Fintan O’Toole: ‘Rural Ireland’ has been romanticised up to its neck

In a series of articles, The Irish Times explores five challenges facing rural Ireland – diversity and migration; poverty; rapid growth; post-recession recovery; and depopulation – and ways to overcome them.

Nobody looks to John Ford's classic 1952 movie The Quiet Man for a realistic portrait of rural Ireland.

But it is poignant to think about what is still called The Quiet Man Bridge outside Oughterard in Co Galway, where some of its scenes were filmed. It is a low, double-arch humpback bridge built around 1800 of rough rubble-stone.

When it was built, the landscape around it would have teemed with people. And this is the way Ford imagines it in the movie: the bridge is filmed as if it is at the heart of a thriving village community.

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But what do you actually see there now? The bridge is still standing, but beyond it is a largely empty landscape of low stony hills and wet fields, dotted with one-off houses that stand in splendid isolation. There is, to quote Gertrude Stein, not much there there. The rural Ireland of the imagination is no more real than The Quiet Man.

One of the most significant aspects of the referendums on marriage equality in 2015 and on abortion in 2018 is what did not happen. Where was the urban-rural divide? Where were the “two nations” that had been so starkly evident in the divorce and abortion referendums on the 1980s, called at the time the “second partitioning of Ireland”. Nowhere much.

Yes, rural Ireland tended to vote more conservatively. But in 2015, every constituency except Roscommon-South Leitrim voted for equal marriage. And in 2018, only Donegal did not vote to repeal the Eighth Amendment.

If these referendums were markers of Irish values, they pointed to a surprisingly united Ireland. It is not just the values of “rural Ireland” are no longer dominant, as they still were in the 1980s. It is that “rural Ireland” no longer exists as a distinctive social and cultural space that can be neatly contrasted to “urban Ireland”.

Let's not wrap the death of 'rural Ireland' in a shroud of nostalgia

Something, these votes told us, has died. But it has been a long, slow death. Indeed, death is in the DNA of “rural Ireland”. It is not some ancient and eternal civilisation, but the product of a catastrophe, the Great Hunger of the 1840s.

The Famine all but wiped out the dense Irish-speaking world of communal clachans. It set in motion a long receding tide of rural depopulation. Leitrim, to take the most extreme example, had 160,000 people in 1841; it had 32,000 in 2016. The Famine led, after the land wars, to the creation of a society of small farms – too small to sustain most of those born into them.

‘Unbearable meanness’ 

And too impoverished, both materially and spiritually, to sustain rural towns of any great beauty or distinction. In 1912, George Russell, a pioneering organiser of the Co-Operative Movement in rural Ireland, wrote scathingly of these market towns: “Our small Irish country towns, in their external characteristics, are so unlovely that one longs for a lodge in a vast wilderness as a relief from the unbearable meanness . . . For if one has a soul and any love for beauty he must feel like an anarchist if he strays into an Irish country town, and must long for bombs to wreck and dynamite to obliterate.”

This is no doubt an exaggeration, and many Irish rural towns do have real character, but the dreariness of towns that had little to offer beyond pubs and churches was very real.

People voted with their feet. They urbanised themselves – in Dublin and Boston, New York and Coventry, Glasgow and Kilburn. It has to be remembered that this mass exodus was driven by the sheer grimness of rural life for those without property and money.

Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh evoked it with a historian’s sense of realism: “Of those who fled rather than have the bank of their youth thoroughly burgled, many went in order to escape the claustrophobic world of Irish small farm society. They fled the rigid hierarchy of rural Ireland, with its imprisoning vocabulary of ‘boys’, ‘service’, ‘station’ and ‘gentleman farmer’, and they sought out what they perceived as the teeming cities of life and opportunity.”

Irish rural communities are actually brilliant at doing things for themselves

This "rural Ireland" was always moribund, even when its conservative values were still dominant in the 1980s. Here, for example, is the historian Joe Lee writing in 1984: "The 'homogenous' society has seen the extinction of the agricultural labourers . . . Now the small farmers themselves are following them into oblivion, silently vanishing off the face of the Irish earth. The death knell of their class was sounded when the girls refused to linger any longer, flying from the fate they saw staring at them in the wizened faces of their own mothers and unmarried aunts. It was, ironically, at the height of the official benediction of 'traditional' values, during the 1930s, that the flight of the girls from the small farms gathered irresistible momentum."

So let’s not wrap the death of “rural Ireland” in a shroud of nostalgia. Piety has never done the real rural Ireland any good. Dying worlds attract romantics and since “rural Ireland” has been dying for 170 years, it has been romanticised up to its neck.

Neglect

The compensation for depopulation, underdevelopment and neglect has been reverence, homage, sentimental devotion. At the high level, generations of politicians, from Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera onwards, ignored all the evidence of flight to the cities and praised rural poverty as spiritually superior and authentically Irish.

At the lower level, where little has changed, local clientelist vote-harvesters reaped their crop by presenting themselves as champions of rural values against alien assaults (not including, of course, agricultural subsidies from urban taxpayers).

None of this blather has ever had the slightest effect on the long, slow evaporation of Irish village life or on the persistence of rural poverty, isolation and underemployment. The paradox of Irish politics is that extreme localism is actually not very good at protecting and sustaining local communities – to do that you need long-term coherent national spatial planning.

Irish rural communities are actually brilliant at doing things for themselves: GAA clubs, Tidy Towns committees, fund-raisers for people in trouble, the ICA, Men’s Sheds and so on. But they can’t build a rural transport network or keep post offices functioning or ensure the survival of village schools or (as we know too well) develop high-speed broadband.

Only national policies with serious planning and consistent decision-making can do those things.

Perhaps, now that the long slow death of “rural Ireland” is over, we can think more clearly about the people who actually inhabit non-urban Ireland, that new mix of farmers, commuters, blow-ins, refugees from city life, refugees from international conflicts and civil wars, retirees, artisans, artists, migrants and natives.

It is in their rich but unromantic lives that an actual rural Ireland lives on.

Analysis

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Challenges facing rural Ireland’s needs centralised decision-making

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Immigration is as much a rural phenomenon as an urban one

The stark problem for Irish towns is simple: they need people