Book Review: “The Rabbit Industry in Ireland” by Michael J Conry

Book: “The Rabbit Industry in Ireland” by Michael J Conry

Thousands of trappers, snarers and ferreters carried their rabbits to market on the crossbars of their bicycles.  Inset:  The Author of “The Rabbit Industry in Ireland”, Michael J Conry

Rabbit hunters are great talkers and there are as many theories about subjects like Myxomatosis as there are hunters.  In future discussions between rabbit hunters when some sage makes a statement that is so outstandingly nonsensical that a rebuttal is required; I expect to demolish the culprit with; “Michael J. Conry in his rabbit book, states the following....”.  Like most young hunters of my generation, I grew up on stories of how my father, uncles and grandfathers hunted rabbits and pigeons during two world wars when a rabbit fetched a half crown and a pigeon one-and-sixpence.  I even sold rabbits myself in the nineteen seventies when work was scarce and rabbits and time were plentiful.  First recorded in Ireland in the 9^th Century the rabbit has given its name to hundreds of townlands (Coneygar; Coinicer , Carrickacunneen, Coney Island, Rabbitburrow).  The rabbit was a source of meat for thousands of poor families in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and supplemented the incomes of the unemployed and thousands of trappers, snarers and ferreters.  Millions were exported to Britain during two world wars when Britain was on the verge of starvation and needed everything Ireland could supply including skins.  In 1954 Myxomatosis ended the rabbit industry in many areas and my Uncles were amazed by the increase in crop yields in the fields by the High Wood in Durrow which had previously been stripped by rabbits.  There was a revival of sorts in the seventies and eighties but the world had changed and so had the reputation of the humble rabbit as food which many people now associated with poverty and disease.  By 2010 Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease had removed rabbits from huge areas of the country.  Now for the first time the Rabbit Industry in Ireland - it could as easily be called a “Rabbit Culture” – has been documented in a professional and thorough manner by a serious author.  Michael J Conry, during his career as an academic and researcher with the Oak Park Research Centre and An Foras Talúntas has published widely on the husbandry of Winter and Spring Barley and on soil science.  In more recent times he has researched and published on various aspects of Ireland’s cultural heritage.  In 2016 he published “The Rabbit Industry in Ireland”; a 528 page volume with 300 black and white (old) and colour photographs, maps and diagrams in full colour.  It is an impressive work with an impressive level of detail and draws on extensive research and hundreds of interviews to cover the history, methodology, economics, gastronomy, epidemiology and culture of the rabbit industry.  This is no slim volume of hunter’s reminiscences but rather a weighty and well-bound definitive and objective book on the subject to which future writers and journalists will refer.  In addition to covering the personalities and methodologies of rabbit hunters in the four provinces – a massive undertaking in itself – he gives us the definitive account of the introduction and spread of Myxomatosis which dispels the accumulated public-house mythology of sixty four years.  Having grown up in Offaly and Westmeath I was fascinated to read about some of the characters I had heard about in my youth and when I showed the book to my friend Dominic Vallely of Armagh, he too recognised some of the personalities from the landscape of his youth .  I have been dipping into this book for a month now and with each return I unearth some new and interesting fact – for instance, I was not aware that pigs had been successfully reared on rabbit offal or that the Irish rabbit is descended from feral escapees in the Middle Ages.  In an era when much that is produced on the subject of hunting and wildlife is published semi-anonymously and in badly written form on the internet without references or research and relying heavily on speculation and opinion, this book is definitive and mandatory reading for anyone interested in the subject.  I am amazed that one man could cover so much of the country, interview so many people and accumulate so many photographs – it must have taken years.  It contains a table of contents, glossary, bibliography and an index which makes it easy to find a particular paragraph or reference.  It sits on my bookshelf with Elmer Keith’s “Hell, I was There”, and Ian Hogg’s Encyclopaedias of Firearms and Ammunition – a book to be taken down at regular intervals and consulted when my own knowledge and recollections are a little vague.  “The Rabbit Industry in Ireland” by Michael Conry (ISBN O 9535876 7 3) is available in local bookshops or direct from Michael J. Conry, Avila, Chapelstown, Carlow, Ireland. Phone: 059 9131535, 086 1591455; http://www.conry-michael-books.com/index.html; email conrymj@gmail.com.

Ferreting men John Gibson, John Craig (with ferret) and Joe O'Neill, Kilbeggan (c. 1945).  You  can read how these men and thousands like them countrywide made a living from trapping rabbits in Michael Conry’s new book “The Rabbit Industry in Ireland”