J. Cunningham (2011) ‘A class quite distinct’: the western herds and their defence of their working conditions',
in C. King & C. McNamara, The west of Ireland: new perspectives on the nineteenth century, Dublin: The History Press, pp. 137-160
Early in 1892, Roger Richards, an agricultural expert who had previously investigated working conditions of employees on English farms, visited the Poor Law Union of Loughrea, Co. Galway, on behalf of the Royal Commission on Labour. Most farm workers in the district, he found, were in a pitiable state – only fitfully-employed, malnourished, and living in tumbledown hovels. There was one grouping however that did not match this pattern; or indeed any pattern known to Richards, since it formed ‘a class quite distinct from any employed in any of the English districts visited, neither shepherds nor bailiffs, and yet a compound of both.’[1] He elaborated as follows:
They are generally paid by ‘freedoms,’ the freedom consisting of so many ‘collops.’ A collop, the right to keep at the expense of the employer, and running among his cattle:- one cow and one calf, or one mare and one foal (up to November); or three yearling calves; or four ewes with lambs; or six dry sheep. The cash equivalent of a collop is generally given as £5 or £6 according to the quality of the land.[2]
The workers described in this excerpt were known as ‘herds,’ and they worked on estates and large-scale pasture farms, looking after cattle and sheep. Reasonably well-recompensed and with a reputation for being skilled, their social status was high – unlike the generality of agricultural labourers. In the words of an informant interviewed for a folklore project, the herd ‘looked after the gentleman’s stock and ... was next to the gentleman himself.’[3] Roger Richards reported that herds ‘have certainly the reputation for keeping the best horses, as I was assured in the fair that all the “long-tailed” horses, i.e., the best, were those of herds.’[4] A more substantial indication of difference in status (and in capacity to provide adequate dowries), between herds and ordinary labourers was provided by Samuel Clark, who found in a Roscommon marriage register of 1864-1880, that 70% of herds’ daughters married farmers’ sons, while only 8% of labourers’ daughters married into farming families.[5]
But if herds’ status was high, it was not secure, for it came under threat from two distinct sources. Many grazier employers regarded freedoms as anachronistic and wished to replace them with wages. For the leagues of the tenant farmers (especially the United Irish League, established 1898), the grazing economy which gave herds their livelihoods was immoral because its origins were in earlier clearances, and it was anti-social because it gave little employment and it deprived ‘congested’ farm families of land.[6] Alert to the challenges facing them, west of Ireland herds established representative bodies – leagues, associations, unions – to protect and advance their interests. Some of these bodies were exceptionally durable by comparison with other rural labour organisations of the nineteenth century.
This article will describe the singular conditions under which herds were employed and rewarded, and trace the origins of their occupation. It will closely examine the efforts of west of Ireland herds to regulate and standardise their earnings while retaining the time-honoured employment customs from which they derived their relative independence and their status.
*
The evidence gathered by the commissioners on the agricultural labourer is rich in detail with regard to conditions of Irish herds in the early 1890s. Four commissioners reported on thirty poor law unions, including Castlerea, Co. Roscommon; Loughrea, Co. Galway; Westport, Co. Mayo; Dromore West, Co. Sligo; and Ennistymon, Co. Clare. A comparison of circumstances in western unions with those elsewhere indicates that Galway and Roscommon were exceptional in the extent to which strict rules applied in respect of remuneration – governing collops and other matters.
‘Collop’ (Irish: colpthach) was a term which was in widespread use. The most significant of the herds freedoms, it was a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure of land, and it was one which was also used in the allocation of shares in commonage and mountain-grazing. But if collops were the most significant of the herds’ freedoms, they were not the only ones. According to Richards, each herd in the Loughrea area was also entitled to a house and several acres of tillage ground, the prevailing rate being either three collops and two acres for the first hundred of grazing land superintended, or two acres and three collops. Moreover, ‘according to his conscience or worth,’ the herd was permitted to keep a few pigs and some poultry on his employer’s land.[7]
Richards’s fellow assistant commissioner, Arthur Wilson Fox, was simultaneously making similar discoveries about the conditions of herds in the Castlerea union of Co. Roscommon. Carrying out detailed assessments of the monetary value of the emoluments of five Castlerea herds, he found considerable variation in their value, but that a standard methodology was employed in their calculation. The annual value of the freedoms enjoyed by the herd employed by Mr Kelly of Castlerea, who was responsible for 200 acres, was estimated at £45, comprising a house and three or four acres of tillage land, £12; grazing for two cows and two calves, £16; grazing and hay for mare and foal, £16; keep of geese and pigs, £5. The estimated incomes of the other four varied between £31.10s for the herd of Mr Young of Harristown for looking after 100 acres, to £71.16s for the O’Conor Don’s herd who looked after 400 acres.[8] It should be borne in mind these figures were based on information provided by employers, and that the monetary value of freedoms varied with livestock and crop prices. Moreover, they did not always represent the return on the labour of a single individual. As Mr Sandford of Castlerea acknowledged, his herd was assisted by an adult son, and ‘if he had not his son’s help, he would have to pay an assistant £10 a year and keep him.’[9]
Collops were by far the most valuable of the freedoms, and when one employer, Lord Ashtown, changed the system of payment for his herds, he continued to provide a house and several acres of tillage ground. Instead of collops and informal indulgences, he paid £1 a week, or £52 a year, which indicates the true value to employees of the established system. Indeed, in exercising their freedoms to the maximum, herds had numerous opportunities to generate extra income, as Wilson Fox was advised in Castlerea:
One of Mr Flanagan’s herds told him that in 1892 that he got £40 for pigs. They also keep geese and poultry. Many herds are paid extra for saving hay and for attending fairs. They grow potatoes and vegetables and they consume milk and butter the value of which is impossible to estimate... Herds sell their calves, say15 months, at prices varying from £6 to £9, according to the sort of cows they breed them from, and this will depend on the quality of the land in possession of the employers... They manage if possible to have their cows calving in early spring so as to have their calves to sell in May year. The price of a calf greatly depends on the feeding it gets. In addition to feeding calves, the herds feed pigs on their land. They also make and sell butter. They mix linseed with the skim milk for feeding purposes. The herds breed better foals than small farmers, having better mares.[10]
There were certain similarities between the conditions enjoyed by East Galway and Roscommon herds and those of their colleagues of other parts of the country. Payment in kind, in part at least, was common, especially in mountain areas where contact between herds and their employers was infrequent, and close supervision impractical. In more accessible places, perquisites were frequently allowed as indicated by the following from Naas, Co. Kildare – ‘in the case of herds, in addition to a house, fuel, potatoes and milk may be allowed – and from Cashel, Co. Tipperary – ‘the grass of a cow is sometimes given by large farmers to herds or other confidential labourers.’[11] Contracts varied widely, however, and it was only from Ennistymon that there were any indications of the existence of standardised principles governing herds’ emoluments similar to those obtaining in Galway and Roscommon.[12]
To better understand the economic position of west of Ireland herds, comparison with the means of other contemporaries will be useful. If there was a labourer, employed by the O’Conor Don, who earned £22.8.5 in 1892, he was exceptional both in having regular work and in having an uncommonly considerate employer. (Evidently, the O’Conor Don was the only agricultural employer in Roscommon who paid his regular labourers when they were ill.) Annual earnings of labourers in the same county were more usually in the range £15 to £17, according to Wilson Fox.[13] A herd on 200 acres (assisted by a son or a servant) would have earned three times as much, giving him an income close to that of a fully-employed urban tradesman, a rank-and-file policeman, or a female teacher.[14] But herds were exposed to risks not faced by others, in that they might be held responsible for damage to livestock in their care due to their own negligence. According to Roger C. Richards, they were liable to make good any losses arising from ‘scab or grub in sheep, injury to cattle from an open drain, or anything obviously out of order’; according to the pithy saying of the country, they were responsible for damage due to the depredations of ‘hogs, bogs, dogs or thieves.’[15]
If the mechanism used to calculate the entitlements of herds were remarkably uniform in Galway and Roscommon, but not so elsewhere, this fact requires explanation. First, however, it is necessary to examine the earlier history of this ‘quite distinct’ occupational group.
*
The system of remuneration and the working condition of the western herds were manifestly archaic, and indeed elements of them may be traced to ancient times. The value of the colpthach or collop was defined in Brehon law (although it altered somewhat over the centuries), and the herd’s duties in respect of restitution were also defined.[16] That the conditions were well established by the eighteenth century is suggested by an entry of 1741 in the diary of a substantial farmer from near Ennis, Co. Clare, setting down the responsibilities of herd and employer in respect of fairs, fences, and saving hay on the one hand, and the provision of necessary supports and freedoms on the other:
1st [May 1741] Friday. I agreed with John Higgins as a herd. He is obliged to herd Carhubranagh, Lurgo, Knockfluck and that part of Feninah held by Andrew Flanagan if I do not set it. He is also to save the hay of the meadows at Carhubranagh, Feninah, and Lurgo, with only the help of 6 men. I am obliged to give him horses to turn home hay and also to make it into a reek. He is also to leave my bounds in the same condition he gets them and to go or send the cattle in his care to fair or market. He’s to get Thomas Connor’s sheaf and Teige Connell’s and the sheaf of Thomas Connor’s soil that was tilled by Thomas Haly and to have the freedom of five collops.[17]
Some eighty years later, in his survey of agriculture in Co Galway prepared for the Royal Dublin Society, Hely Dutton reported that because herds in the grazing districts of the county were ‘servants of some responsibility, they have commonly many indulgences ... a house, small garden, some tillage ground, and grass for a heifer, and generally keeping for a brood mare.’ However, the advantage that the herd derived from running his own stock with those of the employer was of benefit also to the employer, because ‘no person would take a herd without his possessing some stock, as they are frequently the only security from neglect or some misdemeanour.’ A contemporary of Hely Dutton’s, remarked also on the prosperity of west of Ireland herds: ‘many of the herdsmen here are able to give their daughters, when married, twenty guineas, and a feather bed, although the cabins in which they reside are apparently wretched, and seem to contain nothing but dirt, lumber, and rags.’[18]
If such nuggets convey a general impression, there is a more substantial record of the condition of herds in pre-Famine Ireland in testimony collected for the Poor Inquiry of 1836. The testimony was generated by the following question, part of a questionnaire circulated by the commissioners: ‘Upon what terms are herds usually hired in your parish?’ More than fifteen hundred responses were received, and they came from all counties. If the majority were submitted by clergymen, Catholic and Protestant, a considerable number came from employers of herds. Some of them provided quite detailed information.[19]
An examination of the responses shows that conditions broadly similar to those later found by Richards and Wilson Fox, and those earlier described by Hely Dutton, were widespread in the 1830s, but that they did not apply everywhere (See Table 1). Almost universal in the five counties of Connacht and in Clare, they were also widespread in the major grazing counties of Meath and Westmeath, and in other counties to the east of Connacht and Clare. In the dairying and tillage counties of the south, and in Ulster, with the exception of some mountain areas, such herding as took place was carried by farm servants, by boys, or by old men not fit for heavier work, and it was poorly rewarded.[20]
In Co. Galway, however, even on barren Árainn where there were ‘but two persons’ employing herds, payment was almost always in freedoms.[21] That their value varied from one part of the county to another is indicated by the contrasting information provided by T.N Bagot, of Kilcroan, near the Galway-Roscommon border – ‘Herds have a house, two acres of land and grass for two cows, for taking care of the stock, &c., of a farm of 100 acres; and pretty much in that proportion for a larger farm.’ – and by James Kirwan of Tuam – ‘They generally get an acre of land, and the grazing of a cow or horse for the care of 100 acres, and so on in proportion.’[22] Rev. E. Mahon of Strokestown, Co. Roscommon suggested that the herd’s consideration was less than it had been: ‘Some get an acre of land, and the grass of a cow; some two acres and the grass of two cows: only half of what used to be given.’ There were as many as forty herds in the parish of Baslisk, according to the parish priest, John O’Callaghan, and they each had one and a half or two acres of tillage, and the grazing of two or three cows.[23] Around Ahascragh, Ballinasloe, Rev. Henry Hunt reported that herds generally got ‘a free house, garden, and two or three acres of land. and sometimes the grass of three collops (a collop means a cow or three calves, or three sheep); about £20 per annum, but he answers for losses from bog, dog, or thief.’ Incidentally, variations of the latter phrase as an explanation of the herd’s liabilities (mentioned above, and recorded within the past decade from an oral informant) appeared also in responses from Kildare and King’s Co., and Meath.[24] For his part, the bishop of Killala drew an idyllic pen picture of the lifestyle of his own herd:
My herd I find here, he had served my predecessors more than 30 years; he has a cabin in repair by me; three acres of land for oats, potatoes and flax; permission to keep two cows on the demesne, and rear their young; he has no wages; the heads of the beasts and sheep fatted for my house are his; a present at Christmas as he deserves or wants.[25]
