Thousands of people migrated from the west to harvest the bogs of the Midlands. Writer Jack Harte's family was among them and he recalls the summers of back-breaking work
While I was visiting my mother's house in Lanesboro, Co Longford, a few years ago, a young aspiring politician called to the door canvassing for an upcoming election. I asked him what his platform was, and he replied that he wanted to get rid of the economic migrants. I laughed. "You have come to the wrong shop so, because we came here as economic migrants too."
He beat a hasty retreat, realising there were no votes to be garnered in this house, but no doubt perplexed as well, because the economic migrants of the 1950s and early 1960s, who arrived by the thousand in the Midlands, have long since been assimilated into their local communities.
Yet economic migrants we were. And it was the great expanses of Midland bog that brought us here. The bogs may look dull and lethargic now, with their mounds of milled peat wrapped in polythene, but they were galvanic centres of activity when I arrived here as a boy.
My father was a blacksmith. He worked his forge in a townland called Killeenduff in Co Sligo, and the forge was totally traditional, always with men loitering to have a job done, chatting, exchanging stories, engaging in frivolity.
And I wandered freely among the stout legs of the draught horses, having honed my instincts to avoid the air space behind their hind legs. It was a shock and a puzzle to us children when the mention of moving filtered down. But move we did. The economic reason was explained and obvious: tractors were replacing horses on the farms of the 1950s and the trade was in rapid decline.
Yet as children we felt there were other darker reasons for uprooting ourselves from the place where we so obviously belonged, where we were related to everything that moved. Were we also running from the spectre of Death, that had been stalking my father's family, eliminating five of them with TB in as many years? Leaving was an accepted, if lamented, condition of life in the west of Ireland at that time. And crossing the Curlews to the Midlands was less drastic than taking the boat to Holyhead, as many families did, as our peers would have to do as soon as they reached the age of 14.
My father got a job with Bord na Mona doing smith work.
The Bord, as we called it, had been developing the bogs for the commercial production of fuel with serious intent since the war years. By the 1950s their great baggers, special turf-cutting machines, were covering vast tracts with neatly laid rows of turf. The problem was that every sod had to be harvested by hand. When the words "labour intensive" come to my mind, I laugh at the inadequacy of such a term.
The thousands of workers they needed for this grand assault on the bogs of Ireland were not available in the sparsely populated areas in which the bogs were located.
So they recruited men elsewhere, generally from the impoverished communities along the western seaboard. The next problem was accommodation, so they built hostels adjacent to the bogs. Then they built whole villages so that their core of permanent employees could bring their families.
It was to such a village, or housing estate, on the outskirts of the town of Lanesboro, that we arrived in the 1950s, with all our possessions packed around us on the back of a lorry. There were three such villages around Lanesboro, and they all filled up rapidly with large families.
I don't know whether it was part of the ingenious grand plan of the Bord, but, apart from securing the services of the men who occupied the houses, the villages also provided the additional boon of a huge seasonal work-force of women and children.
Roll back that polythene covering and the passage of 40 years. There was no milled peat then, just rows and rows of turf left behind by the baggers to dry in the late spring sunshine. When it was dry enough to "foot", the word went out. The day we had been waiting for with tightened chests had arrived. We descended on the bog in droves, men, women, children.
It was my first job, my first experience of being paid for work. "Footing" involved lifting the sods from their spread position and building them into little structures that would allow them to dry fully. The spread turf was divided into plots and there was a very generous payment for footing each plot.
While we were in school it was an evening and weekend activity, but when the summer holidays came it was full-time. During the footing season the bog resembled a vast carnival, with so many people, from toddlers to pensioners, scattered across the bog-scape, all frenetically busy. A family would take a plot, the mother and children, perhaps, working through the day, the father arriving in the evening after knocking-off from his regular job, older boys expected to continue on with the father for a couple of hours after the mother and younger children had gone home.
I can still recall the ache I felt in my back every time I straightened up. It was easier to remain in a crouched position, easier to continue turning over the sods and lashing them up into footings until boredom more than pain coaxed me upright to admire what I had done, then to check, usually in dismay, how much more my neighbour had done. Yes, footing also introduced us to competition, to suspicion and to subterfuge.
Achievement in footing gave people bragging rights, and could be measured with scientific exactness. Some families and individuals performed phenomenal feats, their deeds being recounted in the pubs of Lanesboro to this day. By comparison, I and my family belonged to the ranks of the journeymen. Of the nine children of our family, six of us did service on the bog. But we were not naturals, never achieved the rhythm and style and stamina of the true professionals. It was the prospect of a holiday back in Sligo at the end of the summer that kept us motivated, and helped us through the pain barrier.
By the mid-1960s turf production was becoming more and more mechanised, until hand-footing became as obsolete as the horse-drawn plough. No more was the summer bog festooned with the bright shirts and dresses of the seasonal workers.
One major challenge I found when presenting these events in a novel, was avoiding both rosy nostalgia on the one hand and the over-emphasising of the hardship and poverty of the 1950s on the other. Only a combination of hardness and humanity could do justice to the experiences.
Another big challenge was to show displaced families, despite their overt affiliation to their native counties, setting down roots and forming bonds in their adopted community, almost unconsciously, through the normal acts of living. When one of my childhood poems was re-published in the Irish Press by Patrick Lagan, aka Benedict Kiely, he described me as "a poet from Lanesboro". The irony was not lost on me, then or now.
• Jack Harte's novel, In the Wake of the Bagger, is published by Scotus Press