The Irish Revolution saw an unprecedented wave of unionization among farm workers, a resumption of the cattle driving protests that characterized the Ranch War c.1908 and the formation of the Irish Farmers’ Union and Irish Farmers’ Party. The period ended with the 1923 Land Act - the major legislative effort of the new Irish Free State which finalized the transfer of ownership from landlords to tenants and saw as much as 20% of farmland in the new state re-distributed.
This talk will offer an overview of agrarian politics and agrarian social movements in the Irish Revolution and will examine how the processes of rural social conflict that characterized Ireland under the Union manifested in landscape change in one east Clare locality.
Terry Dunne graduated with a PhD from the Sociology Department of Maynooth University in 2015, is Laois Historian-in-Residence under the Decade of Centenaries Programme and is currently funded by the Royal Irish Academy to examine the topic of this talk. His work has been published in scholarly journals such as Éire-Ireland, Saothar, Rural History as well as in History Ireland and he makes this research more accessible to a wider audience through his podcast Peelers and Sheep. He is co-editor, with John Cunningham of Galway University, of the forthcoming volume, Spirit of Revolution: Ireland from Below 1917-1923.