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A THOUSAND FAREWELLS TO YOU, ISLAND OF ST PATRICK
A thousand farewells to you, island of St Patrick. It was there we grew up and our ancestors before us; it was the potato blight that drove us abroad to Baltimore, to earn a living.
Gaelic ballad, Famine era,
Irish Folklore Commission
Spacious Miss Elgee, remarkable Speranza, had been a witness to the debates in Conciliation Hall, but also to the irregular army of phantoms drifting into Dublin, while detachments of soldiers marched off to protect grain shipments coming into Dublin from the direction of Wicklow, Kildare and Meath. She famously wrote:
‘Weary men, what reap ye?’ ‘Golden corn for the stranger.’
‘What sow ye?’ ‘Human corses which wait for the avenger.’
‘Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see ye in the offing?’
‘Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing.’
‘There’s a proud array of soldiers—what do they round your door?’
‘They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hand of the poor.’
‘Pale mothers, wherefore weeping?’ ‘Would to God that we were dead—
Our children swoon before us and we cannot give them bread.’
At the Nation, Mitchel rushed this technically awkward but politically urgent poem into print, for he knew the truth of it, having revisited a village first visited two years before.
There is a horrible silence; grass grows before the doors; we fear to look into any door … for we fear to see yellow chapless skeletons grinning there; but our footfalls rouse two lean dogs that run from us with doleful howling, and we know by the felon-gleam in the wolfish eyes how they lived after their masters died. We stop before the threshold of our host of two years before, put our head, with our eyes shut, inside the door-jamb, and say, with shaking voice, ‘God save all here!’—No answer. Ghastly silence, and mouldy stench, as from the mouth of burial vaults! They are dead! The strong man and the fair dark-eyed woman and the little ones, with their liquid Gaelic accents that melted into music two years ago; they shrank and withered together until their voices dwindled to a rueful gibbering, and they hardly knew one another’s faces; but their horrid eyes scowled at each other with a cannibal glare.
Mitchel would have acknowledged though that for its effect on British opinion, the horrifying journal of one Dr Donovan published in the Cork Southern Reporter, not a Young Ireland organ, and reproduced in newspapers in England and the United States, was more potent.
The following is a statement of what I saw yesterday evening on the lands of Taureen. In a cabbage garden I saw (as I was informed) the bodies of Kate Barry and her two children very lightly covered with earth, the hands and legs of her large body entirely exposed, the flesh completely eaten off by the dogs, the skin and hair of the head lying within a couple of yards of the skull, which when I first threw my eyes on it, I thought to be part of a horse’s tail … I need make no comment on this but ask, are we living in a portion of the United Kingdom?
The winter of 1846–7 was climatically savage. In country atypically choked with snow, Esther and her neighbours lived off yellow meal, cabbage leaves, an occasional captured bird, whatever charity came from Belview or from Somerset House. Oats, rising in cost, were probably beyond the reach of what they earned on public works, but she may have had some anyhow, filched from barges on the canal or from the wagons going south into Tipperary. She and her sons, appearing barefoot that steely season at the gale-swept public works, by the flooded ditches and the snow-flecked cuttings, would have been surprised to hear that for now they lived in a less severely affected area of Ireland. By November, 286,000 people were trying to make wages out of the public works, and depending on each labourer, some of whom were children, were three, four or more other people. As public work ran into the summer of 1847, no one was planting the coming year’s harvest.
The arguments between Young and Old Ireland were remote from Esther. Her interest was to get close to the turf fire, God’s one remaining blessing. In the Monaro Hugh rode beneath blazing skies, listening to cicadas sizzle in the forests of eucalypt. She knew, from early letters, that some such contrast existed, and it is remarkable that she did not break under the sardonic weight of that.
It was not fever and dysentery alone that hastened the famishing end of some of her neighbours. Virulent scurvy was also common—black leg, as the Irish called it, since it caused the vessels under the skin to burst. Famine dropsy, seen widely today in the distended bodies of African famine victims, also took its share. Another dietary disease made hair fall from children’s heads but grow in patches on their faces, so that one of the Society of Friends working in Skibbereen said that the starving children looked like monkeys.
