Forging the Border: Donegal and Derry in Times of Revolution, 1911–1940

By Okan Ozseker

Donegal was the bastion of Home Rule conservative nationalism during the tumultuous period 1911–25, while County Derry was a stronghold of hard-line unionism. In this time of immense political upheaval between these cultural and social majorities lay the deeply symbolic, religiously and ethnically divided, and potentially combustible, Derry City.

What had once been a distinct, unified, socio-economic and cultural area (to nationalists and unionists alike) became an international frontier or borderland, overshadowed by the bitter legacy of Partition. The region was the hardest hit by the implementation of Partition, affecting all levels of society.

This completely new interpretation of the history of the Irish north-west provides a fair and balanced portrait of a divided borderland and addresses key arguments in Irish history and the history of revolution, counter-revolution, feuds and state-building.

Ambitious and novel in its approach, Forging the Border: Donegal and Derry in Times of Revolution, 1911–1925 fills an important lacuna, and challenges long-held assumptions and beliefs about the road to partition in the north-west.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Irish Academic Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788550727

Okan Ozseker

Okan Ozseker completed his PhD in History in Ulster University, Coleraine, in 2017.

Book preview

FORGING the BORDER

FORGING the BORDER

DONEGAL AND DERRY IN

TIMES OF REVOLUTION

1911–1925

OKAN OZSEKER

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First published in 2019 by

Irish Academic Press

10 George’s Street

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Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.iap.ie

© Okan Ozseker, 2019

9781788550703 (Paper)

9781788550710 (Kindle)

9781788550727 (Epub)

9781788550734 (PDF)

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Typeset in Minion Pro 11/15 pt

Cover front: British military evacuating Letterkenny in 1922. (McGinley Collection)

Cover back: IRA Volunteers on the Donegal–Tyrone border, May 1922. (Belfast Telegraph)

CONTENTS

Maps

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Forging the Border: Donegal and Derry in Times of Revolution, 1911–25

1‘If Ulster Succeeds, Home Rule is Dead’: The Polarisation of Politics in the North-West, 1910–14

2‘A Matter of Life or Death’: The Militarisation of the North-West, 1910–14

3‘Donegal had Sent the Least Numbers of Men to Swell the Armies of Britain’: The Impact of the First World War on the North-West, Recruitment, Opposition and Apathy

4‘You have Let Hell Loose in Ireland’: Political Transformations, 1916–21

5‘Donegal is Awake in Earnest Now’: The IRA and the War of Independence

6‘Rumours that they were all Mad Cork Men with Lewis Guns’: The IRA and the War of Independence

7‘Derry is Quite Likely to be Destroyed’: Derry City, 1919–21

8‘I Came Up from the South of Ireland to Make You Buggers Fight’: The North-West from the Civil War to the Boundary Commission

9‘The Game is Up’: The North-West from the Civil War to the Boundary Commission

10‘A Microcosm of the Irish Question’

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Endnotes

Index

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PREFACE

This book explores the history of the north-west (Donegal, Derry/Londonderry) from 1911 to 1925 during a time of immense political upheaval. It examines political developments within nationalism and unionism, and their interplay with one another. The north-west was an important, though largely non-violent, part of Ireland during the Irish revolutionary period. Some commentators believed that during the Ulster crisis, the region was the most likely to be the nexus of conflict in Ireland. In the end, the First World War prevented the possibility of an outbreak of violence. It was noticeably loyal to Redmondism during the early part of the War though the region was, except for Derry city, a low recruiting area for the British army. It was not, however, an area where the IRB, the Irish Volunteers or Sinn Féin showed much support. The Irish Parliamentary Party’s acceptance of temporary partition in 1916 and the 1918 conscription crisis dealt serious blows to the party. The opposition of constitutional nationalists and a substantial unionist population restricted local IRA activity in the War of Independence. In the north-west, different local factors such as religious demography, geography, the persistence of clerical influence in politics and the resilience of conservative nationalism restricted republican violence unlike in southern counties. Even though the north-west was peripheral in the War of Independence, Donegal became a staging point for the northern offensive with both northerners fleeing across the border and southern fighters entering the county in an attempt to unite IRA factions in a common cause. This ill-thought-out attempt at reconciliation broke down. The fact that most of the local IRA was pro-Treaty and the outsiders were anti-Treaty caused great local anger in what was viewed as an unwanted and imported conflict. Nationalists placed great hope in the Boundary Commission. Northern nationalists were disappointed by the results and felt betrayed. Partition was entrenched and the north-west was divided between two different states.