A remark of James McHale, parish priest of Robeen and Kilcommon, Co. Mayo, that herds were ‘the most comfortable’ among the lower orders in his parish was echoed by respondents throughout Connacht and Leinster, although Charles Kelly of Churchtown, Co Westmeath qualified his comment by stating that they were also ‘in general the greatest rogues.’[26] A statement from Robert Martin, of the parish of Killanin and Kilcummin on the western side of Lough Corrib, shows that there were herds who were paid in ‘freedoms’ in rundale farming: ‘Landholders of large farms pay herds, generally, by allowing pasture for so many head of cattle and some tillage land; and villages employ herds, and pay them in like manner.’ Other early nineteenth century sources confirm that this was not an isolated instance.[27]
Labourers, it should be pointed out, were only very rarely paid in freedoms in the 1830s. According to evidence from the same questionnaire, they were paid either cash wages, or a notional daily amount which was set against conacre or farm rent.[28]
Pastoral farming was long-established as the predominant economic activity of East Connacht and North Leinster,[29] with Ballinasloe’s October fair being the principal venue where store animals raised west of the Shannon were sold for fattening on the plains of Meath and places adjacent. Annual returns from the fair of Ballinasloe show that the trade was expanding at the time of the Poor Inquiry, and that it continued to expand during the following decade, providing employment for herds but reducing the space available for more labour-intensive agricultural activity.[30] In the post-Famine period, economic and social conditions continued to favour grazing. There was demand for food from industrialising Britain, but due to competition from the United States after the repeal of the corn laws, meat was much more profitable than grain. With famine clearances and encumbered estates legislation facilitating the shift to pasture, cattle and sheep numbers doubled during the second half of the nineteenth century. The grazing element was reinforced by speculative newcomers: solvent middling farmers wishing to expand; as well as by shopkeepers and professionals seeking profitable investment opportunities. The newcomers typically rented farms of a hundred acres and upwards, from year to year. Under the eleven-month-system, the renter gained no tenancy rights, which suited landlords, as did the relative ease of extracting rent from one large tenant grazier as opposed to a multiplicity of impecunious smallholders.[31]
Among the more successful of the arriviste graziers was Joseph Hardy, a small mill-owner at Killimor, Co. Galway, in the late 1830s, who ‘commenced to take land for grazing,’ by his own account, in 1846. His name was routinely mentioned in reports of fairs in the region – at the Ballinasloe fair of 1861, for example, he sold 170 two-year-old heifers – and he was renting 6000 acres by 1880, 90% of them in Co. Galway, from several owners, including Lords Dunsandle and Clonbrock. Although owning no land, he won admission to gentry society, living ostentatiously at Dartfield House, near Kilrickle, serving as Justice of the Peace, Poor Law Guardian, and Grand Juror, and becoming a leading light in the Ballinasloe Agricultural Show Society. A self-made moderniser who was shrewd in business, Hardy nonetheless continued to pay his herds in the traditional way, in collops and tillage ground.[32]
*
During 1881-82, conflicts arose between herds and their employers in mid-Roscommon and East Galway which would have long-lasting consequences. This was a period of intense political commotion in Ireland, encompassing the banning of the Land League and the arrest of its leaders, the formation of the Ladies’ Land League, the release of the imprisoned leaders and the publication of the terms of the ‘Kilmainham Treaty,’ the Phoenix Park assassinations and the Crimes Act, the public declaration by Michael Davitt of his support for land nationalisation, and a strike by members of the Royal Irish Constabulary.[33]
That conflict involving herds broke out in East Connacht, and indeed was largely confined to this region, is not surprising if the occupational distribution is considered. (See Table 2) Almost one fifth of Irish ‘shepherds’ – the census category in which were placed those describing themselves ‘herds’, ‘herdsmen’ or ‘shepherd’ – were to be found in an East Connacht region encompassing seven adjoining poor law unions: Loughrea, Tuam, Mountbellew, Ballinasloe, Castlerea, Roscommon, and Strokestown. Herds were present throughout this region in numbers sufficient for an esprit de corps to develop among them and to sustain their own associations. Another factor facilitating organisation was that traditional conditions of employment for herds survived in this region to a greater extent than elsewhere. The evidence suggests that herds’ contracts in the great grazing zone of North Leinster were being ‘modernised,’ even in the pre-Famine period, and while there were instances there where remuneration was in freedoms, the consideration was usually in cash wages – though calculated in widely-varying ways. As Roger Richards observed of the Balrothery union in Co. Dublin, ‘the greatest diversity is found in the payment of herds.’[34]
There were grazing employers in Connacht who had changed from freedoms to cash, and others who wished to do so,[35] but western herds did not wish to be ‘proletarianised’ – with an associated loss in independence and in status – so when the land war created the conditions for collective action, they acted to extend their freedoms and to retain their freedom.
A Herds’ Association was formed in Roscommon early in late 1881/early 1882, in a context of unrest among subaltern elements in the area. With the Land League proclaimed since the previous October, there were efforts to establish alternatives and successors, and a Labour League gave voice to popular sentiment on a range of issues, just as cognate bodies were doing in Leinster and Munster.[36] It was in this milieu that the Herds’ Association emerged into public view at a meeting of over 400 people on 2 March 1882, on the ‘historic hill of Carn,’ near Tulsk, a site that tradition associated with the O’Connor kings. In the choice of meeting place there was an assertion of the nationalist and ‘popular’ credentials of the herds, and this disposition was also evident in the tenor of the resolutions adopted. Among them was one demanding the release of the nationalist prisoners and another insisting that the grazier employers support that same demand.[37] At a subsequent meeting in Tulsk, at which there were representatives from throughout Roscommon, resolutions of a vocational character were adopted (which were subsequently printed on a membership card), serving strike notice on employers that who did not complied by 18 May with the herds’ demands for two acres, for the grazing of two cows, and for £10 per 80 acres herded. The meeting further committed the association’s members to exclusively ‘peaceful and legal means.’[38]
From the reported speeches, it is apparent that the Roscommon herds were intent upon establishing a national organisation. The Tulsk branch, led by 75-year-old James Scott, was described as ‘the central branch’, in line with the organisational model of the Land League and the Ladies Land League. Routine meetings were held at ‘their rooms in Tulsk.’ Despite receiving national press coverage, notably in The Nation, the association never extended far beyond Co. Roscommon, and the only affiliated branch outside the county was in Ballymote, Co. Sligo. Representatives from other places did attend particular meetings – from Moate Co. Westmeath, Lansboro, Co Longford, and adjacent parishes in Co. Galway. More generally, Roscommon developments had a considerable effect in Galway, as will be shown below.[39]
Alarmed, Roscommon employers also became organised. A meeting held to form a Grazing Landholders Association was advised of steps already taken on behalf of ‘flockmasters’ by the Property Defence Association (a ‘physical force organisation,’ in the words of London’s Times, established by leading Irish landlords in December 1880 to prosecute the land war on behalf of their own class[40]). Seventy-one responses, evidently, had been received to advertisements in Scottish newspapers seeking replacement herds. A skirmishing fund was opened and those present acquiesced in a resolution denouncing the herds’ combination as ‘a moonlight society under a false name,’ and declaring their determination to put it down.[41]
At a herds’ meeting in Ballintubber just after the strike deadline, it was announced that while eight employers had conceded the association’s claim, a majority remained opposed to concession or compromise. Condemning the recent Phoenix Park assassinations, the herds passed a further resolution eschewing violent methods in prosecuting their own dispute. Evidently, they were more united than their employers, for a report of an ensuing meeting suggested that there were further defections from the graziers’ camp. Strike action was taken on a few farms – sums were voted for the support of those involved, and in one instance, it was reported that labourers had walked out in sympathy with a striking herd. [42]
The herds’ association’s commitment to legal methods was accepted neither by employers nor by the authorities. For the employers, the association was a catspaw of the banned Land League, and the real objective of the strike was not to secure the outrageous increases sought but rather to bring an end to the grazing system itself.[43] Whether graziers genuinely believed this is unclear, but it was assuredly in their interest to represent the herds’ association as an element of the general agrarian disorder.
The allegations that the herds’ association was indeed a ‘moonlight society’ seemed confirmed when a leading member, William Gillooly, faced serious charges in August, charges brought under the ‘Crimes Act,’ passed in response to the Phoenix Park assassinations. Gillooly’s prominence is confirmed by the fact that he was called to the chair at the earliest reported ‘monster meeting’ in March, and at another in July.[44] John Neilan testified to having dismissed Gillooly, who had worked for his family for several decades, and having him evicted from his cottage at Holywell in the parish of Kilbride, when he went on strike in May, despite being ‘better paid than most herds.’ It proved difficult, however, to get a replacement. Neilan recalled making a bargain with a man called Morgan ‘at three times the ordinary salary,’ but the man withdrew on receiving a threatening letter and on learning that ‘the country people had gathered in hundreds’ to build a new house near Holywell for the dismissed herd. Others initially interested declared themselves ‘afraid of being shot.’
Three months passed before Patrick Mannion, a local small farmer described as ‘very poor but very brave,’ took charge of the holding, having first inquired from Gillooly whether he wished to return to his former employment. Neilan’s second-hand account of the dismissed man’s response was as follows: ‘No, I will never herd a day for a man of his name; neither will any other man, for the man who would take it would be shot. The Herd’s League have subscribed to a fund to pay for the shooting of any man who takes another man’s place.’[45] Undeterred by this, and by a subsequent similar conversation, Mannion evidently fulfilled his responsibilities towards Neilan’s animals until he was confronted by Gillooly while repairing a stone wall fence. From that point, Mannion insisted on police protection, and swore information against his predecessor, in whose coercive behaviour he also implicated James Scott of Tulsk. Allegations against Scott were withdrawn in the course of the subsequent trial, but Gillooly was convicted of intimidation, and sentenced to six months with hard labour. An appeal was lodged, with legal fees borne by the herds’ association.[46]
That a de facto curfew was imposed on herds, and that tensions arose from that and from the Gillooly prosecution, is apparent from a resolution passed on the hill of Rathcroghan in September at a meeting, attended by ‘large contingents, including a very good sprinkling of the fair sex’ from ‘Ballintubber, Baslisk, Ballinagar, Ballymote Kiltrustan, Ballybroughan, Kilglass, Cloonfinlough, Kilbride, Elphin, Mantua, Oran, Tulsk, Killyfin, Roscommon, Fuerty, Athleague, Rahera, Lanesborough and Tisaragh’:
That whereas our employers should hold us responsible for any accident that may occur through our negligence on their respective farms, we wish to point out that we will not in future hold ourselves responsible for anything that may happen to the flocks in our charge from an hour after sunset till sunrise, as some of our members have already been interfered with by the constabulary and cautioned not to be caught out during that time.[47]
In the event, Gillooly’s appeal was unsuccessful. While he served his sentence in Mullingar, his family was supported by his comrade herds, who continued to deny that their association had a secret set of rules which permitted recourse to violence.[48] But notwithstanding the repeated denunciations of violence, Patrick Mannion continued to feel threatened. Reputedly an educated man, he must nonetheless have been surprised to find on the whitewashed walls of the cottage provided for him by Neilan, alongside ‘a picture of a gun, a pistol and a revolver,’ a message pencilled in Latin: Jacobus Neilan, Jacobus Kilkelly [the resident magistrate], Jacobus Becketta, Patria Mannion: pro fidelibus defunctis.[49]
Clearly, the efforts of the authorities to curb ‘moonlighting’ had consequences for the graziers, and those holding out against the demands of their herds found it hard to recruit replacements. The vaunted ‘Scotch herds’ did not arrive, and eventually the employers as a body decided to concede their herds demands in full. This occurred before March 1883, if an allusion at a herds’ meeting at Fourmilehouse to the ‘time of the settlement’ is an indication. No other contemporary reference to the settlement was located, although there were concurrent allegations that some graziers were reneging on commitments given.[50] These problems were evidently resolved for, almost ten years later, Wilson Fox noted that an agreement dating from 1883 was still observed, more or less, notwithstanding the dissolution of the Roscommon Herds’ Association. Upon agreement being reached, he reported:
The herds’ league and the masters’ defence fund immediately ceased to exist, and it is satisfactory to be able to say that any friction which existed at the time of the strike has long ago died away. A large employer of labour who took an active part in obtaining the settlement said to me, ‘We are just as good friends as ever,’ and a herd who belonged to the league said, ‘Masters and men are very friendly now.’[51]
No references were discovered to any herds’ association activity in Roscommon between 1883 and 1904, At this later date, a local paper reported on ‘herds agitation’ in Castleplunkett, Ballinagare, Clashganny and Kilmurry, prompted by concern among herds about the prospects of those involved under the terms of the recent Wyndham Act.[52]
*
Herds in Co. Galway had followed with interest the fortunes of their comrades in Roscommon, and during May and June 1882 there was a series of meetings of herds at Killimor, Kilconnell, Loughrea and Bullaun. The mobilisations. the police discovered, were prompted by agitational material sent by James Scott of Tulsk. Because these events in the Loughrea area have been treated in detail elsewhere,[53] a summary will suffice.
