Patrick Freyne: Reports of rural Ireland’s death are overblown

Three older farmers are looking at a horse-drawn ridger, recalling what a temperamental machine it is. They’ve come up from Co Kerry to, in Michael Scanlon’s words, “see the old stuff we used before the horse went out of fashion”.

I'm at Teagasc's celebration Farming & Country Life 1916, in Athenry, Co Galway. It's partially themed around the insurrectionary actions of Liam Mellows, who billeted his forces here in 1916. But it's more accurately a celebration of 100 years of country life – and these men remember a good chunk of that. "I remember cutting banks with a scythe," says James Daly, and Scanlon jokes that soon they'll probably farm with "drones".

The farms are bigger now, but they don’t employ as many people, and many of their children are part-time farmers.

Farming is no longer a communal thing, says Patrick Casey. “The meitheal system was at the core of things.” he adds. (Many people here talk about the meitheal.) “When there’d be threshing the neighbours would all come together to do it. There’s no more of that. The population is smaller. Many people work in towns and come home in the evening. They don’t go to pubs any more because of the drink-driving. And in rural areas there are a lot of problems with suicide.” Still, life was hard in the old days, Casey says. “Emigration was always an issue . . . Everyone went into farming, but that was because there was nothing else.”

The artistic director of Farming & Country Life 1916 is a Teagasc forester and drama buff named Michael Somers. "We were asked to do something on the rebellion, and we felt that a lot of people were doing something about the political side of it, so we decided to explore the cultural aspect of it," he says. "We decided the major cause for rebellion in rural Ireland was the land issue, so we've basically covered the story of land from 1880 up to 1930."

A few things to note about Somers. He is, as we speak, dressed in a vintage priest’s cassock, and he breaks off our conversation to wrangle a soon-to-be-sheared sheep into a pen. That’s the kind of thing that happens at Farming & Country Life 1916.

When he’s done he tells me that the problems that rural communities faced in the past mirror those that they face in the present. “Obviously, emigration never went away,” he says. “During the Celtic Tiger people still left rural Ireland. Pubs closed. Schools closed. If there’s a message across what we’re doing it’s that there’s continuity in the problems.”

The organisers have done a very good job of evoking the past. They’ve re-created shopfronts from 100 years ago. Fields are ploughed with horse-drawn ploughs. Actors in period clothes explain obsolete farming methods. Pop-up drama groups re-enact evictions, American wakes and arranged marriages.

At a life-size replica of the GPO (from the set of TG4’s Wrecking the Rising) visitors can record their own Rising stories in a vintage phone booth. (“If you want to sing a song I’ll send it to Simon Cowell,” says the engineer, Garry Kelly.) Brenda Malone of the National Museum of Ireland will look over your family memorabilia. “No one has brought in the Book of Kells yet,” she says. “Though amazing things can happen.”

Panels of academics discuss social history. Musicians play traditional music. Old steam tractors spew smoke. A blacksmith tells a story about a stubborn mule. (“What’s the difference between a mule and a jennet again?” a man asks me.) A weaver works a loom. School-touring children have their photographs taken in vintage gear, and a luxuriantly whiskered storyteller tells a tale about an enchanted army of rats.

Outside, John Whyte from Moylough is digging the earth with a loy. (“It’s hard work,” he says.) Whyte first encountered the loy when performing in an amateur production of The Playboy of the Western World in the 1990s. Now he does his best to keep the art alive.

“Young lads growing up have no interest in the farm now,” he says. “It’s all computers. And the parents don’t want them to know it anyway. They don’t want them to have the hardship. Though sometimes a lad looking at a cow calving might get a bit of an attachment that way, or they get a love of machinery.”

Whyte is slightly ambivalent about how things have changed. “Everything is out in the open now,” he says. “The abuse and all that: it’s known about. That’s the one good thing. But once upon a time if you wanted a drop of milk or a bit of sugar you’d go to the neighbour for it. They don’t have time to talk now. They’ve a lot of machinery, but no one has time to talk.”

Dolores Coffey, a retired teacher, presides over a perfect replica of a 1916 schoolroom. She parades before a classful of wide-eyed seven-year-olds, showing them old-fashioned canes and explaining the concept of corporal punishment: “Poor old Johnny had his spellings wrong all week, so we have to go for the thicker cane.”

Coffey is from Athenry but taught in New Inn. She thinks that all the talk of dying rural communities is overblown, pointing to the GAA and a living traditional music. “The local shop did close,” she says, “but we’re so near everything else, and everyone has a car.”

Kevin Cunniffe, who is dressed as an early 20th-century farmer, is trying to help Patricia Farmer, a visitor, into a huge pair of bloomers. Cunniffe, a Ballinasloe-based engineer, is here at the celebration to “make hay and do a bit of dancing and God knows what”.

He’s a bit of a wag. “Such craic I’ve had with those knickers,” he says. Later he will put them in the hay bale he’ll be working on, so he can pull them out and act shocked. He also has a chamber pot that he shows to a group of highly amused schoolchildren. (“That’s called a ‘chamber potty’,” says one authoritatively.)

