"The Land" of Ireland: connection and reclamation

Exploring women's relationship with the "Land" of Ireland and the impact of Ireland's personification as a female on the lives of ordinary women.

“The landscape [of Ireland] is pregnant with meaning: the anchor of personal and collective history, the material with which local, regional, or national identity is constructed”

—(Lawrence J. Taylor, 1995)

“The Land” — The Land of Ireland— is a phrase that comes up in many women of Ireland project interviews. Rarely are women referring to the physical rock and soil of terra firma when they use it. Instead “The Land” is a simple phrase to evoke the complex and collective numinosity that characterises the land in Ireland.

For Ireland, many of us agree, is magic.

Ireland, as a land, has a particular energy and resonance that you can touch, taste, and feel. It is not something you can utter into mundane words, it’s just something you know — a felt sense.

“The land has always existed. It just is. It needs no help from us. In every speck of its being it is fully present, fully manifested. The choice is ours whether we wish to engage with it in a meaningful way or merely accept it as a backdrop to our lives. From the land’s point of view, our choice is irrelevant; but to us, from a psychological, spiritual and physical health standpoint, it can make all the difference"

—Manchán Magan, Listen to the Land Speak

Women who have moved abroad, and no longer live in Ireland, describe how of all the things they miss, it is “The Land” they can feel most homesick for. That it’s not just a romanticism for ‘home’ but a bodily feeling that recognises the difference between its “presence” and its “absence” in their lives. Visits home become more about being “on the land” than just being in Ireland. They come seeking the ineffable qualities that make up what is so “special about the feeling of being on the land in Ireland”.

In Ireland “the earth itself is less disenchanted than elsewhere in Europe” Lawrence J. Taylor

Whenever and however “The Land” appears in women’s lives it is clear that the connection they feel to it is important, perhaps even vital, for their personal well-being.

“The Land” provides a space through which a depth is achieved (of understanding, meaning, connection), where healing can occur, or where an aspect of the Self can be reclaimed or reconnected to an indefinable essence that may have been previously missing in their lives. For others, cultivating a connection to “The Land” is about finding and receiving ancestral wisdom and knowledge, or connecting in with the sacred feminine force and wisdom “The Land” — as Mother Nature, “Éire”— is seen to embody.

In many ways, “The Land”, as described here, represents what Jan Penrose calls a “mystical bond between people and place”.

“In Ireland, the link between place and myth is strong”.

—Daragh Smyth, Earthing the Myths

Ireland is a heavily mythicised landscape; geographical features and ancient sites earth stories of the other-worldly and transcendental, giving them a meaning that goes beyond the material.

Central to this mythicising of that landscape has been the personification of the land as a woman.

“The personification of the country has been a persistent theme, and it has taken the form of female figures who were originally deities, wishful symbols of the fertility of the land and the people”.

—E. Estyn Evans, The Personality of Ireland

From pre-historical sovereignty goddesses representing a particular territory, to the spéir-bhean (sky-woman) of 18th-century aisling poetry, and the various allegorical females of 19th and 20th-century nationalist political imagery, Ireland has always been represented by a female figure.

“Whether personified as a young woman violated by the colonial English, or as a mother, wife or sister weeping over her murdered menfolk, or as an old woman, Kathleen Ní Houlihan, once comely but now awaiting her young admirers to sacrifice themselves for her and thus restore to her a youthful beauty, Ireland was ever a woman”

—Garry Kearns, University of Cambridge, 2004

In her many and various forms in legendry — Éiru(Éire/Erin)-Fódla-Banba, the Cailleach— and nationalism — Hibernia, Kathleen Ní Houlihan, Mother Ireland and An tSean-Bhean Bhoct— her symbolic heritage has had a very real, tangible and rarely positive impact on the lives of ordinary women.

The “Harp of Erin” by Thomas Buchanan Read

Historian Cara Delay has examined how the feminisation of the Irish landscape, and the transmission of this through folklore, enabled the constraining of women’s bodies in “space and place”. She describes how, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in Ireland, oral traditions and fairy beliefs about the landscape were used to regulate female sexuality, and confine women to the home.

A common narrative in many Irish folk tales is that of a woman being taken-by-the-fairies and replaced by a changeling. As the women in these stories were never at home when they were taken, but in “marginal landscapes” away from home and domesticity —walking the roads, picking berries at the edge of a village, out in the fields— they served to reinforce a social narrative that it was dangerous and treacherous for women to go beyond the domesticity of the home. As Delay explains:

“The telling of such stories sent a clear message to young women: stay at home, and in your proper place, or else you too may fall victim to supernatural abduction”.

Angela Bourke, who wrote The Burning of Bridget Cleary —the story of a young woman who, in 1895 was murdered and burnt by her husband who claimed she had been taken by the fairies— has also argued that fairy belief in changelings, rooted in the landscape, masked domestic violence and served to contain and control strong-minded women.

By the time of Irish independence in the 1920s, the connection between the land of Ireland and women was a well-established nationalist trope. This intermingling of womanhood and nationhood would significantly affect the lives of ordinary women in the new state, as the virtuosity of women was seen as the determinant of the moral health and future success of the burgeoning nation.