ABBREVIATIONS

AOH (BOE)Ancient Order of Hibernians (Board of Erin)

AOH (IAA)Ancient Order of Hibernians (Irish American Alliance)

ASUActive Service Unit

BATTBattalion

BDEBrigade

BMHBureau of Military History

CABCabinet Records, TNA

CCColeraine Chronicle

CDBCongested Districts Board

CICounty Inspector, RIC

COColonial Office, TNA

CÓFLACardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich Memorial Library & Archive, Armagh

COYCompany

CPSClerk of Petty Sessions

CSOCentral Statistics Office

DDDonegal Democrat

DIDistrict Inspector

DIBDictionary of Irish Biography

DJDerry Journal

DP Derry People and Donegal News

DSDerry Standard

DVDonegal Vindicator

FJFreeman’s Journal

GAA Gaelic Athletic Association

GHQ General Headquarters

HA Home Affairs, PRONI

HO Home Office, TNA

HOC House of Commons

HR Home Rule

IGC Irish Grants Committee

IHS Irish Historical Studies

II Irish Independent

INL Irish Nation League

INTO Irish National Teachers’ Organisation

INV Irish National Volunteers

IPP Irish Parliamentary Party

IRA Irish Republican Army

IRB Irish Republican Brotherhood

IT Irish Times

ITGWU Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union

IVF Irish Volunteer Force

IWM Imperial War Museum

JP Justice of the Peace

KOYLI King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry

LS Londonderry Sentinel

LT London Times

MP Member of Parliament

MPF Military Pension File

MSPC Military Service Pension Collection

NA National Archives of Ireland

NAUL National Amalgamated Union of Labour

NC Northern Constitution

ND Northern Division

NEBB Northeast Boundary Bureau

NI Northern Ireland

NLI National Library of Ireland

NUDL National Union of Dock Labourers

O/C Officer Commanding

PA Parliamentary Archives

PR Proportional Representation

PRONI Public Records Office of Northern Ireland

RDC Rural District Council

RUC Royal Ulster Constabulary

SF Sinn Féin

TCD Trinity College Dublin

TD Teachta Dála, member of Dáil Éireann

TFP Ten Foot Pikes

TNA The National Archives, London

UCDAD University College Dublin Archives Department

UIL United Irish League

USC Ulster Special Constabulary

UUC Ulster Unionist Council

UVF Ulster Volunteer Force

WO War Office, TNA

WPF War Pension File

WS Witness Statement to Bureau of Military History

Note: By and large, the book has followed the IHS Convention when referring to Derry for the city and Londonderry for the county and parliamentary constituencies. Northern Ireland consists of six counties. The historic province of Ulster consists of nine counties. This includes the counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan.

INTRODUCTION

Forging the Border: Donegal and Derry in Times of Revolution, 1911–25

The Severed Region

In April 1926, Cumann na nGaedhael, the governing party of the recently created Irish Free State, held a convention in Letterkenny, County Donegal. It was attended by senior government ministers, Patrick Hogan and Patrick McGilligan. The meeting took place shortly after the suppression of the Boundary Commission report. According to a leak to the Morning Post, a London paper notoriously hostile to Irish nationalism, the Commission had produced a plan proposing only minor changes to the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. Indeed, while the minor proposed changes were broadly in favour of the Free State, part of East Donegal (heavily Protestant) was to be transferred to Northern Ireland. These findings, which were not officially published until the 1960s, went against popular expectations in the Irish Free State, which had expected a severe truncation of Northern Ireland with predominantly nationalist areas being transferred. No county in the newly independent state was more disappointed than Donegal. At the Cumann na nGael convention, Father O’Doherty, a local Catholic priest, gave expression to the position of Donegal under the new dispensation. He argued that County Donegal was:

