County histories, national narratives and missing pieces: A report from Ireland
DAVID DICKSON
(Trinity College Dublin)
Let us start with the image of the great sports stadium which nowadays floats over the
north side of the city of Dublin and is capable of holding over 80,000 spectators, by
far the largest such venue on the island of Ireland. This is of course the new Croke
Park, iconic centre-piece of the Gaelic Athletics Association, the sporting body that
emerged in the mid-1880s to codify and promote traditional and ostensibly ‘national’
sports – Gaelic football, hurling and the rest. The GAA’s growth coincided with the
spring tide of Irish cultural nationalism before 1914 and its mission was closely
associated with that of the Gaelic League and the revival of the Irish language.
Despite the coming of independent statehood for three-quarters of the island in 1922
and the strong cultural agenda of successive Dublin governments, national sports
remained outside the control of the state and the GAA remained fierccely committed
to its amateur code – and this remains broadly the case down to the present day. The
Association, with its unwieldy democratic constitution, is a bottom-up organization
which rests on a network of some 2,500 territorially defined clubs: in rural Ireland
these are mostly based on the parish unit and indeed there are (coincidentally) some
2,500 civil parishes in the country. Underpinning the parish unit is the townland – of
which there are about 62,000 – and the most intense sporting rivalries have at times
been pitched at townland level. Club competition has however been principally an
inter-parish matter, and this has been framed within the principal organizational unit
of the GAA – the county. Inter-county competition, notably the provincial and allIreland championships that culminate every September in Croke Park, have kept
county identity and county loyalties in nationalist Ireland viscerally strong, down to
the present era of cable TV and sports commodification.
It is deeply ironic that a nationalist and indeed republican organization like the GAA
helped to copperfasten the county as primary focus of communal identity within
modern Ireland, when the origins of most counties are inextricably tied up with the
country’s colonial past. The shiring of Ireland into thirty-two county units took place
1
between the twelfth and early seventeenth centuries and followed English precedent,
reflecting the development of royal government in Ireland. Parish and diocesan units
are generally much older, but some Irish counties were simply amalgams of earlier
political units (Kerry is a good example of this), and in other cases county boundaries
simply cut across them.1 However the resulting county entities have remained stable
administrative units down to the present day in the Republic (although not in Northern
Ireland), and they are so strongly embedded in the Republic that even slight countyboundary changes are almost impossible to secure. The county as an object of
collective identity of course long predates the GAA: parliamentary contests in county
constituencies were the germination ground of popular politics from the 1760s, more
emphatically so in the era after Anglo-Irish union in 1801.
And with the
proliferation of provincial newspapers from the 1820s, editors increasingly branded
their papers according to the county or counties that they purported to serve rather
than the towns in which they were published. In the twentieth century constituency
boundaries were repeatedly redrawn, leading to the electoral amalgamation of some
counties and the fragmentation of others, and the power of the provincial press has
been greatly diluted. But local government in Ireland and the GAA remain doggedly
county-based.2
***
Now to return to nineteenth-century cultural nationalism, an ideology first developed
by Young Ireland in the 1840s and out of which the GAA emerged a generation later:
this celebrated the particular and the local, but took the essential unity of Irish-Ireland
as axiomatic: its religious and political reading of Irish history as a grand indictment
of most things British over seven hundred years emphasized the collective experience
of victimhood – and in so doing, it ignored (amidst much else) the medieval cultural
divisions on the island and underplayed the huge contrasts in regional experience
during the reconquest of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Modern
county loyalty and inter-county rivalries in sport have almost never drawn on deep
historical or cultural difference to reinforce the terms of engagement on the terraces
1
See ‘Atlas of the cantreds and trícha céts of Ireland, c.1200’, in Paul McCotter, Medieval
Ireland: Territorial, political and economic divisions (Dublin, 2008), pp 258-61.
2
With the exception of Co. Dublin, where administrative reform led to the administrative
breakup of the county and the creation of Fingal, South Dublin and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown
county councils in 1993.
