The Poultry Station – Helping to build a better Ireland
Local farmers were grant aided to build hen houses - like this restored one - following a specific design, ventilated yet draft-free and not to close to the dwelling house.
An almost forgotten aspect of rural life, the Poultry Station, was a hub for growth and a symbol of national recovery in the middle decades of the last century.
Like a young animal desperate to steady itself in the hours after birth, Ireland in the aftermath of gaining independence, needed care and nourishment. The authorities at that time decided on a number of actions to affect such steadiness. They looked to the church for spiritual direction, they looked to tradition to preserve past glories and they looked to agricultural for sustenance. Within agriculture, better education, better methods and better stock were highlighted as the way forward. Better stock meant better yields and better yields meant a better fed population. Ironically, the specialised farming stock that resulted from the British Agricultural Revolution formed a basis for Ireland’s recovery.
A struggling Irish farming sector was encouraged and incentivised to restock. This was an effort by government to get farmers to upgrade and strive for increased efficacy and productivity. A new Department of Agriculture took the lead in providing pedigree stock to improve cattle herds and poultry flocks.
, an essay by Mícheál Ó Fathartaigh, gives an outline of the early years of this ambitious approach.
“In conjunction with this, together with the new county councils, each county in Ireland would begin to recruit advisors (or instructors, as they were then called) to work with farmers to develop their agricultural practices and, as a consequence, develop rural Ireland more generally. Their brief was to help farmers improve their enterprises.
“For much of the 20th century, there were three categories of advisor; the general agricultural instructor, the horticultural and beekeeping instructor and the poultry-keeping instructor. Their interactions with farmers incrementally and very tangibly bore fruit. Enjoying the most immediate success were the poultry-keeping instructors. They were exclusively female and their assistance to farming women in sourcing pedigree hens and producing good-quality eggs often made the decisive financial difference on smaller farms.”
This process filtered down to the each farmer through the local poultry station. There was roughly one in each parish and each station specialised on one or maybe two breeds of hen. My grandaunt, Kathleen O’Hara, ran one such station at the foot of the Ox Mountains at Aclare in Co. Sligo. Kathleen, who came from a progressive farming background in Cloonacool, was well aware of the value of innovation and farming ambition. She embraced the new possibilities and put herself forward as a breeder and advisor. Her station, run from her own small farm, specialised in the Rhode Island Red breed (RIR). The RIR is an American breed, developed there in the late nineteenth century, by cross-breeding birds of Oriental origin such as the Malay with brown Leghorn birds from Italy. The RIR was a dual breed that was as good for the table as it was for egg laying. It is a strong mahogany-coloured bird that now largely exist as a heritage breed kept mostly by fanciers. They should not be confused with the light-brown coloured hybrids of today, mistakenly referred to by the same name.
The whole process was formalised in the Poultry Hatcheries Regulations of 1949 by the then Minister for Agriculture, James Dillon. This was done to ensured best practice in breeding and was responsible for raising the standards of poultry rearing. Essential to the efficient workings of each poultry station was that the whole process was licenced – in the same way bulls had to be licenced. Applications for a poultry hatchery licence had to be made annually. In addition to this, records of eggs laid by pullets at every supply farm had to be strictly maintained and the hatching of eggs, as well as the distribution of hatching eggs, had to be recorded. Quality poultry and egg production was the principal business of each station.
Local farmers were grant-aided to build hen houses following a specific design – ventilated yet draft-free and not to close to the dwelling house. To this day the small holdings of the Ox Mountains are often hallmarked with one of these little sheds. They were built of precast concrete and roofed with asbestos sheeting. They had a particular design that was quite unmistakable. I visited one recently, now a luxury garden shed, and despite its modern comforts, it is still a hen house.
Once a farmer had availed of the grant and built his or her hen house, it had to be stocked with quality-approved birds. This new flock provided income from eggs and sustenance from meat. Happy was the housewife who made the trip to Aclare to pick up her dozen of day-old Rhode Island Red chicks. She chatted to my grandaunt about the best husbandry methods, the right feed and the best hygiene practices. Many is the shopping bag, full of weekly essentials, that was bartered for the eggs laid by this flocks of treasured hens.
My grandaunt, in her later life, would recall with great fondness the various women who called to her poultry station for their annual supply of birds. She still remembered them all by name, the townland they came from and the number of children they had in their families. One of the cruel ironies of my grandaunt’s life was that she never had children of her own, having lost a succession of pregnancies throughout her married life.
Kathleen always made little of her poultry breeding expertise but my mother, her niece, told me that Kathleen had one of the best reputations on the local poultry industry at that time. Hatching was undertaken back then through the use of incubators heated by paraffin oil. While a great advance on more primitive methods, the use of such incubators was painstaking. Maintaining the ideal heat and moisture content was vital in the process and only those with lots of patience and an eye for detail got the best result. Kathleen would get up twice each night to ensure the eggs in the incubator were turned. This essential action ensured she had a higher yield of hatched chicks than most others. Maybe it was a compensation from her lost babies, a bonus for mother.
Whenever I see one of those old distinctive hen houses beside a derelict mountain cottage, I think of Kathleen. I think of her busy life on her small farm near Aclare and all the homes that she supplied with day-old chicks. I think of the farmyards where those chicks matured into adult birds. I think of those birds and how they fed generations of large families who otherwise would have had to survive on lesser rations. I hear the sound of a Rhode Island Red rooster crowing at first light; he is announcing the dawn of a new day and hope for the future.
