Four Green Fields: Trollheart's History of Ireland

[Trollheart]

Lord George Gordon (1751 - 1793)

Even now, over two hundred years later, the jury remains out as to whether he was actually insane, though many believe he was. What is not in doubt, however, is that he was the face of Scottish anti-Papism that met the equally ugly face of English bigotry, and, carrying the riots of Edinburgh and Glasgow to their natural conclusion, was almost single-handedly responsible for the worst anti-Catholic protests and violence in England since the Great Fire of London.

A vehement and vocal opponent of the American War of Independence, he resigned his commission in the navy before he had to serve in that conflict, his views not helping his parliamentary career when he took his seat as MP for Ludgershall in Wiltshire. In 1779 he became president of the Protestant Association and began lobbying hard against the Catholic Relief Act, and in addition to the by now usual threats and predictions as to how the Catholics would drag all of England into a state of "popery", invite the French to invade and presumably roast and eat Protestant children, he warned that England was in danger of returning from a constitutional monarchy back to the days of absolute rulers, one of whom, Louis XVII, would a decade later be deposed and executed as the French Revolution roared into almost unstoppable life.

Gordon had had great success stirring up people's fears and prejudices in Scotland, as described above, and now believed he could replicate that success here in England. The king, though, was not interested. He entertained him till he got bored, then refused to grant him any further audiences. On May 27 1780, Gordon decided to forget trying to gain royal assent for his policies, even taking the rather dangerous step of denouncing the King as an agent of popery,  and on June 2 instead convened a large contingent of his followers, who descended on the House of Commons, in an effort to force them to reject and repeal the Papist Act.

Unlike in Scotland, where pure hatred and distrust of Catholics was the driving force for the riots, here multiple other issues contributed, including the increasingly unsuccessful efforts by the empire to subdue the American colonies, the cost of living, lack of faith or trust in the government and unemployment and low wages. In essence, not only Catholics were attacked when the riots broke out, but anyone seen as profiting from the current situation, anyone rich (or deemed to be), anyone prosperous, anyone who disagreed with the rioters or, frequently, anyone who got in their way or looked funny at them.

With a crowd - quickly becoming a mob - of an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 behind him, and more joining as they marched, Gordon tried to force entry into the House but was stopped, only he himself allowed in as a member of Parliament. Outside, as the impatient mob waited for a result, violence erupted. Ministers leaving were attacked, their coaches overturned, the small contingent of guards present at the House unequal to the task of controlling such a huge gathering. Eventually the army was sent in and restored order, driving the protesters away, while inside the House Gordon's petition was all but unanimously voted down.

Things got worse that night.

Huge crowds organised and gathered to attack Catholic churches and dwellings, and the large Irish settlement of Moorfields came in for particular attention. Again, no appreciable police or military presence was seen on the streets, and Newgate and other prisons were attacked, burned and prisoners freed. The house of the Lord Chief Justice also became a target. Violence continued into the night and the next morning the Bank of England was assaulted, but the army were able to throw the rioters back, although sustaining heavy casualties. Nevertheless, it still took four more days before the army would begin to respond in any real numbers to the violence, making it hard to believe that the rioting was not at best supported, at worst tolerated by the government.

June 7 saw reprisals, finally, as the army took back the streets, killing over 280 rioters and arresting over 400, including their ringleader, Lord George Gordon. An excellent depiction of the events can be read in Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, which centres around the Gordon Riots. Of the 450 or so arrested, only twenty to thirty of the rioters faced execution, and Gordon, though tried for high treason, was acquitted. For some reason he converted to Judaism, and, as vehement and radical as he had been as a Protestant, he became one of the most hardline Jews, sticking rigidly to scripture and abhorring and avoiding those who did not.

He later found himself in the very prison his supporters had destroyed - rebuilt now - as libel suits gained him five years behind Newgate's bars. Nine months after completing his sentence he died of typhoid fever, an epidemic of which had been raging through the completely unsanitary prison. 

Light at the End of the Tunnel: Catholic Emancipation

But despite the best efforts of militant Protestants, rights for Catholics could not be denied or held back forever, and the day was fast approaching when the "papists" would enjoy the same privileges, mostly, as their Anglican and Calvinist brothers and sisters. It had been pretty conclusively proven that this could not be achieved by force of arms (while the opposition had proven beyond doubt that this was the very means by which it could be denied) and, like many great and important questions, this would finally take thinkers, philosophers, men willing to compromise and sit down and talk the whole thing out, for the good of both countries.

The man who would bring this about would be known in Ireland as the Great Liberator.



Daniel O'Connell (1775 - 1847)

A native of County Kerry, Daniel O'Connell was born into a Catholic family which had somehow managed to retain their land, mostly through Protestant trustees and their connections. When he was just sixteen Daniel and his brother were sent to France to continue their education. This was a bad move, as the year 1791 saw some of the worst excesses of the French Revolution, and the brothers had to flee the country's anti-religion sentiment. The experience soured Daniel on using violence as a means to an end, and he swore later that "liberty is not worth the shedding of a single drop of blood." He and his brother escaped to London, and returned to Ireland in 1795.

Four days before the 1798 rising, Daniel was called to the bar, and having no faith in, and giving no support to the rebellion, remained at home in Kerry while the British forces of Viscount Lake crushed the rebels. As we've seen above, he was equally critical of the pseudo-rising attempted by young Robert Emmet, deploring the Irishman's use of violence. In contrast to his time in France, he found many like-minded people in London, such as Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham and William Godwin, and helped pass the Slavery Abolition Act as well as the Act of Reform. He believed passionately that Church and State should be kept separate. He also fought hard against the idea that Catholic bishops should allow their appointment to be subject to the favour of the Crown, arguing that if this were to happen, the bishops would be nothing more than mouthpieces for the Anglican church.

Not only that, but the Crown and Westminster recognised worriedly the part the Catholic priests had played in 1798, and knew that if there was one institution that the papists would and could rally around, it was that of their clergy. Draw them in under the control of the Crown, and that threat could be effectively nullified. If bishops could be appointed they could be dismissed too, if His Majesty felt or was advised they were overstepping their bounds. O'Connell knew this too, and made sure there was no English veto on the appointment of bishops.

The Catholic Association

Perhaps as a response to, perhaps despite Lord Gordon's Protestant Association, Daniel O'Connell set up the Catholic Association, in, um, association with the Irish Catholic church, to lobby for the cause of emancipation for Catholics. Unlike its Protestant equivalent though, this one was not open only to academics, politicians, industrialists and the like. For a tiny fee (the "Catholic rent") of one penny a month anyone could join, which meant the Catholic Association became the first mass-member organisation in the entire world. Not only did this allow its membership to swell to unheard-of numbers, it also effectively removed the class barriers that had characterised such organisations in the past, both Protestant and Catholic. The whole idea, of course, apart from a certain type of "silent terrorism by numbers", was to involve as many ordinary Catholics in the struggle as possible, and show them they had a voice, a way to make their opinions heard, a way to fight back (though being O'Connell's creation violence was not used as a coercive method).

The Catholic rent was clever, as it served three purposes. One, as outlined above, the most obvious, was to get people to join, the more the better. Another was to swell the coffers of the Association: a penny a month is not much, but a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand or more pennies a month adds up to a sizeable sum to go into a war chest. Thirdly, the incredibly low and affordable price all but forced every single Catholic to join: after all, if they did not, others would ask why not? Don't you want repeal? You can't say you can't afford a penny every month. Not that I imagine any Catholic would not want to join, but this would remove an excuse, were any looking for one, and lend suspicion to their reticence to join.

The money could be used to lobby parliament, help Catholic tenants evicted by Protestant landlords or any other good, Catholic causes the Association wished to show support to. Almost at one stroke, it pulled all the disparate elements of Catholic dissatisfaction and grievance together, and allowed them to shout their protest with one, very loud and powerful voice, a voice nobody could ignore.

The Home Secretary (later Prime Minister) Robert Peel was so worried about its power that he equated it with his own government, and the Duke of Wellington foresaw Irish civil war if the Catholic Association was allowed to continue unchecked. The fact that the Association remained loyal to the Crown, though, was a mitigating factor, and made them seem that little bit less radical and less of a threat, giving them more bargaining power. Of course, it already had the considerable backing of the Catholic Church, and priests would regularly collect the contributions for the Catholic Association after Sunday mass, perhaps again another reason why no God-fearing and loyal Catholic would want to be singled out as not being a member.

With a General Election and a new Prime Minister in 1826, the Association began to support those MPs in the House who looked favourably upon the idea of Catholic emancipation, while in 1828 the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which had previously banned "dissenters" from holding public office left Catholics as the only ones now being penalised (literally, thanks to the remaining Penal Laws) and they believed surely the way was opening up towards their political and religious freedoms being recognised and enshrined in law too.

Catholic power, as it were, was shown to great effect at the contentious Waterford elections, when the sitting candidate, Lord Thomas Beresford, smugly confident that his poor tenants would not dare vote against him, had a nasty shock and perhaps too late realised the true impact of O'Connell's Catholic Association when he was defeated as his tenants defied him, and tradition, and voted for a liberal landlord.

This was only the first in a series of upsets for the comfortable and complacent Tory landlords. The tide was beginning to turn. In May, O'Connell himself sat for the seat for County Clare vacated by the retirement of William Huskinson and his replacement as  the President of the Board of Trade by William Vesey-Fitzgerald. O'Connell knew the Penal Laws prevented him from taking a seat in Westminster as a Catholic, but somewhat in the same way as a hundred years later, Gerry Adams of the republican Sinn Fein party would stand for and win a seat, but be unable to take it, O'Connell knew that if he won the seat the clamour over his being barred from sitting at Westminster would rile up the Irish Catholics.

The Catholic clergy mobilised as only they could do, whipping up the people into a fervour of support for the Liberator, one of them declaring "Let every renegade to his God and his country follow Vesey-Fitzgerald, and every true Catholic Irishman follow me!" O'Connell garnered twice as many votes as his opponent, winning the seat easily. Now the British government had a problem. The cause of Catholic repression had never been so publicly front and centre in favour of the position of the oppressed. Fearing a total revolution in Ireland, and unprepared for such an event, Peel and Wellington pushed through the long-fought-for Catholic Relief Act of 1829. Daniel O'Connell had done what Robert Emmet and the men of 1798 had spectacularly failed to do, and had finally won emancipation for his people.

His people. Yes. Let's look at that. Daniel O'Connell surely deserves the title of the Great Liberator that he has earned, however it's also important not to be blinkered about his success. As Richard Killeen points out in A Brief History of Ireland, O'Connell marshalled and mobilised the poor, the ordinary people via the penny-a-month membership fee to the Catholic Association, but he was not above throwing them to the wolves if and when it suited his purposes. This is borne out in his surprise support for a bill authored by Sir Francis Burdett, which had within its text two important provisos, one being the state payment of Catholic clergy, and the other, more important one being the intention to restrict reforms to the rich classes. In other words, the bill provided for the disenfranchisement of those Catholic landowners who paid less than forty shillings for their land, i.e. all the poorer ones.

In the end, it made no difference as once again the House of Lords, final arbiters in any law or Act being passed, voted the Burdett bill down. But here it does seem that O'Connell had played his hand and shown that if he could achieve his aims by throwing the "little people" under the carriage, he was more than ready to do so. And to be fair, the "little people", as Killeen so archly notes, did "much of the heavy lifting for him."

Although Ireland had been traditionally and originally a Catholic nation, Ulster still simmered and seethed with Protestant fervour, fury at the granting of equal rights (except to the poor) to their ancient enemies, and surely trembled a little now too, that they suddenly faced being a complete minority and no longer in control. A minority when taken as a percentage of the whole of the island, certainly, but still very much a majority power in Ulster, where O'Connell rather overconfidently directed his next efforts.

[Trollheart]

Ulster Says No (again): The Repealer Repulsed

Surely O'Connell should have expected nothing less than a hostile reception once he crossed the border, but maybe he was too flushed with success to think about that, or maybe he just wanted to "free his Catholic brethren from the bondage of the Ascendancy"? Either way, he decided to tour there, to try to gain support from and speak to the Catholics of Ulster. Unsurprisingly, the Orangemen were having none of that, and turned out in great numbers in the town of Ballybray, Co, Monaghan, where they turned him back. The event was celebrated by Protestants across the province as the day the repealer was repulsed. It was quite clear that, despite or even in defiance of  their new legal status, Catholics would never get an easy ride in Ulster, and the battle lines - for now, only political but later to spill out into over thirty years of bloodshed, violence and terror -  were being drawn, with Ulster unionists determined to hold and defend that line, as Ian Paisley would later growl, and give "not one inch."

The poor tenants would as always get a raw deal, as one of the provisions in the Catholic Relief Act was for landlords to raise the minimal rent payable on land from forty shillings to ten pounds, an increase of I think five hundred percent. Who could afford that? Not the poor farmers, who, despite now being part of the Catholic Relief Act, surely did not feel either relieved or indeed liberated by the Great Liberator. As for him, he was a celebrity all over Europe, having seemed to have accomplished the impossible, and he had many ardent admirers. He took his seat, finally, with the restrictions removed for Catholics to sit in Parliament, in February 1830, but for a while it was more a symbolic victory, as he had few allies and in the early days of repeal there was a dearth of Catholics in Westminster. Later, when the government changed, he was able to make some alliances, the most significant of which was the eventual removal of the hated tithes in 1830.

But first, there would be a war.

The Tithe War (1830 - 1836)

Technically speaking, this wasn't a war, not in the way 1798 or even Emmet's abortive rebellion could be - generously - described as such, and certainly nothing like the later 1916 Rising. Mostly, it was a time of protests, the majority of them non-violent, but like any protests there were those which went beyond harsh words and heated language. But what were the tithes, and why did Ireland feel so strongly about them? Well, first of all let's get the pronunciation right: tithe is pronounced with a soft "th", the same way scythe and blythe are. Tithe literally means ten percent, and was a levy pushed on Catholic Irish ostensibly for not attending "proper" mass, i.e. Anglican, but in reality as a stealth tax enabling the Church of Ireland to finance itself. People were expected to contribute a tenth of their earnings, land, cattle, produce, to the Anglican Church in Ireland, and this tax fell heaviest, as they always do, on the poor.

Pasture land was exempted from the tithes, and as this was generally only owned by the richer Protestants, land ownership being, until the final passage of the Catholic Relief Act, restricted to them alone, it was the poor Catholics, desperately trying to scratch a living on poor land who had to pay the most. The reality of this was that the Church of Ireland, which no Catholic wanted anything to do with, received about two-thirds of its annual income from people who were not allowed through its doors unless they converted, and which stood as a permanent symbol of their  continuing oppression; whose priests would loudly declaim on Sundays the heresies of the "papists", and swear they were all bound for Hell, while still taking their money. Rather ironically, the percentage of Protestants to Catholics in Ireland was about ten percent too.

Tithes were a slap in the face for Catholic Ireland. They were a way of the Protestants saying "we know you hate us but you're going to pay for us to continue to be here". Although sporadic protests and some violence had broken about against the practice, from about 1760 onwards, there was really nothing anyone could do until 1829, when the rights they had been robbed of for hundreds of years were finally restored to Catholics, and they could muster as an effective force, both political and spiritual, to face the injustice forced upon them.

The first to really grasp the nettle was a farmer called Patrick "Patt" Lalor, who, though he refused to resist any attempt to take his goods in payment for tithes, declared that he knew his friends and neighbours would support him and the Catholic cause by refusing to buy any of the cattle taken from him, which were put up for auction. He was right; though he stood peacefully by when the Irish Police took his cattle for non-payment, the auction to sell them was tumbleweed city. And this was only the beginning.

As ever, the Catholic clergy were deeply enmeshed and involved in what would become known as "the tithe war", which began March 3 1831 when the cattle of Fr. Martin Doyle were taken in lieu of money for the tithes at Graiguenamanagh in Co. Kilkenny. A few months later more serious clashes took place at Bunclody in Co. Wexford, where this time the resistance was met with gunfire, and twelve people were killed by the Irish Police, while in retaliation near the end of the year twelve constables were killed at the aptly-named town of Carrickshock, Co. Kilkenny, when a crowd ambushed forty of them as they arrived to destrain (take in place of) cattle, and when the men responsible for this were put on trial, an estimated 200,000 Irishmen turned out in protest. Speaking on behalf of the accused was one Daniel O'Connell, and his presence there ensured the demise of the tithe system.