2
and the pitches. There is of course one major qualification to be made here: the
collapse of Gaelic Ulster at the beginning of the seventeenth century and in its wake
the heavy colonization of the province by English and Scottish settlers created a
regional exception – a critical mass of newcomers whose descendants eventually
constituted a fifth or more of Ireland’s population. Outside the region a sense of the
Black North as a place apart developed, particularly in the eighteenth century; the
demotic fear of the privileged plebeians ‘up there’ was fanned and exploited by
radical politicans in the 1790s and long after, matched in nineteenth-century Ulster
(as nationalist parliamentary power strrengthened) by the growth of a rhetoric within
demotic Orangeism that characterized the south and west of Ireland as priest-ridden
and backward. But such animosities have rarely found expression in the era of
modern sport, religious differnce almost never being tested in the Irish sports arena,
perhaps regrettably, for it has been a case of different codes for different folks.3
The over-riding point here is that in the discourse of cultural nationalism the island’s
essential historical unity was transcendent and no district, no county, lay outside the
imagined integrity of the island. W.B. Yeats, whose own brand of cultural
nationalism was more subtle and subversive than that of his contemporaries, echoed
this suspicion of the merely local. Commenting in 1892 on the life of William
Allingham, his Pre-Raphaelite precursor from the same part of the Irish north-west
that he was familiar with and, like him, of Protestant bourgeois background, Yeats
praised Allingham’s life-long celebration of his birthplace, the town of Ballyshannon,
but characterized it as ‘a devotion that is not national, but local, a thing at once more
narrow and more idyllic. He sang Ballyshannon and not Ireland’.4
And when we turn to Yeats’ beloved Co. Sligo at this time, we find something of a
history war. W.G. Wood-Martin, Sandhurst graduate, local landowner, firm Tory and
an active antiquarian of the old school, had published a three-volume history of the
county between 1882 and 1892 with the aim, he declared, that the reader ‘may have a
3
Soccer in the north of Ireland has been a partial exception to this, where the Irish Football
League [N.I.] has contained both ’Catholic’ and loyalist clubs, albeit not without conflict and
flashpoints. The standard work on Irish sport is Mike Cronin, Sport and nationalism in
Ireland: Gaelic games, soccer and Irish identity since 1884 (Dublin, 1999), but see the superb
overview in R.V. Comerford, Ireland (London, 2003), pp 212-35.
4
Quoted in Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and imagination: Patterns in the historical and
literary representation of Ireland in the nineteenth century (Cork, 1996), p.187.
3
feeling of more lively interest and more earnest love for the county and town’.5 His
county history drew heavily on the author’s megalithic fieldwork, but it really came
alive in his handling of the highly contentious events of the seventeenth century,
notably the massacre of loyalists in Sligo at the start of the 1641 rebellion. Talk of
‘cold blooded brutality … the natural result of stimulating the passions of an ignorant
people’ was strong beer in an Irish county history, particularly when it was being
published by a resident landlord in the decade of the Land War. It outraged the local
Catholic antiquarian cleric Terence O’Rorke, who some years after the appearance of
Wood-Martin’s first volume launched his own double-decker on the county’s history,
observing of Wood-Martin’s efforts that they had merely created a ‘fog’.6 Father
O’Rorke’s reflections on trying to write a county history are interesting in other
respects: he contrasted the task of the county historian in England or Scotland where
‘he would generally have local annals, official records, family papers … diocesan
archives… and a hundred other like aids’ with his own task where fires, family
discontinuities and church suppression had hugely depleted the resources for the
community’s history, making archives at national level and in London all important.
As for oral history, he
derived hardly any benefit from local traditions … regarding the antiquities or
remote events of the neighbourhood… owing to repeated removals of the
native inhabitants and the substitution of English and Scotch in their stead –
these changes destroying the continuity of local opinions.7
O’Rorke was considerably overstating his problems – at least for Co. Sligo - but his
work stands out in tone and quality against the dominant register of nineteenthcentury Irish local studies.
Nearly all the historical-topographical studies published
in book format that purported to be county histories were conventional works in the
British mould but drew inspiration from the five Irish county surveys that had been
published in the mid-eighteenth century under the auspices of the Physico-Historical
Society, and from the twenty-three county statistical surveys that were published by
5
History of Sligo, county and town, III (Dublin, 1892), pp v-vi.
