influenced writers such as Synge and Yeats who idealised the west coast in their early work. For an authentic portrayal of the west during this period, however, the literary works of Máirtín Ó Cadhain lay bare the dark ambiguities, seething resentments and petty humiliations of rural life. Stripping rural society of its magical residue and replacing the myths and idealisations of cosmopolitan artists with a gritty, uncompromising realism, Ó Cadhain knew first-hand the ways of the village and the drudgery of servitude. In the short story, ‘The Road to Brightcity’, Ó Cadhain provided a haunting portrayal of the hardship of rural life for Brid, the wife of a small farmer in south Connemara:

There were dark ideas slinking at the edge of her mind, and bitterness to sting her feelings, but to her conscious mind the drag and drudgery of life never seemed anything to grumble at. Even Mike the shop – it never occurred to her that he should be complained of and penalised for putting three different prices on the one article according to whether a body was badly in need of credit, or a safe bet, or able to pay on the dot.³⁷

Galway ranked near the top of all standard economic indicators of poverty in 1911 and with very limited economic prospects at home, emigration and seasonal migration remained crucial to the rural economy. In 1911, 2,614 people were designated as paupers and 1,311 received relief in ten workhouses, with 1,313 receiving outdoor relief.³⁸ These grim institutions retained their fearful reputations and the shame of admission was reserved for the utterly destitute and incapable. The Royal Commission on Congestion in Ireland noted the poverty that rural tenants continued to suffer in east Galway and the precariousness of their existence:

The Tuam rural tenantry was in great poverty, labour was scarce and many people eked out an existence cutting turf from bogs and selling it in the town. They were industrious but under present conditions, it seemed mockery to exhort them to self-help … In three or four cases there was gombeenism with 100 per cent but was less flourishing than formerly.³⁹

Most rural people bought the essential commodities they could not produce in the local shop that often functioned simultaneously as a grocer, butcher, public house and undertaker.⁴⁰ Items were usually paid on credit with bills settled after stock or crops were sold. Indebtedness to the shopkeeper haunted many families and in the most serious cases, unpaid bills could result in land being forfeited. The shame of such a catastrophe was the most painful of fates a family could suffer and it was not unknown for an unscrupulous shopkeeper to exhaust a small farmer’s finances in order to claim a piece of land. The economic ties between shopkeepers and farmers and the system of indebtedness was one of the main reasons why shopkeepers were barred from sitting on the parish committees of the Congested Districts Board, a government body set up to alleviate poverty in the West of Ireland in 1891. The chairman of a local committee in Connemara explained:

The shopkeeper might favour his own customer in the selection [of grants] and grants from the Parish Committee for improvements, which the tenant would otherwise have paid for himself might set free an otherwise unattainable sum for the payment of the shopkeeper … The shopkeeper might have a collusive interest in where he got his materials.⁴¹

As indicated in Table 2, the population of Galway dropped steadily in every census from 1871 with a total population of 182,224 in 1911 representing a drop of 5 per cent over the previous ten years. In the ten years between 1905 and 1914, the average number of emigrants from Ireland per year was 30,073.⁴² Emigration acted as a crucial economic pressure valve, releasing parents from the financial burden of their children and holding out the prospect of a better life for the young. From 1901 to 1911, 26,464 people emigrated from Galway, representing a significant drop on the 36,820 who had emigrated over the previous ten years.⁴³

Migratory labour provided vital income for many rural families with roughly three quarters of the 8,687 migratory labourers enumerated in Ireland in 1915 leaving Connacht for work in Britain.⁴⁴ These figures under-represent the extent of migratory labour and the enumerators themselves believed their data represented approximately 60 per cent of the entire total. Of the eight Poor Law districts with the highest ratios of migratory employment, seven were in Connacht (Swinford, Westport, Belmullet, Castlebar, Claremorris, Castlereagh and Glenamaddy). Of the 7,354 seasonal migrants who were enumerated in 1915, only 1,578 were farmers with the vast majority being the sons of labourers and tenants. In 1913, 71 per cent of these men went to England and Wales, with 24 per cent going to Scotland.⁴⁵

