Airgead Poca

 Story by' Padraig 'Paud'  O Cuirrin, photos (c) Eddie Cantwell and others.

Nioclás Ó Griofáin(left) chats with Paud.

                         Airgead Poca

 By, Padraig O Cuirrin

Few people nowadays, and more especially the younger generation, can appreciate how difficult it was to get one's hand on a bit of pocket money in the '50s and '60s. Some would argue that it was hard to acquire cash at all – pocket money or otherwise – at that time!

Growing up in a rural area like An Rinn meant that the agricultural sector offered the best prospects for earning a few bob. Farming then was largely non-mechanised and thus was extremely labour-intensive – and none more so than the cultivation of the sugar-beet crop. As it was a guaranteed cash crop many small farmers locally might have an acre of beet and for some, like Eddie Crotty, it was their main tillage crop.

Labour-intensive it certainly was and, in an Ireland stripped of manpower due to emigration, part-time work opportunities opened up for school-boys like myself at various stages of the sugar-beet cropping cycle. In early summer the newly emerged beet plants had to be thinned (and weeded), while in the late autumn the harvesting process got underway.

This wonderful photo is of Tomás MacEoin (Tom Keohan) An Rinn--1901-1983

His Grandmother was Mary Regan, --and Great Grandaunt to Seán Reagan USA, who gave me the photo. Seán tells me that he oft times carried a bucket of water on his head!  (Eddie)

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Perhaps we did not reflect too deeply on it at the time but thinning beet was hard and monotonous work. It meant being on one's knees from early morning, straddling the beet drills with sacking tied around the knees for protection. If the weather was too dry the hands would be torn off you trying to pull out the surplus plants and the weeds which sprung up with the beet ; when it rained the pulling and dragging was easier but then one had the discomfort of crawling through mud - with perhaps a good soaking added in for good measure! There wasn't much scope for negotiating on pay and the going rate was usually a shilling a drill. How much one earned depended on factors such as the length of the drills, and whether the farmer had “scuffled” the furrows between the drills (which reduced the amount of weed to be dealt with). Overall, the minimum expectation was around ten drills thinned for ten shillings a day, with the possibility of earning up to a pound under optimum conditions.

Early view of Ballinagoul, Ring

While the money was indeed hard-earned it did enable one to make a contribution to the hard-pressed family budget and still have some discretionary funds available to pay for a trip to the cinema or maybe even buy an item of clothing. The downside, of course, is that the thinning season was of short duration and other work had to be found.

Around October the matured sugar-beet was ready for harvesting. This involved a number of men or Ringboys each walking between two drills, pulling a beet plant with each hand and banging them together to remove the excess clay from the roots. Once the beet was all pulled the process of “crowning” began. A special machete-like cleaver was used for this. The beet had to be cleaned of all leaves and thrown in a pile for transporting. A horse and cart would be used to draw the beet from the field to the nearest road where it was heaped until a lorry arrived to take it to the train station in Dungarvan for conveying to Thurles or Mallow beet factories to be processed into sugar. Richie Walsh was usually the haulier who undertook this locally. Getting the beet off the road and into the lorry was tough work indeed. Like the cleaver used for “crowning” a special sprong with balls of metal on the tip of each prong to avoid sticking the beet was developed for this loading work. I well remember cycling over to Eddie Crotty's after school or on Saturdays to participate in this seemingly never-ending work of getting the beet on its way to the factory. Given the time of year it was inevitably undertaken in cold and wet conditions.

Group from Ring on a trip to Youghal (Waterford County Museum)

For all of the hard work involved with beet one would not wish to give the impression that it was unrelenting misery. The process usually involved a number of people at all stages and there was room for some fun and a sense of camaraderie developed – and even a bit of competition sometimes as to who would get the most drills thinned! I suppose our expectations were low and we were just happy to have the opportunity to earn anything at the time.

 Seán & Barbabra Regan pictured with Paud...a few weeks ago!!!

I don't think that anyone made a fortune from sugar-beet production, mainly because of all the labour and other inputs required, but it did provide a modest cheque for many small farmers in the run up to Christmas. For some more of us it put a few shillings in our pockets at a time when money was a scarce commodity indeed.