Old Ways to New Days: The traditions that shaped Ireland — and the Irish revival

In his latest book, folklorist Shane Lehane looks at the traditions that have shaped Ireland, from the sacred heart to the wren boy

UCC's Shane Lehane has written a book, Old Ways to New Days. The folklorist takes a fascinating journey into folk life and the technologies that transformed Ireland. Picture: Larry Cummins

For over 20 years, my late father, Tadg, used to write a daily column for the Evening Echo that was called ‘Wise and Otherwise’. 

He focused on intriguing nuggets of cultural or social history that he illustrated with pen drawings and cartoons. 

He liked to lighten each article by adding in a joke, a snippet of Cork slang or an age-old forgotten maxim. 

I must have inherited something of his mindset because however serious or academic the topic, I can never resist including the quirky anecdote or funny story that my discipline of folklore brings to mind. 

With some 40 years of being fully immersed in Irish folklore, rather than confining the study to academic journals alone, this book, Old Ways to New Days, is consciously written for a wider audience. 

It maintains its solid scholarly backbone while at the same time interweaving numerous fascinating stories and powerful memories gleaned from the generations gone before.

The book opens with an exploration of some of the folk rituals, customs and beliefs that marked the various points on the journey from birth to death. 

In a domestic setting, in a time before modern medicine, the complications relating to procreation and birth fell within the realm of the local wise woman. 

She was the one who might advise how the magical piece of cloth, the Brat Bríde, ‘Brigid’s Cloak’, might be used to help at conception and moreover to ease the labour pains of the mother. 

Such women were held in high regard for their common sense and expert knowledge of vernacular cures and remedies.

They were perceived as having magical powers and their mere presence at specific points of transition in life was vital. 

Many were thought to be able to foretell the future, specifically in respect of someone’s love and marriage prospects.

BACHELORS AND SPINSTERS

Given the complications of land inheritance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the open facility of marriage and the social status it imbued was not open to all. 

Rural Ireland had a disproportionate share of bachelors and spinsters, many of whom, if they did not emigrate or move to the city, were confined to something of a subservient existence. 

They lived out their lives in the house where they were born, working as farm labourers and domestic help under the eye of their now married eldest brother who had inherited the farm.

Marriage was the optimum state and when weddings did occur, they were riotous affairs full of drink, dancing and merriment. 

One old wedding tradition involved a manic horse race from the church to the house of the groom where a bottle of whiskey, along with a kiss from the bride, was the prize for the victor. 

The winner passed the bottle around and everyone drank from it. When empty, it was thrown high into the air and it would break into pieces. If it didn’t break this was taken as a bad omen for the marriage.

Weddings were one of the many occasions, along with Halloween, the Wren Boys and the Biddy Boys, when bands of uninvited guests disguised themselves by dressing in straw costume and the raucous strawboys, causing havoc, were a regular part of Irish wedding celebrations. 

The same mixture of fun and frolic, heavily fuelled by drink and mischief, was a characteristic feature of many wakes in Ireland in the nineteenth century. Here too, the old wise women took central stage, washing the corpse, keening their passing and operating as the prime officiator in the management of death.

UCC's Shane Lehane, holding a book of his father’s published cartoons that featured in The Evening Echo. Picture: Larry Cummins

QUINTESSENTIALLY IRISH

In addition to such ancient folk reflexes, Old Ways to New Days moves to observations of things that might be considered quintessentially Irish. 

These are the casual but essential bits of our communal identity manifest as concerns deeply ingrained in our national cultural psyche. 

Irish people have compulsive affinities with such things as pots of tea, the news, the homeliness of pubs, and a constant preoccupation with the weather. 

We recognise our familiarity with religious paraphernalia — the ‘chalky gods’, the sacred heart, rosary beads, and scapulars that were the backdrop to so many people’s lives growing up. 

Such expositions of the extraordinary of the everyday are teased out throughout this book when looking, for example, at where and how we slept in the past. 

In the chapter on beds, it spans the time of plucking geese to fill the tick feather mattresses for the settle beds in the 19th century to the 1970s when toenails were snagged on the new-fangled, powder-blue, Bri-Nylon sheets.

The final section explores some of the seminal instruments of technological change that took Ireland from an almost medieval way of living to the cusp of the modern country it is today. 

The instructive scenario that most will appreciate are the occasions when, due to a storm or a fault, the electricity goes out and people are plunged into darkness. 

One fumbles around in the drawer to find the stub of an old candle and, striking a match to light the twisted black wick, the dark is defeated. 

Defeated by the simplest and oldest of technologies. It isn’t so long ago, perhaps only 200 years ago, when this, the candle, homemade from rushes and animal fat or fish oils, was the only source of light in rural Irish houses over the dark winter months. 

Over time, commercially produced penny candles gave way to paraffin oil lamps and then the bright globe of the tilly lamps before the major revolution of electricity brought light with the flick of a switch.

CATALYSTS FOR CHANGE

Electricity was the ultimate gamechanger yet, in 1945, two out of every three homes in Ireland were still without the new technology. 

Over the 1950s and 1960s, it was systematically rolled out throughout rural Ireland. Bright 100-watt lightbulbs hanging from the centre of the kitchen ceiling made the night day.

Electrical water pumps miraculously supplied water into the house and revolutionised the efficiencies on the farm. 

In addition to the ubiquitous sacred heart lamp, the electricity socket powered the radio, no longer reliant on the old wet and dry batteries, and Ireland was further opened up to itself and the world. 

The weekly visit to the local cinema had already started this process but it was television from the mid-1960s that would prove the greatest catalyst for change in Ireland.

Perhaps we all define ourselves by what went before us and what has come after. Each and every one of us has and will experience many watershed moments. 

I think about my grandfather’s maternal grandfather, Billy Duggan, from Kilnamartyra, who lived to the incredible age of 112. 

He was born in 1803 and died in 1915 and was alive to experience the era of Napoleon and the monster meetings of O’Connell. 

He survived the Great Famine and was active in the Land Leagues. 

He was particularly delighted to get the old age pension in 1909, the test for which was his ability to recall the great hurricane, ‘The Night of the Big Wind’ that devastated Ireland on January 6, 1839. 

My mother’s grandfather, Patrick Ryan from Ballybeg, Co Limerick, also lived to a great age of 103; born in 1835, he died in 1938. 

My mother, Eleanor, remembered sitting on his lap and he recounting in detail his first-hand memories of the Great Potato Famine. 

The past is never dead but it is enlivened and reimagined and its elements made relevant again at each retelling.

• Old Ways to New Days is published by Hachette