The sixties are often perceived as a renaissance; a period of immense change, characterised by excitement, optimism and rebellion, which had far-reaching effects for culture, legal rights, sexuality, education and the distribution of power in society.Footnote 1 On a surface level, Ireland was no exception to these global trends. In economic terms, it experienced an unprecedented average 4 per cent growth per annum in GDP from 1959–63.Footnote 2 In cultural terms, the national television service Telefís Éireann launched in December 1961.Footnote 3 In educational terms, free post-primary education was introduced in 1966 by Minister for Education Donogh O’Malley (and implemented the following year). Footnote 4 On the basis of such changes, psychologist and priest E. F. O’Doherty reflected in 1963 that ‘We are going through a deep and far-reaching cultural revolution’.Footnote 5
More recent historiography, however, has challenged this narrative of the sixties as an era of widespread change. Mary Daly has highlighted how conservative values — such as those which surrounded the preservation of small agricultural holdings and parish pump politics — continued to flourish during the 1960s.Footnote 6 Marginalised populations, such as children in institutional care or patients confined in psychiatric hospitals, remained overlooked and neglected.Footnote 7 Daly has argued that rather than embracing modernity, Ireland had little choice but to abandon protectionism; and then sought to constrain wider social change as much as possible.Footnote 8 In a similar vein, Enda Delaney has challenged the notion that the sixties were ‘a watershed in late modern Irish history’.Footnote 9 The foundations for social and cultural change had taken root in previous decades. By the mid 1930s, for instance, 80 per cent of films screened in Irish cinemas ‘came from Hollywood’, while the power of the Catholic Church was being challenged in the 1940s and 1950s through magazines such as The Bell.Footnote 10 During the 1950s and 1960s, international youth culture often functioned as a canvas on which moral anxieties and concerns about the pace of social change were projected.Footnote 11 The sixties in Ireland, therefore, contained an uneasy mixture of continuity and change. As this article will outline, this tug of war between continuity and change — most notably in terms of gender roles and alternative visions for society — was reflected through the prism of the counter-culture.
The term ‘counter-culture’ was popularised by Theodore Roszak, who described it as ‘a culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all, but takes on the alarming appearance of a barbaric intrusion’.Footnote 12 Roszak’s broad definition means that various disparate groups including the New Left, anti-war protestors and members of the radical Youth International Party have been included under its remit.Footnote 13 This article, however, focuses exclusively on the hippie counter-culture. Hippies engaged in ‘communal living, embraced Eastern religions and mysticism, preached and practiced love and peace, and sought more meaningful, authentic lives’.Footnote 14 They challenged existing social norms including ‘a bourgeois lifestyle, a nuclear family structure, workplace productivity, consumer capitalism, and rigid gender and sexual practices’.Footnote 15
To date, studies of the hippie counter-culture have emerged in jurisdictions such as the US, Canada, Chile, Mexico, England and Wales, and the Soviet Union.Footnote 16 In an Irish context, however, studies of the counter-culture have been relatively sparse. Holohan valuably examined youth as a social category in 1960s Ireland, while authors such as Petit, McCartney and Stephenson examined student activism and protest during the 1960s in University College Dublin and Trinity College Dublin.Footnote 17 The hippies, however, were not a core focus of these studies. O’Neill offered a photographic account of youth culture in post-1950s Dublin, with hippies forming part of his collection.Footnote 18 Fallon examined the controversy surrounding attempts to form a hippie commune off the coast of Skerries, County Dublin.Footnote 19 Moran created a romanticised account of a hippie commune on Dorinish Island (off the coast of Westport, County Mayo), while Halfacree positioned this commune as an example of a ‘rural back-to-the-land lifestyle’.Footnote 20 Apart from these works, a sustained analysis of the emergence and construction of the hippie counter-culture in Ireland remains absent.
A further gap in the existing literature is that the related concepts of moral panic and folk devil have rarely been applied to the counter-culture in an Irish context. In his landmark study of the Mod and Rocker subcultures in 1960s Britain, Stanley Cohen outlined that during times of moral panic, ‘A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests’.Footnote 21 The media depicts the problem in a distorted manner, and politicians and other moral entrepreneurs propose particular ‘solutions’ to the issue.Footnote 22 (The term ‘moral entrepreneur’ alludes to individuals or groups who create or enforce rules aimed at protecting the moral well-being of wider society). Related to a moral panic is the folk devil — namely, the personification of evil in a given society. Cohen defined folk devils as ‘visible reminders of what we should not be’ but neglected to expand further on this concept.Footnote 23 Later studies addressed this gap by examining the barriers to folk devil status,Footnote 24 the role of the media in enabling folk devils to resist demonisation attempts,Footnote 25 the importance of examining the agency of folk devilsFootnote 26 and the construction of folk devils from different perspectives.Footnote 27
This article applies such insights to its analysis of the counter-culture. It examines three main phases in the social construction of hippies in Ireland: namely, sensitisation, mobilisation and diversification. These phases are distinctive but interdependent, and they contribute an enhanced understanding to the interplay of local, national and transnational forces in the social production of knowledge surrounding the counter-culture. The article first analyses how international developments sensitised the Irish press to associate the hippies with drug abuse, violence and murder. The emergence of a commune on Dorinish Island, County Mayo sparked the mobilisation of interest groups such as the Irish Countrywomen’s Association who attempted to construct the hippies as folk devils. This reaction, however, occurred primarily at local level, and responses to the counter-culture in Ireland cannot be regarded as a fully-fledged moral panic. The hippies succeeded in diversifying social knowledge by offering resistance to negative societal reactions. The final section argues that the absence of direct mobilisation by the Catholic Church and the presence of colonial discourses were distinctive features of the counter-culture in an Irish context.
