Class and status in twentieth-century Ireland: the evidence of oral history

Abstract

In his recent monumental study of twentieth-century Ireland, Diarmaid Ferriter has emphasised pervasiveness of class distinction, particularly in the decades up to I960. This consciousness social class in its specifically Irish setting can be traced to the late 1930s when Arensberg Kimball examined the shopkeepers and farmers of County Clare through an anthropological while the early 1960s saw the publication of the Limerick Rural Survey, which explored the self-images, social relationships and economic shapers of the various groups in the rural population.In the 1980s political scientists, economists and anthropologists joined in the search for the of status and community.3 The windows on social stratification were further opened by the of memoirs of childhood, urban and rural, published from the late 1980s onwards. These can be divided roughly into two types: the nostalgic and romantic, epitomised by Alice works on rural Cork, and the starker and more critical memoirs represented by the publications Frank McCourt on urban Limerick.4 Even when works like these do not engage directly issues of social class and status, such realities can easily be read between the lines: the more the memory, the more sharply the inter-status divide that is presented.