ONE of the things about Ireland, or at least rural Ireland, and we still have one of the highest rural populations in Europe, is just how small it is.
It is hard to convey this. It is hard to translate this into a form of clarity.
I’m still struck, after over twenty-six years living here, by this very thing.
Those of us who grew up Irish in the big Irish communities of the UK mainly had parents from rural backgrounds though we ourselves mainly grew up in the big, old cities, of Britain.
I remember two things about this. I remember thinking that some of the ‘village’ feeling I had was because my own extended family was huge. My mother was one of thirteen and my father one of five. There was always family stuff going on.
Secondly, I remember thinking my own community was laced through the big city I was growing up in.
As a young man we mainly socialised in certain pubs and clubs but I remember on one occasion going to a night club on the other side of the city, away from the usual haunts of the Irish population, safe in the knowledge I wouldn’t see anyone from our community, only for my mother to ask me the next day why I’d gone to that very place.
I still can’t quite figure out how she knew. In rural Ireland itself, though, this is at another level.
My eldest will be home from London soon for a month’s mind Mass for a close friend’s mother.
She is in that capital of capitals, London, living her twenty something life and coming home for an Irish tradition that epitomises the intimacy of rural Irish life.
This is the strength of Irish smallness. People know each other and look out for each other. They rely on each other. At moments of extremity, moments like death, people gather round and friends behave in a way that lets the bereaved know they are not alone.
Ireland is geographically small and because the population is still small and is interlinked traditions like the month’s mind Mass still flourish. People know each other and always have.
My children’s Irish life is nothing like the young life my parents had in Ireland but they all share a strong sense of identity and at times a very local sense of identity.
They’re very much Irish but also very much the rural corner of Ireland they are from.
Sometimes I hear my children talking in a way that is beyond me.
They talk about someone and make some link through a cousin they know or an ex-boyfriend or a friend of a friend. Ireland, even in 2025, is still an intimate place.
As someone once said to me here, people might not be quite sure who you are but they’ll know something about you, even if it is just what you had for breakfast.
Of course, that smallness can sometimes go a bit sour.
I do recall one woman saying about a man raising money for a local ambulance service that he himself would operate that it would be better if he was ‘one of our own’.
Now, I’ve heard many daft things from the one-of-our-own crowd but the idea you might bring that into play in the extreme case of needing an ambulance is the epitome of how smallness curdles.
That smallness of living can also lead to a somewhat oppressively small outlook on life.
I remember watching the fallout around Trump’s first electoral defeat with people who were far more animated about whose cousin the woman in the local chemists the other day actually was.
At times like that it is easy to see why people have found Irish rural life suffocating. It’s a big world out there but a very small one inside some minds it seems.
The great Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh said words to the effect of, if you can know one small field intimately you can know the whole world — and I’ve certainly known people who’ve travelled the globe who have no breadth of humanity and people who haven’t been much beyond the lane they were born on who have a vast generosity of spirit.
Ireland, for better or for worse, is small. It seems that’s just the way it is.
Joe Horgan posts on X at @JoeHorganwriter
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