But there were further confrontations, the largest and indeed last being at Rathcormac, Co. Cork (long known, and still known as "the rebel county") where in a small village called Bartlemy in the parish of Gortroe, about 100 armed British fired upon stone-throwing Irish who supported the widow Johanna Ryan who refused - or could not afford - to pay her tithes. As the party had approached with the Archdeacon to collect the - wait for it - forty shillings due, they were pelted by rocks and stones, then the defenders withdrew behind barricades set up on Widow Ryan's property and continued the assault on the unwelcome soldiers. Their commander ordered them to fire, and up to twenty Irish were killed, estimates ranging from twelve upwards.

At the outbreak of gunfire the defenders scattered, and the widow was left with no choice but to pay her tithe. Nevertheless, condemnation of the "massacre" from O'Connell as well as Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor and Henry Grattan led to charges against the army, which were later dropped. The incident did however serve as the final battle in the tithe war. In 1838 the tithes were camouflaged; cut by a quarter, they were now charged to the landlords and passed on as rent, under the Tithe Rentcharge (Ireland) Act, and finally abolished entirely thirty years later with the Irish Church Act, which completely disestablished the Church of Ireland.

Teach Your Children: The Establishment of the Irish Educational System

One thing that dooms any people is ignorance. Charles Dickens noted this when he had his Ghost of Christmas Present warn Ebenezer Scrooge, in A Christmas Carol, to beware two emaciated waifs he showed him. "The boy is ignorance," he told the terrified miser, "the girl is want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware the boy, for on his brow I see written that which is doom unless the writing be erased."

The legendary writer was using Scrooge's indifference to, almost ignorance of the poor and the needy to illustrate a very valid point. The British government took this warning and twisted its intent, using it to attempt to erase the Irish Catholic by forbidding his education. As Hitler or Stalin would no doubt have told us, the most dangerous enemy is an educated man or woman. For people to be kept down and enslaved to your will they need to be kept ignorant, and if Catholics could not be educated they would grow up unaware that there was anything beyond the lives they lived of drudgery and compliance.

With Catholics banned from sending their children abroad to be educated, schools began to spring up all over Ireland, usually under the aegis of the Catholic Church and run by nuns or priests, starting a nightmare scenario that would terrify and cause resentment among Irish schoolchildren for centuries. You would think the male-dominated and run Christian Brothers would have been the most feared, but that only shows that you never had to endure the teachings of a nun! The Christian Brothers was set up by a former missionary, Edmund Ignatius Rice (1762 - 1844), who had been about to go abroad to preach when he was convinced to stay in Ireland and devote himself to the well-being and education of Irish youth. Not all that many of us would thank him for changing his mind!

Rice set up a school in a converted stable (echoes of Bethlehem, eh?) in Waterford, and though a trying time, he managed to recruit other priests who took on teaching duties, his school soon expanding to a second one, whereafter he formed the order of Presentation Brothers and later the Christian Brothers, tasked with the education of young male children, particularly those from poor families. Eventually his schools spread even further, crossing over the channel where he set establishments up in England.

For girls, there was the horror of the nuns. What a great idea: to put women who were avowedly celibate (and mostly older and more bitter) in a position of power and authority over younger, pretty and impressionable girls! I mean, boys mostly laughed at the "Brothers", and took little to no notice of them, at least in my time, but even when I were a lad a nun could freeze you with a single disapproving look, and somehow you just never fought back. Beneath it all was probably the twin realisations that this was, technically anyway, a woman, and more to the point was a Bride of Christ, who, at ages eight to ten maybe, you did not want to be pissing off! And nuns knew it too, and used their power to its utmost. I remember my sister being sent home in tears because a horrible nun had told her my parents were going to Hell because they had separated. Fucking religion. My mother soon set her straight.

But though nuns could teach boys, they were usually assigned to girls' schools, and there were three orders set up in the nineteenth century that concerned themselves with educating young female minds. The first was the Presentation Sisters (which Rice copied obviously), founded as far back as 1776,  then the Sisters of Charity in 1815 and finally the Sisters of Mercy (NOT the goth band!) who were formed in 1831. It always amuses me that they chose these names, when mostly they had neither any concept of charity nor certainly mercy, if my sisters' and my own experiences are anything to go by.

Of course, having the Catholic school system, as it was then, controlled and run by the Church made it able to tighten its grip on the emerging new generation of Irish children, and one subject that was compulsory even when I went to school was religious education, sometimes called catechism or religious knowledge. It amounted to the same thing though: spiritual brainwashing as you were told all about God, Jesus and the Church and given no option but to profess your belief in it all. R.E. teachers prepared their young charges for such momentous events in their spiritual development as First Holy Communion and First Confirmation, with dreary dress rehearsals for both the norm, at least in my time.

In 1831 the government (British of course) created a national school act which provided millions of schoolchildren with an education, and though these schools, unlike those of the Christian Brothers or the nuns, were of mixed denomination and did not place so much emphasis on religious instruction, this would change towards the end of the century, as churches segregated their children along lines of faith and creed, with Catholic, Presbyterian and Protestant schools admitting only children from families of that belief. The largest university at the time, Trinity College, was steadfastly Protestant, established in 1592 by Queen Elizabeth I, but in 1854  Catholics wanted their own institution, even given that the long ban on their children entering Trinity had expired under the Catholic Relief Act. Catholic University was built, later taking the name University College Dublin, now Ireland's largest institution for third-level education.

[Trollheart]

Train a-comin' - The Iron Horse Arrives in Ireland

As Catholics began to get educated in a way they had been prohibited and prevented from doing before the passing of the Act, the transport system was also beginning to catch up, as trains arrived in Ireland from 1834. Prior to this, transport had consisted of coaches - mostly those carrying mail - and canal boats, a slow progress to be had either way. A remarkably short time behind England, Ireland's first railway was opened in 1834 as the Dublin & Kingstown Railways (D&KR) which connected Dublin to the suburb of Dun Laoghaire, called at the time Kingstown, in honour of the visit of King George IV. Point of note: the only reason His Majesty was there was that he was too drunk to get off the ship he arrived in, historically  the first time an English  monarch had visited Ireland for peaceful purposes, and had to be taken ashore at Howth instead.

The D&KR was the first railway not only in Europe, but the world, to be exclusively dedicated to commuter travel. Early railways in America and other parts of Europe had been used primarily to convey freight or cattle, or were for specific uses but not open to the public. Ireland was also the first nation to construct her own locomotives. Of course, initially railways were confined to the larger cities such as Dublin and Limerick, where investors could be attracted and where profits could be made. The man who oversaw the building and laying of most of these early railways, and who is credited with the title of "father of the Irish railways" is this guy.


William Dargan (1799 - 1867)

"Since I was ten years old, I have been hearing that we are unable to do anything .... for our own prosperity ... that we must have English capital, English judgment, English enterprise. English everything. Why I bring this forward is with the knowledge that there is one great interest in which that doctrine is disproved."

Literally a local boy done good, Dargan was the son of a poor tenant farmer who worked on the Earl of Portarlington's estate. Being a Catholic, opportunities were few for him but he managed, through dint of hard work and a head for numbers, to secure a place in a surveyor's office in his home town. Impressed by his progress there, a local MP and other prominent businessmen helped him to meet Thomas Telford, one of Scotland's primary engineers, who put him to work on the Holyhead-London Road. He also worked on English canals and the Howth Road in Dublin. When the Irish Parliament gave the go-ahead for the first Irish railway he worked tirelessly to promote it, lobbying and giving his own time for free until the thing was finally built in 1834. He later worked on the Ulster Canal, and then other railways, such as the Dublin and Drogheda, the Great Southern and Western and the Midland Great Western.

Unlike unscrupulous railroad barons in America, who earned reputations for being double-handed, unfair and corrupt, and who paid a pittance to their workers, Dargan was known to be more than a fair man; in fact, he paid the highest wages in the sector and was one of the few employers who paid not only in hard cash rather than "in kind", as many workers were, but also paid better wages for those who worked harder and whose work was of a sufficient quality to merit higher pay. The unions, of course, had a problem with this initially but eventually such conditions were accepted; in a time when the worker was being royally ripped off, they really couldn't afford to block such an enterprise, and besides, the incentive to work harder and better for more wages would become a model for future employers, and continues today. It was good for Ireland, good for the Irish worker, and good for Dargan. It also helped that he was so well-liked and trusted, some of this possibly due to his fervent nationalism.

Offered a knighthood he declined, and again when Queen Victoria herself visited him and offered him this time a baronetcy. This visit was on the occasion of Her Majesty attending the Dublin Exhibition, which had come about again thanks to the railway man. Impressed by the British Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, Dargan proposed a similar event be staged in Ireland, to showcase her relatively rapid advances in technology and show the world that the country was more than just backwards farmers working in fields. He ended up having to fund the whole thing, to the tune of £80,000 (about seven million today) and, though he lost over a quarter of that sum on the project was able, thanks to contributions and subscriptions to what was set up as the Dargan Fund in his honour, to open the National Art Gallery.

Dargan was known to be a dedicated man, living in a mobile office and following the tracks as they were laid. He was not one to sit back in a comfortable city residence and be brought details of the progress of his railways; he was out inspecting them and making comments and suggestions as they went down. With no real access to any sort of industrial machinery at the time - Ireland being well behind Britain and the rest of Europe as the Industrial Revolution unfolded, being mostly a country based on farming and agriculture, and moreover, held very much down by the British occupier - most of the work was done manually, with hard sweat and graft.

Dargan was also one of the few Catholics who worked on a project in Ulster, taking over the laying of the Belfast to Lisburn line, and extending it into Portadown and later Armagh, and even excavating an island at Belfast harbour for his later shipping concerns to allow it to become a major port for the first time, where today the great shipyards of Harland and Wolff stand. During the Great Famine, when it seemed all of Ireland was dying of starvation, Dargan performed many humanitarian works, including paying men a week's wages and then sending them home to regain their strength, everyone too weak to work. It's estimated he saved thousands of lives this way, people who would otherwise have died of hunger, and gained himself even more of a place in the hearts of Irish Catholics.

He was responsible for developing the outlying town of Bray, Co. Wicklow into a popular holiday and amusement resort - I remember when a child our big day out being to go to the amusements at Bray, and the best part of it was the train journey there, as we really had no need to go on the train otherwise, though where we lived there was a railway bridge right at the top of the road, and you could hear and see the trains thunder past on their way out of the city or back into it, day and night. But looking at the trains was one thing; for kids in Ireland in the 1970s, getting to actually travel on one was a treat. My mother used also to take us on what the train company called "the Mystery Train" at the weekend, which was exactly what it sounds like: you were not told where the train was going, so it was a surprise when you ended up in Enniskillen or Navan or Portmarnock or Leixlip, or wherever it was going.

Dargan's efforts almost single-handedly helped to revitalise the falling Irish economy, the much more so when you consider how much of his own money he put into projects (of the £18 million invested in Irish railways the British government only contributed a paltry £3 million) and it might not be too much of a stretch to call him Ireland's saviour. Certainly, when he died of complications following a fall from his horse in 1863 his funeral was attended by a 700-strong honour guard of railway workers, and comprised 250 cortege carriages, his remains laid to rest beside the other Great Emancipator, Daniel O'Connell, in Glasnevin. A statue of him now stands outside the National Gallery.

Perhaps ironically, given the state of Ireland and the distrust of Catholics at the time, one of his greatest tributes comes from Prince Albert, who stated "Mr Dargan is the man of the people. He is a simple, unobtrusive, retiring man, a thorough Irishman, not always quite sober of an evening, industrious, kind to his workmen, but the only man who has by his own determination & courage put a stop to every strike or combination of workmen, of which the Irish are so fond. All he has done has been done on the field of Industry & not of politics or Religion, without the Priest or factious conspiracy, without the promise of distant extraordinary advantages but with immediate apparent benefit. The Exhibition, which must be pronounced to be very successful, has done wonders in this respect. A private undertaking, unaided by Govt, or any Commission with Royal Authority, made and erected at the sole expense of a single Individual, & this an Irish Road contractor, not long ago a common labourer himself, who had raised himself solely by his own industry & energy, - it deserves the greatest credit & is looked upon by the Irish with infinite self-satisfaction as an emblem of national hope"

By the end of his life Dargan is said to have laid thousands of miles of railway tracks, and contributed hugely to linking the largely disparate country up. As every railway built in the world did, the Irish rail system helped bring people closer together, not only by making commerce and travel to once-distant towns and cities possible, but by allowing the rapid distribution of newspapers, thus disseminating news across the country in a far more timely manner than it had ever been before. It also encouraged people to travel, to take holidays, to visit other places, something that had not been envisaged prior to the advent of the railway, journeys by canal or carriage slow and often very uncomfortable, and usually available only to the more well-to-do. A railway network turned Ireland from a scattering of independent and isolated counties and towns into a well-connected, interdependent and linked single country.

[Trollheart]

Speak for Yourself: The Decline of the Irish Language

Countries tend to pride themselves on their national heritage, and this is inextricably linked to their language. German people prized their language, and this is still the dominant one there, reinforced, you might say, by the Nazi Party's rejection of all other languages and cultures as "impure", and held onto as a matter of historical pride. Spain still speaks Spanish, French is the language you have to have at least a grasp of if you expect to communicate with the locals, and you won't get far either in Italy without knowing Italian. Most countries, then, retain their national tongue, even if, of necessity, for tourist and business purposes, English must also be learned. But come to Ireland and the only people you'll find speaking Irish (or Gaelic, as it's sometimes known), other than young (or old) men who have had too much to drink, will be in the less-developed and more rural areas of the west. Everyone else speaks English; it's our common tongue. Why?

Some of the reason for the decline of our national language can of course be traced to our biggest humanitarian disaster ever, the Great Famine, of which more shortly. With so many Irish people emigrating, thousands of native Irish speakers were taken out of the population. In order to survive and hopefully thrive abroad, these people would have had to learn English, most if not all of them bound for America. Their descendants (assuming their parents or grandparents survived the trip, which many did not), should they at some point return to Ireland, would then speak English as their first, possibly only language, and if they settled here again their children would be brought up speaking English too.

Another reason was the gradual change in Ireland, from an isolated agrarian society to a more cosmopolitan industrialised one. When the backers for your factories or mills or engines are invariably English, you need to be able to talk to them in their own language, and workers coming from abroad would not understand Irish either. Then we're back to Daniel O'Connell again. Although one of Ireland's greatest heroes and saviours, he was able to put the once-sacred Irish language to one side; where it had been a matter of fierce nationalist pride to speak in your native tongue, and not adopt the "heathen" language of the English, O'Connell was pragmatic enough to realise that English was where it was at, if Ireland wanted to drag itself out of the seventeenth century and take its place among the respected countries of Europe. Irish was a look backwards to the past, a thing that marked its people as poor, uneducated, and engendered varying degrees of scorn, pity and misunderstanding. O'Connell remarked in 1833 that "the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual disuse of Irish."

In other words, he recognised that, nice as it was to be able to speak and understand Gaelic, it was of little to no use in the real world. While many a cultured man or woman might speak French, or even Spanish or Italian - these skills seen as evidence of their higher education, as well as, to a lesser and also less practical degree, Greek and Latin - nobody outside of Ireland spoke Irish. The Welsh spoke an entirely different language, though fellow Celts, and the Scots, though their language shares some similarities with ours, would be as unlikely to be able to understand Irish as we would Scottish. And beyond the "Celtic countries" there was no room for Irish. It just simply was becoming a dead language, and more, as Catholic relief was finally granted, no longer the language of resistance to the English. There just was no point in it.