The article draws primarily on media sources (including newspaper articles, magazines, periodicals, documentaries and television clips) to analyse contemporary constructions of the counter-culture. It also incorporates census data, parliamentary debates, official reports and material created by the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. Overall, the article makes important empirical contributions to the history of the counter-culture by offering new insights on their manifestation in an Irish context. It also contributes conceptual insights into how folk devils are constructed from various vantage points and rooted in specific historical contexts.
I
‘Sensitisation’ alludes to a process whereby the media, politicians and agents of control became more attuned and sensitive to signals of impending threat.Footnote 28 These dynamics were evident in the coverage of hippies by Irish newspapers from summer 1967 onwards. This coverage focused mainly on international developments surrounding the counter-culture. On 3 July 1967 for instance, the Irish Independent featured an article by Mike Royko about a hippie trying to pay for a bus fare at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport with a rock and some seashells.Footnote 29 Such depictions evinced a bewildered view of the counter-culture and associated the hippies with eccentric if harmless behaviour. This perception of harmlessness, however, was soon reconsidered. Drugs were linked with the counter-culture from an early stage. The Cork Examiner reported in October 1967 that twenty people were arrested and over 110 lb of marijuana seized following a raid on San Francisco’s hippie district.Footnote 30 In August 1968, a photographer with the youth magazine New Spotlight travelled to California and compiled a special feature on ‘San Francisco’s Hippies’. He described residents of Haight-Ashbury as ‘the dregs of humanity’ and pronounced the area as ‘a place of drugs, degradation, disease and death’. Footnote 31 These early press depictions, therefore, portrayed counter-cultural lifestyles as risky and destructive.
Irish newspapers also reported on clashes between hippies and the police in San Francisco in summer 1968.Footnote 32 Particular controversy emerged when Dermot Ryan (owner of the Ardhu House Hotel in Limerick and a writer for the Irish Press and Sunday Press newspapers) claimed that police in Chicago used violent methods to disperse peaceful demonstrators, many of them hippies, at the Democratic National Convention in August 1968.Footnote 33 Three hundred Chicago policemen who were visiting Ireland and due to stay in Ryan’s hotel decided to boycott the venue as a result of these allegations.Footnote 34 Such references to clashes with the police aligned the hippies with violence (though often positioned them as victims rather than perpetrators).
Murders associated with the hippies in Los Angeles, Fort Bragg and Santa Cruz in the US further lent an air of notoriety to the counter-culture. The trial of Charles Manson, for instance, was covered widely by Irish newspapers.Footnote 35 In summer 1969, Manson and his followers engaged in a ‘maniacal and racist killing spree’ in Los Angeles in an effort to start a race war, which left nine people dead.Footnote 36 The Irish Press described how members of Manson’s ‘Family’ led a ‘weird, nomadic life’.Footnote 37 According to journalist John Healy, the Manson trial had been ‘a bonanza to the anti-hippie thing’ in Ireland and used as proof that ‘those “drop-outs” and “freaks” are animals’.Footnote 38 Hippies were further implicated as offenders in the Fort Bragg murder case (which occurred in North Carolina in February 1970 and involved a family being stabbed and bludgeoned to death),Footnote 39 and the Santa Cruz murders in October 1970 (whereby a ‘wealthy eye surgeon, Dr Victor Ohta, his wife and two sons and his secretary, were shot in a mass execution’).Footnote 40 Alongside drug abuse and violence, and despite the exceptional nature of these cases, mass murder had now become associated with the counter-culture. Such negative depictions did little to endear readers to the emergence of hippies in Ireland.
By September 1969, hippies on Irish shores started to be covered by newspapers to a greater extent. The front-page of the Irish Press on 27 September 1969 announced: ‘…And now the hippies are coming.’Footnote 41 It was a misleading title given that hippies had emerged in Ireland at least two years previously. In August 1967, the Munster Express reported that a hippie had been spotted distributing flowers in Waterford city. The ‘Flower Children’ had also been seen at Tramore (County Waterford) and Courtown Harbour (County Wexford). These hippies, according to the newspaper, resembled ‘befoliated blackguards who would put thumbs to your throttle for the price of a couple of roses’.Footnote 42 This mirrored the prevailing negative coverage of international developments in the counter-culture.
The hippies who gathered at Courtown Harbour were described by New Spotlight as ‘part-time hippies’ because they only gathered at weekends. Hippie Eamonn Purdy, a 20-year-old electrician, told journalist Pat Egan that ‘I guess I was a Mod before the hippie craze started’. Likewise, according to 17-year-old Yvonne Lawlor: ‘Like most girls, I like to be “in”. Flower power are just like the Mods. Everyone wanted to be a Mod, while this was the thing. Now everyone wants to be a flower child.’Footnote 43 This demonstrates the interlinkage of the Irish subcultural landscape. It also indicates that hippies such as Purdy and Lawlor became involved in the counter-culture because it was seen as trendy (as opposed to holding ideological allegiance to its aims). By the early 1970s, hippies dressed in ‘batik print kaftans, flowing ponchos, moccasins and sandals, tie-died t-shirts, maxi dresses and blouses tied up at the waist, love beads and headscarves’ were visible in venues such as the Dandelion Market and the Osibisa Club in Dublin.Footnote 44 Flower power, it seemed, had now blossomed in Ireland.
