Congested Districts Board Research Articles

The Congested Districts Board and the Isleornsay Pier, Isle of Skye, 1899–1906

The development in the late eighteenth century of a successful herring fishing and curing industry based on Isleornsay on the Isle of Skye and its ultimate collapse one hundred years later is analysed. The start of this commercial venture coincided with the end of the tacksman system and the formation of crofts in the townships close by. The failure of the port is examined, focusing on a local petition for a grant from the Congested Districts Board to construct a deep-water pier to replace the inefficient tidal pier which dated from circa 1805.The petition is viewed in the context of the proposal to build a Light Railway from Isleornsay to Uig and Portree, thence by boat to the Outer Isles, a proposal that was little more than a pipe dream. The railway extensions to Kyle and Mallaig, both constructed to convey fish to the south and supported by Government funding, were expected to bring increased prosperity to the fishermen of the nearby localities but had a calamitous effect on the port of Isleornsay: local fishermen took their catches directly to the railhead and then the arrival of fish curers and trawlers from the East Coast, eager to profit from the new facilities, completed the ruin of a once profitable economy.

The Resettlement of Syre, Sutherland by the Congested Districts Board

Syre in Strathnaver was one of a small number of land purchase schemes undertaken by the Congested Districts Board set up by the Conservative government. Following a protracted negotiation with the Duke of Sutherland with interventions by the local crofters and the Sutherland County Council, 23 settlers took up holdings in 1901. They experienced difficulties not only in paying for the sheepstock but also in repaying the purchase money and loans advanced for buildings. In a changed political climate the settlers petitioned to be rent-paying tenants under the crofting legislation which was eventually granted in 1912. Syre was considered an expensive failure as a land-purchase scheme although agriculturally it was a success. A change in the way Syre was regarded by politicians came during the First World War.

The View from Mrs. Kelly’s Window: Reframing Agency and Land in the Congested Districts Board Photographs

The View from Mrs. Kelly’s Window: Reframing Agency and Land in the Congested Districts Board Photographs

“An Initiated Mystic”: Modernization and Occultism in Synge’s The Aran Islands

“An Initiated Mystic”:Modernization and Occultism in Synge’s The Aran Islands Seán Hewitt In December 1897, having returned from Paris to Dublin, John Millington Synge underwent an operation for the removal of a swollen gland in his neck, the first sign of the disease that would kill him a little more than a decade later. At the time, he was still pursuing Cherrie Matheson, who had already turned down two of his marriage proposals, partly if not wholly due to Synge’s abandonment of Protestantism. In a recollection written in 1924 and published in the Irish Statesman, Matheson (who was by this time married and using the name C. H. Houghton) remembered a peculiar incident from the day of the operation. She tells us, Somewhere about this time he had an operation on his throat and looked very delicate. I saw him not long after, and he said to me: “I tried to send you a telepathic message just before I went under ether. Did you get it?” I had not. He looked disappointed and sad.1 In anecdotal accounts, we find many instances of Synge affecting telepathy and phantasms in those he knew and loved.2 However, Cherrie Matheson’s is the only account of Synge that suggests that he actively attempted to communicate telepathically. As such, her report asks us to take more seriously the question of Synge’s own engagement with occult phenomena. Occultism and theosophy have most usually been seen as a passing phase in Synge’s development as a writer. Recent criticism has provided us with readings of Synge as a primitivist, an anthropologist, an ethnographer; Synge the occultist, however, has never been granted credence.3 Yet Synge’s engagement with the [End Page 58] occult had a profound impact on his writing, and was internalized into his approach as a way of reconciling his own contradictory reactions of the ongoing modernization of the West of Ireland, which he saw not only in terms of cultural and economic changes, but also as a conflict between spirituality and scientific rationalism. When Synge first arrived on the Aran Islands in 1898, the Islanders were already engaging with the commercial economy of the mainland, and in The Aran Islands Synge repeatedly expresses a concern that the inhabitants are becoming increasingly distant from “the real spirit” of their home.4 The islands had played host to a number of eminent visitors, including folklorists, linguists, antiquarians, and ethnographers, and the Islanders had by this time developed a self-conscious awareness of their own cultural status, especially with regard to nationalist movements. However, from the year 1891 onward, the islands were also subject to another influence that was neither touristic nor scholarly in its purpose. The Congested Districts Board for Ireland (CDB), established with the purpose of developing the western seaboard in order to avoid the distress that had occurred throughout the nineteenth century, had already begun to carry out infrastructural development on the Aran Islands before Synge’s arrival. The mode of life on the islands was changing irreversibly. In visiting the islands, Synge came into contact for the first time with a world in transition, and this encounter came at the same time as he was beginning his progression as a writer from the romantic and symbolist modes into proto-modernism. The processes of systematic modernization are, for Synge, the extension of capitalist thought, but they are also one side of a tension that underlies all of Synge’s literary works: the tension between the “old” and the “new,” between competing worlds. In his first encounter with a transitioning community, Synge uses the language of occultism as a method of dramatizing the tension between two cultural and geographical temporalities—first for the Islanders, and second, for Synge himself. The Aran Islands is, in many ways, an extension of the principal concerns of Synge’s early foray into the Symbolist mode in such prose works as “Under Ether” (1897), which gives readers a key not only to understanding Synge’s use of occultist theory, but also an indication of how Synge developed this theory as a reaction to his engagement with socialist thinkers, particularly William Morris. In Synge...