One of the poorest in the Saorstát. They were aware that through legislation the only port of Donegal [Derry] has been filched away from them; and they were also aware that by process of legislation their railways had been so constructed as to form avenues of trade and commerce through Derry. Now, unlike other western counties like Mayo and Kerry who were in direct contact with the capital, Donegal was blockaded: they could not leave the county without passing through the Six Counties.¹

Indeed, as partition had become a reality in 1921, the then nationalist majority on Londonderry Corporation (who would be notoriously gerrymandered into a unionist majority in the 1920s) echoed the views of those in Donegal. Alderman Bradley, at a meeting with senior Sinn Féin figures in September 1921 including Éamon de Valera, stated:

Derry is the second city in Ulster and is by position, population and trade and industry, the capital of North West Ireland, it has the closest relations in business and other intercourse with Donegal from which the British Government proposed to separate it, at the same time separating Donegal from the rest of Ireland, and even from Ulster.²

Derry increasingly also found itself isolated from the northern government in the years following the conclusion of the Boundary Commission. As one study has noted, it was peripheral, lacked administrative convenience and it ‘could expect few favours from the new regime that was now being put in place’.³ The Civil War in the south, after June 1922, ended the northern campaign of the IRA.

The subject of this book is how politics, war and revolution severed the north-west between 1910 and 1925. This period, bookended by the two British general elections of 1910 and the consolidation of the partition of Ireland with the suppression of the Boundary Commission report in 1925, was one of immense political and social change in the two north-western counties of the island of Ireland, Donegal and Derry/Londonderry. It encompassed a bitter controversy over Home Rule, the First World War, an Irish republican insurgency against British rule, a Civil War and finally the completion of the division of the region between two new states, the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. What had once been a distinct unified socio-economic and cultural area (to nationalists and unionists⁴ alike) became an international frontier or borderland. This book’s inspiration lies in developments in local studies of the revolutionary period since the 1970s, which have employed more sophisticated modes of historical inquiry and methodology enabling the revolutionary period to be reconstructed on a more intimate and local level.⁵ It is intended to modify these models, due to the differences between the north-west and other counties.

