Sinéad Mercier
When we moved to An Cheathrú Rua in Conamara I was eleven years old. At the time, being a Bléa Cliath/Dublin blow in, I remember wondering why there were so few statues. I had grown up surrounded by Connolly, Larkin, Parnell and O’Connell towering over me, great revolutionaries stern-faced, caked in pigeon poo, flanked by knives and guns and, in the case of O’Connell, scandalous bare-breasted angels.
I loved history in school. I had the most wonderful teacher. A rousing speaker, passionate and intensely knowledgeable, he made the past vibrant in the classroom. He could turn the dry kindling of legislation and parliamentary debate into power and fire. It was from Máistir de Búrca that I learnt how history is not made by great men, but by great masses of people working together, often unnamed and unwritten who inspire one another across borders and oceans – Ní neart go cur le chéile. Liberty was not abstract, it was not the chance to throw on the gilded jacket and behave just like your former masters – but the chance to build the world anew, to feed and clothe and care for everyone. We learnt of the civil rights movement in America, and in the north of Ireland, and of how Bernadette Devlin, having herself been given the key to New York, gave it back to the Black Panthers, proudly proclaiming the connection between the two causes. We stood and raised our left fists, “Agus anois, an Black Power!”
From Máistir de Búrca, I learnt that the unending grey stream of text listing Land Acts in the pages of our Stair na hArdteistiméireachta book in fact detailed an incendiary battle that raged the length and breadth of our island. This finally explained the lack of great stern statues ar an gCeathrú Rua. As Connolly repeated the words of a Frenchman, “Teach them, O Lord, that in the haven of Liberty there are neither heroes nor great men.”
“Nár mhór an sight a raibh ag tíocht i mbáid ann”: Ag meabhrú ar Chath na Ceathrún Rua.
To my mind, great men were likely not lauded in Conamara because the rebellion had required not only a great mass of people but a very different – and far more threatening – understanding of land: as communal. Militant land agitation by ordinary people – women and children included – was the root cause of the Land Acts and the forming of the Land Commission.
Constant cattle driving, public shunning, boycotts and threats led to the first legislative improvements in conditions through the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870. In the poorer land of the West, this militancy was most pronounced.
The song Cath na Ceathrún Rua tells one such story. In 1880, 89 out of 159 tenant holdings in An Cheathrú Rua were two years in arrears to the landlord Kirwan. Corralled by Kirwan and his local agents, the RIC and British Army were to assist in a mass eviction of the local people. Their plans were foiled, however, due to mass solidarity. Ordinary people came in their droves from Cois Fharraige, Ceantar na nOileán, Ros Muc, Oileáin Árann and Dúiche Sheoigeach – even from as far as County Clare, Drogheda and Sligo – to barricade the men into the RIC barracks for days with sticks, stones and boiling water.
If I can be a ‘heroic Gael’ in my analysis, this solidarity was because land was understood in a manner that was fundamentally different from in England, and indeed from the more prosperous farming regions in the East. In the West, nationalism was considered deeply connected to the land, and who owned the land was core to the nationalist debate. It was a campaign that was unwilling to accept the mere replacement of the British with any kind of new green landlordism. In the West, the fight went to the core of what land should be, and how the law should order land management.
In Ireland, where only around 3% of householders in rural Ireland owned their own land, the people railed against the “English” custom of private property as an abomination. The tenant Irish, as Rachael Walsh and Lorna Fox O’Mahony outline in their sharp analysis of legal differentiation between England and Ireland, demanded that land be managed according to more communitarian principles: The Land for the People. I love the land, says the farmer even today. I love the land. I love the place.
A shared assembly: A Roinn Dáil
One of the most powerful ways that we can see the difference in land management structures is through Roinn Dáil, the rundale system, which was practiced for generations by many communities in the west up until at least the nineteenth century if not later. Roinn Dáil required communal and democratic deliberation; a Dáil was held annually to share out the use of the land (Roinn) between those who relied on it for subsistence. These deliberations took into account not only the social requirements of the included families, but the ecological abilities and realities of the land.