Facilities for Transit: the Congested Districts Board and Steamship Services

The Congested Districts Board for Ireland (CDB) was established in 1891 and is best remembered for its attempt to create a peasant proprietorship by the purchase, reorganisation and resale of estates. While this was the main thrust of the CDB's work, energy and funds were also expended in developing industries along the west coast, the principal focus being fisheries. Lack of transportation facilities was an obstacle in the way of this objective and the CDB attempted to remedy this by providing financial assistance to several coastal steamship services. This article examines the role of the CDB in establishing and supporting steamship services between 1891 and 1923. the year of the CDB's dissolution.

Melness Farm, Sutherland: The Land Question and the Congested Districts Board, c. 1866–1911

Melness Farm, Sutherland: The Land Question and the Congested Districts Board, c. 1866–1911

The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland. By Ciara Breathnach. Pp. 197. ISBN: 9781851829194. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. €49.50.

<i>The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland</i>. By Ciara Breathnach. Pp. 197. ISBN: 9781851829194. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. €49.50.

Cumann na nGaedheal, sea fishing and west Galway, 1923–32

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British government made a vigorous effort to ameliorate poverty in the west of Ireland. In 1891 the Congested Districts Board (C.D.B.) was established, with an array of special powers to promote economic development in the west. It recognised that land could only play a limited role in development due to its generally poor quality, but that sea fishing had significant potential. Nowhere was this more obvious than west Galway, where the majority of people were farmer-fishermen, living either on the islands or along a coastal belt on the mainland because fishing offered some compensation for inadequate land. Sea fishing in west Galway was, however, for the most part primitive.

