Four Green Fields: Trollheart's History of Ireland

[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.

[macywack]

bet we’ve run out of paper

[Trollheart]

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

[i]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.[/i]

John Crosfield

[i]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.[/i]

Anonymous

[i]… 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.[/i]

James Mahoney, reporter for The Illustrated London News

…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

[i]“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.”[/i]

[Trollheart]

You mean for the articles? Meh, I just got tired transcribing the damn things. How depressing!

[Trollheart]

Relief without Strings: The Role of Quakers in the Famine

“If there be one thousand of our fellow-men who would perish if nothing be done, our rescue of one hundred from destruction is surely not the less a duty and a privilege, because there are another nine hundred whom we cannot save.”

One religious group which gave food without any conditions attached at all, and earned the undying gratitude of the Irish, were the Quakers. Called the Religious Society of Friends (Quaker being a pejorative term they were labelled with for being pacifist) they certainly proved themselves friends to the starving Irish, to the extent that it was said of them and long remembered: “They fed us in the Famine.” Though broadly Protestant, Quakers engaged in none of the proselytising or spiritual blackmail that some of that faith did, as already described. Their soup kitchens were open to all, regardless of whether they believed what they believed and without any obligation on the hungry to listen to their sermons or speeches. Quaker relief was given with a free and open hand, from hearts torn by the sight of frail, living skeletons trudging through the streets and the fields, desperately searching for anything to eat.

The Quakers also recognised the urgent need of the poor for proper clothing. With no food in their bellies, no way to farm and the winter setting in, people were literally freezing to death. The women undertook this task, with clothing committees established in London and Dublin. As they explained: “starvation has produced raggedness in those who had clothing, and nakedness in those who previously had nothing better than rags to cover them, both by day and by night.” Surely the words of Jesus must have rung in their ears: “I was naked, and you clothed me”?

Another great resource Ireland has always had is fishing. Being an island, we have access to huge stocks of fish, and even today, especially in the coastal towns (duh) it’s a huge industry and also a livelihood and tradition that has been passed from grandfather to father to son. Irish men were more than capable of fishing, but they had two problems: one, their methods were outdated, using old rowing boats and nets, and two, they had pawned all their fishing equipment in order to be able to eat. The Quakers, as already mentioned, redeemed their fishing equipment through loans, but went further, bringing in experts who were able to talk to them and show them how to improve their fishing methods.

Unfortunately, learning a new way of doing things is fraught with pitfalls, not least among them the stubbornness of men who have “always done it this way” and are reluctant and resistant to change. This attitude, combined with what could either be called inexperience or perhaps less kindly, but more accurately incompetence, doomed most if not all of the fisheries projects the Quakers tried to set up. Some lasted a few years, but within a maximum of five they had all failed, mostly through bad management. Still, while they lasted they did provide both employment and food for those who took part in them, so they couldn’t be called a complete failure, and it was more than the British were doing.

William Bennet, an English Quaker, became a sort of Quaker Johnny Appleseed, except the seeds he sowed throughout the worst-hit areas in Ireland were not of apple, but of turnip, carrot, mangelwurzel (shut up) and parsnip, this being done in an effort to wean the Irish off the potato, total dependence on which had of course been one of the main causes of the Famine. The only problem seen here was that greedy landlords might take the crop harvested from this seed, believing it was due them as rent arrears. When the government sent eighteen tons of seed in May 1847, they didn’t dare touch it, and thanks to the efforts of another Quaker, William Todhunter, who used the postal service as well as free carriage donated by a coach line and a steam packet line, to distribute the seeds, which resulted in crops over almost 10,000 acres.

The next year, the Central Relief Committee repeated the process, and this was even more successful, yielding about 32,000 acres, which is estimated to have fed about 150,000 people. A small amount compared to the million who died, yes, but as they say in Tesco, every little helps. As did the reclamation of agricultural land, when a consortium of landowners approached the Central Relief Committee with an offer of free use of over 500 acres of land, to be sowed and planted. This also gave work to people, who again were paid according to the work they did, not a flat rate, but the rates were higher to account for the weakness of the workers due to hunger. Although the harvest was disappointing - the blame largely levelled on the poor quality of the land - the project did help to begin to change attitudes towards farming, and show the Irish a better, more profitable way to sow.

Continuing their quest to turn the Irish away from a one-trick-pony industry, and diversify the industry in the country, the Quakers organised loans for small businesses, both cottage industries and more factory-based enterprises such as flax or cotton mills. All of this helped people find employment and again move away from dependence on agriculture as their sole means of living. This also served to educate people on how to set up and run a small business, and in turn give employment to other people. In effect, you could say some tenant farmers made the huge leap from poor tenant to relatively wealthy landowner, the beginnings perhaps of the first native Irish businessmen in the country.

Quakers also provided material assistance to the British government in their efforts to provide some sort of relief to the Irish poor, supplying the cauldrons and boilers that would be used to heat the soup that would be given out in the kitchens, and they also acted as almost a kind of “famine newsline”, relaying the information on the disgraceful state of things to their contemporaries across the water in America, and providing the newspapers with interviews and stories, that the true extent of the disaster be conveyed to the British public. They were also one of the only organisations to keep going after all other efforts stopped, in 1847, continuing their work and later supplying fishing tackle, seeds and farming tools to the people, that they might endeavour to get back on their feet, a real case of helping the people help themselves. However when the government - which had bowed out by now, charity towards Ireland having dried up as people shrugged and thought they had done enough and went back to their lives full of rich food and shelter - asked them to resume their efforts in 1848, they declined, as they believed - rightly - that the situation had now become a humanitarian disaster, and that only the government could tackle such a problem effectively.

Quakers may have earned Ireland’s eternal gratitude for their kindness, compassion and charity, but it came at a high price. Fifteen of them died from famine-related diseases, including exhaustion. Unlike some of the other organisations, who tended to provide what relief they could at a distance, or through intermediaries, the Society of Friends were personally involved in daily contact with the Irish people, leading to a closer bond between the two, and a great appreciation for the kindness of strangers.

Jonathan Pim (1806 - 1885)

One of seven brothers, Pim was born in Dublin and from an early age had an abiding interest in the welfare of the Irish poor. He endorsed the removal of the landlord system in favour of allowing tenants to purchase land in the pamphlet drawn up by the Quakers in 1826, Statement of some of the causes of the disturbances in Ireland and of the miserable state of the peasantry and later helped set up the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, which, unlike other relief schemes which operated and were distributed through the local poor union houses, the Quakers took a personal approach to. They placed no limits or minimum eligibility on their relief, unlike that of the government, as already noted, thanks to that bastard Gregory and his cursed clause, and they used interest-free loans to help stimulate Irish business and agriculture.

Pim travelled widely through the worst areas ravaged by the Famine, noting the effect the relief was having, or not having, on the starving Irish, and he wrote a three-volume report in 1852 called Transactions of the Central Relief Committee, in which he published his findings.Deeply critical of the poor response by the government to the crisis, he was outspoken on the issue, but overwork led to his collapse, as it had led to the early death of his partner, Joseph Bewley the previous year. He argued strongly for the establishment of the Encumbered Estates Act, which he hoped would help tenant farmers buy cheap land estates (but which, as we’ve seen earlier, sadly for him, resulted in even worse deals for the poor and benefitted the super rich) and for sweeping reforms, such as the equal treatment of Catholics, and, basically, since they had all but annexed Ireland, for Britain to treat it as an actual part of its kingdom, and not some vassal state.

Through his links with the Quakers, and their effective publicity machine, he was able to get copies of his The Condition and Prospects of Ireland (1848) to many British MPs and, more importantly, to the Dublin University Magazine, where it became the focus of a debate. He became the first and only Quaker to be elected to the seat of Dublin MP in 1865, and his 1867 work The Land Question in Ireland was instrumental in helping the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, author the Land Act 1870, which finally established tenant right throughout Ireland and provided compensation for tenant farmers driven off their land.

James Hack Tuke (1819 - 1896)

Another seventh son, this time from Britain, James Tuke was sent “into the west” by the Quakers to examine and report on the situation there with regard to the Famine. His eyewitness testimony helped to show the doubters that there was no exaggeration here; in fact, however bad they had been told it was, the reality was ten times worse. He identified the flaws in the current system of Irish agriculture, and concluded it was not sustainable. He also blamed the conditions on economic, not political causes, and was another who advocated the purchase of land for tenant farmers, investment in agriculture and fisheries, and a system of emigration for those who had no chance here, the poorest of the poor.

However, before anyone thinks he was just disposing of the problem by getting rid of the troublesome Irish, or even, Hitler-like, shipping them off so they would no longer be of concern, you could not be further from the truth. Rather than put people on coffin ships with no idea where they were going or what they would do when (if) they got there, Tuke spent two months in 1880 on a fact-finding mission in America and Canada, identifying the places where work was available, where these people would be welcomed or at least not reviled, and even met with officials in Canada, who assured him they would do all they could to welcome the new arrivals and help them integrate into their society. He then returned to England to set up a committee to solicit donations to help pay the families’ fares to the New World.

The stated price was £100 per family (Tuke believed the only solution was for whole families to emigrate together, rather than one at a time, in order to be able to put down proper roots), a huge sum at the time, but his committee, which included the Duke of Bedford, W.H. SMith (don’t know if that’s the same one, but maybe) and Samuel Whitbred raised over £8,000, which would of course then allow 80 families to make the journey. However, when he arrived in Clifden, Co. Galway, where he intended to concentrate his efforts, these being the poorer areas (Connemara, Mayo) and also the ones controlled by the worst and most eviction-happy landlords, he found to his considerable dismay that he was faced with nearly three times that number. People were desperate to get out of Ireland, but had no means, and Tuke was their only hope. It was time for a rethink.

Unfortunately, not everyone was as philanthropic and selfless as Tuke. The local board of guardians, to whom the loan application had to be made, had rescinded the offer on foot of protests by local shopkeepers (why? It’s not like these people had any money to buy their stuff!) and moreover, wanted to get the best bang for their buck, using a very early form of the philosophy espoused and practised by Michael O’Leary at Ryanair: cram as many in as possible for the least price. They wanted to send the emigrants on coffin ships, or at least a cheaper passage, which would allow them to get more families out at a cheaper rate, whereas Tuke was concerned with their comfort and safety. In the end he decided to restrict the scheme to just Clifden, and managed to help 1,200 families emigrate safely.