T. O’Rorke, History of Sligo, town and country, I (Dublin, [1889]), p. xxii. Competing if
not rival county histories had also appeared for Co. Cork (see list in fn. 5 below).
7
Ibid., pp xxvi-xxvii
6
4
the Dublin Society between 1801 and 1832.8 In all, between 1820 and 1921 county
histories were published for eighteen of the thirty-two Irish counties: these were
uneven in their scholarship and organization, invariably eclectic but broadly
respecting the conventional standards of antiquarian scholarship. Most were
chronological, some were an aggregation of essays on baronies [i.e. hundreds], and a
few attempted to be thematic; some spanned two or three centuries, most sought to
cover the whole canvas. Archives were increasingly used during the period, but the
Irish PRO does not seem to have had the impact on new antiquarian scholarship that
its English counterpart did. However the fact that the county historians quarried the
Irish PRO at all, given that nearly all its holdings were to be incinerated at the start of
the Irish Civil War in 1922, gives them permanent value.9 Their print-runs were
generally small and their impact slight, but it is striking that it was those county
histories by gentry authors which seem to have had most impact, or at least most
currency at the time, several of the authors being sponsors of the first antiquarian
societies and field clubs.10 But almost no one, gentry or otherwise, thought of using
On the Physic-Historical Society and its publications, see Eoin Magennis, ‘A land of milk
and honey’: The Physico-Historical Society, improvement and the surveys of mid-eighteenthcentury Ireland’, in Proc. R.I.A,, (2007). For the DS surveys, see Desmond Clarke, ‘The
Dublin Society’s statistical surveys'’, in An Leabharlann: The Irish Library, 15 (1957), 47-54.
9
In date order: James Hardiman, The history of the town and county of Galway… (Dublin,
1820); Rev. R.H. Ryland, The history, topography, and antiquities of the county and city of
Waterford (London, 1824); Patrick Fitzgerald & J.J. McGregor, History, topography and
antiquities of the county and city of Limerick (Dublin, 1826-7); John Ryan, The history and
antiquities of the county of Carlow (Dublin, 1833); John D’Alton, History of the county of
Dublin (Dublin, 1838); Daniel O’Byrne, The history of the Queen’s County… (Dublin, 1856);
Rev. C.B. Gibson, The history and county of Cork (London, 1861); M.F Cusack, History of
the kingdom of Kerry (London, 1871); M.F. Cusack, A history of the city and county of Cork
(Dublin, 1875); E.P. Shirley, The history of the county of Monaghan (London, 1879); W.G.
Wood-Martin, History of Sligo, country and town, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1882-92); Rev. Terence
O’Rorke, History of Sligo, town and county (Dublin, [1889]); J.P. Farrell, History of the
county Longford (Dublin, 1891); W.J. Doherty, Inis-Owen and Tirconnell: Being some
account of antiquities and writers of the county of Donegal (2nd ed., Dublin, 1895); William
Healey, History and antiquities of Kilkenny county (Kilkenny, 1893); James Frost, The
history and topography of the county of Clare (Dublin, 1893); Rev. P. White, History of
Clare and the Dalcassian clans… (Dublin, 1893); P.H. Hore, History of the town and county
of Wexford, 6 vols. (London, 1906); John O’Hanlon, E .O’Leary & M. Lalor, History of the
Queen’s County (Dublin, 1907-14); H.T. Knox, The history of the county of Mayo (Dublin,
1908); J. Stevenson, Two centuries of life in Down 1600-1800 (Belfast, 1920); D.C. Rushe,
Monaghan 1660-1860… (Dundalk, 1921); J.W. Kernohan, The county of Londonderry in
three centuries (Belfast, 1921).
10
From the above list, Ryland, D’Alton, Shirley, Wood-Martin, Frost and Hore would be in
this category, but the posthumous reputation of the first on the above list, the Catholic writer
James Hardiman, is probably greatest.
8
5
the the landed estate (or the manor) as the basis of a local history, although the
documentation to attempt this was still abundantly extant.