This system was different from the ‘Commons’, which means that only certain parts of the land could be farmed in this communal manner. As Amanda Byer argues, rundale and other subsistence farming at the time in Ireland was more in keeping with the idea of ‘landscipe’/‘landsceap’ – or ‘land-ship’. These are the Norse and Middle Dutch etymological origins of ‘Landscape’. The English suffix -ship is even more closely tied to the German -schaft, meaning “creation, constitution, condition.” The land is a ship – a constitution, a Bunreacht na hÉireann – that carries the people; the people themselves work the ship and their fellow/citizen-ship confers responsibility as well as rights to live, manage and farm in a manner that sustains life, liberty and vitality. ‘Land’, as Byer writes, was “a system of nested obligations, use rights, and institutions representing a people and its relationship with the material environs.”
The Irish for ‘environment’ reflects this understanding of human culture as ecologically embedded in a wider framework. In Irish, the human is enveloped by an comhshaol, the shared life, or mórshaol, the greater-than life. Na bailte fearainn, or townlands, as preserved in maps from the 1500s, reflect this understanding. Na bailte fearainn were the basis of land management structures in the pre-colonial era. Regions were divided as to the specific to the physical properties of the land: bog, woodland, glen. These features often incorporated myth, folklore, and kinship structures evident from prominent families or holdings named in them. As is evidenced from their Irish names, land, law, and polity were interconnected. It is an ideal hidden too in respect for na daoine maithe; a reverence for the utterly unknowable, un-ownable qualities of land. As Kavanagh writes:
Beside a pile of fairy whinstone rocks,
That no man dreams of quarrying – not knowing
What’s hid beneath, who here at midnight walks
It is these earlier systems of ownership that ordinary everyday peasants, working class revolutionaries, depended on as narrative guides for their cause in the Land Wars. Some claim these narratives were based on idyllic ‘Celtic Twilights’; rose-tinted views of what was a hierarchical (and perhaps even slave-based) system. However, it’s not that these land management systems were perfect. Landships need not be “indigenous” in the sense that they are the continuation of some ancient, “authentic” tradition. Perhaps rundale was even a way of living that was developed post the Celtic era, as communities came together to cope under landlordism. As Heaney wrote “he is raised up by what he buckles under.” The point, as Amy Strecker outlines, is that people built their social system to fit the land, something which today’s concept of property seems unable to do.
Is leor don dreoilín a nead
Ownership of land was a touchy topic in the new Ireland that followed partial independence in the 1920s. The passing of the Land Law (Commission) Act 1923 reconstituted the Land Commission under Free State control, allowing for compulsory purchase and local redistribution of land owned by non-Irish citizens. The Land Acts from the 1880s had begun to replace communal rundale systems with private, ecologically and socially inefficient land ownership. Land was often parcelled out in thin straight strips that were unable to sustain a family. As Myles Dungan notes, “when viewed dispassionately, the story of the Land War is of how small farmers, and their Fenian allies, were exploited by a new elite to shake the money tree and topple the aristocracy from the uppermost branches.”
In the law, the Land Commission was seen as a nationalist statement of fundamental legal difference from England. Yet, the Land Commission also undermined the communal claims to the land that were the substantive material living evidence of that nationalist distinction. In place of the communal and earth-bound emerged a legal land regime that removed the known ecological, genealogical features of the land in favour of a nameless, placeless, fungible, financial product. Land owned by one sole male heir head of the family. Land that could be sold without any attachment. Land that was not belonging to a family or a community by right, but a contextless product for an international market. Land that was shorn of its ecological importance and attributes and duties in its legal deeds – without concern for the nest of wrens in the stonework, the marsh, the holy well, the fairy tree or the badger’s sett. We can be raised up by what we buckle under – for good or for ill.