Although Irish continued to be taught in Irish schools during my time - and may still be - and there is a special sort of "summer school" in Galway called The Gaeltacht, where only Irish is allowed to be spoken, and though some areas, mostly, again, in the West and mostly close to the area wherein stands The Gaeltacht, keep it alive, even in its native land Irish is effectively dead now. I can speak a little Irish, learned in school, but could not understand a fluent Irish speaker nor write much of a coherent sentence in Irish without referring to Google. Certain words and phrases stick with you - all Irish people my age know the phrase "An bhfuil cead agam dul amach go dti an leithreas?" (May I go out to the toilet?), which you had to ask during Irish lessons - and a few other phrases, mostly from mass and so on, but few can speak the language with any sort of confidence. Few want to, except maybe to impress a foreign girl or disguise some remark to an Irish mate. I recall an instance when two of my bosses, incensed that their Japanese business contacts began jabbering away in their own language, began talking to each other in Irish, drawing very surprised and blank looks from the Asian gentlemen!

Ireland makes valiant attempts to keep Irish alive, if only for the sake of national identity and history. We have (though few people listen to or watch them) an Irish radio station and an Irish TV station, and our news bulletins in the evening are always followed by one in Irish. Various events are organised to encourage people to keep their language alive, and you'll still see Gaelic translations of streets and buildings on name plates all over the country. There are even Irish cartoons and Irish rap! But for the majority of us, the language that once defined us as a nation is gone, and good riddance. It might seem a harsh thing to say, but then, I'll guarantee none of  you lived through the excruciating Irish classes where the teacher would constantly answer your questions in English with a snappish "As Gaeilge! As Gaeilge!" (In Irish! In Irish!) I mean, if you don't understand the fucking language, how can you ask your question in that language? But that's Irish schools for you.

RIP Irish language: nobody misses you, sorry not sorry.

The Poor Law: The Legacy of Abuse Begins

Just as it had decreed in its own country, England moved to enact a version of the Poor Law in Ireland, setting up what were known as Union Houses to take care of the elderly, children under age fifteen and the poor. After the Royal Commission on the Poorer Classes of Ireland made its report in 1833, four years after the Catholic Relief Act, the Irish Poor Law Act of 1838 recommended that Ireland be divided into Unions, loosely based around towns, and administered by three poor law commissioners, whose staff would run the poorhouses to be built, and distribute aid to the poor. Like those in England, the poorhouses were houses of horror, where living conditions were set at a bare minimum and many abuses took place, the residents having little or no rights.

In fact, poorhouses had been in existence in Ireland since the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the oldest, St. James', established in 1703. This was later changed to the Foundling Hospital and Workhouse of Dublin City in 1727. Immediately the pejorative term "pauper" was applied to all residents, as per the Articles, of which there were over fifty. Among them, and first indeed among them, the conditions under which one might be admitted. Makes you wonder why they thought it was a privilege to get a bed here, though I suppose it really could be a case of something was better than nothing, and horrible and miserable a place as these poorhouses (or houses of industry, as they were rather grandiosely called in the eighteenth century) might be, they did at least provide food (of a sort) and a bed, which might not be available otherwise.

Note: These were copied from an actual scanned reproduction of the rules for Union Houses in Ireland, and whoever scanned it folded over the pages, so that some words were lost or blurred, particularly at the edges, so if corrections are seen to be needed, I've made them. Otherwise they're verbatim, a copy-and-paste job, with my comments below. Warning: there are over forty articles.

Article 1.—Every pauper who shall be admitted into the workhouse, either upon his first or any subsequent admission, shall be admitted in one of the following modes only, that is to say ; — V 1. By a written or printed order of the Board of Guardians, signed by their clerk or presiding chairman. 2. By the master of the workhouse (or, during his absence or inability to act, by the matron), without any such order, in case of any sadden (sudden, surely?) and urgent necessity, or in of his receiving a written recommendation from a warden to admit, provisionally, any person or persons mentioned by name therein, whom the master shall, on due examination of the circumstances oi the case, believe to be destitute, and deem to he a proper object for admission to the workhouse.

I expect this meant that a large percentage of people turned up outside the poorhouse, desperate for somewhere to stay and for food, and were turned away for various reasons. Such incidents were common in England, as portrayed by Jack London in his People of the Abyss, in which the famed writer goes undercover as a pauper, to explore and report back on how the system of workhouses is broken and not fit for purpose, corrupt, unfair and damaging to the prospects of the poor.

Article 2 then states that —-No pauper shall be admitted under any written or printed order as mentioned in Article 1 , if the same bear date more than three days before the pauper duly presents it at the workhouse.

I take this to mean that if a pauper is given a written order to present at a particular poorhouse and does not arrive there within three days, that order is considered to be rescinded. Depending on where the order was issued, how soon the pauper was furnished with it and how immediately he or she could set out, that could be very little time, especially given the lack of public transport and, oh yeah, these people were poor as church mice and could not afford to travel in carriages and omnibuses, if such were available. And as if that wasn't enough:

Article 3.—If a pauper be admitted in any other than the first of the two modes mentioned in Article 1 , the admission of such pauper shall be brought before the Board of Guardians at their next meeting, who shall decide on the propriety of the pauper's continuing in the workhouse or otherwise, and make an order accordingly.

So your place could not be guaranteed, even if you had secured it, until or unless a governor or board member confirmed it. Article 9 went on to classify the various types of paupers, at least as the poor commission saw them:

Article 9. The paupers, so far as the workhouse admits thereof, shall be classed as follows : — 1. Males above the age of 16 years.
2. Boys above the age of 2 years, and under that of 16 years.
3. Females above the age of 16 years.
4. Girls above the age of 2 years, and under that of 15 years.
5. Children under 2 years of age.

Article 11 provides for the segregation of said paupers:

Article 11.—Each class, or subdivision of a class, shall respectively remain in the apartment assigned to them, without communication with any other class or subdivision of a class; subject, nevertheless, to such arrangements as exist with reference to the probationary wards and infirmary, and also to the following five exceptions ; —

Exception 1. —Any paupers of the third class, and any paupere of a proper age in the fourth class, may be employed, constantly or occasionally, as assistants to the nurses in any of the sick wards, or in the care of infants, or as assistants in the household work ; provided that ^ the said paupers, when employed in the household work, be so employed without communication with the paupers of the first and second classes.

Exception 2.—Any aged pauper of the third class, whom the master may deem fit to perform any of the duties of a nurse or assistant to the matron, may be so employed in the sick wards, or those of the second, third, fourth , or fifth classes; and any pauper of the first class, who may he deemed fit, may be placed in the ward of the second class, to aid in in management, and superintend the behaviour, of the paupers of such class.

Exception 3. —The boys and girls under 15 years of age may be permitted to meet in the same school, for the purposes of instruction, subject to the consent and approval of the Poor Law Commissioners, having been obtained.

Exception 4.—All paupers of class 5, whose mothers are inmates of the workhouse, shall be allowed to remain with their mothers, if they so desire ; and all paupers of classes 3 and 4, who are between two and seven years, shall, when not attending school, be placed in some apartment specially provided for them; and the mothers children shall be permitted to have access to them at all reasonable times.

Exception 5.—The master of the workhouse (subject to be made by the Board of Guardians and approved by the Poor Law Commissioners) shall allow the father or mother of any child in the workhouse, who may be desirous of seeing such child, to have an interview with such child at some time in each day, in some room in the workhouse appointed for that purpose.

So essentially, wading through all that legalise guff, it seems the children would be separated from those believed adults (over sixteen), separated by sex, and the two only allowed to (possibly) intermix during schooling (presumably to save the workhouse and the Poor Law Commission the expense of having two schools, one for boys and one for girls). Children of "class 5", in other words, less than two years of age, would be allowed to stay with their mothers (though nothing is said of fathers) and children over this age were to be put in apartments when not at school, the mothers allowed to visit these. A father (this time they're mentioned) or mother who wished to see his or her child would be allowed to at the behest of the Board.

I'm a little unclear on this. Does this refer to children who may not have been in the poorhouse, but whose parents were? Or the other way around, though unlikely I would have thought. Or does it simply mean that parents living in one area of the poorhouse could visit their children in the other? But if so, is that not already specified in Exception 4?

At any rate, what these articles do make clear is that the paupers become all but the property of the poorhouse, the staff of which could put them to work (surely unpaid?), throw them out if they didn't follow the rules and could also visit different types of punishment upon them. The next articles go into some detail about this, and between them are a handy guide to what daily life must have been like in these places.

Article 13 —All the paupers in the workhouse, except those disabled by sickness or infirmity, persons of unsound mind, and children, shall rise, be set to work, leave off work, and go to bed at such times, and shall be allowed such intervals for their meals as the Board of Guardians shall, by any regulation approved by the Poor Law Commissioners, direct ; and these several times shall be notified by the ringing of a bell.

Article 14.—Half an hour after the bell shall have been rung for rising, the names of the paupers shall be called over by the master, schoolmaster, matron, and schoolmistress respectively, in the several wards, when every pauper belonging to each ward must be present to answer to his name and to be inspected.

Article 15.—The meals shall be taken by all the paupers (except those disabled by sickness or infirmity, persons of unsound mind, and children) in the dining hall, and in no other place whatever; and during the time of meals order and decorum shall be maintained ; and no pauper (except those disabled by sickness or infirmity, persons of unsound mind, and children) shall go to or remain in his sleeping room, either in the time appointed for work or in the intervals allowed for meals, except by permission of the master or matron.

Article 16.—The master and matron of the workhouse shall (subject to the directions of the Board of Guardians) fix the hours of rising and going to bed for the sick, the infirm, and the young children, and determine the occupation and employment of which such inmates may be capable ; and the meals for such inmates shall be provided at such times and in such manner as the Board of Guardians may direct.

Article 17.—The paupers of the respective sexes shall be dieted as set forth in the dietary-table which may be prescribed for the use of the workhouse, and in no other manner.

Article 18. ---Provided that the medical officer may direct in writing such diet for any individual pauper in the sick or lunatic wards as he shall deem necessary.
2dly.—That if the. medical officer shall at any time certify that he deems a temporary change in the diet essential to the health of the paupers in the workhouse, or of any class or classes thereof, the guardians shall cause a copy of such certificate to be entered on the minutes of their proceedings, and shall be empowered forthwith to order, by a resolution, the said diet to be temporarily changed according to the recommendation of the medical officer, and shall forthwith transmit a copy of such certificate and resolution to the Poor Law Commissioners.
3dly —That the medical officer shall be specially consulted by the matron as to the nature of the food of the infants, and the time at which such infants should be weaned.

Article 19.—No pauper shall have or consume any tobacco, or any spirituous or fermented liquor, or food nor provision other than is allowed in the said dietary table, unless by the direction in writing of the medical officer, as provided for in Article 17.

Article 20. —The clothing to be worn by the paupers in the workhouse shall be made of such materials as the Board of Guardians may determine.

[Trollheart]

Article 21.—The paupers of the several classes shall be kept employed according to their capacity and ability ; but no pauper shall work on his own account, or on account of any party other than the Board of Guardians ; and no pauper shall receive any compensation for his labour.

Article 22. —The boys and girls who are inmates of the workhouse shall, for fee of the working hours at least every day, be instructed in reading, writing, arithmetic, and the principles of the Christian religion; and such other instruction shall he imparted to them as shall fit them for service, and train them to habits of usefulness, industry, and virtue.

So we can see above that the paupers would certainly not be paid for their work, moreover they were not allowed to "sub in" for each other, i.e., no one pauper could undertake the work of another for any reason; initiative would certainly not be rewarded, might even be punished. Everything from the clothes they wore to what they ate, how they ate it and when they got up and went to bed was determined by the Poor Law Commissioners, and you can bet that those boys didn't stump up for proper grub. Let them eat gruel, huh?

You could leave the poorhouse but you had to make an appointment. This, again, is shown in London's People of the Abyss, where he notices that departure, despite what Article 23 tells us, was often delayed while inmates were forced to sit through a length Bible-bashing mass service, whether they wanted it or not. Such delays - often lasting hours - impacted upon the paupers making any possible interviews for work they might have had, and then getting back to the poorhouse, or another, in time before the gates shut.

Article 23.—Any pauper may quit the workhouse upon giving the master three hours' previous notice of his wish to do so ; but no such pauper shall carry with him any clothes or other articles belonging to the Board of Guardians, without the express permission of the master or matron.

Article 24.—No pauper having a family dependent on him shall so quit the workhouse without taking the whole of such family with him ; nor shall anv pauper, after so quitting the workhouse, be again received therein, except in one of the modes prescribed in Article 1 for the admission of paupers.

I guess Article 24 then makes it impossible for a father or mother to desert their family and leave them behind, or for children to abandon their parents. A real case of one out, all out. Or, you know, in. Article 26 seems to have allowed the "master" and higher-level staff of the poorhouse to use the inmates to run errands, perhaps?

Article 26.—The master of the workhouse may allow the paupers of each sex under the age of 16, subject to such restrictions as the Board of Guardians may impose, to quit the workhouse under the care and guidance of himself, or the matron, schoolmaster, schoolmistress, porter, or some one of the assistants and servants of the workhouse, for the purpose of exercise.

But no visitors, no reading (in other words, no attempt to educate themselves or be educated) and absolutely, under no circumstances, any fun, as Articles 27 - 29 make clear:

Article 27 .-No person shall visit any pauper in the workhouse, except by permission of the master, or (in his absence) of the matron, and subject to such conditions and restrictions as the Board of Guardians may prescribe ; such interview shall take place, except where a sick pauper is visited, in a room separate from the other inmates of the workhouse, in the presence of the master, matron, or porter.

Article 28.—No written or printed paper of an improper tendency shall be allowed to circulate, nor be read aloud among the inmates of the workhouse.

(I wonder if by "improper tendency" they mean Catholic, or Irish nationalist papers?)

Article 29.—No pauper shall play at cards, nor at any game of chance, in the workhouse ; and it shall be lawful for the master to take from any pauper, and to keep -until his departure from the workhouse, any cards, dice, or other articles relating to games of chance, which may be in his possession.

The iron-tight grip of Protestant religion makes itself clear in Articles 31 - 33

Article 31.—Any regular minister of the religious persuasion of any inmate of the workhouse who shall, at any time in the day, on the request of any inmate, enter the workhouse for the purpose of affording religious assistance to him, or for the purpose of instructing his child or children in the principles or his religion, : shall give such assistance or instruction so as not to interfere with the good order and discipline of the other inmates of the workhouse; and such Religious Assistance or instruction shall be strictly confined to inmates who are of the religious persuasion of such minister, and to the children of such inmates.

Article 32. —If any inmate of the age of 15 years and upwards, of sound mind, shall desire to be registered as of a different religious denomination different from that which is entered in the register as his religious denomination, or if the parents or surviving parent of any child under the age of 15 shall desire,  in like manner, to have the register amended in respect of the religious denomination such child; in either of such cases, if the guardians shall, after due inquiry and personal examination, of the party expressing such desire that the present religious persuasion of any inmate is wrongly described in the register, they shall cause the register to be amended accordingly.

And

Article 33.—If any inmate, being of sound mind, shall desire to be visited by a minister of any religious denomination different from that which is in the register as the religious denomination of such inmate, the request shall  be made to the master of the workhouse, who shall report such to the Board of Guardians at their next meeting; and the guardians shall give directions thereon as may appear to them fitting and. expedient; provided that in any case of urgency affecting the life of an inmate, the master shall, of his own discretion, permit such inmate to be visited at once, and communicate such request to such minister accordingly.

Meaning that if you wanted to see a priest not of your own faith (or the faith "entered in the register", which could I suppose easily be "mistakenly" entered as Protestant) you would have to have your request submitted to the master, who would submit it to the Board, who would consider it at their next board meeting - whenever that was - then get back to the master who would in his own good time no doubt get back to you. One can only assume that if the minister in question was a Catholic, the request would get bogged down in delays, or be refused outright.

Hey, at least Article 34 gave them Christmas Day off!

Article 34.—No work, except the necessary household work and cooking shall be performed by the paupers on Sunday, Good Friday, and Christmas Day,

Plenty of room for God though...

Article 35.—Prayers shall be read before breakfast and after supper every day, and divine service shall be performed every Sunday in the workhouse (unless the guardians, with the consent of the Poor Law Commissioners, shall otherwise direct) ; at which prayers and service all the paupers shall attend, except the sick, persons of unsound mind, the young children, and such. as are too infirm to do so ; provided that those paupers who may object so to attend on account of their religious principles shall also be exempt from such attendance.

