im writing a paper on poverty in ireland in the 1930s and i'm having no luck finding any info. help me out? :)

Question

We just finished reading Angela's Ashes in one of my classes and we have to write a paper based on the book. I'm thinking about writing my paper on the poverty conditions in Ireland during the 1930s vs. the poverty conditions in the US during the Great Depression. But I'm not having much luck finding information on poverty in Ireland in the 1930s. If anyone could help me out with where to find information, it would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!! :)

Answer 1

Poverty - - - how does your generation rate Poverty? Not being able to pig out at McBurger twice a day and being limited to last year's Ipod model. Just being mean. It is late so I will throw this page at you, you might gleam a lot from it.

http://casperirish.com/hannah.htm
"""Some Old Customs and Cures



Áine Ní Mhaolchathail [Hannah (McCarthy) Mulhall]



Note: Hannah's name is a palindrome in English, but not in Irish.


Back in the year 1930 or thereabouts the people of Ireland lived a different life than that of today. People had their own milk, made their own butter and bread. The flour used was got from milling the wheat which they grew on the land.

They had no electricity or electric or gas ovens. They used a "bastible" or pot oven. The bastible was the main way of cooking. Turf was used to make the fire. They cut the turf in the bog, dried it and drew it home with donkeys and baskets or if they were lucky they had a horse and slide. To come back to the "bastible" it was used as I have said to bake bread. The turf coals were placed on the lid and the fire distributed under and around the sides. It was also used to boil meat and potatoes, roast chicken, duck or goose. It was the most useful utensil around the house.

The main meat used was bacon. Pigs were fattened by boiling small potatoes which again were home grown, mixed with crusted oats or barley to which a little skim milk was added. The chicken was usually a Sunday treat. Then once a month when the man of the house would go to the fair he would bring home a piece of fresh meat -- what we now know as round steak. That was the only meat purchased. All the rest was home produced.

Another very important food was fish. It was to be got by fishing from the rock in Summer. A quantity of that was salted in a timber barrel to preserve it. It was then dried in the sun and stored up for the Winter. Every Friday was a fast day. The fish was placed in cold water overnight to remove the salt, then boiled and served with onions, white sauce, butter and potatoes and very nice it was too.

The tradition always was to have a fish supper on Christmas Eve, place a light to Our Lady and St. Joseph on the dark and lonely road to Bethlehem.

The big treat at Christmas was to have currant cake, wine, apples and oranges. People went to early Mass in the dark of the morning on foot, and odd bicycles, others went by horse and trap. All exchanged the same greeting -- "Happy Christmas" and I firmly believe everyone was happy.

If people were lucky they had a turkey for dinner on Christmas Day. If not they had a goose, again their own produce. They had no radio or television. Perhaps.they had a gramophone and some records like "The geese in the bog", "Dan McCann" or "Flanagan Brothers". That entertainment was usually kept for Christmas night. No one left their home on that night, as home was the place to be.

The next day was St. Stephen's Day and the Wren Boys were out bright and early. They carried a little wren on the top of a holly bush and wore anything from mother's apron to sacks in disguise with faces blackened with shoe polish and so on They sang and played the tin whistle and accordion at every house and got a bit of money everywhere they went.

At the end of the day, they counted all the sixpences and shillings and maybe two bobs and an odd half-crown and divided the cash between them. They finished up tired and happy.

Hallowe'en was another time of the year looked forward to especially by the children. They tied an apple from the ceiling and whoever managed to get the first bite got the apple. The mother made a brack and put a ring, a match and a rag in it. There was great excitement to see who would get the different items. As the saying goes -- he who gets the ring gets married within the year, and so on. Blind Man's Buff was another favourite game on that night. Candles and paraffin oil lamps were the main source of light.

May Day -- the beginning of summer was another traditional day. Whoever got out of bed first on that morning brought in the Summer. This was usually a green slip of a tree or shrub. It was said to be unlucky to travel on May Day. The belief was some misfortune would follow. It was also deemed unlucky to lend anything on May Day, or give milk or butter away as for the remainder of the year there would be very little cream on the milk People had no water on tap. They drew the water for the kettle in buckets from the spring well. They collected the rain water in a barrel from the roof of the dwelling house for washing clothes and for the many other uses around the house.

