Tony Varley

On the Road to Extinction: Agrarian Parties in Twentieth‐Century Ireland

Abstract Four main explanations have been offered to account for the absence of a major agrarian party in post‐independence Ireland and for the minor status and transience of those agrarian parties that did appear. For contextual reasons associated with nationalism and modernity, two of these suggest that there was no real need for a major agrarian party to begin with. Two other explanations point to the inability of the three main agrarian parties that did emerge to transcend the class divisions that prevented farmers becoming a coherent political class, and to counter the inadequacies that left them organisationally and tactically disadvantaged vis‐à‐vis their political rivals. The author’s reading emphasises how the difficulties generated by class and political divisions were mutually reinforcing and how these difficulties in turn impacted on organisational and tactical prospects.

Towards a Theory of State-Community Partnerships: Interpreting the Irish Muintir na Tire Movement's Experience.

This paper begins by outlining two very different models or ideal-types of partnership relations between community movements and the state. What we call the optimistic model of partnerships suggests that community interests are central to the partnership approach and that they can expect to be empowered by their participation in partnerships. The pessimistic model of partnerships, in contrast, draws our attention to the manner power imbalances can skew partnership-type relations to the advantage of the state and to the disempowerment of community interests. How well these optimistic and pessimistic models fit the phenomenon of partnership as experienced by the Irish community movement, Muintir na Tire, is then considered. The Muintir case poses numerous interpretative challenges, as elements of both models are relevant to understanding it, though pessimistic model assumptions turn out to be especially relevant. Finally, the possibility that community interests may seek to exploit the opportunities the optimistic model sees contributing to empowerment, and to resist the disempowerment the pessimistic model sees flowing from co-optation, allows us to push beyond our pessimistic and optimistic models to propose a third model of partnership. What we call the activist model focuses on the abilities of community interests to assert their own capacity for collective agency by devising strategies to exploit the opportunities and negotiate the constraints associated with partnerships more to their own advantage.

Arensberg and Kimball and Anthropological Research in Ireland

For many years Irish rural sociology came to be defined in relation to Arensberg and Kimballs celebrated anthropological study, Family and Community in Ireland, for which fieldwork was undertaken in Clare between 1932 and 1934. It has been observed that ethnographers in Ireland post-Arensberg and Kimball were strongly inclined to take the community as their unit of analysis, focus their analysis of social life on kinship and social networks, and adopt structural functionalism as their theoretical model of local society. The essay republished here in abridged form accompanied the re-publication of Family and Community in Ireland in 2001. It critically examines the intellectual and political background to Arensberg and Kimballs ethnographic fieldwork in rural Clare, the manner in which their research unfolded and the subsequent reception of their published work over a period of some sixty years.