Four Green Fields: Trollheart's History of Ireland

[Trollheart]

The True Sisters of Mercy: Womankind, in the Most Literal Sense

And let's not forget, shall we, the efforts of those most moved by the tragedy, and, though restricted from contributing to most political or world affairs by virtue of their social status, the ones who always rose to the occasion when it was demanded. Women were very active in procuring aid, food, clothing, all sorts of charity for the poor, and though they were forbidden to intervene directly (being only women and all) they did a massive amount of work and to a great extent showed their men up, displaying Christian charity and kindness regardless of religious affiliation or class. The only one of their kind who had any influence had the biggest influence of all, and after Her Majesty had personally made the largest single donation to famine relief (£2,000, so nearly fifty grand) out of her own pocket, and her Queen's Letter was read out at masses all over Britain, English women staged a one-day "General Fast and Humiliation Before Almighty God" on March 24 1847, donating all the proceeds to famine relief.

Nevertheless, showing that in a way people only had so much to give - or were only prepared to give so much - and that, like most appeals, crises, famines and other emergency charitable works, sympathy only lasts so long - the Queen's second letter came at a time when the famine had been going on for two years, and, put simply, people were fed up. A phenomenon called "famine fatigue" had nothing to do with people dropping in the streets from tiredness due to hunger, but instead reflected how pissed off the more well-to-do had become with supporting the Irish poor. It was envisaged that this stupid famine might never end, and they would be forever required to put their hands into their pocket, and they weren't prepared to do so any longer. Let the Irish look after themselves, they said. No more English money to be sent across the water, no more English taxes to pay for starving Irish - Catholics, indeed! Didn't they believe that God helped those who helped themselves? Let them, then, put that doctrine into practice, and leave the hard-pressed English, who had already given enough, to their own problems.

The British government agreed with the will of the people, and transferred all responsibility for the financing of Irish famine relief to the landlords in Ireland, whom it believed (mostly correctly, but not solely) had been responsible for the whole damn mess. All aid, all food, all donations would henceforth be cut off (although I imagine that did not apply to personal efforts) and England could draw a line under this damned famine.

England might have been able to, but Ireland could not. Relief stopped in 1847, resulting in the most deaths and also the most evictions of the period, as landlords tried to alleviate the huge financial burden thrust upon them by cutting down their dependents. This led to the year being forever known in Ireland as "Black '47", and also signalled only worse to come as the blight returned year after year, like an assailant who, having punched and kicked you into unconsciousness, came back to finish the job just as you were struggling, bloody and beaten, back to your feet. The idea that "the famine was over" was easy for those whom it did directly affect to believe, or to claim: to them, while certainly as noted above there had been a great outpouring of charity and assistance, the limit had been reached, but nobody considered, or probably cared, what would happen when that charity stopped? It wasn't like the blight was going to go away, or even if it did - as one year was left blight-free, only for it to return the next - the damage that had been done could not be so easily repaired, and this would be the work of perhaps decades. Ireland would not rise from the ashes for a very long time.

Undeterred, Ladies' Associations began to form, including the Ladies' Relief Association in Dublin (which, were times different, might have attracted the wrong sort of donors!) and the Belfast Ladies' Association. An interesting fact about this latter is that it had as a member - its oldest, in fact - the sister of Henry Joy, whom we learned rebelled in 1798 and was executed. His sister. Mray Ann McCracken, then went on to carry out great charitable works until her death. Agreeing with the approach taken by the Quakers, the ladies not only provided food and clothes, but flax and linen to enable the poor women to work and earn money. Though some of them refused to proselytise, many did, and it's sort of ironic in a way that one of the areas they chose to try to convert was Connaught, which those who have read previous entries will remember was the province to which the Catholics were driven out of Ulster, with the warning "to Hell or to Connaught." Now  that they had settled there - although obviously, as one of the most barren and poor areas of the country, and surely suffering terribly from the Famine - the Protestants wanted to convert them.

But whatever their ulterior motives were, it's not clear that converting was a condition of their being fed, taught or shown how to develop skills, and while nuns worked in fever hospitals, taking care of the sick, and taught in the schools, food and clothing was distributed and poor girls were taught needlework, spinning  and knitting, in an attempt to create small cottage industries and help the girls to support themselves and their families. Convents opened their doors to the starving poor, and the Ladies' Industrial Society of Ireland and the Newry Benevolent Female Working Society endeavoured to "carry out a system for the development and encouragement of the latent capacities of the poor of Ireland."

[Trollheart]

When Sorrows Come: Dark Allies of the Famine

An unfortunate but rather inevitable result of the Famine was the spread of diseases, most if not all of them deadly in the nineteenth century. With overcrowding as people shuffled to soup kitchens, workhouses and food depots to try to get fed, conditions were ripe for the incubation of viruses like cholera, typhoid, whooping cough, measles, diphtheria, tuberculosis and that old favourite, fever. With greatly weakened, almost ineffectual immune systems due to the weakness brought on by hunger, people were especially vulnerable to these diseases, and though there are no proper records of how many died from what, it seems that you were just as likely to die from any of the above as you were from actual starvation.

