This teaching resource from the Irish Qualitative Data Archive focuses on class, social mobility, and consciousness in 20th-century Ireland, utilizing interview excerpts to illustrate the lived experiences related to social class. It emphasizes how class affects opportunities, educational access, and community interactions, particularly within rural settings. The resource is part of a larger project aimed at enhancing teaching and learning through qualitative archives.

1. Class
This teaching and learning resource has been produced by the Irish Qualitative Data
Archive as part of the NUI Maynooth/NDLR Learning Innovation Community Support
Project, “Teaching and Learning Through the Archive”.
The presentation includes short interview excerpts from the Life Histories and Social
Change Project, http://www.iqda.ie/content/life-histories-and-social-change-20th-
century-ireland where the respondent have given their consent to be identified.
Irish Qualitative Data Archive, 2013
Additional teaching resources are available at http://www.iqda.ie/content/teaching-
resources
Development of this resource funded by National University of Ireland Maynooth /
National Digital Learning Repository
Attribute as follows: Irish Qualitative Data Archive [distributor], 2012.

2. Class
Image courtesy of The National Library of Ireland

3. Concepts:
Class
Social mobility
Class consciousness

4. 1. What do we mean
by ‘class’

5. 1. What do we mean by ‘class’?
“There are many ways to explain, even to
justify, inequalities of opportunity and
outcome ... [In] all modern
societies, wealth, income, education and
social esteem or status are always of key
importance. ‘Class’ is widely used by
sociologists in discussions of these kinds of
inequality.” (Share, Tovey and
Corcoran, 2007, pg. 180).

6. 1. What do we mean by ‘class’?
• [A] system whereby people are grouped according to
their common economic position, especially as those
positions give access to differential rewards in the
shape of wealth, property, income and power
• *An+ expression of people’s lifestyles, in particular how
they consume and how they express themselves
through certain styles of consumption
• [A] matter of social esteem, prestige or status – a
measure of social standing within a particular society
(Share, Tovey and Corcoran, 2007, pg. 181)

7. 2. Class in
Ireland

8. 2. Class in Ireland
“In the first half of the
twentieth
century, opportunitie
s open to Irish people
depended heavily on
whether the family
own property such as
a farm or small
business”
(Share, Tovey and
Corcoran, 2007, p. 162)
Image courtesy of The National Library of Ireland

9. Cooring: diminishing or reinforcing class
division in rural Irish communities?
Cooring means...
“the exchange of labour between
households, either routinely, or at
particular points of the year such as
haymaking when labour needs are
high” (Tovey & Share, 2003, p. 108)

10. Cooring: diminishing or reinforcing class
division in rural Irish communities?
“According to Arensberg and Kimball [the
institutions of kinship and cooring] reflected the
strong value that local culture placed on the
obligations of neighbourliness.
They also helped ensure a level of equality between
the farm households in the local area and
prevented any from falling into severe poverty or
debt, or indeed from becoming particularly
wealthy” (Tovey & Share, 2003, p. 108)

11. Think about...
Listen to the interview excerpt on the next slide
and think about the following questions.
Q1. Which social group was seen as more powerful within the
community?
Q2. Why do you think they were seen as more powerful?
Q3. According to the interview participant, how was higher
status shown?
Q4. Does this excerpt support or contradict Arensberg's and
Kimball's argument that cooring ensured a level of
equality?