Realising the problem was too big for him to handle with his small committee, Tuke turned to the government for help. As their relief efforts were hardly doing much to alleviate the crisis - and also, perhaps, as out of sight is out of mind - they agreed to provide the necessary funding, leaving Tuke with a staggering 6,400 families applying for the grant and hoping to leave Ireland for a better life (or a life, anyway) in the New World.

Joseph Bewley (1795 - 1851)

When we hear the word Bewley, there’s only one word that comes to mind: coffee. Well, two: coffee and cakes. The Bewley’s tea and coffee rooms became such a fixture in Ireland that people from all over the world would make sure to visit them when they came to our country. I believe they are now closed down - I know my sister worked in one for a time, and we used to wait for her to come home from work with a big bag of cakes - but once they were as much a part of Irish society as the pubs and the fish-and-chip shops like Burdocks and Beshoffs. Joseph Bewley was the eldest son of Samuel, who established the chain of coffee houses throughout Ireland, circumventing the monopoly of the gargantuan East India Tea Company by having his tea and coffee brought directly into Ireland on his own ships from China.

Joseph, a devout Quaker and a man worried that his business side would outweigh that of his spiritual, retired early in life and dedicated himself to the Quaker lifestyle. He was one of the first to open up a soup kitchen when the Famine began to hit, giving of his time and his money equally. It was once noted that, as demand for his highly nutritional soup increased, and he was warned the cost was rising exponentially, and might do well to reduce the ingredients in it, that he refused, saying “not one iota shall be taken out; indeed more shall be added, even if it is at my own expense. The soup shall be rich and nourishing, as well as palatable.”

Sadly, as recounted above, for all his good works and selflessness the Good Lord took Joseph at an early age, he collapsing from overwork and dying in 1851, while those who either lifted not a finger to help or actually exacerbated the misery of the people by throwing them off their land mostly lived to a ripe old age and never paid for their sins, at least in this world.

Jacob Harvey

Another exponent of the benefits of emigration, Harvey asked “what would Ireland do without America?” pointing to the way the States had taken in so many Irish immigrants, and how they had, in their turn, helped improve life in the New World. Hard, industrious (mostly) honest workers, they shied from no job and they put everything they had into any task they undertook, keenly aware, no doubt, that the Almighty had granted them a second chance, a chance denied many of their brothers and sisters back home, to escape the Great Famine and make a name, and a new life, for themselves on the shores of America. They weren’t about to waste that opportunity.

“They do all the rough work, carrying the hod, paving the streets, digging canals etc and care not much for the comforts of life. These are mostly too old to change their habits, and we must look for improvement to their children, who become Americanised as they grow up. The city Irish, I must say, have not the ambition of the Americans to rise above their condition. I speak in the general; but they are affectionate and kind-hearted, generous to their relatives at home and willing to serve each other.”

He did somewhat regret the fact that so many of the immigrants chose to stay in the city, where a salary of a dollar a day for menial work most Americans would see as beneath them was to them a fortune, and they saw no need to go west, as some of the hardier farmers had. An article in the Irish Times of August 1847 somewhat derides Mr. Harvey’s loud pronouncements, pointing out that “he has never been to Ireland, and is unaware of the lonely and mostly silent trek these families from the west engage in to get to Dublin Port, from where, I suppose, the ships to America sail. Watched by crowds of the well-to-do as they pass through the towns and cities, they are like an army of ghosts, quiet, frail, the walking dead, heading east with the faintest hope in their hearts that they can be saved from this dreadful plague. Though some hearts are stirred in sympathy, nobody approaches them, mostly due to fear of contagion, but also because of their ghastly aspect.”

This sort of dismissal of Harvey’s comments is understandable. He had emigrated himself in 1816, and so had completely escaped any tinges of the Famine (being of good family anyway, even had be been there at its height it’s unlikely he would have suffered) and while fellow Quaker James Hack Tuke was an Englishman, he did at least come to Ireland to see with his own eyes the devastation being wrought by the Famine. Compared to him, Harvey was sitting back in a plush hotel room or townhouse in Baltimore, was expounding about how emigrants should be going into agriculture and not settling for (relatively well-paid) jobs in the city, while having no real idea what life was like in Ireland at that time. A man whose heart may have been in the right place, but who seemed to look on the crisis from the vantage point of a somewhat snobbish high horse.

[Trollheart]

… Those Who Hunger and Thirst : The Role of the Church in the Famine

Though the above is a quote from Jesus’s sermon on the Mount, in what became known in Christian belief as “the Beatitudes” (which really sounds, and kind of was, more like platitudes), when he uses the notions of hunger and thirst in a metaphorical sense (“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness”), it can’t be denied that the Catholic Church - and to a smaller extent, the Protestant too - did much to help to try to alleviate the suffering of those who were literally hungering and thirsting. Ireland being such a religious and above all Catholic country, it was to the priests and bishops that the people turned to in this time of need, not necessarily for bodily sustenance (though they gladly accepted this when it was offered) but for the sustenance of their souls. They wanted, needed to know that, contrary to what the high-handed Protestants in England believed, or wanted to believe, God had not sent this curse and he was not unhappy with them.

Of course, if you believe in God then you can’t say what his motives are, even if you’re one of his ground troops, as it were. But rational-thinking men in the Church knew that, even if they suspected this was a judgement brought down from the Almighty (it’s possible some, in the very extremity of their grief, at times allowed that thought to cross their minds and infest their hearts) it was of paramount importance that the people be disabused of any such notion. For one thing, it would crush them spiritually, take all the fight out of them and make them look upon the crisis as having been of their own making, as if they deserved it, had invited it, had brought it upon themselves. For another, it would surely have packed out churches, as the people flocked to try to atone and ask forgiveness, and with so much disease around, that really wasn’t something you wanted them doing.

But probably more importantly, the people needed not to lose faith. It’s certain that even as they died some may have cursed what they saw as an uncaring God, or even decided there was none, but the vast majority of Irish people clung to their faith and hoped to be brought into the light of Heaven when they passed out of what was almost literally now for them a vale of tears. Take that away, and you would only make what remained of their miserable life, and inevitable death, even harder to bear. If God had deserted them, what had they got? Generations of Irish people wiped off the face of the map, never to populate the island again, because, what? God hated the Irish? What had they done, they would possibly ask, to have merited such treatment? Sure, the English hated them, but that was at this point an enmity that stretched back over six centuries, and further. What had the Irish ever done but kept faith with God, the true God, the Catholic God? Why should he punish them? Why should he be angry with them?

But keeping up the spirit, literally, is one thing; keeping the body alive was quite another, and here too the Catholic priests must be given the credit they are due. Many set up relief committees of their own, interceded - or tried to - with landlords who demanded rent or tried to force tenants off their land, liaised with local charities and aid organisations, and appealed to their Catholic brothers in Britain and America. Two names stand out, though, as having done the most good in the name of the Church, and of their people.

Archbishop John MacHale (1789/1791 - 1881)

Like a lot of the Catholic clergy, Archbishop MacHale was an ardent nationalist, and used his position to lobby for Catholic emancipation, as well as helping the poor and attacking the proselytising of the Church of Ireland. He was one of the only Archbishops in Ireland who advocated the continued use of the Irish (Gaelic) tongue, and preached in that language alone. He was born in Co. Mayo, and though, as you can see above, there is some doubt as to what year that was, if it was 1789 then it was a sign indeed, this being the year of the French Revolution, and indeed, believed to be born March 6 as he was, a few months only before the storming of the Bastille. Though a tiny and very sickly infant at the time, he had already forged a link with Irish nationalists as he was baptised by Father Andrew Conroy, who was later hanged after the Irish themselves rebelled in 1798. The son of a farmer, he watched the French troops march through Castlebar as a boy, this no doubt helping to fuel his desire to join the fight for Irish freedom.

But he was destined for the Church, and to the Church he went, ordained in 1814 by the other subject of this article, another who helped the poor Irish during the Famine, Archbishop of Dublin, Daniel Murray. He became friends with Daniel O’Connell, and joined with him in his fight for Catholic Emancipation, preaching to his people that the British government had broken their promise of equal treatment for Catholics when Ireland was incorporated into the United Kingdom through the Act of Union. He encouraged disobedience and resistance, and promised Heavenly rewards to all those who fought to retain their faith. He lobbied against the English practice of mixed-faith schools, believing Catholic children should go to Catholic schools and be taught by Catholic teachers, to prevent them being indoctrinated by English anti-Catholic sentiment.

He wrote letters to the Prime Minister of the time, Earl Grey, outlining and railing against the unfair treatment of Catholics in Ireland, but his letters were ignored. They found it harder to ignore him when, on the death of the Archbishop of Tuam in 1834, and over the protests of Westminster, Pope Gregory XVI appointed him to the position. He immediately ramped up his rhetoric and constantly harangued the British over their attempts, as he saw it, to disenfranchise Catholics spiritually as they had materially by the implementation of the National School system, which he bitterly opposed. Irish people today though might not thank him for introducing the schooling of boys by the Christian Brothers and that of the girls by the dreaded nuns!

Well that is interesting. Despite what I said above, and given that I read he was quite a fiery personality, I guess what we would today call a real “Bible-thumper”, a “fire-and-brimstone” kind of guy, he actually did tell his congregation that the Famine was a judgement from God on them for their sins. Seems a bit harsh. He decried the uselessness of most of the public works put into operation by the British, thundering that roads were of little use when what his people needed were piers and docks so they could fish. Presumably this was before they sold all their fishing gear. He did however organise shipments of food from England and even had bread and soup distributed from his own kitchen.

Archbishop Daniel Murray (1768 - 1852)

Another farmer’s son, he was ordained in 1792 and assigned to the parish of Arklow, where he saw his parish priest shot in bed by English Yeomanry during the 1798 Rising. He fled to Dublin to avoid being killed, and remained there for two years. In 1814 and 1815 he travelled to Rome to protest against the Crown’s veto on appointing bishops, and in 1825 was made Archbishop of Dublin. Unlike his counterpart in Tuam, and despite his opposition to their veto, he seems to have been popular with the British government. He too was responsible for founding the Christian Brothers schools, and as his were in Dublin I should hate him more, having been taught by them. He dedicated a lot of his life to helping the poor though, especially during the 1834 cholera epidemic, when he founded St. Vincent’s Hospital.

You know, I have looked through so many accounts but I can’t find anything that refers to his work in the Famine, other than generally praising him for his courage and generosity, so I guess we’ll just have to take the word of the article I’m reading from, which then goes on to give me some more interesting - and some shocking - information about the Catholic Church around the world, and indeed here at home in Ireland.

