Inside Rural Ireland: Power and Change Since Independence

Fresh analyses on decades of rural and agricultural centrality in Ireland, and the power players seeking influence over rural outcomes.

In the early decades of twentieth-century Ireland, a new kind of farmer, one who was among the landowners who emerged as the major winners in the recent agricultural revolution, exerted considerable influence over the new Free State and Irish Catholicism. After 1932, the strides of industrialization were never strong enough to threaten agriculture’s economic primacy or the countryside’s central position. It was not until the severe crisis conditions in the 1950s that a transformation began, setting southern Ireland on a gradual path toward urban industrialism. Exploring rural Ireland before and after this momentous transition, the contributors to Inside Rural Ireland examine the power of varying groups—ruling politicians and state bodies, farmers, clerical and non-clerical civic activists, intellectuals (social commentators, as well as fiction writers), returned emigrants, and farm women—to promote or impede rural changes.

The book reveals that the state’s power to promote rural change has contracted and expanded throughout the years since Ireland joined the European Union in 1973. Furthermore, it explores divided views on the impact of urban industrialism on rural interests. Throughout much of the period, since the 1950s, the power of organized farmers to represent Irish farming interests remained high as the number of those working the land continued to dwindle. In recent decades, the persisting limited power of clerical activists and intellectuals to restructure rural civil society along Catholic or Christian lines has undergone further decline. Most recently, the prospects for farm women to increase their relative power have arguably improved the most, in certain respects, even if land ownership still remains stubbornly in male hands.
 

Tomás Finn is a lecturer in history and a member of the Social Sciences Research Centre at the University of Galway, Ireland. He is the author of Tuairim, Intellectual Debate and Policy Formulation: Rethinking Ireland, 1954-75.

Tony Varley is a former senior lecturer in political science and sociology and is a current member of the Social Sciences Research Centre at the University of Galway, Ireland. He has coedited A Living Countryside? The Politics of Sustainable Development in Rural Ireland, Integration through Subordination: The Politics of Agricultural Modernisation in Industrial Europe, and Land Questions in Modern Ireland.