Article 37 lays out the rules, breakage of which carry various punishments.

Punishments for Misbehaviour of Paupers.

Article 36.—Any pauper who shall neglect to observe such of the regulations herein contained as are applicable to and binding on him ;
Or who shall make any noise when silence is ordered to be kept ;
Or who shall use obscene or profane language ; Or shall by word or deed insult or revile any person j •
Or shall threaten to strike or to assault any person ;
Or shall not duly cleanse his person ;
Or shall refuse or neglect to work, after having been required to do so;
Or shall pretend sickness;
Or shall play at cards or other game of chance ;
Or shall enter, or attempt to enter, without permission, the ward or yard appropriated to any class of paupers, other than that to which he belongs ;
Or shall misbehave at public worship, or at prayers ;
Or shall not return after the appointed time of absence, when allowed to quit the workhouse temporarily ; Or shall wilfully disobey any lawful order of any officer of the workhouse ; ., 1 . shall be deemed Disorderly.

Article 37.—Any pauper who shall, within seven days, repeat any one or commit more than one of the offences specified in Article 36, or who shall by word or deed insult or revile the master or matron, or any other officer of the workhouse, or any of the guardians ;
Or shall wilfully disobey any lawful order of the master or matron after such order shall have been repeated ;
Or shall attempt to introduce any fermented or spirituous liquors or tobacco, without lawful authority;
Or shall unlawfully strike or otherwise unlawfully assault any person ;
Or shall wilfully or mischievously damage or soil any property whatsoever belonging to the guardians ;
 Or shall wilfully waste or spoil any provisions, stock, tools, or materials for work, belonging to the guardians ;
Or shall be drunk ;
Or shall commit any act of indecency ;
Or shall wilfully disturb the other inmates during prayers or divine worship;
Or shall climb over any wall or fence, or attempt to quit the workhouse premises in any irregular mode;
Or shall attempt to convey out of the workhouse any clothes or other articles belonging to the Board of Guardians ; shall be deemed refractory

Article 38 then laid out the punishments

Article 38.—It shall be lawful for the master of the workhouse, with or Without the directions of the Board of Guardians, to punish any disorderly pauper, by requiring such pauper, for a time not exceeding two days, to perform one hour's extra work in each day, and by withholding all milk or buttermilk which such pauper would otherwise receive with his meals.

Article 39.—It shall be lawful for the Board of Guardians, by a special direction to be entered on their minutes, to order any refractory pauper, to be punished by confinement in a separate room, with or without an increase in the time of work and an alteration of diet, similar in kind and duration to that prescribed in Article 38 for disorderly paupers; but no pauper shall be so confined for a longer period than 24 hours ; or, if it be deemed right that such pauper shall be- carried before a Justice of the Peace, and if such period of 24 hours should be insufficient for that purpose, then for such further time as may be necessary for such purpose.

Article 40.—It shall be lawful for the Board of Guardians, by any special or general order, to direct that a dress different from that of the other inmates shall be worn by disorderly or refractory paupers, during a period of not more than 48 .hours, jointly with or in lieu of the alteration of diet to which any such pauper might be subjected by the regulations herein contained; but it shall not be lawful for the Board of Guardians to cause any penal dress, or distinguishing mark of disgrace, to be worn by any adult pauper, or class of adult paupers, unless such pauper or paupers shall be disorderly or refractory within the meaning of Articles 36 or 37 of this Order.

Article 41.—If any offence, whereby a pauper becomes refractory under Articles 36 or 37, be accompanied, by any of the following circumstances of aggravation ; that is to say, if such pauper Persist in using violence against any person ;
Or persist in creating a noise or disturbance, so as to annoy a considerable number of the other inmates ;
Or endeavour to excite other paupers to acts of insubordination ;
Or persist in acting indecently or obscenely in the presence of any other inmate;
Or persist in mischievously breaking or damaging any goods or properly of the guardians ; it shall be lawful for the master, without any direction of the Board of Guardians, immediately to place such refractory pauper in confinement for any time not exceeding 13 hours ; which confinement shall, however, be reckoned as part of any punishment afterwards imposed by the Board of Guardians for the same offence. But it shall not be lawful for the master to confine any adult pauper without the direction of the Board of Guardians in that behalf, except in one of the cases specified in this Article.

Article 42.—Every refractory pauper shall be deemed to be also disorderly/, and may be punished as such ; but no pauper who may have been punished for any offence as disorderly shall afterwards be punished for the same offence as refractory ; and no pauper who may have been punished for any offence as refractory shall afterwards be punished for the same offence as disorderly.

Article 43.—No pauper who may have. been under medical care, or who may have been entered in the weekly medical return as sick or infirm, at any time in the course of the seven days next preceding the day of the commission of the offence, or who may be reasonably supposed to be under 12 or above 60 years of age, or who may be pronounced by the medical officer of the workhouse lo be pregnant, or who may be suckling a child, shall be punished by alteration of diet, or by confinement, unless the medical officer shall have previously certified in writing that no injury to the health of such pauper is reasonably to be apprehended from the proposed punishment ; and any modification diminishing such punishment which the medical officer of the workhouse may suggest, shall be adopted by the master.

Article 44:—No pauper shall be confined between eight o'clock in the evening and six o'clock in the morning, without being furnished with a bed and bedding suitable to the season, and with the other proper conveniences.

Article 45.—No child under 12 years of age shall be confined in a dark room, or during the night.

Article 46.—No corporal punishment shall be inflicted on any male child .except by the schoolmaster or master of the workhouse.

Article 47.—No corporal punishment shall be inflicted on any female child.

Article 48.—No corporal punishment shall be inflicted on any male child, except with a rod or other instrument, such as shall be seen and approved by the Board of Guardians or the visiting committee.

Article 49.—No corporal punishment shall be inflicted on any male child until six hours shall have elapsed from the commission of the offence for such punishment is inflicted. .

Article 50.—Whenever any male child is punished by corporal correction, the master and schoolmaster shall (if possible) be both present.

I could go on, but this is getting ridiculous. There are a total of 71 Articles, and it's clear that few were followed to the letter. After all, who was going to check on them and report them? Most of the masters of these poorhouses, I imagine, would have looked upon these rules as more guidelines or suggestions, and there's absolutely no doubt that the conditions governing punishment of inmates were routinely broken. Who would take the word of a pauper, even if he or she were to gather the courage to speak up? Most of the men running these institutions would have been highly regarded, men of breeding and status, men whose solemn word would be taken - not even required, in such cases, but assumed to be the truth - were they to be accused of breaking these rules.

What is quite clear from that rather long-winded diversion into the rules and regulations of the Irish poorhouses quite clearly is that they were not fun places to be, nor were they meant to be. They functioned as a source of cheap (slave) labour, as a way of drilling into the poor what their place was, and no doubt allowed many a sadistic "master" to vent his spleen on people about whom nobody cared, to whom nobody listened, and who had no rights. They were, after all, part of one great amorphous, forgotten and neglected mass going under the umbrella term of the poor, or, which is somehow worse, paupers.

A quick count of the poorhouses listed in that document gives me approximately 120 operating in Ireland from south to north and east to west. That was bad enough; the Brits did that to us. But all too soon we would perpetrate one of our own making, to our country's eternal shame.

First, though, we would have somewhat bigger problems to occupy us.

[Trollheart]

Time to step back a little in history again, to explore an event which changed Irish history, and the perception of Ireland so radically and fundamentally that we would never again be the same. In fact, it almost made sure we became nothing more than a memory, a footnote in history, and might in time pass into legend as a race who may, or may not, have existed.


Bitter Harvest: Blight on the Landscape
The Great Famine (1845 - 1849)

"The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine." - John Mitchell

While famine is always a big issue, and should always be taken seriously, and if we can, we should do all we can to help avert or end it, overall I think it's fair to say that the days of Live Aid are gone, and in these times of, well, more important things on our mind, we can watch news footage of famines in Africa and Central America and other places and just shrug. It's not that we don't care, but without Geldof to poke and prod us and snarl "Give us your fucking money!" while providing us world-class music entertainment in the hope of prising that fiver or tenner (hey, this was 1985, remember! I'd barely left school!) from our pocket, you might say the conscience that drove our revulsion at famine, and the need to do something about it, has gone.

Not that I'm for a moment proposing that nobody cares. You probably give to good causes and hope they will funnel the money to those who need it, those who have nothing to eat, rather than self-styled warlords living in opulence off the backs of the people they purport to be freeing, or to have freed, from oppression. Or even corrupt governments who divert the funds into slush accounts and personal nest eggs. Our faith in our charitable institutions has without doubt taken a serious knock over the last say ten years or so, and I know that I, personally, maybe like a lot of you, only give out of guilt. To some degree, I only half-expect my small contribution to go where it's supposed to go, but what can you do?

Famines are of course not new to the twentieth century, nor the twenty-first, and back hundreds of years ago they were more common across Europe than they are today in the poorer, developing countries (not socially acceptable to call them third world countries now - always wondered what qualified a country as a second world one?), mostly because of, well, the same reasons really. A huge gulf between the classes, with the super-rich not giving a curse about the super-poor, wars constantly raging across the continent (most, but to be fair, not all, driven by England, who always seemed to be at war with someone, and were that restless when they weren't that they had to fight among themselves) and rising prices and mass unemployment making it harder to make ends meet. Market forces, as ever, drove supply and demand, and those who could afford to bought all they could at the lowest price they could, and then sold it to those who could not afford it at the highest price they could. Never changes.

But while Europe had its famines, and they were many, none seemed as devastating and none are remembered with such horror by history as the one that gripped Ireland in the tail-end of the nineteenth century. With the Industrial Revolution in full swing across Europe, and especially in Britain, Ireland still lived in a kind of hundred-year reverse, where peasants toiled the land with crude tools, there were few if any factories, crops had to be dug out of the soil by the sweat of your brow, and wealthy landowners kept all the best and most arable land to themselves. An underclass of Irish Catholics worked as tenant farmers on the worst and least cultivable land, where the only thing that would grow in such hardy soil was that old Irish staple, the potato.

But before we get too wrapped up in crops and harvests and blights and the inevitable road to starvation and emigration, we should of course examine the years leading up to what became known in Ireland as Gorta Mór, which literally means "the great hurt", but which would be remembered by generations of Irish people as The Great Famine.

The Devon Commission

Appointed in 1843 and reporting the year the Great Famine begun, the Devon Commission was a royal commission undertaken by the Crown to enquire into the state of Irish tenant labourers and farmers in Ireland. It was headed by the Earl of Devon (hence the name)  and identified many facts which were well-known to the Irish - and, most likely the English, though the latter would prefer they remained unknown - the principle one being that the distribution of land in Ireland was unfairly weighted on the side of wealthy Protestant landowners. Its recommendations were strenuously objected to by Irish (read, English/Protestant) landowners and landlords, mostly because they had no intention of putting their hands in their pockets, and so watched impassively and with absolutely no sympathy or sense of responsibility for the horrible famine that swept across the country.

Evidence is given here by a land agent as to how all but impossible a task it was to get Irish landowners to even engage with the few improvements that might have saved lives, had the commission reported sooner (though two years is actually quite rapid for a report, even now) and/or its recommendations been implemented with all haste. The emphasis in the following extract has been added by me.

Robert O'Brien, esq., land proprietor, and agent to properties in the counties of Clare and Limerick.

6. A farming society, professing to be for the counties of Limerick, Clare and Tipperary, has been in existence for the last few years, and has certainly produced some good in inducing cattle breeders to take more pains about their stock than they would otherwise do; but every effort to extend its application to the small farmers has been attended with failure from want of co-operation, arising from its sphere of action being too extended. When I was manager, in 1841, I endeavoured to establish branches in every barony, for the benefit of small farmers, making the condition that £10 should be contributed to the parent society out of that barony. Though three baronies were qualified, no application for the premium was made from anyone. In 1842, I endeavoured to get up a ploughing-match, and though I advertised for land could get none. I also, that year, had the prizes placed at our disposal by the Royal Agricultural Society offered for competition in the Limerick district alone; and though I circulated the papers largely, no claim for competition was made. Again, in 1843, I applied to the local society, and obtained a grant of money for premiums, in addition to what was given by the Royal Agricultural Society, to be offered for competition in each poor-law union in the counties of Clare and Limerick. The union of Ennistimon was the first on the list, and though I sent the premium sheets to every resident gentleman and clergyman, yet hardly any notice was given to the small farmers to prepare themselves, and only a few competitors appeared; nor had it the effect which was intended, of inducting residents in the union to attempt to form a local society. One of the reasons that a farming society, whose object is the improvement of tillage, has not succeeded here is that the gentry generally hold rich lands, which are kept for pasture, and do not, as a class, feel so direct a sympathy with those who occupy the waste and poor lands. It is, therefore, only a few landlords who, taking an interest in the improvement of the tenantry, would be willing to support such a society; but they, finding no general interest in the subject, confine their exertions to their own estates, on which several are engaged in extensive improvements.

Extract from notes by David J. Wilson, landowner in County Clare:

The small piece of land attached to it (three and a half statue acres) is the greater part of it very poor land, at the foot of a mountain, and with a very thin surface...


The Great Emancipator himself had little faith in the impartiality of the Commission, nor its intent to help the poor farmers, being made up as it was exclusively of landowners: " You might as well consult butchers about keeping Lent as consult these men about the rights of farmers!" he snarled. Perhaps he would have eaten his words - to use a terribly inappropriate metaphor - had he seen the report of the commission, but it came, as I say, too late, and though its recommendations would later be put into practice, those whom it was supposed to help would by then either be in America, dead at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean or dead or dying in the grey, mucky, empty fields of Ireland.

Laws were of course weighted heavily, almost entirely on the side of the landowner, and a tenant who was unable to pay his rent could have goods to that value - including his crops - seized, (we've come across this practice before, called distraining; the English used it in the tithe wars) meaning that as these were his sole means of income, he had no chance at all of making good on the debt. The landlord was, in effect, robbing him and leaving him with no way to make good on that deficit. Then of course he could just be ejected, or evicted from the land, a process that was made easier for the landlords and which was often chosen by them as their preferred method of dealing with a tenant in arrears. Conacre was another practice in wide use in Ireland. This was the idea of letting a small plot of land for the growth of one or two crops, barely enough for the tenant to feed himself and his family on. The idea of class - closer to ancient serfdom or even slavery really - was never more potent than in Ireland, especially the south, what became known as the Republic, under the English. The feelings of many British MPs were summed up almost in one sentence by the then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland: 'Esquimaux* [sic] and New Zealanders are more thrifty and industrious than these people who deserve to be left to their fate instead of the hardworking people of England being taxed for their support."


Why was this? Why the lack of empathy, pity or even a sense of inclusion into what was now the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland? The reality was that the Union had been more or less forced on Ireland; at no time had she requested it, and though the likes of Daniel O'Connell had supported it, in the hope that it would bring more recognition for Ireland, and even the protection of the king most Irish people hated, this was of course not the case. It was merely a way for the British government and the Crown to tighten their hold over the troublesome country, dismiss its parliament and rule from Westminster. It was, I suppose you would have to say, a way of showing the Irish who was boss. But like marginal members of society suddenly pulled into, and in most cases forced upon that society - think maybe itinerant/gypsy/pikies being given houses in a housing estate, or maybe immigrant refugees - it was made clear that the Irish were still "poor cousins" (emphasis heavily on the poor) and were neither accepted nor wanted. Like children being told they have to play nice with those of neighbours they didn't like, the British people sulked and muttered but could do nothing about this new addition to their Union. But they didn't have to make them welcome, and they went out of their way to make sure they did not.