As might be expected, Catholics around the world did donate, the Bishop of Boston raising a quite phenomenal figure of $20,000 (equivalent to almost half a million today) and when Pope Pius IX, as already mentioned, issued his encyclical calling for Catholics in all countries to help, money poured in from Venezuela, Australia, South Africa, France, Argentina and other countries. However what is a little surprising and a little hard to understand is that rather than thank the Pope for helping them in his unique way (talk about pulling power and influence!) the Irish bishops are said to have had to have been all but forced to show their gratitude by an irate letter from the advisor to His Holiness. Help was cut off abruptly though when Italy entered a state of revolution in 1848, and the Pope had to flee for his life.

[Trollheart]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Trollheart]

When Sorrows Come: Dark Allies of the Famine

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

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

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

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

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

[Trollheart]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just let them catch their breath first, all right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Trollheart]

Chapter XII: Under the English Heel II Part II: Rebuilding Ireland: Parnell, the Land League and the Rise of the Catholic Church

It’s a poor student who fails to learn the lesson they’ve been taught, and right or wrong, in the very starkest terms, Ireland had been taught a bleak lesson in survival which, if not taken to heart, could only be guaranteed to come back to haunt her. And so, with the conditions right for a change, almost a sea change, the day of the poor tenant labourer and the rich absentee landlord was drawing to a close as the world entered the second half of the nineteenth century. As already alluded to in the epilogue to the last chapter, many of the hated landlords had been ruined by the Famine and fucked off back to England, leaving their lands to be snapped up by wealthy Catholics, who did indeed learn the lesson of history and eschewed the practice of parcelling out the land in tiny plots and renting it out to poor tenants. Pasturage was the way to go, they saw, and landowners metamorphosed into actual farmers, helping to create the all but ruling class of rural Irish society.

Of course, change never comes easy, and as we will see as this chapter develops, there was no smooth transition from ownership and usage of the land that had, to use a broad and not very accurate term, supported the poor Irish in the years leading up to the Great Famine. As a matter of fact, the idea would kick off an actual war, which would come to be known as the Land War. With Catholic emancipation now in play, and no real reason for wealthy Protestant landowners to remain in Ireland, another power would begin an inexorable rise, which would eventually make it all but the de facto ruler of Ireland. The Catholic Church had of course been a powerful institution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - and before - but only in a spiritual sense. It was the Church which kept the people going, kept them loyal and faithful, and for which so many died, both its priests and their flock.

But once the hunting of clergy was done with, while still not recognised by the British government, the Catholic Church was free to flex its muscles, and over a relatively short period would become the dominant power in the country, having institutions, organisations and even governments bow before it. Well into the middle of the twentieth century the Catholic Church would establish an iron grip on education, entertainment, the morals of its people, and fight tooth and nail for their souls. From this overzealous, often cruel and brutal viewpoint horrible spectres would tower out of the darkness, casting their evil shadows so long and so far that they yet resonate in the Irish consciousness, and things like Magdalene Laundries, Mother and Baby homes, an absolute intolerance of (some might say tacit persecution of) homosexuality and other “deviant” behaviour, arranged marriages and the complete stamping down of any sort of rights for women would be the awful legacy of a country that seemed to believe Church and State were inseparable.

Unquestioning, unswerving and blind obedience to and belief in the Church would only begin to waver in the face of the most heinous allegations, which would turn out to be revelations, of child abuse within its auspices, and finally, too late for many, ordinary folk would see that priests and nuns were not saints on Earth, God’s unchallenged and pure representatives, but ordinary people with ordinary failings, some capable of as much evil as any wife-beating drunk or paramilitary killer. The foundations of the Church would be shaken to its bones, and even today the whole rotten institution rocks uncertainly as it tries to regain a foothold it will never again maintain.

But after the Famine, people remembered principally how the Church had opened its doors, fed the starving, clothed the naked, and actually done the sort of things Jesus said they should. Religion was a benison to the soul, and in some cases no doubt gave people with nothing the will to go on, the courage to endure, or perhaps the determination to leave their beloved home country behind and seek a new life. It’s both indicative of the awesome power of the Church, and of the sharp demarcation between the poor Irish who starved in the streets and the more affluent Catholics whose bellies were full, that more churches were built during the time of the Famine than at any other time, among them the Cathedral of the Assumption in Kilkenny, St. Mary’s in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary and St. Patrick’s in Armagh. Perhaps in a way it could be said that, despite all the horror and the death and the starvation, a cruel, uncaring and mostly vain God still demanded, through his priests and bishops, that palaces be built to his everlasting glory, and his subjects herded into them by those clergy to pray for their souls, even though their souls had been torn out of them.

For Irish Catholics, you might also say things had swung somewhat full circle. From being banned from going to mass, even executed if they were found to have done so, they were now forced and required to do so. Even in my day, anyone who did not regularly go to at least Sunday mass was seen as an outsider, a blasphemer and a pagan, and this in a time when Ireland had nothing but Catholics, so you couldn’t plead following a different religion. Sunday worship was almost like assembly at school; if you were missing, the parish priest would want to know why, and so would all your fellow parishioners. Few dared skip mass, and few, for a long time, even had the temerity to leave the church before being dismissed by the priest. Nobody wanted to take those first few steps towards the door, not because they didn’t want to leave, but because they did not want to be seen to be rushing out, not paying the proper respect.

As we go on, we’ll see how the Church squeezed and tightened its grasp on just about every aspect of Irish life, and I don’t just mean in the years after the Famine. It wouldn’t be at all unusual to find priests patrolling dance halls, cinemas, on the prowl for “ungodly” conduct by the young girls and boys, even going so far as to rush in and separate them when they go too close for the slow dance. I’m not kidding. Priests were treated with, well, reverence well into the middle of the twentieth century. I’ve noted before how my aunt told me you were supposed to genuflect (go down on one knee and make the sign of the cross) if you even passed one in the street! And it was true. I saw a programme only a few days ago (as I write) where a priest arrived at a house and as the woman answered the door to him she did indeed genuflect.

Though dampened and even forgotten about for some time after such a horrendous human holocaust, the cause of Irish independence could never be fully extinguished, and it would come blazing back to life towards the latter part of the century, as organisations such as the Fenian Brotherhood, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and of course eventually the Irish Republican Army were born. Though in fairness it would be political exigency and a general pragmatism and all but exhaustion with the Irish that would eventually lead to us gaining that independence, despite the failed heroics of the Easter Rising, as late as 1916. But it would probably be fair to say that the late 1850s and 1860s were when the first real, organised opposition to English rule would spring up, not secret societies or a ragtag militia, but actual what would become known as nationalist, and later republican organisations; not quite military, not quite armies, but the most coherent resistance to the British that had come out of Ireland. In a small way, post-Famine Ireland, as it would come to be known, was making slow, dogged steps towards its freedom, and somewhat like Yeats’ rough beast, was shambling towards a new life for this island.

The very character of Ireland changed after the Famine, with the Irish language spoken less, even more hatred for the English and a total reorganisation of the available land. With over a quarter of its population gone, either to starvation and death or to emigration, it could be said that Ireland teetered for some time on the edge of all but extinction. Though there were those, as mentioned, who had weathered the storm by virtue of being wealthy, the poorer class was all but wiped out and the idea of tenant farmers soon vanished as the Land Wars began. As is often the case though with history, it’s necessary to step back in time a little, though we’ve actually come through the Great Famine and stand on the edge of the chasm looking back, with the year around 1850 or so. While nobody really cared - too busy dying of hunger - the seeds of, if you will, the new generation of Irish rebels were sown in that awful time, and though they failed miserably (vaguely alluded to in the timeline), without the first real organised opposition to the British since the United Irishmen in the eighteenth century, true resistance to the occupying force might never have sprung up. And so we need to trace back the genesis, evolution and eventual metamorphosis of that resistance.

[Trollheart]

Young Ireland

In all but direct opposition to Daniel O’Connell’s “Old Ireland”, Young Ireland, or Éire Óg, grew out of the first real nationalist newspaper, appropriately titled The Nation, and like most attempts at uprising, theirs was doomed to failure from the start. Quite why they thought trying to raise the country to arms when so many were dying of starvation or abandoning it is open to debate, but they did set down the marker for those who later followed, and so are seen almost as the grandfathers (despite the name) of the Irish resistance movement that would eventually swell up into an army. Perhaps surprisingly, The Nation was not run exclusively by Catholics, but was in fact set up by two Catholics and a Protestant, and would feature contributions from eminent authors, barristers, at least one M.P. and the editor of the London Magazine. Originally members of O’Connell’s Repeal Organisation, the three founders would lose faith in the Great Liberator’s constant compromise with the Crown and split off to form their own, more radical organisation.

Sir Charles Gaven Duffy, KCMG (1816 - 1903)

Is it of any significance that the editor of this first nationalist newspaper, and therefore one of the fathers of Irish resistance should have been born one hundred years before the great, doomed event that would nevertheless presage Irish independence, the Easter Rising? Probably not, but you know how I like remarking on such things. A poet and journalist, again it’s one of those weird coincidences that though he was born in Dublin Street, this was in Co. Monaghan, which is just on the border with Ulster, and in fact, though a Catholic, it was in the North that he edited his first journal, The Vindicator, after having befriended a member of the United Irishmen when only ten years old. This was in Belfast, but he later moved south and studied law in Dublin, becoming then one of the founders of The Nation.

Cracks began to appear in the alliance with O’Connell when the Great Liberator refused the call for Catholic and Protestant children to be educated together in non-denominational colleges, championing the cause of Catholic Ireland - Old Ireland - and predicting and wishing for the virtual elimination through absorption into the Catholic Church of the Protestant Ascendancy. Duffy and The Nation were more in favour of an all-inclusive Ireland (as I said, one of their founders was a Protestant) and disagreed with O’Connell’s ideas, seeing them as outdated and counterproductive to the cause of eventual Irish independence. Duffy and his colleagues were, too, it has to be said, reluctant to get involved in the abolitionist cause which O’Connell trumpeted, mostly because they relied on funding from America, and with the Civil War yet twenty years and more off, the overall feeling in the new colony was that it was nobody’s business but theirs if they kept slaves. In this, at least, it has to be said that O’Connell was on the right side of history and Duffy has to be seen as something of an apologist at best, a coward at worst.

