During the early 1950s the remnants of the Monsell family decided to sell their Tervoe Estate in west Limerick. The Monsells had been big landowners in the region since the mid-1600s. They were also at various stages significant players in British and imperial politics. One of them, William Monsell, had been an MP for Limerick between 1847-1873 as well as under-secretary for the colonies.

Unionist in politics, (though later converts to Catholicism) politically their time had passed by 1922. But it was still over 30 years after independence before they finally divested of their Limerick holdings. Cement Ltd, which ran a plant nearby at Mungret, purchased some of the land, while many of the former Monsell tenants were accommodated on parts of the estate by the Land Commission.

The Land Commission was a very significant institution in independent Ireland. With almost every story of its workings there were tales of disappointment and the division of the Monsell lands was no exception. One of the estate’s labourers, James Hanley, received nothing and though he later worked on the part of the farm bought by Cement Ltd, his failure to secure a holding remained a source of disappointment.

Though Hanley (the reviewer’s grandfather) worked on a farm, he was not a farmer. He was an agricultural labourer, a class which on the eve of the Famine numbered over one million. By 1911 just 250,000 remained, but they played a significant role in the militancy of the revolutionary era, some 60,000 joining the Irish Transport Union as it expanded into rural Ireland. In 1920 the Royal Irish Constabulary Gazette would complain that the police officer had once been “a vastly superior man to (the) agricultural labourer ... yet, behold how they have advanced!”

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However, by the time of Jim Hanley’s disappointment, the farm labourers had almost vanished as a category. A recognition of the class stratification of rural Ireland is one of the strengths of this new book. Myles Dungan is an accomplished writer of popular histories, as well as the engaging presenter of the excellent History Show on RTÉ Radio 1. This is his most ambitious book yet, over 500 pages spanning a similar number of years. It is written for a popular audience and is all the better for that.

Dungan has little time for what he considers nationalist mythology, though he usually recognises that people held on to certain “myths” because they had a basis in their own experience. As the title suggests he takes it as read that it was the struggle for land that “shaped Irish history”. Indeed, while acknowledging the importance of other factors in the “upheaval that produced political independence in 1922″, he still asserts that “while the land was not all that mattered, once you got beyond the largely symbolic shibboleths of identity and allegiance, it might just as well have been”.

It is true that the land question was often central to political mobilisation in Ireland. Some historians have suggested that it was the substantive ‘settling’ of this issue following the Land War that took the revolutionary edge out of the movement for independence. Paul Bew, whose work, along with that of James Donnelly and Terence Dooley, informs much of the book’s assertions, praises Dungan for getting to the “heart of the Irish obsession with land”.

But is there really a specifically Irish obsession with land? And does that explain everything from the conservative outcome of the Irish revolution to the “real estate obsession” of the Celtic Tiger era? In his introduction Dungan summons up “The Bull” McCabe of The Field to illustrate this point. There is a McCabe relevant who is here, but it is the economic historian Conor rather than John B Keane’s creation.

In his 2011 book The Sins of The Father, McCabe argued convincingly that “there is no Irish property-owning gene. It is not part of our DNA.” The development of Irish capitalism since 1922 has more to do with our housing crisis than a fixation about property ownership.

To see land as a specifically Irish obsession is to ignore that fact that it was often industrial Britain that was the outlier in Europe, not Ireland. Land questions were central, for example, to the Russian Empire, with peasant agitation ever present in Russia, Ukraine and Poland. The Social Revolutionaries won a mass following among the Russian peasantry by promising land redistribution. Their rivals the Bolsheviks stole much of their thunder by demanding “Peace, Land, and Bread” in 1917. The violence of the Spanish revolution in 1936 had much to do with the fierce hatred of the country’s peasantry for the landlord class that brutally exploited them. The Austro-Hungarian empire saw upheavals over land and southern Italy was wracked by agrarian problems. Farmers’ parties were represented in parliaments across Europe.

Even in the United States during the 1890s and again in the 1930s, farmers (sometimes in alliance with workers) produced powerful protest movements. And this is without even considering the importance of land to popular movements in Asia, South American and Africa. In India for example, peasant movements have played a big part in politics, both pre and post-independence.

