Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

8

      Soon the smell of the rotting crop was thick around Ballydonoghue. It would be followed soon enough by the smell of corpses.

      The newspapers of Kerry and Cork provide us with a picture of deepening distress over the Famine years. There was relief, but never enough. Concern by some landlords, but indifference and cruelty from others. In August 1846 the correspondent of the Cork Examiner reported that the potato crop ‘was not partially but totally destroyed in the neighbourhood of Listowel … the common cholera has set in there without a particle of doubt’.9 By autumn desperation had given way to rage. In November a crowd of up to six thousand came to Listowel ‘shouting out “Bread or Blood” and proceeded in the greatest state of excitement to attack the Workhouse … with the intention of forcibly helping themselves to whatever provisions they might find within the building.’10 They were stopped by the intervention of a popular priest.

      North Kerry was devastated. The Tralee Evening News of 16 February 1847 described how: ‘Fever and dysentery prevail here to a frightening extent.’ The ‘bloody flux’ reduced its victims to hopelessly defecating shadows who squatted and lurched in roads, lanes, fields, market squares, on the seashore and riverside, reduced by the mayhem of disease, covered in their own waste, uncared for, and, when they died, often left unburied. ‘Men women and children [are] thrown into the graves without a coffin,’ reported the Kerry Examiner, ‘no inquests inquire as to how they came by their death, as hunger has hardened the hearts of the people. Those who survive cannot long remain so – the naked wife and children staring them in the face – their bones penetrating through the skin.’11

A parish historian recorded the deaths of eighty people in 1847, nearly half of whom were buried without coffins.* Kerry had the second-highest rate of recorded deaths from dysentery during the Famine. Starvation and disease would take the lives of around 18,000 people in just a single decade.

      Rural labourer in Famine era (Sean Sexton Collection)

      Thousands fled, emigrating to Britain and further afield. Taking ship to escape poverty was an established feature of life in the area and the expanding frontiers of North America offered opportunity. Garret and Mary Galvin from Listowel arrived in Canada with only meagre belongings but within a few years were farming thirty-six acres in Ontario, with twelve cattle, two horses, seventeen pigs and forty sheep. That was in 1826. Two decades later conditions were unrecognisably worse: the government logs of passengers do not even list their names. A few entries picked from the records of the year 1851, hint at the great migration:

      18 July: twenty-eight from Listowel make the crossing to Quebec on the ship Jeannie Johnstone.

      29 August: sixty-five from Listowel board for Canada on the ship Clio.

      26 September: thirteen from Listowel sail on the John Francis …12

      Passengers were often selected by their landlords, being of no further economic use on the land, or by the guardians of the workhouses, and sent away to North America with just the price of their fare.

      At Quebec the immigrants disembarked at Grosse Isle in the St Lawrence archipelago. Five thousand were buried there, the majority killed by typhus. A priest who went on board the arriving ships left an account of desolation:

      Two to three hundred sick might be found in one ship, attacked by typhoid fever and dysentery, most lying on the refuse that had accumulated under them during the voyage; beside the sick and the dying were spread out the corpses that had not yet been buried at sea. On the decks a layer of muck had formed so thick that footprints were noticeable in it. To all this add the bad quality of the water, the scarcity of food and you will conceive but feebly of the sufferings that people endured during the long and hard trip. Sickness and death made terrible inroads on them. On some ships almost a third of the passengers died. The crew members themselves were often in such bad shape that they could hardly man the ship.13

      A report from the government in Quebec noted that those ‘sent out by their landlords were chiefly large helpless families, and in many instances widows and their children’ and that they ‘were generally very scantily supplied … The condition of many of the emigrants, I need not inform you, was deplorable.’14 A priest gave the last rites to the dying. ‘I have not taken off my surplice today,’ wrote Father Bernard McGauran, ‘they are dying on the rocks and on the beach, where they have been cast by the sailors who simply could not carry them to the hospitals. We buried 28 yesterday, 28 today, and now (two hours past midnight) there are 30 dead whom we will bury tomorrow. I have not gone to bed for five nights.’15

      The Listowel passengers on the ship Clio were told to expect a sum of money from the Listowel Union on arrival. Nothing was sent and they were left ‘entirely without means’. The colonial government moved them on to where they might find work.

      In the same period Scots Highlanders were also being shipped out by their landlords. A Colonel Gordon sent his entire tenantry – 1,400 people from the islands of Barra and Uist – to Canada. But to those Irish who were forced into migration, and to those left behind, what mattered was their particular circumstance. Even if they had been aware of the sufferings inflicted on the Scottish and English poor it would not have ameliorated their sense of loss, or the accumulation of grievance that the Famine caused. Nor would it have disposed them to think more highly of the government and the landlords. The wider context is everything until it is nothing at all.

      My grandmother Hannah and her brother Mick and their friends were brought up with stories of the Famine as passed on by their grandparents. Moss Keane from Ballygrennan outside Listowel recalled his grandfather’s memories: ‘The families used to get sick and die. The fever was so bad in the end they used to bury the people by throwing their mud houses down on them; then they were buried. The English could relieve them if they wished … Many a person was found dead on the roadside with grass on their mouths.’16 As always the spirit world was invoked in memory of the dead. People told of meeting them along the road.

      They were in the ground but walking still.

One story relates how a prosperous landowner came to gloat at a starving old woman. She was so ashamed of her plight that she boiled stones in the pot and pretended they were potatoes. ‘But when the time came, she found flowery bursting spuds in the pot.’17 Another tells of a great fiddler from the locality who was buried in a mass grave and whose music could still be heard on certain nights. I found out that there had indeed been such a man, a famous dancing master who died of exposure in Listowel Workhouse.*

      I met a woman walking past Ballydonoghue church one evening who turned out to be a family friend of the Purtills. Nora Mulvihill was born and reared here and came from a line that went back to the nineteenth century. Nora was middle-aged with grown-up children, and most evenings she walked the local roads to keep fit. Drive the roads of rural Ireland any evening and weather and you will see women like her, heads down and arms swinging. She knew the land and its stories.

      We drove to Gale cemetery where the dead of the Famine from Ballydonoghue were buried. ‘Do you know about the doctors that were here?’ she asked. I assumed she meant the medics who visited the workhouse during the disease epidemics. But no, Nora had another story. I would leave without knowing how to interpret what I was told. Maybe it was just a story, like so many of the others told over the generations by the old people, a story with some truth maybe