But typhus was still the supreme killer. During the winter, Thomas Burke of Roscommon, not so far from Esther, wrote to his emigrant sister in Australia, ‘They are dying like the choler pigs as fast as they can bury them and some of their remains does not be burid for ten or fifteen days and the dogs eating them some buried in mats others in their clothes.’ Esther and her sisters could lose the strength and motivation to fetch water in quantity, nor did they have means to boil it up in large amounts for washing what clothing they still owned. People huddled together by any turf fire, and lice and typhus travelled from one to another. By day, the roads were full of desperate travellers who conveyed the infected lice from place to place. In late February and March 1847 nearly 3,000 were dying every week in Ireland’s workhouses. The Board of Guardians in Fermoy, Cork, reported by March what other Poor Law guardians around the country were observing. ‘Every room is so crowded that it is impossible to separate the sick from the healthy … thirty children labouring under disease were found in three beds.’ Esther Larkin and her sons saw a shadow and a distancing fall over kinships they had till now taken for granted. They became wary and grudging. The families of sufferers would themselves often vacate the house where fever brought down a sister, a parent, a spouse. ‘It was not desertion so much as quarantine,’ says a historian, ‘for once or twice a day these people would feed the ailing one inside by tying a can of water and a bit of hot gruel to the end of a long pole.’ When there were no more tugs on the pole, the house would be pulled down on top of the corpse and burned, an unprecedented method of disposing of a body.
Did Esther ever face these impossible options, considered mortally sinful by those who carried them out? Or did she ever find herself isolated and at the end of the pole, and emerge at last to see the evasive shame in the faces of her kinsmen?
She and all her peers meant to avoid the workhouse at all costs. The Poor Law commissioners spoke with some dismay of the reluctance of people in the areas of Loughrea and Ballinasloe to use the available relief, the shelter, food, clothing, medical and spiritual consolation within the workhouse, and the willingness instead to suffer ‘the worst privations.’ It was better to appeal for some miraculous intervention than approach that neo-Gothic standardised gatehouse beyond which lay hell.
O King of Glory, hear and answer us,
From bondage save us, and come to our aid,
And send us bread, as we cry in misery,
And may the poorhouse be in ashes laid.
The reaction against the workhouse would become even more markedly the last option when in June 1847, an amendment was made to the Poor Law. Proposed by the Galway landlord William Gregory, it was commonly known and cursed as the Gregory clause, and it denied access to relief to any person and his or her children who still tenanted more than a ¼-acre of land. To enter the workhouse or the fever hospital, a family had to abandon their land, and could expect their cottage to be tumbled in their absence. Esther may have held as much as a ¼-acre of conacre, but if not, a holder of even smaller amounts of land was often equally vulnerable to a law whose purpose was to clear the tenantry off land which could more profitably be used as pasture. Indeed, apart from those who volunt
arily fled to emigrate, over 65,000 families, in excess of 300,000 people, would be evicted between 1846 and 1850.
Some of the images of the Famine which would reach the world through journals such as the Illustrated London News were of people, as an Irish song said, like ‘young crows, with death in their throats’; of women and children nearing an end, of passive, skeletal hopelessness. These illustrations did not indicate how cleverly, how determinedly, the portrayed scarecrows struggled to avoid being so reduced. Apart from outdoor relief and public works, apart from whatever it was men were able to take at peril from barges and wagons, Esther Larkin and her compatriots were engaged in a huge national hunt for any half-workable food source. Coastal people in the west dealt with hunger by catching fish, winkles and mussels. They gathered seaweeds named crother and dulaman, the second of which was not edible until after the first frosts of winter and caused diarrhoea. In Mayo, seabirds were hunted. Men were lowered over cliffs by rope and stole eggs, fighting off large ferocious mother birds.
