Mná na hÉireann PART 3

Survival & Celebration In 19th Century Irish Art

& Poetry & Song

LINEN Making transformed ULSTERThe Linen Board was formed with

public money in Dublin in 1711 to regulate the growing industry.

In the second half of the century, production expanded dramatically, and by 1800 linen exports had risen to between 35 million and 40 million yards.

Early linen production was not industrialised. It centred on farm-family units, with the whole household involved in planting and harvesting the flax, the women and girls spinning it into yarn and the men weaving the yarn into cloth. FLAX

Linen transformed Ulster in other ways too Hunger for land to grow flax led to destruction of the last of the great Ulster >>>forests that had terrified Tudor (16th century) armies: the last wolf in the Sperrin Mountains was killed in the 1760s.

The population rose rapidly: between 1753 and 1791 the number of households paying hearth tax in Ulster doubled.

This rapid change produced new social tensions, including militant protests in 1771–2 by groups called the Hearts of Oak and Hearts of Steel, enraged by bad harvests, taxes and rent rises.

Emigration to Colonial America from Ulster peaked in the 1770s; In the1780s sectarian tensions rose, especially in Co. Armagh, now

the most populous county in Ireland, here the Protestant Peep O’Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders engaged in low-level warfare.

These tensions were fuelled, ironically, by the very success of the linen trade, as Catholic and Protestant weavers competed for business.

Youghal lace collar, Co Cork 1906

• Within five years, the convent had developed a regular lace-making school.

• By turn of century, up to 70 women and girls were making needlepoint and crochet laces at Youghal Lace Co-operative, with many others working at home.

• Young women didn’t make fortunes from these delicate skills, but their earnings were highly significant in households with very limited incomes. •They gave young women a degree of economic value and independence they would not otherwise have enjoyed, and many young women used their savings from lace-making to buy their tickets to the US.

In 1847 a nun at the Presentation convent in Youghal, Mary Anne Smith, ‘conceived the idea of getting up some kind of industrial occupation amongst the poor children attending the convent school such as would help them to earn a livelihood or, at least, keep them from starving’.

Patchwork 1892James Brenan

Woman sews in the time honored tradition of using scraps of material to give other worn clothes an extra lease of life.

Painting is full of charm and interesting details of the architecture, clothing and artifacts of small farmhouse in Co Cork in1890s.

In a Fisherman’s Hut 1844Alfred Downing Fripp

A poor Claddagh (Galway) cabin. Boiled potatoes are strained in a shallow basket (a skib –’sciob’ ) in front—traditional substitute for a table—eat potatoes with bare hands.

Dresser was main status symbol in Irish cabin –this one empty indicating poverty and hunger rather than pride.

Barefoot woman sits with her back to the loft ladder, with a child on her knee as she sews. Above her head hang fishing nets which the women spun and knotted themselves.

Cottage Interior, Claddagh, Galway 1845Francis William Topham

Bareheaded woman holds a baby while her mother mends a net just behind them. She has tied the net onto a loft ladder to keep it off the floor.

A rare window onto the unique social and material culture of the west of Ireland before the Famine.

Sympathy 1847

Rev John Rooney (alias Joannes

Clericus)A mother in red petticoat, pauses from spinning flax to consider what her daughter has brought.

Girl reveals a dead bird, symbolic of famine death.

Painter was concerned for the poor. He was no longer a practicing Catholic priest and adopted pseudonym lest his paintings be rejected.

The Postwoman 1860Stephen O’Driscoll

The Postwoman “Del” in large bonnet, shawl, overcoat carries leather satchel and large lidded wicker basket.

Location is inscribed ‘Kingsbridge’, either the railway station, Dublin which opened 1844, or on Kingsbridge Road, Cork.

Artist, a lithographer and silhouette portrait artist in Cork, specialized in silhouette paintings.

The Dispensary Doctor, West of Ireland Howard Helmick 1883

Uneasy young woman holds hat of man whose head is being dressed by doctor on the right—horsewhip on boarded floor suggests a fight with the other man on the left whose head is bandaged.

The London Times reviewer ignored the artist’s sympathy: “Mr Helmick has handled the perpetual comedy of Irish life with his usual delicacy and success.”

“A few anxious individuals were standing around the doorway of a dispensary, as if the medicines given them could supply the life and strength which their poor food and hard lives could not afford.”