The Lie of the Land

The county of Londonderry was bounded to the north by the Atlantic Ocean, to the west by Donegal, to the south by Tyrone and by Lough Neagh and Antrim to the east. At just over half a million acres, it was half the size of Donegal. One-third of this was tillage (oats, potato, flax and some wheat); nearly 45 per cent was pasture and about 20 per cent bog, waste or mountain. The largest urban area in the north-west, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, the fourth largest city on the island, was Derry city with 39,892 inhabitants sitting on the banks of the River Foyle at the north-western end of the county. Its population rose slightly to 40,780 in 1911.⁶ The other large town was Coleraine which was dominated by the linen industry. It lay at the north-eastern end of the county sitting on the estuary of the River Bann. A plantation county, over a quarter of the land of Derry –153,202 acres – was owned by the Irish Society and seven London companies. By the outbreak of the First World War, they had either sold up or were in the process of selling up to their tenants under the provisions of the various Land Acts.⁷ The county of Londonderry had suffered considerable population change over the course of the nineteenth century as well. Covering 523,525 statute acres, the population, as in most Irish counties, peaked in 1841 at 222,174 and had fallen to 140,625 by 1911.⁸ The 65,296 Roman Catholics made up just under 45 per cent of the population, Presbyterians roughly 31 per cent and the Church of Ireland just under 20 per cent, with smaller groups of Methodists and smaller Protestant sects numbering roughly 5,500.⁹ Londonderry was heavily anglicised. Only four inhabitants in 1901 used Irish solely and only 3,472 were bilingual in both Irish and English.¹⁰ Its emigration pattern was higher per capita than Donegal with 112,126 emigrants leaving between 1851 and 1911. This peaked in the 1850s, 1870s and 1890s with well over 20,000 leaving.¹¹ The Londonderry Borough (i.e. Derry city) area had fared best. It had more than doubled in size since 1861, which made it, along with Belfast, one of the demographic success stories of nineteenth-century Ireland.¹² The decennial period between 1891 and 1900 saw the city’s population increase by 20 per cent, though this had declined to just a 2 per cent increase in the 1901–11 period. Catholics made up 56.21 per cent of the population in 1911.¹³ What had been a Protestant city was increasingly Catholic. This was reflected in the marginal nature of its parliamentary seat. Its relative prosperity, mainly due to textile manufacture in the second half of the nineteenth century, can still be detected today in ‘the solid red brick and massive factory buildings scattered throughout the city [which] reflect Derry’s one-time position as a world leader in shirt manufacturing’.¹⁴ The ability to employ ‘an endless supply’ of female labour at wages lower than the rest of the United Kingdom led to a shirt-making boom.¹⁵ Women were predominantly employed in this industry. High female employment within the city could coincide with periods of high male unemployment.¹⁶ This gave the city, ‘a unique employment structure in Ireland’.¹⁷ By 1901, there were 80,000 employed in the shirt industry (18,000 of whom were in the city) in the county. This was more than the rest of industry combined.¹⁸ More than 71 per cent of the sewing machines in Ireland were in the county. Nearly a quarter of the shirts and ancillary products in the entire United Kingdom were made in Ireland and the vast majority of these were almost certainly from the north-west.¹⁹ Shipbuilding was the other major employer. Agriculture, finance and distilling held importance. Economic stagnation and industrial decline did not set in until the 1920s.²⁰

One visitor in the early 1900s, Samuel Bayne, a Ramelton native who enjoyed extraordinary success as a banker in New York, toured Donegal on his visit to Ireland in 1902 by jaunting car; he captures a flavour of landing in Derry. Having sailed from New York to Londonderry, Bayne described the customhouse as the ‘most exasperating ordeal of its kind to be found in any port in existence’. The collector insisted on charging excise duty on tiny amounts of tobacco carried by some of the travellers. Bayne described his collector as ‘an Irish imitation Englishman, and his h’s dropped on the dock like a shower of peas when he directed his understrappers in a husky squeak how best to trap the passengers’.²¹ He depicted the people of Derry as ‘town proud’ echoing comments made by Stephen Gwynn.²² There was much to be proud of, at least in heritage terms. Derry had perhaps the most complete intact city walls in Britain and Ireland with seven impressive gates: The Bishop’s Gate, Shipquay Gate, Butchers’ Gate, New Gate, Ferry Quay, Castle Gate and the latest addition, the Northern Gate. Derry had been inhabited since St Columba built a monastery on the site in the middle of the sixth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Sir Henry Docwra had seized the settlement and built the modern city with its famous walls dating from 1609. Derry’s major claim to fame was its three-month siege in 1689, which established the city as a key part of the Protestant memory of resistance to Catholic Ireland. The English radical writer, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, visited Donegal in 1886 on an Irish tour to explore the Land War. He described Derry city in that year:

It is not difficult to understand with these memories [of the siege] kept alive, as they are, that the local Protestants should be fighting hard against Home Rule. It will mean for them the end of the Protestant ascendancy. At present they monopolize all public offices from Town Councillor to Town Crier, although the Catholics are half the population of the town; also there are none but Protestant JPs in the county, and this holds good even in the adjoining districts of Donegal, where the proportion of Catholics to Protestants is four over even six to one. The farmers round Derry are mostly Presbyterian, and favourable to the Land League as they are too highly rented, but are against Home rule, all but a few.²³