“I like a bit of craic and a bit of devilment,” Cunniffe says.

“Oh, you have to laugh,” says Farmer, who has never met Cunniffe before.

Cunniffe laments that nobody has time to talk any more. Young people are leaving the countryside, he says. His daughter is in Dubai teaching, “people have to go to the big towns because the shops are all closing down. The post offices are closing . . . Communication is lost.”

His own connection to his community is formed through amateur drama – “and music is on fire at the moment.” Later I see him dancing a jig with a traditional musical ensemble. Out come the bloomers again.

The age profile here is very young and quite old. There aren’t many people in their teens and20s, but it is a Friday afternoon.

Jack Kelly, a texting young Irish Volunteer, thinks he’d like to farm part time, like his parents. “But there’s not much to do around our area,” he adds. “There’s a lot of stuff closing down.”

Anna Finnegan, who is dressed like an early 20th-century land agent, is here with her friends from Holy Rosary College in Mountbellew to re-enact a hiring fair. “It was like slavery,” she says. “People would rent children out for the summer, and sometimes they’d just get fed rather than paid.”

Finnegan and her friends all like their community, but the consensus seems to be that they will leave it, at least for a while.

“Oh, I’m out of here,” says Finnegan, and her friends laugh.

“After college I’m emigrating. I think I’ll go to Australia, because I think I’d prefer the lifestyle out there. If I lived in Ireland I’d definitely be in the city – Galway or Dublin. There’s just more to do.”

In the catering tent I sit next to 71-year-old Tom O’Neill, who came from Dunlavin, in Co Wicklow, using “the free travel”. O’Neill keeps donkeys.

He recently won a competition for the best-turned-out donkey.

He’s also a sucker for old farm machinery; if he sees a rusty contraption in a farmer’s ditch he buys it. His recent acquisitions include an old-time corn crusher, a donkey hearse (a sort of 19th-century cart for transporting coffins) and a doctor’s gig, “for bringing the doctor around before there were cars”.

“My son and daughter wouldn’t look at that stuff,” O’Neill says. His son gives golf lessons. His daughter lives in Sydney and works for an insurance company. Farms are bigger and faster now, he says, but there’s still a sense of community in Dunlavin.

O’Neill says to call in on him if I’m ever nearby. He tells me how to get to his house.

Declan Coyne and Johnny Johnston, a pair of balladeers, have a toy dog hitched to a wooden cart containing their song sheets. Johnston, who wears a long coat and a floppy hat, takes a while to drop out of character and regularly breaks into song.

“I got six months for incitement,” he says, “for singing revolutionary songs at the Ballinasloe fair.”

“In my father’s time ballad singers – often Travellers – went around to the fairs, selling ballad sheets,” says Coyne, who has a big beard, a cap and a waistcoat. “Now there’s a whole generation who probably think music comes out of a box.”

“Politics is in books,” says Johnston. “But the social history is in the songs.”

Johnston is also political in real life.

“The greatest insult to rural towns was the slogan ‘Let’s keep the recovery going’, running into the last election,” he says. “It was an awful slight to two-thirds of the country. I’m from Ballinasloe, and it’s creaking. It’s so sad . . . Factories have closed and left.”

“I remember going into Roscommon on a Wednesday, and the place would be buzzing,” Coyne says, “but now there’s nobody in the pubs and no cinemas. People are probably drinking more than ever – but at home.”

“Every State agency was asked to commemorate 1916 in an appropriate way,” says Teagasc’s director, Prof Gerry Boyle. “We decided to do something here because of the Liam Mellows connection. The biggest mobilisation outside of Dublin was in Athenry. We decided we’d emphasise farming and country life as it was in 1916.

“The land is what creates a continuity for a lot of people. There’s something very deep about attachment to the land.”

We discuss how rural communities are changing. There are fewer and bigger farms, and about half of farmers have a second job. It’s a different job now, Boyle says.

“A lot of farming is associated with back-breaking physical activity, but the modern young farmer is a different type of farmer. It isn’t really about the physical intensity of the labour any more. It’s more about managing resources.”

He says that worrying about the destruction of rural Ireland is a bit overdone. “Obviously, there are stats on people leaving agriculture, but it varies around the country. A lot of it depends on proximity to motorways and large towns.”

We’re joined by the archaically costumed Nuala King and Mary Doherty, who earlier demonstrated traditional methods of preserving eggs.

Back in the 1970s the women were poultry instructors, travelling Ireland’s byways to instruct farmers on technique. “They used to call me a fowl woman,” says King as a hen strolls under our feet.

King worries about lonely older people but isn’t as sure as others I’ve spoken to that rural society is declining. “People are still very supportive of each other,” she says. “There is a sense of community.”

As I leave, Doherty even suggests that I might be part of it. “Start off with the hens,” she says, “and you can continue farming from there.”