One Farm, One Heir

There is a word that does more work than any statistic in this whole subject.

Boy.

In the West of Ireland a man was a boy until he got the land. Not until he was grown, not until he could do a day's work, not until he was thirty or forty or fifty. Until he got the land. A farmer in his middle forties was still the boy of the house while his father lived and held the deed, and everyone in the parish used the word without thinking about it.

1852. The rule that made it

After the Famine a farm passed whole to one child. That was the rule, and it was not sentiment. A divided holding in the West could not feed anybody once the potato was no longer trusted.

So one child got everything. Every other child got cash, a ticket, a trade, a religious vocation, or a bed and no wages.

The rule is simple. What follows from it is not.

1900. What a farm that size meant

By 1900, 82.5 per cent of holdings in Mayo were under thirty acres. Roscommon was 82.8 per cent. Leitrim 80.7. Sligo 80.1. Galway 75.8.

Compare the large farm counties in the same year. Meath 61.4 per cent under thirty acres. Kildare 60.3. Tipperary 55.3.

Thirty acres is the line that matters, not fifteen. At the fifteen acre line Meath looks nearly as small farmed as Donegal, because Meath was full of one and two acre labourers plots. At thirty acres the West separates cleanly from everywhere else.

A farm of twenty five acres in Mayo fed one household. Not two. There was nothing to argue about.

The handover, not the funeral

Here is the part that is usually left out.

The son could not marry until he had the farm. He could not get the farm until his father decided to give it to him. And the father had every reason on earth to wait.

The farm was the old man's living. It was also his standing, his authority in his own kitchen, and his guarantee of being looked after when he could no longer work. A man who signs a holding over to his son at sixty is a man who has made himself a lodger in his own house.

So he did not sign. Not at sixty, and often not at seventy five.

That is why the age of marriage in the West was not a matter of courtship at all. It was set by a decision taken by somebody else, in another generation, for reasons that had nothing to do with the couple.

1932. The boys of north Clare

Fieldwork in north Clare in the early 1930s recorded the word in use and set down what it meant. [1]

A man was a boy while the father held the land. As a boy he had no authority to speak for the farm at a fair or a market. He had no standing to open a negotiation for a wife. He worked the ground every day of his life and owned none of it.

The household ran on three things together: the single heir, the match, and the fortune that came with the bride. Take away any one of them and the other two stop working.

One caution belongs here. The neat model that grew out of that fieldwork, in which the Irish farm household is a textbook stem family of three generations under one roof, does not hold up when the census returns are counted. There were far too few households with two married couples in them for that to have been the norm. [2]

What the returns do show is something plainer and sadder. By 1911 one household in fifteen was a person living entirely alone, and one in eight held no family at all. That is not a family system. That is what is left after one.

1926. It was not a national habit. It was an occupational one

The figures by occupation are the most useful in the whole subject, because they show that this was never something the Irish did. It was something farming did.

Men aged forty five to fifty four who had never married:

In 1926, farmers and their farming relatives stood at 32 per cent. Farm labourers and fishermen at 41. Higher professional men at 22. Employers and managers at 15.

By 1971, farmers and their relatives had risen to 41 per cent and farm labourers to 47. Professional men had fallen to 7. Employers and managers to 9.

Read that again. Over the same forty five years, in the same country, the rate among farm workers went up by six points and the rate among professionals fell by fifteen.

A doctor in Galway city married. A farmer six miles outside it did not. They were not living under the same set of rules, and it was never the country's rules that mattered. It was the farm's.

1966. The gradient opens

The same thing shows up if the farms are sorted by size rather than by occupation, and it is the single most revealing table in this series.

In 1926 the size of a farm barely mattered. Every band, from the great grazing farms of two hundred acres down to the smallest holdings, sat between 18 and 23 per cent.

By 1966 the smallest farms carried 42 per cent and the largest 18.

The gradient was not inherited from the Famine. It opened up in the twentieth century, while Ireland was independent, while the land was owned, and while the state was building roads and schools and power lines into every parish in the country.

1911. The room at the western gable

When the handover did come, it came with a piece of furniture.

The old couple moved into the west room, the room at the western gable of the house. It held the religious pictures, the good furniture and the things the mother had brought in with her own fortune a lifetime earlier. It was the good room, and folk belief tied that gable to the fairy road and to the otherworld.

Moving into it was dignified and it was also a demotion. The old man was no longer the farmer. He had become a guest at the head of his own table.

That is what a man had to bring himself to do. And it explains, better than any moral argument, why so many of them did not do it until they were carried out.