By the turn of the twentieth century, matters had changed somewhat due to shifting demographics. The electoral register suggested Protestants held a small majority over Catholics, though the actual population of the city was majority Catholic from 1851. The 1912 claims of a local unionist that Derry city was ‘Unionist in its representative citizens, in its industry and in social life, aye, its very bricks and mortar are Unionist’ were a rapidly disappearing reality.²⁴ The Londonderry Borough parliamentary seat, as one incumbent, John Ross, noted had, by the 1880s, become the hardest fought marginal seat between nationalist and unionist in all of Ireland. Derry city was, he remarked in a notable phrase, ‘where the two great tides meet, the old Anglo-Irish colony on the one hand, and the great Celtic county of Donegal on the other’.²⁵

The changing sectarian makeup of Derry city since the middle of the nineteenth century saw frequent outbreaks of communal violence. There was a riot in 1869 on the arrival of Prince Arthur to the city in which three men were killed. In 1883, fighting disrupted the Nationalist Lord Mayor of Dublin’s visit.²⁶ The 1920 Derry riots, as Eamon Phoenix has noted, were a ‘foretaste of the serious politico-religious riots which were to scar the face of Belfast and other northern towns during subsequent months and, indeed, years, for it was not until late 1922 that murder and arson ceased to be a factor in the everyday life of the six counties’.²⁷ A.T.Q. Stewart notes that the location of the 1969 ‘Battle of the Bogside’ was an area of frequent clashes: ‘The open ground beyond the wall from Bishop’s Gate to the Butcher’s Gate is a volcanic zone where the hurtling of a brick or the firing of a pistol can start an earthquake.’²⁸ Derry (and its associated memory and historical baggage) is, in many senses, the nexus of conflict in Ireland between the Orange and the Green. Ian McBride convincingly argues that: ‘At the centre of Ulster Protestant culture lies a cycle of myths concerning the seventeenth-century struggle between Protestant and Catholic, settler and native, for supremacy in Ireland’ and ‘it is the siege of Derry, however, which is the key episode for loyalists’.²⁹ This was apparent long before the most recent troubles in Northern Ireland. Stephen Gwynn, on his visit in the 1890s, noted that Derry had enjoyed prosperity but not peace.

Annually, two anniversaries are celebrated: on December 18th, the Closing of the Gates; and on August 12th, the Raising of the Siege. At the December festival it is usual to burn in effigy the treacherous governor Lundy: and both are attended with processions of the most aggressively Protestant character. At least half of the population is Roman Catholic and Nationalist, so that these occasions are a fruitful source of street riots. Law has interfered and prohibited repeatedly all that might give offence to religious or political susceptibilities; but the anniversaries are still celebrated, and even those who are least in love with Orangeism would scarcely desire to see the historic commemoration of so valiant a feat of arms omitted. The police, I believe, still regularly exercise their faculties to discover beforehand the vile body of Lundy, stuffed with squibs and crackers; but at the critical moment he seldom fails to swing out of the window of the Prentice Boys Hall.³⁰

Derry was not just the county town; it was also the major urban centre for Donegal. Charles Gallagher wrote that Derry which is ‘beautifully situated on the River Foyle – forms the gateway to, and is, the real capital of Donegal, and I would say without hesitation that the greater number of its citizens had their roots in the county’.³¹

