A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

by Fintan O'Toole

  82. Emigrant’s teapot, late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century

  This humble object tells two stories of wandering people. It is a tin teapot, with a pouring lip soldered onto one side and the internal wall of the cup punctured with holes to make a strainer. It was made in Tuam, Co. Galway, by an old tinker, Mike Maughan, and collected in 1961. Maughan was responding to a request to make the kind of vessel that his family had traditionally made for nineteenth-century emigrants. Preparing for the long sea voyage to America, and unwilling to do without the tea for which the Irish had acquired an insatiable thirst, emigrants would buy these specially-designed pots. They were made by travelling people in an era before ‘tinker’ became a term of abuse. The deftness of the object suggests that the Travellers were well attuned to the market for their goods.

  It is telling that Irish folk culture developed its own objects specifically for the act of emigration. The sheer scale of outward migration in the decade of the Great Famine is staggering: 2.1 million people. More people left Ireland in the 11 years immediately after the famine than during the previous 250 years. Some left on what Thomas D’Arcy McGee first called ‘sailing coffins’, and many were ragged, famished and diseased. Many settled permanently in Britain, especially in ports such as Liverpool; around 340,000 went to Canada and 1.5 million to the United States; smaller numbers settled in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Even after this first wave of refugee migrants, Irish people continued to leave in droves, impelled not by hunger but by the push of poverty and the pull of urban industrial life. Between 1856 and 1921, between 4.1 and 4.5 million adults and children emigrated (passenger lists show large number of children travelling alone). It is especially striking that, almost uniquely, Irish emigration was as heavily female as male—the Irish maid, and later the Irish public school teacher, were as much stock figures in American life as the Irish navvy or publican.

  At one level, these experiences were part of European life: 26 million Europeans left for the New World between 1840 and 1900, and emigration was a significant aspect of life in every country except France. Ireland, however, was an extreme case—in the proportion of the population that emigrated, in the persistence of mass migration, in the number of women who went and in the very low rate of return, even from nearby England. Emigration became, not a response to crisis, but a natural expectation. ‘Children’, wrote one contemporary observer, ‘learn from their childhood that their destiny is America; and as they grow up the thought is set before them as a thing to hope for’. Ironically, the leaving of Ireland became one of the real markers of Irish identity. Leopold Bloom, in James Joyce’s Ulysses, asked to define a nation, says it is ‘the same people living in the same place’. Then remembering that he is Irish (and Jewish), he adds ‘or also living in different places’. The remarkable fact was that the Irish, scattered among the continents, did retain some sense of being ‘the same people’.

  83. William Smith O’Brien Gold Cup, 1854

  This spectacular 125 ounce, 22 carat gold cup is perhaps the first really eloquent object of the Irish diaspora. It was made in Melbourne, Australia, by Irish-born goldsmith William Hackett, using nuggets donated by Irish miners, and presented to an Irish nationalist hero, William Smith O’Brien. It brings together the two sides of Irish emigration—political deportation in the case of O’Brien, who was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in July 1849, having been found guilty of high treason; and the ordinary economic migration of those who sought opportunity beyond post-famine Ireland.

  Gold was discovered in 1851 and over 100,000 Irish immigrants made their way to Australasia over the next decade. As was the case elsewhere, they had mixed fortunes. In the countryside, some became highly successful farmers, but sympathy for the bush-ranging gang led by Ned Kelly epitomised continuing resentment of the power of large, mostly British, landholders. In Melbourne, Irish-born lawyers, doctors, and other professionals, mostly graduates of Trinity College Dublin, gained positions of status and privilege, while many unskilled Irish migrants struggled to gain a secure foothold.

  The Irish émigré community as a whole, though, was enthused by O’Brien’s release from Van Diemen’s Land in 1854. John O’Shanasy, from Co. Tipperary (later to become Sir John and premier of Victoria), organised ceremonies to welcome him and two other ex-prisoners to Melbourne. At a large public banquet, O’Brien was presented with an illuminated address and a sheet showing the design of the gold cup to be created in his honour. Irish diggers in the gold field of Ballarat presented O’Brien with a gold nugget and later collected the gold with which to make Hackett’s design a reality.