Between 1845 and 1847 the cracks between O’Connell and what would become Young Ireland widened, at first due to O’Connell’s denouncing the “seditious” articles in The Nation and even pressing for the conviction of Duffy (which did not happen) and then later, when he (O’Connell) refused to countenance the use of violence as any sort of last resort to gain independence, while Young Ireland saw it as a valid method of persuasion if all else failed. In this difference of opinion it can be clearly seen that the Repeal Association was destined to fade into the background of history, despite Daniel O’Connell’s undoubted gains for the Irish people (though see previous chapters for qualification as to who that covered) while Young Ireland would be the springboard for the more militant arm of Irish resistance. As a result of what was seen as intransigence and perhaps also cowardice, or at least a lack of will to do what needed to be done to free Ireland, by the Repeal Association, Duffy and his Nation compatriots split from O’Connell and formed the Irish Confederation, the forerunner of Young Ireland.

After the minor rising they tried to prosecute, Duffy was the only one not sentenced to transportation, and toured Ireland during the Famine and in 1850 formed the Tenant Right League, of which more soon. His hope was to unite Protestant and Catholic, North and South in a non-sectarian assembly that would campaign together for the rights of poor tenant farmers, but like all such ventures that sought to join the two diametrically opposed sides, it was doomed to failure. Perhaps one of his biggest miscalculations was to go head-to-head with the Catholic Church, in the shape of the Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, whom he accused of caring more about Rome than Ireland. Cullen, for his part, disliked Duffy, calling him an “Irish Mazzini”, referring to the Young Italy revolt which deposed the Pope in 1849, setting up an Italian Republic.

Disillusioned and losing faith in the cause of Irish independence, especially in the face of the opposition from the Church, which seemed to want Ireland to remain as part of the United Kingdom in order to “convert by stealth”, or something, Duffy emigrated to Australia in 1856, where he finally flourished, realising his talents and became premier of Victoria. He married three times, had a total of eight (surviving) children, and died in 1903 in Nice, but was buried back home in Ireland, in Dublin.

Thomas Davis (1814 - 1845)

Born in Mallow, Co. Cork to a Welsh father and a Protestant Irish mother, Davis never knew his father, the man dying a month after the boy’s birth, so he was brought up by his mother, who had been left enough of a legacy by her husband to be financially independent and allow her to move back to her native Dublin, where Thomas went to Trinity College to study law. Having set up The Nation with Charles Gavan Duffy and John Blake Dillon, he fiercely opposed Daniel O’Connell’s willingness, even eagerness to do away with the Irish language, fighting through the paper for not only its retention but its supremacy as the standard tongue of Ireland. Perhaps due to his mother’s ancestral ties to the great Gaelic families of the O’Sullivan clan, he developed a great affinity and respect for the ancient heritage of Ireland, and fell in love with the rural countryside, wishing for Ireland a separate national identity and independence from Britain.

“The country of our birth, our educations, our recollections, ancestral, personal, national; the country of our loves, our friendships, our hopes; our country: the cosmopolite is unnatural, base - I would fain say, impossible. To act on a world is for those above it, not of it. Patriotism is human philanthropy.”

Despite his opposition to O’Connell, Davis did not get to be a member of Young Ireland nor take part in the abortive mini-rising, as he died of scarlet fever in 1845, aged only 30.

John Blake Dillon (1814 - 1866)

Again the coincidences: both he and Thomas Davis were born in the same year, though he lived 21 years longer. Dillon was the only one of the three founders of The Nation who had any sort of connection to the nobility, being related through his father to the Earl of Roscommon. While studying law at Trinity he met Thomas Davis, and then encountered Charles Duffy when both men worked for the Morning Register newspaper. The three would then set up Ireland’s first nationalist journal. With the inevitable failure of the Young Ireland rising he fled to France and then America, returning to Ireland in 1856 with vastly changed views, advocating the union of Ireland and Britain. He died of cholera ten years later, and like Duffy, is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

Although these were the three founders of The Nation, it doesn’t seem to me that they took any real part in the rising, so to speak (one of them being dead, of course, before it took place) so it is perhaps important that we look at the other members of Young Ireland who were more instrumental in attempting to, perhaps foolishly, rebel during the worst ecological disaster Ireland had ever faced, or ever has.

John Mitchel (1815 - 1875)

Given what we’ve heard he wrote about the Famine in the previous chapter, it comes as something of a surprise to me to find that he was a Protestant, born in Londonderry (Derry) the son of a Presbyterian minister. He probably got his Catholic sympathies from his father, who had begun to shy away from support of Ascendancy candidates for parliament, to the extent of earning the nickname “Papist Mitchel”, not a tag you wanted to have in Protestant-ruled Ulster! John was one of those who welcomed Daniel O’Connell to Ulster - though his attempt to garner support for repeal of the Act of Union naturally fell on stony ground and failed - and moved to Dublin in 1843, having seen a copy of The Nation and begun work there as a writer. When Thomas Davis died suddenly, two years later, he was made editor by Charles Gavan Duffy.

Showing the depth of his dedication to both the paper and the Irish cause, Mitchel shut down his law practice in Newry and moved his family to Dublin, taking up the post at The Nation. When the Great Famine hit, as we have seen, he spoke out about it, writing editorials blaming cruel and heartless and greedy landlords, and deploring the lackadaisical attitude of the British Government, culminating in, as above, his blaming them for the Famine and the deaths of over a million poor Irish. In March 1846 he wrote ”The Irish People are expecting famine day by day… and they ascribe it unanimously, not so much to the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England. … They behold their own wretched food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth, and they see heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England; they see it and with every grain of that corn goes a heavy curse.”

His views too radical even for The Nation, he resigned from his post at the end of 1847 and a few months later published his own newspaper, The United Irishman, in which he attempted to show his fellow Irish in Ulster how they were being treated: "My Lord Enniskillen . . . is apprehensive not lest you be evicted by landlords, and sent to the poorhouse, but lest purgatory and the Seven Sacraments be down your throats… . . The Seven Sacraments are, to be sure, very dangerous, but the quarter-acre-clause [conditioning access to poor relief][38] touches you more nearly . . . end all your energies to resisting the “encroachments of Popery” you thereby perpetuate British dominion in Ireland and keep the “Empire” going yet a little while. Irish landlordism has made a covenant with British government in these terms—“Keep down for me my tenantry, my peasantry, my ‘masses’ in due submission with your troops and laws, and I will garrison the island for you and hold it as your liege-man and vassal for ever.”

A true example of what would be seen as one of the first republicans now, advocating total independence from the British government, “passive resistance” to their efforts to export grain out of Ireland, refusal to pay rents and other modes of civil disobedience, without promoting an actual rising (which he had enough good sense to know would fail, given the state of the country and most of its people), Mitchel wrote the following mission statement for the United Irishman, after quoting the heroic Wolfe Tone:

That the Irish people had a distinct and indefeasible right to their country, and to all the moral and material wealth and resources thereof, … as a distinct Sovereign State …;
That the property of the farmers and labourers of Ireland is as sacred as the property of all the noblemen and gentlemen in Ireland, and also immeasurably more valuable;
That the custom called ‘Tenant Right,’ which prevails partially in the North of Ireland, is a just and salutary custom both for North and South …;
That every man in Ireland who shall hereafter pay taxes for the support of the State, shall have a just right to an equal voice with every other man in the government …
That all ‘legal and constitutional agitation’ in Ireland is a delusion;
That every freeman, and every man who desired to become free, ought to have arms, and to practise the use of them.
That no combination of classes in Ireland is desirable, just, or possible, save on the terms of the rights of the industrious classes being acknowledged and secured; [and]
That no good thing can come from the English Parliament, or the English Government.”

This was provocative, but he went further, calling the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon, “Her Majesty’s Executioner General and General Butcher of Ireland”, and declaring his intention, through his journal, to “resume the Holy War to sweep this island clear of the English name and nation.” Unsurprisingly, the British government did not take this lying down, and after, I suppose, providing him with enough rope to hang himself, Mitchel was arrested and his paper suppressed. Even from jail however he did not shut up: [My] gallant Confederates … have marched past my prison windows to let me know that there are ten thousand fighting men in Dublin— ‘felons’ in heart and soul. I thank God for it. The game is afoot, at last. The liberty of Ireland may come sooner or come later, by peaceful negotiation or bloody conflict— but it is sure; and wherever between the poles I may chance to be, I will hear the crash of the down fall of the thrice-accursed British Empire.”

When charges of seditious libel did not stick (well, he was telling the truth, even if the British didn’t want to hear it, so how could it be libel?) the charge was changed to treason felony, and under this crime he was found guilty and transported, first to Bermuda (don’t even think about it: it’s nowhere near as good as it sounds!) and then after a year to Tasmania (then called Van Diemen’s Land) where he was reunited with his fellows from The Nation and his own paper, Thomas Francis Meagher, William Smith O’Brien and John Martin, who had been sent there after their abortive Young Ireland rising.

[Trollheart]

James Fintan Lawlor (1809 - 1849)

It has certainly been said that the pen is mightier than the sword, and that powerful words can win the heart and minds of the people, so it’s not too surprising to find that one of the principle architects of the Young Ireland Rising was a celebrated author, perhaps one of the country’s best during this period, and a man whose writing had major influence on such colossal figures in the cause of Irish independence as Padraig Pearse, James Connolly and Arthur Griffith. One of twelve children (I’m not sure if they all survived or indeed where he came in the pecking order) he was born in Raheen, Co, Laois (leesh) and due to an accident as an infant was partially crippled. As a result, he did not go to school but was home tutored, however he did enrol in Saint Patrick’s, Carlow College where he made close and lasting associations with people like Father William Kinsella, the future Bishop of Ossory, and Father Andrew Fitzgerald, who would be imprisoned during the Tithe Wars.

However, despite being a capable student, familiarising himself with both chemistry and law, his poor health told against him and he lasted a mere year in college, whereafter he was forced to return home. Later he fiercely opposed the tithes imposed on the Irish people by England, and was very active in the war of the same name. Though his father Patrick was involved in Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association, James saw little future in this and when Father Matthew set up his temperance society in 1839, James joined but then suggested it could expand its influence and had it named the Shamrock Friendly Society, essentially one of those secret societies that the Irish Catholic clergy hierarchy would come to despise, as we will see in the next chapter, and who would raise once again the flag of Irish freedom. Father and son were so much opposed that in the end their house could not hold both of them, and so James was obliged to leave.

