In some respects, the recent cabin in the back garden debate has shades of times past. In 1943, taoiseach Éamon de Valera spoke to the Agricultural Science Society at University College Dublin about the erection of second houses on farms for farmers’ sons who desired to marry while continuing to assist on their parents’ farms.
This was partly a response to emigration and low marriage rates or “late marriages” in rural Ireland – the marriage rate per 1,000 of southern Ireland’s population between 1936 and 1945 was just 5.37, while in Northern Ireland in 1946, it was 7.4 and in England and Wales, 9. Ireland had 73 married women aged under 45 per 1000 of the population, compared to 145 in the USA.
De Valera was in relaxed and jocular form when speaking to the students. So far, in relation to his proposal, he had “found no one to agree with him as to its practicality” but, “laughingly”, he said, “I still think it would be a good one”. He was not joking, though. What he had in mind was that every farmer should build a second house on the farm “a fairly reasonable distance from his own”. The son destined to inherit the farm could get married (“say at 25″) and bring his wife to live in the second house. They would assist in the running of the farm until the parents reached retirement age. At that point, they would “swap” houses.
These were intriguing suggestions and de Valera even established an interdepartmental committee to look into the matter, but it never grew wings. Files in the Department of the Taoiseach record de Valera’s surprise his idea was “so coldly received”. He was undoubtedly underestimating many things, including worries about subdivision of farms, instinctive resistance to changes in traditional land practices, living under the eyes and noses of parents and in-laws, defining “reasonable distance” and appetite for an eventual swap.
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Some of the media reaction was positive, however. The Farmer’s Gazette welcomed the idea, particularly because “Mr De Valera does not often unbend in public”. When the notion was raised again in 1947, The Irish Times applauded the taoiseach for displaying “an unusual and welcome sense of reality”.
But a degree of desperation is also common to both the historic and current proposals. The lack of autonomy and options for so many created a sourness in the infant state.
According to the Free State census of 1926, 269,636 people belonged in the category of “relatives assisting”. As the census report observed, the overall unemployment figure was only 6 per cent but “one the reasons for the low figure for Saorstát is that the number of people assisting relatives – people who run practically no risk of unemployment – are very large in this country”. They may have been working but that did not mean they were well remunerated or paid at all. And they had to endure degrees of arrested development that could sometimes fuel envy, acid tongues and frustration, summed up by the poet Patrick Kavanagh in 1938 as “the venom of a thousand repressed desires”.
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Kavanagh’s poem The Great Hunger, published in Dublin in 1942, fleshed out the consequences. It is a desolate epic, the hunger for sex and love strangulated by what has been described by Michael G Cronin in his 2012 book Impure Thoughts as a “life-denying theology embedded in an implacable social system”. Paddy Maguire can only gaze with hopeless desire at young women on the road, then wait until his family are asleep before furtively exploring his own body. The fields grow fertile while his body shrivels:
“No Cash
No Drama
That was how his life happened
No Mad hooves galloping in the sky
But the weak, washy way of a true tragedy -
A sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die.”
Kavanagh was also cutting about the lot of an ageing “boy” in rural Ireland: “Maguire was faithful to death:
He stayed with his mother till she died
At the age of ninety-one.
She stayed too long,
Wife and mother in one.
When she died
The knucklebones were cutting the skin of her son’s backside
And he was sixty-five.”
We have 21st century versions of these social dilemmas. By 2022, there were 522,486 adults aged 18 years and over living with their parents, a 14 per cent increase from 2016 and a 19 per cent increase from 2011. The 2022 census revealed 61 per cent of adults aged 20-24 were living at home, up from 54 per cent in 2011.
Comparative figures in Finland suggested less than 6 per cent of adults in their twenties still lived at home, while the figure in the Netherlands was 17 per cent.
The scale of the “repressed desires” behind those statistics must be enormous, while the continuity of “implacable social systems” witnesses the refloating of an old focus on the back garden.