The Nursing Radicalism of the Honourable Albinia Brodrick, 1861–1955

The Honourable Albinia Brodrick was born into the English aristocracy in 1861 but died pauper in Ireland in 1955. During her lifetime, she moved from England to Ireland, changed her name from Albinia Brodrick to Gobnait Ni Bhruadair, and embraced Irish nationalist ideals that were in total opposition to the unionist political beliefs of her family. Throughout all these changes, this article argues, her life, work, and ideals were shaped by her embrace of the profession of nursing and her commitment to the rights of nurses. Her dedication and energy helped shape nursing politics in Ireland in the early twentieth century. Brodrick was born on December 17, 1861, in Middlesex, England, to William Brodrick, Viscount Middleton, and his wife Augusta. She had the usual upbringing and activities of an aristocratic Protestant daughter, including attending concerts and balls at Buckingham Palace.1 She became familiar with politics as she accompanied her father on his visits to the House of Lords. She also accompanied him on visits to the family estates in County Cork, Ireland.2 However, there was always more to Brodrick than the ritualistic rounds of the upper classes. At the end of her twenties, she was known to be writing articles on political and scientific issues for English journals and possibly lived in Oxford as hostess for her uncle, George C. Brodrick, Warden (1831-1903) of Merton College.3 Yet, these activities were obviously not enough for her. By 1904, she had become nurse. Her introduction to nursing was not easy. She trained as certificated nurse at the District Infirmary in Ashton-under-Lyne, and in later life, she was to refer to the hardships she experienced in her role as nursing superintendent in workhouse.4 By 1909, she was able to declare that she was a trained nurse; I have the certificate of trained midwife; I have the certificate of health visitor, and I have two certificates to qualify me as sanitary inspector.5 Brodrick and Ireland In 1904, at the age of forty-two, Brodrick moved to Ireland but not to the estates of her family. She not only did her midwifery training in Dublin in 1905 but also spent some time in Kerry learning Irish. In 1908, she purchased land at West Cove near Caherdaniel in Kerry in the west of Ireland. The poverty of the land can be gauged by the fact that it was in one of the areas covered by the Congested Districts Board, an institution established by the British government to attempt to promote development in areas that were overpopulated or congested and where the population was regarded as permanendy close to starving.6 This was to be her home for the rest of her life, although the next twenty years saw her traveling continually between England and Ireland. Appalled by the poverty she saw, and in particular by the health problems of the population, Brodrick set about building hospital using her own money. She wrote to readers of the British Journal of Nursing on the evolution of her ideas and of her desire in middle age to build Hospital for Kerry, for one corner of Kerry, because of the children haunted by tuberculosis, the women tortured in childbirth, the men struck low before their time. She had received litde encouragement for this idea when she sought advice on her scheme and she castigated those who derided her plans, asking, Did you ever need to be driven eighteen miles with fractured thigh? Has your wife bled to death in childbirth for want of help? Is it your child that goes lame for life for want of treatment?7 Brodrick called her scheme Ballincoona, the House of Help, and from the start it was no modest undertaking. Four acres were reclaimed from bog, 5,000 trees were planted, road was laid, and twenty-foot well was dug. A shelter, storehouse, workshop, fowl house, piggery, and catde house were all completed and the foundations for the hospital laid in the first year, all for an expenditure of £2,620. …

CIARA BREATHNACH. The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891-1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland. (Cork Studies in History and Culture, number 5.) Portland, Oreg.: Four Courts Press. 2005. Pp. 197. $65.00

The unwary may think that congestion describes a state of crowding, overpopulation, high density, or blockage. That is not what it meant in late nineteenth-century Ireland. The population was not particularly crowded in, or living at high density: indeed population density in the “Congested Districts” was relatively low. And the closest thing to blockage that we can identify refers to economic opportunity. Instead congestion meant that there was a higher than average density of relative poverty, and an overdependence on a narrow range of economic opportunities, epitomized by a higher incidence of small agricultural holdings than existed elsewhere in Ireland. Poverty became synonymous with economic dependence on smallholdings. This became worse in the economic aftermath of the famine of the 1840s, and as the chasm between the poorest in society and the not so poor widened, the authorities recognized the need for a radical solution. Congestion occurred in western Ireland, particularly in the province of Connacht, and marginally also in Ulster and Munster. It was prevalent in the counties of Donegal, Mayo, Galway, Kerry, and western Cork, and touched parts of Sligo, Leitrim, and Roscommon.

Review: The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland

Review: The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: Poverty and Development in the West of Ireland

The Congested Districts Board of Ireland, 1891–1923: poverty and development in the west of Ireland. By Ciara Breathnach. Pp 197. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2005. €45.