At the Kilconnell meeting, veteran Patrick Connolly complained that freedoms were the same as when he started in his career. ‘Artisans, mechanics, and labourers had their wages greatly increased in the last ten years,’ he continued, ‘but the shepherds of Ireland have made no progress; they receive the same miserable wages as their fathers.’[54]
Preparations for a large meeting at Bullaun on 8 June 1882 alarmed employers, and one of them alerted the authorities to what was taking place. In terms very similar to those used by the Roscommon graziers, he advised that herds were ‘for the most part content,’ and that their movement was not what it seemed, that it in fact represented ‘an attack on the grass farms of this county veiled in this manner.’[55]
If the Galway herds were influenced by Roscommon events, so were the graziers, for they quickly established a Galway Grazing Landholders Association. And following Roscommon precedent further, this body established a ‘defence fund’ and prepared to face down a strike – despatching its secretary to ‘the North of Ireland’ to arrange for the recruitment of substitute herds there, and ruling out any negotiations with herds’ representatives.[56]
Joseph Hardy, at Dartfield, acted as recommended by his association when a representative of his own herds sought improved conditions. He dismissed the man, Thomas Broder, had him evicted from his house; and introduced ‘scab’ labour, provided by the graziers’ association when his other herds went on strike in protest. As it transpired, this was an ill-considered approach, and it would place at risk Hardy’s lifetime’s achievements in pastoral agriculture. The eviction, the introduction of ‘emergencymen’ from Armagh, the arrival of police reinforcements, was all too suggestive of the ‘land war’ tactics of landlords to be accepted by the community. Moreover, Hardy was already notorious in Killimor, for having evicted a herd’s widow in the townland of Lurgan in 1880 – the house was subsequently burned by agrarian incendaries.[57] Smaller graziers, consequently, felt pressurised to concede. At a herds’ association meeting in Killimor, where Hardy’s ‘emergencymen’ were bivouacked, a grazier announced that he was accepting the herds’ terms. Others followed suit. Isolated, Hardy summoned herds’ representatives to Dartfield, where he conceded the demands of three collops, two acres, and £10 for each 100 acres herded. He further agreed to have a new cottage built for each of his herdsmen.
Five years later, Hardy was in a reduced condition, grazing less than a third of his former acreage. He blamed his difficulties on the strike – that the settlement was ‘most extravagant;’ that the graziers agreed to continue paying in freedoms rather than in cash; that he personally ‘had been obliged for years to have protection.’ And he continued to believe that the herds’ agitation was fomented by the Land League:‘Everything proceeds from the Land League or National League – they have absorbed everything into them, and while the government allows them to exist, and doesn’t put down its foot and stop it, you will never have things as they ought to be.’[58]
By the early 1890s, there are no indications that Richards’s or Wilson Fox’s informants believed that the Land League was behind the herds’ agitation of 1882. By that point, indeed, it was widely accepted that the objectives of tenant farmers and of herds were incompatible. How then did the notion of Land League influence over the herds gain such wide currency? Firstly, as has been pointed out above, graziers promoted this interpretation in order to secure more intensive policing of herd militancy. Secondly, the speeches of herds’ leaders supported this interpretation. Conscious that the type of farming in which they were engaged was anathemised by elements of the agrarian movement, herds supported tenant farmers’ demands and likened their own predicaments to those of farmers. In speaking the language of the Land League, it is not surprising that it was considered to be part of it. Finally, and most importantly, there was evidence from one part of the country of Land League manipulation of herds. In 1880, a year before the Roscommon and East Galway agitation, Oughterard and adjacent branches of the Land League adopted resolutions demanding that herds ‘give up herding so that the land might become waste ... and the owners forced to divide it into small farms.’ Fifteen ‘outrages’ against herds in North Conamara were recorded during 1880, the objective being to force those targeted to give up their herdings. While a ‘Shepherds’ Association’ claimed responsibility for the attacks, the pattern of the violence would suggest that it was instigated on behalf of tenant farmers, rather than by the small number of herds in that district (there being six times as many herds in the poor law unions of Loughrea and Ballinasloe as in the poor law unions of Oughterard and Clifden).[59]
If the authorities were credulous in 1882 of assertions of Land League manipulation of the herds’ associations, it was because when such a body had previously come to their attention, it had been transparently a Land League creation. The Roscommon and East Galway mobilisations, however, clearly had as their key objective the winning of improved working conditions. Significantly, the terms agreed in 1882 were still observed in Galway ten years later, just as they were in Roscommon.[60]
Although suspicions of tenant farmer manipulation of the herds’ movement were allayed, there remained in the official mind a belief that organised herds continued to achieve their objective through violence. A leading historian of rural labour, moreover, has accepted that theirs’ was among ‘the most violent societies of the countryside.’[61] The calculated use of violence would explain the effectiveness of this rural labour body, but the evidence for it is arguably somewhat slender. In the first place, it seems certain that the most sustained violent episode attributed to herds – in Conamara in 1880 – was not perpetrated by herds at all but by militant advocates of the cause of tenant farmers. And even if one chooses not to accept at face value the repeated disavowals of violence by representatives of Galway and Roscommon herds, there is little enough to connect their associations with strategic violence. It is true that William Gillooly was convicted of threatening strike-breaker Patrick Mannion, but the evidence against him was not that strong. Even if the alleged threats were made, the circumstances suggest that they reflected the anger of an individual rather the modus operandi of an association. Certainly threats were made in the heat of battle, intimidatory meetings were held, and there were incidents of ‘drumming’ or ‘rough music’ outside the house of a notorious individuals but the evidence indicates nonetheless that moral suasion was far more important in the assertion of the herds’ claims than any physical force.[62]
The disputes of 1882-83 were the only widespread herds’ disputes although, unlike their Roscommon comrades, the herds of Galway remained organised during the following two decades. In May 1884, a great meeting of the Co. Galway Shepherds’ Association was held at Cappataggle to protest the dismissal of Matthew McKeague by his employer, Mr Longworth. McKeague said that his difficulties began two years previously when he acted as a representative for the association: ‘Because I attended meetings, the landlord is wreaking vengeance on me.’[63] During the following decade, there were other such indignation meetings at Killimor, Kiltormer, and Loughrea in response to individual grievances.[64]
By the early 1890s, the Galway association had divided into two, one headquartered in Loughrea, the other in Tuam. At a meeting of the latter in November 1891, James Pender of Kilrickle, a representative of Loughrea, reported that his association had 400 members. Encouraged by this information, those present agreed that ‘the Shepherds’ Association of Athenry, Milltown, Tuam, Dunmore, Kilconnell, Oranmore, and Claregalway ... be amalgamated with the Loughrea branch and deposit funds in the Hibernian Bank.’[65] Insofar as it reveals that the Tuam association – the St Patrick’s Herdsmen Association – extended twenty miles east, twenty miles west, and ten miles north of its headquarters, the resolution is of interest. It was not acted upon, however, and, three years later, a similar resolution was discussed in Tuam. By then, St Patrick’s was claiming 400 members itself. Evidently, it a strong financial position, for the authorities discovered it had £250 in the bank.[66]
Only in one of the other thirty unions investigated by the agricultural labourer commissioners was there any suggestion of an organisation of herds. This was in Ennistymon, Co. Clare, where herds received generous freedoms and where they had ‘in recent times [i.e. in the early 1890s] entered into some form of combination which renders it now impossible for farmers to fill the places of any of them that it may have been found necessary for any reason to remove.’ An intelligence report confirmed there was an association ‘to prevent interference with the interests of herdsmen’ in the same district at that time, noting it had ‘no connection’ with the Galway movement.[67]
*
The St Patrick’s Herdsmen Society carried out the useful service for future historians of providing the most comprehensive extant set of rules of any of the herds’ associations. Published in a local newspaper in 1891, twenty rules provided for the conduct of the Association’s internal affairs; for terms and conditions of employment; for herds’ duties to their employers; for the friendly benefits payable to members in adversity; for the duties of members towards one another (‘to assist each other at fairs and markets.’ to contribute five shillings each to the widow or family of a deceased member, to boycott any employer wrongfully dismissing a member).[68]
Arguably, the most important of the Tuam rules was the following: ‘That none but a qualified herdsman be admitted as a member.’ What constituted qualification was not defined, but the matter of eligibility was discussed at several meetings, so it is possible to discern what was intended. Only herds who had held their position for five years were admitted to membership at the founding of the Association in Loughrea in 1882; a decade later it was a requirement that the prospective member should have been in position in 1882.[69] There was provision for succession rights, however, in the Tuam rules’ facility for honorary membership for ‘a son, a brother, or friend [i.e., relative; in-law] living with him on the farm.’ Succession indeed was fought for, and there were instances when the associations defended the right of the widow of a member to continue in occupancy – on the basis usually that she hired an assistant until a son was able to take over. For example, in a resolution adopted at a ‘large and enthusiastic’ meeting called to consider removal of ‘Widow Egan and her son from a farm at Aggard, Craughwell, herds pledged to ‘sustain young Egan on the land of his birth where his father worked for forty years’.[70] Generally, rights of tenure for herds were asserted on the same basis as those of tenant farmers, so, while contracts of employment generally included a clause obliging the herd ‘to give up possession of cottage by one month’s notice,’ the prevailing attitude was that no herd should be removed without grave reason.[71]
The attention to eligibility for membership arose from a desire to exclude potentially controversial individuals, who might place their association in conflict with tenant farmers’ leagues. Thus, the Tuam rule prohibiting members from acting ‘as bailiff, rent warmer, or caretaker, unless the land be conacred.’ A key objective of herds was to have their position accepted in the community, notwithstanding the public opprobrium that surrounded grazing itself. Their associations, therefore, cheerfully endorsed the policies of the farmers’ leagues, even to the extent of being critical of grazing itself on occasion. They certainly did not wish to have to protect members who offended against popular notions of propriety with regard to land, notions they themselves might have shared. While there were certainly herds who accepted unpopular and controversial responsibilities, herds’ associations excluded such people, regarding them in the same light as unionised artisans regarded ‘colts’ or gobáns. Resolutions adopted at herds’ meetings and statements in the local press confirmed the cultural orthodoxy of the members, by reflecting the political language of the tenant movements. Dismissed herds, therefore, were ‘evicted herds’; those who took on dismissed herds’ responsibilities were ‘herd grabbers.’[72]
But if the herds’ associations adapted well to rural circumstance, they were highly conscious of the need to guard their own particular interests. A resolution adopted at a meeting in Bullaun marking the tenth anniversary of the association in that area stressed its independence, the legitimacy of its members’ position, and its commitment to broader national and agrarian, as well as labour, causes: ‘That working as an independent body for the past ten years, side by side with the tenant farmers, labourers and mechanics who desire a native parliament, we claim an honest recognition by the Irish Parliamentary Party.’ Several other rural labour bodies that had emerged at the same time as the herds’ association had been absorbed by the tenant-dominated nationalist movement and had their own particular agendas ignored.[73] The herds resisted the temptation to do the same, notwithstanding the fact that their circumstances were closer to tenant farmers’ than were those of other agricultural employees
Two years later, at Bullaun, the recognition demanded was given when two nationalist land-warrior MPs, John Roche of East Galway, and David Sheehy of South Galway, were the ‘the first MPs ever to stand on a platform of the Shepherds Association.’ Impressed by this achievement of their ‘South Galway brethren,’ the Tuam herds resolved to invite their own MP, Colonel Nolan, to attend a demonstration.[74] Police reports during the following years confirmed the continuing existence of a herds association,[75] attributing its relative quiescence to the fact that the ‘principles for which it was formed have not hitherto been seriously meddled with.’[76]
Renewed activity in 1899 was prompted by the emergence of the UIL. Just as its predecessor had done with labourers’ organisations in 1882, it urged the herds to throw in their lot with it, but the herds were determined to remain independent. For the authorities, up to then concerned about the herds’ movement, it now represented a ‘certain antidote’ to the redistributionist impulse of the tenant movement, and, in November 1900, a police officer predicted that ‘clash’ between the two bodies was inevitable. This did not transpire. Rather, William Duffy, David Sheehy’s successor as MP for South Galway, spoke at a meeting of herds at Kilrickle in the following month,[77] urging them to join the UIL. They did not do so immediately, but there was cooperation between herds and the UIL in the Woodlawn area when Lord Ashtown replaced his own herds with Scotsmen.[78]
There was a final flurry of meetings of herdsmen in 1903-04, in response to the important Wyndham Act, which facilitated the transfer of land ownership from landlord to tenant, while making provision also for certain estate workers. Both before and after the legislation was introduced, there were meetings in East Galway, in North Mayo, and in Roscommon, where demands were made that herds not be overlooked – that they be ‘put on the same footing as tenant farmers.’[79] The absence of further reports suggests that the herds abandoned their own associations at that point, and that they began to assert their claims to share in the land reform through the United Irish League (UIL). The process was a difficult and protracted one, and local papers as well as police reports contain many accounts of attacks on herds, as the people of rural Ireland competed for scarce acres.[80] Generally, the victims of such attacks were individuals who were acting as rent warmers or bailiffs on controversial properties, rather than the more settled category of herds represented by herds’ associations. In the grazing heartland of eastern Connacht, established herds successfully made the transition to farmer in the following decade or so. According to tradition, moreover, they did well as far as the allocation of land was concerned, generally getting ‘a big farm out of the landlord’s property,’ in the words of one informant.[81] In their new role, herds continued to place their attested skills in veterinary matters and in the judging of animals at the disposal of their neighbours. Many of them (and their descendants), evidently, became noted breeders of cattle and sheep.[82]
*
The herds of Galway and Roscommon were remarkable in many respects. They were not the only rural workers who acted to maintain archaic working methods – harvesters in the south-east had smashed reaping machines and scythes fitted with ‘cradles’ in 1858 in a vain effort to protect the sickle from obsolescence[83] – but they were singularly successful in this regard. Indeed, not only did they keep their collops and their freedoms but through sustained organisation and collective action, they were able to standardise and to considerably improve their value. Their associations were also able to protect individuals members from victimisation by employers. In both respects they were unusual among Irish rural trade union in the nineteenth century, which were characteristically ‘spontaneous, fragile and ephemeral.’[84] The herds’ success was clearly attributable to their capacity to organise, but why were herds, especially those in Co. Galway, better at maintaining their organisations than almost all other rural workers? The main reason was that their bargaining position was much better than that of ordinary labourers, so there were clear benefits to be derived from organisation. Herds were unusually skilled, and could not be easily replaced, and in this respect they benefited from solidarity in rural Ireland, among one another most importantly, but also from small and middling farmers. It was by no means inevitable that herds should have had the sympathy of tenant farmers, for, given their position in the rural economy, they might have been pushed into the landlord/grazier camp in the course of the land war. Their associations were careful therefore to ensure that the membership was restricted to those conforming with the ‘unwritten law’ of the countryside. At the same time, and unlike most other rural labour bodies, they remained independent of the tenant farmers’ leagues until the 1903 land act meant that this was no longer expedient. In terms of organising themselves, herds also benefitted from a confidence that came status and from routinely exercising responsibility in their employment. Moreover, by comparison with rural labourers, herds’ working conditions and relatively high living standards facilitated an organisational culture among them. They could come and go without getting permission from an employer, and most of them owned a horse to take them to and from meetings.
