|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 11, 2010 14:37:25 GMT
I just read "The Vanishing Irish" edited by Rev Prof John A. O'Brien (I think CSC), London, 1954.
Anyone else read it and if so, any opinions? I thought it good, but a bit anectdotal.
|
|
|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on May 18, 2010 11:51:35 GMT
The Vanishing Irish is a collection of essays edited by Father John O'Brien, of which several figures in the current literary, intellectual and media world try to arrive at answers as to why the population of Ireland fell so dramatically over the 110 years between 1841 (the last census before the Famine) and 1951, the first post-Famine census to register a slight increase.
Obviously, Ireland had a very high emigration. But contributor after contributor asserted that the principal problem was not the emigration rate, but rather that Ireland had both the lowest marriage rate and the highest average marriage age in the Christian West. This didn't necessarily reflect economic conditions as many poorer countries did not have the same problem. Ireland was locked into a demographical problem which we have heard applied to several other European countries in recent years, but Ireland alone has less people now than in Napoleonic times.
A friend of mine got married a few years ago and posted his impending nuptials on his blog. One of the comments came from an Irish American traditionalist who quipped that he should, like all Irish Catholic men, have many children - I believe she gave a high figure, I forget. This showed ignorance not only of the marriage and family patterns of the Irish in Ireland, but also of the Irish abroad. Because the Irish American community and other Irish communities abroad were characterised by the same marked reluctance to marry young, if at all. Though there were large Irish families, these existed by way of exception, both at home and overseas. This was contrasted by the relatively high numbers of Irish priests and religious.
The situation has little got to do with orthodox Catholic teaching. In Catholic countries, it is seen as natural that most people will marry if they do not have a clear vocation to the priesthood or religious life and the vocation to the single life is not the default, but one which was seen as unusual (the fact that Christian marriage is not something that naturally emerges in our present society is a huge pastoral problem which requires attention). Among the Irish at home and abroad up to and beyond the 1950s, single life was the default and marriage was the exception. It has been overstated that this was due to Jansenism, but this did not appear as evidently before as after the Famine (though one contributor did cite 'The Midnight Court' as providing literary evidence of a similar tendency before the Famine) when economic conditions were much worse, but the Irish rate and average age of marriage was closer to the internaittional norm. What several contributors did cite was the memory of the Famine. The Great Famine was still part of living memory a generation before and one contributor heard her grandfather talk of people dying with green around their mouths as they attempted to eat the grass as they starved to death. Folk memories may be distorted, but that does not mean they don't carry some basis in truth. It is sufficient to say that the Famine brought about a huge shock that left succeeding generations of Irish people consciously worried about provision for their children and as a result reluctant to marry or have children at all.
One factor, reported by several contributors, was the tendency of older farmers to resist signing the property over to their adult children until they were near death themselves. As a result, the son likely to inherit was not in a position to marry until he may have been 50 years of age or older. Had he married early, he could be punished by being disinherited (I know of such cases). The contributors remarked upon the selfishness of such couples and I understood - one Irish American contributor published a letter received from a well educated Irish American spinster who was subject to moral pressure to remain at home with her parents and who said that any desire to go out and seek male company was seen as lack of gratitude. Some contributors, including clerical contributors, question the inclusion of the phrase 'company keeping' as a sin in the catechism. They said certain types of company keeping was indeed sinful, but in itself, company keeping was not only innocent and healthy, but necessary.
Some contributors remarked on the tendency, shown by personal ads taken out by Irish bachelors, to require a potential spouse to have means and to have a social standing (indeed one reason why it was regarded as such an advantage of having a priest in the family was the corresponding raising of social status of his family). This was real, and at a time nearer our own, could have drastic consequences. A few years ago, you might recall a case where a man, a son of a farming family, in his 40s shot his octogenarian father and mother and turned the gun on himself in an isolated farm near Baltinglass in Co Wicklow. What impressed me about the event was that the man had had a number of girlfriends, but none were good enough for him in his mother's eyes for social reasons. Had this happened some fifty years before, no doubt the contributors to 'The Vanishing Irish' would nod their heads, but the fact it happened in the past five years indicates their period is not dead yet. The tragedy is that the now dead woman was probably firm in her belief that she was doing no less than what a good mother ought to do for her son.