A Wicklow farmer saw groups of men cornering cattle, to cut a vein in the neck of a beast and pour off a few pints of blood into a jar. They would repair the incision with a pin and a swatch of hair cut from the animal’s tail. The blood would be salted then and fried in a pan. People fought over the blackberries before they had ripened. When the fish in the Ow River in Wicklow had all been caught, people ate the pencil-thick worms from the bottom of the stream. A landlord, afraid that all the birds of the country would be exterminated, paid a bounty of 2 pence each for every live bird brought to him. Rats which had eaten of the dead were fair game. In Mayo in the spring of 1847, 3,000 people of the parish of Island Eady intended trying to live through the summer on chickweed. One recipe in common use in Galway was to boil nettles, sorrels and dock leaves with a spoon of meal on top.
Then there was soup. In fact, for fear of the impact of the sale of cheap corn on the market, Trevelyan had ordered that from now on sales would occur only in the extreme west and south-west. The Ballinasloe corn depot was closing down. But in February 1847 a new Act of Parliament provided for the immediate establishment of local relief committees to dispense soup from premises outside the workhouse, to sustain the Irish and encourage them to plant for the harvest. The soup kitchen also gave official form to some of the individual, already existing gestures of landlords like the O’Briens in Clare and Limerick, and of Maria Edgeworth of Edgeworthtown in County Longford, who had been distributing soup or porridge locally. The Society of Friends of Cincinnati, Ohio, had read of Maria Edgeworth’s ministrations to the 3,000 starving of her area, and consigned to her $180 worth of cornmeal to be used in stirabout, that is, corn porridge. The Friends had already entered the soup business in Ireland before outdoor relief became official. From their three-boiler soup plant in Cork city, they made and distributed 2,500 quarts of a full-bodied recipe including meat, vegetables and barley.
It took a little time that spring for new relief committee kitchens to be established throughout the country, and ordinary people, however hungry, had a resistance to them too. There was the matter of personal pride. And then charity of this nature had generally in the past been dispensed by such bodies as the Protestant Colonisation Society, which attempted to combine generosity with a demand that the peasant also climb out of the spiritual pit of Papism and convert to the Protestant faith. But need came to override any reluctance. By the summer of 1847, for nearly three million people, half the population of Ireland, the transition from stirabout to soup from the soup kitchens had been accomplished. Some modern commentators claim that much of the soup was too watery to help famine-bloated bodies. But there was no doubting the good will of Alexis Soyer, the French chef from London’s West End, who in the spring of 1847 opened in Dublin a series of model kitchens in which fashionable volunteers worked to feed the masses. No doubting it unless one saw the soup kitchen at, say, the Royal Barracks, Dublin, from the same point of view as John Mitchel of the Nation. He wrote of:
the piteous ranks of ‘model’ paupers, broken tradesmen, ruined farmers, destitute sempstresses, ranged at a respectful distance till the genteel persons had duly inspected the arrangements, and then marched by policemen to the place allotted them, where they were to feed on the meagre diet with chained spoons—to show the gentry how pauper spirit can be broken, and pauper appetite can gulp down its bitter bread and its bitterer shame and wrath together.
As operated in Ballinasloe itself, outdoor relief catered for all but unmarried men. Lord Clancarty, the local landlord, considered that ‘a system of demoralisation had become very general among the poor and their industrial habits had been altogether interfered with.’ To give young men soup was to foster indolence. But from 1847 onwards, the degree of need in the Union of Ballinasloe was such that people were impossible to control even when relief was being distributed. A report to Dublin Castle declared that the scenes at the two soup kitchens in the town of Ballinasloe were beyond description, with the hungry competing for the next available bowl. There or in the countryside to the south, Patrick and Hugh tasted the thinned-down soup of charity.
But as well as displays of individual desperation, acts which would cause fits of shame amongst survivors, there were also displays of solidarity amongst the masses of people of the margin. In March 1847, for example, in a Roscommon procession headed by a man carrying a loaf of bread on a pole, a large body assembled in order to speak to the gathered relief committees of the nearby parishes. But licit protest was itself considered an outrage. The leader was taken into custody and armed troops were set to patrol the streets.