[1] Royal Commission on Labour: the agricultural labourer, vol. iv, Ireland, pt.iii, report on the Loughrea Union by Roger C. Richards, 1893-94, House of Commons, vol. xxxvii, p. 21.
[2] ibid.
[3] J. Forde et al, The district of Loughrea, vol.ii: folklore,1860-1960, Loughrea History Project, 2003, p. 255.
[4] The agricultural labourer, Richards report, p. 23
[5] S. Clark, Social origins of the Irish land war, Princeton 1979, p. 118.
[6] P. Bew, Conflict and conciliation in Ireland, 1890-1914: Parnellites and radical agrarians, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, passim; D.S. Jones, Graziers, land reform, and political conflict in Ireland, Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995, pp. 176-84; J. Cunningham, Labour in the west of Ireland: working life and struggle, 1890-1914, Belfast: Athol Books, 1995, pp. 42-46.
[7] Royal Commission on Labour, Richards’s report, p. 21.
[8] ibid., pt.iv, report of Arthur Wilson Fox on the Castlereagh union, p. 97
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid., p. 92.
[11] ibid., reports of W.P. O’Brien on Naas union, p.44, and on Cashel union, p.65.
[12] ibid., O’Brien report on Ennistymon, p. 53
[13] ibid., Wilson Fox report, pp. 90, 92, 97.
[14] J. Cunningham, Unlikely radicals: Irish post-primary teachers and the ASTI, 1909-2009, Cork: Cork University Press, 2009, p.7.
[15] Series of conservations with Tom Glynn (1916-2003), whose father and his antecedents were herds for O’Rourkes at Mullaghmore, Moylough, Co. Galway.
[16] According to P.W. Joyce (Social history of ancient Ireland, Phoenix, Dublin 1903, vol.ii, pp.281-83), animals were classified in Brehon law as follows with regard to the regulation of grazing rights, ‘the cow being taken as the unit’: two geese are equivalent to a sheep; two sheep to one dairt or one year old heifer; two dairts to one colpthach or two-year-old heifer; two colpthachs to one cow; a cow and a colpthach to one ox.’ See also F. Kelly, Early Irish farming: a study based mainly on the law texts of the 7th and 8th centuries A.D., Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1997, pp. 182-87, 442-44.
[17] B. Ó Dálaigh, ‘The Lucas Diary, 1740-41,’ Analecta Hibernica, no. 40, 2007, p. 118.
[18] H. Dutton, A statistical and agricultural survey of the county of Galway, with observations on the means of improvement, Dublin 1824; E. Wakefield, An account of Ireland, statistical and political, 2 vols., London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812, vol.ii, p. 749. I am indebted to Cathal Smith for this reference.
[19] Poor Inquiry (Ireland) Appendix D. ‘Baronial Examinations relative to Earnings of Labourers ... and supplement containing answers to Questions 1 to 12 circulated by the commissioners,’ House of Commons, 1836, vol. xxxii.
[20] ibid., passim.
[21] ibid., p.2.
[22] ibid., p.3.
[23] ibid., pp.31, 37.
[24] ibid., pp. 6, 64, 65, 86, 104.
[25] ibid., p. 29.
[26] ibid., pp. 24, 136. See also pp. 7, 25, 33.
[27] ibid., p.13; A.T. Lucas, Cattle in ancient Ireland, Kilkenny: Boethius Press, 1981, pp. 20-21.
[28] Responses to Q.11 of the Poor Inquiry supplement: ‘Are wages usually paid in money, or provisions, or by conacre? or in what other way?’
[29] K. Whelan, ‘Settlement and society in eighteenth century Ireland,’ in G. Dawe & J. Wilson, eds, The poet’s place, Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991, pp.45-62.
[30] Jones, Graziers, pp.32-4
[31] ibid., pp.42-61, 139-58.
[32] Irish Times, 9 October 1861; P. Melvin, ‘Estates and gentry around Loughrea,’ in Forde et al, Loughrea history, pp.46-47; Cunningham, J., ‘“A spirit of self-preservation”: herdsmen around Loughrea in the late nineteenth century.’ Forde et al, The district of Loughrea, vol.i: history, 1791-1918, Loughrea History Project, 2003, pp. 464-66; Mark Thomas, ‘Dartfield House,’ in ‘Abandoned Ireland’, http://www.abandonedireland.com/Dartfield_House.html, accessed 20 April 2011.
[33] P. Bew,, Land and the national question in Ireland, 1858-82, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1978, pp. 191-216; P. Bull, Land, politics and nationalism: a study of the Irish land question, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996, pp. 88-110.
[34] The agricultural labourer, report of Roger C. Richards, p. 49.
[35] ibid., p.21; Report of the Royal Commission on the Land Law (Ireland) Act, 1881, and the Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act, 1885, House of Commons, 1887, vol. xxvi, par.12200-201.
[36] CSORP, 1882/23402 and 1882/37691; The Nation, 25 February 1882; Roscommon Journal, 24 June 1882; Roscommon Messenger, 9 September 1882; F. Lane, ‘Rural labourers, social change and politics in late nineteenth century Ireland,’ Lane & Ó Drisceoil, eds, Politics and the Irish working class: 1830-1930, 1830-1945, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 124-29, 131.
[37] Roscommon Messenger, 4 March 1882.
[38] CSORP 1882/36108
[39] Roscommon Messenger, 6 May, 16 September 1882, 3, 24 March 1883; Roscommon Journal, 3 June 1882,; 1901 census, household schedule of James Scott, Carns; The Nation, 18, 25 February, 18 March, 1, 8, 15 April, 6, 27 May, 3, 10 June, 1, 8 Jul, 12 August, 16, 23, 30 September 1882.
[40] L. Perry Curtis, Jr., ‘Landlord responses to the Irish Land War, 1879-87,’ Eire-Ireland: Journal of Irish Studies, Fall-Winter, 2003.
[41] The Nation, 8 April 1882; Roscommon Journal, 6 May 1882.
[42] Roscommon Herald 20, 27 May 1882; Roscommon Journal, 3 June 1882.
[43] CSORP, 1882/37691; The Nation, 8 April 1882.
[44] Roscommon Messenger, 4 March 1882, The Nation, 15 July 1882.
[45] CSORP, 1882/37691
[46] Roscommon Messenger, 9, 16 September, 23 December 1882, 6 January 1883
[47] Freeman’s Journal, 25 September 1882.
[48] Roscommon Messenger, 9 September, 23 December 1882.
[49] ibid., 9 September 1882. Pro fidelibis defunctis, which is part of a prayer said for the dead, translates ‘For the faithful departed.’
[50] Roscommon Messenger, 24 March 1883, Roscommon Herald, 28 April 1883.
[51] Royal Commission on Labour, Wilson Fox report, p. 95.
[52] Roscommon Journal, 2 July, 10 September 1904.
[53] Cunningham, ‘Herdsmen around Loughrea,’ pp. 457-95.
[54] Western News, 24 June 1882.
[55] CSORP, 1882/24208.
[56] Galway Express, 15, 22 July 1882.
[57] The Nation, 24 September 1881
[58] Royal Commission on the Land Law, 1887, par.12200-202.
[59] Public Records Office, London, CO 904/16, Irish crimes records: Register of home associations: ‘Memorandum as to the working of the Shepherds or Herds Association of County Galway WR,’ pp.401/1-5; 1891 Census.
[60] Royal Commission on Labour, Richards’s report, pp 21, 23.
[61] Pádraig G. Lane, ‘Agricultural Labourers and Rural Violence, 1850-1914,’ Studia Hibernica, no. 27, 1993, pp 83-84.
[62] Cunningham, ‘Herdsmen around Loughrea,’ pp 470-71.
[63] Tuam News, 30 May 1884.
[64] ibid., 27 February 1885, 21 August 1891.Western News, 19 May 1888;
[65] Galway Observer, 5 December 1891.
[66] Tuam News, 13 July 1894.
[67] Divisional Commisioners and County Inspectors Reports (DCCI), CO 904/16, Information on Herds Association in Ballyvaughan and Ennis district, November 1892. For an account of the grazing economy in Clare, see Brendan Ó Cathaoir, ‘Another Clare: ranchers and moonlighters, 1700-1945,’ in M. Lynch & P. Nugent, eds, Clare: History & Society, Dublin: Geography Publications, 2008, pp. 359-423.
[68] Tuam News, 13 November 1891.
[69] ibid, 12 February 1892; Western News, 24 June 1882.
[70] Tuam News, 21 July 1893. See also Tuam Herald 22 May 1897.
[71] The agricultural labourer, Wilson Fox report, p.100.
[72] Tuam News, 21 July 1893, 19 July 1895.
[73] ibid., 8 July 1892; F. Lane, ‘Rural labourers,’ pp. 129-35; Pádraig G. Lane, ‘Agricultural labourers and the land question,’ in C. King, ed., Famine, land and culture in Ireland, Dublin, UCD Press, 2000, pp 105-09.
[74] Tuam News, 6, 13 July 1894.
[75] DCCI, CO 904/58, Galway East Riding, February, September, November 1895; CO 904/59, June-December, 1896, January-June 1897.
[76] DCCI, CO 904/69, Galway East Riding, January 1900.
[77] Inspector General’s Monthly Confidential report, Box 2, Galway East Riding, October 1899; DCCI, CO 904/71, Galway Esat Riding, November 1900, CO 904/72, December 1900.
[78] Cunningham, ‘Herdsmen around Loughrea,’ pp. 475-76.
[79] Western News, 4 July 1903; Western People 14 February 1903; 13 February 2004; Roscommon Journal, 2 July, 10 September 1904
[80] A. Varley, ‘The politics of agrarian reform: the state, nationalists and the agrarian question in the west of Ireland, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Illinois University at Carbondale, 1994, pp. 96-286.
[81] Forde et al, Loughrea folklore, p.255. This evidence was supported by conversations.with Tom Glynn.
[82] Beatrice Bill Talbot & John Lenihan, And that’s no lie [memoir of Roscommon herd’s son], Cambridge, Mass: Houghton Mifflin, 1946, p. 53; Tom Glynn conversations.