The faults I have with the book is that a lot of the material is anectdotal and even hearsay - more observation than fact. But that doesn't undermine its value. Essentially it shows that in the 1950s there was commentary about cracks, many of them very old cracks, in Catholic Ireland. These were distortions and deviations in regard to Catholicism, though many today - traditionalist and progressive - would present them as the rule. I know there are some aspects of the critique are feeble. For example the affection of Irish men for pubs, greyhounds and horse races may be a reason for prolonged chastity among the men, but the case can be overstated when it needs closer study.
All in all, it is a book which merits much consideration and does much to point at where Ireland went wrong as there were social and economic consequences to this tendency, which as I said are not altogether gone.
|
|
andyf
New Member
Posts: 18
|
Post by andyf on May 18, 2010 16:36:18 GMT
The suggestion by the Church that the Catholic family should be large was also tried in Quebec,Canada successfully. Here the intent was to have the French have a larger say in the primarily protestant (brit) parliamentary system. It was not uncommon to see 12 children families in Montreal in the 50's where I was brought up.
Coincidentally, the current Euro financial crisis which pegs Ireland has a have-not nation can as well be attributed to those sad times and before. The funneling of vast sums of profit to the empire left an industrious people penniless for the future and dependant on a system that held it's own subjects, the Irish, to public disdain.
Now is the time for Ireland to tell it has it is and call those nations to account who profited on the backs of the very people they hold to criticism. Europe should boycott britain to return to ireland centuries worth of billions of pounds of equivalent wealth that was used to adorn the grand halls of british dukes and the wealthy.
The story of Ireland has an industreous nation should have finalized in a success story parallel to any prosperous Asian country today, so how can we explain it? Simple. Coersion and genocide on a grand scale by that parasite nation which has a history of being unwelcome by the moral standards of the world. Time to get this fat letch to pay up to it's subjects. What a gesture this would be.
In true character it says nothing and admits to nothing.
Ireland, stand up and take no more.
Andy.
|
|
|
Post by Askel McThurkill on May 19, 2010 13:49:43 GMT
Andyf leaves me a bit baffled. Quebec is given as a counter-point to Ireland where there was a remarkably rapid expansion of population in the same period.
But Quebec has had the Quiet Revolution and the birth rate there plummetted to the lowest in North America. Ireland, though it has many parrallels to Quebec, had nothing like this yet and it is still far from the demographic nightmare unfolding in Germany and Italy. But we shouldn't rest on our laurels.
This is a point that Alaisdir seems to be making in his review of 'The Vanishing Irish'.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on May 24, 2010 10:22:15 GMT
Andyf's comments on Quebec are extremely dotty. If he is not careful he will be banned for general lunacy, which is the reason for the deletion of his "Criminal records" thread. the high Quebecois birthrate preceded self-government and was not simply inspired by a desire for more political influence (though there were French-Canadians who proclaimed that they would win back Canada through "le revanche du berceau" - the revenge of the cradle). It should also be remembered that Quebec had its own legislature from the second half of the nineteenth century.
Oddly enough, Quebec is relevant to this discussion. It had one of the highest birth-rates recorded (partly because it was a pioneer society) and also had a considerable amount of out-migration to New England and to other parts of Canada. Actually this is closer to historic Catholic teaching than the Irish situation, since a great deal of emphasis was placed on the idea that those who did not enter the religious life should marry young - an application of St. Paul's dictum that "it is better to marry than to burn". Mary Kenny pointed out in her GOODBYE TO CATHOLIC IRELAND that for much of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth the Irish catholic press, mission preachers, etc were much given to denouncing late marriages and criticising bachelors as selfish. The limited attention paid to this is often cited as evidence that pre-Vatican II Irish catholicism reflected the social needs of that society (or influential elements within it) which wa selective in its use of Catholic teaching. The big problem with the official teaching is that it leads straight to the Malthusian dilemma.
