Muintir na Tíre involved in Community Alert and Community Enterprise Development

Muintir na Tíre have been involved in many initiatives and projects throughout its history. Some of the projects they have been involved in include rural electrification, building of community halls and centres, EEC Pilot Project for the Training of Trainers and The Tidy Towns competition. Further information on the many projects they have been involved in can be found here.

Some of the files that I have recently catalogued have dealt with two big initiatives that Muintir na Tíre have been involved in. Both of these initiatives involved community development and empowering the local community to work together.

The first initiative is Community Alert which Muintir na Tíre are still involved with today. Muintir na Tíre became involved with Community Crime Prevention back in 1985. The idea of Community Alert was Muintir’s response to a number of vicious attacks on elderly people in 1984 and 1985 in rural Ireland. 

  

Muintir na Tíre worked with An Garda Síochana to establish the community crime prevention programme. Neighbourhood Watch had been introduced in urban areas in 1984 and Community Alert was launched in 1985 for rural areas.

 

Community Alert was organised by local community councils or interested local people with the help of a Muintir na Tíre Development Officer and a Garda. Community Alert road signs were erected in local areas and a local campaign was established.

Funding for Community Alert was provided by government departments including Department of Social, Family and community Affairs, Department of Health and Children and Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.

The files in the collection give us a great understanding of the development of community alert and how Muintir na Tíre were to the forefront of its development. To find out more about the Community Text Alert Scheme run by Muintir na Tíre today visit here.

The second initiative that Muintir na Tíre was involved in was with the Youth Employment Agency. They employed an Enterprise Development Officer to work with community groups to establish community enterprises to create jobs in the local community. 

The beginnings of an initiative to have full time staff involved in community development training began with the EEC Pilot Project in the 1970s but it was not until the mid 1980s that they got to initiate the initiative. Through the support and financial backing of the Youth Employment Agency, which later became FÁS, they were able to employ a fulltime Enterprise Development Officer.

This work was led by Eamon O’Sullivan, the Enterprise Development Officer, and he worked with numerous community groups such as Burgess Community Enterprise Group, Castletownroache Community Enterprise Co-op, Galbally Community Enterprise Group and Tallow Community Enterprise Group.

The files detail the work that Eamon did with each group to investigate and establish various community enterprises. They also detail how the state agencies were working with different groups to improve the unemployment situation that was in Ireland during the 1980s. 

The programme ran until 1988 and while there was some success with industries formed by local Enterprise groups not all groups involved in the programme were a success. The files provide us with great insight into the programme and how Muintir na Tíre worked with government departments. The programme was another example of how Muintir na Tíre was always working with communities to be self-reliant.

There are many more examples of the initiatives that Muintir na Tíre were involved in in the collection and this shows the impact and involvement that they have had on Irish society in their 80 year history. 

Muintir na Tíre and Community Development as evidenced in its publications

My colleague Marie Boran and I gave a talk for culture night on 22^nd September. Marie focused on James Hardiman and I focused on Muintir na Tíre. The common thread we weaved through or talks was community development. Marie looked at how James Hardiman got involved in community groups in Galway in the 19^th century and I looked at how Muintir na Tíre conveyed the message of community development and showed it in action in Rural Ireland and The Landmark in the 20^th century. 

Rural Ireland, an annual publication, was first published in 1941 and was initially titled ‘Muintir na Tíre Official Handbook’ and renamed in 1948. Contained within Rural Ireland were reports from guilds, agricultural advice, short stories, historical articles and articles on community development, vocationalism, rural sociology, rural electrification, water schemes and afforestation. Details of the National Executive and affiliated guilds were published annually. It ceased publication in 1972 when the last Rural Ireland was published.

The Landmark, a monthly publication, was first published in August 1944. It was hoped that The Landmark would ‘pass into many hands, and will also be a binding force for the guilds of Muintir na Tíre scattered throughout the country. It will serve as a platform for their views, and it will tell them what others are doing in the country’. …..The Landmark goes forth as a banner to lead and unite the vocation of agriculture and bring Christianity to our fields’.

The Landmark had more recurring themed articles which were targeted at women, agricultural workers, young people, gardeners and those interested in GAA. Articles on The Parish Plan, agriculture, vocationalism, electrification, forestry, water schemes, youth in the community, agricultural improvements and guild updates were published. It ceased publication in 1973.

Muintir na Tíre came into contact with the term community development in the late 1950s. The definition of community development that Muintir na Tíre adopted was from the United Nations who defined community development ‘as a process designed to create conditions of economic and social progress for the whole community with its active participation and fullest possible reliance upon the communities own initiative’.