As Conor McCabe writes in Sins of the Father, the small Land Commission strips would come to achieve Sir William Petty’s dream of Ireland as a cattle ranch for Britain, its rural wastelands, emptied of a troublesome public. The quiet, slow , and politically embarrassing deaths of Irish towns followed, without much fanfare or criticism apart from the work of John Healy.
Men of no property?
The ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ is often held up as the neoclassical parable of our times, but arguably it only comes true in conditions of entrepreneurial capitalism – conditions that rely on a dead and empty understanding of land. Today, there are 100 times more Airbnb rentals in the Gaeltacht than long-term rentals. In his 2013 conference paper at the Song and Emergent Poetics Conference, ‘Cath na Ceathrún Rua and Amhrán na Ceathrún Rua: A Hidden History Preserved in Song’, Éamonn Costello meditates on why the song Cath na Ceathrún Rua lost its popularity in the early 2000s, offering that the cultural class became uncomfortable with how they began to recognise themselves more in the landlord’s local agent than the angry tenant women with their pans of boiling water.
Today it is the youth of the Gaeltacht who are Wolfe Tone’s men of no property, as the new Gaeltacht housing movement Banú shows. They are unable to live or build locally as the government engages in a volte face from Parnell and Davitt and Connolly. Rentier capitalism is encouraged and homelessness normalised. Where they lead the local gombeens follow; refusing to sell to local young families, higher profits are to be made renting out whole properties on Airbnb or selling the land for holiday homes. The Irish language itself, a reservoir of alternative ways of communally and ecologically ordering and managing land, is again under threat from a colonial, alienated and financialised view of land as being for private profit.
Article 41 of the Constitution lays out the following vision for a postcolonial Ireland: The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.
What then of our recent housing policies? Or indeed, a world of war, famine, fear, and a stark austere future that it is difficult to think of bringing a child into? A better world is possible. As Máire Ní Fhinneadha writes of Fibín’s theatre production of Cath na Ceathrún Rua, “Níl muid cniogtha fós!”
Níl muid cniogtha fós
For their flaws, the Land Acts and the Land Commission were an incredible feat. From 1870 to 1916 alone, people owning their own land increased from 3 to 64%. Originally, land was given only to registered large farmer tenants. Repeated protest and anger and mass walk-ons by spailpíní and the landless in the west from the 1880s into the days of the Irish Free State forced a greater capitulation to the young and the poor. As Terence Dooley’s ‘The Land for the People: The Land Question in Independent Ireland’ shows, the land question “remained one of the most potent political issues until the early 1980s.” In all, it was a successful, politically transformative re-distributive process. So much so that future attempts to replicate land redistribution on the same level were shut down by empires in postcolonial contexts from Kenya to Guatemala to Chile.
What I learnt from my history teacher, Máistir de Búrca, was that law is not just what is written in books or spoken in courts. Law is a creative social practice of ordering society, in constant motion. It delineates what can and cannot be done, but it can be undone and remade. It is difficult to know much about our earliest land management systems that were encoded in the Brehon laws from the 7th to the 17th century. What we do know from dinnseanchas is that in the pre-colonial era, Ireland’s land was understood and mapped in the oral tradition, most likely according to land-use potential, to webs of kinship, and related to forms of animism and spiritual appreciation of place.
What would it mean for our Dáil today to operate like the Roinn Dáil? Article 45 of the Constitution is not legally enforceable, but it calls for public policy to ensure “That there may be established on the land in economic security as many families as in the circumstances shall be practicable”. To achieve this in our current ecological and social setting, as artists Julie Morrissey and Eimear Walshe have pointed out, would require new conceptions of housing, land ownership and who lives on the land. The Roinn Dáil can serve as an imaginative basis – the communal sharing of resources through an ecologically and socially embedded democratic process. Our Bunreacht is a landship/landschaft; a Constitution of Land and People and Polity. Seo linn, a chairde.
