Depending on your age and on whether you’re Irish, men and women who were out and about in the 1920s were your great-grandparents or your great-great-grandparents. They are the people who stare gravely out at you from photographs, afraid to smile. They can look like a stern lot and can make you feel vaguely uneasy.
And yet, when they were young, these very same people were seen by the Irish bishops as verging on immorality and wildness, needing only the slightest prompting to fall into sin.
I am indebted for the information on this phenomenon to Jim Smyth who, as a sociology lecturer in Queen's University, Belfast, wrote about this subject in History Ireland in the early 1990s (bit.ly/jimsmyth).
Back in 1924, the bishops were issuing pastorals to their congregations complaining about immodest dress, and indecent dancing, especially in unlicensed venues. Dirty dancing at the crossroads, I suppose.
A lot of these dances took place in private houses; a big tradition in rural Ireland until it was suppressed in the late 1930s. At these events you might have people dancing in one room and playing cards in another. They added life and gaiety to the countryside.
Sometimes people paid to get into the house dances and the money might go to pay for a funeral, or for a passage to the US, according to an article in History Studies, the journal of the history society of the University of Limerick, by Gerard Dooley (bit.ly/gerarddooley).
But the bishops saw house dances as promoting “company keeping”; in other words, men and women going out with each other.
Often the dances were broken up by the parish priest. My father told me about a house dance in the parish on which the priest descended only to be told to “eff off” by one of the dancers. Such defiance was so unheard of that my father remembered it many decades later.
Into this mix came two additional threats: the motor car and jazz music. The bishops saw jazz as a huge threat to morality and even claimed that in the US, jazz caused suicide among young women.
But the people wanted jazz and they got it from private dance halls, in spite of the condemnation by the bishops. For instance, in 1930 Thomas Street in Waterford had no fewer than three dance halls.
As for the motor car, Smyth quotes Cardinal McCrory warning that “by bicycle, motor car and bus, boys and girls can now travel great distances to dances, with the result that a dance in the quietest country parish may now be attended by unsuitables from a distance”.
Many people swallowed the bishops’ line on jazz. For example, in January 1934 an estimated 3,000 mostly young people showed up at a demonstration in Mohill, Co Leitrim, to protest against jazz, carrying banners with such slogans as “Down with jazz” and “Out with paganism”.
Radio Éireann, God bless it, allowed jazz to be played occasionally on sponsored programmes. Because the then minister for finance, Seán MacEntee, refused to stop this, the secretary of the Gaelic League complained that he “has a soul buried in jazz and is selling the musical soul of the nation for the dividends of sponsored jazz programmes. He is jazzing every night of the week.” County councils passed resolutions condemning jazz.
The private dances were eventually legislated against in 1935, though Smyth doubts whether the legislation was thoroughly enforced. Nonetheless, many people did end up in court for holding dances in their homes. It is possible, in my view, that this suppression of house dances by the State at the behest of the bishops was the start of the decline of rural Ireland: socially, it must have torn the heart out of it.
While much of this seems amusing now, it was part of a grim system of sexual repression that took the joy out of many lives. I don’t know whether my own great-grandparents on either side of the family defied the bishops and enjoyed their jazz. But I hope they did.
pomorain@yahoo.com Padraig O'Morain is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.