The year was 1844, a mere three years before the Great Famine would grip the country in icy dead fingers, and James travelled to the capital and then to Belfast in his quest to try to find ways to help the Irish poor, but again his bad health was his worst enemy, and having been diagnosed with what it believed to have been consumption (TB) he was forced to mend bridges with his father and return home. It was from here, perhaps ironically, that he would begin to make his voice properly heard, as he wrote articles for The Nation and The Felon, putting across clearly and concisely his views on Irish independence and his contempt for Repeal, no doubt to the chagrin of his father: “I will never contribute one shilling, or give my name, heart or hand for such an object as the simple Repeal.”

He was soon recognised as one of the brightest new writers emerging in Irish nationalist circles, and on the subject of the nascent Irish Confederation (which would become Young Ireland) he had this to say: “in what form of words you please; but denounce nothing—proscribe nothing, more especially of your own freedom of action. Leave yourselves free individually and collectively.” He continued “if any resolution, or pledge, be adopted to seek Legislative independence by moral force and legal proceedings alone, with a denunciation, or renunciation of all or any other means or proceedings, you may have millions better and stronger men than I to join you; but you won’t have me. . . . There has already, I think, been too much giving in on this question of means and force.” He wrote extensively about tenants’ rights, the poor, the Irish landlords, and, as it hit, the famine.

[i]“Famine, more or less, was in 500,000 families—famine with all its diseases and decay; famine, with all its fears and horrors; famine, with all its dreadful pains and more dreadful debility. All pined and wasted, sickened and drooped; numbers died—the strong man, the fair maiden, the infant—the landlord got his rent… The 8,000 individuals who are owners of Ireland by divine right and the grant of God, confirm (by themselves) in sundry successive acts of parliament have a full view of these coming results and have distinctly declared their intention of serving notice to quit on the people of Ireland…The landlords have adopted the process of depopulating the island and are pressing it forward to their own destruction, or to ours…” Fintan Lalor’s view was that the Landlords were “enforcing self-defence on us.”

Still, gifted writer though he was, he soon had to admit he was no orator, as a planned public meeting at Holycross, Co. Tipperary failed miserably, his lack of effectiveness as a public speaker and his own poor health showing him he was better conducting his battle from behind a desk and with pen and ink rather than trying to rouse the people personally. But his words continued to resonate through Ireland (or at least, in the ears of those who weren’t dying of hunger or disease, or making for the coffin ships, one assumes) and brought him to the notice of John Mitchel, among others, for whom he would write in both nationalist journals, campaigning, indeed, against the transportation of both he and his fellow writer John Martin.

Both appeals failed, and Lawlor blasted the decision, writing that “The rights of property may be pleaded. No one has more respect for the than I have; but I do class among them the robber’s right by which the lands of this country are now held in fee for the British Crown. I acknowledge no right of property in a small class which goes to abrogate the rights of a numerous people… I deny and challenge all such rights, howsoever founded or enforced. I challenge them as founded only on the code of the brigand, and enforced only by the sanction of the hangman.”

Inevitably, of course, with such bold and (in the eyes of Dublin Castle and Westminster) treasonous pronouncements as "We hold the present existing government of this island and all existing rights of property in our soil, to be mere usurpation and tyranny, and to be null and void as of moral effect; and our purpose is to abolish them entirely, or lose our lives in the attempt. The right founded on conquest and affirmed by laws made by the conquerors themselves, we regard as no other than the right of the robber on a larger scale. We owe no obedience to laws enacted by another nation without our consent, nor respect to assumed rights of property which are starving and exterminating our people…” and “We have determined to set about creating, as speedily as possible, a military organisation, of which the Felons office shall be the centre and citadel. As a first step of proceeding, we are now founding a Club which, it is intended, shall consist of one, two or more persons from each parish throughout Ireland who are to be in immediate connection and correspondence with this office. . . . A prospectus and set of rules are in preparation, which we will publish when completed. But without waiting for such publication, we earnestly request every man in Ireland who desires to enrol himself as a colleague and comrade, and as a member of the Felon Club, will signify his wish by letter to the provisional secretary, Mr. Joseph Brenan, Felon office, 12 Trinity Street” to say nothing of his final article, wherein he asked “Remember this—that somewhere and somehow, and by somebody, a beginning must be made. Who strikes the first blow for Ireland? Who draws first blood for Ireland? Who wins a wreath that will be green forever?” Fintan Lawlor was arrested, but this time, in a way, his bad health came to his rescue and he had to be released.

This did nothing to stop him campaigning against the English, and in fact - surprisingly, given the state of his health at the time - he went on to help organise yet another abortive rising in County Waterford. Poorly planned, as ever, badly conceived and with no real direction it fizzled out, and Lawlor finally passed away three months later, at the age of forty-three.

[Trollheart]

Father John Kenyon (1812 - 1869)

In the spirit of his forebears who died at Vinegar Hill and who took Wexford the previous century, Father John Kenyon was one of what I have referred to in a previous chapter as a “warrior priest”, which is to say, he didn’t just support the cause of Irish freedom, but physically fought for it, in the process going against the Catholic hierarchy. Coming from a fairly well-to-do family, all but one of his six siblings went into the priesthood, but he was the only one to get involved with Young Ireland. He was part of Father Matthew’s temperance movement, but whether or not this brought him into contact with either James Fintan Lawlor or the Shamrock Friendly Society I don’t know. What I do know is that when Young Ireland was established in 1842 he was quick to join up, seeing the new movement’s goals align with his.

During the Famine - which he blamed, perhaps unfairly, exclusively on the British, preaching hatred of all things English from his pulpit - he was a tireless worker for relief of the poor, even providing work to the poor tenant farmers by establishing his own small “public works”, a wall he needed built around his house. Ah, I see he did meet Fintan Lawlor, as well as others such as John Mitchel, John Martin and James Blake Dillon. He was able to argue for and justify his belief in independence through violence by showing that the Old Testament God had not been above ordering murder, rape and even taking a hand in the demolition of certain cities, and basically laying bare the whole dark hypocrisy of such a god bleating “Thou shalt not kill” while advocating his followers to do just that to the people who wouldn’t bow down and worship him. Take that, Christianity!

He had a lot to say about Daniel O’Connell, too, none of it good: “We have been guided, step by step, self-hoodwinked to such an abyss of physical and moral misery – to such a condition of helpless and hopeless degradation, as no race of mankind was ever plunged in since the creation. We are a nation of beggars – mean, shameless, and lying beggars. And this is where O’Connell has guided us.” Not for Father Kenyon the hypocrisy of lamenting his enemy after he had passed on, as he made clear in no uncertain terms at the Liberator’s death, even going so far as to castigate those of Young Ireland who eulogised him: “On the contrary, I think that Mr. O’Connell has been doing before his death, and was likely to continue doing so long as he might live, very grievous injury to Ireland; so that I account his death rather a gain than a loss to this country.” Well, he was nothing if not consistent.

When the Irish Confederacy was set up it was not trusted by the Catholic powers, since it also included Protestants and Presbyterians, so the patronage of Father Kenyon was of immense value to the new society, and when John Mitchel was transported in 1848 Kenyon became the loudest voice agitating for action within the society, even pushing for it to become a secret society, capable of becoming a stand-in government for Ireland should an uprising succeed. Naturally, his actions brought him into conflict, even head-on collision with his superiors in the Church, and he was given an ultimatum: to get out of politics or get out of the clergy. He hedged his bets, agreeing not to support armed rebellion, but still giving it his blessing.

Perhaps hard to understand now, but like John Mitchel, Kenyon (and indeed John Martin - the three of them known informally as “the three Johns”) was against abolition, leading to his epithet of “the slave tolerating priest from Tipperary”. Political affiliations aside, I do find it hard to credit how men like Kenyon, Mitchel and Martin could fight for the freedom of their own people yet tolerate, even support the enslavement of their American brothers. Might be worthy of a later article, but I don’t want to stray too far down unfamiliar roads in the dark here: might never find my way back.

[Trollheart]

We Rise (Again), We Fall (Again) - The Young Ireland Rebellion

Throughout our long and troubled history, there does not seem to have been a single instance of a rebellion, uprising or even civil disturbance taking place that succeeded in its aims, and of course this latest would be no exception. I’ve already pointed out my own amazement that such a thing should be contemplated in a time when people were quite literally dying in the streets of hunger and disease, but it does seem as if their hand was forced. When the British government set about plans to arrest the Young Irelanders, having suspended habeas corpus, there really was no choice for the fledgling secret society, and they prepared to revolt. Not waiting to be arrested, William Smith O’Brien, Francis Meagher and John Blake Dillon were headed through Counties Wexford, Kilkenny and Tipperary when they were accosted by a squad of policemen near Ballingarry Mines.

When the police saw the strength of the opposition they faced in attempting to arrest O’Brien - miners, tradesmen and tenant labourers had all come to his aid and helped erect barricades to prevent his being taken - they instead took refuge in a local house, taking the children there hostage. When the tenant, Mrs. McCormack, demanded to be let in to her house she was refused entry, and turned to O’Brien, demanding to know what he intended to do about her hostage children? O’Brien was negotiating with the police when a shot was fired, and all hell broke loose. For the next few hours, the rebels and the police fought to a stand-off, until reinforcements for the police arrived, and the rebels had to melt away, ending the short-lived and almost humorous Young Ireland rising. I don’t know what happened to the McCormack children after that, though I read the family emigrated to America in 1853, so I guess they survived.

Let’s take a quick look, then, at the main figures behind this (snigger) rising, shall we?

Thomas Francis Meagher (1823 - 1867)

Having spent time being educated in England, Meagher returned with plans to go into law, but was attracted instead at first to the Repeal Movement and then, when he became disillusioned with their policies, to Young Ireland. In 1846 he made his views quite plain when he delivered what has become known as “The Sword Speech”, in which he outlined the justification of the use of arms in order to gain independence for Ireland. It’s a long speech and I’m not going to transcribe it all here, but a relevant section will give you an idea of what he was talking about:

“Then, my lord, I do not disclaim the use of arms as immoral, nor do I believe it is the truth to say, that the God of heaven withholds his sanction from the use of arms. From that night in which, in the valley of Bethulia, He nerved the arm of the Jewish girl to smite the drunken tyrant in his tent, down to the hour in which He blessed the insurgent chivalry of the Belgian priests, His Almighty hand hath ever been stretched forth from His throne of light, to consecrate the flag of freedom—to bless the patriot sword.
Be it for the defence, or be it for the assertion of a nation’s liberty, I look upon the sword as a sacred weapon. And if, my lord, it has sometimes reddened the shroud of the oppressor—like the anointed rod of the high priest, it has, as often, blossomed into flowers to deck the freeman’s brow. Abhor the sword ? Stigmatise the sword? No, my lord, for in the passes of the Tyrol it cut to pieces the banner of the Bavarian, and through those cragged passes cut a path to fame for the peasant insurrectionist of Innsbruck. Abhor the sword? Stigmatise the sword? No, my lord, for at its blow, and in the quivering of its crimson light a giant nation sprang up from the waters of the Atlantic, and by its redeeming magic the fettered colony became a daring, free Republic. Abhor the sword? Stigmatise the sword? No, my lord, for it swept the Dutch marauders out of the fine old towns of Belgium—swept them back to their phlegmatic swamps, and knocked their flag and sceptre, their laws and bayonets, into the sluggish waters of the Scheldt. My lord, I learned that it was the right of a nation to govern itself—not in this Hall, but upon the ramparts of Antwerp.”

