Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 1 (2016), p. 124

Donegal in transition is a study of the Congested Districts Board’s activities in the county of Donegal in the north west of Ireland. The book comprises ten chapters, each of which gives some context and a description of CDB policies and activities in relation to industry, fisheries, agriculture and parish committees. Beattie’s main argument is that historians heretofore have underestimated the impact of the CDB on Irish life, in particular life in Donegal. This study presents the extent of CDB’s activities and details the minutiae of various schemes and start-ups promoted by the board.

For those unfamiliar with Irish governmental bodies, the CDB was a regional development board active over the period 1891 to 1923. From 1891 to 1909 it had a very specific frame of reference: it would deal with ‘congested districts’, defined as counties or parts of counties where more than 20 per cent of the population of the county lived in electoral divisions where the total rateable valuation per capita was less than £1 10s (First CDB report). The geographic scope and scale of the CDB was expanded in 1909 so that the area under the board’s remit increased from 3.5 million acres to 4 million acres, the population increased from 0.5 million to 0.6 million and the rateable valuation of lands under the CDB remit rose from £0.5m to £1.79m (Nineteenth CDB report).

Curiously, for a book solely about the CDB in Donegal, a sizeable share of the county was not under the remit of the CDB from 1891 to 1909: it was only after 1909 that the entire county was included within the CDB’s remit (p. 3). This disparity is never addressed, nor has the comparison of districts in and out of the CDB remit been contemplated. Another clear omission is the lack of engagement with the definition of ‘congestion’ and its specific application to Donegal: other areas of the island had similar levels of congestion in terms of having per capita valuations below the £1 10s threshold but were excluded from the remit of the CDB. The conventional criticism of the CDB is that it was too underfunded to have any meaningful effect: essentially, it subsidized uneconomic industries and when the subsidies were removed these industries floundered. This book does little to counter these arguments, but instead highlights the grants that were provided by the CDB, equating this to success. Throughout the book the reader is repeatedly reminded of how Lee’s Modernisation of Ireland (1989), Ferriter’s The transformation of Ireland (2005) and Breathnach’s The Congested Districts Board of Ireland (2005) argue that the CDB had limited impact, and we are simply told that the author disagrees with this interpretation with little subsequent argument or disputing of the facts provided.

This study could have been much improved by adopting a more comparative approach to the topic. An obvious issue that is never addressed is why Donegal was chosen as a location of study. Was this where the CDB was most successful and had its greatest impact? A second, related point is that the CDB operated in regions of several western counties of Ireland. What was the experience like in the different counties? Did the CDB adopt a uniform one-size-fits-all approach or were policies tailored towards specific contexts? Allusions are made to other counties but these are never pursued to their logical conclusion, nor is there much in the way of comparison with wider experiences in the rest of Ireland or indeed with the British Isles more generally. Finally, the study needed a clearer way to assess how the CDB made an ‘impact’ and to more clearly disassociate this from other factors. For example, some of the important investments discussed in this work (drainage and light railways) occurred before the CDB was formed (p. 22), so it would be difficult to disentangle the effects of both the capital improvements and CDB policies.

A concluding, but no less crucial, point is that this study confuses national and local perspectives throughout. We are told that Ireland was poor (p. 23: ‘the high level of economic growth in Scotland, however, stood in stark contrast to the decline in the strength of the Irish economy at the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to the presence of coal and ore in the former and over-taxation in the latter’), but this perspective ignores the industrialization of the north of the island and is illustrative of a lack of engagement with the wider literature. Recent advances in the understanding of Irish economic growth suggest that Ireland (as a whole) experienced convergence on British income levels over the second half of the nineteenth century (see, for example, Geary and Stark’s 2002 contribution in the Economic Journal), and that this convergence was not confined to the north (on which see Kennedy, Giblin and McHugh, Economic development of Ireland). Another example of this lack of clarity appears on p. 119, where we are told that Donegal had the largest number of holdings under a £4 valuation in Ulster and that the ratio of ‘farm workers to 100 farmers’ fell from 111 to 104 between 1901 and 1911. In the subsequent paragraph we are told that farm output continued to increase, from £27m in 1850 to £50 by 1914. The latter figures, which are derived from Turner’s After the famine, refer to the island of Ireland and not to Donegal; this is a deceptive error and overall more care needed to be taken when switching between local and national contexts.

Beattie’s work certainly has merits in terms of the level of detail presented on local events, but overall it is an unfocused study, at times plagued with repetition and irrelevant material. One obvious example comes from chapter 5, where the reader is informed about fish curing in Donegal in ‘ancient times’ (this phrase is used frequently), and in the next sentence the discussion inexplicably moves to mackerel curing in Japan, then back to Donegal without expanding on this Japanese comparison (p. 58). This is but one example of scattered narrative in the book, which was, unfortunately, overly distracting. Thus while this book presents occasional snippets of thoughtful analysis, overall it is a lost opportunity. If the author had been more attentive to both the finer details and the broader context, the book would surely have made a more valuable contribution.