During the long winter nights, knitting was the pastime for the women folk, while making baskets from twigs, playing cards or an odd house dance kept most of the men happy.

There were cures for the usual coughs and colds. Anyone suffering from Asthma for example took a hot drink of carrageen moss and lemon juice going to bed. The carrageen moss was picked on the sea shore, dried and stored until needed. It was also used as dessert. Camphorated oil was another cure to rub on the chest and cover with red flannel, and of course, beat up the white of an egg very stiff, add sugar and a teaspoonful of whiskey and take every couple of hours. All those cures were known to be very effective.

There were very few doctors or pills in those days. The family Rosary was said every night. Money didn't matter that much. If there was anything they thought they needed and couldn't afford, they always found a way to get on without it. Everyone seemed happy and content.


[Editor's Note: In paragraph 3, I fixed a typo in the original publication. I changed 'stide' to 'slide'. A slide is a wheel-less cart that slides rather than rolls. I suspect a wheeled cart would be useless in the bog.]






NO TIME FOR LESSONS



Hannah Mulhall (b 1927)



West Cork, 1930s


I can recall many, many memories from an early age. l was born on February 16th 1927. I am now heading for sixty-seven. I can remember the birth of my younger brother on December 18th 1931. I was then three years and ten months. He was born at home. The bed was brought down stairs to the parlour. The nurse came and a good neighbour who knew what to do. At the same time my poor father had rheumatic pains and was spending a lot of time in bed. My poor mother had to do the milking and tend the cattle as well as take care of me and my six-year-old brother.

She had no 'mod cons'. She had an open fire in the kitchen. On it, she cooked and baked bread in the bastible by putting the red sods of turf on the lid. The same bastible boiled the spuds. She had a smaller one for boiling the bacon and cabbage or whatever type of cooking took place.

The usual thing to do at the time was to fatten a pig, kill it and salt it in a wooden barrel. Then when fair day came once a month, and an animal would be walked ten miles to Bantry fair and sold for very little, my father would buy a piece of fresh meat. That was a treat and with the lovely fresh carrots and parsnips and onion which he grew in the field and the potatoes, there was no one hungry. Another treat in the meat line was to catch a chicken or hen in the yard and kill it. Boil it in the bastible with pepper and salt and an onion and we had lovely chicken broth when that was cooked.

We also had lots of fish. My father was a great provider. He got up early and went fishing off the rocks in summer. We had beautiful fresh fish and we also had salted fish. They were put in a tub with coarse salt for a few days, then taken out and dried in the sun on top of the slates of the cow house. When dry, they were hung from the rafters of a back room. Then to cook them, it was necessary to steep overnight in cold water. Boil them, take out the bones. Make a white sauce from milk and flour, pepper and salt, and a nice lump of butter melting in the middle of it, to that mixture add the fish and nice floury potatoes. (Num-num, delicious).

We also had our own eggs, wheat, oats and barley. The wheat was ground into flour. The oats were crushed, also the barley made into meal, it was used to feed the calves and cows. The horse got whole oats. He also got furze. It was ground in the furze machine by hand and dropped down a little trap door into the manger. My father also grew mangolds and swede turnips. Some turnips were used for the dinner but were mainly cut up with the mangolds and fed to the cows on top of the hay under their heads in the cow house. They would also get a handful of crushed oats on top of the mangolds. We had a separator to take the cream off the milk. The cream would then go into a barrel to make butter. We all took turns at the handle until at last the butter appeared. The separated milk was fed to the calves. The buttermilk was used to make the brown bread, so you see we only had to buy tea and sugar and bread soda and paraffin oil for the lamp.

We had no electricity. We had our own turf cut in the bog, saved and drawn home with donkeys and baskets and benched up in the hay shed under the hay. My dad cut the hay with a scythe, saved it and drew it in with the horse and cart. He ploughed the fields with the horse. So as I say, we had our own turf for the fire, our own flour to make the bread, our own meat, fish, milk, butter, eggs and vegetables. We also had sheep. When the wool was taken off their backs, it was sold and the money used to buy shoes, clothes and blankets. There was no dole, or children's allowance or handouts of any kind. We had six cows, some sheep on the mountain, a donkey and a horse.