Despite the proliferation of the counter-culture, newspapers were largely unforgiving in their depiction of the hippies. In 1968, the Evening Herald ran a cartoon strip on a fictional couple called ‘Jiggs and Maggie’, which featured a hippie called ‘Tripper’. Tripper was depicted as idealistic, lazy and scrounging for money (or ‘bread’), which conveyed ridicule towards members of the counter-culture.Footnote 45 Provincial newspapers similarly portrayed the hippies in a pejorative manner. Some of the kinder descriptions of hippies by the Southern Star included ‘undesirable aliens’, a ‘scruffy, unwashed band of nomads’ and a ‘colony of morons’.Footnote 46 Pre-existing ethnic prejudices also fed into press coverage. The Irish Press, for instance, wrote that hippies ‘can arouse strong feelings of dislike and disgust among normally well-meaning people the way itinerants do in this country’.Footnote 47 The term ‘itinerants’ was broadly used by the settled community at the time, but is now regarded as a stigmatising term which has contributed to discrimination against members of the Travelling community.Footnote 48 Hippies were not denigrated in and of themselves, but rather were perceived as deviant by association with other marginalised groups. International developments, therefore, shaped early press coverage of the counter-culture in a largely hostile manner, but this coverage was interpreted through the lens of existing ethnic tensions within Irish society.
II
The second phase in the construction of the counter-culture in Ireland — namely, mobilisation — involved the emergence of interest groups in opposition to the hippies. Their emergence translated the perceived hippie threat from an abstract to tangible form. This was evident in an early controversy which erupted in September 1969 surrounding the future of St Patrick’s Island (located off the coast of Skerries, County Dublin). The owner of the island, Herbert Marriott, offered to sell the island to a group of hippies for the sum of £20,000.Footnote 49 These hippies were led by Sid Rawle, the son of an Exmoor farmer, and Frank Harris, who was born in Ireland. Spiritual leader and yoga guru Swami Vishnudevananda was also a member of the hippie group.Footnote 50 In response to the episode, the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (ICA) emerged as a key interest group in opposition to the hippies.
The ICA was a ‘non-political and non-sectarian’ women’s organisation.Footnote 51 It was officially created in 1935, but its origins lay in the Society of United Irishwomen, formed in 1910, which aimed to establish ‘a national rural women’s movement’ and to improve the standard of living in rural areas. Linda Connolly has described the ICA as the ‘largest women’s organisation in Ireland and one of the oldest rural movements in Europe’.Footnote 52 The ICA was democratically structured into local branches known as guilds; the guilds elected a national council; and the national council then elected an executive to oversee the organisation.Footnote 53 It was a ‘very flatly-structured organisation’ which operated primarily at local level (though, in the early 1950s, the organisation did purchase a premises called An Grianán in County Louth which acted as a training centre for members nationwide).Footnote 54
On 4 October 1969, Blanche Moss, a member of Schull ICA guild, wrote to the secretary of the organisation that there was ‘considerable concern and anxiety felt at the prospect’ of selling the island to the hippies.Footnote 55 Skerries ICA guild were similarly alarmed. They sent an emergency resolution to the ICA executive which had been passed unanimously on 9 October 1969, asking ‘the Minister concerned to use his powers to prevent this disaster’.Footnote 56 The executive, however, did not pass the Skerries guild resolution. It outlined five main reasons for not doing so:
Firstly, that it was not a function of the Association to interfere with the liberty of property owners to sell to whom they wished. Secondly, that we could not be the arbiters of the morals of any section of the community. Thirdly, the possibility of an increase in the drug problem is already in the hands of the authorities. Fourthly, they wish me to point out that the idea of a hippy colony on St Patrick’s Island has already been abandoned. Finally it was felt that in cases of this kind more effective action could be taken at local level.Footnote 57
The executive, therefore, effectively disassociated itself from protesting against the hippies. It did not, however, forbid rank and file members from doing so. Due to local opposition, the hippies ultimately decided not to use St Patrick’s Island as a commune.Footnote 58 The fact that businessman Butty Sugrue outbid the hippies for purchase of the island may also have influenced their decision not to locate there.Footnote 59 The controversy over St Patrick’s Island set a template for how future anxieties surrounding the hippies would be handled. In the case of the Dorinish Island commune, Westport ICA guild would wage its battle at local level.