The context for local history was changing by the end of the nineteenth century. Land
reform from the 1880s and local government reform in 1898 seriously eroded the
power and prestige of the county gentry, with only a small minority associated with
the national cultural movements. And within the several strands of a Catholicized
political nationalism there was a strident new historicity which coloured everything
from the disputed management of national monuments to the politics of local history
societies. The most distinctive achievement of this phase was the publication of a
series of essentially Catholic diocesan histories between the 1870s and 1930s, fine
works of clerical scholarship that consolidated the grand narrative of Catholic
resurgence at home and abroad.11 Their appearance reflected the rising prestige of the
Irish hierarchy and of the overflowing seminaries. Curiously there was almost no
sign of the humble parish history at this period.12
The political transformation of Ireland between 1916 and 1922 embedded many of the
oppositonal cultural values of pre-war days in official policy. Irish heritage was to be
treasured (although the National Museum itself atrophied) and revival of the Irish
language became the centrepiece of state educational policy. However local history
and regional diversity did not chime with the times. But it was in this inter-war
period that the island communities off the west coast were discovered –
11
In date order, Anthony Cogan, Ecclesiastical history of the diocese of Meath, 3 vols.
(Dublin, 1862-70); James O’Laverty, An historical account of the diocese of Down and
Connor, ancient and modern, 5 vols. (Dublin, 1878-95); Michael Comerford, Collections
relating to the diocese of Kildare, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1883-86); Jerome Fahey, History and
antiquities of the diocese of Kilmacduagh (Dublin, 1893); William Carrigan, History and
antiquities of the diocese of Ossory, 4 vols. (Dublin, 1905); John Begley, The diocese of
Limerick, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1906-38); Edward Maguire, A history of the diocese of Raphoe, 2
vols. (Dublin, 1920); J.E. McKenna, Diocese of Clogher: Parochial records (Enniskillen,
1920); E.A. D’Alton, A history of the archdiocese of Tuam, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1928); Patrick
Power, Waterford and Lismore: A compendious history of the united dioceses (Cork, 1937).
12
Terence O’Rorke’s History, antiquities and present state of the parishes of Ballysadare
and Kilvarnet in the county of Sligo (Dublin [1878]) is almost unique as a clerical parish
history in that period. But cf. ‘Maghtochair’ [Michael Harkin], Inishowen: Its history,
traditions and antiquities (Londonderry, 1867, 3rd ed. Dublin, 1985), a distinctive blend of
topography and parish history, book-learning and folklore. For Harkin and nineteenthcentury West Ulster ‘subaltern’ local history, see Breandán Mac Suibhne & David Dickson,
eds. The outer edge of Ulster: A memoir of social life in nineteenth-century Donegal (Dublin,
2000), esp. pp 46-53.
6
ethnographically and historically – and held up as zones of cultural purity for the
newly independent nation. The Blasket and Aran Islands achieved an iconic
importance (as their youth continued to haemorrhage abroad), and their archaic
material history was seen as a key to understanding the essence of the Irish past. The
islands and their oral histories were seen as emblematic of a shared past of national
poverty, not as culturally specific or as places apart.13
Two other relevant initiatives date from these years: the establishment of the Irish
Folklore Commission in 1935, initially with heavy Swedish input and support, and it
immediately launched a remarkable programme of folklore recording, using trained
volunteers as well as professional collectors. But although the templates used were
admirable in many ways the assumptions underpinning the project were culturally
normative and somewhat ahistorical. That said, it created a magnificent archive for
future microhistories.14 Several years earlier, two young Harvard social
anthropologists, Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, began fieldwork on six
communties in nearby Co. Clare, and the resulting publications by the ‘Harvard Irish
Survey’ became international classics.15 Other Amercian anthropologists and
folklorists followed them into rural Ireland in the mid-twentieth century, but none
were to have the same impact.16 However what is striking is how little contact there
13
The Blasket classics all appeared in Irish within a few years of each other: Tomás Ó
Criomhtháin’s Islandman first appeared in 1929, Muiris Ó Súilleabháin’s Twenty years agrowing in 1933, and Peig Sayers autobiography in 1936. The rise of the iconic status of the
Aran Islands was more complex and long drawn out; for an excellent anthology of writings
on and by islanders, see Breandán & Ruairí Ó hEithir, eds. An Aran reader (Dublin, 1991).
14
For an insider’s overview see Bo Almqvist, ‘The Irish Folklore Commission: Achievement
and legacy’, in Béaloideas, xlv-vii (1978), 6-26.