  Patriotic fervour and resentment at English power were obvious motives for this generosity, but there was also a broader desire for the comfort of a connection with home. In the year after the cup was made, one gold digger, Michael Normile from Co. Clare, wrote in response to a letter from his father at home ‘I received your welcome letter…which gave me and my Sister an ocean of consolation’. In the permanence and solidity of gold there was a similar consolation.

  Nevertheless, the iconography of the cup suggests how mass emigration was already complicating that story. The top has Hibernia carrying a cap of liberty and crowning O’Brien with a laurel wreath, but the bottom of the main cup is decorated with two interesting kinds of symbols. There are images of ancient gold torcs, lunulae and brooches—along with the now-standard Irish imagery of shamrocks and wolfhounds —showing how notions of antiquity were becoming important to Irish identity. On the sides, in wild incongruity, are a kangaroo and an emu. Already, there is the sense of an Irishness that looks back to a distant time, even while it has to acknowledge its present situation in an even more distant place.

  84. Parnell silver casket, 1884

  This ornate silver casket, with by now standard imagery of round towers, wolfhounds and ‘Celtic’ filigrees, and a representation of the former (and hoped-for future) Irish parliament, was presented by ‘the nationalists of Drogheda’ to Charles Stewart Parnell in 1884. He was then near the summit of his prestige as the ‘uncrowned king of Ireland’.

  Parnell was an unlikely leader of Irish nationalism. Born into a Protestant landowning family in Avondale, Co. Wicklow, and educated at Cambridge, he was nervous, superstitious and sometimes withdrawn. At his height, however, he was a brilliant political strategist. Within five years of election as Home Rule MP for Co. Meath in 1875, he had established control over the previously fractious Irish parliamentary party at Westminster and the extra-parliamentary Land League. To do so, he had to appeal to respectable middle-class nationalists, militant tenant farmers and physical-force republicans belonging to the Fenian secret society, which staged an abortive ‘rising’ in 1867. Parnell was a pragmatist who could hint effortlessly at revolutionary intent.

  His boldest stroke was to accept the presidency of the Land League, founded in Dublin in 1879 by Fenian gun-runner Michael Davitt. Its long-term demand was for tenants to become owners of the land; in the short-term it focused on the ‘three Fs’: fair rents, free sale and fixity of tenure. Its tactics became increasingly militant: rent strikes, physical impeding of evictions, mass meetings and, its signature tactic, the boycott, a term coined to describe the organised ostracism of Mayo land agent Captain Hugh Boycott in 1880.

  Parnell fused these tactics with an obstructionist campaign at Westminster, to keep the Irish land question near the top of the British political agenda. His triumph was the 1881 Land Act, which granted the three Fs and established a land commission with powers to set rents and make loans to tenants wishing to purchase their holdings. It was the first in a series of acts (1885, 1891 and 1903) that gradually accomplished a momentous social change—the transfer of the vast bulk of Irish land from landlords to peasant proprietors.

  After the first land act Parnell shifted his focus to Home Rule—autonomy for Ireland within the empire. When he led 86 Home Rule MPs to Westminster in 1885, gaining the balance of power, he cemented an alliance with Prime Minister W
illiam Gladstone. He now had a formidable alliance for Home Rule, from the Catholic bishops to the Liberal Party. In 1886 a Home Rule bill was defeated in the House of Commons, but only by 30 votes.

  From this zenith, Parnell’s power declined. Poor health and a long-term affair with Katherine O’Shea, wife of one of his more disreputable MPs, diverted his energies. He briefly regained his heroic status in 1890, because of a failed smear campaign linking him to secret support for rural crime. He was then cited by O’Shea’s husband in a divorce petition and lost the support of the Catholic bishops. The party split bitterly; Parnell died in Brighton in 1891, aged just 45.

  85. Carlow Cathedral pulpit, 1899

  It is extraordinary to think that this dazzlingly lavish, twenty-foot high, pulpit was made for an Irish Catholic church just half a century after the devastation of the Great Hunger. It captures the most remarkable aspect of the second half of the nineteenth century in Ireland: the triumph of a new, highly organised Catholicism that took control of many aspects of life. From the trauma of the famine emerged an institution that defined the identity of the majority of the population for the next 150 years.