Following the failure to establish a commune off the east coast of Ireland, in November 1969 Sid Rawle and Barry Norcott announced their intention to establish a commune off the west coast — namely, on Dorinish Island (located in Clew Bay, County Mayo). Two years earlier, Westport Harbour Board had sold the island to Alistair Taylor, a London businessman acting on behalf of Beatles member John Lennon.Footnote 60 Lennon offered it for free to the hippies.Footnote 61 Operating under the auspices of the Digger Action Movement, the hippies envisaged that thirty people would live on the island to start, and seventy more would join during the summer.Footnote 62 The term ‘Diggers’ originated in San Francisco in 1966, and by 1968, the Hyde Park Diggers were formed in London. The Diggers ‘organized squats and crash pads, free food and free stores, as well as political and cultural forums’.Footnote 63 Dorinish Island was not the first hippie commune in Ireland; in April 1970, a commune known as ‘the Island’ comprising twelve people had been formed ‘at the end of Nutley Lane on the Merrion Road’.Footnote 64 This commune was demolished in June 1970, however, and received limited press coverage compared to Dorinish Island.Footnote 65
On 14 November 1969, an annual general meeting of Westport ICA was held. It was agreed to do everything possible to stop the hippies from coming. Local opposition was headed by Ceura Alger, president of the Westport ICA guild. Alger offered a foreboding warning to members of the counter-culture: ‘Hippies, remember, keep out; we mean business and in a very nasty way if we have got to.’Footnote 66 Westport ICA were not the sole group to express opposition to the hippies, with the ‘Westport Council of Trade Unions, Kilmeena ICA, St Anne’s Boxing and Sporting Clubs, Kilmeena NFA and Westport Cycling Club’ similarly voicing criticism.Footnote 67 A Mayo News editorial praised these groups as ‘watchdogs for the protection of the social and moral standards of the local community’.Footnote 68
There were three main grounds on which these local watchdogs were opposed to the hippie commune. First, it was feared that the hippies would have a negative impact on young people. In 1966, Westport Urban District had a population of 2,927 people.Footnote 69 Of these, 1,340 (or 45.8 per cent) were under twenty-four years of age.Footnote 70 There was particular concern that the ‘free love’ practised by hippies would corrupt the moral norms of these youths.Footnote 71 The second ground on which local groups opposed the hippies was on the basis of future risk. When asked what locals were seeking to protect themselves from, Ceura Alger responded:
The scruff and the scum that will follow on afterwards does the damage. Not the people who are on the island at the moment, but what will follow them maybe next summer, the following summer, we don’t know when, if at any time. This is really what we are worried about. What will follow them.Footnote 72
This fear of future risk proved difficult to dispel and was likely grounded in the predominantly negative international press coverage of the hippie counter-culture. Yet, it appeared to be misplaced. In February 1972, seven hippies from London arrived to camp on Dorinish Island. When they heard about the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry (during which British soldiers shot dead thirteen unarmed civilians taking part in a protest march in the Bogside area of the city; another civilian later died from his injuries), the hippies called to the offices of the Mayo News to condemn the killings. Spokesman for the hippies, Bill Reaves, told the newspaper that: ‘we are horrified at this brutal attack by the soldiers and the people of Northern Ireland have our deepest sympathy.’Footnote 73 These hippies came across as empathetic and conscientious individuals, as opposed to ‘scruff and scum’.
Thirdly, drug-taking was a concern. When asked by Alger about their drug-taking habits, the hippies ‘eventually admitted […] that the greater proportion of Hippies used cannabis, and about 10 per cent used heroin’.Footnote 74 It is worth delving further into these allegations of drug use. Allegations of drug-taking had emerged in 1966 surrounding the Mod subculture, with concern that reefers (cigarettes tipped with drugs) were being sold to teenage patrons of beat clubs (Mod music venues).Footnote 75 Fears surrounding the consumption of drugs by young people, therefore, predated the emergence of the hippie counter-culture.
Because of the ‘extensive publicity’ surrounding use of ‘soft’ drugs in late 1960s Ireland, a working party chaired by Dr Karl Mullen was established in December 1968.Footnote 76 It found that cannabis and LSD were the ‘most commonly abused’ drugs in Ireland and traced the origins of the drug subculture to the beatniks.Footnote 77 The beatniks emerged in the 1950s and rejected American society, were critical of its materialism and, instead, drew inspiration from Oriental philosophies.Footnote 78 The hippies were regarded as the successor of the beatniks, and the report outlined that ‘the hippy cult’ had ‘attracted many youths of unstable personality’ who were unable to cope with ‘establishment culture’.Footnote 79 University students were also associated with drug use in the late 1960s because of ‘the perceived influence of international counter-culture’.Footnote 80 While the report of the working party offered a largely critical depiction of the counter-culture, it did recognise that hippies had not emerged in a vacuum, nor were they the first (or only) group of youths to engage in drug use.
Other reports were more sympathetic towards the hippies. In early June 1969, the Medico-Social Research Board asked Larry Masterson to carry out a study of drug use in Dublin among young people. He estimated that there were 106 addicts in Dublin and outlined that ‘Of all the drugs available on the Dublin drug scene marijuana is the most readily available and the most universally used drug’.Footnote 81 Hippies were one of the groups who smoked this drug and also consumed cannabis and LSD. However, according to Masterson, the hippies were largely responsible users who availed of drugs for ‘pseudo-intellectual reasons’.Footnote 82 This sympathetic attitude sharply contrasted with the ICA’s more critical perspective on psychedelia within the counter-culture.