15
The Harvard Irish Survey took place between 1931 and 1936, Arensberg and Kimball
having been guided to Clare by Séamus Ó Duilearga, the future director of the Folklore
Commission. The first results were Arensberg’s The Irish countryman: An anthropological
study (Cambridge, Mass. 1937), followed by their joint classic, Family and community in
Ireland (Cambridge, Mass. 1940). See the Introduction to the 3rd edition of the latter, edited
by Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson and Tony Varley (Ennis, 2001) for a history of the Survey.
16
John C. Messenger, Inis Beag (New York, 1969) [based on fieldwork in Inishmore, Co
Galway in the 1960s]; Henry Glassie, Passing the time: Folklore and history of an Ulster
community (Dublin, 1982) [based on fieldwork in a Fermanagh townland through the 1970s];
Marilyn Silverman & P.J. Gulliver, In the valley of the Nore: A social history of Thomastown,
Co. Kilkenny 1840-1983 (Dublin 1986), and Merchants and shopkeepers: A historical
anthropology of an Irish market town, 1200-1991 (Toronto, 1995) [based on fieldwork in
Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, and its hinterland in the 1980s.] However the work of two social
English anthropologists working in Co. Donegal has had more enduring impact: Hugh
Brody’s work on Gola Island [Inishkillane: Change and decline in the west of Ireland
7
was between the study of folklore or of the ethnology of small places in the west of
Ireland, and the world of professional Irish history - at a time when the ‘new history’
was being born in Dublin and Belfast. For despite the fact that the foremost
champion of ‘historical science’ in Ireland, Theodore Moody, had begun his
professional career with a path-breaking study of the seventeenth-century
Londonderry plantation, local and regional history formed no part of his
historiographical agenda. In Moody’s eyes professional local history (if that was not
a contradiction) was the business of human, and especially, historical geographers.
And the geographers he dealt with were more inspired by British models than French
géographie humaine.17
That said, it was in the principal monograph series on Irish history edited by Moody
that two key mongraphs appeared: E.R.R. Green’s economic history essay, The Lagan
Valley 1800-50: A local history of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1949) and,
almost a generation later, a much broader social study of an Irish county, The land
and the people of nineteenth-century Cork, published in 1975; overturning older
views about the inadequacy of archival evidence for the study of an Irish county, the
Harvard-trained J.S. Donnelly quarried documentation in some 33 archives, many of
which were still private. His study of the largest Irish county ran fom the postWaterloo depression to the end of the Land War in 1892 and set the bar high; it has
remained required reading for all students of nineteenth-century Ireland. But it
contributed, perhaps inadvertently, to what might be called the representative fallacy,
the view that Donnelly laid out in his Introduction:
Just as the east and the west of Ireland manifested substantial differences with
respect to population density, soil fertility and patterns of landholding and land use,
so too did East and West Cork. The county has therefore some claim to be regarded
as a microcosm of the entire country.18
(London, 1974)] and Robin Fox’s work on Tory [The Tory islanders: A people of the Celtic
fringe (Cambridge, 1978)].
17
The contrast here is between the traditions of Human Geography and Historical
Cartography in Moody’s Trinity College with the more French influences in UCD (Jones
Hughes) and Queen’s University Belfast (Estyn Evans). Cf. Kevin Whelan, ‘The region and
the intellectuals’, in Liam O’Dowd, ed. On intellectuals and intellectual life in Ireland
(Belfast, 1996), pp 126-7.