It’s a bit much isn’t it really? Glamourising violent uprising by cataloguing the - dubious and very much dependent on your view - benefits of taking up arms. It’s like saying war is terrible but it has its good points, or, to stretch the metaphor to breaking point, Hitler was a cunt but at least the trains ran on time!

Six months later, Meagher, along with William Smith O’Brien,Thomas Devin Reilly and John Mitchel formed the Irish Confederation, and the following year he and O’Brien travelled to France and returned with what would be the official Irish tricolour, given to them by sympathetic French women. After the failed uprising, he and his co-conspirators were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, but public outcry led to the sentences being commuted to transportation for life, and Meagher found himself on the other side of the world, in Van Diemen’s Land, off the coast of Australia. In 1852 he escaped, leaving behind his heavily-pregnant wife, and fled to America where he founded a local Irish newspaper and became a naturalised American citizen.

By the way, if you’re wondering about his wife and child (he didn’t) they were not to last long. She died two years later - though she did join him in America for a short time - their son dying almost four months after his birth. Meagher went on to marry an American woman, and enlisted in the New York State Militia as a captain, then to the Union Army at the outbreak of the American Civil War.

He recruited and trained a specialised unit of Irishmen which he called the “Fighting 69th” (well, Irishmen do know how to fight!) and was quickly promoted to colonel and then brigadier general. After the war, he was elected governor of the Territory of Montana, and is believed to have died when he fell - or was pushed - overboard a steamboat on the way back from Fort Benton. He had made many enemies in his time in America, and in Montana, and there were rumours of his having been killed in reprisal, though no proof was ever offered and his body, having fallen into the Missouri River, was never recovered, leading to his being perhaps one of the only Young Irelanders not to receive any sort of burial, in Ireland or elsewhere.

William Smith O’Brien (1803 - 1864)

A man who could certainly not be described as having been born into poverty, O’Brien was the son of Sir Edward O’Brien, 4th Baronet, and could, in addition, trace his lineage right back to Ireland’s High King, Brian Boru. A Protestant and landowner, he was afforded the best education money could buy, and went to Harrow and Trinity College in Cambridge. Despite this, he became interested in the Repeal Movement, having previously clashed with the Liberator when he was an MP. He did what he could to secure famine relief for his people, but quickly came to the conclusion that the British government were doing and were going to continue doing nothing, and that the only way to help the Irish was to form a national government. This led him to Young Ireland, and the aforementioned excuse for a rising.

Sentenced at first to death and then to transportation with his colleagues, O’Brien attempted escape from Van Diemen’s Land, but unlike Thomas Francis Meagher he was unsuccessful, betrayed by the captain of the ship due to take him away, and he remained there for five years. Prohibited from returning to Britain, he settled in Brussels in 1854. Two years later he was granted a pardon and allowed to return to Ireland, but his health was failing and he died in Wales in 1864.

[Trollheart]

The Tenant Right League

When the Encumbered Estates Act was passed in 1849, as already discussed, as a way for absentee landlords to realise the best financial return from their failing estates, the rights of the small tenant farmer were of course ignored and trampled underfoot. Everything in the Act lent its support and power to the landlord, who could evict at will tenants unable or unwilling to pay their rent, and also refuse to compensate them for any work carried out on their land. In response to this injustice, Charles Gavn Duffy called for a tenant right convention, which met in Dublin in September 1850. From this came the all-Ireland Tenant Right League, which espoused three main tenets, which became known as “The three F’s”:

Fair Rent (assessed by land value and fixed to prevent the rack renting of tenant improvements)
Fixity of Tenure (so long as the fair rent is paid)
Free Sale (the right of farmers to sell their “interest” in their holding to an incoming tenant).

Though this of course angered the landowners, it could not be put down or dismissed as a Catholic agitation, as it had the support also of Protestant farmers, and many radical MPs in Westminster, as well as O’Connell’s Repeal supporters. Perhaps a rare, even unique instance of Young Irelanders (John Martin) and Old Irelanders working for common cause. The League won 48 seats in the 1852 general election, though of course, as always, such alliances were fragile and soon Ulster support began to crumble. Old suspicions and enmities came bubbling back up to the surface, and everyone must have known, Utopian ideal that it was, the idea of north and south linking arms and marching forward into a bright new future together was a fantasy. With Orangemen breaking up meetings, accusations of interference in religious and political affairs, and the opposition, or at least, lack of support of the Catholic hierarchy, the Tenant Right League was, like many idealistic Irish ventures, doomed to failure.

And fail it did.

With the death of its founder, Frederick Lucas, who had further alienated himself with the Catholic leadership by taking a - failed - complaint against Archbishop Cullen to Rome, the conviction and transportation of John Martin and Duffy’s emigration to Australia, the movement was dead in the water by 1855. There were some attempts to revive the League, but most met with little success until Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt would champion the Land League more than twenty years later.

Boycott: The Man, the Meaning, the Word

An interesting little aside, before we get into the whole Land War story and the people behind it, is the origin of the word “boycott”. I had heard the story but had forgotten it, so here it is for those of you who are unaware. We have to jump a little ahead, to the point where, as a result of the Land War and the rent strikes, tensions between landlords and tenant farmers were at perhaps their highest since the mass evictions during the Great Famine.

Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832 - 1897)

Having served in the British Army in Belfast, though it appears he became ill soon after and only lasted a year there, after which he resigned his commission and moved to County Tipperary, and then to the remote Achill Island, where he was involved in various controversies, including charges for assault, land disputes and a case in which he was said to have salvaged a wreck illegally. he next found himself in Lough Mask, Co. Mayo, where his infamy would spread back to his homeland, working as a land agent for the 3rd Earl of Erne. Land agents, or middlemen, were, as I think I have already pointed out in the previous chapter, almost more hated than the landlords themselves, who were seldom if ever seen by their tenants, and so became the embodiment of the oppression the landlord exerted over his tenant farmers.

Although Boycott himself seemed to think he was a fair man, the truth is far different. He laid down many petty restrictions, took privileges away from his tenants, and even refused to pay his own labourers an increase when they asked for it, causing them to strike. This was in August 1880. A local priest, and member of the Irish National Land League (see further), who fought for fair treatment for tenant farmers, had been involved in the labourers’ dispute, and when, the following month, Boycott demanded his landlord’s rent from the tenant farmers, Father O’Malley turned to the speech given by the leader of the Land League, Charles Stuart Parnell, only three days before, in Ennis, Co. Clare.

“I wish to point out to you a very much better way – a more Christian and charitable way, which will give the lost man an opportunity of repenting. When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him – you must shun him in the streets of the town – you must shun him in the shop – you must shun him on the fair green and in the market place, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him alone, by putting him in moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of the country, as if he were the leper of old – you must show him your detestation of the crime he committed.”

In response to this call, Boycott’s tenants began a campaign of, perhaps you might say, civil disobedience. When he issued eviction notices against eleven tenants, the process servers were prevented from delivering them, attacked by the other tenants and had to withdraw. News soon spread to nearby Ballinrobe, from which a large crowd descended upon the estate and advised Boycott’s labourers and servants to desert him; in fear, most of them did, leaving the captain to be forced to run the place without help. But his troubles were only beginning.

A campaign of withdrawal of services began. The postman would not deliver his letters. The local laundress would not wash his clothes, the blacksmith would not shoe his horses. Soon, the local shops began refusing him service, leaving Boycott in a kind of siege, so that he had to import provisions from outside of the village. The phrase “to boycott someone or something” originates from the treatment this English land agent received from the people of Ireland he had treated so callously. Completely oblivious, it seems, to the reasons why he was being so treated, Boycott wrote a whining letter to The Times, in which he outlined his situation:

THE STATE OF IRELAND
Sir, The following detail may be interesting to your readers as exemplifying the power of the Land League. On the 22nd September a process-server, escorted by a police force of seventeen men, retreated to my house for protection, followed by a howling mob of people, who yelled and hooted at the members of my family. On the ensuing day, September 23rd, the people collected in crowds upon my farm, and some hundred or so came up to my house and ordered off, under threats of ulterior consequences, all my farm labourers, workmen, and stablemen, commanding them never to work for me again. My herd (?) has been frightened by them into giving up his employment, though he has refused to give up the house he held from me as part of his emolument. Another herd on an off farm has also been compelled to resign his situation. My blacksmith has received a letter threatening him with murder if he does any more work for me, and my laundress has also been ordered to give up my washing. A little boy, twelve years of age, who carried my post-bag to and from the neighbouring town of Ballinrobe, was struck and threatened on 27th September, and ordered to desist from his work; since which time I have sent my little nephew for my letters and even he, on 2nd October, was stopped on the road and threatened if he continued to act as my messenger. The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house, and I have just received a message from the post mistress to say that the telegraph messenger was stopped and threatened on the road when bringing out a message to me and that she does not think it safe to send any telegrams which may come for me in the future for fear they should be abstracted and the messenger injured. My farm is public property; the people wander over it with impunity. My crops are trampled upon, carried away in quantities, and destroyed wholesale. The locks on my gates are smashed, the gates thrown open, the walls thrown down, and the stock driven out on the roads. I can get no workmen to do anything, and my ruin is openly avowed as the object of the Land League unless I throw up everything and leave the country. I say nothing about the danger to my own life, which is apparent to anybody who knows the country.
CHARLES C. BOYCOTT
Lough Mask House, County Mayo, 14 October

As a result of this self-serving cry for help, the British press mobilised, and Englishmen came to Boycott’s rescue, to help save his crops, which, after all, if he could not harvest them would not reflect well on him with his lord and master back in England. The idea of so many Ulstermen - hundreds originally, and to have been armed, though this was reduced to fifty and no arms, on the orders of the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Lord Edward Forster - descending on the south spooked many nationalists, and was seen almost as a prelude to an invasion. There were protests and unrest as the trains travelled south, but no violence in the end. Boycott, not surprisingly, found that staying in Mayo after that was not a good idea, and was evacuated to Dublin, where again he received threats until he was transferred home to England. Using the word which would forever after become synonymous with his name, letters to the hotel in which he lodged in Dublin prior to his return to England threatened to “boycott” the place if he was not sent packing… After this, the term passed into common parlance, and anyone earning ostracisation was said to be “boycotted”. Apparently, the whole idea went back to our friend, Father John O’Malley:

I said, “I’m bothered about a word.”
“What is it?” asked Father John.
“Well,” I said, “When the people ostracise a land-grabber we call it social excommunication, but we ought to have an entirely different word to signify ostracism applied to a landlord or land-agent like Boycott. Ostracism won’t do – the peasantry would not know the meaning of the word – and I can’t think of any other.”
“No,” said Father John, “ostracism wouldn’t do.”
He looked down, tapped his big forehead, and said: “How would it do to call it to Boycott him?”

