A love of home, ‘one’s own place’, is said to have characterised Irish people from the earliest days. These days, when people remove themselves to as far away as the Antipodes, there is still, even in the sunshine of Bondi Beach, that melancholy longing for the old place at home.
How we lived in the past is a subject that interests everyone, and which this book, a collection of papers presented to a conference organised by the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland, focuses on.
Its publication is timely. Much of the public discourse at present includes the difficulties newly-weds are facing when attempting to secure their first home, as well as widespread concern at the number of homeless people sleeping rough in our cities and elsewhere.
Cabins
At the outset the Irish peasant cabin is examined from several angles. Charles Dickens described the miserable Irish cabin as featuring a “pig in the parlour, fever in a dung heap, seven naked children on the damp earth floor”.
There have been more depressing descriptions of it. For Charles Lever in Tom Burke of Ours (1844): “It was a low mud hovel, with a miserable roof of sods, a wretched attempt at a chimney occupying the gable, and the front to the road containing a small square aperture, with a single pane of glass as a window, and a wicker contrivance in the shape of a door… A filthy pool of stagnant, green covered water stood before the door, through which a little causeway of earth leads.”
England
By the mid-18th Century the mud cabin had become an important item of propaganda for the British authorities and press. Clean, industrious and enlightened English culture was portrayed as the solution to the dirty, lazy, barbarous, criminalised Irish living in a mud cabin. Hence, the vindication of the imperial project.
Owing to urban stagnation and decline and a deteriorating housing stock, the working-class housing in Irish provincial towns was just as miserable. One of the most graphic accounts of the poor housing conditions of the time was published in The Tuam Herald in 1912 by its proprietor Richard Kelly.
A bed, stretched on the cold damp floor, was the only family resting place in the building”
He described a section of the town as follows:
“The houses with few exceptions are small thatched dwellings… I took the liberty of an inside inspection, standing at the entrance door through which a medium-sized person would have to stand low… In several of these hovels large families were occupying a single room and old sacks fastened on cross-bars served the purpose of portioning off a small corner, in which a bed, stretched on the cold damp floor, was the only family resting place in the building.”
Brian Griffin provides a magisterial account of the dwellings and housing occupied by the Royal Irish Constabulary across Ireland. Many were former military barracks; some were even former medieval castles. A number were built in a manner which mimicked the defensive features of medieval castles.
According to RIC folklore these were built from plans which had been prepared for installations on India’s North-West Frontier.
But the majority of the barracks were ordinary dwelling houses, many of which were built by landlords with the express purpose that they should be used as police dwellings. (One of these, for instance, was the setting for John McGahern’s first novel, still in use for the police of the new Irish state.)
There are accounts of middle-class housing in Belfast and Dublin. It was associated with suburbanisation. Thus the upward social mobility, enabled by economic growth, in Belfast shaped suburban development and middle-class housing there in a way that was not seen in any other part of Ireland.
Professions
The middle-class who occupied these houses was a broad social group with varied occupations ranging from industrialists and business owners to members of the professions. By contrast Kathryn Milligan describes middle-class housing in Dublin in terms of the family and professional life of the painter Walter Osbourne (who died in 1903) in Rathmines, also still in use today.
The contributors are to be congratulated on these deeply researched and well-presented studies.
English culture was portrayed as the solution to the dirty, lazy, barbarous, criminalised Irish living in a mud cabin”
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