12. Audio clip An account of class in a rural community
Source: Life Histories and Social Change Project, LH102 (male, born in 1916)
http://www.iqda.ie/content/life-histories-and-social-change-20th-century-ireland
INT: And tell me this Michael, em, a lot of people we talk about remember there was different classes in society. You know,
there was the upper class or the lower class?
RESP: There was, a lower class, the upper class had special seats in the in the gallery, as in the church, they had definitely
INT: Right who were they?
RESP: Big farmers
INT: Right
RESP: Had their name up in the, you daren't go into their seats
INT: Yeah so people were aware of it, you knew it?
RESP: Oh you knew it, oh Jesus they were, oh God they were. And you see if the big farmer had the thresh on and you
might have two or three days he'd make you work and you'd be there in the morning early
INT: Is that right, yeah
RESP: He'd be looking over you the whole time
INT: Is that right
RESP: Wanting there'd be, could be thirty men in at the threshing and he'd be there and he'd be spotting everything
INT: Making sure the work was done right?
RESP: The work was done right and he'd shift you to another job if you weren't pulling your weight
INT: Yes, and did you do those that kind of work when you were a teenager?
RESP: Oh God I did, we all did it, and then you'd have two or three days, the big man had always the majority, for everything
INT: So if anything would be going on they'd get the jobs done first?
RESP: They would, they'd get the big man ordered and then they'd get the first in
INT: And would they pay you well?
RESP: They’d give you nothing *laughs+ a thankless job
INT: Is that right
RESP: You’d be lucky if you had your coat coming home, and your fork!
INT: Is that right

13. 3. Social Mobility

14. 3. Social Mobility
Social mobility can be understood in two key ways:
• as structural mobility: a consequence of changes
in the occupational structure itself
• as relative social mobility: the chance or
‘odds’, compared to others’, of moving into a
different class to the one into which one is born
(Whelan, 1995 cited in Share, Tovey and
Corcoran, 2007, pg. 172)

15. 3. Social Mobility
[W]hen mobility opportunities
are blocked or
constrained, what might
otherwise remain simply
economic differences
between individuals are
transformed into
membership of identifiable
social classes with
distinctive lifestyles and
unequal life chances.
(Tovey, Share and
Corcoran, 2007, pg. 174)
Image courtesy of The National Library of Ireland

16. Think about...
Listen to the interview excerpt on the next slide
and think about the following questions.
Q1. How does this respondent distinguish the better off people
from the poor in the community of his childhood?
Q2. How did ownership of property affect the opportunity to get
access to secondary education in this community (called
‘college’ here)?
Q3. The participant describes how the teacher selected the sons
of farmers to continue to secondary education, and how
these boys were picked out in front of the class. How might
such actions contribute to the reproduction of social class?

17. Class inequalities in education in the 1930s
Audio clip Source: Life Histories and Social Change Project, LH109 (male, born in 1924)
http://www.iqda.ie/content/life-histories-and-social-change-20th-century-ireland
INT: And when you were going to school what did you hope you were going to get out of life when you grew up then?
RESP: *Incredulous laughter+ You didn’t know what to do at that time. There was five of us, five boys, in the same class. And
there was a priest came over one day and he asked the teacher could they, or she, recommend anyone that would
like to go to college down to Rochestown I think to college in Rochestown. She picked out two boys and then she said
‘I could give you a third fella as well’, she said, ‘but he couldn’t afford it.’ *Laughter+ We couldn’t either. They were
farmers you see, the two boys that were picked.
INT: And were they picked out in front of each other? Did the other boys know who was being picked?
RESP: Oh they did, yeah they did
INT: Yeah
RESP: As far as like the senior class now
INT: I know what you mean. And so, you’d have known who was well off and who wasn’t well off, would you?
RESP: Well yeah, that way you would yeah, you would yeah
INT: Would you?
RESP: You would
INT: Who were the better off people?
RESP: Well the farmers were better off
INT: Were they?
RESP: They were. Because they were able to grow their own potatoes and all vegetables and they had their own milk
INT: [Interrupts] And who were the poor people?
RESP: And their wheat, grinding, making the flour. Ah God, they’d be better off than we were anyway, you know
INT: And who were the poor people then Patrick?
RESP: Well I suppose we’d be, we’d be classed as poor then, yeah
INT: Yes. Your father was working for somebody or whatever?
RESP: That’s right yeah, that’s right, yeah, that’s right

18. 4. Symbols and
Strategies of Class

19. 4. Symbols and Strategies of Class
“Class awareness involves a shared awareness and
acceptance of a common style of life among the
members of a class” (Breen and Whelan, 1996
cited in Share, Tovey and Corcoran, 2007, pg.
189, emphasis added)
Class consciousness implies “recognition that the
attitude, beliefs and styles of life that members
of this class have in common signify a class
affiliation, that there are other classes with
different attitudes, beliefs and patterns of
behaviours”. (Ibid.)