18
Donnelly, Land and people, p.2
8
That attribution of typicality had been used by Arensberg and Kimball in their choice
of Clare in the 1930s (for them it was that county’s supposed cultural
representativeness),19 and the fallacy has been echoed in the framing of recent work,
from county studies20 to the more microcosmic monographs of nineteenth-century
communities, notably Kevin O’Neill’s Family and farm in pre-Famine Ireland,21 a
study of a single south Ulster parish for which superb demographic data survive, and
Robert Scally’s The end of hidden Ireland, studying famine, eviction and emigration
with its principal focus on a single Co. Roscommon townland.22 Always something
of a maverick, Donald Akenson in his foray into local history – the Antrim peninsula
of Islandmagee from 1798 to 1920 – protested:
I firmly refuse to make any scholarly judgment about whether Islandmagee was
typical of small Irish communities, or was unique… the determination to treat
Islandmagee on its own terms, without comparative reference to customs elsewhere
in Ireland, is a product of my resolution to avoid becoming involved in the
methodological fray concerning the definition of ‘culture’ that so distracts
anthropologists and sociologists.23
In the three decades since Donnelly’s Cork, there have been literally dozens of
county-based social history projects, most of them focussed on the evidence-abundant
nineteenth century. The few which have peered back into the eighteenth century –
notably Eric Almquist’s unpublished study of Mayo24 and Peter Connell’s study of
Meath25 – are much the better for it, providing more sophisticated accounts of the
terminal crisis of the 1840s than those working within a shorter time frame. Further
back in time, early modern Sligo and eighteenth-century Tipperary have been the
19
Conrad M. Arensberg & Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (3rd ed.,
with new introduction by Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson &Tony Varley, Ennis, 2001), pp
xiii-iv.
20
E.g. D.E. Jordan, Land and popular politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plantation
to the Land War (Cambridge, 1994), two-thirds of which relates to the second half of the
nineteenth century.
21
Madison, 1984.
22
New York, 1995.
23
D.H. Akenson, Between two revolutions: Islandmagee Co. Antrim 1798-1920 (Port Credit,
Ontario, 1979), p.4
24
Eric L. Almquist, ‘Mayo and beyond: Land, domestic industry and rural transformation in
the Irish West’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1977).
25
Peter Connell, The land and the people of County Meath 1750-1850 (Dublin, 2004).
9
subject of very fine county mongraphs by Mary O’Dowd and Thomas Power.26 Two
narrowly focussed but highly innovative modern regional studies appeared in the
post-Donnelly era: Bruce Elliot’s inticate study of some 775 Protestant families in
Co. Tipperary who migrated to Canada in the years 1815 to 1855, which recontructed
the virtual transplantation of whole community and was a study both of place and of
people in motion; it has become a classic in migration history. 27 And for the early
twentieth century there is David Fitzpatrick’s magisterial reconstruction of social
change and popular politics in Co. Clare between 1913 and 1922, published in 1977.28
This has inspired a large number of county histories of the revolutionary period, but
only that by Fitzpatrick’s former student Peter Hart, on revolutionary politcs in Co
Cork, has achieved a similar critical reception.29
But there is a the new elephant in the room, or rather a herd of them – the series of
composite county histories edited and published by the geographer Willie Nolan: the
first of these – on Co Wexford appeared in 1991, and the nineteenth volume – on Co.
Carlow – in 2008.30 Some of these exceed a thousand pages, having enjoyed the
forebearance of a most tolerant series editor. The formula has remained the same – a
spicey potpourri of essays ranging from the neolithic to the contemporary on the
county in question, with literature, ethnomusicology and cartography sharing the bed
with mainstream social history. As a publishing phenomenon it has been a
remarkable success for a small private imprint, made viable thanks to strong local
government sponsorship and county patriotism.
But for all that, the county volumes have had limited intellectual impact. Some of the
best essays in the volumes have been the most narrowly focussed pieces, whereas the
broad county thematic surveys have suffered from the old problem of the artificiality
of the county as a unit of analysis. Others have made the same mistake: the county
Mary O’Dowd, Power, politics and land: Early modern Sligo 1568-1688 (Belfast, 1991);
Thomas P. Power, Land, politics and society in eighteenth-century Tipperary (Oxford, 1993).
27
Bruce S. Elliott, Irish migrants in the Canadas: A new approach (Kingston and Belfast,
1988).
28
David Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish life 1913-1921: Provincial experience of war and
revolution (Dublin, 1977).
29
Peter Hart, The I.R.A. and its enemies: Violence and community in Cork, 1916-1923
(Oxford, 1998).
30
For a complete list of counties see http://www.geographypublications.com/index.