Some diseases were already well-entrenched in Irish society, such as smallpox and influenza, which at that time was lethal, so next time you whine you have "the flu" think yourself lucky. Other, more disgusting maladies linked with diarrhoea were a kind of triple whammy, brought on by poor hygiene, a radical change in diet and unsanitary conditions. To make matters worse, Asia sent its friendly cholera strain to visit Ireland briefly in the 1830s, but then as part of a worldwide tour it returned in 1849, just as the Famine was really taking hold of the country. Catholic Ireland must really have thought they had seriously pissed God off, and you would wonder (though I don't see it recorded anywhere) if faith in the Almighty waned at all as the people suffered and God seemed, to quote Tom Waits, to be away on business?

Knowing Ireland and the Irish as I do, and from what I've learned of my ancestors researching this journal, I'd say no. If there's one thing Irish people tend to hold onto in the face of any and all adversity it's their faith. Many's the time I heard my mother or my aunt observe, on something unfortunate or unlucky happening, that it was "God's will" or "God's plan". No Irish person - probably less now but certainly back then - ever seemed to doubt that God was right, at all times, and that he could be trusted. Like the story of Job - which to me reveals the capriciousness and spitefulness of a supposedly loving god - no matter what was done to them, Irish people would cleave to their faith like a rock in a storm or a piece of driftwood after having been washed overboard, or even like a man or woman grasping a handhold as they dangled from a cliff, awaiting a sheer drop.

I suppose you could say you can't blame them, or couldn't, anyway, at that time. After all, Irish Catholics had suffered horrendously, including death, for what they believed in. At any time, they could have changed that by recanting and swearing fealty to the Church of Ireland, but few if any did. Catholics were fiercely proud of their religion, fanatically devoted to Rome and the Pope, and hated the Protestant Ascendancy that had taken their lands and caused them so much misery in their own country. So even if God was essentially hammering them down like rusty coffin nails, they probably just looked on it as a test, a test they must pass, and they held on for dear life to what they believed in.

Not that, in the short term, it did them any good.

[Trollheart]

Epilogue II: Four Grey Fields: The End of Ireland?

No single event in Irish history has had such a devastating effect on the country. Not even the ravages of the Black Death five hundred years earlier could come so close to destroying our small island. During the Great Famine, over a million people emigrated and never came back, either dying on the voyage that took them away from their native land, or reaching their destination and, again, either dying there or prospering, building a new life in a new land. Of those who remained, it's estimated about the same number perished, from hunger, exposure, infirmity or by falling prey to any of the many diseases mentioned above. With a population calculated at the time as being in the region of almost nine million prior to the arrival of the blight and the onset of the Famine, that means almost a quarter of the people in Ireland left or died by the time it was over.

This had a huge and lasting effect on the country, which still today only numbers its citizens at around five or six million (seven including Northern Ireland). Had the Famine not occurred, or had it been dealt with properly, it seems likely that we would now be approaching the eleven or twelve million mark. This is probably, to be fair, far too large for such a small island, so in some very cynical and cold way you could look on the Great Famine as having been a sort of forced depopulation or reduction of the numbers living in Ireland. But due to the massive emigration from necessity and to save lives, the idea soon took hold and even now, when the only real factors driving it are financial and social prospects, when it is certainly more voluntary to leave the country than it was then (and a lot safer) Ireland has embraced emigration, with mostly younger, skilled people seeking an outlet for their talents - and the appropriate reward in monetary and promotional terms - abroad, to the extent that there used to be a funny poster on sale here with a map of the country and the request "would the last person to leave Ireland please turn out the lights?"

Another major effect the Famine had was to lead to the ending of smallholder leases on land, as landlords, many broken by the loss of their tenants and the cost of the Famine to them (oh boo hoo indeed!) gave up their lands and were replaced by Catholic farmers, who bought up the land and used it for pastureland, a practice that continues today, and has led to farmers becoming some of the richest men in Ireland (though they'll tell you differently). Despite the abortive and mostly laughable "rising" of the Young Ireland movement spoken of briefly earlier, the country was so drained and exhausted that all thoughts of rebellion or independence died for about twenty years. There simply was no appetite (pun intended) for facing up to the almost-architects of the Great Famine, no strength and no spirit; the country was broken, though of course it would not remain so. For a long time, all people wanted to do was get back to some sort of normal, some sort of life, and give thanks that they had survived. Nobody wanted to push God on this one.