While hippies had not introduced drugs to Ireland, they were regarded as exacerbating the problem. An article in the Musical Gazette in September 1967, for instance, warned that it was ‘only a matter of time’ before marijuana spread beyond the counter-culture to become a ‘major teenage problem’.Footnote 83 The emergence of hippies in Ireland also coincided with an increase in the number of people being charged with drug offences. In 1965, just two people were charged with drug offences in Ireland, and this figure even fell to zero in 1967. The year 1968, however, witnessed twenty-four people being charged with drug offences, rising to seventy-one by 1970 and 231 by 1972.Footnote 84 While correlation does not equal causation, these increasing figures did little to dispel contemporary fears surrounding the proliferation of drugs associated with the hippie counter-culture.
By May 1970, local opposition had become more organised. In an article entitled ‘Hippies Keep Out!’, the Western People outlined that a committee of sixteen people had been elected ‘to tell the hippies that Westport does not want them in town or on Dorinish Island in Clew Bay’.Footnote 85 Starting from 29 June 1970, the Festival of Life was held on Dorinish Island for eight weeks. This marked the official inhabitation of the island by hippies. The Digger Action Movement distributed 20,000 leaflets advertising the event. In response, the ICA picketed on the jetty with signs saying ‘Westport hates you’ and ‘We don’t want our children contaminated’.Footnote 86 This invocation of a discourse of disease (‘contaminated’) sought to dehumanise members of the counter-culture.
A number of different tactics were used by the Westport ICA in effort to disrupt the hippie commune. They initiated a policy of non-cooperation, which meant local traders would ‘refuse to supply the hippies with goods’. Local boatmen were directed to ‘refuse to ferry the hippies across the two-mile stretch of water’ from the mainland to the island.Footnote 87 Westport ICA further threatened that ‘any locals who help the hippies in any way — with food supplies or other facilities — will also be boycotted’.Footnote 88 Opposition was even further inflamed in spring 1971. The front-page headline of the Connaught Telegraph on 17 March 1971 read ‘Locals Declare War: Hippy Republic is Under Siege’. The island was described by Sid Rawle as ‘under a virtual blockade’ and a hippie van parked near Carrahally was sabotaged with the tyres ‘deflated and sugar […] pumped into the tank’. Boatmen at Westport such as Tommy Gibbons were cautioned not to transport people over and back to the island; according to Gibbons, ‘it’s a sort of siege, an ugly mood all over, and I can’t go against the whole of the parish’.Footnote 89 Interpersonal relations at local level were, therefore, effectively manipulated in an effort to bring the hippie commune to an end.
Politicians also played a key role in attempts to demonise the hippies. Nine days after the siege of Dorinish Island started, Dr Hugh Byrne, TD for Dublin North-West, alleged that the hippies were growing their own marijuana on Dorinish Island. He also claimed that hippie communities in the Kerry Gaeltacht in Annascaul, and in Bantry, County Cork, were growing drugs.Footnote 90 Byrne’s views, however, were not supported by his colleagues. Michael Begley, TD for South Kerry, criticised Byrne for making ‘unwarranted and unfounded allegations against harmless people’,Footnote 91 while Labour Party TD Barry Desmond mused that Byrne had ‘the most vivid imagination of any deputy I ever met’.Footnote 92 Gardaí visited Dorinish Island to check if drugs were being grown there, but none were found.Footnote 93 It seemed that preconception rather than reality shaped the reactions of these local and political watchdogs to the hippies.
III
Despite the hostility evinced by interest groups such as the ICA, opposition to the hippies during the Dorinish Island controversy was not unanimous. The Mayo News on 29 November 1969 described the reaction in Westport to the proposed hippie isle as follows: ‘on one side is absolute disapproval, on the other total acceptance. And in between a considerable amount of indifference.’Footnote 94 Some newspapers even criticised the actions of local groups against the hippies. Journalist John James writing in the Connaught Telegraph described them as ‘puritanical busybodies’ and articulated that: ‘The hippies have broken no laws. They haven’t made a nuisance of themselves. They merely mind their own business — something which our petty little protestors should do.’Footnote 95 The hippie counter-culture in Ireland, therefore, managed to avoid unanimous application of folk devil status. The voices who disapproved of the hippies were mainly local and female, while those who approved (or at least, were sympathetic towards the hippies) tended to be male voices at regional or national level.
Hippies had two major advantages which enabled them to fight back against negative societal perceptions and diversify the social knowledge surrounding them. First, hippies were former members of the mainstream society from which they sought to escape. As the Musical Gazette outlined in November 1969, ‘Hippies are not rejects. They are dropouts. That means they have freely chosen not to be a part of society […] Rather than society rejecting them, they have rejected society and the values their parents held.’Footnote 96 This made them less alien compared to other outsider groups. Secondly, hippies were often educated and articulate, which enabled them to fight back effectively against societal criticism. On Dorinish Island, for instance, one member of the commune, Ian, was a fully qualified mechanic from Yorkshire, while Frank was a former science student from University College Dublin.Footnote 97 The hippies, therefore, had the social capital and skills required to defend the counter-culture from criticism.
To challenge their folk devil status, hippies spoke at public meetings and engaged directly with opposition groups such as the ICA. In relation to the controversy over St Patrick’s Island, Frank Harris spoke at a public meeting on 3 October 1969 at Holmpatrick Hotel in Skerries. His eloquence and passion for the hippie vision sparked begrudging admiration from the honorary federation secretary of Skerries ICA guild, M. Bracken, who described how ‘his glib tongue and unconventional dress appealed to the immature youth of the town’.Footnote 98 Sid Rawle also met and engaged with the ‘anti-Hippie committee’ in Westport. He initially downplayed the extent of local opposition to the hippies, claiming that ‘everywhere I go in the town I get nothing but handshakes’.Footnote 99 This seemed unlikely given the determined opposition of the local ICA branch, but it nevertheless signalled an attempt by Rawle to defuse the panic surrounding the hippies.