The statement that the big family was an exception is I think an overstatement by Alasdir. Apart from the labouring poor, who tended to have large families on the principle described by Smauel Johnson as "I cannot be poorer, so I'll e'en have Polly", farmers tended to have large families when they did marry (the wives would of course generally be younger, which is one reason why the issue of the widow controlling the farm long after the prospective inheriting son is an adult would arise.) The major change brought about by the famine in rural society was the decline/ending of partible inheritance. Instead of dividing the farm among the sons, one son would inherit, one daughter woudl get a dowry, and the others would emigrate. One inspiration for the secularising drive of the "Quiet Revolution" in Quebec was a feeling that Anglo-Protestants though a minority dominated business and the professions in Quebec and that this was partly due to the shortcomings of the Church's educational system.
One solution offered by conservatives/traditionalists in Quebec for out-migration was to open up more land in the North for rural settlement. I suspect this is also an issue in THE VANISHING IRISH - for much of the twentieth century the decline of the rural (as opposed to the urban) population was a matter of great concern for Irish nationalist policymakers - the UCD academic Mary Daly has a book on these debates called THE LONG FAILURE. The arguments about company-keeping etc are based on the assumption that the rural population could be stabilised if life were made more cheerful, omitting the possibility that rural decline was an inevitable feature of economic modernisation.
|
|
andyf
New Member
Posts: 18
|
Post by andyf on Jun 8, 2010 4:10:28 GMT
hibernicus:
Ah! that threat.
By all means, please do not for my sake refuse to satiate that urge common to some administrators who lack debating stratagem to advance effective arguments. After failed mud slinging is that unpredictable irresistible urge to strike that keyboard, and that must be overwhelming.
We are all overwhelmed by your show of extreme benevolence.
Incidentally, by your admittance your tact of initially caricaturing myself to third persons rather than letting me have the advantage to advance an explaination privately is in extremely poor taste and is frowned upon in most mature forums. You would have found me quite agreeable to anything you insisted upon. However since it is you who set the standard and chose this public platform to spew your diatribe, it suits me quite nicely also.
But you fool no one.
The criminal record thread was I thought very to the religious point, being, yes, unpolitically correct. It is indeed a misplaced sentencing, for that is what it has now become from it's original use has an instrument to monitor only, and everyone knows it, and so is every post-sentence, after-thought, vengeance driven decree, quite out of character to 2 Cor 2,5 and Mathew's advice. Given a pontifical Catholic enquiry with the right clergy I would have won my case hands down. In fact, the Holy See is correcting another nation on such a similar issue based on the same principles right now.
Everyone. My expressions of what occurs in Quebec comes from an informed and personal background. My paternal grandmother was torn from her family and forced out of Ireland along with millions because of the insensitive Parasite. My mother is french canadian, and I have learned the trials in Quebec that parallel the plight of the Irish under the Parasite's oppressive biased political system adopted after the fall of Quebec.
I had a french ancestor who was holding a placard in protest at a factory along with 50 other french workers, and who was shot dead by an english aristocrat owner just because he had the audacity to refuse to work and protest, and who was never taken to trial. I have seen many times the french montrealers hoping for that day, striving to attain higher management positions only to see a less qualified english person take the job. My british born grandfather who was wounded and won many honours fighting in the french trenches for britain during WW1 told my father one day that it was true the french canadians were being discriminated against. Catholic french children were forced to speak English and were punished for slipping on the words. The list goes on.
This was not the Church's doing, but tried anything to better the lives of it's oppressed by larger families, and it worked.
Because I have an english name I came to experience life in more comfort and was shielded from the discrimination, but I had a front row seat in life watching the sad lives unfold of my cousins and uncles on my mother's side.
It wasn't until the past 40 years that the french finally started to wield some political influence. The referendum finally drove these facts home and it was long overdue.
So don't you dare tell me I get it wrong.
Take any book and you can feign being expert, but I lived it. Before you take me off the board, I will tell everyone here.
God bless the Irish and the French, there must surely be a special purgatory and special indulgences for these Saints For Our Time.
BTW:
Absolute [profanity deleted by administrator]! The rest probably gleaned from another politically correct anglo saxon document geared for a parliamentary audience bent on twisting facts.
