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Family life and the workplace: a case study of the Inchicore and Broadstone Irish railway communities, 1847-1925
| This paper will discuss the influence of the Irish railway workplace on the family life of two Dublin communities. The main rail works of the Great Southern and Western Railway (GSWR) was completed in 1847 in Inchicore. The company also built houses, a school, and recreation facilities for its employees, and in doing so it created not only a workplace, but also a community. Similarly, the railway community in Broadstone was created by the Midland Great Western Railway (MGWR) in the 1850s. Each community was surrounded by a wall that separated it from the rest of Dublin. Those self-contained communities provided both employment and a family surrounding, and with that the friendships, relationships, conflicts, motivations, ambitions and resolutions that are inherent to any family and work setting. The rail system became the main environment of the rail workers. It was, in many ways, their parish. It was not unusual for railway families to intermarry, and this saw the extended family unit run parallel with the workplace unit. It made the workplace more than a job. It became an identity, part of a family’s tradition, which added to the culture of the workplace itself. By 1910 there were third and fourth generation railwaymen employed by the GSWR and MGWR. Fathers, sons, cousins and uncles all worked alongside each other. These family connections gave the railwaymen a sense of distance from the rest of Dublin’s working class. As well as discussing the role of the workplace, this paper will also explore that conceptual and spatial distance and the influence it had on family life and structures - from the establishment of the Inchicore community in 1847 to the amalgamation of the two rail networks in 1925.
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