The hippies also gave various interviews to journalists in defence of their activities and lifestyle. Keith Morris, a member of the Dorinish Island commune, defended the hippies from allegations that sexual activity was taking place on the island:
Quite honestly, there is no sex here because we are basically a family unit and nothing else. The girl here does the usual housewife’s chores — cooking and washing. She gets into her sleeping bag with six or seven guys in the tent but that’s it. It is primarily a brother and sister relationship.Footnote 100
The role of females in the commune will be discussed later in the article. Another hippie, Barry Norcott, claimed that the hippies had no intention of distributing drugs to local youths, noting that ‘the only drug we have experienced since we came to Ireland has been Irish whiskey’.Footnote 101 Sid Rawle also strongly refuted TD Hugh Byrne’s claims that marijuana was being grown on Dorinish Island. According to Rawle, ‘There is marijuana being grown all over Ireland […] but we are not foolish enough to grow it on an island which we have worked so hard all through last winter to try to make into a home for ourselves’.Footnote 102 These defensive pronouncements were designed to reassure locals and dispel the perceptions of risk and danger which surrounded the hippie counter-culture.
During the siege of Dorinish Island in March 1971, hippies adopted a more offensive rather than defensive approach which was directly critical of Westport locals. According to Rawle, ‘this is a war. But it is a silent war. Nobody will own up, but we know for a fact that they are out to get us […] Why can’t they leave us in peace?’ Footnote 103 Keith Morris further described how Westport had become a ‘town of hate’. According to Morris:
… we have now got a certain lunatic fringe in Westport who are whipping up hate against us. We have done nothing to warrant this, but they keep on imagining us as ‘Charlie Mansons’ who will come in the middle of the night and slice their heads off for bread [money].Footnote 104
The more critical and emotive language used by hippies during the siege conveys the mounting strain they faced in wake of sustained local hostility.
The Dorinish Island commune came to a rather abrupt end in October 1971 when an oil lamp fell over and burned the tents and £500 worth of equipment.Footnote 105 It had survived for sixteen months in the often harsh and unpredictable Atlantic climate. Other hippies continued to camp sporadically on the island into spring of 1972, and as late as January 1983, the Connaught Telegraph reported that some hippies were living on the island.Footnote 106 While the hippies faced significant hostility during the sixties, they effectively managed to resist being unanimously designated as folk devils.
IV
In many ways, the manifestation of the counter-culture in Ireland was not unique. Rather, it aligned with broader transnational ‘flows’ surrounding communalism, tribalism and idealism.Footnote 107 In an interview with Newsbeat reporter Michael Ryan, broadcast on 7 January 1971, Rawle outlined his vision for the commune:
We’re using Dorinish to set up a tribal community. It’s really a place where people can come who want to go into this type of living and work out if they really do want to […] we don’t want any of the paraphernalia and claptrap of twentieth-century society, if you like.Footnote 108
Tribalism was cast in oppositional terms to modern society. It conveyed a return to mechanical solidarity — namely, social cohesion based on shared beliefs, values and worldviewsFootnote 109 — and the formation of ‘peaceful, loving communities’, instead of a society premised on materialism and conflict.Footnote 110 According to one of the island residents, ‘One knows one another, one works together, plays together, and lives together in mutual harmony, which in the world outside […] is impossible’.Footnote 111 From a hippie perspective, Dorinish Island represented a hopeful and harmonious new society. As Manzano has outlined, values such as ‘equality, respect for “human individuality”, and search for authentic expression’ were core to a communal lifestyle worldwide.Footnote 112
In Ireland as in other communes, it proved challenging to maintain this idealism over time. In 1972, Alan Sidi, a member of the Mercury Movie Makers (based since 1959 in Leeds), released a documentary entitled Tribe of the sun about the Dorinish Island commune. Initially a peaceful way of life pervaded the island with hippies spending their days playing music, digging foundations to construct permanent dwellings and making food from scratch. Sidi and his documentary crew, however, returned a year later to find only one person, Tom, remaining on the island. Tom outlined that it was difficult in the long run for people to cohere as a family unit and commented that leadership struggles had emerged. Nevertheless, his optimism remained intact: ‘It only needs one or two more people, and the whole thing can start again. Maybe it’ll be a success this time.’Footnote 113 As Paul Willis has noted, while waging cultural politics was a strength of the counter-culture, effecting practical political change in wider society was not. Footnote 114 The efforts of the hippies, in Ireland as elsewhere, to create an alternative society, therefore, remained largely inhibited by idealism.
Another transnational dimension of the counter-culture which manifested in Ireland was its conservative attitude towards gender roles.Footnote 115 Ruth Bradshaw, who lived in the Merrion Road ‘Island’ commune and later travelled to Dorinish Island, recalled that ‘the men pottered about and the women did all the cooking and cleaning and looking after the children, and we were there to be used at will’.Footnote 116 From a gendered perspective, the hippie counter-culture was far less different to the mainstream society from which it sought to escape. Indeed, the prominence of the female-led ICA in its opposition to the counter-culture demonstrates that hippies may have been even more conservative than mainstream society in the context of gender politics.