There is nothing unique about Ireland. The memory of Cromwellian dispossession is not the reason we all want to own our own homes. But while this assumption weakens Dungan’s overall argument, you have to admire his ambition to tell a story that features agrarian secret societies across the centuries, several famines, brutal feuds and a variety of forms of resistance to landlordism. He integrates work by a variety of historians into a lively narrative.

His outline of the division of Irish rural society in the mid-1800s echoes that of Virginia Crossman when she argued that in Ireland “people had a very clear idea of their place in society relative to other people, and the importance of maintaining this. If landowners tended to see all tenants as members of the lower classes broadly defined, middling and large tenant farmers regarded themselves as belonging to a very different social category from small tenants and labourers, and were anxious to enforce this sense of difference through adherence to concepts such as respectability. The poor, and more particularly the destitute, were regarded by the better off as almost beyond class ...”

That intense class division could be obscured by assertions like those of CS (Todd) Andrews who claimed that “apart from the usual tendency of tuppence-halfpenny to look down on tuppence, the Irish nation in the mass was a classless society. There was no social immobility based on birth or inherited wealth.” This tendency to see class in rural Ireland as being primarily about Anglo-Irish landowners and their tenants survives. It was graphically if rather pathetically illustrated by former Fine Gael minister James Reilly’s claim that his ability to purchase a Georgian mansion and sleep in a bed made for King George IV, represented a triumph for the plain people against the ascendancy; “Feck you, Your Majesty; Paddy is back.”

Dungan’s book, at least, shows that the reality was more complicated. He devotes significant attention to the War of Independence and illustrates how different types of land agitation played out in this period. While republicans were broadly sympathetic to labour struggles they were much more wary of land disputes that had the potential to fracture the separatist coalition, fearing that people would be “diverted from the struggle for freedom by a class war”.

How this could play out at local level is illustrated by an example which also featured in Dungan’s last book Four Killings. During 1920, an IRA volunteer, Mark Clinton, was shot dead as part of a land dispute in Co Meath. Local republicans alleged a gang called “The Black Hand” were responsible and William Gordon, a war veteran, was abducted and shot in response. It is a measure of the complexity of any case involving land that a rival account exists which contradicts Dungan’s version. Cavan republican Bryan Finnegan and his family asserted that there was no “Black Hand” gang and that Clinton was actually killed by other IRA Volunteers as part of a dispute between smallholders and large farmers. In their view, Gordon was simply a convenient scapegoat.

This book serves as a lively introduction to a huge topic. It should lead readers to want to find out more about the Ladies’ Land League, to discover how young Irish domestic servants in the United States helped fund land agitation in Ireland and how the radical Henry George influenced Michael Davitt. They might be inspired too to read Kevin Kenny’s Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, Breandán Mac Suibhne’s The End of Outrage or listen to Terry Dunne’s Peelers and Sheep podcasts. Suggesting “land is all that matters” can seem like a statement of the obvious given the consensus that exists about this in Ireland. But a strong argument can be made for a general history of this country called “class is all that matters”. Perhaps someone should write one.

Brian Hanley’s latest book is The Impact of the Troubles on the Republic of Ireland, 1968-79: boiling volcano? (Manchester University Press, 2018).

Further Reading

Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War (Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series, 2021) by Niall Whelehan, examines a key feature of mobilisation during the Land War, that of the Irish abroad, from emigrant women in Dundee to “exiles in the Argentine Republic”. Ideas too, travelled across borders. Land and Liberalism: Henry George and the Irish Land War (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Andrew Phemister, argues that not only did George’s ideas resonate in Ireland, but the Irish struggles also inspired radical American thinkers. Social division at local level is crucial to Brian Casey’s study focusing on Ballinasloe, Class and Community in Provincial Ireland, 1851-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Casey looks at the experiences of small farmers, labourers and graziers during a period of great change. Intra-class tensions, this time in Kerry, are also vividly brought to life by Donnacha Seán Lucey’s Land, Popular Politics and Agrarian Violence: the case of County Kerry 1872-86 (UCD Press, 2011).