In 1915, the weekly wages of agricultural labourers in Connacht, who did not have accommodation provided or who did not receive allowances of any kind, ranged from 13 to 16 shillings for ploughmen, 13 to 15 shillings for herdsmen, 11 to 13 shillings for labourers and 7 to 10 shillings for boys.⁴⁶ These rates were slightly behind the average rates paid elsewhere in the country but many agricultural workers were paid partly in cash with allowances such as food, fuel, access to land, housing and board, making precise comparisons problematic. The sale of turf supplemented meagre incomes for many, particularly in south Connemara. A visitor to Galway in 1907 wrote of his encounter with a group of turf cutters in Connemara:

The vast level stretches of the bog extended as far as the eye could see in every direction. Nothing but black mounds and coarse grass, with now and then a stunted scrub of grass covered hillock could be seen. In all parts of this vast stretch of waste land, where millions of square yards of peat lay open for the gathering, men, women and children were at work cutting the brick shaped masses and carrying them off to be dried. Many could be seen moving the piles and re-stacking the blackish brown blocks, which after drying, resembled decaying wood.⁴⁷

Ballinasloe, Loughrea and Athenry were the largest towns in south Galway, with Tuam, the only relatively large town in the north of the county. The town of Ballinasloe was described by a witness to the Royal Commission on Congestion in Ireland in 1907 as possessing streets where ‘labourers were huddled together in filthy slums’.⁴⁸ The witness believed the high level of admissions to the county asylum situated in the town was primarily due to emigration as ‘the flower of the population having emigrated, those weak in body and mind were left behind’.⁴⁹ Claiming four-fifths of the houses occupied by labourers were unfit for human habitation, a local priest concluded, ‘these abodes are an insult to God and they degrade men and women made to His image and likeness, herded together in these wretched dens to the level of brutes’.⁵⁰ In Loughrea, labourers’ cottages were described by a member of the Rural District Council in 1914 as ‘a living disgrace … situated in the midst of a smiling and peaceful landscape, these abodes of men are in dull and gloomy contrast’.⁵¹

In communities with few social amenities, taking part in societies of a sporting, civic or political nature offered social outlets for ordinary people. The sheer variety of clubs testified to the social value of such groups. In towns such as Loughrea and Ballinasloe, choral and amateur dramatic societies thrived, along with branches of the Town Tenants’ League, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the United Irish League, the Gaelic League, Sinn Féin and the Land and Labour Association. Fraternities such as the Loughrea Trade and Labour Society, the Athenry Labourers’ Society, the Irish Grocers and Vintners’ Assistants’ Association, the Galway Grocers’ Association, the Ballinasloe Workingmen’s Association and the Galway Artisans’ and Labourers’ Housing Association proliferated.

While most rural people were traditionally circumspect about interacting with the RIC, and the poor continued to view the force as they always had – as something of a menace – to have a son become a constable remained an aspiration ranking behind having a priest or a teacher in the family. With the professions confined to the bourgeoisie, the military provided a livelihood for the working poor, many of whom had no option but to join their local regiment or face a lifetime of economic desperation. While ordinary people delighted in poking fun at the pretence and ‘shoneenism’ inherent in the upper tiers of the Crown Forces, in towns such as Ballinasloe, the barracks was one of the few avenues of employment for whole generations.

Social life, as far as it existed for the poor, was sometimes boisterous. Faction fighting at fairs, festivals and GAA matches, in particular – while much less common than during the previous century – remained a feature of rural life. A trial of a group of Galway men for riot and unlawful assembly was changed to Dublin in May 1912 after the County Inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) stated in court that an impartial trial was not possible in the county due to the undue sympathy of Galway jurors.⁵² Disputes over land between neighbouring families could rapidly escalate into gun attacks between rival factions and the practice of shooting into the windows of houses at night with shotguns was endemic in certain districts. In December 1912, a Dublin judge proclaimed ‘the district of Athenry is a disgrace to Ireland. Day after day, night after night, and week after week, heaps of outrages were being committed there and not one offender was being made amenable to justice.’⁵³ The quick recourse to violence to settle personal disputes was exacerbated by the tolerance of excessive alcohol consumption that was a feature of communal occasions, including funerals, wakes, fairs and pattern days. It is this complex and diverse community that will be discussed over the coming chapters and how the unprecedented social and political upheaval of the Irish revolution was mediated.