From Patronage to Brokerage in the Local Politics of Eastern Ireland

Abstract

The literature of Irish political studies suggests that Irish political party cleavages date from the ideological split that resulted in the Civil War of 1922-23. Ethnographic research in county Meath in eastern Ireland reveals a more complex picture, in which many individuals and families remember the events of the 1930S as the key ones in the determination of their party allegiances. Crucial to their initial choices of party membership was the patronage available from their local and national politicians. After the 1934 local government elections, however, both the government and political parties began to limit county councillor control of scarce goods and vital services. Councillors' roles as patrons quickly changed to those of brokers after the County Management Act of 1940. This investigation of the changes in local political patronage which can result from the processes of party and government centralization demonstrates the relevance of ethnohistory for the study of comparative European politics. Anthropological accounts of Irish politics have principally dealt with local politicians' roles as political patrons and brokers who act as mediators between local political actors and individuals and groups outside their communities. With few exceptions (such as Sacks 1976), these studies have lacked a historical perspective, a charge often made against the ethnography of Ireland in general (Gibbon I973). Ethnographers may review some salient moments in national political history in order to focus their community studies (see, for example, Bax 1976), but they present the institutions and organization of local politics in a way which suggests little of the dynamism of local political history. This is remarkable given the complex, often exciting history of local party politics throughout Ireland, a nation renowned for its obsession with all things political. In fact, the political Ethnohistory 37:2 (Spring 1990). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-80oi/9o/$ .5o. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.53 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 05:11:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Local Politics of Eastern Ireland anthropology of Ireland mirrors the state of the field throughout Europe; ethnographers seldom investigate party politics at the local, regional, and national levels. This essay is an initial step in the ethnohistory of party politics in Ireland; it explores some of the origins of traditional political roles in county Meath in eastern Ireland in order to focus attention on contemporary political parties and ideologies. It also addresses notions of local political studies done throughout Europe by ethnographers who, for over a generation, have been instrumental in placing patronage studies in the mainstream of political anthropology. The anthropological analysis of local politics in Europe was stimulated by such groundbreaking case studies as those of Kenny (I96I), PittRivers (I96I), and Silverman (1965), which in turn were part of a new anthropological interest in local communities' relations with institutions and people at more complex sociopolitical levels (see, for example, Bailey 1969; Barth 1965; Wolf 1966; Worsley 1968). Revisionist ethnographies which analyzed the political economy of European communities and regions continued the investigation of the definition, development, and evolution of political and cultural patronage and brokerage (Boissevain I965, 1966; Blok 1974; Campbell 1964; Hansen 1977; Schneider and Schneider 1976). But in their efforts to identify such people as noncorporate groups, secret societies, culture brokers, and merchant capitalists, in order to show that community studies cannot and should not be arbitrarily left at solely the local level, the institutions to which many of these patrons and brokers belonged took on secondary significance. Ethnographers became increasingly imaginative in the ways that they analyzed patrons and brokers, and network analysis (Barnes 1968; Boissevain 1974) was but one way to analyze the webs of social and political relations that, in the absence of kinship ties, bound community members both to themselves and to outsiders. The analysis of patrons' networks provided clues to the sources of their power and authority which narrowly focused community studies often missed. But the success of these revisionist patron-client studies in delineating the many noninstitutional and noncorporate ties that villagers and rural people had to the outside world made it more difficult to see the institutional aspects of their personal networks. In fact, the institutions that these people belonged to became an ethnographic backdrop, a political mise en scene to the more important and increasingly stylized and idealized personality cults of patrons and clients. With few exceptions (see, for example, Berger 1972; Cole and Wolf I974; Kertzer I980), local political studies in Europe have emphasized the analysis of the informal politics of brokerage in all its forms, furthering the view of patron and client as ideal types. This has resulted, in the I59 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.53 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 05:11:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms