This is not a history podcast - this is a rebel story, rebelling against accepted wisdoms and prevailing views, overturning what we thought we knew and creating new understandings, delving beneath the surface appearance of things.
This is a podcast about peelers and sheep. Sheep representing agricultural production – the form of production most obviously involving an interface with ecology. But this is not just farming heritage. The peelers, or the police, representing the violence of the state undergirding relations of power, conflict, and exploitation.
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In this episode we have moved into the summer of 1920, agrarian protest has expanded and Sinn Féin are trying to put a halter on it with a new system of Dáil courts – supplanting London’s authority while doing so. We’ll have a deep dive into two court cases from near Mountrath – one in the Dáil system and one in the old U.K. system. Some of these conflicts have a long history — going back as far as the 1870s and we’ll get to see how the Dáil Courts related to earlier forms of dispute resolution.
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17 Apr 2023
April 1920 – Month of Revolution
In this second episode of the Divided Land series we’ll be looking at a ‘Land for the People’ demonstration that took place in Killeshin on the borders of counties Laois and Carlow in April 1920 – and broadening out to look at that month – a month of revolution that saw the burning of police barracks, a general strike in support of hunger striking political prisoners, and industrial action to restrict food exports. We’ll also hear something of the growth of a ‘peace party’ within Dublin Castle and we’ll have an overview of some of the political career of Patrick ‘Paudge’ Gaffney, a Killeshin man and a key activist in the ‘Land for People’ demonstration.
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29 Mar 2023
Cattle Driving Under The Tricolour
This first episode is on what happened when the First World War hit Irish farms and Irish kitchen tables, and we’ll be looking at the tillage movement of 1918 – a time with an intersection between the rise of Sinn Féin and agrarian social conflict and a grievous food crisis. This episode highlights a specific incident in the hinterland of Clonaslee at the foot of the Slieve Blooms in February 1918. We’ll end up then with the conscription crisis of April 1918 – an important turning point in Irish history but one often overlooked.
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4 Jul 2022
The Land for the People?
1923 saw a new Land Act, with greater focus on the re-distribution of land as well as the Agricultural Commission which informed policy for what was the major industry of the new Irish Free State.
This episode is on debates on agrarian policy within the Irish labour movement, particularly within the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, the main union for agricultural employees, and looks at it from the bottom-up - foregrounding the words of local activists by drawing on branch resolutions, a survey of the branches, and a essay competition which ran in the pages of the union's newspaper. There was strong support for continuing compulsory tillage, but divergences of opinion around land division, collective ownership and cottage gardens. There will also be a quick look at the agrarian writings of James Connolly.
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2 Jun 2022
Red Flag in Kilmallock
In this episode after Truce & Treaty Irish separatists have assumed control over much of the country and we go to Ireland's dairying heartland and to the winter farm strikes of the winter of 1921-'22. Very different conditions to the harvest farm strike we looked at in episode one of season one, not only seasonality we are now in an economic slump and things are getting more militant: kidnappings, sabotage, the take-over of Mallow Mills by its workforce and the role of the Irish Republican Army in policing industrial disputes.
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27 May 2022
The Summer of 22 (Season Two Trailer)
A taster of what is coming in future episodes on popular struggles as the British state slowly withdraws from much of Ireland and a new Irish Free State is established, a wave of workplace occupations and land conflicts resume in late spring & early summer 1922 - a Third Revolution - a new cycle of revolt pushing back against the limitations of the revolutionary outcomes.
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7 Jun 2021
Ep 8: The Factory Farm and the Forest Frontier
All about habitat destruction, simplified eco-systems, declining bio-diversity and how this ties in the spread of zoonotic diseases such as Ebola, AIDS, Avian Flu & Swine Flu – looking not just at human impact on nature but at particularly capitalist forms of agriculture & resource extraction and how that form of society determines environmental crises.
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31 May 2021
Ep 7: Landscape of Lyme.
All about landscape as a historic creation – how what we often think of as ‘nature’ has been shaped by generations of human activity – especially farming. Changing land uses impact on eco-systems and helps spread zoonotic diseases – that’s diseases that come to us from animals – like Covid, AIDS, Ebola, Avian Flu. This episode particularly focuses on lyme and the relationship between lyme and suburbanisation in the US.
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12 Apr 2021
Ep 6: In Dublin County In 1913.
Starting in the summer just before the famous Lock-Out of 1913 was a movement of farm workers in the rural parts of Dublin – back then the countryside went in as far as Crumlin. So this is Dublin in 1913, but not the Dublin of trams and tenements— this is the Dublin of bullocks and brassicas.
Dublin had its own particular agricultural industry with a strong presence of market gardening. The main centres of the movement included Clondalkin and Swords. Also coming into the story is the farmers’ leader Andrew Kettle, who was the father of Tom Kettle, and who had a long career in public life going back to the Tenants’ Right League of the 1850s.
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8 Mar 2021
Ep 5: Notes on the Defence of Irish Country Houses.
The name comes from a draft document composed in 1914 by Colonel George O'Callaghan-Westropp, self-styled as The O’Callaghan, a county Clare landlord. O'Callaghan-Westropp was an activist in the British conservative-nationalist mobilisation against Home Rule and lost out through agrarian agitation and government intervention in the years running up to 1914 (that is the years of the Ranch War). He later re-invented himself as a leading activist in the Irish Farmers’ Union.
This episode tells his story and also looks at the Farmers’ Union and its clash with the labour movement over attempts to control food prices through regulating food exports in 1920 (the Butter and Bacon Embargo). The Irish Farmers’ Union also had a political wing – the Irish Farmers’ Party and a proposed paramilitary wing – the Farmers’ Freedom Force.
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26 Feb 2021
Ep 4: Dubs, Dirty Shirts and World Revolution.
Where were the Irish regiments of the British Army in 1919‒21? This episode goes from Cairo and Constantinople to Iraq and India and puts the Irish revolution into its global context through some of the scribblings of Sir Henry Wilson - the Longford man who was Chief of the Imperial General Staff – the highest military position in the British Empire.
From January 1919 onwards the Empire was beset by strikes, riots and protests and so the agenda shifted from the expansion of the Empire to its defence — even to the defence of London. In 1919-21 the Dirty Shirts – the Royal Munster Fusiliers - were in Cairo, and the Dubs – the Royal Dublin Fusiliers - were in Constantinople. Other Irish units were in Iran, Iraq, and India.
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4 Nov 2020
Ep3: The Last Campaign Of The Leinsters
In the Autumn of 1921 men of the 1st Battalion Leinster Regiment were in action against a rebellion in Malabar, in the south-west of what was then British India. This was the last combat of any of the southern Irish regiments which were disbanded in 1922. In this podcast there is some of the history of the Irish regiments and of Irish recruitment to the British Army, then something of the background to the rebellion itself, as well as the story of the actual fighting. The men of the Leinster Regiment played a pivotal role in the early days of the uprising.
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7 Sept 2020
Ep 2: Prairie Fire
This episode looks at the West of Ireland agrarian movement of the spring and early summer of 1920. That year saw a widespread popular mobilisation known as the cattle drives - crowds assembling to drive cattle and sheep off disputed land.
This movement was a major factor underpinning the land reform policies of the new Irish Free State - policies which lead to almost 20% of farmland being re-distributed. The episode takes in the story of the movement itself, as well as the social structure which it arose in reaction to.
Also examined is the response of the republican leadership, who put considerable effort into putting an end to the agrarian movement.
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3 Aug 2020
Ep 1: The Forgotten
This episode is about the farm labour strike in Meath and Kildare in July and August 1919. Farm workers were by far the largest single group in the transport union during the revolutionary years.
The episode will look at the forming of small local unions in 1917 and 1918 as well as the epic clash in 1919. The strike that year saw robust picketing by farm workers, sympathetic action by drovers and dockers, and even rail sabotage by the IRA.
The Transport Union’s expansion into rural Ireland laid the foundation for the largest single strike in Irish history – the general strike in support of hunger-striking political prisoners in Mountjoy Gaol in April 1920.
The podcast also deals with the socio-economic background to the dispute – especially the food supply measures of the 1914 to 1918 war.
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29 Jun 2020
Teaser: This Is A Rebel Story
The name Peelers and Sheep comes from an incident in the 1919 Meath and Kildare farm labour strike.
It took eleven policemen, nicknamed peelers, led by a sergeant and a head constable, with fixed bayonets, just to deliver thirteen sheep to Drumree railway station. In the end, as you’ll discover when listening to our first episode, the bayonets of the Royal Irish Constabulary were of no avail, the sheep were boycotted in Dublin and returned on the very next train.
This is the land, but this is not a land of timeless tradition, this is the hothouse where the modern world is made.
This is a rebel story. This is a story of people who are not the big names of Irish history. This is not the history you learned in school.
This is history from below.
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