So despite 1848 being known across Europe as the "year of revolutions", with particularly the Paris revolt that returned Napoleon to the head of the Second French Republic, and notwithstanding the efforts of Thomas Davis and Young Ireland, the country had been battered to its knees and had no fight left in it, and revolution, rebellion and rising all passed Ireland by. It would take the rise of the Fenians in 1860 before Ireland would again be able to stand up to its auld enemy and gird itself for battle. Needless to say, spoiler alert, such attempts would fail. It would in fact take another half a century before Ireland would finally be free, and even then, well, we'll see when we get there, but let me just say that the course of independence never ran smoothly, nor did it with Irish freedom.

Politically, one thing the Famine did prove, even if the Irish were too bone-weary and heartsick to address it, was that the Act of Union was pure bollocks. The idea had been that Ireland would, as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, enjoy the same patronage and protection England, Scotland and Wales did, but of course the cold and uncaring response to the Famine showed this was nowhere near the case. Ireland was treated more as a troublesome colony that had been reined in, in the same way America could not be, and was once again firmly ground under the heel of the British boot. Very little, as we have seen, was done to help the "new recruit", and in fact largely the problems of Ireland were ignored, scorned, derided and pushed to one side. So though the body may have been weak, the spirit, in some ways, was willing, and the Irish would not forget the way they had been treated. Nationalist fervour, only held for now at arm's length, would soon return with renewed fury.

Just let them catch their breath first, all right?

Another, sadder effect of the aftermath of the Famine was that many young girls who had been lucky enough to survive were now orphans and had no visible means of support. This led to the rise of prostitution in Ireland. Of course, no doubt there had been ladies of the night in the country before, but now once-respectable women were forced out onto the street in order to simply earn enough to feed their families. One of the major ports of call, so to speak, for these orphaned girls was Curragh Barracks in Co. Kildare. With a permanent British military presence established there, and soldiers always horny, the business was brisk for them, but because they were not allowed stay in the barracks they were reduced to sleeping in and around its environs, in bushes and ditches, leading to their becoming known as "the wrens of the Curragh".

In general, it seems the army treated the women well, allowing them to buy supplies at the market and making sure they had water, and some of them even married, though due to army regulations they were not allowed to live at the base. Locally, they were shunned and called "morally repugnant" and such terms by people who believed they brought disease and were thieves, so I must say it's certainly nice to see how shattered Ireland banded together in a common cause to help those who had suffered through the worst humanitarian disaster in their living memory. Catholic Ireland my arse. It wasn't as if these women chose to be sex workers; they simply had no other choice.

Although not the final death knell for the Irish language, emigration and the death of many native Irish speakers (the effects of the Famine being of course hardest felt in the poorer, more rural and therefore more Irish-speaking areas of the country) certainly hastened its demise. Although a sort of reverse reaction occurred in the countries to which the emigrants moved, especially in America, where a reawakened interest in all things Irish, including the language, grew as more emigrants arrived, back home the language of choice was quickly becoming English, and today, as already mentioned, few if any people can speak proper Irish, nor really want to.

Another thing the emigrants exported with themselves was the idea of nationalism, and independence for the country they had left behind, leading to a growing groundswell of support for the "Irish cause" which would lead to finance for and interest in Irish republican paramilitary forces like the IRB, the Fenians and later the IRA. As some Irish immigrants rose to positions of power and standing in the USA, they would use their new influence to do all they could to support and endorse and help to bankroll the rebellions and risings against the British back home.

While it may certainly be a biased view - how could any contemporary source be otherwise, on one side or the other? - the final word should perhaps be left to the man whose quote opened this chapter, writer John Mitchell, editor of the nationalist paper The Nation, which would inspire the creation of the Fenian movement twenty years later. You can certainly hear, in his damning words, the voice of every Irish person who died needlessly, whether they dropped from starvation or perished on one of the coffin ships, or in a foreign land, far from home. More than perhaps anything they ever did, even the outrages perpetrated by Cromwell or the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII, Irish people look to the brutally indifferent response by the British government to the Great Famine to fuel and keep alive their hatred of the auld enemy.

"I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a "dispensation of Providence"; and ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine."

No apology has ever been forthcoming from the British government, even now, almost 150 years later. In 1997 it seemed Tony Blair's government had finally grasped the nettle, when his statement was read out by Gabriel Byrne at a Famine commemoration event. It said ""those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy". The sincerity of the message was however dampened when, in 2021, it was confirmed that Blair had not written, nor approved the message, and it had come from his private secretary, as a personal gesture. That's all well and good, but it's the head of state - the real head of state - we want the apology from, not some secretary, flunky or underling.

Even now, in these enlightened times, when relations between Ireland and Britain seem to be at the strongest they ever have been, even now, it appears we are still seen as inferior, no excuse or apology needed, no responsibility taken, and quite possibly, the ghosts of two million Irish cry out for reparations which will never come, and two simple words which will never form on the lips of the leader of the British government: "We're sorry".