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Respondent
Dr Caitriona Clear, NUI Galway
Everyday Working Life in the Revolutionary Era: Two Case Studies Dr Caitriona Clear An Dr Caitriona Clear
Margaret O’Callaghan has pointed out in her keynote address that people living a hundred years ago in Ireland did not know what was to come after, and that we cannot evaluate their experiences as if they had this knowledge. But neither did they look backwards and see themselves as inhabiting a gloomy ‘postFamine Ireland’. The people who came of age in Ireland in the years 1891 to 1921 experienced dramatic transformations in all aspects of everyday life. The numbers of men and women working in shops, offices, factories, workshops, transport and communication, schools and hospitals increased by thousands, at a time when population was falling. For example, there were over 7,000 more clerks and over 10,000 more teachers in Ireland in 1911 than there had been in 1891, and over 16,000 workers in the new field of telecommunications in 1911, and numbers in these sectors continued to grow.
All these workers and others like them had to present themselves for public view every day; their need for respectable and hard-wearing clothing and footwear created countrywide demand for dressmakers, tailors, seamstresses and drapery shops, which in turn created more jobs. And however poor their working conditions, waged and salaried workers had set time off, so clerks and shop assistants, factory workers and railway guards, teachers and nurses learned Irish, first aid or other skills, rowed on rivers, kicked football, made novenas, played in bands, and of course as we know well, joined trade unions and political organizations in their thousands. Irish people were still on the move out of Ireland – emigration figures remained high – but within Ireland the young and the single of both sexes were in a state of perpetual motion too.
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