Donegal

Donegal had suffered considerable population decline over the course of the nineteenth century. Like most Irish counties, the population peaked in 1841 at 296,448. It had been 248,270 in 1821.³² It fell steadily over the rest of the century: 255,161 (1851); 237,395 (1861); and 185,635 (1891).³³ Emigration ebbed and flowed. Around 30,000 left in both the 1870s and 1880s but it fell back to 12,977 in the 1890s. It dipped moderately to 12,662 in the 1900s. In any case, more than 135,000 persons left Donegal between 1851 and 1911.³⁴ In 1901, the 178,625 inhabitants of Donegal were made up of 134,909 Catholics and just under 44,000 Protestants of various denominations with slightly more Church of Ireland than Presbyterians.³⁵ The 1911 census revealed a further small decline in population to 168,537 of whom 78.9 per cent were Roman Catholic. The population was overwhelmingly from the county – 92.8 per cent had been born there, which was the highest percentage in Ulster.³⁶ Illiteracy was in decline but still quite high compared to the rest of Ireland and the UK, with more than one in five unable to read or write.³⁷ The number of Irish speakers was high at 59,313 representing 35.2 per cent of the population. All of the county districts, with the exception of Ballyshannon, had shown a decline in population since 1901. The county was overwhelmingly rural. The urban areas were, even by Irish standards, very small. Only Letterkenny, Ballyshannon and Bundoran were considered urban and their combined population was only 6,480, representing less than 5 per cent of the population of the county.³⁸ Bundoran had gone from a population of 10 in 1813 to over 2,000 in 1911. However, both Letterkenny and Ballyshannon (whose population had nearly halved) were smaller than in 1813.³⁹ Revd Lecky described the geography and demography of Donegal in 1908.

It should be remembered, however, that there are two Donegals – an outer and an inner. The former, which is almost wholly Roman Catholic, and from which the County to a large extent takes its character and complexion in the eye of the public, consists of the extensive mountainous districts that lie along the western seaboard, and at some points run far inland. The latter consists of the more flat and fertile country that lies between the mountains and the river Foyle – the eastern boundary of the County. It is largely Protestant, and from a very early period in history has been known as the Laggan, i.e., the low or level country. In the days of the Ulster Plantation, from 1607 onwards, this district, on account of its fertility and also the fact that the undertakers or persons who obtained the grant of estates in it were chiefly Scotchmen, was largely peopled by immigrants from Scotland, whose descendants, unto this day, till the fields their forefathers then acquired, and keep to the Presbyterian principles they brought with them from their native land.⁴⁰

Donegal, at the start of the twentieth century, was perhaps the most peripheral county in Ireland. It was the only one without a main line railway – the terrain generally being too hilly and the population too rural or settled in small towns and villages for the private railway sector to take an interest. The first narrow railway gauge in the county from Strabane to Stranorlar was opened in 1863. This was through private investment and subject to limitations. As one travel guide, published in the 1890s noted, the ‘outside car’ was the best means of seeing the county.⁴¹

The British government, through Arthur Balfour, the Chief Secretary in Ireland, had put in place a number of narrow-gauge railway lines in an attempt to alleviate poverty.⁴² The Light Railways (Ireland) Act was passed in 1889. This enabled government grants to develop narrow-gauge railways. This included Donegal town to Killybegs in 1893, Stranorlar to Glenties in 1895, the Strabane to Derry extension in 1900 and Buncrana to Carndonagh in 1901. In 1903, the railway was completed with a direct service from Burtonport to Derry city. In 1905, Donegal to Ballyshannon was opened. Strabane to Letterkenny opened in 1909. This benefited the local economy, improving trade links, work opportunities and enabling more shops to open and local industries to develop. This included carpet factories in Killybegs, Kilcar, Crolly and Annagry.⁴³ The railways were targeted during the War of Independence and Civil War. This left debt and the increase in motor vehicles and private ownership undermined the railway system within the county. The narrow-gauge system did not survive the inter-war years.⁴⁴ The railways facilitated those who wished to emigrate to reach Derry Quay and leave the country. There were four termini in Derry. The city was the economic and transport hub of the north-west.

Donegal and Londonderry, the north-westernmost counties on the island of Ireland, are culturally and historically bound together. Donegal’s geographical location and isolation from the economically and politically dominant east of the country, a factor even more engrained since partition, is key to understanding its unique characteristics. As Jim McLaughlin argues, the term ‘northern’ possesses subtleties in its complexities and is more complicated than simply geography: ‘it is a quality ingrained in the very psyche of the people. It is evident in the topography, geology and physical geography of this, the most northern of Irish counties.’⁴⁵ The county itself is richly diverse in terms of landscape, topography and demography. North Donegal, in particular Inishowen, feels set apart from the rest of Donegal. Local parlance often refers to it as the 33rd or the forgotten county. Its main cultural and geographical links are to its near neighbour Derry city. West Donegal, the poorest economically and the most remote region in the county, consists of unfertile, harsh landscapes and rough terrain. South Donegal and such places as Bundoran and Ballyshannon have cultural ties to elsewhere in Donegal but also to counties such as Sligo. East Donegal, the richest region in the county, consists of the flattest and most fertile land and was home to the most sizeable Protestant population.