Looking at the two publications we can see many examples of how Muintir na Tíre were involved in community development before it became the organisation’s focus after 1958. Before 1958, an example is the development and the promotion of the Parish Plan which was devised by Professor Joseph Lyons UCC and P.J. Meghen, county manager for Limerick. Muintir na Tíre believed that any reform of Irish agriculture should be based on the parish as a unit. The plan was to be administered by the Parish Council (the guild), with the co-operation of all sections of the parish in the interest of balanced agricultural effort. It was also intended that the Plan would utilise to the fullest the existing schemes offered by the Department of Agriculture for agricultural improvement.

We see articles on what the plan will mean for parishes, how productivity will be increased and how it will improve farming in both publications. ‘Better Farming by the Parish’ by Professor J. Lyons in Rural Ireland 1949 lays out how the parish council can establish a plan and how it should be organised. A second article in the same issue titled ‘The Parish Plan’ states that the plan is to increase agricultural production so that the country may have an increased income and thus a greater spending power.

Muintir na Tíre were also involved in the promotion of the use of electricity in rural Ireland. Bansha was one of the first guilds involved in the promotion and use of electricity with electricity switched on on May 23 1948. Fr Hayes stated on the day that “rural electrification has given a new life and new light to our community” The Landmark, June 1948.

Articles on rural electrification began to appear in Rural Ireland in 1945. In 1947 we see articles discussing how Muintir na Tíre can help with establishing rural electrification in your area and in 1949 discussing how the scheme of rural electrification is progressing. There are numerous examples of the work of the guilds with the ESB and rural electrification found in both publications.

Post 1958 we see an increase on the number of articles on community development. An article by Rev M. Morrissey in Rural Ireland 1959 entitle ‘Canon Hayes – Pioneer of the Community Idea in Ireland’ looks at how Canon Hayes was developing a community spirit through his work in Muintir na Tíre.

Muintir na Tíre was supported by Professor George F Thomason, from Cardiff University who was known for his research and work in industrial relations. He wrote numerous articles and publications on community development for Muintir na Tíre. He notes in his article ‘Community Development – A view of Society’ in Rural Ireland 1960 that the term community development and the application of the principles of community development that is changing the face of India, Ghana and other countries is not something that need worry Muintir na Tíre as they have been doing the same thing themselves. 

Another big scheme that Muintir na Tíre got involved in in the 1960s was in local group water schemes and getting piped water to communities. The guilds got involved in the planning of group water schemes and piped water. In The Landmark in February 1962 there is information provided on how to form a group water scheme and when it is best to do this “many groups of people throughout the country have found that where suitable water is not readily available, big economies may be effected by a number of householders getting together and utilising one source of water and one pump for the whole group”.

Other examples of community development shown in the two publications include the involvement of guilds in the Tidy Towns competition. This was very much encouraged by headquarters as it was something that the guilds could lead on. In 1963, 66 guilds provided entries to the Tidy Towns Competition. This was an increase of 11 on 1962. For Muintir na Tíre this showed great community spirit.

While only a sample of how community development is discussed and evidenced in both publications it shows how heavily involved Muintir na Tíre were involved in improving local communities and aimed to “organise the different elements of rural life in Ireland into one body for the common good. It strives to promote the true welfare of Ireland, spiritual, cultural and material based on a wider and better knowledge and practice of Christian social principles”.   

Muintir na Tíre's financial and governance records

In my last blog I wrote about the various stages of work that an archivist does in preparing a collection to make it accessible in the reading room. Having completed the arrangement (almost) I have now started describing the collection. These descriptions will provide researchers with sign posts to what is contained in a file or bound volume.

The material I have been cataloguing in the collection so far has been mainly financial records and governance records of Muintir na Tíre. The financial records of Muintir na Tíre contain various ledgers detailing membership, income and expenditure, annual reports and petty cash books. The annual reports of Muintir na Tíre date back as far as 1945. Below is an example of the annual report from 1974. These records provide a great understanding of the financial position of Muintir na Tíre throughout its history.  

 

 

The ledgers dealing with membership provide us with the details of the guilds and community councils who registered as members with Muintir na Tíre. The Guild’s Ledgers contain information on the subscriptions that guilds had for Landmark. Below is an example of this. All this valuable information provides us with evidence of the number of guilds/community councils that were members of Muintir na Tíre down through the years. We can ascertain the history of guilds/community councils for the last 80 years from these records as well.