[83] J.W. Boyle, ‘’A marginal figure: the Irish rural labourer,; in Clark & Donnelly, eds, Irish Peasants: violrnce and political unrest, 1780-1914, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1983, pp 316-18
[84] F. Lane, ‘Rural labourers, p. 115.
in C. King & C. McNamara, The west of Ireland: new perspectives on the nineteenth century, Dublin: The History Press, pp. 137-160
Early in 1892, Roger Richards, an agricultural expert who had previously investigated working conditions of employees on English farms, visited the Poor Law Union of Loughrea, Co. Galway, on behalf of the Royal Commission on Labour. Most farm workers in the district, he found, were in a pitiable state – only fitfully-employed, malnourished, and living in tumbledown hovels. There was one grouping however that did not match this pattern; or indeed any pattern known to Richards, since it formed ‘a class quite distinct from any employed in any of the English districts visited, neither shepherds nor bailiffs, and yet a compound of both.’[1] He elaborated as follows:
They are generally paid by ‘freedoms,’ the freedom consisting of so many ‘collops.’ A collop, the right to keep at the expense of the employer, and running among his cattle:- one cow and one calf, or one mare and one foal (up to November); or three yearling calves; or four ewes with lambs; or six dry sheep. The cash equivalent of a collop is generally given as £5 or £6 according to the quality of the land.[2]
The workers described in this excerpt were known as ‘herds,’ and they worked on estates and large-scale pasture farms, looking after cattle and sheep. Reasonably well-recompensed and with a reputation for being skilled, their social status was high – unlike the generality of agricultural labourers. In the words of an informant interviewed for a folklore project, the herd ‘looked after the gentleman’s stock and ... was next to the gentleman himself.’[3] Roger Richards reported that herds ‘have certainly the reputation for keeping the best horses, as I was assured in the fair that all the “long-tailed” horses, i.e., the best, were those of herds.’[4] A more substantial indication of difference in status (and in capacity to provide adequate dowries), between herds and ordinary labourers was provided by Samuel Clark, who found in a Roscommon marriage register of 1864-1880, that 70% of herds’ daughters married farmers’ sons, while only 8% of labourers’ daughters married into farming families.[5]
But if herds’ status was high, it was not secure, for it came under threat from two distinct sources. Many grazier employers regarded freedoms as anachronistic and wished to replace them with wages. For the leagues of the tenant farmers (especially the United Irish League, established 1898), the grazing economy which gave herds their livelihoods was immoral because its origins were in earlier clearances, and it was anti-social because it gave little employment and it deprived ‘congested’ farm families of land.[6] Alert to the challenges facing them, west of Ireland herds established representative bodies – leagues, associations, unions – to protect and advance their interests. Some of these bodies were exceptionally durable by comparison with other rural labour organisations of the nineteenth century.
This article will describe the singular conditions under which herds were employed and rewarded, and trace the origins of their occupation. It will closely examine the efforts of west of Ireland herds to regulate and standardise their earnings while retaining the time-honoured employment customs from which they derived their relative independence and their status.
*
The evidence gathered by the commissioners on the agricultural labourer is rich in detail with regard to conditions of Irish herds in the early 1890s. Four commissioners reported on thirty poor law unions, including Castlerea, Co. Roscommon; Loughrea, Co. Galway; Westport, Co. Mayo; Dromore West, Co. Sligo; and Ennistymon, Co. Clare. A comparison of circumstances in western unions with those elsewhere indicates that Galway and Roscommon were exceptional in the extent to which strict rules applied in respect of remuneration – governing collops and other matters.
‘Collop’ (Irish: colpthach) was a term which was in widespread use. The most significant of the herds freedoms, it was a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure of land, and it was one which was also used in the allocation of shares in commonage and mountain-grazing. But if collops were the most significant of the herds’ freedoms, they were not the only ones. According to Richards, each herd in the Loughrea area was also entitled to a house and several acres of tillage ground, the prevailing rate being either three collops and two acres for the first hundred of grazing land superintended, or two acres and three collops. Moreover, ‘according to his conscience or worth,’ the herd was permitted to keep a few pigs and some poultry on his employer’s land.[7]
Richards’s fellow assistant commissioner, Arthur Wilson Fox, was simultaneously making similar discoveries about the conditions of herds in the Castlerea union of Co. Roscommon. Carrying out detailed assessments of the monetary value of the emoluments of five Castlerea herds, he found considerable variation in their value, but that a standard methodology was employed in their calculation. The annual value of the freedoms enjoyed by the herd employed by Mr Kelly of Castlerea, who was responsible for 200 acres, was estimated at £45, comprising a house and three or four acres of tillage land, £12; grazing for two cows and two calves, £16; grazing and hay for mare and foal, £16; keep of geese and pigs, £5. The estimated incomes of the other four varied between £31.10s for the herd of Mr Young of Harristown for looking after 100 acres, to £71.16s for the O’Conor Don’s herd who looked after 400 acres.[8] It should be borne in mind these figures were based on information provided by employers, and that the monetary value of freedoms varied with livestock and crop prices. Moreover, they did not always represent the return on the labour of a single individual. As Mr Sandford of Castlerea acknowledged, his herd was assisted by an adult son, and ‘if he had not his son’s help, he would have to pay an assistant £10 a year and keep him.’[9]
Collops were by far the most valuable of the freedoms, and when one employer, Lord Ashtown, changed the system of payment for his herds, he continued to provide a house and several acres of tillage ground. Instead of collops and informal indulgences, he paid £1 a week, or £52 a year, which indicates the true value to employees of the established system. Indeed, in exercising their freedoms to the maximum, herds had numerous opportunities to generate extra income, as Wilson Fox was advised in Castlerea:
One of Mr Flanagan’s herds told him that in 1892 that he got £40 for pigs. They also keep geese and poultry. Many herds are paid extra for saving hay and for attending fairs. They grow potatoes and vegetables and they consume milk and butter the value of which is impossible to estimate... Herds sell their calves, say15 months, at prices varying from £6 to £9, according to the sort of cows they breed them from, and this will depend on the quality of the land in possession of the employers... They manage if possible to have their cows calving in early spring so as to have their calves to sell in May year. The price of a calf greatly depends on the feeding it gets. In addition to feeding calves, the herds feed pigs on their land. They also make and sell butter. They mix linseed with the skim milk for feeding purposes. The herds breed better foals than small farmers, having better mares.[10]
There were certain similarities between the conditions enjoyed by East Galway and Roscommon herds and those of their colleagues of other parts of the country. Payment in kind, in part at least, was common, especially in mountain areas where contact between herds and their employers was infrequent, and close supervision impractical. In more accessible places, perquisites were frequently allowed as indicated by the following from Naas, Co. Kildare – ‘in the case of herds, in addition to a house, fuel, potatoes and milk may be allowed – and from Cashel, Co. Tipperary – ‘the grass of a cow is sometimes given by large farmers to herds or other confidential labourers.’[11] Contracts varied widely, however, and it was only from Ennistymon that there were any indications of the existence of standardised principles governing herds’ emoluments similar to those obtaining in Galway and Roscommon.[12]
To better understand the economic position of west of Ireland herds, comparison with the means of other contemporaries will be useful. If there was a labourer, employed by the O’Conor Don, who earned £22.8.5 in 1892, he was exceptional both in having regular work and in having an uncommonly considerate employer. (Evidently, the O’Conor Don was the only agricultural employer in Roscommon who paid his regular labourers when they were ill.) Annual earnings of labourers in the same county were more usually in the range £15 to £17, according to Wilson Fox.[13] A herd on 200 acres (assisted by a son or a servant) would have earned three times as much, giving him an income close to that of a fully-employed urban tradesman, a rank-and-file policeman, or a female teacher.[14] But herds were exposed to risks not faced by others, in that they might be held responsible for damage to livestock in their care due to their own negligence. According to Roger C. Richards, they were liable to make good any losses arising from ‘scab or grub in sheep, injury to cattle from an open drain, or anything obviously out of order’; according to the pithy saying of the country, they were responsible for damage due to the depredations of ‘hogs, bogs, dogs or thieves.’[15]
If the mechanism used to calculate the entitlements of herds were remarkably uniform in Galway and Roscommon, but not so elsewhere, this fact requires explanation. First, however, it is necessary to examine the earlier history of this ‘quite distinct’ occupational group.
*
The system of remuneration and the working condition of the western herds were manifestly archaic, and indeed elements of them may be traced to ancient times. The value of the colpthach or collop was defined in Brehon law (although it altered somewhat over the centuries), and the herd’s duties in respect of restitution were also defined.[16] That the conditions were well established by the eighteenth century is suggested by an entry of 1741 in the diary of a substantial farmer from near Ennis, Co. Clare, setting down the responsibilities of herd and employer in respect of fairs, fences, and saving hay on the one hand, and the provision of necessary supports and freedoms on the other:
1st [May 1741] Friday. I agreed with John Higgins as a herd. He is obliged to herd Carhubranagh, Lurgo, Knockfluck and that part of Feninah held by Andrew Flanagan if I do not set it. He is also to save the hay of the meadows at Carhubranagh, Feninah, and Lurgo, with only the help of 6 men. I am obliged to give him horses to turn home hay and also to make it into a reek. He is also to leave my bounds in the same condition he gets them and to go or send the cattle in his care to fair or market. He’s to get Thomas Connor’s sheaf and Teige Connell’s and the sheaf of Thomas Connor’s soil that was tilled by Thomas Haly and to have the freedom of five collops.[17]
Some eighty years later, in his survey of agriculture in Co Galway prepared for the Royal Dublin Society, Hely Dutton reported that because herds in the grazing districts of the county were ‘servants of some responsibility, they have commonly many indulgences ... a house, small garden, some tillage ground, and grass for a heifer, and generally keeping for a brood mare.’ However, the advantage that the herd derived from running his own stock with those of the employer was of benefit also to the employer, because ‘no person would take a herd without his possessing some stock, as they are frequently the only security from neglect or some misdemeanour.’ A contemporary of Hely Dutton’s, remarked also on the prosperity of west of Ireland herds: ‘many of the herdsmen here are able to give their daughters, when married, twenty guineas, and a feather bed, although the cabins in which they reside are apparently wretched, and seem to contain nothing but dirt, lumber, and rags.’[18]
If such nuggets convey a general impression, there is a more substantial record of the condition of herds in pre-Famine Ireland in testimony collected for the Poor Inquiry of 1836. The testimony was generated by the following question, part of a questionnaire circulated by the commissioners: ‘Upon what terms are herds usually hired in your parish?’ More than fifteen hundred responses were received, and they came from all counties. If the majority were submitted by clergymen, Catholic and Protestant, a considerable number came from employers of herds. Some of them provided quite detailed information.[19]
An examination of the responses shows that conditions broadly similar to those later found by Richards and Wilson Fox, and those earlier described by Hely Dutton, were widespread in the 1830s, but that they did not apply everywhere (See Table 1). Almost universal in the five counties of Connacht and in Clare, they were also widespread in the major grazing counties of Meath and Westmeath, and in other counties to the east of Connacht and Clare. In the dairying and tillage counties of the south, and in Ulster, with the exception of some mountain areas, such herding as took place was carried by farm servants, by boys, or by old men not fit for heavier work, and it was poorly rewarded.[20]
In Co. Galway, however, even on barren Árainn where there were ‘but two persons’ employing herds, payment was almost always in freedoms.[21] That their value varied from one part of the county to another is indicated by the contrasting information provided by T.N Bagot, of Kilcroan, near the Galway-Roscommon border – ‘Herds have a house, two acres of land and grass for two cows, for taking care of the stock, &c., of a farm of 100 acres; and pretty much in that proportion for a larger farm.’ – and by James Kirwan of Tuam – ‘They generally get an acre of land, and the grazing of a cow or horse for the care of 100 acres, and so on in proportion.’[22] Rev. E. Mahon of Strokestown, Co. Roscommon suggested that the herd’s consideration was less than it had been: ‘Some get an acre of land, and the grass of a cow; some two acres and the grass of two cows: only half of what used to be given.’ There were as many as forty herds in the parish of Baslisk, according to the parish priest, John O’Callaghan, and they each had one and a half or two acres of tillage, and the grazing of two or three cows.[23] Around Ahascragh, Ballinasloe, Rev. Henry Hunt reported that herds generally got ‘a free house, garden, and two or three acres of land. and sometimes the grass of three collops (a collop means a cow or three calves, or three sheep); about £20 per annum, but he answers for losses from bog, dog, or thief.’ Incidentally, variations of the latter phrase as an explanation of the herd’s liabilities (mentioned above, and recorded within the past decade from an oral informant) appeared also in responses from Kildare and King’s Co., and Meath.[24] For his part, the bishop of Killala drew an idyllic pen picture of the lifestyle of his own herd:
My herd I find here, he had served my predecessors more than 30 years; he has a cabin in repair by me; three acres of land for oats, potatoes and flax; permission to keep two cows on the demesne, and rear their young; he has no wages; the heads of the beasts and sheep fatted for my house are his; a present at Christmas as he deserves or wants.[25]