It's a matter of historical tragic irony that at the height of the Great Famine, Ireland was in fact exporting to Britain enough corn to feed two million people, twice as many as would die of hunger in Ireland during this awful period. Far from being able to grow only potatoes - and those useless once the blight hit - Irish farmers grew crops which were, however, not for local consumption but for export, literally sending out of the country food that could have prevented the Famine. There was no corresponding import of grains, this all due to the infamous Corn Laws, passed in order to keep the importation of corn prohibitively expensive and therefore allow domestic corn prices to remain competitive. In reality, what it did was give the Irish landowners a monopoly and the opportunity to raise their own prices, as corn could not be got from anywhere else unless you wished to break the bank. This all began in laws enacted back in 1815 by the British Government.

The Corn Laws

It should be understood that "corn" was, in the legal sense of the Act, a catch-all word which covered all grains - wheat, barley, oats and of course corn - as the Tory Government sought to keep Britain competitive in the agricultural market. In the time of George III, prices for the importation of foreign corn had been set at a ceiling of 48 shillings per quarter. A quarter was equal to eight bushels, and though it's very complicated, basically it seems a bushel was in or around maybe 14 Kgs or about 30 pounds. With victory over Napoleon corn prices began to fall, and in order to remain competitive Britain passed the Corn Laws (An Act to amend the Laws now in force to regulate the importation of corn), raising the ceiling to 80 shillings. What this meant, in effect, was that as long as Britain (and Ireland) produced corn that cost no more than 80 shillings per quarter (around £1200 per tonne) no corn would be allowed to be imported to the country. Falling prices as noted above, due to peace finally being attained in Europe, ensured this ceiling would never be reached.

And then came an unexpected event.

* I assume he's talking about eskimos

[Trollheart]

Winter is coming: the Year Without a Summer

In 1816, one single year after the Corn Laws had been signed into operation, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted. The volcano threw huge clouds of ash and smoke into the air, cutting off sunlight and plunging the world into deep cold. In fact, over the last eight years there had been no less than five massive volcanic eruptions around the world, a comparable one to Mount Tambora being the eruption two years previous of Mount Mayon in the Philippines, causing the world to undergo a catastrophic change in climate. The image above shows how cold it got in that year, compared to normal average temperatures. The whole planet was affected as crops failed everywhere. China found itself in the grip of a massive famine, torrential floods and snow in Taiwan, while India was battered by rain which exacerbated an outbreak of cholera across the country.

The newly-struggling independent colonies did not fare much better. Though there was no famine, and they were used to colder temperatures as the norm, seasons seemed reversed in areas of America such as Massachusetts, New York and Vermont, and crops again failed. William G. Atkins, in The  History of Hawley, West Massachusetts wrote "Severe frosts occurred every month; June 7th and 8th snow fell, and it was so cold that crops were cut down, even freezing the roots ... In the early Autumn when corn was in the milk it was so thoroughly frozen that it never ripened and was scarcely worth harvesting. Breadstuffs were scarce and prices high and the poorer class of people were often in straits for want of food. It must be remembered that the granaries of the great west had not then been opened to us by railroad communication, and people were obliged to rely upon their own resources or upon others in their immediate locality."

And in Europe, as rain pelted down and freezing frost killed the crops, starvation and disease spread all over the continent. Typhus claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, people roamed the streets begging for food, other people took the law into their own hands and rioted, demanding "bread or blood", while strange phenomena were recorded in Hungary, where brown snow (a result of the volcanic ash in the air) fell, and Italy, where it seemed to rain blood, though again this was snow tinged red by the eruption's ejecta. As in the time of the Black Death, people must have thought the end of days had come. For some, of course, this would prove to be true, and as always, the awful weather and failure of crops would disproportionately affect the poor.

I suppose at this point you couldn't really blame the British for not having lowered the ceiling to import corn - where were they going to import it from, after all? - but the real damage the Corn Laws would wreak would of course be seen in its legacy with regard to the Great Famine. There were some amendments made to the laws, but they were impractical, restricting the price of corn to be imported to the extent that it never had any chance of reaching that level, and things stayed as they were. Many British politicians and industrialists, though, had had enough.

The Anti-Corn Laws League

In 1838 a confederation of these men got together and formed the Anti-Corn Laws League (well, it had been formed two years earlier, but only gained nationwide appeal in this year) in an attempt to force the repeal of the unpopular laws, which, they said, strangled Britain's trade and were unfair and biased. It's probably likely that not one of these people considered the Irish in their speeches and the pamphlets they wrote, or mentioned them at the many meetings held; these men were all about protecting British interests, though eventually repeal of the Corn Laws would have a positive effect on Ireland.

Richard Cobden (1804 - 1865)

(All right, is there not something ironically funny about a guy whose name contains the word "cob" opposing the Corn Laws? No, you're right: this is no place for jokes. Over there, that's the place...)

One of the leaders of the League, Cobden was a Liberal, a Radical and would later be instrumental in securing free trade with France, in the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty. The son of a poor farmer, his sympathies of course then came to lie with the tenant farmers, but he was determined to better himself and not live as his father had done. A man to whom nothing was handed on a plate, he worked in his uncle's business until that failed, while at the same time trying to improve on the meagre education his family had been able to afford for him, and eventually set up his own printing business, and soon got into politics, standing for the seat of Stockport in 1837, though he did not win it till four years later. He quickly established himself as an expert and authority on the Corn Laws, and in 1843 took Prime Minister Robert Peel so to task on the subject that he was accused of inciting to violence.

Peel. however, was changing his stance and, swayed partially at least by Cobden's passionate rhetoric, became a supporter of repeal and in 1846 accomplished this, finally removing the hated laws. Though he had wished to rest after his exertions, which had taken considerable reserves not only of his time and money but also his health, and travelled extensively in Europe, he soon found that his fame had preceded him, and he was something of a celebrity. Bowing to the inevitable, he declared "Well, I will, with God's assistance during the next twelve months, visit all the large states of Europe, see their potentates or statesmen, and endeavour to enforce those truths which have been irresistible at home. Why should I rust in inactivity? If the public spirit of my countrymen affords me the means of travelling as their missionary, I will be the first ambassador from the people of this country to the nations of the continent. I am impelled to this by an instinctive emotion such as has never deceived me. I feel that I could succeed in making out a stronger case for the prohibitive nations of Europe to compel them to adopt a freer system than I had here to overturn our protection policy."

A great ambassador for peace, Cobden argued that as "in the slave trade we [the British] had surpassed in guilt the world, so in foreign wars we have the most aggressive, quarelsome, warlike and bloody nation under the sun." He also thundered "you will find that we have been incomparably the most sanguinary nation on earth... in China, in Burma, in India, New Zealand, the Cape, Syria, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc, there is hardly a country, however remote, in which we have not been waging war or dictating our terms at the point of a bayonet." Cobden believed the British, "the greatest blood-shedders of all"

This could not have made him popular back home. Nobody likes to be reminded of their mistakes, or what might be seen as the excesses of youth, in terms of empire, and the late Queen Victoria would most certainly not have been amused. He was proven correct however in his assessment of the seemingly insatiable British thirst for war, conquest and the need to "show other nations who was boss" when they declared war on Burma (now Myanmar) for the specious reason that they took exception to how the government there had treated two of their captains. Cobden wrote in disbelief:

"I blush for my country, and the very blood in my veins tingled with indignation at the wanton disregard of all justice and decency without our proceedings towards that country exhibited. The violence and wrongs perpetrated by Pizarro or Cortez were scarcely veiled in a more transparent pretence of right than our own."  The Burmese, Cobden continued, had "no more chance against our 64 pound red-hot shot and other infernal improvement in the art of war than they would in running a race on their roads against our railways... the day on which we commenced the war with a bombardment of shot, shell and rockets...that the natives must have thought it an onslaught of devils, was Easter Sunday!"



John Bright (1811 - 1889)

The other leading light in the Anti-Corn Law League was a Lancashire man, the son of a miller and a Quaker by religion, and acknowledged as one of the great orators of his generation. He learned this through giving speeches for the local temperance association, and later, after meeting Richard Cobden, formed the League with him. When his wife died in 1841 it gave him a greater incentive to have the Corn Laws repealed, so that no other person need die of hunger or neglect or poverty, and feel the pain he did at the passing of his wife from tuberculosis. In 1843 Bright was elected to the seat at Durham, and so sat in the House of Commons with his friend, who had been there two years before him.

Bright was responsible for two famous phrases, the first being "flogging a dead horse", which he used as a way to illustrate how unwilling parliament was to pass the Reform Act of 1867, the other when he called England "The Mother of Parliaments". He went on to become MP for Birmingham, a position he held for thirty years. Originally a supporter of the Irish Tenant Right League and Irish land reform, Bright changed his stance when the sectarian divide began to grow, and refused to support Home Rule for Ireland, calling the Irish "disloyal". An odd phrase, I think, to use, considering we were never really willing subjects of the Crown, but there you go. This what what he had to say about an hour-long meeting he had with then-Prime Minister William Gladstone:

"He gave me a long memorandum, historical in character, on the past Irish story, which seemed to be somewhat one-sided, leaving out of view the important minority and the views and feelings of the Protestant and loyal portion of the people. He explained much of his policy as to a Dublin Parliament, and as to Land purchase. I objected to the Land policy as unnecessary—the Act of 1881 had done all that was reasonable for the tenants—why adopt the policy of the rebel party, and get rid of landholders, and thus evict the English garrison as the rebels call them? I denied the value of the security for repayment. Mr G. argued that his finance arrangements would be better than present system of purchase, and that we were bound in honour to succour the landlords, which I contested. Why not go to the help of other interests in Belfast and Dublin? As to Dublin Parliament, I argued that he was making a surrender all along the line—a Dublin Parliament would work with constant friction, and would press against any barrier he might create to keep up the unity of the three Kingdoms. What of a volunteer force, and what of import duties and protection as against British goods? ... I thought he placed far too much confidence in the leaders of the rebel party. I could place none in them, and the general feeling was and is that any terms made with them would not be kept, and that through them I could not hope for reconciliation with discontented and disloyal Ireland."

He was less than impressed when Gladstone signed the Home Rule Bill into law only two weeks later. Returning from the funeral of his brother-in-law, and in response to a request to visit the PM, he wrote: "I cannot consent to a measure which is so offensive to the whole Protestant population of Ireland, and to the whole sentiment of the province of Ulster so far as its loyal and Protestant people are concerned. I cannot agree to exclude them from the protection of the Imperial Parliament. I would do much to clear the rebel party from Westminster, and do not sympathise with those who wish to retain them—but admit there is much force in the arguments on this point which are opposed to my views upon it. ... As to the Land Bill, if it comes to a second reading, I fear I must vote against it. It may be that my hostility to the rebel party, looking at their conduct since your Government was formed six years ago, disables me from taking an impartial view of this great question. If I could believe them honorable and truthful men, I could yield much—but I suspect that your policy of surrender to them will only place more power in their hands to war with greater effect against the unity of the 3 Kingdoms with no increase of good to the Irish people. ... Parliament is not ready for it, and the intelligence of the country is not ready for it. If it be possible, I should wish that no Division should be taken upon the Bill."

It's therefore clear to see that, though these two men fought for the working poor, it was the English working poor they championed, and that neither had the slightest interest in the plight of the Irish tenant farmer. In fact, as we can see above, Bright positively loathed the Irish south of the border. But what about the man at the top? No, not the king: any real power the monarchy had held disappeared with about six inches of King Charles I. England - Britain - was and is a constitutional monarchy, and the head of state is more a figurehead than anything else. He or she possesses no influence over the government, and exists mainly as a sort of rubber-stamp for parliament's policies. What the king thought of the Irish situation - if indeed he thought of it at all - I don't know, and it doesn't matter. English kings had been sympathetic - either covertly or brazenly - to the Irish cause (or at least the Catholic cause, which was not always by any means the same thing, but the two did sometimes dovetail) and it had been the ruin of them. Remember James II? No, I'm talking about the real power, the man who led the country, the man who had the mandate to get things done.

This guy.


Sir Robert Peel, 2nd baronet (1788 - 1850)

Although his tenure as Prime Minister (the second time he held the post) would in fact end one year before the Great Famine began - and although he himself would die during the famine years, though obviously not of hunger) Peel was the man in whose hands the fate of Ireland lay, as he was the only one capable of repealing the hated Corn Laws. As we've read above, this would in fact happen far too late to save the millions that died or were forced to emigrate in the Great Famine, but throughout his term as Prime Minister he wrestled with the question, trying to keep his own people onside, and eventually more or less fudged the issue. More about that in due course, but for now, what about the man behind the title? Well, everyone will surely know he was responsible for setting up London's first proper police force, the Metropolitan Police, the precursor of today's modern police force, and which were known colloquially at the time as "Peelers", for obvious reasons. Also "bobbies", again due to his name.

Like John Bright, Peel was born in Lancashire, but there the similarities end. Peel came from a rich family, one of the richest in the country. His father was a textile magnate, and Robert was sent to Harrow Public School (always amazes me how the English system of exclusive, expensive education is called public rather than private - I think the "common" schools were - and may still be - called grammar schools?) where he hung out with the poet and writer Lord Byron. At the age of 21 he entered politics, sponsored for a "rotten borough" (read, controlled by the landowner, so who they wanted to get the seat got the seat) in Cashel, Co. Tipperary by the Duke of Wellington, who would become a great friend and ally of his.

Though he served as Chief Secretary of Ireland (a post previously held by the Duke) and laid the basis for the Royal Ulster Constabulary by bringing in some of his "peelers", he was no friend to Ireland, opposing Catholic emancipation and defeating Henry Grattan's bill in parliament. For a time, his anti-Catholic stance told against him, as, given the post of Home Secretary in 1822, he had to resign when the PM did, his successor an advocate of Catholic emancipation. He didn't last long in the post though, and when the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister, Peel was made Home Secretary again in 1827, believed to be the Duke's right-hand man and second, as it were, in line to the throne.

As we've already seen, Peel's change of heart on the issue of Catholic emancipation was not due to any softening in his position, but to the unexpected and quite unwelcome election of Daniel O'Connell to the Clare seat, and the potential for civil war in Ireland should he not, as per the Penal Laws then in force, be allowed to take his seat. As a matter of pragmatism, then, and in order to avoid civil unrest or even outright war in Ireland, he pushed through the Roman Catholic Relief Bill, helped in the House of Lords by his mate the Duke of Wellington, who threatened to resign if the king did not sign it into law, despite furious opposition by his own party. Thus were the Penal Laws removed and Catholics a step closer to equality with their Protestant neighbours.

Peel of course also set up the Metropolitan Police Force, as I mentioned in his introduction. Originally a force of 1,000 constables, they were based out of Scotland Yard, and took over from the unpaid parish constables who had, until then, overseen law and order (and, it has to be said, with varying degrees of success and indeed interest - after all, if you're not being paid for your work, why throw yourself into the line of fire?) and supplementing the Bow Street Runners, the city's first detective force, created in 1753. The deployment of the Metropolitan Police (later, and even now, known as the Met) saw greater prosecution of crime, a more zealous sense of service to the community, and a more organised approach to fighting lawlessness in the streets.

His first term as Prime Minister in 1834/5 ended badly, all his policies frustrated by the opposition Whigs in collusion with Daniel O'Connell and his Radical Irish Party, and after 100 days Peel resigned. He returned to power in 1841, giving him the opportunity, which he took - and which brought down his government - to repeal the Corn Laws. Having previously noted that the scale of the problem was likely much less severe than reported: "There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable" - he perhaps in hindsight worried that history might judge him as partially, or even fully responsible for the Great Famine (which he kind of was, as the Prime Minister who did nothing to help the starving Irish, though he was by no means alone) and so got the repeal through, with the help of his friend and ally in the House of Lords. It came, of course, too little too late, but he was probably more concerned with his place in the history books than how he could actually save lives.

His Irish Coercion Bill - a request for greater powers to suppress revolutionary elements (and this was taken mostly to mean in Ireland) - presented to the House on the same night, shows he was no friend to the Irish. The bill, however, was defeated and he resigned a few days later.

[Trollheart]

So much for the man at the top; we'll see soon enough what, if anything, he did to help stave off the Famine. For now though, let's return to people who did at least seem to have some sort of compassion for the Irish farmer, but whose voices were either shouted down or ignored altogether. Yeah, back to the Devon Commission we go. One of the observations made by the earl was the absolute naked poverty of the people, as he noted "It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [the Irish labourer and his family] habitually and silently endure ... in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water ... their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather ... a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury ... and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property."