A constitution has been used as the governing method of Muintir na Tíre since its foundation. The constitution has been amended over the years to reflect the development and different ways of working of Muintir na Tíre. In 1996, Muintir na Tíre became a Company Limited by Guarantee and now has a memorandum of understanding and articles of association. They developed guidelines on setting up a community council and they provided a template for the constitution they required if setting up the council as a company limited by guarantee. Examples of some of the constitutions is provided below.

 

We also get an understanding of the election process in Muintir na Tíre. The Honorary Returning Officer was a busy person organising and managing the election process from the nominations to confirming the names of those elected. We see the variety of individual who were nominated and got involved in the National Council.

 

Finally, we also get an understanding of the decisions made by the National Council of Muintir na Tíre. The minutes of the National Executive committee meetings provide the eveidence of the decisions made by the leadership of Muintir na Tíre down through the years. They also show the many discussions that took place on various issues that faced Muintir na Tíre and the many projects they got involved in.

  

These records provide us with the evidence of how Muintir na Tíre was governed over the last 80 years. The descriptions for these records have been written and while you have to wait until the collection as a whole is catalogued before they are available for consultation, you can start thinking about how you can use this wonderful collection for your research purposes. 

  

The work of an archivist

In the first blog post I wrote I spoke about the various stages of the work that an archivist does in preparing a collection to make it accessible in the reading room. I am now down to the last of the boxes and files in the arrangement phase. The time it can take to arrange an archive can vary depending on the size of the archive and the order in which the material is in the archive. 

During the arrangement phase archivists look to keep and respect the order that the creators arranged their own records. In archival terminology this means that I look at the Muintir na Tíre collection as a fonds. This comes from the term respect des fonds, an archival principle which tells us to acknowledge the source, or provenance, of records when we are arranging them. By maintaining the original order we can learn a lot more about the organisation and the records and how Muintir na Tíre worked.

However, this is not always easy to do especially when you receive a collection has been stored like below and no original order has been kept.

Another aspect that makes it hard to appraise and arrange the collection and follow the archival principles described above is when you get a bundle of loose papers. It requires a lot of patience and skill to arrange the material and put some order on it and make sense of the material in the bundles.

My work as an archivist is to help put order on the archive especially the messier aspects of it and provide sense of the records but also help researchers make sense of it. 

The Muintir na Tíre archive as stated in my first blog was partially organised. This work was done by Tom Fitzgerald. Tom Fitzgerald worked in Muintir na Tíre for over 60 years and was the main administrator and was the creator and keeper of the majority of the files within the archive. Building on this work I will provide further sense of the archive.

That means that each item will have been arranged in a hierarchy that will look something like below:

But what does this actually mean? This means that as I am arranging the Muintir na Tíre archive (fonds) that it will be divided into series and subseries which are groupings of the records based on function or theme or subject. The series or subseries would then have files which includes items within them. 

A description will be provided for at the top level and or the file level of the collection. Each file will also be provided with a reference number. The archive uses archival management software to create our catalogues/finding aids and publish the catalogue on line. To view the catalogue go here.

I hope that this blog has given you a further insight into the work of an archivist as we are progressing through the Muintir na Tíre archive and end one phase and begin another. 

Sociologists in Muintir na Tíre

Muintir na Tíre pioneered and were involved in promoting many new concepts and technologies in its 80 year history. They were involved in rural electrification, group water schemes, community alert and community development. They had prominent Irish sociologists involved in the organisation in the 1940s to the 1990s. Among these were Jeremiah Newman, Bishop of Limerick, Dr Thomas Morris, Archbishop of Cashel and Emly and Tomas Roseingrave.

Within the Muintir na Tíre collection we are lucky to have the papers relating to Muintir na Tíre of Dr Thomas Morris and of Tomas Roseingrave. We do have correspondence from Jeremiah Newman but these are contained in the correspondence of Muintir na Tíre not his own papers.

Dr Thomas Morris was the National Recording Secretary of Muintir na Tíre. He was Vice President of the diocesan seminary, St Patrick’s college in Thurles and became Archbishop of Cashel and Emly in 1960. In the archive we have correspondence that was received by Dr Morris with regard to the work of Muintir na Tíre, his role as editor of Landmark and with regard to his views on sociology, rural Ireland and community development.

He was concerned with the internal organisation and structures of Muintir na Tíre and produced papers on how the secretary should work, the use of filing systems and the structures of guilds. 