Hostile reactions to the hippie counter-culture were not unique to Ireland. In Latin American jurisdictions (many of which, similar to Ireland, were former colonies with a strong Catholic heritage), hippies were similarly stigmatised. In Argentina, hippies were perceived as idle and eccentric, while in Brazil, they were associated with ‘social dissent and political subversion’.Footnote 117 In Chile, the counter-culture was viewed as a cultural import ‘of foreign manufacture and therefore not truly and authentically criollo’.Footnote 118 Moreover in European jurisdictions such as Spain, use of cannabis by the hippie movement resulted in a repressive state response.Footnote 119 From a comparative perspective, Ireland was perhaps a relatively welcoming place for hippies.
Despite these strong alignments between the counter-culture in Ireland and wider transnational flows, two elements of the counter-culture in Ireland may be regarded as distinctive (if perhaps not completely unique). The first was the absence of direct mobilisation of the Catholic Church in opposition to the hippies. As a traditionally conservative, Catholic state for most of the twentieth century in which women were largely confined to the private sphere, mobilisation of the Catholic Church in response to the hippies would have been an obvious and expected development. Footnote 120 The sexual liberation associated with the hippie counter-culture blatantly violated Catholic mores which reserved sex for the purpose of procreation within marital relationships. The papal encyclical Humanae Vitae in July 1968 reaffirmed a prohibition on Catholics using contraceptives, claiming that the rhythm method was the only permitted method of birth control.Footnote 121 This further contravened the counter-culture’s embrace of ‘free love’.Footnote 122 The hippies’ perceived embrace of a more liberal sexuality should, in theory, have placed the counter-culture on a collision course with the Catholic Church.Footnote 123
This collision, however, did not seem to occur. During a mission in St Mary’s Church in Westport in November 1970, Rev. Sean Noonan, SJ, told local men in the parish that ‘they should be ashamed for not helping out local women in their fight to prevent the advent of hippies to Dorinish Island in Clew Bay’.Footnote 124 This signalled deference to the ICA and bestowed it with authority to deal with the perceived hippie problem. The church was not leading the vanguard of opposition to the hippies. The ICA was certainly conservative in its attitude towards the hippies, but it was also female-led and ostensibly non-denominational (though Connolly has noted that the ICA later became ‘Catholic-dominated […] in both ethos and constituency’).Footnote 125 The nature of societal reaction to the counter-culture, therefore, sheds important light on changing attitudes to gender roles and the diffusion of religious authority in Ireland during the sixties.
Rather than expressing opposition to the hippies, religious commentators often spoke in their defence. Fr Fergal O’Connor, a lecturer in political science at University College Dublin, claimed on The Late Late Show (a popular Irish television chat show) that St Francis of Assisi was one of the first hippies, thereby bestowing religious precedence on the hippie lifestyle.Footnote 126 (In response, Senator Tomás Ó Maoláin called for funding to the universities to be cut if this was the kind of thing that was being taught).Footnote 127 In July 1969, Monsignor Jeremiah Newman, president of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, travelled to San Francisco and visited the hippies there. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, he claimed that the hippies were ‘on the same wavelength’ as early Christians who fled the ‘materialistic influence of the Roman Empire’. Footnote 128 This superimposed a long historical and religious lineage on the counter-culture and sought to convey a strong synergy between hippies and the Catholic Church.
This sympathetic attitude of priests towards hippies likely stemmed from the changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council (1962–5). These changes included a more active role for the laity, masses delivered in the vernacular language instead of Latin and priests facing the congregation during religious services.Footnote 129 The Second Vatican Council also meant that there emerged a more radical strain in the Catholic Church. Priests such as Fr Michael Sweetman, SJ, advocated for improved housing conditions during the 1960s and 1970s (and even proposed that ‘church land should be sold for low-income accommodation’). Fr James McDyer participated in the Save the West Campaign (which sought to draw attention to economic neglect of communities in the west of Ireland).Footnote 130 The hippies’ vision for an alternative society, therefore, complemented this radical strain within the church which embraced social change and improvement.
Class dynamics also impacted on the church’s attitude towards the hippies. Working-class subcultures such as the Teds and Mods had attracted the ire of the Catholic Church during the 1950s and 1960s. The Teds, for instance, were monitored by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid’s Vigilance Committee (formed in 1954), while religious figures such as Fr Michael Cleary mobilised in opposition to the Mods.Footnote 131 In contrast, religious commentators evinced sympathy rather than hostility towards the middle-class hippies. In a US context, Stuart Hall similarly noted how the hippie counter-culture comprised ‘affluent, middle class’ youths adopting a ‘disguise of poverty’.Footnote 132 It seems that these class dynamics trumped otherwise pertinent concerns to the Catholic Church (such as the perceived sexual immorality of young people).