Donegal’s economy was dominated by agriculture, mainly of the subsistence kind. In 1911, 3,705 were employed in agriculture in Donegal. This was the biggest employer in the county. The vast majority of employees were farmers, graziers and agricultural labourers.⁴⁶ Conditions were hard. John Morley, former chief Secretary for Ireland, made reference to the poverty in Gweedore: ‘I doubt if there is living in her Majesty’s dominions people living a harder life than the people of Gweedore … They have one friend, their Priest.’⁴⁷ ‘Donegal can never be a thriving county, but it may cease to be clouded by the shadow of famine; and it is in the meantime no worthless appendage of the Empire,’ commented the Protestant nationalist writer, Stephen Gwynn, during a tour in the 1890s.⁴⁸ The other dominant facts of economic life were large-scale seasonal migration and permanent emigration. These ‘were facts of life in a poor, congested district’.⁴⁹ The hiring fairs were an important feature of Donegal life. In west Donegal in particular many families relied on income that this work would provide. Some went to the Laggan in east Donegal and the neighbouring counties Tyrone or Fermanagh. Others went to Scotland working on farms, as well, as potato pickers known as ‘tatie-hokers’.

A sympathetic observer, James Tuke, an English Quaker philanthropist well versed in Irish social matters, writing in 1889, provided an account of the economics of the tenant farmers of Donegal. Quite simply, as he eloquently explained, they could not survive on the land without other means of generating income. This other means was seasonal migration to the east of Ireland, Scotland or England. He reckoned nearly every man, boy, and girl able to work, in several parishes of Donegal, left during the summer. One priest told him that from his parish, ‘containing about 7000 persons, nearly 1000 boys and girls of ages varying from nine to fifteen, go annually to the Laggan [the famous hiring market] and 800 to 1000 men and boys go to Scotland and England for the summer and autumn harvests’. This added nearly £8000 of wages for the winter months. Tuke noted that Catholic churches (always overcrowded in winter) are said to be almost empty during the summer months. The wages earned plus the ability to sell a couple of livestock meant that family income might be £15–£25 pounds to ‘which could be added milk, the produce from one to one and a half acres of potatoes, the same quantity of oats, free turf and more or less free mountain grazing. This example referred to tenants who hold from three to five acres of land’. He concluded that an ‘English Labourer might envy this’ but the potato crop was ‘constantly liable to partial failure’, the hiring situation of seasonal labourers in England and Scotland was variable and your animal might not sell.⁵⁰

Many of those who were hired out were young. Stephen Gwynn attended the big hiring fair at the turn of the twentieth century and noted ‘Boys and girls engage themselves to employers from 27 May to 20 November, and there is another hiring fair then for the winter season. A good stout workman will get up to £7 or £8 in addition to his board for either period: a girl from £5 to £4’.⁵¹ The hiring of children attracted considerable criticism. Patrick MacGill, the acclaimed writer, a native of Glenties, was twelve years of age when he was hired out in Strabane. To him the hiring fair was more akin to a ‘slave market’. He savagely criticised the local priest’s influence and the gombeen men (shopkeepers).⁵² His condemnation and social critiques were acclaimed in England and heavily criticised in Ireland and his home county.⁵³ His writing, such as Children of the Dead End, which was originally published in 1914, was ‘an important literary influence’ on the socialist republican Peadar O’Donnell.⁵⁴ Only a few innovators such as Patrick Gallagher, by establishing the co-ops of the county, provided an economic alternative in parts of Donegal.⁵⁵