  The pulpit is of a mediaeval grandeur. It was carved, from the finest oak, by artists in the Belgian city of Bruges and unveiled in the Cathedral of the Assumption in Carlow in October 1899. While the execution may be foreign, there is no doubt that the overall conception of the piece is specifically Irish. The message of the pulpit is that the Irish church is now fully intertwined with European, and therefore Roman, Catholicism. The first panel, just below the balustrade, shows St Patrick preaching to the High King at Tara, with a statue of St Brigid beside it. Other Irish saints, Laserian and Conleth, are represented on further panels. The image of St Paul is based on a Raphael painting in the Vatican and the crucifix on the reredos is based on a painting by Van Dyke in the cathedral in Bruges. Thus, Irish Catholicism is fully fused with the universal church.

  There is another message too. An angel at the base holds a scroll that says Vox Hibernorum—‘the voice of the Irish’, an allusion to Patrick but also a reminder of who it is that now speaks for the Irish. Almost all the scenes on the panels are of preaching, and the majesty of the pulpit itself, raising the priest high above the congregation, declares the absolute authority of the preacher’s voice.

  A massive programme of church building had begun in Ireland even before the famine was over. Churches designed by the great English neo-Gothic architect Augustus Pugin, notably Enniscorthy and Killarney cathedrals, were being built even while millions were starving. Under the leadership of Paul Cullen, who became archbishop of Armagh in 1849 and Ireland’s first cardinal in 1866, the church co-operated closely with the state, assumed control of the primary education and health systems (largely through orders such as the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy, founded by Edmund Rice and Catherine McAuley, respectively), and became highly centralised, authoritarian and dogmatically orthodox. A ‘devotional revolution’ submerged older, semi-pagan practices that centred on holy wells, patterns and wakes and instead structured religious life around sacraments, sermons, missions led by fiery preachers and confraternities.

  In this revolution, the church gained control of the process of modernisation, shaping the ways in which Irish people learned to conform to Victorian standards of comportment, and imposing rigid sexual ideals. It gave a society shamed by a great catastrophe a way to be respectable. In its beautiful new places of worship, the church provided calm, comfort and dignity. For millions of emigrants, its universality guaranteed a crucial element of continuity that helped them live with massive disruption. These benefits came at the cost of obedience, but for most Catholics that seemed a price worth paying.

  86. Youghal lace collar, 1906

  This exquisite needlepoint lace collar, made in Youghal, Co. Cork and exhibited at the Royal Dublin Society in August 1906, epitomises one of the more remarkable achievements of Irish women in the second half of the nineteenth century—the creation from scratch of a world-class craft industry.In 1847 a nun at the Presentation convent in Youghal, Mary Anne Smith, ‘conceived the idea of getting up some kind of industrial occupation amongst the poor children attending the convent school such as would help them to earn a livelihood or, at least, keep them from starving’.

  Smith found a piece of antique Italian point lace and was struck by the idea that lace-making was a potentially lucrative activity that needed little in the way of initial capital. She unravelled the Italian lace, worked out its complex patterns and began to teach the techniques to those of her pupils most adept at needlework.

  Within five years, the convent had developed a regular lace-making school, and by the turn of the century, with Sr Mary Regis heading the school, up to 70 women and girls were making needlepoint and crochet laces at the Youghal Lace Co-operative, with many others working at home. From Youghal, the craft of needlepoint lace spread to Kenmare and New Ross. (A short-lived school at Tynan, Co. Armagh, was founded around the same time as that in Youghal, and a later school was founded at Inishmacsaint, Co. Fermanagh.)

  Youghal needlepoint lace was marked by the Italianate techniques developed by Smith, and evident in this floral collar: flat cotton stitching made with fibre thinner than human hair, motifs surrounded by shell stitches (seven tiny stitches on each loop). But the Youghal women also developed 50 new stitches. They had to combine inventiveness with finesse to compete in a market flooded by machine-made lace. Irish laces were a niche product for the well-to-do, and their attractions were greatly enhanced by the cachet of the Arts and Crafts movement of the nineteenth century.

