About The Podcast.
The name Peelers and Sheep comes from an incident in the 1919 Meath and Kildare farm labour strike. It took eleven policemen, nicknamed peelers, led by a sergeant and a head constable, with fixed bayonets, just to deliver thirteen sheep to Drumree railway station. In the end, as you’ll discover when listening to our first episode, the bayonets of the Royal Irish Constabulary were of no avail, the sheep were boycotted in Dublin and returned on the very next train.
This is the land, but this is not a land of timeless tradition, this is the hothouse where the modern world is made.
This is a rebel story. This is a story of people who are not the big names of Irish history. This is not the history you learned in school.
This is history from below.
Episodes
Red Flag in Kilmallock
In this episode after Truce & Treaty Irish separatists have assumed control over much of the country and we go to Ireland’s dairying heartland and to the winter farm strikes of the winter of 1921-’22. Very different conditions to the harvest farm strike we...
Season Two Trailer: The Summer of 22
A taster of what is coming in future episodes on popular struggles as the British state slowly withdraws from much of Ireland and a new Irish Free State is established, a wave of workplace occupations and land conflicts resume in late spring & early...
Ep 8: The Factory Farm and the Forest Frontier
All about habitat destruction, simplified eco-systems, declining bio-diversity and how this ties in the spread of zoonotic diseases such as Ebola, AIDS, Avian Flu & Swine Flu. Looking not just at human impact on nature but at particularly capitalist forms of agriculture & resource...
Ep 7: Landscape of Lyme
All about landscape as a historic creation – how what we often think of as ‘nature’ has been shaped by generations of human activity – especially farming. Changing land uses impact on eco-systems and helps spread zoonotic diseases – that’s diseases that come to...
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My Name Is Terry Dunne
The peelers and the sheep featured in the Meath and Kildare farm labour strike of 1919 – farm labourers were described by one historian as the forgotten men of Irish history. The Drumree incident — the peelers and the sheep — comes from a space that is marginal in popular memory.
It resonates with me personally as I am descended from agricultural wage workers and from part of the country – south Kildare – where they formed a large part of the population.
But this wasn’t always the history I grew up with…