Law and Order in the North-West

The RIC’s establishment in 1914 consisted of 440 men. The RIC county inspector for Donegal was based in Letterkenny. In 1910, it was H.B. Morrell. In 1914, it was Albert A. Roberts.⁵⁶ His counterpart in Londonderry was E.G. Cary.⁵⁷ There were fifty-nine stations scattered across the county in 1917. Its strength had declined considerably with now just 319 (302 in the ranks), rising to 324 in September 1918. This amounted to nineteen men per 10,000, which was substantially less than Cork County. John Hughes was county inspector of Donegal by that time.⁵⁸ His force continued to decline. In September 1919, it was down to 318. In September 1920, it had fallen to 292. John Foster became county inspector in 1921. The strength of his force had risen to 325 by September 1921.⁵⁹ There were nine district inspectors to support him at Ardara, Ballyshannon, Buncrana, Dunfanaghy, Dungloe, Letterkenny, Moville, Raphoe and Rathmullan. The military presence was small. There were barracks at Lifford and Ballyshannon and some coastal fortifications. Donegal formed part of the Belfast military district. There were two resident magistrates. In 1910, they were George Butler at Letterkenny and Captain Charles Herries-Crosbie at Donegal. The prison at Lifford had closed in 1886.

With a population only a little smaller than Donegal, the county of Londonderry was remarkably lightly policed with an establishment of 135 men. The RIC county inspector was Edward Cary with four district inspectors in Coleraine, Limavady, Londonderry and Magherafelt.⁶⁰ It was down to 124 in September 1919.⁶¹ There were five RIC barracks in the city with the headquarters at Victoria station. The effective strength on the RIC in the city on 30 September 1918 was 101, equal to twenty-five men per 10,000, which was a higher ratio than ‘rebel’ Cork City in 1918 (168 men or twenty-one police per 10,000). It did not substantially change, though it dropped slightly to ninety-seven in September 1921.⁶² On the same date, 125 men policed the county; this number represented twelve police per 10,000, manning some twenty-two stations.⁶³ It had risen to 142 in September 1920 and Vere Gregory had replaced Cary.⁶⁴

The major policing problem in Donegal in the post-Famine period was agrarian violence associated with evictions and land agitation. However, the level of agrarian violence diminished over the course of the nineteenth century. Donegal, according to a statistical measure of agrarian crimes on the island from 1851–60, was eighth overall. The following decade, it was eleventh. Moreover, as Vaughan notes, it ‘was one of the counties least affected by fenianism’.⁶⁵ One observer notes that fenianism in Mid-Ulster was ‘more significant than in either Donegal or Derry but at the same time it never broke free from narrow social constraints to appeal to the mass of Catholics who remained firmly under clerical leadership’.⁶⁶ Fenian strength in Donegal is unclear at the turn of the century, though Kelly suggests a membership of 300. There were 250 active Fenians in Londonderry.⁶⁷

Despite being a reservoir of great social and economic ills, Donegal was relatively tranquil during the Land War. Agrarian crime in the county had dropped compared to the rest of Ireland as a whole. The notable exception to this was the famous murder in north Donegal of Lord Leitrim in April 1878. There was also anti landlord activity on the Nixon, Olphert, Stewart and Swiney estates. However, from 1871–80 Donegal was ranked twenty-one out of thirty-two in terms of agrarian crime. James Hack Tuke noted in 1880 that in comparison to Mayo and Galway, in Donegal ‘with rare exceptions, there was little agitation or openly expressed bitterness towards landlords, and the number of police is small, and their duties not very harassing’.⁶⁸

This is not to say there were not tensions or shocking behaviour by landlords. There were notable mass evictions. In Derryveagh, evictions in 1861 – some forty-seven families from the estate of J.G. Adair – centred on Glenveagh Castle. Adair had picked up the 20,000-acre estate cheaply in the aftermath of the Famine. The poor law inspector confided that he had seen nothing like it since the evictions that occurred in Mayo in 1847. The crisis was only resolved when the government of Victoria took the tenants en masse to Australia. Adair’s motive,