  Irish laces quickly became high fashion, worn by everyone from the Pope to Queen Victoria. In 1886 a large quilt of needlepoint lace made at Kenmare was sold to an American millionairess for the then-staggering sum of £300. The industry spread outwards from the convents, although commercial lace production in Limerick and Carrickmacross had developed at an earlier period; each type of lace-making had its own distinctive style and techniques. Lace design was taught and developed at colleges, notably Cork’s Crawford School of Art; Irish designers such as Michael Hayes and Eileen O’Donoghue, from Limerick, helped to create styles that appealed to an international market.

  Young women did not make fortunes from these delicate skills—eighteen shillings a week was regarded as top earnings for a diligent lace-maker. Nevertheless, these earnings were highly significant in households with very limited incomes. They gave young women a degree of economic value and independence they would not otherwise have enjoyed. An irony of Irish life was that many young women used their savings from lace-making to buy tickets to America.

  87. GAA medal, 1887

  This gold medal was presented to a Limerick player, P.J. Corbett, a member of the team that won the first all-Ireland Gaelic football championship final. On 1 November 1884, at Hayes’s Hotel in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, Michael Cusack convened the first meeting of the ‘Gaelic Athletic Association for the Preservation and Cultivation of National Pastimes’. Cusack had been an enthusiast for rugby and cricket. Another of the prime movers, Maurice Davin, was an accomplished all-round athlete. In the atmosphere of the 1880s, they and others were now determined that Ireland should have its own distinctive sporting culture. The GAA thus set out to take control of Irish athletics, to codify the ancient sport of hurling and to develop Gaelic football, a version of the game influenced by both rugby and soccer. Indeed, in its first two or three years, it was the GAA’s athletics events that were its most popular aspect.

  In one sense, the GAA was a very ‘British’ development, part of the great Victorian drive to codify all kinds of games and turn them into popular spectacles. Thus, although it found its greatest support among the growing class of ‘strong farmers’, the GAA was in many ways a typical product of ninteeenth-century modernisation. All over Europe, a new popular nationalism looked to culture as the basis for a collective identity that could bind together an increasingly literate and mobile p
opulation.

  In Ireland, these notions had a particular appeal. After the fall of Parnell, the parliamentary Irish party was bitterly split and Home Rule was a more distant prospect. Even prior to the split energy was being channelled into a remarkable ferment of civic activity: Irish language revivalists were active from the late 1870s, and there was also development in relation to the agricultural co-operative movement (by 1914, there were over 800 co-ops on the island), trade unions (the Irish Trade Union Congress was established in 1893) and campaigns for votes for women (the Irish Women’s Franchise League was founded in 1908).

  Much energy also went into the cultural nationalism of the GAA, the Gaelic League (established in 1893 with the aim of reviving Irish as the vernacular language), pipe bands, Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) and the Irish Literary Theatre. These last two organisations fed into the creation, in 1904, of the Abbey Theatre. Its great early figures, William Butler Yeats, Augusta, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge gave international prestige to the idea of a distinctive Irish culture (albeit in the English language).

  These attempts at ‘cultural revival’ were remarkably successful, and whereas interest in all sports, including in rugby and soccer, grew dramatically at this time, by 1915, Gaelic football was the most popular spectator sport on the island and the GAA was well on the way to becoming arguably the most remarkable amateur sporting body in the world. The Gaelic League never succeeded in making Irish the vernacular, but it did have an enormous influence on younger nationalists. Yet hopes that culture would be a terrain on which political and religious differences could be left behind were disappointed. Politics could not be forgotten—both the GAA and the Gaelic League were heavily infiltrated by the secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood. The football championship for which P.J. Corbett won his medal was begun in 1887, but it was delayed because of fierce political infighting between IRB, clerical and non-aligned supporters within the association, and the final itself was not played until 29 April 1888; in a further twist, the medals were not presented until c. 1912, because of a lack of money within the GAA.