Tyrone-
Patrick McGill, circa 1913; ‘There was great talk going on about the Omagh train. The boys who had been sold at the fair before said that the best masters came from near the town of Omagh, and so everyone waited eagerly until eleven o’clock, the hour at which the train was due.
It was easy to know when the Omagh men came, for they overcrowded an already big market. Most of them were fat, angry-looking fellows, who kept moving up and down examining us after the manner of men who seek out the good and bad points of horses which they intend to buy.
Sometimes they would speak to each other, saying that they never saw such a lousy and ragged crowd of servants in the market-place in all their life before, and they did not seem to care even if we overheard them say these things. On the whole I had no great liking for the Omagh men.’
Children of the Dead End, 1914.
The Strabane hiring fair was held twice annually, on 12 May and 12 of November. There’s no coincidence that the occasion of the hiring market coincided with the “Gale Days”; traditionally the time when six months rent was paid to the landlord. The difficulty of paying rent led many tenant farmer families to send their children, both sons and daughters – some as young as 12 or 13, to the fair to seek employment as farm labourers or servants, in order to make up the difference with the rent.
Although hiring markets were held throughout all parts Ireland, the one in Strabane was amongst the most popular for the buying and selling of labour. Contemporary accounts described the trains as packed, with an extra fourth class carriage was generally added to cope with large amount of passangers. Labourers and farmers travelled from the surrounding counties, and further still. Remembering the hiring fairs of his youth in the 1920’s Ciarán Ó Nualláin, a native of Strabane and a brother of the great Irish novelist Flann O’Brien, described the congregations that assembled in the streets as; ‘so crowded that you could walk across the streets on the people’s heads!’* Remarkably by the 1940’s the Hiring Fair of Strabane had declined completely.
* The early years of Brian O’Nolan / Flann O’Brien / Myles Na gCopaleen, Ciarán Ó Nualláin, 1998
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