Jeremy Harte at Literary Review:
Don’t impress me with peasant virtues, said Chekhov, I have peasant blood in my veins. Patrick Joyce has the blood too. His people won a living from the hard lands of Dúiche Seoighe, or Joyce Country, which stretch from Loughs Corrib and Mask to the Atlantic Ocean and straddle the border of County Mayo and County Galway. Although his father took the family to England in 1930, he brought his sons back every year and they would fall asleep night after night listening to kitchen talk in English and Irish. Joyce knows what he is talking about, and if his peasants are not always virtuous, they are at least vivid and real.
It is hard to hold on to that reality, for peasants will soon be as extinct as the aurochs and Irish elk. In western Europe, the proportion of the population employed in agriculture now stands at something between 1 and 5 per cent.
more here.