Why Limerick Was Different

Cross the Shannon into Limerick and the same country behaves differently.

The land is better, the farms are bigger, the cows pay monthly, and the towns are close. The men there married more, and younger, than the men in Mayo.

But the difference is one of degree, not of kind, and the evidence for that comes from Limerick itself.

1891. The line the statute drew

The clearest boundary between the two Irelands was drawn by an Act of Parliament, and it is worth looking at because it was drawn on poverty alone.

The Congested Districts Board covered any electoral division where the rateable value came to less than thirty shillings a head. Eight counties qualified in 1891: Donegal, Leitrim, Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, Kerry and west Cork.

Limerick was never scheduled. The Board's own First Report says of Limerick, Clare and Tipperary that there are not any districts in them that are congested within the meaning of the Act. [1]

A line drawn on nothing but valuation per head put Limerick on one side and Mayo on the other. The same line separates the two halves of this series.

1883. Forty two thousand cottages, and where they went

This is the strongest single fact in the comparison, and it is not about farms at all.

From 1883 the Labourers Acts built rural cottages for agricultural workers, each with half an acre of ground. About forty two thousand went up between 1883 and 1920.

The position at 31 March 1911, counted as cottages built per rural district:

Munster 247. Leinster 215. Ulster 103. Connacht 46.

And in County Mayo not one had been provided under the Act by 1906. [2]

A cottage with half an acre and a wage is a household. It is a place a man can bring a wife to at twenty five without waiting for anybody to die. Munster built them by the tens of thousands. Connacht built almost none.

1889. The monthly cheque

The Golden Vale runs across Limerick, south Tipperary and north Cork on carboniferous limestone, with brown earths fifteen to forty eight inches deep, well drained, under thirty one to thirty nine inches of rain a year. It grows grass as well as anywhere in northern Europe.

Ireland's first co-operative creamery opened at Dromcollogher in County Limerick on the sixth of June 1889. By 1900 there were 191 co-operative creameries, and by 1914 some 350 dairy societies with around 47,000 members. The concentration was Cork, Limerick and Tipperary. Connacht barely appears.

Here a point has to be made carefully, because it is reasoning rather than a finding. Dairying pays monthly. Store cattle pay once a year, after a fair. A household with a milk cheque every month has a different relationship with money, with credit and with the future than a household that waits on one sale.

No source reached for this series makes that link to marriage directly. [3] It is put here as an argument, not as a fact, and the reader should treat it as one.

1926. Two cities, and somewhere to go

Cork city grew at every single census from 1891 to 1971, from 75,345 people to 134,430.

Over the same eighty years every county in the West fell at every census.

Limerick city carried bacon curing, flour milling and condensed milk. Ford built cars in Cork from 1917 to 1984. Mitchelstown creamery, founded in 1919, became the largest dairy processing business on the island.

So a younger son leaving a farm in north Cork could take a wage twelve miles from the house he was born in. A younger son leaving a farm in Leitrim went to Glasgow or to Boston.

That is the difference, stated plainly. It was never that Munster men wanted marriage more. It was that Munster had more than one way to become a household.

1964. The evidence against the whole argument

Now the counter evidence, which has to be carried honestly because it is strong.

A survey of rural Limerick between 1958 and 1964 found farmers sons who could not marry even after both their parents had died, because a brother or sister was still living in the farmhouse. [4]

In the best farmland in Ireland. In the 1960s. The same blockage, for the same reason.

And the occupational figures cut the other way too. The worst affected group in the whole country was not farmers at all. It was farm labourers and fishermen, at 41 per cent never married at forty five to fifty four in 1926, rising to 47 per cent by 1971.

That is the direct challenge to the cottage argument. The waged agricultural class, the very people the cottages were built for, had the highest rate of non-marriage in the state.

The cottage argument survives it, but only in a narrower form. What mattered was access to a house and a plot of ground. It was not enough simply to be a labourer.

There is one more difficulty. The co-operative movement may have reduced the demand for agricultural labour rather than raising it, by taking butter making out of the farmhouse and turning it into a centralised waged operation. [5]

What the comparison actually shows

Limerick and Cork were not exempt. They were cushioned.

Better land, larger farms, a cash income that arrived every month, a cottage programme that actually built, and two growing cities within reach of the farm gate. Every one of those widened the number of ways a man could form a household.

The West offered one way. Inherit, or leave.

And it is worth saying that Clare, Kerry and Donegal all reached their lowest point in 1966 or 1971 and then recovered, much as Limerick did. The contrast holds firmly only against Leitrim and Roscommon, which went on falling into the 1990s.