Inherit or Leave

Two roads led out of a small farm in the West of Ireland. A son could inherit it, or he could leave the country.

A great many got neither. They stayed where they were born, worked the ground their brother owned, and never married at all.

1841. Before the hunger

The country did not marry young. In the census of 1841, forty three per cent of men aged twenty five to thirty four were still single, and twenty eight per cent of women. About one in ten never married at all. Those are ordinary Western European figures.

The change had already begun, and it began in the wrong place for the usual story. Permanent bachelorhood rose first in the east and the north, in the 1860s and 1870s. The West was the last part of the country to feel it.

One number settles the direction of travel. In the decade after the Famine, Connacht sent out the smallest share of its people of any province, 13.5 per cent against Munster's 23.2. Mayo and Sligo were the lowest in the country. The poorest province could not afford the fare.

1845. The farm stops being divided

Before the blight a father could cut a holding in two and both halves would feed a family, because the potato fed a family on very little ground. After 1845 that was no longer true, and everybody knew it.

So the dividing stopped. From then on a farm passed whole to one child. Every other child in the house got cash, a passage ticket, a trade, a religious vocation, or a bed and no wages.

By 1900, 82.5 per cent of holdings in Mayo were under thirty acres. A farm that size fed one household. It could not be halved and it could not be shared.

1870. What a father actually owned

Here the usual objection arrives. The Irish did not own their land, so how can inheritance explain anything.

In 1870 three per cent of Irish farmers owned the ground they worked. In Connacht nine in ten smallholders held at will, with no lease, no fixed term and no right to sell their interest. What a father passed to his son was his place on the rent roll.

That was enough. The system needed no title deed. It needed a holding too small to split, and a father who decided when to let go.

1885. The land changes hands, and the grip tightens

The Ashbourne Act of 1885 advanced the whole purchase price for the first time. The Wyndham Act of 1903 moved nearly two hundred thousand tenants into ownership. By 1929, 97.4 per cent of Irish farmers held their farms freehold.

Three per cent to ninety seven in sixty years, and the West finished buying out first.

It loosened nothing. A farm the family now owned outright was worth more to hold whole, and worth waiting for.

1901. One house in Port

Port is a townland of 331 acres on the Donegal coast, in the parish of Glencolumbkille. Every travel page in the country calls it a village abandoned in the Famine. Twenty people lived there in 1901, and twenty in 1911. Thirteen of the twenty in 1911 were children.

One house in Port carried the whole arrangement. In 1901 the head of it was John Gillespie, a widower, and still the farmer. Four grown children lived with him. Not one of them was married.

Ten years later a married John Gillespie was head of a Gillespie house in Port, with a wife, and with two unmarried sisters living there, returned as farmer's daughters.

Read each return on its own. The ages the two censuses give do not agree, so these are two photographs of the same arrangement rather than one family followed through time. Neither needs the other. The first is a handover that has not come. The second is the sister who stays.

1911. The boys, and the women who left

Arensberg and Kimball went to north Clare in 1932 and found men of forty five still called boys. The word was not affectionate. A man was a boy while his father held the deed. He could not speak with authority at a fair, and he could not negotiate a match.

A marriage needed a fortune, and one fortune came into a house each generation. That money rarely stayed with the couple. It paid out a sister, or bought a brother's passage. One fortune settled one sibling, and there were usually four.

The daughters read the arithmetic and went. Mayo sent 175 women abroad for every 100 men between 1886 and 1905. Domestic service in America paid a wage, board and lodging, and needed no capital. A farm at home paid nothing at all.

1936. The peak

Thirty four per cent of Irish men aged forty five to fifty four had never married. Twenty five per cent of women. Ninety years after the Famine, and the highest it ever went.

The countryside carried it rather than the country. Among farmers and farm labourers the rate went on rising into the 1970s and reached forty seven per cent. Among professional men it fell to seven.

Almost none of it produced children outside marriage. The Irish rate was 2.6 per cent of births around 1905, against 12.8 in Austria, which ran the same one heir system. An Austrian man who did not inherit still had a family. An Irish man had neither.

1961. The last of it

In rural Ireland there were 244 single men for every 100 single women aged forty five to fifty four. The population of the state fell to 2.8 million, the lowest ever recorded. Some 405,000 people left in ten years.

The Commission on Emigration had already put its finger on it in 1954. Holdings were too small to support a home, so men waited. The Commission called the result an attitude towards marriage which may be described as one of undue caution.

1973. It breaks

The marriage rate reached 7.4 per thousand, the highest ever recorded to that date, up from 5.4 in the late 1950s.

Ireland joined the EEC in January of that year and the farm retirement scheme came in 1974. Neither can have caused a recovery that was already finished.

What did it was the decade before. Wages within reach of home after 1958. Electricity from 1946, and piped water rising from 39 per cent of households to nearly all. A council cottage that was not the farmhouse. And a car, which turned a marriage market of one parish into a marriage market of twenty.

The farm stopped being the only way to make a home. The moment it did, people married.