Displacement and Dislocation
By Jim Mac Laughlin

Displacement was one of the formative experiences of Donegal families, and rural communities, throughout the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century. By this is meant the separation of people from home and native culture, either through physical dislocation or through the imposition of a foreign culture. Displacement is evident in the radical sense of dislocation experienced by raw recruits from rural Donegal who helped fill the trenches of World War I. It is especially evident in the profound sense of homelessness experienced by young women from Donegal workhouses transported to Australia in the late Famine years. It is also apparent, albeit in a far less unsettling form, in the nostalgic letters which the Reverend J.L. Henry, Church of Ireland curate of Culdaff in north Inishowen, wrote home to his aged mother in Draperstown, County Derry, in the 1830s and 1840s.

The cumulative effects of the social and economic forces which refashioned Donegal throughout this period effected massive external and internal displacements. The rationalization of the agricultural landscape which followed on from the decline of rundale transformed rural life, drove many to migrate throughout Ulster, and forced others to emigrate. The establishment of workhouses and barracks to control the pauperized caused others, not the least the elderly and the infirm of mind and body, to experience displacement in its harshest forms. The imposition of wider forms of social discipline by Church and State also led to the introduction of new forms of social control which could contribute to a sense of displacement. Viewed thus, displacement not only caused people to be expelled from their native culture through migration and emigration. It could also occur from within, as when the old and the pauperized were moved from the heart of the community to the cold interior of the workhouse, or when children of the rural poor were removed from the bosom of the family to take up work in unfamiliar surroundings far from home.

Patrick MacGill captured the effects of the dislocations brought on by migration and emigration in his classic novel, The Rat Pit. When leaving home, he wrote, the familiar landscapes of childhood suddenly become 'in some ways very remote, like objects seen in a dream'. In this way, everyday events and familiar landmarks become dearer and more precious to those about to leave home.

In Donegal the displacements brought about by social and economic change were exacerbated by a number of factors. Firstly, Ireland's entry into a free trade system dominated by England hastened the demise of craft industries and caused large numbers of labourers, artisans and craftworkers to seek other employment at home, and especially abroad. Secondly, international competition dictated the further modernisation of the rural landscape and hastened the decline of rundale in Donegal. New state institutions like the workhouse, the barracks, the schoolhouse and churches, now spread their network across the landscape. In so doing they literally located the surveillance state at the very doors of rural communities. Moreover, it was in institutions such as these that the poor were not only fed and clothed, but also monitored and disciplined. It was here too that the names of the people were first recorded. Their names are still to be found today in the minutes of the workhouse meetings, in rosters of the 'deserving poor' that were displayed in local barracks, in roll books of national schools, in lists of prison inmates, in marriage and baptismal certificates, in the lists of the forgotten young Donegal men who fought and died in World War I, as well as in passenger lists of ships that transported Donegal emigrants to a new life in North America, Australia and Britain.

My own father once told me that when the Enniskillen Fusiliers came on a recruiting visit to Carndonagh at the start of World War I, it was the poorest sons of town and country who flocked to join the British Army. Many of these were servant boys who looked on the war in France as an escape from a life of drudgery in farms around Inishowen. The enormous sense of dislocation felt by these young men, many mere boys, who experienced trench warfare was well captured by Patrick MacGill in his novel. The Red Horizon. Here he described how the farmhouse where he was billeted in northern France 'reminded me strongly of my home in Donegal with its fields and dusky evenings and its spirit of brooding quiet.' Then in a poignant opening verse of the novel he laments:

I wish the sea were not so wide
That parts me from my love;
I wish the things that men do below
Were known to God above
I wish that I were back again
In the glens of Donegal;
They'll call me a coward if I return,
But a hero if I fall.

Police barracks, workhouses, asylum wards, schools and churches disciplined and controlled all those left behind by the process of moderisation, or socialised them into that very process. Thus workhouses housed paupers, vagrants, the old, the unwanted and the 'deserving poor'. 'Bastilles of Poverty' was the term used by one historian to describe the workhouses of England in the mid-nineteenth century. What made them all the more incongruous on the mid-nineteenth century social landscape of Donegal was the fact that they now became places where the unwanted elderly ended their days, rather than being cared for at home in the countryside, as had been the custom of centuries. Moreover, the poor here received charity now because they were considered 'deserving poor' by the wider community. They received it instead precisely because they were no longer regarded as part of Donegal society and were socially excluded from it. The prison system also represented a new form of authority on the Donegal landscape. It incarcerated 'protest criminals and all those who resisted the process of modernisation It also 'housed' the criminalised poor and all those who engaged in such socially 'unacceptable' activities as poteen-making, smugging, vagrancy, drunkenness and petty theft.

Schools and chapels for their part taught the children of the poor to accept the authority of 'their betters'. All of these institutions smoothed the transition from a system of production based upon the customary rights of peasants, to one based much more firmly in the private ownership of the means of production by landowners and their agents.

Donegal's emigrants for their part literally 'peopled' the frontiers of the world's economy. The county's emigrants not only filled gaps in the international labour market - like 'hirelings' in the rich Laggan district, they also provided families back home with the cash that contributed to their very survival well into the twentieth century. We also know that an estimated seasonal migrants from the west and north west of the country were still moving between Ireland, Scotland and the north of England on the eve of world War I. Many of these were young migrant workers from west Donegal who were engaged in 'tattie hoking' in Scotland.

One historian has argued that these seasonal earnings 'helped householders back home to keep their homes'. Young boys and not a few young women were often literally expected to do 'a man's work'. Girls as well as boys suffered seriously at the hands of their masters. The history of physical and sexual abuse which young servant girls from Donegal undoubtedly suffered in their home county and elsewhere in Ulster, and in Scotland, has still to be written. However, servant boys and girls also had their own internalised class system. Those who fared well, or were well treated by their masters, generally regarded themselves as the social superiors of the large numbers who were harshly treated. As 'Children of the Dead End', their lives were often lived in three very different worlds, the world of brief childhood at home, the harsh world of the servant boy or girl in rural Ulster, and the alien world of the Donegal immigrant in Scotland or the north of England. They are the forgotten victims of social displacement in Donegal who still haunt the social history of Donegal and Scotland.

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