In the 1940s and 1950s the Catholic Church were vocal against Communism across Europe. This view was supported by both Canon Hayes and Dr Morris who spoke out against communism in Ireland. Below we have an example from a paper written by Dr Morris on this.

       

He also looked at community development in rural Ireland. One of the papers in the archive is ‘Organisation of Rural Workers’ which looks at the history and structure of the agricultural industry, growth of workers’ associations and the parish organisation in Muintir na Tíre.

The other prominent sociologist involved in Muintir na Tíre was Tomas Roseingrave, who had a Master’s Degree in social science from UCD. He was Director of manpower studies in the Department of Labour. In 1968 he became the second National Director of Muintir na Tíre. He resigned from the post in 1975 but continued on as consultant National Director and was involved until his death in 1993. In 1973 he became a member of the EEC Economic and Social Committee where he was President in the 1981.

Roseingrave was a constant in Muintir na Tíre from 1968 to his death in 1993. His work as National Director included setting the direction of the organisation, developing policy and organising the administration and staff.  He communicated with various organisations and government departments on behalf of Muintir na Tíre and also represented them on various committees and bodies.

He also led a number of Muintir na Tíre projects. As the lead on the E.E.C. Pilot project the Community Development Officers reported to him on their work. The outcome of this was the report Pilot Scheme on Training Programme for Community Development Officers. 

He also wrote many paper on community development. Below is an example of an article he wrote for Community Focus in 1979 

             

and this paper published in 1974. 

In his role on the Economic and Social Committee he became well versed on European issues and was a support of Ireland joining the E.E.C. He was very concerned with community development and the improvement of rural life and decreasing the gap between rich and poor. This can be seen in his address at the Plenary Session of the Economic and Social Committee in December 1981.

Muintir na Tíre have been very lucky to have prominent sociologists involved to help develop the theme of community development down through the years. 

Muintir na Tíre's Community Development Officer - A Common Thread

As mentioned in an earlier post I spoke about getting to be the first to explore an archive. Another perk is getting to see common threads, trends in the work an organisation/person, the issues that come up over and over again and how the organisation/person worked.

In Muintir na Tíre one of the common threads throughout its 80 years in existence is the use of Community Development Officers/Community Alert Development Officers. The role has been used to spread the word and work of Muintir na Tíre in the community. The Development Officers formed guilds, community councils and community alert group with the local community. They provided advice and guidance to these and ensured they were informed of any decisions from headquarters.  

In the archive we can see the role of Organisers in the 1950s is to spread the work and word of Muintir na Tíre in communities and to from guilds. There were approximately six organisers employed by Muintir na Tíre during this time. Each week the Organiser had to submit a report to Headquarters with regard to the weeks work and note if a new guild was formed. Below is a repot from O. Reilly who covered Tipperary, Kilkenny, Kerry, Kildare and Meath. These reports give a great insight into the communities that Muintir na Tíre engaged with and the issues that were facing guilds. 

In the 1970s Community Development Officers were employed in the E.E.C. Pilot Project. Funding for the pilot project came from the European Social Fund. The project was focused on training community development workers in rural community work which led to employment opportunities through local enterprise. The project also focused on developing community councils, identifying community needs, organising local resources, linking of local resources to those available at higher levels and seeking to accommodate the local projects within the plans and programmes devised at statutory, regional and national levels of administration/organisation [Tierney p.158]. The Community Development officers advised on the creation of community councils and the identification of the needs and objectives of rural-urban societies. They operated in defined locations and worked closely with community council and provided them with training and a professional approach. A copy of Conditions of Employment for Community development officers can be seen below. They also provided weekly reports which are also in the archive.

In the 1980s there were two types of employee’s in Muintir na Tíre. One of these was the Community Development officer who continued to focus on community development, supporting community councils and creating new councils. Kevin Hickey was employed by both Headquarters and Cork County Federation and his role and achievements in Cork is described below.

The 1980s also saw the creation of Community Alert in rural Ireland in 1985. To help promote Community Alert, Muintir na Tíre employed and continues to employ Community Alert Development Officers who help establish community alert groups in local communities across Ireland. They work closely with An Garda Síochána. The Community Alert Development Officers also completed weekly work reports. Below is an example of a report from the 1990s from Pat Doyle. 

These reports provide a great insight into the development of community alert and the issues facing communities in rural Ireland.

The role of a community development officer to promote the work and word of Muintir na Tíre has been an effective tool for 80 years. This role is one of many common threads in the archive.