"PUT it down through you, do you hear?" is what one mother says to her teenage daughter in Sylvia Cullen's new play; Broken Ground, when she reads in her eyes that she has been raped, has had a child, and has put that child up for adoption. It is an expression Cullen heard from women in their 60s during the six weeks of research she put into the play: "It was how their mothers taught them to deal with pain."

Broken Ground was written because the Artistic Director of the Clonmel-based Galloglass Theatre Company, Theresia Guschlbauer, could not find the story of rural women in contemporary Irish drama. She approached Cullen, a young writer from a rural background in Co Waterford, who relished the challenge. The writer and her director, Fiona Quinn, interviewed more than 100 women in Limerick, Tipperary and Clare, to weave together the play.

"There were women from Macra groups and the Irish Countrywoman's Association groups, liberal and conservative," Cullen explains. At the end of their consultations, the two presented a scene to a group of 10 women, who would give them feedback on what had become, in Cullen's words, "an epic play, taking the whole sweep of the 20th century, telling the story of three generations of women".

It was epic, alright, in the version which played on Friday at the Knockinrawley Resource Centre in Tipperary town to an invited audience of women. Day turned into night as the play steamed along for three and a half hours with only a 15-minute break for cigarettes and consciousness-raising; one cast member was calling the performance "the emotional Olympics". But the audience's attention barely wavered, because what was being said on stage rang so true.

"Everyone would know someone in that play," said Catherine Sharpe, a young mother from the Cairdeas Women's Group in the town.

Broken Ground gives a sad and often savage picture of rural Irish women's lives over the last century. The cast of three who helped devise the play, Peg Power, in her 60s, Nuala Walsh, in her 40s and Tracey Downes, in her 20s, play women who are held down by their poverty and their fertility. They are also held down, however by mysterious ties of love and hatred, particularly towards their daughters. They seem determined their daughters will not know a better life than theirs.

In the play Bridie, played from childhood to old age by Peg Power, is caused by the pain of having her child adopted to inflict further pain on a daughter born within marriage. She just cannot bear, for instance, to hold her daughter's first-born child, and rushes out of the ward promising to say a prayer for them in the chapel. Some kind of relief comes 20 years later, when she tells her grandchild about the hidden birth: "Grandmothers are much freer with their grand-daughters than they are with their own daughters," says cast member Nuala Walsh. "It's almost like the love they should have expressed to the daughters, they express to the grand-daughters."

The woman on whose story the adoption scene was based had kept her child for nine months, but she finally gave her up due to pressure from nuns, priests and even a bishop: "The break was much harder at that stage." says Quinn. "She had met the child again a year before we talked to her. Her daughter was 30.

The devising and rehearsal period have made Walsh confront the mother-daughter relationship, and to identify "the silent, suffering Irish mother". "It's basically the whole Virgin Mary thing," she says. "The suffering mother of Jesus Christ.

"The mother-daughter relationship is different because they're both women," she goes on. "There's empathy and there's also envy. A lot of mothers haven't had the lives they would have wanted, and they envy their daughters. The love, is always there, but it's masked."

Studies have shown that mothers wean their daughters earlier than their sons, and hold them less. Susie Orbach, in her book on anorexia, Hunger Strike, interprets these findings as a message from mothers to daughters not to expect too much of adult life in which they have been disappointed themselves. Mothers can also be overly fearful for their daughters, transmitting the message: "Be frightened of your body, it is always waiting to get you down."

There is plenty of evidence of these patterns in Galloglass's research. Mary Maher, a woman in her 50s who has three daughters, who took part in the devising of Broken Ground through the Cairdeas group, says: "No mother trusted her daughters. And each mother brought it with her that she wasn't trusted herself."

By "trust", she confirms, she means trust that she would not get pregnant outside marriage. "You can see in the play, Bridie's fear that her daughter will go down the same road she has gone," explains Catherine Sharpe. "My daughters are of a marriageable age, and I would trust them emphatically" says Mary. "But every time we went out the door, my mother feared for us. And now, you still do that."

NUALA Walsh has learned a lot about "the push and pull" of the mother-daughter relationship from her feelings towards her niece, intensified by the fact that her sister is dead: "Sometimes I'm resisting her growing up, and I'm not quite sure how to break out of it. I think she will. I experience that as a loss." She has felt the strength of the mother-daughter bond herself: " I had been living in London for many years and my mother, who was in Ireland, might as well have been living with me. The thought would come into my head `My mother would be so upset'."

Women's emotions were, of course, strongly affected by their financial powerlessness. Many of the women Cullen and Quinn talked to had experienced an epiphany when that powerlessness became evident to them: "One woman had bought a calf with her knitting money, and she had used the money she got to build extensions to the house. But she suddenly realised she didn't own it. And that changed her life. She became an instant feminist," Quinn says.

"Some of the most powerful women in rural Ireland were not seen to be in power," cautions Mary Maher. "Alice Taylor has shown that well. They held the purse-strings."

"Mothers teach their daughters to be powerful in a world where they can't be overtly powerful," Nuala Walsh adds. "It's a silent collusion that goes on between mothers and daughters."

While many of these patterns occurred, and still occur, throughout society, they were intensified in rural Ireland through an extreme combination of isolation and endless back-breaking manual work.

"Now," says Mary, "I think rural women have it all." When she married in 1964, hardly a house in the Glen of Aherlow had a bathroom. Breda MacCarthy, another young mother from the Cairdeas group, feels fear of change held up the arrival of modern comforts to rural Ireland for instance, her family didn't buy a milking machine for a long time, and it amazes her to think of her mother walking in and out to the nearest village, with the car sitting unused: "She couldn't drive it. She never even considered driving it. She just assumed it was there for the men.

THERE are treasures too, however - secrets Sylvia Cullen's women pass from generation to generation.

These are symbolised in a rusty tea-caddy of pieces of broken china of rich and exotic colours, mined from the broken ground through years of searching. These china pieces, or "chaneys", as they were called, were mined anew for the play from the recollections of Mary Maher, just one example of hidden women's lore uncovered by the Broken Ground process. "When I was a little girl I loved going out into the fields and picking up bits of old cups and jugs," explains Mary, to nods of recognition from Catherine and Breda. "My daughters did the same, digging bits of jugs out of ditches.

"I thought: `Whose life was this part of? Who touched this?'"