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Handicraft, Mass Manufacture and Rural Female Labour: Industrial Work in North-West Ireland, 1890–1914

A range of discourses on rural life, gender, and work accompanied the parallel expansion of mass garment manufacture and handicraft industries in north-west Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Proponents of each frequently claimed that these two forms of production were sharply distinguished by scale, organisation and the ‘skills’ they required. However, these strategies for rural industrial development require a more integrated analysis. A close examination of the technologies of production, workers' earnings and experiences, and the stability of rural industrial initiatives, drawing on Parliamentary Papers and the Baseline Reports of the Congested Districts Board, challenges assumptions about the structure and status of women's industrial work in rural Ireland.

The Role of Women in the Economy of the West of Ireland, 1891-1923

The role of women in the rural economy in the West of Ireland altered dra matically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 Joanna Bourke's important 1993 study, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland 1890-1891, argues that Victorian reform agencies? specifically, the Congested Districts Board (CDB), the Irish Agricultural Organ isation Society founded in 1894, and later, the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction founded in 1899?intentionally displaced the role of women in the rural economy by removing female labor from the fields and rel egating it to employment in the home.2 However, Bourke's contention that the CDB was guilty of imposing an enforced housewifery on the women of the West fails to consider other powerful forces at work in Irish society; it would be more accurate to state that the CDB's major role in effecting a shift in women's economic roles was that it enhanced already existing mechanisms of paid female employment. Rural life in Ireland presented two distinct economic zones in the later half of the nineteenth century. The West was submerged in varying degrees of rela tive and absolute poverty, while the East enjoyed the spoils of better land, bet ter transport, and better market facilities.2 Philanthropists highlighted the plight

“I Thought I Was Landed!”: The Congested Districts Board and the Women of Western Ireland

“I Thought I Was Landed!”: The Congested Districts Board and the Women of Western Ireland

Facilities for Transit: the Congested Districts Board and Steamship Services

The Congested Districts Board for Ireland (CDB) was established in 1891 and is best remembered for its attempt to create a peasant proprietorship by the purchase, reorganisation and resale of estates. While this was the main thrust of the CDB's work, energy and funds were also expended in developing industries along the west coast, the principal focus being fisheries. Lack of transportation facilities was an obstacle in the way of this objective and the CDB attempted to remedy this by providing financial assistance to several coastal steamship services. This article examines the role of the CDB in establishing and supporting steamship services between 1891 and 1923. the year of the CDB's dissolution.

Public housing in Ireland, 1880–1921

In Ireland, unlike the rest of the British Isles, the first large public housing programmes were in rural areas and associated with major land reforms at the end of the nineteenth century. The Labourers’ Acts from 1883 to 1911 enabled rural local authorities with state subvention to erect by 1921 almost 50 000 new cottages for landless labourers mainly in the south and east of the country. The Congested Districts Board, a central government agency established in 1891 to improve economic and social conditions in the poor western seaboard counties, erected or very substantially improved over 9000 farm dwellings and financed improvements to thousands more. Severe housing problems existed in most Irish cities and towns with little political or legislative response. Dublin, a deposed capital, was probably the worst housed and unhealthiest city in the British Isles and remained so despite the remedial efforts of the Corporation. Belfast, with strong industrial growth, fared better but considerable housing and h...

THE WORK OF THE ORDNANCE SURVEY OF THE IRISH FREE STATE

AbstractUp to 31st March 1922, the work in Ireland with regard to the revision and supply of Ordnance Survey Maps was governed by similar rules to those existing at the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain. No changes were made in the Irish Free State until the revision of Co. Waterford was completed on the 25-inch scale in 1923. It was then decided to depart from the usual procedure of taking up the work of the revision of Counties according to a cycle of years, and to revise those particular portions of the country in which extensive alterations had been carried out by reason of the division of properties by the Congested Districts Board and the Irish Land Commission. Accordingly, those portions of Counties Galway, Mayo and Roscommon which had undergone the greatest development were taken up for revision. In all eighty-nine sheets were specially revised and completed by 1928.