Andy
|
|
|
Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Aug 19, 2010 14:00:37 GMT
Any chance we can get back to the point on this thread? It seemed interesting.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Aug 24, 2010 14:28:41 GMT
Andyf basically killed it. I should have deleted him after that abusive post.
For the record, in relation to his posts; The claim that the traditional Quebec education system was too academic anddisadvataged its graduates in business/vocational terms was made by the leaders of the "Quiet Revolution" like Pierre Trudeau and Rene Levesque, who generally started out as Francophone liberal Catholics and ended up ceasing to be Catholics.
The reason that I brought up the subject is that a similar complaint was made about the pre-1960s Irish educational system - that it was excessively oriented towards passing on the faith, inculcating nationalism/patriotism, and producing professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc) at the expense of science/technology/business. I beleive the OECD produced a report on it to that effect. I remember THE HIBERNIAN once had an article in which the writer claimed a friend of a friend had met a foreign businessman in the early 60s who told him his company would invest in Ireland if the education system was less catholic. This was presented by the HIBERNIAN as evidence of the Great Insider Conspiracy against Irish Catholicism, but it may in fact simply reflect the perception ofthe Irish education system described above (assuming it is not all a fantasy like so much on the rumour mill).
|
|
|
Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Aug 25, 2010 11:54:12 GMT
One point I will make about the Irish eduction system up to the 1960s that is usually missed is that there was a free second level education strand which specialised in technical/vocational education, if not so much in business and science, and that was the network of vocational schools. But parents prefered to send their children to academic secondary schools if they were putting them through second level at all, even though it meant paying fees. As a result, the vocational sector was the Cinderella of the education system in Ireland. This is something rarely commented on in the education debates.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Aug 26, 2010 15:34:49 GMT
Seamus O Buachalla's study of education in C20 Ireland argues that the Church used its influence to limit development of the vocational schools for fear they might become a state-run rival to Catholci secondary schools.
|
|
|
Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Aug 31, 2010 9:52:52 GMT
Seamus O Buachalla's study of education in C20 Ireland argues that the Church used its influence to limit development of the vocational schools for fear they might become a state-run rival to Catholci secondary schools. That maybe, but the posibility of attending was there and few parents sent their children to the schools.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Aug 31, 2010 10:02:51 GMT
That, I suggest, reflected the traditional British bias against technical education as something for the second-raters who are not clever enough to do academic subjects. (The contrast with the German approach, in which technical schools have equal prestige to academic counterparts, is very striking). O Buachalla's argument would be that the Church's suspicion of poential state rivals to church schools led to the underdevelopment of the technical system and this reinforced its image as second-rate; though given the general parsimony of Irish governments from the twenties to the sixties I doubt whether they would have been likely to create high-grade technical schools anyway.
|
|
|
Post by Askel McThurkill on Aug 31, 2010 11:21:46 GMT
I can see that the Church would prefer not to see the development of the vocational strata, but it was the parsimony of the Department of Finance rather than conspiracy by the Church which led to their underdevelopment - and maybe the British undervaluing of technical education was the major underlying factor.
|
|
|
Post by hibernicus on Sept 1, 2010 10:05:33 GMT
There would not be an absolute differentiation between the Church's suspicions and Department of Finance parsimony - the two could feed off one another. I wouldn't call it "conspiracy" - tunnel vision or myopia would be more like it. The British mindset could be held even by people who were fiercely anti-British and didn't see the incongruity of it. I sometimes look at back issues of the old CATHOLIC BULLETIN of the 20s and 30s (which was wont to denounce WT Cosgrave and his government as tools of the freemasons and to deny that British Catholics were Catholic at all) and I remember seeing at least one article denouncing proposals for technical education on the grounds that this was a device to deny the children of the poor the chance of a proper academic education and train them to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. (Mind you, the CATHOLIC BULLETIN maintained that proper Catholic scientific training required that students should be specifically taught NOT to think for themselves but simply to copy whatever the teacher did, so I can see how they might be hazy about the difference between scientific and technological education.) I'm not making this up by the way - I wish I was.
|
|