The Commissioners pointed out that the Irish tenant farmers were working for basically their oppressors, the English. There was no loyalty and no real communication between the two. The one thought the other savage and almost subhuman, the other thought the landlord cruel and unfair, and between both stood the ever-present spectre of religion and sectarianism. It's fair to say that had these tenants been Protestants, they might have expected better treatment from their Anglican landlords. But to the English, the Irish Catholics were, to put it mildly, scum, who deserved no sympathy and who had to be kept beaten down. In the role of the occupier throughout history, the Ascendancy asserted its power and ensured its authority was unchallenged. England had suffered similarly under the Normans, hundreds of years in the past, but seemingly had not learned from the experience.

Not that the landlords were even there to see the deprivation of their tenants. Most visited Ireland maybe once or twice in their lives, perhaps like plantation owners who left it to the overseers to get things done, and worried only about profits, not caring about the welfare of the men and women who toiled to afford them the luxury in which they lived. Even at that, the profits from the farms went outside the country, over six million pounds being spent overseas in 1842 alone. The hated middlemen, who worked on behalf of the landlord, were cruel and vicious and uncaring, and only wanted to make as much money from the land as they could. They leased it from the landlord and then, like the equally hated slumlords, who would take a house and rent as many rooms as they could in that house to as many people as possible, cramming more and more bodies into a single room with no regard for health or safety, they  subdivided it into smaller and smaller parcels of land to maximise their profits. This of course meant that each tenant farmer had a smaller patch to work on, usually bad land too, making it harder to even exist and hold body and soul together, never mind make any money. Most labourers on farms worked for food to feed their families, and the work was often very sporadic and always very hard.

As if that wasn't bad enough, tenants had no rights. They could be thrown off the land at any time, at the whim of the landlord or middleman, and any improvements they might have made to their lands automatically became the property of the landlord when their lease expired or they were kicked out, so nobody bothered. So with such rotten land to grow anything on, and with so little of it, what choice had the farmers but to sow potatoes? It might seem like (mixed metaphor time) putting all your eggs in one basket, or hedging your bets on the one thing, but they really had no option. Potatoes would grow in hardy soil where other crops would not, and could basically be eaten out of the ground (oh yeah: some people did eat raw potatoes) or at least just peeled and thrown into a pot to make a meal. Cereals such as grain, wheat, corn, oats etc all had to be made into something - usually bread - that would take time. Potatoes were also fed to livestock, so really formed the lynchpin of the Irish diet, both for humans and animals.

Not that it was a reliable crop. The Great Famine was by no means the first time that a potato crop had failed. In fact, there had been multiples failures from as far back as 1728, though none of these were nationwide failures. But then, again, as I say, it's not like the farmers had any choice. It's not like they could say, well the potatoes have failed, let's try something else. Unless they wanted mud for dinner, potatoes was all they had. Which of course led up to the catastrophic potato crop failure due to blight, or Phytophthora infestans in 1845. To some degree, and stretching it a lot I know, but the arrival of the blight in Ireland must have been a little like Spanish Flu or SARS or Covid; it absolutely destroyed people's lives and livelihood, and was directly responsible for the deaths of over a million Irish. It wasn't confined to Ireland, but it was here that it hit hardest, for reasons already outlined.

Nobody is certain, even now, where the blight originated, though it's thought to have begun in Mexico, and then been introduced to Ireland via clipper ships carrying passengers from America to Ireland, in the potatoes used in the food those passengers were fed on board. Like all viruses and pathogens (unless there is an antidote or vaccine) once here it was here to stay. Kind of horribly ironic, I feel, that the people who abandoned Ireland in search of salvation in America were quite likely retracing the path the blight had taken to get here, though of course in reverse. A chronology, then, of the arrival of the blight shows the steps taken, or not, as the spectre of famine leered towards Irish shores.

Countdown to famine: how apathy and disinterest doomed Ireland

As we've already noted, Sir Robert Peel was the Prime Minister at the time, and so to him fell the opportunity to help, or to ignore. To be fair to him, he did try, just too little too late. His already-quoted statement about things being exaggerated helped to hammer nails into the coffins of a million people who need perhaps never had died. The response, in general, from the English was a shrug and a sort of who cares, it's only the Irish. Maybe that's being overly harsh, is it? Let's see.

1843: First reports of Phytophthora infestans around the ports of New York and Philadelphia.

1844: Panic in Belgium as the crop failed. In desperation - and surely exacerbating the problem - the Belgian government imported seed potatoes from America. Were they not already aware that the blight was there? Perhaps not: news would not have travelled as fast in the nineteenth century as it does now. Still: a year? Does this not strike you as similar to importing meat from China just as Covid broke out? Anyway, to the surprise of nobody in hindsight, the crop was rotted. The blight spread to France, and then England.

1845

August: Kent had a diseased potato harvest.

September: Blight reported in Ireland. Questions were asked but the British government adopted a "wait and see" approach until the harvest was completed.

October: Evidence began emerging of the scope of the disaster as the potato crop was dug, but the British again hummed and hawed and thought well it can't be that bad. When it was clear that yes, it was that bad, they hummed and hawed over the expense of providing humanitarian relief to the Irish, nobody wanting to put their hand in their own, or the British public's pocket. Peel tried to repeal the Corn Laws, which in the case of the approaching famine sounds to me like putting a sticking plaster on after your arm has been chopped off. He sent a scientific team to Ireland to investigate the reports. Tories who were furious with Peel for granting Catholic emancipation, and now his intention to repeal the Corn Laws, refused to allow meetings to even discuss Irish relief, and the whole thing assumed a somewhat Covid-like aura, where people - English of course, and wealthy English - claimed it was all a big hoax, built up to be more than it was, and blamed it on Irish - wait, what? Alligators? Oh no. Agitators. Well. Anyway.

November: A lot happened, but nothing happened really. Peel arranged for the purchase of £100,000 worth of Indian corn to be shipped to Ireland, while his scientific committee confirmed the devastation of the potato crop, this backed up by the Mansion House Committee. Nobody cared. Peel, unable to gain enough support to have the Corn Laws repealed, resigned. His resignation only lasted days though and he was back, leading the government into 1846, the first real year of the Famine.

1846
In March, as the first deaths occurred from the famine, Peel set up projects for public works and relief in Ireland, but three months later his government fell, and the new Prime Minister reversed all his policies, basically telling the Irish they could starve for all he cared. We'll have a look at Lord Russel later. If there had been any hope of staving off, or nipping the Famine in the bud before it grew to national proportions, they were destroyed by the rise to power of the Whigs, who certainly played their part in dooming Ireland. The Quakers (remember our friend John Bright, one of the founders of the Anti- Corn Law League, was a Quaker?) did what they could to plug the gap, and presumably embarrassed by being shown up by a bunch of peaceniks, the government grumpily reinstated the public works, but dragged its feet on the release of food, while they continued to authorise the export of grain, which could have saved so many lives, from Ireland, even as the Famine tightened its grip.

1847
As famine fever gripped the country, and things began to spiral out of control, the government passed the Temporary Relief Act, also known as the Soup Kitchen Act, which was exactly what it sounds like, cheap food for the poor and starving. It only lasted till September though, when surely the worst of winter was about to descend on the country. After that, the relief was to be financed by the local Poor Law rates, something that was unsustainable. People began to see there was no hope for them in Ireland, and if they were going to die they may as well do so making an attempt to get to a new country. Thus the legend of the coffin ships was born, where vessels bound for America dumped corpses regularly overboard as immigrants died on the way to the New World. Passage on these ships was cheap, but so was life. Little if any food or water was provided by the owners, and it was said that sharks followed the ships, aware of the amount of bodies being thrown overboard. I can't say of course, but I wonder how many of them were actually dead, and how many just dying of hunger or disease, and thrown over the side just the same? If so, a horrible way to end your journey. Rates are reported of up to thirty percent mortality on these ships, so if you survived to the destination you could consider yourself one of the lucky ones.

Lord Russel's reaction to the horror being played out just over the Irish Sea was to crack down on agitators by passing the Crime and Outrage Bill (Ireland), which allowed for police forces to be sent into Irish districts, the eternal solution of the British to any sort of unrest (see also, miners' strikes).

1848
After having peaked, the Famine returned and cholera spread across the island. Sympathetic as usual, the British landlords continued to evict anyone who could not pay their rent (what the fuck were they supposed to pay with, I ask you?) and famine relief at this time stood at 840,000 people. Confirming (hah) the Crown's contention that there might be a rebellion (really? You think? In a country where you bastards were doing nothing to help and everything to ensure the Irish were wiped out? Never!) a small force of Young Irelanders had finally had enough and staged a tiny uprising, but it was the only spot of trouble in the time of the Famine - everyone else were probably too busy dying or trying to survive another day - and quickly put down.

1849
Another bad harvest, more cholera. More of the same. Minus the uprising.

1850
The famine finally ended.

[Trollheart]

There's an old Irish saying (not really, it's a joke but we should adopt it): "Important" in Ireland means "what's yer hurry? There's time for another pint!" and as for "urgent", see under "important"! Although the circumstances under which this journal - and all my others - have been left languishing for next to a year are far from funny, in a way it fits. At any rate, time to head back to that dark time in Irish history when the only people who weren't dying of starvation were the rich and the English.

Welcome back, a chairde (friends) to the Great Famine.

But first things first. Let's, then, before we go into the Great Famine in detail, as I promised we would, look into this guy who took over from Peel, and so was surely at least partially responsible for all the deaths in Ireland at the time.


John Russel, 1st Earl Russell (1792 - 1878)

It will come as a surprise to nobody to read he was a rich bastard, born into one of the richest and most noble families in Britain, his ancestry stretching back to the seventeenth century, and despite - or perhaps due to - his father being Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he had no time for the Irish. Few British politicians did, all of them being Anglican Protestants and the hatred of both Catholics and, as the main exponent of that religion, Irish, almost hard-coded into their DNA by now. Like a lot of the young aristocracy, Russell's seat in the House of Commons was literally given to him by daddy, the Duke of Bedford instructing his cronies to return his son (never understood that phrase: someone who is standing for the first time for a seat can be returned - doesn't something have to be somewhere first before it can be returned?) despite his not even being of age to take the seat. Wasn't even interested in politics, and only entered due to a sense of duty. Fucking rich bastards. One law for etc.

But maybe I'm wrong here. Seems he authored the Sacramental Test Act, which sought to remove the restrictions on Catholics and Dissenters, allowing them to hold public office. Hmm. And the bill passed. He also argued against the  tithes in Ireland, suggesting that  a proportion of the funds should go to help educate the Irish poor. Yeah. Seems like  I have got him wrong. At least in the earlier days - this was around 1834 - he does look to have supported the Irish cause as much as would have been possible for him. He also got through the Marriages Act, which removed the requirements for Catholics to only marry in Anglican churches, and even helped reduce the amount of crimes punishable by death in Britain, paving the way for the almost-abolition of the death penalty for any crime but murder.

In opposition at the end of 1845 he supported Peel's attempt to overturn the Corn Laws, so it seems odd to me that, once in power, he refused to help the Irish during the Famine. Let's see. Came to power, as I said above, mid-1846, and seems to have made some efforts but realised they have failed (probably worried that the cost outstripped the political capital he would have to sacrifice in "siding with the Irish" maybe) and with a small majority barely keeping his government in power, and a financial crisis also to deal with, he just turned to other things. I'm sure a million Irish understood.

Men at work: The Public Works

Although the idea behind creating a system of public works was to allow people to earn money to buy food, there were a lot of drawbacks to this idea. Firstly, we're talking here about people who could barely stand, never mind lift a shovel or pick, and not just the men:  wives and children also worked. Apart from the child labour laws being entirely non-existent at this time, the simple arithmetic of it was that the more people in your family who worked, the more you got paid, and so everyone worked. Apart from anything else, would you want to be starving at home while your parents dug ditches or built roads? But that was all well and good until one bright spark decided hey, I've got an idea! Instead of paying these Oirish louts a day's work for a day's pay, let's just pay them for the actual work they do. That will weed out the lazy and feckless among them, or Her Majesty isn't Empress of India!

Great. So now by definition the strong got to eat, while the weak, unable to work, or at least unable to work as well as the stronger ones, would be paid less, or even nothing. It has been said, and I can see why, that far from actually creating relief these public works were all but slave labour, working people to death, and a percentage of the mortalities in Ireland at this time can certainly be put down to those who literally dropped dead at their work. Even if you did earn enough for a few scraps of food, you still had to travel some distance - on foot of course - with your stomach grumbling, no guarantee you would even reach the store before you just collapsed, both of hunger and weakness.

The other point about the works is that they were largely pointless, projects devised and put into operation for no reason other than to afford work to people. While this is all very philanthropic on the very skimmed surface - it would have been more Christian, would it not, to have given out bread free, as was happening in Europe? - it left Ireland with a bunch of roads and ditches and harbours and stuff which she did not need. They were, as Liam Neeson notes in the wonderful two-part documentary The Hunger "roads to nowhere".

The Repealer tries to Repel: O'Connell's efforts to stave off the Famine

Leading a deputation including the Duke of Leinster, Lord Cloncurry and the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Daniel O'Connell, who saw the Devon Commission as a pointless and one-sided endeavour, made up entirely of landowners with no representation from tenant farmers, went to the Lord Lieutenant in November 1845 with a petition and ideas, including opening up the ports to foreign corn, the end of the use of grain in distilleries and the prohibition of the export of foodstuffs. He also asked for the practice of "tenant right", in operation over the border in Ulster, which gave the tenant farmer the right to compensation for any improvements he had made to the land he worked, to be introduced in the South. But Lord Haytesbury shrugged and told him not to be worrying; things were not as bad as they seemed.

O'Connell also lobbied - perhaps over-ambitiously, to say the least - for the repeal of the Act of Union, as he maintained that an Irish parliament would have instigated his ideas, closing the ports to export and opening them to import, and providing relief and work for the starving people of his island. Needless to say, this was shut down, if not actually laughed at. The idea that the British would allow Ireland to leave the Union in a sort of nineteenth-century Eirxit, just to save a few million lives, was ludicrous in the extreme. Also that an reinstated Irish Parliament would have given a toss about Catholics - never had before. It's hard, under the evidence of such intransigence and apathy on behalf of the British, to challenge the words of  John Mitchell, Irish nationalist, poet and repeal advocate, quoted at the beginning of this piece. If the Great Famine was not a deliberate attempt at ethnic cleansing and genocide, it's difficult to defend the notion that the British used it to try to accomplish their goal of pacifying Ireland and reducing significantly the number of Catholics living there.

It's also a little hard to comprehend why the British government did not order the closure of the ports, as this had been British policy a hundred years ago, in 1782-83, and it worked. But showing the innate pig-headedness and casual cruelty and lack of compassion of the Whig government, the Gregory Clause of the Poor Law stated that - hold on here a moment. This is what I don't understand. I assumed this guy Gregory (William H.) after whom the Clause is named, was some ultra-hardline Protestant, but then I read that he was sympathetic to the Catholic cause AND a friend of Daniel O'Connell! So how then could he have authored a clause in the Act which prohibited relief to anyone with a farm of a quarter of an acre or more? That's approximately 10,000 square feet, or 1000 feet by 1000. Try to picture that. If your sitting room or bedroom is about maybe 15 feet (let's assume, for the sake of my poor maths, that it's ten) then push ten of them together and you have one side of the farm, another ten across and that's the size of the land you have to work on. That's not a farm; that's not even a plot. That's an allotment, and not usually even of good land.

So the idea of the Gregory Clause was that if you had this quarter-acre or more of land you worked, and it became necessary for you to seek relief because you couldn't grow anything on the land you rented from the fat bastard landlord as, you know, potatoes were being blighted and there was a famine on and all, you had to sell your land in order to qualify for the relief! It sounds to me like in order to get the money for food you had to sell your house. This ended up creating a phrase, "passing paupers through the workhouse": in effect, you went in a man and came out a pauper, with everything taken from you. And who knew what piddling amount they would condescend to give you in relief? Very little, surely. Not worth the land you had spent perhaps your life working on, which now went back to the callous landlord, who could rent it to someone else.