26
10
was used as the basic unit of analysis by Joel Mokyr in his classic cliometric study on
the Irish Famine, Why Ireland starved (1983), a pyrotechnic work that failed to
produce any strikingly new insights as to the causes of regional variation in the
working out of the 1840s crisis. It was only when Cormac Ó Gráda more recently
disaggregated much of the pre-Famine social data from county down to barony levels
that certain highly suggestive correlationships began to be revealed.31 And no one
has more eloquently revealed the limitations of the county unit in historical analysis
than the historical geographer William Smyth - in a number of subversive countybased essays that have probed the colonization, settlement and proprietorial
geographies of Tipperary, Kilkenny, Cork and Dublin, thereby transforming our
understanding of the agrarian history of early modern Ireland.32
The most influential, or at least the most widely read, modern contribution to Irish
regional studies has not been a local-history work itself, but the somewhat misnamed
Atlas of the Irish rural landscape.33 The commercial success of this beautifully
produced work (with sales in excess of 15,000) was entirely merited, but its
importance lies in the outstanding array of interpretative maps. Included in the
volume were a number of longitudinal case-studies of districts, the most remarkable
of which was an essay on the Hook peninsula in Wexford by Billy Colfer, which has
since become a monograph.34 These essays help make the case for more longue durée
studies of environmentally distinct pays, something which human geographers and
cartographers from Estyn Evans’ time have attempted - his Mourne Country (1951)
being matched by John Feehan with The landscape of Slieve Bloom (1979), and by
Tim Robinson more recently in his remarkable writings on the Aran islands and
Connemara.35
The Atlas also strengthened the case for regional historical studies
Cormac Ó Gráda, Black '47 and beyond:
The great Irish famine in history, economy, and
memory (Princeton, 1999); D. W. Miller & L. J. Hochberg, ‘Modernization and inequality in
pre-Famine Ireland’, in Social Science History, 31, 1 (spring 2007), 58.
32
See William J. Smyth, Map-making, landscapes and memory: A geography of colonial
and early modern Ireland, c.1530-1750 (Cork, 2006), which brings together more than thirty
years of research and writings.
33
Cork, 1997.
34
Billy Colfer, The Hook Peninsula, County Wexford (Cork, 2004).
35
The mathematician/cartographer Tim Robinson’s studies are in an intellectual category all
of their own and include: Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (Dublin, 1986); Stones of Aran:
Labyrinth (Dublin, 1995); Setting foot on the shores of Connemara (Dublin, 1996);
Connemara: Listening to the Wind
(Dublin, 2006); Connemara: The last pool of darkness
(Dublin, 2008).
31
11
that burst out and looked beyond or across county boundaries: so far there have only
been a few of these – including Raymond Gillespie’s collection of essays on the
Leinster/Ulster border country, Eoghan Ó Néill’s remarkable study of south-east
Tipperary/south Kilkenny across seven centuries,36 and my own study of the
commercial hinterland of Cork city, spanning most of three counties and two
centuries.37 But perhaps the prospects for something truly innovatory rests with the
combination of maximum time-span and smallest place, weaving together
paleoecology, environmental archaeology and documentary evidence. In a way this
started precisely a century ago with the project conducted by the Royal Irish Academy
in 1909-11 and led by R.L. Praeger to examine the natural and environmental history
of Clare Island in Co. Mayo, a project that has now been revisited a hundred years
later by another interdisciplinary team.38 But the prize for the most ambitious
celebration of a small place must go to the economic historian Peter Carr for his twovolume, 748-page study of the townland of Portavo, Co. Down, nestling on the Irish
Sea – an extraordinary example of Victorian single-mindedness for twenty-first
century Ireland, an odyssey which awaits critical notice.39
36
The Golden Vale of Ivowen: Land and people of the valley of the Suir (Dublin, 2001).
Raymond Gillespie & Harold O’Sullivan eds., The borderlands: Essays on the history of
the Ulster-Leinster border (Belfast, 1989); David Dickson, Old world colony: Cork and
south Munster 1630-1830 (Cork, 2005).
38
See Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh & Kevin Whelan, eds. New Survey of Clare Island, I: History
and Cultural Landscape (Dublin, 1999). Cf. Brian Dornan, The Inishkeas: Mayo’s lost
islands (Dublin, 2000), which is a substantial addition to the historical/ethnographic literature
on the western islands,
39
Portavo: An Irish townland and its peoples (Belfast, 2001-5). It was however nominated
for the Wolfson Prize in 2006.
37
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