20. Think about...
Listen to the interview excerpt on the next slide
and think about the following questions.
Q1. The respondent remarks that her mother has no friends in her
local area. How does she explain this lack of interaction with
the neighbours? On what grounds are the neighbours
delineated into two groups?
Q2. In her story of ‘one-upmanship’, what words or phrases indicate
a class related attitude in the woman she met through
voluntary work?
Q3. The respondent states that, “most of the time people take you
as they find you”. Do you think that this excerpt contains an
abundance of, or lack of, class consciousness?

21. Symbols of class
Audio clip Source: Life Histories and Social Change Project, LH233 (female, born in 1952)
http://www.iqda.ie/content/life-histories-and-social-change-20th-century-ireland
Int: What about em, like your parents or other adults, would they have mixed?
Resp: Em [short pause] not with the neighbours, not with the neighbours. Its only lately that me mam and I, we were
actually talking about this, you know, and eh, I said to her I think at one stage, "why have you no friends?" ya know.
Now she didn’t have friends, she had friends but they weren’t from where we lived, they weren’t any of the
neighbours, she spoke to the neighbours but she had friends but they weren’t from Drimnagh where we lived. Em, she
said to me, she said, "I’m not good enough for the people in the purchased houses" she said, and she said "I think I’m a
bit better than the people that live in the corporation houses" [laughter] so that was it but she had her friends from
when she was children and that she grew up with and her sisters and all so she had plenty of company but she didn’t
have any friends in, you know
Int: And do you think that now has class changed, would you find it different from then?
Resp: I think from my own experience *pause+ when you’re mixing with people 95% of the time it doesn’t matter ya know, I
think like because [pause] I think most of the time people take you as they find you and it's not actually important
where in the social ladder you are, but there are occasions when you can see, yes there is, there is still a bit of one
upmanship
Int: Can you give me a for instance?
Resp: Em *long pause+ Eh I’d say it's *pause+ I’ll give you an example: I do a bit of voluntary work, one of the ladies there, em,
a very nice lady but sort of *sigh+ in *pause+ inclined to be, I don’t know how to describe it but I always felt she *pause+
she was looking down on me, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but I couldn’t figure out what, ya know, and we
were doing something one day, we were actually in Cape Town in South Africa and we were bringing a big container of
water back to our food stock and she was talking about her son and, ya know doing business and the whole lot. "Ah
yeah yeah" I said about the son being in college, "ah yeah" says I, "I done business and science" and she stopped dead
in her tracks and she looked at me and she said, she said, "you were in college?", I said, "yeah, yeah, yeah", "what are
you doin workin as a secretary?", I said "I like it" but she was totally surprised totally, the idea of me going to college
was "ah" [intake of breath] like, you know, like if I had of told her I taken wings and flown to the moon for me holidays
she couldn’t have been more surprised, like it was like I hit her over the head with a sledge hammer. So she had to
revise her opinion of me at that stage, you know, so that was her perception of me that I was, so suddenly I was on the
same level that I had been to college to business and science and the whole lot, and I'd attended college so she had
readjust her thinking on that one.

22. References
Tovey, H. and Share, P. 2003, A Sociology of Ireland, 2nd Ed., Gill
& McMillan, Dublin.

23. Note on this teaching resource
IQDA Teaching Resources by Irish Qualitative Data Archive is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.iqda.ie/content/life-histories-and-social-change-20th-
century-ireland.
Life Histories and Social Change was funded by the Irish Research Council (IRCHSS).
Images on slides 2, 8 and 15 are courtesy of The National Library of Ireland.
This teaching resource was prepared by Ruth Geraghty. IQDA would like to acknowledge Linda
O'Keefe and Aileen O'Carroll for their work on this teaching resource.
Preparation of this teaching resource was assisted by an NDLR Learning and Innovation Project
grant from the NUI Maynooth Centre for Teaching and Learning
Irish Qualitative Data Archive, 2012