A remark of James McHale, parish priest of Robeen and Kilcommon, Co. Mayo, that herds were ‘the most comfortable’ among the lower orders in his parish was echoed by respondents throughout Connacht and Leinster, although Charles Kelly of Churchtown, Co Westmeath qualified his comment by stating that they were also ‘in general the greatest rogues.’[26] A statement from Robert Martin, of the parish of Killanin and Kilcummin on the western side of Lough Corrib, shows that there were herds who were paid in ‘freedoms’ in rundale farming: ‘Landholders of large farms pay herds, generally, by allowing pasture for so many head of cattle and some tillage land; and villages employ herds, and pay them in like manner.’ Other early nineteenth century sources confirm that this was not an isolated instance.[27]
Labourers, it should be pointed out, were only very rarely paid in freedoms in the 1830s. According to evidence from the same questionnaire, they were paid either cash wages, or a notional daily amount which was set against conacre or farm rent.[28]
Pastoral farming was long-established as the predominant economic activity of East Connacht and North Leinster,[29] with Ballinasloe’s October fair being the principal venue where store animals raised west of the Shannon were sold for fattening on the plains of Meath and places adjacent. Annual returns from the fair of Ballinasloe show that the trade was expanding at the time of the Poor Inquiry, and that it continued to expand during the following decade, providing employment for herds but reducing the space available for more labour-intensive agricultural activity.[30] In the post-Famine period, economic and social conditions continued to favour grazing. There was demand for food from industrialising Britain, but due to competition from the United States after the repeal of the corn laws, meat was much more profitable than grain. With famine clearances and encumbered estates legislation facilitating the shift to pasture, cattle and sheep numbers doubled during the second half of the nineteenth century. The grazing element was reinforced by speculative newcomers: solvent middling farmers wishing to expand; as well as by shopkeepers and professionals seeking profitable investment opportunities. The newcomers typically rented farms of a hundred acres and upwards, from year to year. Under the eleven-month-system, the renter gained no tenancy rights, which suited landlords, as did the relative ease of extracting rent from one large tenant grazier as opposed to a multiplicity of impecunious smallholders.[31]
Among the more successful of the arriviste graziers was Joseph Hardy, a small mill-owner at Killimor, Co. Galway, in the late 1830s, who ‘commenced to take land for grazing,’ by his own account, in 1846. His name was routinely mentioned in reports of fairs in the region – at the Ballinasloe fair of 1861, for example, he sold 170 two-year-old heifers – and he was renting 6000 acres by 1880, 90% of them in Co. Galway, from several owners, including Lords Dunsandle and Clonbrock. Although owning no land, he won admission to gentry society, living ostentatiously at Dartfield House, near Kilrickle, serving as Justice of the Peace, Poor Law Guardian, and Grand Juror, and becoming a leading light in the Ballinasloe Agricultural Show Society. A self-made moderniser who was shrewd in business, Hardy nonetheless continued to pay his herds in the traditional way, in collops and tillage ground.[32]
*
During 1881-82, conflicts arose between herds and their employers in mid-Roscommon and East Galway which would have long-lasting consequences. This was a period of intense political commotion in Ireland, encompassing the banning of the Land League and the arrest of its leaders, the formation of the Ladies’ Land League, the release of the imprisoned leaders and the publication of the terms of the ‘Kilmainham Treaty,’ the Phoenix Park assassinations and the Crimes Act, the public declaration by Michael Davitt of his support for land nationalisation, and a strike by members of the Royal Irish Constabulary.[33]
That conflict involving herds broke out in East Connacht, and indeed was largely confined to this region, is not surprising if the occupational distribution is considered. (See Table 2) Almost one fifth of Irish ‘shepherds’ – the census category in which were placed those describing themselves ‘herds’, ‘herdsmen’ or ‘shepherd’ – were to be found in an East Connacht region encompassing seven adjoining poor law unions: Loughrea, Tuam, Mountbellew, Ballinasloe, Castlerea, Roscommon, and Strokestown. Herds were present throughout this region in numbers sufficient for an esprit de corps to develop among them and to sustain their own associations. Another factor facilitating organisation was that traditional conditions of employment for herds survived in this region to a greater extent than elsewhere. The evidence suggests that herds’ contracts in the great grazing zone of North Leinster were being ‘modernised,’ even in the pre-Famine period, and while there were instances there where remuneration was in freedoms, the consideration was usually in cash wages – though calculated in widely-varying ways. As Roger Richards observed of the Balrothery union in Co. Dublin, ‘the greatest diversity is found in the payment of herds.’[34]
There were grazing employers in Connacht who had changed from freedoms to cash, and others who wished to do so,[35] but western herds did not wish to be ‘proletarianised’ – with an associated loss in independence and in status – so when the land war created the conditions for collective action, they acted to extend their freedoms and to retain their freedom.
A Herds’ Association was formed in Roscommon early in late 1881/early 1882, in a context of unrest among subaltern elements in the area. With the Land League proclaimed since the previous October, there were efforts to establish alternatives and successors, and a Labour League gave voice to popular sentiment on a range of issues, just as cognate bodies were doing in Leinster and Munster.[36] It was in this milieu that the Herds’ Association emerged into public view at a meeting of over 400 people on 2 March 1882, on the ‘historic hill of Carn,’ near Tulsk, a site that tradition associated with the O’Connor kings. In the choice of meeting place there was an assertion of the nationalist and ‘popular’ credentials of the herds, and this disposition was also evident in the tenor of the resolutions adopted. Among them was one demanding the release of the nationalist prisoners and another insisting that the grazier employers support that same demand.[37] At a subsequent meeting in Tulsk, at which there were representatives from throughout Roscommon, resolutions of a vocational character were adopted (which were subsequently printed on a membership card), serving strike notice on employers that who did not complied by 18 May with the herds’ demands for two acres, for the grazing of two cows, and for £10 per 80 acres herded. The meeting further committed the association’s members to exclusively ‘peaceful and legal means.’[38]
From the reported speeches, it is apparent that the Roscommon herds were intent upon establishing a national organisation. The Tulsk branch, led by 75-year-old James Scott, was described as ‘the central branch’, in line with the organisational model of the Land League and the Ladies Land League. Routine meetings were held at ‘their rooms in Tulsk.’ Despite receiving national press coverage, notably in The Nation, the association never extended far beyond Co. Roscommon, and the only affiliated branch outside the county was in Ballymote, Co. Sligo. Representatives from other places did attend particular meetings – from Moate Co. Westmeath, Lansboro, Co Longford, and adjacent parishes in Co. Galway. More generally, Roscommon developments had a considerable effect in Galway, as will be shown below.[39]
Alarmed, Roscommon employers also became organised. A meeting held to form a Grazing Landholders Association was advised of steps already taken on behalf of ‘flockmasters’ by the Property Defence Association (a ‘physical force organisation,’ in the words of London’s Times, established by leading Irish landlords in December 1880 to prosecute the land war on behalf of their own class[40]). Seventy-one responses, evidently, had been received to advertisements in Scottish newspapers seeking replacement herds. A skirmishing fund was opened and those present acquiesced in a resolution denouncing the herds’ combination as ‘a moonlight society under a false name,’ and declaring their determination to put it down.[41]
At a herds’ meeting in Ballintubber just after the strike deadline, it was announced that while eight employers had conceded the association’s claim, a majority remained opposed to concession or compromise. Condemning the recent Phoenix Park assassinations, the herds passed a further resolution eschewing violent methods in prosecuting their own dispute. Evidently, they were more united than their employers, for a report of an ensuing meeting suggested that there were further defections from the graziers’ camp. Strike action was taken on a few farms – sums were voted for the support of those involved, and in one instance, it was reported that labourers had walked out in sympathy with a striking herd. [42]
The herds’ association’s commitment to legal methods was accepted neither by employers nor by the authorities. For the employers, the association was a catspaw of the banned Land League, and the real objective of the strike was not to secure the outrageous increases sought but rather to bring an end to the grazing system itself.[43] Whether graziers genuinely believed this is unclear, but it was assuredly in their interest to represent the herds’ association as an element of the general agrarian disorder.
The allegations that the herds’ association was indeed a ‘moonlight society’ seemed confirmed when a leading member, William Gillooly, faced serious charges in August, charges brought under the ‘Crimes Act,’ passed in response to the Phoenix Park assassinations. Gillooly’s prominence is confirmed by the fact that he was called to the chair at the earliest reported ‘monster meeting’ in March, and at another in July.[44] John Neilan testified to having dismissed Gillooly, who had worked for his family for several decades, and having him evicted from his cottage at Holywell in the parish of Kilbride, when he went on strike in May, despite being ‘better paid than most herds.’ It proved difficult, however, to get a replacement. Neilan recalled making a bargain with a man called Morgan ‘at three times the ordinary salary,’ but the man withdrew on receiving a threatening letter and on learning that ‘the country people had gathered in hundreds’ to build a new house near Holywell for the dismissed herd. Others initially interested declared themselves ‘afraid of being shot.’
Three months passed before Patrick Mannion, a local small farmer described as ‘very poor but very brave,’ took charge of the holding, having first inquired from Gillooly whether he wished to return to his former employment. Neilan’s second-hand account of the dismissed man’s response was as follows: ‘No, I will never herd a day for a man of his name; neither will any other man, for the man who would take it would be shot. The Herd’s League have subscribed to a fund to pay for the shooting of any man who takes another man’s place.’[45] Undeterred by this, and by a subsequent similar conversation, Mannion evidently fulfilled his responsibilities towards Neilan’s animals until he was confronted by Gillooly while repairing a stone wall fence. From that point, Mannion insisted on police protection, and swore information against his predecessor, in whose coercive behaviour he also implicated James Scott of Tulsk. Allegations against Scott were withdrawn in the course of the subsequent trial, but Gillooly was convicted of intimidation, and sentenced to six months with hard labour. An appeal was lodged, with legal fees borne by the herds’ association.[46]
That a de facto curfew was imposed on herds, and that tensions arose from that and from the Gillooly prosecution, is apparent from a resolution passed on the hill of Rathcroghan in September at a meeting, attended by ‘large contingents, including a very good sprinkling of the fair sex’ from ‘Ballintubber, Baslisk, Ballinagar, Ballymote Kiltrustan, Ballybroughan, Kilglass, Cloonfinlough, Kilbride, Elphin, Mantua, Oran, Tulsk, Killyfin, Roscommon, Fuerty, Athleague, Rahera, Lanesborough and Tisaragh’:
That whereas our employers should hold us responsible for any accident that may occur through our negligence on their respective farms, we wish to point out that we will not in future hold ourselves responsible for anything that may happen to the flocks in our charge from an hour after sunset till sunrise, as some of our members have already been interfered with by the constabulary and cautioned not to be caught out during that time.[47]
In the event, Gillooly’s appeal was unsuccessful. While he served his sentence in Mullingar, his family was supported by his comrade herds, who continued to deny that their association had a secret set of rules which permitted recourse to violence.[48] But notwithstanding the repeated denunciations of violence, Patrick Mannion continued to feel threatened. Reputedly an educated man, he must nonetheless have been surprised to find on the whitewashed walls of the cottage provided for him by Neilan, alongside ‘a picture of a gun, a pistol and a revolver,’ a message pencilled in Latin: Jacobus Neilan, Jacobus Kilkelly [the resident magistrate], Jacobus Becketta, Patria Mannion: pro fidelibus defunctis.[49]
Clearly, the efforts of the authorities to curb ‘moonlighting’ had consequences for the graziers, and those holding out against the demands of their herds found it hard to recruit replacements. The vaunted ‘Scotch herds’ did not arrive, and eventually the employers as a body decided to concede their herds demands in full. This occurred before March 1883, if an allusion at a herds’ meeting at Fourmilehouse to the ‘time of the settlement’ is an indication. No other contemporary reference to the settlement was located, although there were concurrent allegations that some graziers were reneging on commitments given.[50] These problems were evidently resolved for, almost ten years later, Wilson Fox noted that an agreement dating from 1883 was still observed, more or less, notwithstanding the dissolution of the Roscommon Herds’ Association. Upon agreement being reached, he reported:
The herds’ league and the masters’ defence fund immediately ceased to exist, and it is satisfactory to be able to say that any friction which existed at the time of the strike has long ago died away. A large employer of labour who took an active part in obtaining the settlement said to me, ‘We are just as good friends as ever,’ and a herd who belonged to the league said, ‘Masters and men are very friendly now.’[51]
No references were discovered to any herds’ association activity in Roscommon between 1883 and 1904, At this later date, a local paper reported on ‘herds agitation’ in Castleplunkett, Ballinagare, Clashganny and Kilmurry, prompted by concern among herds about the prospects of those involved under the terms of the recent Wyndham Act.[52]
*
Herds in Co. Galway had followed with interest the fortunes of their comrades in Roscommon, and during May and June 1882 there was a series of meetings of herds at Killimor, Kilconnell, Loughrea and Bullaun. The mobilisations. the police discovered, were prompted by agitational material sent by James Scott of Tulsk. Because these events in the Loughrea area have been treated in detail elsewhere,[53] a summary will suffice.
