Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

During a research leave term in 1982 which coincided almost exactly with the period of the Falklands’ War I lived in Dublin as a visiting academic in the Sociology Department of Trinity College. My primary purpose was to explore the history of social housing in the Free State and then  Republic of Ireland with a focus on Dublin itself. However, I became interested in the way in which a Poor Law on the lines developed by the English (and Welsh then) Royal Commission on the Poor Law on laissez faire lines had been imposed on Ireland despite the very different recommendations of the Irish Commission on the poorer classes. That report was almost proto Keynesian in its form asserting unequivocally that the problem in Ireland was not unwillingness to work – the basis of the less eligibility element of the 1834 Poor Law but “lack of work for those who want it”. I read the Reports of the Irish Royal Commission and the voluminous research appendices to it in the Library of Trinity College, alongside a very interesting set of pamphlets stored in the early printed books part of the Library which was then located underneath the section of the library in which the Book of Kells was displayed. The desks for studying were actually in a roped off area up a spiral stair behind the Book of Kells. Tourists used to come in, look at the Book of Kells, and then look at us.  The Porter who acted as security once observed that those of us working there should be on a wage as an additional attraction!

I developed a lot of my understanding of the nature of a reserve army of labour from reading the section of the report dealing with the condition of the Irish Poor in Britain, much in the same way I hazard a guess, as Karl Marx when working through Blue Books (government reports) in the British Museum Library. What I want to focus on here is the actual social research which underpinned the conclusions of the report. These form the basis of a fascinating and systematic – note that word systematic – account of the condition of the Irish peasantry in pre Famine Ireland. That social system was massively disrupted by the potato famine during the 1840s when a natural  disaster deriving from  reliance on a vulnerable food source (originating in the Andes) was exacerbated by the nature of government policy in the form of a wholly inappropriate poor law and a harsh belief, as expressed by The Economist that the famine would enable the transformation of Irish agriculture on productive capitalist lines, albeit at the cost of more than a million deaths and the forced emigration of up to two million people (my mother’s grandfather among them). To set this in context this was about the same proportionate death rate as that in the Ukraine during forced collectivization in the 1930s. This was an exact example of the transformation of a complex socio-ecological system.

Recently I read Patrick Joyces Remembering Peasants (2024) I found this book irritating, not least because Joyce describes the tool in use in Manet’s painting “Man with a Hoe” as an adze. An adze is a woodworking tool with a curved blade and requiring detailed skill in its employment, for example by boatbuilders in making splines – see the etymology of that term as translated into mathematics. What the man in Manet’s painting is using is a digging hoe. I have an identical – really identical – hoe myself and use if for opening up ground, particularly for planting potatoes.  Joyce’s peasants are typified by the members of his own family who remained in the West of Ireland during the 20^th Century before the Celtic Tiger took off.  Their way of life was absolutely different from that of the people of Connaught in pre-famine Ireland. In effect they were small capitalist farmers whose primary activity was cattle raising, often of store cattle sent to England for fattening although the farmer I worked for on harvests in Northumberland nearly sixty years ago did not like those cattle as their livers were not good. Sure, they grew some of their own food but not like the conacre tenants of pre famine Ireland who subsisted on potatoes and buttermilk with the butter being their main form of cash crop for sale to pay rents. Ireland after the famine and the Land Acts has a rural society of small proprietors, not the subsistence peasants of before the famine.

This took me back to the Royal Commission Report and the kind of detailed research it conducted as the basis of its inquiry and to inform its conclusions. They sent out what was in essence a survey to all parishes – the unit of civil administration containing on average about 30 townlands and below barony and then county. Typically, the respondents were magistrates, ministers of religion (both catholic and protestant), police officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary and Customs Officers (important in coastal districts), and some others. There were other surveys of hospitals and dispensaries. These responses, reported in detail in Appendices to the volumes of the report, form the basis of a description of social conditions in Ireland in the immediate pre famine years.

I know Mayo well as my youngest daughter’s grandfather was like Joyce’s father an emigrant from rural Connaught to England about twenty years later in the 1950s. This was the heartland of the rising in the West in the ’98, when Irish conacre tenants and landless labourers rose in support of the French Revolution. The Catholicism of which Joyce writes was riveted onto rural Ireland from Maynooth, the seminary funded by the British state to use ultra montane Catholicism to root out revolutionary sentiments.

As it happens Joyce also write about Silesia in South West Poland (but much of which was in pre Second World War Germany), again somewhere I know well from a longish relationship with the Institute of Sociology at the University of Katowice. What is interesting there is that Silesia was the Prussian state’s eastern equivalent of the Ruhr and a key zone of carboniferous capitalism. Connaught’s peasantry had a long relationship with the North East of England to which many emigrated in the 19^th century seeking work as navvies and often like my own great grandfather going on to be a coal miner. Two of the accused in the notorious Maamtrasna Murders although purely Gaelic speaking had been working as navvies digging out Tyne Dock just next to Jarrow where one of Joyce’s relatives later worked. They could function under Gaelic and English speaking gangers just like the Polish Workers in Farne Salmon in  Duns near where I live now under bilingual Polish supervisors. In Silesia whilst the Silesian miners (gorniks) were pretty scathing about their contemporary peasant workers in the 1990s – they come down the pit and sneak off to sleep in the abandoned workings (rather dangerous – my great grandfather was paid danger money to wall these off) – the line between peasant and industrial worker was not fixed, just as in China in the 1990s. Anyhow, to conclude, I was stimulated to write this piece largely by being annoyed by Joyce’s misidentification of a hoe, but it prompted me to recognise yet again that there are sources of data which whilst not numerical in a simple sense can yield important historical quantitative and qualitative information about ways of life. I wonder if anybody has ever put the Appendices of the Irish Commission Report into NVIVO and generated data from them? Could be a good thing for a Ph.D. student to do