SCYTHES, PITCHFORKS AND BURNING TURF: THE 300-YEAR REVOLT FOR IRISH LAND

RTÉ broadcaster Myles Dungan argues the fight for land was even more important than our battle for sovereignty, writes Andrew Lynch

Gone with the Wind, according to some opinion polls, is the United States’ favourite novel of all time. It is also a profoundly Irish story. In the opening scene of its 1939 film adaptation, Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara sneers at the Georgian cotton plantation which her immigrant father has nostalgically called Tara. He promptly issues a stern rebuke.

“Land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it’s the only thing that lasts,” Gerald O’Hara declares. “To anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them, why the land they live on is like their mother… It will come to you, this love of the land. There’s no getting away from it if you’re Irish.”

As Myles Dungan shows in his sweeping, magisterial and elegantly written study of Ireland’s agrarian conflicts, this just about sums up our national psyche. From the 17th century Ulster Plantation to the 1930s Economic War, he notes in his introduction, legal, parliamentary and physical battles raged over how exactly this island’s 21 million acres should be shared out. “Irish peasants killed, burned, slashed, scalded, carded, boycotted and were hanged, beaten and jailed for… the right to possess, enjoy and bestow their own real estate.”

While Dungan is best known as an RTÉ broadcaster (he currently presents The History Show on Radio 1), nobody could accuse his books of being populist. Land is All That Matters is a typically heavyweight piece of work (563 pages), drawing on the most recent scholarship to craft a rich, sometimes dense narrative.

It covers roughly three centuries of bitter territorial disputes, including the Tithe War, the Famine clearances and the Plan of Campaign. If you want to know the differences between regional militant groups such as the Whiteboys, the Oakboys, the Steelboys, the Rightboys and the Peep O’Day Boys, this is a volume you need on your shelf.

Dungan’s leisurely tour of his sprawling terrain involves several sidetracks. He analyses literary depictions of Captain Rock, the fictional folk hero who provided a pseudonym for many agitators when they sent death threats to the ‘Big House’.

He lauds the 19th century Ordnance Survey of Ireland mapping project (depicted in Brian Friel’s classic play Translations), and examines the young Irish Free State’s attempt to establish Gaeltacht areas, which prompted a complaint from Fine Gael TD Patrick Belton that some Connemara migrants were lazy “imbeciles” who spent their days swilling poitín and sleeping past noon.

DAVID AND GOLIATH NARRATIVE

Thankfully, Dungan also has a central thesis that prevents his labyrinthine story from drowning in detail. Essentially, he wants to challenge the romantic notion that clashes over Ireland’s land were always between perfumed earls and noble savages.

“Generations of schoolchildren,” he laments, “have been taught that Irish tenant farmers waged an unequal struggle against the forces of landlordism, a David versus Goliath contest that ended with a stirring victory in the 300-year war for the little guy with the slingshot.”

While this image contains “more than a grain of truth”, Dungan acknowledges, the truth is considerably messier. Far from being a homogeneous society, rural Ireland had its own complex class structure with tensions between landowners, gentlemen farmers, smallholders and labourers. Each group played their own distinct role in a slow-burning revolution which included shadowy vigilantes (such as the Ribbonmen), national organisations (the Tenant League) and open revolts (four separate Land Wars).

Perhaps mindful of how daunting this subject can be, Dungan begins each chapter with a colourful incident. Some are not for the squeamish. They concern sinister figures who “go abroad under cover of darkness, arm themselves as best they could, wield scythes, pitchforks, stones and sods of burning turf” and head for the homes of their antagonists to “build mock coffins and gallows, cut off the ears of their adversaries, unleash general mayhem, and then… retire to their beds”. Dungan also focuses on high-profile cases such as the murder of Strokestown landlord Major Denis Mahon in 1847. Reviled for his ‘assisted emigration scheme’ which led to hundreds of evicted tenants dying on coffin ships, Mahon was ambushed in a horse-drawn carriage and shot dead at Roscommon’s Khyber Pass. The crime caused shockwaves throughout Britain’s upper classes, with Queen Victoria confiding in her diary: “Really [the Irish] are a terrible people… it is a constant source of anxiety and annoyance.”

As listeners to The History Show will know, Dungan often leavens the weight of his learning with sardonic quips. He takes a notable dig at the British civil servant Charles Trevelyan (immortalised in the sporting anthem The Fields of Athenry), who thought the Great Famine was sent by God to punish Irish “indolence and barbarism”. Trevelyan also seems to have imagined that most Irish country folk got their annual planting, digging and turf-cutting done in just over a month.

“Given the 47 weeks of the year in which the average cottier could enjoy what Trevelyan called the ‘evils of leisure’,” Dungan suggests, “it should come as a surprise that the best European fiction of the mid-19th century was emanating from the Russian aristocracy and not

The crime caused shockwaves, with Queen Victoria confiding in her diary: ‘Really [the Irish] are a terrible people… it is a constant source of anxiety and annoyance’

from Irish peasants with so much time on their hands.”

This is obviously a male-driven saga, with women mostly appearing as the victims of rape or forced marriages. Every now and again, however, they do crop up in key supporting roles. The four O’Halloran sisters from Bodyke, Co Clare caused quite a stir while resisting eviction in 1887, pouring urine on the bailiffs and using language (according to one observer) “so revoltingly obscene that the policemen blushed”.

Charles Stewart Parnell cynically urged Irish farmers to “keep a firm grip on your homesteads” when this suited his political purposes, but it was the Wicklow landlord’s idealistic sister Anna who chaired the short-lived Ladies’ Land League. As Dungan puts it, poor Anna ended up getting “trampled in the rush for the appropriate exit by a range of special interests — or disinterest, in the case of her esteemed brother”.

Inevitably, the technicalities of how Ireland’s land was eventually redistributed make for drier reading. Even here, however, Dungan does not neglect the human dimension.

The 1903 Wyndham Land Act was a seminal piece of legislation that made it much easier for tenants to purchase their holdings and resulted in around nine million acres being transferred over the next decade. It’s also interesting to learn that George Wyndham was a racist socialite who saw Irish peasants as “obscene reptiles” and may have played nude tennis with Oscar Wilde.

Dungan ends this formidable, gruelling and hugely impressive book by arguing that the fight for Irish land was even more important than the fight for Irish sovereignty.

Many of the events described here coincided with great national debates over issues such as Catholic Emancipation and Home Rule, which are better remembered today but made precious little difference to how Flann O’Brien’s “plain people of Ireland” actually lived. Crucially, the militant republican movement could only succeed because Irish society had already got well used to “regular outbreaks of arson, assault and murder”.

Just like Winston Churchill’s famous verdict on democracy, Dungan concludes that Ireland’s 300-year land struggle “produced the worst form of agrarian settlement, except for the possible alternatives”. Scarlett O’Hara’s daddy would surely have agreed.