At the Kilconnell meeting, veteran Patrick Connolly complained that freedoms were the same as when he started in his career. ‘Artisans, mechanics, and labourers had their wages greatly increased in the last ten years,’ he continued, ‘but the shepherds of Ireland have made no progress; they receive the same miserable wages as their fathers.’[54]
Preparations for a large meeting at Bullaun on 8 June 1882 alarmed employers, and one of them alerted the authorities to what was taking place. In terms very similar to those used by the Roscommon graziers, he advised that herds were ‘for the most part content,’ and that their movement was not what it seemed, that it in fact represented ‘an attack on the grass farms of this county veiled in this manner.’[55]
If the Galway herds were influenced by Roscommon events, so were the graziers, for they quickly established a Galway Grazing Landholders Association. And following Roscommon precedent further, this body established a ‘defence fund’ and prepared to face down a strike – despatching its secretary to ‘the North of Ireland’ to arrange for the recruitment of substitute herds there, and ruling out any negotiations with herds’ representatives.[56]
Joseph Hardy, at Dartfield, acted as recommended by his association when a representative of his own herds sought improved conditions. He dismissed the man, Thomas Broder, had him evicted from his house; and introduced ‘scab’ labour, provided by the graziers’ association when his other herds went on strike in protest. As it transpired, this was an ill-considered approach, and it would place at risk Hardy’s lifetime’s achievements in pastoral agriculture. The eviction, the introduction of ‘emergencymen’ from Armagh, the arrival of police reinforcements, was all too suggestive of the ‘land war’ tactics of landlords to be accepted by the community. Moreover, Hardy was already notorious in Killimor, for having evicted a herd’s widow in the townland of Lurgan in 1880 – the house was subsequently burned by agrarian incendaries.[57] Smaller graziers, consequently, felt pressurised to concede. At a herds’ association meeting in Killimor, where Hardy’s ‘emergencymen’ were bivouacked, a grazier announced that he was accepting the herds’ terms. Others followed suit. Isolated, Hardy summoned herds’ representatives to Dartfield, where he conceded the demands of three collops, two acres, and £10 for each 100 acres herded. He further agreed to have a new cottage built for each of his herdsmen.
Five years later, Hardy was in a reduced condition, grazing less than a third of his former acreage. He blamed his difficulties on the strike – that the settlement was ‘most extravagant;’ that the graziers agreed to continue paying in freedoms rather than in cash; that he personally ‘had been obliged for years to have protection.’ And he continued to believe that the herds’ agitation was fomented by the Land League:‘Everything proceeds from the Land League or National League – they have absorbed everything into them, and while the government allows them to exist, and doesn’t put down its foot and stop it, you will never have things as they ought to be.’[58]
By the early 1890s, there are no indications that Richards’s or Wilson Fox’s informants believed that the Land League was behind the herds’ agitation of 1882. By that point, indeed, it was widely accepted that the objectives of tenant farmers and of herds were incompatible. How then did the notion of Land League influence over the herds gain such wide currency? Firstly, as has been pointed out above, graziers promoted this interpretation in order to secure more intensive policing of herd militancy. Secondly, the speeches of herds’ leaders supported this interpretation. Conscious that the type of farming in which they were engaged was anathemised by elements of the agrarian movement, herds supported tenant farmers’ demands and likened their own predicaments to those of farmers. In speaking the language of the Land League, it is not surprising that it was considered to be part of it. Finally, and most importantly, there was evidence from one part of the country of Land League manipulation of herds. In 1880, a year before the Roscommon and East Galway agitation, Oughterard and adjacent branches of the Land League adopted resolutions demanding that herds ‘give up herding so that the land might become waste ... and the owners forced to divide it into small farms.’ Fifteen ‘outrages’ against herds in North Conamara were recorded during 1880, the objective being to force those targeted to give up their herdings. While a ‘Shepherds’ Association’ claimed responsibility for the attacks, the pattern of the violence would suggest that it was instigated on behalf of tenant farmers, rather than by the small number of herds in that district (there being six times as many herds in the poor law unions of Loughrea and Ballinasloe as in the poor law unions of Oughterard and Clifden).[59]
If the authorities were credulous in 1882 of assertions of Land League manipulation of the herds’ associations, it was because when such a body had previously come to their attention, it had been transparently a Land League creation. The Roscommon and East Galway mobilisations, however, clearly had as their key objective the winning of improved working conditions. Significantly, the terms agreed in 1882 were still observed in Galway ten years later, just as they were in Roscommon.[60]
Although suspicions of tenant farmer manipulation of the herds’ movement were allayed, there remained in the official mind a belief that organised herds continued to achieve their objective through violence. A leading historian of rural labour, moreover, has accepted that theirs’ was among ‘the most violent societies of the countryside.’[61] The calculated use of violence would explain the effectiveness of this rural labour body, but the evidence for it is arguably somewhat slender. In the first place, it seems certain that the most sustained violent episode attributed to herds – in Conamara in 1880 – was not perpetrated by herds at all but by militant advocates of the cause of tenant farmers. And even if one chooses not to accept at face value the repeated disavowals of violence by representatives of Galway and Roscommon herds, there is little enough to connect their associations with strategic violence. It is true that William Gillooly was convicted of threatening strike-breaker Patrick Mannion, but the evidence against him was not that strong. Even if the alleged threats were made, the circumstances suggest that they reflected the anger of an individual rather the modus operandi of an association. Certainly threats were made in the heat of battle, intimidatory meetings were held, and there were incidents of ‘drumming’ or ‘rough music’ outside the house of a notorious individuals but the evidence indicates nonetheless that moral suasion was far more important in the assertion of the herds’ claims than any physical force.[62]
The disputes of 1882-83 were the only widespread herds’ disputes although, unlike their Roscommon comrades, the herds of Galway remained organised during the following two decades. In May 1884, a great meeting of the Co. Galway Shepherds’ Association was held at Cappataggle to protest the dismissal of Matthew McKeague by his employer, Mr Longworth. McKeague said that his difficulties began two years previously when he acted as a representative for the association: ‘Because I attended meetings, the landlord is wreaking vengeance on me.’[63] During the following decade, there were other such indignation meetings at Killimor, Kiltormer, and Loughrea in response to individual grievances.[64]
By the early 1890s, the Galway association had divided into two, one headquartered in Loughrea, the other in Tuam. At a meeting of the latter in November 1891, James Pender of Kilrickle, a representative of Loughrea, reported that his association had 400 members. Encouraged by this information, those present agreed that ‘the Shepherds’ Association of Athenry, Milltown, Tuam, Dunmore, Kilconnell, Oranmore, and Claregalway ... be amalgamated with the Loughrea branch and deposit funds in the Hibernian Bank.’[65] Insofar as it reveals that the Tuam association – the St Patrick’s Herdsmen Association – extended twenty miles east, twenty miles west, and ten miles north of its headquarters, the resolution is of interest. It was not acted upon, however, and, three years later, a similar resolution was discussed in Tuam. By then, St Patrick’s was claiming 400 members itself. Evidently, it a strong financial position, for the authorities discovered it had £250 in the bank.[66]
Only in one of the other thirty unions investigated by the agricultural labourer commissioners was there any suggestion of an organisation of herds. This was in Ennistymon, Co. Clare, where herds received generous freedoms and where they had ‘in recent times [i.e. in the early 1890s] entered into some form of combination which renders it now impossible for farmers to fill the places of any of them that it may have been found necessary for any reason to remove.’ An intelligence report confirmed there was an association ‘to prevent interference with the interests of herdsmen’ in the same district at that time, noting it had ‘no connection’ with the Galway movement.[67]
*
The St Patrick’s Herdsmen Society carried out the useful service for future historians of providing the most comprehensive extant set of rules of any of the herds’ associations. Published in a local newspaper in 1891, twenty rules provided for the conduct of the Association’s internal affairs; for terms and conditions of employment; for herds’ duties to their employers; for the friendly benefits payable to members in adversity; for the duties of members towards one another (‘to assist each other at fairs and markets.’ to contribute five shillings each to the widow or family of a deceased member, to boycott any employer wrongfully dismissing a member).[68]
Arguably, the most important of the Tuam rules was the following: ‘That none but a qualified herdsman be admitted as a member.’ What constituted qualification was not defined, but the matter of eligibility was discussed at several meetings, so it is possible to discern what was intended. Only herds who had held their position for five years were admitted to membership at the founding of the Association in Loughrea in 1882; a decade later it was a requirement that the prospective member should have been in position in 1882.[69] There was provision for succession rights, however, in the Tuam rules’ facility for honorary membership for ‘a son, a brother, or friend [i.e., relative; in-law] living with him on the farm.’ Succession indeed was fought for, and there were instances when the associations defended the right of the widow of a member to continue in occupancy – on the basis usually that she hired an assistant until a son was able to take over. For example, in a resolution adopted at a ‘large and enthusiastic’ meeting called to consider removal of ‘Widow Egan and her son from a farm at Aggard, Craughwell, herds pledged to ‘sustain young Egan on the land of his birth where his father worked for forty years’.[70] Generally, rights of tenure for herds were asserted on the same basis as those of tenant farmers, so, while contracts of employment generally included a clause obliging the herd ‘to give up possession of cottage by one month’s notice,’ the prevailing attitude was that no herd should be removed without grave reason.[71]
The attention to eligibility for membership arose from a desire to exclude potentially controversial individuals, who might place their association in conflict with tenant farmers’ leagues. Thus, the Tuam rule prohibiting members from acting ‘as bailiff, rent warmer, or caretaker, unless the land be conacred.’ A key objective of herds was to have their position accepted in the community, notwithstanding the public opprobrium that surrounded grazing itself. Their associations, therefore, cheerfully endorsed the policies of the farmers’ leagues, even to the extent of being critical of grazing itself on occasion. They certainly did not wish to have to protect members who offended against popular notions of propriety with regard to land, notions they themselves might have shared. While there were certainly herds who accepted unpopular and controversial responsibilities, herds’ associations excluded such people, regarding them in the same light as unionised artisans regarded ‘colts’ or gobáns. Resolutions adopted at herds’ meetings and statements in the local press confirmed the cultural orthodoxy of the members, by reflecting the political language of the tenant movements. Dismissed herds, therefore, were ‘evicted herds’; those who took on dismissed herds’ responsibilities were ‘herd grabbers.’[72]
But if the herds’ associations adapted well to rural circumstance, they were highly conscious of the need to guard their own particular interests. A resolution adopted at a meeting in Bullaun marking the tenth anniversary of the association in that area stressed its independence, the legitimacy of its members’ position, and its commitment to broader national and agrarian, as well as labour, causes: ‘That working as an independent body for the past ten years, side by side with the tenant farmers, labourers and mechanics who desire a native parliament, we claim an honest recognition by the Irish Parliamentary Party.’ Several other rural labour bodies that had emerged at the same time as the herds’ association had been absorbed by the tenant-dominated nationalist movement and had their own particular agendas ignored.[73] The herds resisted the temptation to do the same, notwithstanding the fact that their circumstances were closer to tenant farmers’ than were those of other agricultural employees
Two years later, at Bullaun, the recognition demanded was given when two nationalist land-warrior MPs, John Roche of East Galway, and David Sheehy of South Galway, were the ‘the first MPs ever to stand on a platform of the Shepherds Association.’ Impressed by this achievement of their ‘South Galway brethren,’ the Tuam herds resolved to invite their own MP, Colonel Nolan, to attend a demonstration.[74] Police reports during the following years confirmed the continuing existence of a herds association,[75] attributing its relative quiescence to the fact that the ‘principles for which it was formed have not hitherto been seriously meddled with.’[76]
Renewed activity in 1899 was prompted by the emergence of the UIL. Just as its predecessor had done with labourers’ organisations in 1882, it urged the herds to throw in their lot with it, but the herds were determined to remain independent. For the authorities, up to then concerned about the herds’ movement, it now represented a ‘certain antidote’ to the redistributionist impulse of the tenant movement, and, in November 1900, a police officer predicted that ‘clash’ between the two bodies was inevitable. This did not transpire. Rather, William Duffy, David Sheehy’s successor as MP for South Galway, spoke at a meeting of herds at Kilrickle in the following month,[77] urging them to join the UIL. They did not do so immediately, but there was cooperation between herds and the UIL in the Woodlawn area when Lord Ashtown replaced his own herds with Scotsmen.[78]
There was a final flurry of meetings of herdsmen in 1903-04, in response to the important Wyndham Act, which facilitated the transfer of land ownership from landlord to tenant, while making provision also for certain estate workers. Both before and after the legislation was introduced, there were meetings in East Galway, in North Mayo, and in Roscommon, where demands were made that herds not be overlooked – that they be ‘put on the same footing as tenant farmers.’[79] The absence of further reports suggests that the herds abandoned their own associations at that point, and that they began to assert their claims to share in the land reform through the United Irish League (UIL). The process was a difficult and protracted one, and local papers as well as police reports contain many accounts of attacks on herds, as the people of rural Ireland competed for scarce acres.[80] Generally, the victims of such attacks were individuals who were acting as rent warmers or bailiffs on controversial properties, rather than the more settled category of herds represented by herds’ associations. In the grazing heartland of eastern Connacht, established herds successfully made the transition to farmer in the following decade or so. According to tradition, moreover, they did well as far as the allocation of land was concerned, generally getting ‘a big farm out of the landlord’s property,’ in the words of one informant.[81] In their new role, herds continued to place their attested skills in veterinary matters and in the judging of animals at the disposal of their neighbours. Many of them (and their descendants), evidently, became noted breeders of cattle and sheep.[82]
*
The herds of Galway and Roscommon were remarkable in many respects. They were not the only rural workers who acted to maintain archaic working methods – harvesters in the south-east had smashed reaping machines and scythes fitted with ‘cradles’ in 1858 in a vain effort to protect the sickle from obsolescence[83] – but they were singularly successful in this regard. Indeed, not only did they keep their collops and their freedoms but through sustained organisation and collective action, they were able to standardise and to considerably improve their value. Their associations were also able to protect individuals members from victimisation by employers. In both respects they were unusual among Irish rural trade union in the nineteenth century, which were characteristically ‘spontaneous, fragile and ephemeral.’[84] The herds’ success was clearly attributable to their capacity to organise, but why were herds, especially those in Co. Galway, better at maintaining their organisations than almost all other rural workers? The main reason was that their bargaining position was much better than that of ordinary labourers, so there were clear benefits to be derived from organisation. Herds were unusually skilled, and could not be easily replaced, and in this respect they benefited from solidarity in rural Ireland, among one another most importantly, but also from small and middling farmers. It was by no means inevitable that herds should have had the sympathy of tenant farmers, for, given their position in the rural economy, they might have been pushed into the landlord/grazier camp in the course of the land war. Their associations were careful therefore to ensure that the membership was restricted to those conforming with the ‘unwritten law’ of the countryside. At the same time, and unlike most other rural labour bodies, they remained independent of the tenant farmers’ leagues until the 1903 land act meant that this was no longer expedient. In terms of organising themselves, herds also benefitted from a confidence that came status and from routinely exercising responsibility in their employment. Moreover, by comparison with rural labourers, herds’ working conditions and relatively high living standards facilitated an organisational culture among them. They could come and go without getting permission from an employer, and most of them owned a horse to take them to and from meetings.