My father spent nine years in the Rocky Mountains. He brought home a Rocky Mountain saddle in his trunk. That was in 1923. My sister has it at present. There were six boys in my father's family -- no girls. Two of my father's brothers died in Casper, Wyoming, USA, from the 'bad' flu. Two other brothers died there at a later date. They all herded sheep. We heard great stories about the lambing season and the foxes and the coyotes and moving camp and getting frost bitten and falling off horses, etc. His other brother went to England, he was home only twice during his time there. He married and had one son and is buried in England. My dad was the only one to come home from USA at the request of his mother who was a schoolteacher. She gave him the place. The other four never returned. They were buried in the USA. My father's father died young. My dad was only three years old. His mother got married at the age of thirty-nine and had six sons in seven years; so she was forty-seven by the time the sixth child was born.

We had to work, there was no time for play. The water had to be drawn in buckets from the well before we went to school in the morning. The cows had to be driven out to the hill, also the calves. Turf had to be brought in to keep the fire going, to keep the kettle and the pot boiling. After school I had to feed hens, bring in the eggs and clean them. They were sold at the shop to buy the groceries. I had to wash the separator and put it back together and have it ready for the milking. The job I hated the most was washing the dishes off the table and sweeping the floor and taking out the ashes. During the summer when the turf was getting cut I used bring tea up the hill to my father and maybe a helper. Then I' d go and try and find .the cows and bring them home.

We had hardly time to do our lessons. We had poor light from the candles and oil lamps, but we knew we had to know them off by heart or be killed in school next day. The hardest thing I ever had to do was teach my younger brother his Catechism and Life of Our Lord for his Confirmation. I thought it would never end. I am sorry to say he died in April 1991. My father and mother are also dead. May they all R.I.P.

My mother was a great woman. She made all our clothes and quilts and pillows and did all the washing by hand. She worked in California for four years and met my father on the boat coming home. Her mother was sick and requested her to come home. There were nine in her family, four of her brothers went to California. They never came home and are buried there. My mother had a return ticket. She never went back. She married my father six months later. She was a native of Kerry. My dad bought a horse and trap in Killarney and drove to Bantry. As I have already said he was a great man. I remember bringing tea to him in the field and to the rocks when fishing. He would let me hold the fishing rod and if I got a pick he would have it in and oh the excitement to get a fish. He used crabs for bait. Now I love to go fishing and have caught a lot of fish over the years.

I went to National school -- mixed boys and girls, only one teacher to teach all classes. I stayed on until I was sixteen and in 8th class. From there I went to Domestic Science college for two years as a boarder. I was like a fish out of water, a backward country girl. I got a job from there in a convent orphanage in charge of the children in April 1945. The pay was £36 a year and my keep. When my stamp was taken out of it, I got £2 16s 7d a month. I got married in 1954. At that time girls had to give up work at marriage, so now when I applied for my oId age pension I was told I had only ninety-four stamps after 1953 and need 156 to qualify so I get no old age pension, although I had stamps since 1945. They don't count.

I have just touched here and there and given you a glimpse of bygone days as it comes to mind. I always wanted to write a book. I have so many different memories to relate.

[Editor's Note: Hannah discusses the bastible in great detail in her Old Customs and Cures.] """

http://irelandposters.com/dublin/old_dublin_ireland.html

http://www.cepr.org/pubs/Bulletin/dps/dp117.htm
"""Ireland in the 1930s
What price protection?

The election of the Fianna Fail government of Eamonn de Valera in 1932 marked a watershed in the economic policies of the Irish Republic. Before the change of government, Ireland had been one of the last predominantly free-trading countries in the world. The interventionist measures introduced by Fianna Fail included a massive increase in protection, aimed to create jobs quickly and to foster an indigenous industrial sector, and a shift of emphasis in agricultural policy from pasture to grain. One index of tariff levels showed an increase from 9% to 45% over the period 1931-6; The Control of Manufactures Acts of 1932-4 also severely restricted foreign capital inflows. Moreover, a long- standing financial dispute with the UK Treasury led to the 'Economic War' of 1932-8, in which both countries erected a wall of punitive tariffs and restrictions on each other's trade.