And then the government passed the Encumbered Estates Act, in 1849, which allowed for the sale of these lands at a knockdown price. The lands were of course then bought by speculators, who didn't want no stinking tenants fouling the place up and moaning about being poor and hungry: who wanted to hear that, even if they weren't actually there to hear it themselves? One must maintain some standards, don'tcha know? So the tenants were often evicted - and could be, without the slightest cause or reason, and with no recourse by the tenants to the law - so that the new owner could raise livestock or whatever they wanted to use the land for. Between 1849 and 1854 over 50,000 families were evicted. That's one-twentieth, or five percent of the lives lost in the Great Famine. I said it before, and I'll say it again: bastards. No wonder we hate them.

Still, before get too anti-British, let's consider the military response. Between 1846 and 1847 the Royal Navy transported supplies into Cork and other ports in Ireland, the government having realised by January that the idea of leaving the Irish to it was not working duh, and two days after Christmas 1846 Sir Charles Trevelyan, in charge of relief in Ireland, ordered all available ships to assist in the effort. Royal Navy surgeons were also despatched in February 1847 to assist in rendering medical aid and to ensure all burials were undertaken with proper health and sanitation procedures followed.

While the general perception has been that people starved as food was exported from the country - and it was - statistics now seem to back up the fact that less went out than came in, but that complications with financing the relief effort through the Poor Laws, and the need to feed cattle, resulted in there being less food for the starving families, making it necessary for food to be sold so as to enable landlords to pay the rates and thereby fund the workhouses. Father Nicholas McAvoy, Parish Priest of Kells, wrote in The Nation in October of 1845:

"On my most minute personal inspection of the potato crop in this most fertile potato-growing locale is founded my inexpressibly painful conviction that one family in twenty of the people will not have a single potato left on Christmas day next. Many are the fields I have examined and testimony the most solemn can I tender, that in the great bulk of those fields all the potatoes sizable enough to be sent to table are irreparably damaged, while for the remaining comparatively sounder fields very little hopes are entertained in consequence of the daily rapid development of the deplorable disease.
With starvation at our doors, grimly staring us, vessels laden with our sole hopes of existence, our provisions, are hourly wafted from our every port. From one milling establishment I have last night seen not less than fifty dray loads of meal moving on to Drogheda, thence to go to feed the foreigner, leaving starvation and death the sure and certain fate of the toil and sweat that raised this food.
For their respective inhabitants England, Holland, Scotland, Germany, are taking early the necessary precautions—getting provisions from every possible part of the globe; and I ask are Irishmen alone unworthy the sympathies of a paternal gentry or a paternal Government?
Let Irishmen themselves take heed before the provisions are gone. Let those, too, who have sheep, and oxen, and haggards. Self-preservation is the first law of nature. The right of the starving to try and sustain existence is a right far and away paramount to every right that property confers.
Infinitely more precious in the eyes of reason in the adorable eye of the Omnipotent Creator, is the life of the last and least of human beings than the whole united property of the entire universe. The appalling character of the crisis renders delicacy but criminal and imperatively calls for the timely and explicit notice of principles that will not fail to prove terrible arms in the hands of a neglected, abandoned starving people."

It is fair though to say that the Famine opened hearts, and wallets, and many charitable donations did give aid to the hungry. Perhaps surprisingly, English Protestants accounted for the highest amount of Irish famine relief outside of Ireland, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical which called on the entire Catholic world to help in the relief of their Catholic brothers and sisters in Ireland, and a rough figure for donations - including about a half million from Britain - totalled in the area of £850,000. I mean, in real terms, that's less than a pound per person who died in the Famine, but it does at least show that there was an appetite for aid and that Ireland did not stand entirely alone as the rest of the world looked on. And remember, too, that other areas of Europe - Belgium, France, even England - had suffered their own destruction of crops, though none of these hardships compared in any way to the Irish Famine, which is still seen as the greatest humanitarian disaster of the nineteenth century.

[Trollheart]

While most of the history of the Great Famine is steeped in tears, tragedy, pain and anger, death and disease, despair and emigration, and a burning need for justice - or if that wasn't possible, revenge would do - it is illuminating to just recount the many ways people across the world came to the aid of Ireland, many doing the little they could (which quite often means more than huge donations from banks and corporations and kings) and everyone trying to help a country that was really teetering on the edge of extinction. Irish-Americans of course dug deep, and even future President Abraham Lincoln, at the time a mere Congressman, donated ten dollars (doesn't seem much, but that's about three hundred in today's money, and that was a lot for a private individual to contribute to any cause) while the president at the time, Jame Polk, gave five times that much. Choctaw Indians, who had just been resettled, read, forced to leave their native lands on the horrible journey of despair which came to be known as "The Trail of Tears", gathered together a huge sum at the time, 170 dollars, which you can see yourself is more than three times what the President of the United States gave, almost five grand today.

Every country helped. Russia, Italy, Venezuela, South Africa, Mexico, Australia, while the British Relief Association, on foot of a letter from Queen Victoria urging donations to help the Irish poor, raised almost seventy percent of the total given by the British, over £390,000. It's also really heartening to see that in America, religious groups put aside their differences as Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Episocopalians all banded together to help raise funds and send ships of food and goods to Ireland, and in South Carolina it was said that "The states ignored all their racial, religious, and political differences to support the cause for relief."

Let's be honest here: you can't see that happening today, can you? In fact, it doesn't. Other than going back to Bob and Live Aid as I mentioned at the start, we don't see such universal comings-together in the name of starving people. We have, unfortunately - and this very much includes we Irish, who should know better - got so used to famine in general and to seeing pictures of starving children on our television that we just ignore it; another humanitarian disaster, terrible, wish there was something we could do, poor kids, change the channel. Not only that, but sharp religious and political differences have never been so at the forefront of politics all over the world now that such setting aside of enmities and prejudices and old rivalries seems, and in fact is, impossible to envisage. You only have to look at the ongoing migrant crisis to see how a stream of human beings, dispossessed of their homes and fleeing war zones, elicits nothing more than lip service and a shake of the head. Times have most definitely changed, and not for the better.

There was, however, another, less noble and somewhat more sinister practice involved in some of the charity given, where certain groups used the offer of food as an inducement, or rather put a condition on it. This was called "souperism", from the practice of Protestant Bible schools setting up soup kitchens, to which anyone was admitted and would be fed, as long as they were prepared to learn the Protestant way of things. It amounted in effect to blackmail, a case of "if you want to eat worship our god", and became a bone of contention with Catholic families, who felt they were being asked to choose between their religion and their family, which they were. Those who accepted the deal were looked down upon by those who did not, their full belly no guarantee the Catholic Devil would not drag them all down to Hell for such betrayal. They were called "soupers", or "the ones who took the soup", and both became a real insult in Catholic Ireland, similar to "taking the King's shilling", i.e., adopting the English way.

It is however important to understand that, like a lot of claims made about this or that by this or that injured party, and meaning to do my own countrymen no disservice, the practice of "souperism" is reported to have been quite minimal; many, in fact most schools, even many of those operated by Protestants, offered food and relief to people without any condition attached, though because of either the hyperbole of newspaper reporting, the inbuilt, deep-seated hatred and distrust of Catholics for Protestants, or to help special interest groups fan up that hatred and outrage, or a combination of all three, and maybe more, the word went around at the time that all Protestant schools were engaging in this form of spiritual blackmail, and as a consequence, even if the school in question was not, Catholics feared sending their children there in case they ended up being corrupted and forced into the wrong religion. As well as this, with or without riders, Protestant faith does not observe Good Friday, and so their schools would serve meat soup on Fridays, when Catholics were supposed to abstain from meat. This was another reason why they were shunned by the Irish, and why many children went hungry, the health of their everlasting soul deemed more important than that of their temporary body.

To some extent, you could say the term "souper", used not for those who provided the food under these restrictions, but for those who partook of it, became almost as much an insult as "collaborator." The idea was of course that those who gave in and accepted the charity - even if it was a case of their doing the reverse of above, and putting the health of their children - their very survival, their lives - ahead of religious matters were seen as giving in, as bowing down and all but accepting the Protestant faith. That wasn't true of course; these weren't, to my knowledge, boarding schools, and the children's parents could correct any erroneous notions put in their heads by the teachers by explaining they had to endure this in order to get food, but that what they learned in these schools was nonsense.

Nevertheless, the very act of crossing the threshold of a "souper" school made the parents responsible in the eyes of other Catholics, and traitors to their religion. They would be ostracised, in some cases British soldiers even having to be called in to protect them from their furious neighbours. How incredible, that even at death's door with hunger, people could still find reasons to fight over religion. If it had been me, and Satan had opened up a soup kitchen, I'd have had my kids down there. But the Catholic religion teaches that the body is nothing but a shell, and everyone should be more concerned about how their soul will fare after death. Only here for a short time, not a good time, could be a motto for the Catholic Church, and its priests joined in the condemnation, loudly lambasting known soupers from the pulpit. With full bellies, no doubt.

Nice as it is, and a change, in the midst of so much horror and death, to talk about charity and kindness shown to the victims of the Great Famine, it is sadly inevitable that we have to return to the darker, more prevalent side of the crisis, and specifically to the ones who, it could very well be said, precipitated and then exacerbated the misery by refusing to recognise, or care about, the depth of the poverty of the people they demanded rent from. All they cared about was their pockets, and yeah, you'll not be surprised to hear I'm talking about the landlords and the middlemen, the scourge and curse of the Irish poor, and almost the incarnation of evil with very little if anything to mediate their greed, lack of compassion or even humanity. Let's shuffle into the rogues' gallery to meet some of them.

Marcus Keane

Feared and hated by thousands as "the exterminator-in-chief", Keane was the son of a landowner whose family had come over to Ireland almost with King Henry II, and had been in Clare since the thirteenth century. He worked as an agent for some of the bigger landlords - the Conynghams, the Vandeleurs and the Westbys - but had by degrees built up his own landholdings until he owned about 4,500 acres. Consider that: if each tenant farmer, as noted earlier, had a quarter acre to farm (they didn't; many had larger, but not much. This would have been the average) then Keane's landholding would have supported - in the loosest possible sense - over 18,000 families. He got married the year the Great Famine struck, 1847, no doubt a lavish wedding feast that could have fed most if not all of those 18,000. He would not have cared. From the epithet above, you can guess he was not a nice man.

A hardline Protestant, he refused the local parish priest, Father Michael Meehan,  permission to build a Catholic church on his land in Kilbaha, as his master, the landowner and his father-in-law, Edward Westby, did not want such a focus for Catholic worship. In defiance, Father Meehan built a small mobile church called the Little Arc on the foreshore, and this became a focus for resistance to the tyrannical landlord. But this was mild. Through 1847, at the worst heights of the Famine, Keane evicted twelve families from his land in Garraunnatooha, the most famous - or infamous - of these being Bridget O'Donnell and her family. Bridget was pregnant at the time, and her husband worked a small farm of five acres from Keane. He had purchased oat seeds from the landlord, grown the corn and harvested it, then had it confiscated by Keane's agent, Dan Sheedy. Sheedy had then arrived with a gang to evict the O'Donnell's. Owing to the trauma, Bridget had given birth to a stillborn baby and received the last rites from Father Meehan, though whether she survived, died or what happened to her afterwards is unknown.

Also unknown, and of some small comfort, is what happened to Keane's body after he died. Supposed to have been interred in his own private mausoleum, he rather inconveniently (but not before time, if you ask me) died before it was completed, and so was instead laid to rest in the vault of the Burkes, where he had had the body of his governess, Margaret Barnes buried. When the new tomb was ready his son came to move the body but found to his dismay that it was gone, along with that of the governess. A search party found nothing, and it would be a full seven years before the two corpses would be discovered to have been buried nearby in another plot, with the nameplates removed from their coffins. Perhaps the ghosts of the victims  of the Irish families he treated so reprehensibly had their revenge from beyond the grave?

His kind of brutish, unprincipled, evil behaviour would not have been typical, in fairness, of every landlord in Ireland, but the few who were decent and treated their tenants well would certainly have been in the minority. Bridget's plight came to national attention when an engraving of her appeared in the London Illustrated News, the picture like something out of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge is shown the spectres of want and ignorance skulking beneath the cloak of the Ghost of Christmas Present. The pathos and pity such a figure elicited threw into sharp relief the disgraceful practices of Irish landlords, Keane being accused of being over-zealous in his eviction of tenants from Klirush, especially in the local Poor House, from 1848 - 1849, and a parliamentary committee was convened to look into the allegations, which had been brought to British officials by the Poor Law inspector for the Union, Captain Kennedy. As a result, a reporter was despatched from the London Illustrated News, and he brought back this harrowing account.

"It is a specimen of the dilapidation I behold all around. There is nothing but devastation, while the soil is of the finest description, capable of yielding as much as any land in the empire. Here, at Tullig, and other places, the ruthless destroyer, as if he delighted in seeing the monuments of his skill, has left the walls of the houses standing, while he has unroofed them and taken away all shelter from the people. They look like the tombs of a departed race, rather than the recent abodes of a yet living people, and I felt actually relieved at seeing one or two half-clad spectres gliding about, as an evidence that I was not in the land of the dead."

Perhaps it did English people some good to see the way their representatives were treating the Irish people in their power, perhaps they didn't care, but the engraving of  Bridget O'Donnell and her pathetic family remains one of the striking images of the Great Famine, akin perhaps to that picture of the GIs raising the flag at Iwo Jima, or the Chinese student facing the tank in Tiananmen Square. Even when the evicted tenants did their best to set up makeshift shanty towns, huts of mud and sticks called "scalps", near to where they had only just recently lived before being thrown out by an uncaring landlord, they were not safe. This account tells of how one woman lost not only her second, lean-to home, but also her child, no doubt the work of the "wreckers", bands of tough, young, ill-educated poor yobs who worked for the landowner or his agents, and must have been equated to the Yeomanry of earlier decades.

Having put together their scalp, the woman's husband went off somewhere while she visited a "neighbour" about 100 yards away. While she was out of the scalp it was set on fire. She ran back to try to save her child, but was only in time to see them being 'taken out of the scalp on a shovel, all burnt to death, by a man named Michael Griffin. I am sure that the scalp was set on fire by some person or persons, for it could not otherwise take fire.' Utter scum. Not content with destroying the family's poor home and kicking them off the land, they burned down their makeshift one, and never bothered to check if anyone was inside. True, they probably did not mean to kill anyone, but I doubt the fact they did caused them any sleepless nights.


George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan(1800 - 1888)

Another serious offender was a nobleman, an earl, who was so dismissive of and uncaring of his tenants that he snapped he "would not breed paupers to pay priests", had over 300 homes knocked down, making over 2,000 people homeless in Ballinrobe, Co. Mayo, and even went so far as to destroy their only alternative means of support, the workhouse. He, too, earned the nickname "The Exterminator" among the Irish. For his crimes against humanity he was appropriately punished, being promoted from colonel to major general in 1851. He was not a popular man, enraging the local garrison by demanding their barracks windows be blocked up, as he snarled the men were looking at his wife as she took her walks in the garden of his house, which the barracks overlooked. On arriving in Ireland he dismissed his land agent, a popular man called St. Clair O'Malley, and immediately set about enforcing the kind of reputation he had enjoyed in the army, as a martinet and a bully.

One one occasion, his tenants in Castlebar, believing him to be in London, burned him in effigy, and then had to scatter in panic as he rode up upon them, shouting "I'll evict the whole bloody lot of you!" An interesting fact here is that after returning to England, he was posted to the Crimea and actually led the doomed and pointless but very famous Charge of the Light Brigade. Odd to read that when he came back to Castlebar he was welcomed, the city illuminated in his honour. As a postscript, it seems his son was far better than his father, returning to Mayo and being much fairer with the tenants, providing education for Catholic children and allowing the tenant farmers to buy their land.

