Tom Power
(Clarendon, £40)
Tipperary has been a hot county in terms of recent Irish history writing. The acknowledged epicentre of agrarian disturbance, the county’s fearsome reputation in the early nineteenth century and the subsequent wave of transportation added a new verb to the English language: administrators were afraid that these convicts would ‘Tipperaryify’ Australia. From the Whiteboys to Dan Breen, the county has seldom been far from the cutting edge of social and political mobilisation. The wave of recent research has begun to clarify the reasons. The county was poised between the richer east and the poorer west, the passive midlands and feisty Munster. It juxtaposed marginal mountain blocks with the finest farmland in Europe, while being internally divided between a normanised south and a gaelicised north. It was home to the richest and most assertive Catholic communities in the country. It partook in a variety of farming systems, oscillating between grazing and tillage, and with swings accentuated due to its location on the fluctuating borders of the hinterlands of Cork, Waterford, Limerick and (marginally) Dublin. It had a highly stratified and intensely self-conscious class structure, simultaneously volatile and recalcitrant.
The strength of Tom Power’s book is the painstaking probing of this complex matrix; Tipperary’s uniqueness lay precisely in its complexity, and analysing this requires a sophisticated understanding of both the sources and the wider context. Power masters both and this book provides an unequalled anatomy of an eighteenth-century county. Added to David Dickson’s superb (but largely unpublished) work on Cork, it provides us with an exceptional understanding of the distinctive dynamics of this Munster world.
While based on his 1987 TCD thesis, the book has been carefully reworked around a trilogy of themes — the old reliables of economy, land and politics (regrettably, culture is missing as a category). Louis Cullen is the eminence grise and Power lays out in less elliptical fashion some of the many insights of Cullen’s pivotal The emergence of modern Ireland 1600-1900 (1981) — a book rich in understanding but in rebarbative prose. Power’s industry is admirable; the work is based on almost fifty different repositories, on literally hundreds of estate paper collections, and a vast array of contemporary writing, much of it hitherto obscure. The book does, however, emphasise 1980s rather than 1990s thinking, as the pace of eighteenth-century research picks up. For example, he emphasises the now old-fashioned view that agrarian issues lay at the heart of the success of 1790s radicalism — despite his own emphasis that Tipperary was not ‘backward, subservient, politically or narrowly localised’ in this period.
Power is very good indeed on the eighteenth-century economy, emphasising the transition in mid-century from an underdeveloped agrarian economy (based on pastoralism, low population and skeletal stratification) to a rapidly modernising one (switching to tillage, smaller farms, rapid population growth and a complex social hierarchy). The entrenched position of middlemen is of crucial significance, as they were de facto controllers of the countryside. Power traces in illuminating detail the rise of the wealthy Catholic middlemen of the Suir valley — the Nagles, McCarthys, Scullys, Dohertys, Keatings and Baldwins.
The most exciting chapter is on the 1760s. Here, Donnelly’s newspaper-based study has long held sway, with its relentless detailing of the local social and economic contexts. Power’s account recuperates the explicitly political context, both of Tipperary and of the country as a whole. This analysis is confirmed by recent work on Edmund Burke. Drawn in by concern for his Catholic relatives targeted as Whiteboys, Burke’s deeply influential and hostile version of ‘Ascendancy’ Ireland was rooted in his scalding encounter with ‘red hot’ political Protestantism at its Tipperary worst. No historian of eighteenth-century Ireland can ignore Power’s innovative account of the Whiteboy period. Fr Sheehy was a constant revenant in the imagination of late eighteenth-century Munster; his shadow flickers fitfully in the lurid pages of Musgrave’s Memoirs of the various rebellions in Ireland (1801) and in the still unpublished cycle of poems in Irish written on his judicial murder. Power’s rather prosaic style does not rise to the gothic horrors of the 1760s. In 1770, a crowd watched impassively as Sheehy’s executioner of four years earlier completed a routine job — before stoning him to death. That cascade of stones reverberates in the glasshouses of those who see mid eighteenth-century Ireland as a mainstream ancien régime society.
County Tipperary has been lucky in the range and calibre of its recent scholars — Donnelly, Beames, Smyth, Elliott, O hOgáin. There has also been a renaissance of interest locally, typified by the new County Museum and historical journal, and by the work of George Cunningham, Tom McGrath, Des Marnane, Eoghan O Néil, Jim Condon, Willie Nolan and a host of others. Power’s book adds further impetus to this momentum. It is a landmark volume in demonstrating the interplay between the local, the regional and the national.
Kevin Whelan