This essay appears in the publication ‘Dinnseanchas – Visions of Ireland’s Uplands’, which was edited by Grace Wells, Lucy Taylor and Ray Ó Foghlú and published by Hometree Publications. This publication was part of the Dinnseanchas project, which was lead by Hometree and received funding from Creative Ireland through its Creative Climate Action Programme.
With thanks to Máire Phat Ní Chualáin, and to Julie Morrissy and Adam Hanna for their deliberations on this theme of Article 45 at Disappearing Acts, TULCA Festival of Visual Arts Galway, November 9, 2024.
Text of Amhrán na Ceathrún Rua- The Carraroe Song
Translated by Dr. Éamonn Costello
Amhrán na Ceathrún Rua- The Carraroe Song
1
Tá súil le Muire agam is le Rí na nGrásta,
Go bhfaighe muid sásamh ins an gCeathrúin Rua,
Is a liachtaí taircaisne is scannail ghránna,
A fuair an chlann údan Chlainne Gael.
I hope to Mary and the King of Grace,
That we will get satisfaction in Carraroe,
From the threat to health [?] and ugly clouds,
That befell the Gaelic family there.
2
Beidh Parnell grandáilte ann is O’Sullivan láidir,
Dillon álainn agus father Keane,
Ach beidh Father Conway isteach ón bhFairche,
Agus scata fear álainn ag tíocht ina dhiaidh.
Parnell the grand and O’Sullivan the strong will attend
Dillon the beautiful and father Keane,
But Father Conway will come in from Clonbur,
With a group of fine men in his train.
3
Nár mhór an sight a raibh ag tíocht I mbáid ann,
As oileáin Árann is taobh aniar de chuan,
Bhí muintir Shligeach ann agus Chontae an Chláir,
Isteach as Malbay agus Droichead Átha.
Wasn’t it some sight the throngs that came there by boat,
From the Aran Islands and from behind the bay,
They were there from Sligo and from County Clare,
In from Malbay and Drogheda.
4
Níor raibh aon chruinniú anuas ó Bhaile Átha Cliath,
Mar a bhí an lá údán ar an gCeathrúin Rua,
Bhí mór-uaisle as gach uile cheard ann,
Mar siod é an chéad áit lenar dearnadh an gníomh.
There was never a meeting from Dublin down,
As there was that day in Carraroe,
There was nobility there from every corner,
Because it was the first place where deed was done
5
Bhí briseadh claimhí ann is gunnaí is bayonets,
Le maidí láimhe is ag gabháil chun cinn,
Ach beidh cuimhne go deo again ar an lá údán,
Ar caitheadh in aired na próiseannaí.
Swords clashed there and guns and bayonts,
And hand-sticks were engaged,
But that day will never be forgotten,
When the writs where disregarded for ever more.
6
I deas an áit é I leith ón bhFairche,
Murach geadán gránna atá ar an mBóthar Buí,
Gur sádh báidín ann thrí chnoic is thrí ghleannta,
Nó gur fágadh an lá údán í faoi láimh an dlí
It’s as nice a place as you’d find from Clonbur across.
Except for that awful patch of land in Bóthar buí,
That was stabbed by a boat that came through hill and valley,
Until she was left that day under the rule of the law
7
Bhí Tom Ó Flaitheartaigh ann, an buachaill sasta,
Na grasta go bhfaighe sé, nach a dté sé gcill,
Tincéirí agus bacaigh a bhí ar fad an lá údaí ann,
Mar gheall ar bhuidéal parliament is braon póitín.
Tom Flatherty was there, the happy boy,
May he receive the grace of God when he dies,
Tincéirí and the lame where all around,
Because there was whiskey and a drop of poteen.
8
Tá súil le Muire agam is le Rí na Gloire,
Go bhfaigh muid sásamh ar an namhaid atá a dtí,
Tiarnaí talon a chur le fána,
Agus Óileán Phadraig go deo gan pinn.
I hope to Mary and the King on High,
That we will overpower the enemy at our gates,
To overthrow landlords,
When the Island of Patrick is forever poor
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