The realities of rural life in the 1950s-1980s

FATHER JAMES MCDYER: My ideal was that we would start a whole community family here, everybody working for everybody else, but I was too idealistic in that matter. But the fact remains that by the few or by the many that local cooperation is probably the only way I know how to vitalise an isolated and a low resource community such as ours.

Conditions were quite awful when I arrived here because emigration was taking a massive toll of the people, to tell you the truth. When I saw what was happening I was as mad as hell because all the young people were being siphoned off and they were just emigrating in droves, and before very long this community would die, and being saddled with an elderly population, they were thus conservative. So when the opportunity came to have electricity brought into here, rural electricity, they refused.

So one of the first things I got busy on was to rectify that and there was no pipework up to any house, and by means of what they call the group water scheme we got practically all the houses here supplied, and also I kept up a drum fire of agitation about the roads. There was only one tarmacadamed road here. So we got all the spur roads tarmacadamed and that gave the people a certain amount of confidence, but that by itself would not hold people from emigrating. 

PAT JESS: A community is often identified through settlement and housing is a major feature.

This is many people’s idea of the traditional Irish cottage, and that’s the way it features in the tourist literature. It also seems to give some people a highly romantic notion of what rural life is like. This is quite unjustified. There’s ample evidence and illustration of the sheer harshness of life which existed down into the 1950s and ‘60s, and of the very real difficulties which people like the Fullers still experience today.

Hello, are you there?

CHARLES FULLER: Aye.

GLADYS FULLER: Hello.

CHARLES FULLER: You’ve arrived.

PAT JESS: I’ve arrived indeed, yes. Oh it’s a wild day isn’t it.

CHARLES FULLER: Wicked day, same every year.

PAT JESS: Aye it is indeed. Oh it’s getting nasty now.

CHARLES FULLER: It is, yes.

PAT JESS: Great bit of heat in here.

CHARLES FULLER: Oh you need it.

GLADYS FULLER: You need it today.

PAT JESS: Sure is, it’s a lovely warm house.

GLADYS FULLER: This wall does anyhow.

PAT JESS: It’s a very old house!

CHARLES FULLER: Ah about a couple of hundred years old.

PAT JESS: Is it?

CHARLES FULLER: Yes.

PAT JESS: Is this the family home?

CHARLES FULLER: It is yeah.

PAT JESS: Have you lived in it all your life?

CHARLES FULLER: Yeah, my mother and my father always lived in it.

PAT JESS: Really.

CHARLES FULLER: Yes. Well my father was born in the States.

PAT JESS: Was he?

CHARLES FULLER: Yeah.

PAT JESS: Well what happened to your generation, people that you went to school with for example?

CHARLES FULLER: Well they all…

GLADYS FULLER: The majority all emigrated.

CHARLES FULLER: Emigrated.

PAT JESS: Where did they go?

CHARLES FULLER: Mostly all to England.

GLADYS FULLER: All practically all, England, Scotland.  A few went to America, but not many.

PAT JESS: And how many would be left in the Glen now, that you would have been at school with?

CHARLES FULLER: I’d have said three or four about the height of it.

GLADYS FULLER: That’d be about all of our age.

PAT JESS: But the Fullers are leaving their old cottage. They’re now going to live in a new bungalow built very nearby by the County Council.

So you’re moving out of the old house now down to this nice new one, but why are you moving?

GLADYS FULLER: Well really this house is damp. We have no bathroom, no water inside.

PAT JESS: And what about the kitchen?

GLADYS FULLER: Well it was small and we had no accommodation for anything.