[1] Royal Commission on Labour: the agricultural labourer, vol. iv, Ireland, pt.iii, report on the Loughrea Union by Roger C. Richards, 1893-94, House of Commons, vol. xxxvii, p. 21.
[2] ibid.
[3] J. Forde et al, The district of Loughrea, vol.ii: folklore,1860-1960, Loughrea History Project, 2003, p. 255.
[4] The agricultural labourer, Richards report, p. 23
[5] S. Clark, Social origins of the Irish land war, Princeton 1979, p. 118.
[6] P. Bew, Conflict and conciliation in Ireland, 1890-1914: Parnellites and radical agrarians, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, passim; D.S. Jones, Graziers, land reform, and political conflict in Ireland, Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995, pp. 176-84; J. Cunningham, Labour in the west of Ireland: working life and struggle, 1890-1914, Belfast: Athol Books, 1995, pp. 42-46.
[7] Royal Commission on Labour, Richards’s report, p. 21.
[8] ibid., pt.iv, report of Arthur Wilson Fox on the Castlereagh union, p. 97
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid., p. 92.
[11] ibid., reports of W.P. O’Brien on Naas union, p.44, and on Cashel union, p.65.
[12] ibid., O’Brien report on Ennistymon, p. 53
[13] ibid., Wilson Fox report, pp. 90, 92, 97.
[14] J. Cunningham, Unlikely radicals: Irish post-primary teachers and the ASTI, 1909-2009, Cork: Cork University Press, 2009, p.7.
[15] Series of conservations with Tom Glynn (1916-2003), whose father and his antecedents were herds for O’Rourkes at Mullaghmore, Moylough, Co. Galway.
[16] According to P.W. Joyce (Social history of ancient Ireland, Phoenix, Dublin 1903, vol.ii, pp.281-83), animals were classified in Brehon law as follows with regard to the regulation of grazing rights, ‘the cow being taken as the unit’: two geese are equivalent to a sheep; two sheep to one dairt or one year old heifer; two dairts to one colpthach or two-year-old heifer; two colpthachs to one cow; a cow and a colpthach to one ox.’ See also F. Kelly, Early Irish farming: a study based mainly on the law texts of the 7th and 8th centuries A.D., Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1997, pp. 182-87, 442-44.
[17] B. Ó Dálaigh, ‘The Lucas Diary, 1740-41,’ Analecta Hibernica, no. 40, 2007, p. 118.
[18] H. Dutton, A statistical and agricultural survey of the county of Galway, with observations on the means of improvement, Dublin 1824; E. Wakefield, An account of Ireland, statistical and political, 2 vols., London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812, vol.ii, p. 749. I am indebted to Cathal Smith for this reference.
[19] Poor Inquiry (Ireland) Appendix D. ‘Baronial Examinations relative to Earnings of Labourers ... and supplement containing answers to Questions 1 to 12 circulated by the commissioners,’ House of Commons, 1836, vol. xxxii.
[20] ibid., passim.
[21] ibid., p.2.
[22] ibid., p.3.
[23] ibid., pp.31, 37.
[24] ibid., pp. 6, 64, 65, 86, 104.
[25] ibid., p. 29.
[26] ibid., pp. 24, 136. See also pp. 7, 25, 33.
[27] ibid., p.13; A.T. Lucas, Cattle in ancient Ireland, Kilkenny: Boethius Press, 1981, pp. 20-21.
[28] Responses to Q.11 of the Poor Inquiry supplement: ‘Are wages usually paid in money, or provisions, or by conacre? or in what other way?’
[29] K. Whelan, ‘Settlement and society in eighteenth century Ireland,’ in G. Dawe & J. Wilson, eds, The poet’s place, Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991, pp.45-62.
[30] Jones, Graziers, pp.32-4
[31] ibid., pp.42-61, 139-58.
[32] Irish Times, 9 October 1861; P. Melvin, ‘Estates and gentry around Loughrea,’ in Forde et al, Loughrea history, pp.46-47; Cunningham, J., ‘“A spirit of self-preservation”: herdsmen around Loughrea in the late nineteenth century.’ Forde et al, The district of Loughrea, vol.i: history, 1791-1918, Loughrea History Project, 2003, pp. 464-66; Mark Thomas, ‘Dartfield House,’ in ‘Abandoned Ireland’, http://www.abandonedireland.com/Dartfield_House.html, accessed 20 April 2011.
[33] P. Bew,, Land and the national question in Ireland, 1858-82, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1978, pp. 191-216; P. Bull, Land, politics and nationalism: a study of the Irish land question, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996, pp. 88-110.
[34] The agricultural labourer, report of Roger C. Richards, p. 49.
[35] ibid., p.21; Report of the Royal Commission on the Land Law (Ireland) Act, 1881, and the Purchase of Land (Ireland) Act, 1885, House of Commons, 1887, vol. xxvi, par.12200-201.
[36] CSORP, 1882/23402 and 1882/37691; The Nation, 25 February 1882; Roscommon Journal, 24 June 1882; Roscommon Messenger, 9 September 1882; F. Lane, ‘Rural labourers, social change and politics in late nineteenth century Ireland,’ Lane & Ó Drisceoil, eds, Politics and the Irish working class: 1830-1930, 1830-1945, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 124-29, 131.
[37] Roscommon Messenger, 4 March 1882.
[38] CSORP 1882/36108
[39] Roscommon Messenger, 6 May, 16 September 1882, 3, 24 March 1883; Roscommon Journal, 3 June 1882,; 1901 census, household schedule of James Scott, Carns; The Nation, 18, 25 February, 18 March, 1, 8, 15 April, 6, 27 May, 3, 10 June, 1, 8 Jul, 12 August, 16, 23, 30 September 1882.
[40] L. Perry Curtis, Jr., ‘Landlord responses to the Irish Land War, 1879-87,’ Eire-Ireland: Journal of Irish Studies, Fall-Winter, 2003.
[41] The Nation, 8 April 1882; Roscommon Journal, 6 May 1882.
[42] Roscommon Herald 20, 27 May 1882; Roscommon Journal, 3 June 1882.
[43] CSORP, 1882/37691; The Nation, 8 April 1882.
[44] Roscommon Messenger, 4 March 1882, The Nation, 15 July 1882.
[45] CSORP, 1882/37691
[46] Roscommon Messenger, 9, 16 September, 23 December 1882, 6 January 1883
[47] Freeman’s Journal, 25 September 1882.
[48] Roscommon Messenger, 9 September, 23 December 1882.
[49] ibid., 9 September 1882. Pro fidelibis defunctis, which is part of a prayer said for the dead, translates ‘For the faithful departed.’
[50] Roscommon Messenger, 24 March 1883, Roscommon Herald, 28 April 1883.
[51] Royal Commission on Labour, Wilson Fox report, p. 95.
[52] Roscommon Journal, 2 July, 10 September 1904.
[53] Cunningham, ‘Herdsmen around Loughrea,’ pp. 457-95.
[54] Western News, 24 June 1882.
[55] CSORP, 1882/24208.
[56] Galway Express, 15, 22 July 1882.
[57] The Nation, 24 September 1881
[58] Royal Commission on the Land Law, 1887, par.12200-202.
[59] Public Records Office, London, CO 904/16, Irish crimes records: Register of home associations: ‘Memorandum as to the working of the Shepherds or Herds Association of County Galway WR,’ pp.401/1-5; 1891 Census.
[60] Royal Commission on Labour, Richards’s report, pp 21, 23.
[61] Pádraig G. Lane, ‘Agricultural Labourers and Rural Violence, 1850-1914,’ Studia Hibernica, no. 27, 1993, pp 83-84.
[62] Cunningham, ‘Herdsmen around Loughrea,’ pp 470-71.
[63] Tuam News, 30 May 1884.
[64] ibid., 27 February 1885, 21 August 1891.Western News, 19 May 1888;
[65] Galway Observer, 5 December 1891.
[66] Tuam News, 13 July 1894.
[67] Divisional Commisioners and County Inspectors Reports (DCCI), CO 904/16, Information on Herds Association in Ballyvaughan and Ennis district, November 1892. For an account of the grazing economy in Clare, see Brendan Ó Cathaoir, ‘Another Clare: ranchers and moonlighters, 1700-1945,’ in M. Lynch & P. Nugent, eds, Clare: History & Society, Dublin: Geography Publications, 2008, pp. 359-423.
[68] Tuam News, 13 November 1891.
[69] ibid, 12 February 1892; Western News, 24 June 1882.
[70] Tuam News, 21 July 1893. See also Tuam Herald 22 May 1897.
[71] The agricultural labourer, Wilson Fox report, p.100.
[72] Tuam News, 21 July 1893, 19 July 1895.
[73] ibid., 8 July 1892; F. Lane, ‘Rural labourers,’ pp. 129-35; Pádraig G. Lane, ‘Agricultural labourers and the land question,’ in C. King, ed., Famine, land and culture in Ireland, Dublin, UCD Press, 2000, pp 105-09.
[74] Tuam News, 6, 13 July 1894.
[75] DCCI, CO 904/58, Galway East Riding, February, September, November 1895; CO 904/59, June-December, 1896, January-June 1897.
[76] DCCI, CO 904/69, Galway East Riding, January 1900.
[77] Inspector General’s Monthly Confidential report, Box 2, Galway East Riding, October 1899; DCCI, CO 904/71, Galway Esat Riding, November 1900, CO 904/72, December 1900.
[78] Cunningham, ‘Herdsmen around Loughrea,’ pp. 475-76.
[79] Western News, 4 July 1903; Western People 14 February 1903; 13 February 2004; Roscommon Journal, 2 July, 10 September 1904
[80] A. Varley, ‘The politics of agrarian reform: the state, nationalists and the agrarian question in the west of Ireland, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Illinois University at Carbondale, 1994, pp. 96-286.
[81] Forde et al, Loughrea folklore, p.255. This evidence was supported by conversations.with Tom Glynn.
[82] Beatrice Bill Talbot & John Lenihan, And that’s no lie [memoir of Roscommon herd’s son], Cambridge, Mass: Houghton Mifflin, 1946, p. 53; Tom Glynn conversations.
[83] J.W. Boyle, ‘’A marginal figure: the Irish rural labourer,; in Clark & Donnelly, eds, Irish Peasants: violrnce and political unrest, 1780-1914, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1983, pp 316-18
[84] F. Lane, ‘Rural labourers, p. 115.