Kilrush/Miltown Malbay,County Clare.

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Two towns in West Clare steeped in Traditional Irish Music.(God protect us from Spoon Players!)

Pre-famine Clare - Society in Crisis
by Flan Enright


Introduction
Widespread poverty usually causes social tension, crime and sometimes violence. There is no scarcity of evidence about the extent or severity of poverty in pre-famine Clare. Outbreaks of distress, lawlessness and violence at that time indicate particularly severe periods in what turned out to be a long era of misery.

Some of the causes of this hardship are easy to see while some are quite complex. For example, too many people were over-dependent on the potato as a staple food. When it failed, famine quickly followed. Cause and effect are obvious in this case. What is not so clear is how so many people came to be permanently in such dire need and why society seemed incapable of helping them.

This essay looks at some of the evidence connected with poverty and violence in pre-famine Clare and attempts to discuss underlying causes.
The need for Employment
The population of Clare doubled in the fifty years before the famine. It stood at 286,394 in 1841, almost four times the current total. These were divided into 48,981 families, and apart from a small number of professional people and craftsmen, all of them earned a livelihood from the land. The great challenge of that time was the provision of food and work for such a teeming population.

As in contemporary society, people at that time may be divided into employers and employees. Most of the big employers before the famine were the landlords. They employed a permanent male and female staff for indoor and outdoor work on their estates. For example, there was a permanent staff of 34 at Butlers of Castlecrine in this period, but many additional people were needed during busy times of the year.

One of Clare's problems was a scarcity of these very magnates who were able to generate so much wealth. William Smith O'Brien, an M.P. for Ennis for a time, drew up a list of Clare landlords. He counted 90 resident gentlemen and 63 non-residents. Of particular significance was his discovery that the non-residents owned about half the land of the county. Most of these absentees employed agents to collect their rents, but the money was generally spent elsewhere. This was a big loss to Clare.

The resident gentlemen were more than just landlords. They actually carried on the work of local government and industrial development. They were people of capital who spent most of their wealth locally. They built roads and bridges, and even towns and villages. Sixmilebridge, Newmarket-on-Fergus and Kilrush are examples of places developed by the initiative of local resident landlords in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Clare had scarcely half the resident landlords it could have had and that meant less development and less permanent employment.

The 1841 Census further revealed that the county had only 1052 farms of more than 30 acres. The large tillage farms had considerable employment potential, especially at sowing and harvest time. However, many large holdings belonged to graziers who needed only a few herdsmen. 80% of all farms were between one and fifteen acres in size, and even with the most intense cultivation could hardly be expected to employ more than a family or two throughout the year.

The real hardship cases were among the 22,000 families that had no land of their own. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that half the people of Clare, the landless labourers, subsisted under a spectre of poverty that was a direct result of a gross shortage of work. This situation arose from developments in the Irish economy outside their control.