agricultural labourers

agricultural labourers first became a significant element in rural society during the 18th century, as commercialization and population growth hastened the stratification of hitherto largely undifferentiated peasant population. Pure wage earners, hired by the day or for a longer period and using the cash they earned to purchase food and other necessities, were mainly to be found in the monetized north and east. Elsewhere labourers paid in cash more commonly purchased conacre, while many were cottiers, exchanging labour directly for potato ground. Male and female servants, unmarried and generally young, lived in the houses of landlords and farmers and performed both indoor and outdoor work. Migrant workers (spalpeens—see seasonal migration) from poorer regions provided extra hands at times of peak demand. This complex hierarchy, in which farmer, smallholder, and labourer shaded imperceptibly into one another, makes census statistics difficult to interpret. But recent estimates suggest that by 1841 the agricultural workforce consisted of 400,000 farmers, defined as persons living primarily off their own landholdings, 1 million labourers and cottiers, and 300,000 small‐holders partly dependent on employment as hired labour.

After 1845 the labouring population fell sharply. Heavy Famine mortality and displacement of population was reinforced by continued heavy emigration as post‐Famine adjustment, substituting livestock for tillage, reduced the demand for labour. The census of 1901 classified only 333,000 males as agricultural labourers, while by 1912 only one in three persons working in agriculture was a hired labourer, as opposed to a farmer or assisting relative.

Conflict between farmers and labourers over wages, conacre rents, and related issues contributed substantially to pre‐Famine agrarian violence. Continued tension after 1850 reflected the limited extent to which labourers, despite falling numbers, shared in the general prosperity of the post‐Famine decades. The English National Agricultural Labourers' Union sought to establish itself in Ireland during the 1870s, and there were also several local labourers' organizations. During the Land War the labourers were successfully co‐opted into the general anti‐landlord alliance. The Labourers Act (1883), allowing boards of guardians (from 1898 rural district councils) to provide cottages for rural labourers, and to prosecute employers who provided inadequate housing, took some account of their needs, but the wider hopes awakened by the slogan ‘the land for the people’ remained unfulfilled. The discontent of labourers, many now organized by the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, once again contributed substantially to social unrest during the Anglo‐Irish War and Civil War. In independent Ireland the muted disaffection of farm labourers was reflected in the significant rural base, up to the late 1960s, of the Labour Party.