Rural Irish Homes
"Now that the land is coming into his own hands, the Irish farmer is showing, as I have stated, a wonderful instinct for improving his surroundings."
From: 1909 C.E. To: 1909 C.E.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Home Life in Ireland by Robert Lynd, 1909.
Now that the land is coming into his own hands, the Irish farmer is showing, as I have stated, a wonderful instinct for improving his surroundings. The farms themselves are still shaggy. I say shaggy rather than shabby in appearance, but the houses, especially the houses of small farmers, are beginning to wear a new air of brightness and prosperity.
One thing that will strike you about the houses in most parts of the country, it will strike you especially forcibly if you have listened with an attentive ear to all the old falsehoods about Ireland, is their cleanliness. I do not mean that they are as clean as a new pin or as some of those spick-and-span hydrangia-guarded cottages in North Wales. But they are clean beyond all the conceptions of nearly all the people who have ever written about Ireland.
Ireland has always been set down as a country of dirty houses, as though people living in London or Manchester ought to feel almost unwell at the thought of it. The picture is a false one. I am sure there is more dirt in London or Manchester than in all Connacht. The comparison between town and country may seem unfair; but dirt is dirt wherever you will find it, and there has been too much uncontradicted nonsense talked about the dirtiness of Ireland.
If I seem to exaggerate on this matter, it is because I wish to redress a balance and bring the truth nearer. Politicians, I believe, have for a long time had the loudest say about Ireland, and they have almost invariably maligned her either out of love or from malice. Pro-Irish politicians, wishing to make a pitiable and sympathy-winning show of the country, have dragged forward the dirtiest and most dismantled mud hovels as demonstrations of the people. Anti-Irish politicians, on the other hand, have called up these same dirty and dismantled hovels as witnesses to the fact that the Irish are a half-savage and worthless people, less fit than any other in Europe to be trusted with the government of their own land.
Thus a very deceptive myth has been created; a myth which many of us even in Ireland have begun to believe. All sides have agreed to judge Ireland by its worst, and have held up as the typical Irish home not anything like the average Irish home, but the most tumbledown and ill-kept Irish home they could find.
Irish farm-houses vary, of course, from imposing stone-finished dwellings, fitted out with pianos and Victorian furniture, down to small two-roomed and even one-roomed cottages, white-washed, and with thatched roofs held down by numerous stones hanging from cords over the eaves. I for one like the smaller houses better than the larger. There is no room here for any decorations, save the decorations that are in themselves necessary things.
The turf fire burns on the floor against the wall furthest from the door, and over it from hooks and hangers swings a coal-black pot with swollen sides and insect-like feet, or a heavy old-fashioned kettle. High upon another wall rises the dresser with its rows of pleasant and many-coloured delf; the most comfortable of all ornaments. Perhaps, there is a wooden bed in the corner of the room; a large and lordly bed, high beyond all temptation to sit down on the edge of it. There is a wooden chair here and there, and, perhaps, a long bench against the wall in which the door is built.
If there is a second room, the instinct for ornamentation will as likely as not have been at work. Sometimes, in a room like this, you see crudely-coloured pictures of saints plastered all over the wall; pictures sold by pedlars or given away with religious papers. Or there may be political cartoons or portraits of heroes; equally horrible in colour.
Perhaps the two most popular pictures in Irish houses are the Holy Family and Robert Emmet. After these came Daniel O'Connell and the things that grocers give away at Christmas, and occasionally portraits of royal people like Queen Victoria or King Edward VII. These royal pictures are sometimes to be seen in the same room with portraits of Wolfe Tone and Emmet, and are to be taken as proofs that the people want cheap decorations, not that they are becoming loyal to the English connection.
In Unionist homes, of course, they have another meaning. Here they add to the dulness of walls already made dull by framed photographs; dismal photographs dismally framed of those who have emigrated and those who have died. In the Orange homes of Ulster, too, the portrait of King William the Third, blue-coated and on a white horse, takes the place of the portrait of Emmet, and the Rev. Henry Cooke, the genius of bigotry and debate, is the Presbyterian substitute for Daniel O'Connell. In the poorest houses the black mantelpiece has often as its proudest ornament a coloured delf statue of King William of Orange seated on a charger.
Robert Lynd, Home Life in Ireland (London: Mills, & Boon, 1909), 14-18.
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