“The future of the country is bound up with the dignity and purity of the
women of Ireland”.

—Dr. Gilmartin, Archbishop of Tuam, 1926

Women became the symbols of national identity and “Irishness”. The “real” Ireland was Catholic, Gaelic and Rural. Making it a reality required women to adhere to the ideals of Irish womanhood; to be benign, silent and virtuous Catholic wives and mothers who, through their ‘duties in the home’, would serve to civilise, moralise and ‘Gaelicise’ the state’s future citizens. In the continued blurring of ‘nation’ and ‘woman’ typical of the Irish nationalist tradition, women became essentialised not just as mothers, but as mothers of the nation.

‘Women of Ireland’ were ‘Mother Ireland’

As women’s place ‘in the home’ became a core aspect of nation-building, and women’s domestic activities were linked directly with national regeneration, the architecture of the state became as much about putting in place what was needed to run a new nation as, what James Smith calls, the “architecture of containment”. Such architecture encompassed state-funded institutions (such as the Magdalene laundries) designed to contain those who were deemed to have violated ideals of female virtuosity and make clear that women’s proper sphere was the private: married motherhood.

“The regulation of women and the landscape thus helped bolster the new patriarchal state that would deny most Irish women a significant active or public role”.

—Cara Delay, Deposited Elsewhere”: The Sexualized Female Body and the Modern Irish Landscape, 2012

In this way, the women of Ireland and the land of Ireland have a shared heritage. Their stories are deeply intertwined and inseparable, shaped as they are by similar forces. The symbolic —the feminisation of the land— impacting on the literal —the lives of women.

And yet, for the women interviewed for this project who feel a close connection to “The Land”, it is clear that they are reaching to something beyond that feminised-nationalised space — that 'Mother Ireland’— which has long served to disempower and contain women in a “straightjacket of purity and passivity” (Elizabeth Butler Cullingford). For their “Land of Ireland” represents a liberating, healing, nourishing and powerfully numinous force in their lives — a source of grounding, reclamation, strength, empowerment and identity.

These women are, quite intuitively and often unbeknownst to themselves, creating a radical shift in the symbolic meaning of the land of Ireland.

For women who grew up outside of the boundaries that have determined “Irishness” —Catholic, Gaelic, White— the innate, soul-level connection they have felt to “The Land” itself has been what has made them feel ‘of Ireland’ and Irish. Considering the symbolic role the land has played in the formation of national identity (once so strictly defined as Catholic, Gaelic and Rural) this is a powerful shift. Through their innate connection to “The Land”, these women are decoupling the land of Ireland from strict notions of national identity and creating a more secular form of “Irishness”. One that is ultimately more meaningful for the individual, capturing, as it does, the very essence of that ‘mystical bond’ they feel between them and the land of Ireland:

[Now, as a woman of Ireland, the most important thing to me is the connection to the land, knowing that] “I truly am a part of the very earth of it”.

[Despite growing up Protestant and feeling that parts of Irish culture were not available to me, when it comes to the land of Ireland] “I could hold Catholicism to one side, and Protestants to the other side…. [so], when it comes to just me —in me— it would be the land of Ireland that I would have always turned to, for restoration and for health, and for completeness, maybe, and courage”. (Read June’s story in full here).

For others, “The Land” —itself so heavily politicised in its feminised form— has provided, in nature, a space in which they have been able to de-politicise and reclaim their own bodies:

[So, over the last few years, I’ve been working with other people doing nature-based work] “it's just all [about] reconnecting, it's reconnecting us to our place and our mountain and our river and our soil, you know, so for me the body, you know woman's bodies are so political, but for me, this was like taking it back and reclaiming it, and it's mine. And it's the earth’s, you know, it belongs to the earth. And I think that was something that I really struggled with growing up, you know, there's not many women that haven't experienced sexual harassment… it's so normal”. (Read Cora’s story here)

It could be said that the tradition of personifying Ireland as a woman began with the sovereignty goddesses — the female deities who were seen as one and the same as the land.

But the history of the female personification of Ireland is anything but a story of sovereignty. Voiceless, Her story has been written and shaped by the agenda of countless poets and politicians, writers and artists, and subject to their expectations and ideals.

While the ecofeminist movement has long pointed out the parallels between the oppression and degradation of the land and nature, and the oppression and degradation of women, in Ireland I feel, it goes even deeper than that — it has also been the parallel symbolic control of the land and women.

But this deep symbolic intertwining of “The Land” and women in Ireland also means that what impacts one can impact the other.

I see this interaction playing out in women’s stories, how they turn to “The Land” to heal themselves from the very things “The Land” has also been subject to — the politicisation and sexualisation of her body, the religious gatekeeping of national identity, expectations of ‘ideal womanhood’, disconnection and disenchantment.

It feels as though, by turning to the land for what it has long represented in the human psyche —nourishment, healing and connectedness— women are giving it back some sovereignty whilst also finding their own.

The intermingled story of The Land of Ireland and The Women of Ireland continues.