On the first day of 1847, a meeting had been held at Rothschild’s offices in London to establish a British Association for relief of distress. Baron Lionel de Rothschild, Lord Monteagle and Mr Abel Smith were founder-members. The association was catalysed by the magistrate Nicholas Cummins, who after a visit to Skibbereen in West Cork, had written to the Duke of Wellington a letter published in the Times on Christmas Eve, 1846. Coming from such a reliable source, it was above all the communication that galvanised British compassion. In Skibbereen’s hovels were scenes
such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth, their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive … four children, a woman and what had once been a man … Suffice it to say, that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least two hundred such phantoms … My clothes were nearly torn off in my endeavour to escape from the throng of pestilence around, when my neckcloth was seized from behind by a grip which compelled me to turn. I found myself grasped by a woman with an infant just born in her arms and the remains of a filthy sack across her loins, the sole covering of herself and baby.
Trevelyan made a personal donation of £25, as people from throughout the British Isles and the world sent money to the newly founded association. But Trevelyan warned that ‘Feeling in London is so strong against the Irish, that I doubt if much progress will be made in subscription until further horrifying accounts are received.’ Queen Victoria donated £2,000, though an Irish myth still has it that it was a lesser sum—£5 is often nominated. The amounts raised would be distributed through regional agents of the association, but—as generally occurs in famines in any century—under government directive. The February 1847 articles in the Illustrated London News by sketcher-journalist Mr James Mahony, whose frank but non-partisan tales of his journeys in West Cork, and whose sketches of stricken villages, hasty and pathetic burials and wasted people, would become some of the most frequently invoked images of the Famine, also appalled and moved Britons.
The same reports and illustrations caused a number of American cities and committees to raise money for Ireland, independently of the British Association, from fêtes and other events. Tammany, the American Democrat head
quarters in Lower Manhattan, wisely entrusted what it raised to the Society of Friends, the Quakers. Individual Catholic dioceses sent money—the parish churches of Brooklyn raised an initial amount of $19,000. Boston as a whole may have sent as much as $150,000. The Choctaw Indians contributed an amount in excess of $100. Southern railroads carried food donations freight-free. The Irish Relief Committee of Philadelphia sent three barks loaded with aid, one to Londonderry, one to Cork, one to Limerick, all in care of the Society of Friends. The citizens of Boston and the Irish Relief Committee of New York had shipments of grain for the Society of Friends in Cork; the United States Navy provided the sloop Jamestown to deliver Boston’s grain and the aged, formerly British frigate Macedonian, moored in Brooklyn, was seconded to the New Yorkers.
At the Fever Hospital in the County of Dublin infirmary, an assistant surgeon and Young Irelander, Kevin Izod O’Doherty, treated the rampant fevers which took the lives not only of Dubliners and refugees from the countryside but also of some of his colleagues. Though he must have carried fever with him into the councils of the Young Ireland movement and the meetings of the ’82 Club, he and the others were well fed, and fortified against disease. O’Doherty’s late father, a conservative Westland Row lawyer who did not sport the Celtic O’ before his name, had provided O’Doherty with a robust constitution. He was the same age as Tom Meagher, but had a calmer presence, and was less exorbitant in dress and manner.
In the Irish mass he treated, many cried, ‘Let us reform with Jesus’s help and place our trust in the Lord above; and we will have potatoes again.’ But to O’Doherty at the Dublin infirmary, the sick were victims not of their own sins but of those of others. ‘The potato-blight,’ wrote Gavan Duffy in terms O’Doherty agreed with utterly, ‘had spread from the Atlantic to the Caspian, but there was more suffering in one parish in Mayo than in all the rest of Europe.’ O’Doherty came to Young Ireland about the time it was deciding to give itself a formal structure, to turn itself into a political party. The ’82 Club, being largely a social group, was not adequate. An Irish Confederation, the official organisation of the Young Irelanders, came into existence at a meeting in the Rotunda in Dublin, on the evening of 13 January 1847. The participants in that first Confederation meeting were delighted to be joined by Smith O’Brien, who warned the young men that the Confederation should be driven in this awful hour by the need to unite all the Irish parties, including aristocrats and Repeal. The organisation would at its peak have 10,000 members, less than the 11,000 pay clerks, gangers and inspectors employed by the public works. And the Confederate Council of thirty-nine people, now proposed, of which clergy, Members of Parliament and justices of the peace were ex-officio members, seemed almost as top-heavy as the committee of the Repeal Association.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 19