[Trollheart]

The Land War

William Ewart Gladstone (1809 - 1898)

What is it with these weird middle names? Ewart? Never heard of an Ewart before. Wonder if it’s a corruption of Stewart? Well, he was Scottish-born, so maybe. Reminds me of the old Simpsons line: “Attention! The Gift Shop has sold out of Bort licence plates! I repeat: there are no more Bort licence plates!” Ah, you had to be there. Having served under no less than four Prime Ministers - twice under Robert Peel - Gladstone was finally elected to the top position himself in 1868. He was seen as a liberal politician, and said to be the friend of the working man. Well, coming from Liverpool (yes yes! His father was Scottish: I never said he was born there, smartass) he would be, wouldn’t he? He campaigned against the previous administration’s policy of trade protectionism - which was chiefly to blame for the Famine, or at least the government’s response, or lack of it, to it - and believed in equality of opportunity. This would in turn lead to his passing the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870, which was not as good a thing for Ireland as it sounds.

He was also a supporter of Home Rule for Ireland (though his efforts were thwarted) and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. He is of course remembered as one of Britain’s greatest Prime Ministers, mentioned in the same hallowed breaths as Disraeli, Churchill and Peel. However let’s not shy from the issue of slave ownership, which his father practiced. Ah and I see now the middle name came from the surname of one of his father’s friends, William Ewart. Actually, I guess he may have been named for him, since his first name was William too. Though provided with his seat at Newark, a “rotten borough” - a small area where voting was tightly controlled by the landowner - controlled by his friend the Duke of Newcastle, he won his own seat in the general election easily, and quickly became a famed orator and rising star. Due to either his own or his father’s views on the subject, he spoke out in support of slavery, but also championed the cause of lower paid workers in England, especially children.

An interesting if slightly self-serving attitude towards slavery, I see. Apparently he and his father advocated for eventual freedom for slaves, but only after they had undergone “moral emancipation through apprenticeship”, which I take to mean a sort of Columbus-like idea of “adopt our laws and traditions, and while you’re at it worship our god, and we’ll talk about it”. Right. They also opposed the international slave trade, but only, it seems, because this helped push the price of slaves up. Charming. Even more charming (not), quite sickening in fact is the attitude of the British government towards slave owners after slavery had been abolished, in 1834. Incredibly, slave owners were paid, compensated for the loss of their slaves, with Gladstone’s father receiving the equivalent in today’s money of ten million pounds. Hell, at least the Americans went to war over the subject! No such payout for the Southern slaveowners! Yeah, he did soften his position later on, but fuck him: he’s not getting a pass for that. It seems that was mostly to piss his father off and shake off the influence Sir John had had on his politics, so again I say, in that instance, fuck him.

There is, however, setting that aside for the moment, no doubt that he was a friend to the Irish, as we will see, but also to those suffering in China under the opium trade, as well as “fallen women” whom he, um, “met late at night on the street, in his house or in their houses, writing their names in a private notebook” (certainly sounds dodgy, though I kind of see what they mean) and visited political prisoners in Naples. When he defeated Disraeli in the 1868 general election, his promise was to “pacify Ireland”. In the mouth of any other British Prime Minister, that might have sounded ominous for us, but he really meant it. Two years into his premiership, he passed the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870 (often known for short as the Land Act), which proposed to ensure that The Ulster custom or any similar custom prevailing elsewhere was given the force of law where it existed.
Tenants not enjoying that protection (the vast majority) gained increased security by compensation for improvements made to a farm if they surrendered their lease (they had previously been accredited to the landlord, hence no incentive to the tenant) and compensation for ‘disturbance’, damages, for tenants evicted for causes other than non-payment of rent.

The ‘John Bright Clauses’, which Gladstone accepted reluctantly, allowed tenants to borrow from the government two thirds of the cost of buying their holding, at 5% interest repayable over 35 years if the landlord was willing to sell, though he was not compelled to do so.

Unfortunately the provisions in this Act were generally ignored or attempted to be circumvented by the landlords, and as I noted earlier, doing more harm than good, led to what became known as the Land War, a few months later. So that is where we leave Gladstone and turn our attention to two of the new rising stars of the Irish political scene, both of whom would be very much involved in the coming Land War.

Charles Stewart Parnell (1836 - 1891)

The son of a struggling miller, eking out a poor existence, an oppressed Catholic tenant farmer, these were just a few of the things Parnell was not. He was in fact the son of a wealthy Anglican landowner, and had a connection back to the Royal house of Tudor on his great-grandmother’s side. He came from a large family - eleven children in all, of which he was the seventh, and really does not seem at first reading to be the kind of man you would expect to be fighting for Irish independence, and indeed even on his sojourn through the southern states of the USA with his brother John Howard in 1871, neither troubled to associate with or seek out Irish-Americans. Why, then, did Charles become so deeply involved in the Irish cause? To be honest, I really can’t see, and other than reading a biography of the man - which I neither have the time nor interest for - I’m going to assume that it came about through his time as a landowner (seen as one of the more progressive in his High Sheriffdom of Wicklow) and his association with the Home Rule League.

Whatever the catalyst, he replaced John Martin as MP for the League when the Young Irelander died in 1875, and defended the Fenian Brotherhood against charges of murder in Manchester, bringing him to the attention of the IRB, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, forerunner of the IRA. The Manchester Martyrs - so known by the Irish; the British called the incident the Manchester Outrages, though in a way that would have suited both sides, given what happened - were three Fenians (Catholic nationalists) who, in attempting to free two of their brothers who were being transported to jail in a police van, accidentally (it’s claimed) shot one of the police officers as they tried to shoot off the lock. As a result, all three were hanged for murder. This we may explore in more detail when I write about the IRB, but for now it serves to show where Parnell’s loyalties lay, and how this would have helped ostracise him from his Westminster colleagues. Think, I guess, an MP standing up in the House of Commons and declaring that the Birmingham Six were innocent (they were) or maybe a senator claiming that Osama Bin Laden was killed illegally, maybe.

Parnell began to work with the Fenians, using his position in parliament to help obstruct business by making long, often irrelevant speeches (the filibusters of their day?) in order to concentrate and force attention on Irish affairs, which had largely been ignored. He also met Fenian leaders, and as he travelled around the country making speeches and I suppose you could say rabble-rousing, he reminded tenant farmers of the awful treatment they had received from wealthy landowners (notwithstanding that he was one) during the time of the Great Famine: “You must show the landlord that you intend to keep a firm grip on your homesteads and lands. You must not allow yourselves be dispossessed as you were dispossessed in 1847”.

In 1879 the Irish National Land League was founded by Parnell’s compatriot, Michael Davitt, and Parnell was elected its president. The Land League, as it was more commonly known, eschewed the previous idea of the Tenant Right League, that of gaining cross-border and cross-faith participation, and was exclusively a Catholic organisation, agitating for the rights of small Catholic tenant farmers. Unlike the previous “three F’s”, the Land League had two major objectives, which were “… first, to bring about a reduction of rack-rents*; second, to facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the soil by the occupiers [and that these]… can be best attained by promoting organisation among the tenant-farmers; by defending those who may be threatened with eviction for refusing to pay unjust rents; by facilitating the working of the Bright clauses of the Irish Land Act during the winter; and by obtaining such reforms in the laws relating to land as will enable every tenant to become owner of his holding by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years.”

• basically, exorbitant or unfair rents

Having already cultivated relationships with Clan na Gael (the American offshoot of the IRB) leader John Devoy, Parnell and Davitt were able to travel to the United States and secure funding and support, perhaps - unless I miss my guess here - the first time such assistance had been sought, other than for famine relief in 1847, and beginning the special relationship between Irish-Americans and their brethren at home. Scotland, traditionally no friend of the English, got in on the act too, setting up their own office of the Land League. Though two more Land Acts were passed in 1880 and 1881, neither went far enough for the League and Parnell and Davitt spoke out against them, earning themselves imprisonment in Kilmainham Jail, from where they issued the “No-Rent Manifesto”, calling for a total rent strike of all Irish tenant farmers, demanding all rents be withheld.

Of course, the landlords did not stand for this, and issued eviction orders against those who refused to pay, sending in the police and the bailiffs. Conversely, any farmer who did pay, and therefore defied the Land League’s edict, would be boycotted by its members, so in a very real way you can see that it was a lose/lose situation for the small farmers. The simmering tensions would lead, as I said, to the Land War, but also to an attempt to implicate Parnell in a double murder.

[Trollheart]

The Phoenix Park Murders

If one thing has remained constant about paramilitary organisations, especially but surely not limited to Irish ones, it’s that for every radical there is a more radical one who doesn’t think the current radicals are radical enough. In other words, when the procedures and strategies followed by the parent organisation don’t seem extreme enough, or fail to get the results they want, others in the the group splinter off into side-groups and launch their own, usually unauthorised and unsanctioned attacks. So it was with the IRB, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, also known as the Fenian Brotherhood or just the Fenians. In 1881 a faction calling itself the Irish National Invincibles broke off from the IRB, its mission to kill those responsible for implementing British policies in Ireland. Their main target was Chief Secretary William Edward Forster, but after repeated failures to kill him Forster resigned his office and was replaced by Lord Cavendish.

The INI now went after his Permanent Under-Secretary, Thomas Henry Burke. They shadowed him for days, and finally came upon him in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, just after he had stopped to offer a lift to his new boss, Lord Frederick, who had only arrived in Ireland that day to take up his new post replacing Forster. Tragically for him - but I suppose a stroke of good fortune for the Invincibles - Lord Frederick was not even known to the attackers, just happened to be there and could not be allowed to survive as a witness. It was Burke they were after, and they got him, and his new boss, stabbing both men with surgical knives.

