FROM THE ARCHIVES:Myles na gCopaleen took issue with some enduring Irish traits in this column 60-odd years ago. –
It is many years now, of course, but when I originally took over the Santry estate and carried out my famous “clearance” – some 200 peasants had to take ship for distant Barbadoes [sic] to make way for the Jersey herd – I was frankly appalled at the mentality of the people in whose midst I had come, at a late hour, to think and dwell.
They feared the ancient rite of washing, preferred rags to clothes, and of diet would have none but tea, potatoes and scones. But most extraordinary of all was their attitude to money. Such coins as they garnered they did not regard anywise as a medium of exchange but rather as holy medals, to be hidden securely in socks and horsehair mattresses.
Socks were never used for putting on the feet, and I think most of the sleeping was done on the earthen floor. According to my gardener, who came down with Max Nurock in ’08 after being first in “Greats”, the name given to this philosophy was the “Poor Mouth”. In those days myself and Horace Plunkett were passing through a painful phase of idealism, learning Irish (even teaching it to Sir John Purser Griffith) and seeking tirelessly to raise the methods of Irish husbandry from the level prevailing in 800 A.D.
I went to work on my own tenantry, starting my tanneries, weaving schools, poultry farms, introduced thoroughbred wheat strains, even founded great mulberry plantations for the cult of silk worms. Now I fear I was needlessly interfering with nature. The peasants were probably happy the way they were, whereas now they are merely prosperous.
These thoughts came to mind (of all places) the other Sunday when I read an article by Mr. P. S. O’Hegarty in a newspaper issued by Mr. Hector Legge, , whom I regard as the Achilles Heel of the publishing house he serves. Mr. O’Hegarty’s points are fairly clear. Whatever money is for, he asserts, it is not for spending. In no circumstances should money be spent on public works.
A County Council which is guilty of this offence is “a spendthrift” and “a squanderer”.
There is a Lancashire proverb – “clogs to clogs in three generations”. There is still living in Ireland after all the centuries tens of thousands of people who never even attained to clogs. Many of them are refugees from the squalor of agriculture, but no matter how grand their town house they can never eradicate the inner gnaw of conscience, the conviction that they are apostates.
Provided a thing is small, mean, shoddy, provided the procedure is slovenly, makeshift and parsimonious, provided there is no question of “taking pleasure” in anything, then is there an inundation of their grudging wintry approval. Wouldn’t Dublin be the fine place if their likes had built it? I need hardly observe that these crushed eccentrics regard themselves as “the people”.