A second distinctive feature of the counter-culture in Ireland was the deployment of colonial discourses, rooted in Ireland’s historical relationship with Britain, to convey opposition to the counter-culture. The idea of (predominantly English) hippies taking over a small (Irish) island struck a historical nerve. An article in the Irish Independent on 4 October 1969 alluded to ‘the planned hippie invasion of St Patrick’s Island’.Footnote 133 The Cork Examiner alluded to hippie attempts ‘to colonize St Patrick’s Island’. Footnote 134 Boycotting, one of the tactics used by the local opposition, was described by the Evening Herald as ‘the dreaded West of Ireland weapon’.Footnote 135 The term ‘boycotting’ originated in the year 1880, when the Irish National Land League spearheaded a campaign of social ostracisation against a land agent for the Lough Mask estate (County Mayo), Charles Cunningham Boycott, who poorly treated tenants.Footnote 136 Given the origins of Ireland’s landlord system in various land confiscations and plantation attempts by Britain from the sixteenth century onwards, the Herald’s allusion to boycotting implicitly situated the hippies as part of a longer colonial trajectory.Footnote 137
This colonial discourse was paired with xenophobic rhetoric, with national tensions surfacing in constructions of the hippies. A letter to the editor of Western People claimed that ‘The English do not want the hippies and think they can fool the Irish by dumping their filth and undesirables over there. Anyway I can’t understand why the Irish people sell land to foreigners.’Footnote 138 This discourse was not unique to the hippies, but rather reflected more widespread concerns about ‘foreigners’ purchasing agricultural land in Ireland. The ‘opening up and modernisation of the Irish economy’ after 1958 (when the First Programme for Economic Expansion was published) led to local and national newspapers expressing fears of land being possessed by European (particularly German) buyers.Footnote 139 In late 1968, Sinn Féin even launched a campaign against ‘foreign-owned assets and properties generally’.Footnote 140 Prevailing responses to the hippies, therefore, reflected these more widespread social concerns. A letter to the editor of the Mayo News from a resident of Ohio, US (whose mother was from the village of Drummin, County Mayo) described hippies as ‘the greatest curse the bloody English could ever put on Ireland’.Footnote 141 Despite the fact that the counter-culture originated in the US, and that Irish hippies had surfaced on the south-east coast prior to the arrival of the Dorinish Island commune, it was easier to lay blame for the arrival of this perceived undesirable population on Britain.
Yet, colonial discourses were simultaneously mobilised in defence of the hippies. A letter to the editor of the Irish Press from a Westport resident outlined how the culture and traditions of the west of Ireland had remained unchanged by ‘750 years of alien occupation’ and expressed hope that ‘the mothers around Clew Bay today have sufficient confidence in themselves to transmit that tradition to their children unsullied above all by racialism’.Footnote 142 During the siege of Dorinish Island in March 1971, journalist John James writing in the Connaught Telegraph compared the actions of the locals to ‘the treatment dashed out to the minority in the North by bigoted Orangemen’.Footnote 143 This allusion to Northern Ireland, which remains part of the United Kingdom and was formally partitioned under the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, further connoted Ireland’s colonial relationship with Britain.Footnote 144 As Frederiksen and Knudsen have argued, folk devils do not emerge in a vacuum, but rather are ‘rooted in particular socio-economic and cultural histories’.Footnote 145 Ireland’s historical relationship with Britain forms an important backdrop in understanding contemporary constructions of the hippie counter-culture.
V
The story of the hippie counter-culture in Ireland during the period 1967–72 was ultimately a nuanced (and rather contradictory) mixture of local condemnation, collective defiance and considerable indifference. Despite negative press coverage of international developments, not to mention determined efforts by interest groups at local level to cast the hippies as folk devils, the counter-culture demonstrated a penchant for articulate engagement with the media. This disrupted efforts to disparage the hippies, and constructions of the counter-culture remained a site of contestation. While the counter-culture in Ireland largely conformed with rather than challenged transnational flows, distinctive features included the absence of direct mobilisation of the Catholic Church in opposition to the hippies and the presence of colonial discourses grounded in Ireland’s historical relationship with Britain.
Knowledge is never value-free, and the social production of knowledge surrounding the hippies involved a complex interplay between local, national and transnational forces.Footnote 146 From the manipulation of interpersonal relations in the siege of Dorinish Island, to the manner in which pre-existing ethnic prejudices shaped interpretations of the hippies, to their transnational embrace of an alternative tribalistic society, the counter-culture simultaneously occupied multiple layers of meaning and contestation. Although the counter-culture continued to exist into the late 1970s and beyond, the level of attention it received in subsequent decades was limited compared to its original manifestation between 1967–72.Footnote 147 Its significance was intrinsically tied to the perceived changes that swept Ireland and the wider world during the turbulent era of the sixties. Such a perspective, however, risks overlooking the stagnancy and lack of imagination which characterised some elements of the counter-culture, particularly its conservative attitude towards gender roles.
The hippie counter-culture has been credited with various legacies. It is perceived as heralding more liberal attitudes towards sexuality, and it also enjoyed various resurgences over time in the form of the New Age Movement.Footnote 148 Perhaps its most enduring legacy is its vision of a sustainable lifestyle attuned with nature. As James Moran reflected, ‘The idealism of the hippies while not universally acceptable was based on true concern for the planet and its people. At one with nature as well as being at one with each other was what it was all about.’Footnote 149 In an era of climate crisis, with the global mean sea level having risen by 30.8% between 1999 and 2025, the return to nature ideology of the Dorinish Island commune remains pertinent.Footnote 150 The hippie counter-culture may have been eccentric, contentious and divisive. But it simultaneously functioned as a (tie-dyed) canvas which espoused an alternative social vision and forewarned of climate challenges to come.
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