Proving the old adage that there is no honour among thieves, and certainly none among killers, the leader of the Invincibles, in return for being spared when they were all arrested, agreed to testify against five of his members, who were all hanged. The clear implication that Parnell was involved in the planning, hard to refute (though also impossible to prove) because of his close association with the Fenians - if not the Invincibles - scuppered his political plans for home rule and lost him most of his allies in parliament. He did however make a speech in 1882 condemning the murders, and though letters were later printed purporting to show that he did in fact support the killings, these were proven to be forgeries. After his release from prison in 1882 Parnell set up the Irish National League which, as its name implies, was more concerned with home rule and independence than tenants’ rights and rents. The INL gained the support of both the Irish Independence Party (the loose collection of Irish MPs who supported home rule in the Commons) and, perhaps more importantly, the Catholic Church. However a split occurred when the scandal of Parnell’s becoming involved with the divorced wife of another MP, Katharine “Kitty” O’Shea.

Feckin’ women! The Downfall of Parnell

Before anyone jumps down my throat, the title is humorous, and meant to reflect the attitude of the times (and perhaps even now): I’m sure, to paraphrase Judge Judy, nobody forced Parnell at gunpoint to go to bed with the wife of his fellow MP, and it would be disingenuous and also, um, what’s that other word for blaming women for your troubles? Oh yeah: being a cunt. It would be stupid anyway to try to blame the woman just because he got caught. Damn fool knew what he was getting into (and where and with who he was getting into it with) and we can’t pretend he was a virtuous man tricked by a shameful woman.

But the fact does remain, without apportioning blame (because I’m not prepared to exonerate her either, though I will admit she probably had less say in things, this being the era it was and her being a woman and all) that the affair was the direct catalyst for the fall from grace and eventual removal from the political stage - and, not too soon after, this one on which we strut and fret the hours away - of the man who perhaps could have advanced the cause of Irish independence and prevented much of the bloodshed that was to follow his death.

So it’s therefore important, I think, not to just brush past Katharine O’Shea as a footnote in the political - and indeed, personal - life of Charles Stuart Parnell, and give her some historical space, let her tell her story, see what we can learn about her.

Katharine “Kitty” O’Shea (1846 - 1921)

The first thing I note is that she outlived both her husbands, so fair play to her, though I have a feeling she may not have had the easiest time of it after Parnell’s fall. Born Katharine Wood in Essex (yes yes, an Essex girl, what of it?) she was another, like Parnell, born into a life of luxury and privilege. Her father was the 2nd Baronet of Essex, Sir John Page Wood (seriously?) and granddaughter of the former Lord Mayor of London. My god, she even had an uncle Western! Western Wood! Wonder if he had siblings named Northern, East… yes okay I’ll get on. But it’s funny stuff.

Unfortunately, like many women who stand in the shadows of great men in history, I can find out nothing about her life before marriage, and while I could of course read biography of her, I’m not that interested. I just want to write a little about her and not skim over her. So I presume she was educated, probably in France, as was, to quote Grampa Simpson, the style at the time, and in 1875 she met Captain John O’Shea, who was an MP for Clare. The two were married but the marriage only lasted seven years, and as no children resulted I guess we can assume it wasn’t exactly a loving one. It should be remembered that back then, a woman getting separated or divorced was a huge deal. It was nothing like it is today, where women freely admit they had an ex-husband. Let me put this in perspective for you using my favourite medium, television programmes.

On the BBC period drama The Onedin Line, Ann Onedin leaves her husband, James. Now, so far as I remember, there was no legal separation in this instance; they had a falling-out which could not be resolved and she left him. Seeking work to support herself (a “respectable” woman in nineteenth-century England seldom worked of her own accord, and never a married one, who was expected to give up her job as soon as she was wed) Ann approaches a family about the job of governess to their children. The lady of the house asks when Ann’s husband died, assuming she is a widow. When Ann tells her that James is alive, but she has left him, the woman is so shocked and scandalised that she can’t consider giving her a position. In her eyes, Ann is a “fallen woman”, and she advises her to make amends with her husband before it is too late.

What happened? Did she? Meh, you’ll have to watch the show to see. But the point is, back then a separated or divorced woman was an object of scandal, gossip and the idea was held that it must be her fault, as women were blamed for just about everything then. So Kitty getting a divorce was a black mark against her. Now, she waited a whole five years before taking up with Parnell, but that wasn’t good enough for English society. To them, the wedding vows were sacred, and you could only marry again if your husband died. It was, most likely, not the same for men who divorced their wives, though I don’t know this for sure. I expect more latitude was afforded them, anyway, as, like I say, divorce was always blamed on, and seen as the failure of the woman. Really oddly, it seems that at that period, marrying again even if you were divorced was still seen as adultery! To me, adultery means you play away from home when you’re still married, not after you’re divorced! Oh, those Victorians, eh?

At any rate, as you would probably expect, our Captain O’Shea was none too pleased that his wife left him not only for another MP but a bloody Irish one! What surely got his goat though has to have been the fact that Katharine had not one, not two, but three children with Parnell, and while one of them died, the very fact of their ever having existed must have made him feel less of a man than his fellow MP. I don’t know the details of their relationship, but perhaps the fact that they had had no children might have been blamed by him on his wife being barren, and now it would emerge that the trouble lay in his direction, so that would have stung.

In another little historical quirk, it seems that when Parnell was languishing in Kilmainham Gaol the man sent to negotiate his release was none other than O’Shea, who, it’s believed, used his knowledge of the affair to emotionally and indeed politically blackmail Parnell into accepting compromises with the government. This might not be true, as unofficial gossip concerning the affair was already doing the rounds a year prior, and O’Shea had in fact challenged his rival to a duel that year, 1881. Presumably it never took place. Katharine was in fact not known as Kitty but Katie, however the popular press used the nickname for her as it was also a slang word for a prostitute, showing how little society in general thought of her. And what had she done? It wasn’t like she had slept with Parnell while still married to Captain O’Shea: the fucker had left her five years before hand! Some people just can’t let go, can they? Arsehole. Oh wait: a classic case of Trollheart not reading ahead before commenting. I see that although they separated in 1875, O’Shea only filed for divorce in 1889, perhaps because he was waiting for her rich aunt to die, and hoped to reap a windfall. Unfortunately for him, she left it in trust to a cousin. Probably knew what kind of a cunt he was. So then he filed, and I suppose in the eyes of Victorian society, Katharine was then seen as not having been divorced - and therefore, still married to the captain - when she hooked up with Parnell. Something similar to the plight of the abovementioned Ann Onedin, had she taken up with another man, which she did not.

Through her family connection with the Liberal Party, Katharine (whom, since I’ve just learned of the reason, I will no longer refer to as Kitty) brokered a meeting with Gladstone when Parnell presented his First Irish Home Rule Bill in 1886. Though it’s hard to find solid details, I believe she’s accepted as having been all but Parnell’s right-hand woman in politics, and a great help to the man, but it’s a story without any happy ending. After O’Shea had divorced her, Katharine was free to marry her lover, and did, in 1891, becoming Mrs. Katharine Stuart Parnell, but it was not to be a long and happy life of blissful marriage. They had only four months together before Parnell got sick and died (see below) and a further blow was to follow when the divorce court, ever on the side of the man, awarded custody of her two remaining children to O’Shea, so in almost one moment she lost both her lover and new husband and both her children. She also found herself vilified for outraging Catholic society by daring to marry again, and died in obscurity, friendless and alone.

She would have been forgotten, most likely, had it not been for Henry Harrison, Parnell’s bodyguard and aide-de-camp, who looked after her on his ex-boss’s behalf when Parnell died, and learned from her the true story of their affair, not the salacious one that the press were reporting. It’s through him that we have the real image of Parnell and of Katharine O’Shea, and her legacy was praised in 2022 when the Taoiseach Michael Martin said, during the annual Ivy Day memorial that commemorates Parnell’s (though not her) life that she has been treated “terribly” by Irish history and “We should honour her as an individual and as a pillar who enabled his work for our country."

It’s rather ironic, and yet totally expected, that on the one hand, Charles Stuart Parnell is lauded and praised as one of Ireland’s greatest heroes, yet the woman without whom his legacy might have been so tarnished it faded away altogether has been forgotten, misremembered and miscast, and relegated to a footnote in our struggle for independence and self-determination. She deserves more than that.

As for Parnell himself, his was perhaps the most shocking and total downfall in Irish politics. The scandal, and subsequent split of his party, destroyed both Charles Stuart Parnell and the chances of any Home Rule bill being passed. The wagging finger of morality is a hard one to avoid, and both Gladstone’s Liberal party and indeed - jumping somewhat on the moralising bandwagon a bit later - the Catholic Church pointed it hard at the man who had been called “the uncrowned king of Ireland”. Under such pressure, he toppled and despite frenzied attempts to revive his political career (or indeed, directly due to them, as he contracted pneumonia as a result of one of his campaigns) he died in 1891 at the age of 55.

Despite his fall and failure though, Parnell is still revered as one of Ireland’s greatest and most devoted sons, perhaps the more so because he was a Protestant but fought doggedly for Home Rule, and literally gave all he had for the country of his birth. It’s said that at his funeral, as more and more mourners joined the cortege, each time it stopped at the grave of an Irish martyr, three hours passed before it could move again. People (presumably women) fainted at the sight of his coffin. No less than thirty bands accompanied the procession, and estimates of the crowd range from 100,000 to 200,000.

Would it be fair to blame Parnell’s fall on Katherine O’Shea? Did a “fallen woman” contribute to, or even bring about his defeat and death? I don’t believe so: Parnell knew what he was getting into, and Katherine’s ex-husband, Captain John O’Shea, only refrained from starting divorce proceedings because of his relationship to her elderly aunt, upon whom he relied for financial help. She could not last forever, and once she died, Parnell must have known O’Shea would sue, and he did. It was a case of living - or, if you prefer and want to be a slight bit more colourful, loving - on borrowed time, and his time ran out. Perhaps he thought his standing in parliament was secure enough and dominating enough for him to ride out the divorce. In that one matter, he had reckoned without the po-faced Victorian morality, allied to the disapproval of an equally po-faced Catholic Church, and in the end, it was these two opposing forces, working for once in concert, which brought down one of Ireland’s greatest leaders.