It could be argued that these policies achieved some of their objectives, despite the general view at the time that they were, at best, misguided. A rise in employment in this period, although not spectacular, probably represented the first sustained increase in numbers in work since the 1846 Famine, and real industrial output rose by 46% from 1931 to 1938. The Economic War hurt farmers badly, especially livestock farmers, but real agricultural output fell by only 2.8% over this period, and cheap food was very popular. Yet surprisingly, there has been little thorough analysis either of the impact of protection on the Irish economy or of who 'lost' the Economic War.

In Discussion Paper No. 117, Research Fellows Peter Neary and Cormac O'Grada examine the effects of these developments on the Irish economy in the 1930s within the framework of international trade theory. The authors use a model of an economy with two sectors, manufacturing and agriculture, each producing a single good whose price is determined by world markets. The supply of all inputs to production is assumed to be inelastic. The model predicts that a tariff on manufacturing imports will expand output in manufacturing and reduce output and employment in agriculture. Neary and O'Grada note, however, that the shift in government policy towards labour-intensive tillage, rather than land-intensive pasture, probably offset these effects on employment in the agricultural sector. This may have accounted for the reduction in the 1930s of the century-old flight of labour from the rural areas.

In Neary and O'Grada's model, the increased return on manufacturing capital will encourage inflows of capital from foreigners wishing to benefit from the protected domestic market, causing both employment and real wages to rise in the manufacturing sector. The Irish government's simultaneous imposition of restrictions on capital inflows was therefore inconsistent with the objective of expanding employment, and it was perhaps fortunate that these restrictions were not very effective. Yet they could be defended on grounds of overall welfare, the authors argue, since capital inflows into protected sectors are often felt to reinforce the distortions caused by tariffs.

In the longer term, however, such employment gains as the tariffs might have achieved were not costless. The infant industries established in the 1930s failed to develop much further, and industrial employment grew by barely 10% from 1938 to 1958. The return to free trade in the 1960s and 1970s led to substantial redundancies in older industries, and these, Neary and O'Grada argue, should be seen as the price of extra jobs in the 1930s. The policies of the 1930s thus involved an intertemporal trade- off which was not foreseen at the time.

Neary and O Grada find it less easy to assess the effects of the 'Economic War' on Ireland. It is unclear how far Ireland's market power in the cattle trade affected UK purchasers of livestock, or how far British exporters could pass the effects of Irish tariffs onto Irish consumers. In terms of overall welfare, substantial losses to farmers from lower export earnings and a dramatic fall in domestic livestock prices may have been compensated by income from Irish duties and by the benefits of cheaper food. Neary and O'Grada also suggest that the losses in consumer surplus from special import duties were likely to have been small. The authors tentatively conclude that Ireland probably did not 'lose' the Economic War, although this conclusion is very sensitive to assumptions concerning the market power of its food exporters and the substitutability of UK imports.


Protection, Economic War and Structural Changes: The 1930s in Ireland
J Peter Neary and Cormac O'Grada"""


Peace........................ppppfffttttzzzzzzz (ah !!)

Answer 2

If you're doing a class, presumably you're at an institution with a library? Go and ask the library staff to help out - they'll be able to tell you what books they have and also which electronic resources you can get access to.

Answer 3

It's an era that most people who lived through it would prefer to forget.

Try the National Library in Dublin, they have lots of old newspapers and could probably help you out.

Answer 4

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Answer 5

The Course of Irish History by T.W Moody and F.X. Martin. I had to read this for an Irish anthropology class and it is full of great info.

Answer 6

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Answer 7

There are many healthy fruits and vegetables. Fruit and vegetables like broccoli and kale contain calcium and are packed with fiber.

Answer 8

http://www.nationalarchives.ie/search/index.php?browse=true&category=1&subcategory=9&offset=13730&browseresults=true

http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/cromer/e211_f07/klasen.pdf

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