Denis Mahon

A major in the British army, he secured landlordship of Strokestown, in Co. Roscommon, by having its previous owner, his uncle Maurice, declared mentally unfit and taking over. His first move was to inform the tenants there that rents, which had lapsed during the tenure of his uncle, were now due, including all arrears, going back three years. Obviously nobody could pay this sort of money, and a strike was quickly organised, whereby everyone refused to pay. Mahon responded with mass evictions, but the families returned to their homes, he would have them evicted again, they would return, and the whole thing took on the complexion of a crazy game of roundabouts.

Mahon broke this cycle by ensuring those evicted were moved onto chartered "coffin ships" bound for Canada. Almost everyone on board died or were refused admittance, the news coming back to their families in Roscommon. This led to an attack on Mahon in which he was killed on November 2 1847, the murder sparking off a tinderbox of similar killings of landlords, and threats against others. Not surprisingly, the Ascendancy back in London were quick to jump upon this as a Catholic plot against Protestant landlords, without bothering to consider how brutal a man Mahon had been, and four men were eventually accused of his death, two hanged, one sentenced to transportation for life (which, given the coming years of famine, may very well have saved his life. Or he may have died over there, but at least he would have had more of a chance than those he left behind) and one who escaped to Canada.

The final word on evictions can perhaps be best left to the Bishop of Meath, The Most Reverend Thomas McNulty, who wrote, in a pastoral letter to his congregation:

Seven hundred human beings were driven from their homes in one day and set adrift on the world, to gratify the caprice of one who, before God and man, probably deserved less consideration than the last and least of them ... The horrid scenes I then witnessed, I must remember all my life long. The wailing of women—the screams, the terror, the consternation of children—the speechless agony of honest industrious men—wrung tears of grief from all who saw them. I saw officers and men of a large police force, who were obliged to attend on the occasion, cry like children at beholding the cruel sufferings of the very people whom they would be obliged to butcher had they offered the least resistance. The landed proprietors in a circle all around—and for many miles in every direction—warned their tenantry, with threats of their direct vengeance, against the humanity of extending to any of them the hospitality of a single night's shelter ... and in little more than three years, nearly a fourth of them lay quietly in their graves."

[Trollheart]

Coffin Ships, Corpses and Cholera: Death Voyage to the New World

For many, there was only one escape, and that was emigration. It probably should be made clear that at this time in history, certainly in Ireland, emigration had already been in progress from the middle of the eighteenth century; in fact, by 1845 over a quarter of a million Irish had left to seek their fortune and a new life in America. That was, though, by choice, or forced by circumstances, but not as a desperate attempt to avoid death by starvation. For the majority of those who remained, the idea even of people travelling outside their own village or town, much less city or county, was something viewed mostly with fear and suspicion. So the thought of a trip across three thousand miles, taking months and with no guarantee of any sort of future at the end of it - assuming you made it - must have been terrifying. And yet, what choice was there? Stay and waste away, watch your family die in front of your eyes, nobody to appeal to for help, no recourse to any authority, no rest from the screams and cries of your starving children? To over two million people, this seemed to be the only alternative left to a slow, miserable, pitiless and certain death in their native country, while the ones who had assumed control and command of Ireland looked on with cold, merciless, uncaring eyes, for the most part.

Not everyone went that far, though. For some, the escape was closer. England (though they  might inwardly have hated the idea of fleeing to the home of their oppressors, they were likely to have some chance of a better life there), Scotland, Wales, Canada and Australia were also destinations for the hungry flood that poured out of Ireland during the Famine years, some of those years seeing as many emigrate as had done in the fifty preceding the Gorta Mor. In large part, this mass emigration can account for the proliferation of Irish in cities such as Liverpool, Toronto, New York and Boston, and some of these would play a large role in the shaping of the history of those countries including the great-grandfather of a man who would become the 35th President of the United States of America.

While the emigration from Ireland was, later, beneficial to many of the countries they emigrated to - Liverpool still has three-quarters of its people claiming Irish heritage, and has been known as "Ireland's second capital", while even as early as 1850 a quarter of the population of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore were made up of Irish - this was due largely to the fact that the emigrants arrived (as immigrants now of course) without any money and so had to stay where the ships docked, trying to put down roots and make a life there.

The other side of that coin is of course that Ireland became vastly depopulated as millions of her citizens left, and it's estimated that by 1851 the population had decreased by a massive 20%. An estimated million people died (there's no way to be sure, as records was non-existent, and it's quite possible more died from disease than actual starvation, and then there are those who must surely also have died of exposure) and a believed up to two million more emigrated over the course of the Famine. Taken together, that's more than the total deaths which resulted on both sides in the Napoleonic Wars, which raged across Europe for twelve years. The graphic above shows the decline in the population of Ireland over a ten year period, most of which covered the Famine.

Voices of the Famine: Harrowing Accounts from History

All of this, however well written (what?) or researched it is, boils down to facts, figures, data, and somewhere in there, perhaps, we've forgotten or overlooked the actual people this data represents. So I'd like now to do my best to give voice to those people, by allowing them to recount their experiences in their own words. You can call it lazy writing, an easy way out, but I don't feel I have the right to try to paraphrase or rearrange their words. I once went three days without food and I was near to collapse: these people went weeks, months, even years without being able to provide food for their families or themselves. What do I know of such hardship? How can I understand - not hunger, for that's too small a word, as is starvation - the actual disintegration of the body and soul as life is leeched from it by the lack of food, coupled with disease, exposure and the heartsickness that comes from being completely powerless?

I couldn't. None of us could. And I don't intend to. I feel it would be presumptuous of me to try. And so instead, these accounts are being pasted in, without any alteration or editing, and few if any comments. Those who died in the Great Famine deserve to have their say, so listen now to their voices from beyond the grave, from nearly two hundred years in the past.

Rodger Cantwell

When the potato famine swept through Ireland in 1846, I was 30 and my wife, Mary (McDonald), 33. We lived in a small cabin valued at only 5 shillings, where I was one of 30 farm laborers on the estate of George Fawcett, Esq. in Toomyvara, Tipperary. At that time we had five children: Bridget (age eight), Thomas (7), Michael (4), Julia (2), and little Mary (1). Because of a generation-long collapse in our living standards, we came to rely mainly on potato farming for our sustenance. A single acre of potatoes could yield up to 6 tons of food, enough to feed our family for the year.

It had been raining a lot, even more than usual for Ireland. In October 1845, almost overnight, a dense blue fog settled over our puddled potato fields. An odor of decay permeated the air. When the wind and rain died away, there was a terrible stillness. The potato crop was ruined, destroyed (we learned later) by the fungus Phytophthora infestans.

Over especially the next 2 years, life was miserable. We were always hungry and lost weight. England gave us some Indian corn and maize, but it was poorly ground and caused abdominal pain and diarrhea. In an effort to earn some money, I joined a public works labor force, sponsored by the British, building roads and digging ditches that seemed to have little purpose. It did pay 10 pence per day (12 pence equals 1 shilling), almost double my salary as a potato farmer. By August 1846, many of my countrymen had joined me in this endeavor, as the labor force increased fivefold to 560,000.
We tried planting potatoes again in 1846, but stalks and leaves of the potatoes were blackened, accompanied by a sickening stench, and within only 3 to 4 days the whole crop was obliterated. Our family was very fortunate, somehow avoiding the pestilence (typhus, relapsing fever, dysentery, and scurvy) that many of our neighbors succumbed to.

We narrowly avoided having to go to one of the area workhouses. The Irish Poor Land System resulted in building 130 such workhouses, with a total of 100,000 beds, but the British goal was bizarre: they wanted to make poverty so unendurable that we (its victims) would embrace the virtue of the "saved," namely to be more industrious, self-reliant, and disciplined. Hard to do, I'd say, when one is starving and out of work.
Many of the British took the attitude that the famine was God's punishment toward a sinful people. We Catholics (80% of our population but not in ruling authority like the Protestants) didn't agree with this nonsense. Despite the fact that many of us were starving, our country kept having to export foods to England—oats, bacon, eggs, butter, lard, pork, beef, and fresh salmon. In return, Britain did open up soup kitchens for us, but of 2000 planned, only half were in operation in 1847.

In 1847, I was able to do some work again in the potato fields, as the crop was finally healthy but only one-fourth normal size, as we had to eat the seed potatoes and grain over the past winter to stay alive. That year Britain passed its Extended Poor Law, shifting the cost of feeding the starving masses and the maintenance of poorhouses to the Irish landowner. This, in effect, made eviction of tenant farmers (like I was) an efficient way for the landowner to lower his tax (poor rate). Between 1847 and 1851, the eviction rate rose nearly 1000%.

We held on until June 1849, when George Fawcett, Esq. hired agent Richard Wilson to bring in a crew of men overnight and destroy all of the little cabins his 30 tenants lived in.  He did offer to pay our passage via ship, first to Liverpool and eventually to New York. Big of him. Our family survived, in temporary shelters, until April 19, 1850, when I put Bridget (12), Thomas (10), Patrick (eight), and Mary (7) on the boat Princeton with several relatives. The trip took 2 months. Fortunately, living conditions on board had improved since the crowded trips 3 to 4 years earlier, when 30% or more died en route. I left Liverpool 6 months later on the Waterton.

October 30, 1850. We managed to avoid the "runners" and bullies who preyed upon the new arrivals and settled in Rochester, NY, where our daughter, Jennie, was born in 1856. We came by boat to Milwaukee that same year, where our youngest son, William, was born in 1858 and where I worked as a common laborer until my death from a heart attack at age 55, in 1870.

My widow, Mary, then moved to Shawano, Wisconsin, with daughter Jennie (14) and William (11), where married daughter Mary was living with her husband Cornelius. Wife Mary died at 76 in Shawano. Her physician was her youngest son, William, who had graduated from Rush Medical School in Chicago the year before.

As I reflect back upon my life, and those who have come after me, I believe we are of hardy stock to have survived such difficult times, including the famine, febrile illnesses, and hazardous boat trips. So many of our friends and neighbors weren't as fortunate. Our seven children lived to fairly old ages (80, 79, 79, 77, 74, 60), except for little Mary, who died of an infection at 33, long before antibiotics became available. I am especially proud that even though I came from humble means, every generation since, beginning with youngest son William, has had physicians (six to date, over four generations) and other fine occupations. None became farmers, like I was, although grandson Arthur dabbled in it. (He proved to be a much more successful obstetrician than farmer.) Fortunately, my great-grandson John chose cardiology over farming, since he once poured gas in the radiator of a tractor and almost drove off an incline going into the barn.

The British have had moments of greatness through the years, none more so than their heroic actions at the outset of World War II. However, their leaders like the Whig Charles Trevelyan came up far short during our famine years. As historian John Kelly wrote in 2012:
The relief policies that England employed during the famine—parsimonious, short-sighted, grotesquely twisted by religion and ideology—produced tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of needless deaths (1).

Our population of 8.2 million was reduced by one-third between 1845 and 1855. Over 1 million died of starvation and disease, while another 2 million emigrated to other countries. One of the worst policies was the Extended Poor Law of 1847, which eventually resulted in the destruction of our little home and eviction of our family. However, if not for this, our family might still be living in Ireland instead of America.
The bad feelings toward the British persisted for several generations. My youngest son, William, the first family physician (and the first family member to leave the Catholic Church), once said that if he thought he had even a drop of English blood in his body he'd cut his finger and let the drop drip out. He had to be careful where he expressed this, for his wife Harriet's grandparents had come from Foville (Wiltshire) England, leaving for America in 1830, well before the famine year.

John Crosfield

At the Castlerea poor-house a shocking state of things presented itself, the poor inmates lying upon straw and their dormitories being in such a state of dirt that W. F. was unable to venture into them. In this poor-house there are at present 1080 paupers, but the last 434 were admitted in so hurried a manner that there is neither bedding nor clothes for them, the measles being in the house and a few cases of fever already, it is probable that if something be not speedily effected to remedy the evil, there will be a fearful mortality among the inmates.

In the children's room was collected a miserable crowd of wretched objects, the charm of infancy having entirely disappeared, and in its place were to be seen wan and haggard faces, prematurely old from the effects of hunger and cold, rags, dirt and deformity. In the school room they spend some hours every day in hopeless, listless idleness, though there are both a schoolmaster and mistress there are no books nor slates nor any of the apparatus of a school.

Anonymous

... they were generally crowded around the funnel of the steamer or huddled together in a most disgraceful manner; and as they have not been used to sea passages, they get sick, and perfectly helpless, and covered with the dirt and filth of each other. I have seen the sea washing over the deck of a steamer that I came over in one night, completely drenching the unfortunate people, so much so that several of them got perfectly senseless.

There were 250 deck passengers on board and they were in a most dreadful state; it was an extremely stormy night and the vessel heaved about in a very awful manner; the sea washed over her tremendously, and it was only by great exertions that some of these people were not carried overboard... early in the morning, when it became light, I saw 50 or 60 of these people, including 4 or 5 children, perfectly stiff and cold... There was a fine boy, apparently dead, but by a great deal of exertion and rubbing him in hot water and laying him before a fire, he was revived.

James Mahoney, reporter for The Illustrated London News[/i]

...we came to Clonakilty, where the coach stopped for breakfast; and here, for the first time, the horrors of the poverty became visible, in the vast number of famished poor, who flocked around the coach to beg alms: amongst them was a woman carrying in her arms the [cadaver] of a fine child, and making the most distressing appeal to the passengers for aid to enable her to purchase a coffin and bury her dear little baby.

Anonymous farmer

...a queer mist came over the Irish Sea, and the potato stalks turned black as soot. [The fields were] a wide waste of putrefaction giving off an offensive odor that could be smelled for miles.

The Marquis of Waterford

The faces of these people were subdued with hunger; pale, or rather of a ghostly yellow, indicative of the utmost destitution. They are starving. We hurried with horror from these frightful visitations, which are permitted by Providence for his own wise ends, sick at heart

James Mahoney again

We next reached Skibbereen... and there I saw the [ailing], the living, and the [expired], lying indiscriminately upon the same floor, without anything between them and the cold earth, save a few miserable rags upon them. To point to any particular house as a proof of this would be a waste of time, as all were in the same state; and, not a single house out of 500 could boast of being free from [mortality] and fever...

Thomas Maher, farmer

When I wrote you last I gave you an account of the probable loss that would attend the failure of the potato crop. I was very far from knowing the real loss, but now, alas, I know it at my own expense. You must have seen through the press the number of [fatalities] from starvation and its concomitant diseases [of] fever and dysentery. And do not imagine there is any exaggeration in the reports.

Hannah Curtis, whose brother escaped to Philadelphia

...don't attempt to leave me here to fall a victim to the miseries that await the country... there is not room in the church yards for to bury the [slain] as they are [perishing] so fast the coffins I may say are on the surface of the earth and has no more room for them...

Mahoney again

In the street, however, we had the best opportunity of judging of the condition of the people; for here, from three to five hundred women, with money in their hands, were seeking to buy food; whilst a few of the Government officers doled out Indian meal to them in their turn. One of the women told me she had been standing there since daybreak, seeking to get food for her family at home. This food, it appeared, was being doled out in miserable quantities, at 'famine prices..

Gerald Keegan, Schoolteacher, Co. Sligo

"We have come to the end of our rope. The twin specters, famine and pestilence, hold sway over the land. As a result of the loss that I have suffered, the prospect of death on this field of battle is not at all frightening. Some have been found dead with grass in their mouth. Dogs and donkeys have become common items of diet. Scores of bodies lie along the roadside. The children have lost their normal youthful appearance. They look like old people. They do not laugh and play anymore.

I think I have acquired a deeper understanding of the Israelites' long and painful march from their captivity in Egypt to a Promised Land. I have seen a never-ending stream of gaunt, dejected, ghost-like figures. viewing the landscape in respectful silence, getting a last look at what is for all of us the dearest place on Earth. [Survivors of the coffin ships] looked for all the world like specters coming out of tombs with their ghastly complexions and gaunt, emaciated bodies. I am alone now and I feel I have nothing to live for. Eileen is dead. I only wish I were her."

[QuantumSync]

I remember reading some of these over at MB but this thread is a great. I bookmarked to read again

[Trollheart]

Thanks man. Appreciate it. Nice to know at least one person is reading. I'll be updating it soon.