FAMINE ECHOES
GILL & MACMILLAN
I gcuimhne
For my father, Charlie Porter, who died while I was researching the material for this book, and for my mother, Mary. Thanks for sharing your memories.
Contents
Cover
Title page
Dedication
Chapter 1: Folk Memory and the Famine
Chapter 2: Before the Bad Times
Chapter 3: Abundance Abused and the Blight
Chapter 4: Turnips, Blood, Herbs and Fish
Chapter 5: ‘No Sin and You Starving’
Chapter 6: Mouths Stained Green
Chapter 7: ‘The Fever, God Bless Us’
Chapter 8: The Paupers and the Poorhouse
Chapter 9: Boilers, Stirabout and ‘Yellow Male’
Chapter 10: New Lines and ‘Male Roads’
Chapter 11: ‘Soupers’, ‘Jumpers’ and ‘Cat Breacs’
Chapter 12: The Bottomless Coffin and the Famine Pit
Chapter 13: Landlords, Grain and Government
Chapter 14: Agents, Grabbers and Gombeen Men
Chapter 15: ‘A Terrible Levelling of Houses’
Chapter 16: The Coffin Ships and the Going Away
Chapter 17: Of Curses, Kindness and Miraculous Food
Doctor Knows Best
Generosity Rewarded – Food Replenished
Miraculous Food – Strange Visitor
Prayers Answered – Miraculous Food
Grain From Chaff
Food From Fairies
Milk-stealing Witch
Come Butter Come
Meanness Cursed
Saved From the Grave
Outwitting the Soupers
Appendix I
Famine Years
Relief of the Suffering
Proselytism
Extracts from Emigration
Extracts from Local Evictions
Appendix II
References
Select Bibliography
Copyright
About the Author
About Gill & Macmillan
1
Folk Memory and the Famine
The Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s and early 1850s was the biggest social catastrophe in Irish history. One million people died of starvation and disease in five years and people fleeing the Famine made up a considerable part of the two million who fled the country in the ten years after the Famine began. Three million of the pre-Famine population of eight million were dead or gone in a few years and those who survived and stayed in Ireland soon found themselves in a totally changed society.
The landless potato-dependent poor, labourers and small cottiers, were wiped out. The system of land ownership and use was totally changed and modernised by the disappearance of the rundale system and so-called clachán settlements, as well as by a huge increase in pasture lands and livestock numbers. The class structures were transformed, and political, cultural and linguistic moulds were broken and reshaped into those which we now recognise as forming the basis for modern Ireland. The Great Irish Famine of the 1840s was to be the last major famine in Europe and a watershed in Irish social and economic history.
The extremes of nationalist and revisionist histories of the Famine stretch, on the one hand, from theories of British governmental genocide of the Irish, to the belief, on the other hand, that everything that the British could have done to save lives during the catastrophe was done, and that the number of people who died of starvation and disease was both unavoidable and exaggerated.
Much recent research has come up with findings relatively free from either of those ideological strait-jackets and a more complex and deeper understanding of the circumstances surrounding the disaster is becoming available to a wider readership.
Rather than fail to do justice to the work of those scholars by attempting to give too brief a summing-up of their work on the history of the Famine, at the end of the book I have drawn up a short bibliography of recent and readily available books to provide context for the range and relevance of the folklore of the Famine.
The unravelling, explaining and analysing of the various interacting factors which led to the Famine, and the reaction to it, is part of the ongoing task facing historians, economists and others. This work includes a constant search for new or underused sources of information about the Famine and the application of new models and research techniques to analyse and assess the value of the material. This re-evaluation and interpretation of the Famine is constantly changing in its conclusions or emphasis, as evidence and perceptions are challenged and changed by new research.
Perhaps the 150th anniversary of the Famine period may provide an opportunity for furthering debate about the historiography of the Famine. As part of that process, this book, and the radio programmes on which it is based, is an effort to look in detail at the folk history of the Famine and provide a comprehensive overview of it for those interested in getting a fuller picture of the terrible events.
Working as a broadcaster, with a background in folklore studies, I often feel that the folk memories of the oral tradition are one of the most accessible, yet undervalued and underused sources for understanding the Great Irish Famine and its consequences.
The folk memory of the Famine has been accorded little attention by historians and there may be many reasons for this omission. The use of folklore as an historical source has been rare in Ireland and in the English-speaking world. Traditionally the majority of historians here, though not elsewhere, have tended to focus only on the evaluation of data in contemporary documents.
There is no shortage of contemporary written sources for studies of the Great Irish Famine. Indeed there is a wealth of official documentation from government and its various agencies, from travellers, journalists and diarists, from charities and churches. So great is the possible harvest of contemporary documentary evidence that, perhaps, it is not surprising that folklore and folk memory are among the areas which have been forgotten, disregarded, or put on the long finger, as attention has focused on other more orthodox areas of research.
In some lesser developed countries, where the written records are considered to be biased or lacking in their coverage of native history, folklore has been used to complement or fill the gaps in written sources. Perhaps the ready availability of a wide range of written sources for the Famine period in Ireland explains why historians have, by and large, ignored the folk record. There may be other reasons, however, for the general neglect of oral history as one of the sources for information on the Famine and other aspects of Irish history.
Anyone coming in search of material about the common people, and what they themselves had to say about what happened, will discover an incredible gap in the documentary knowledge of the Famine period.
While there is a vast amount of written evidence, little or none of it comes from the perspective of the ordinary people. The communities who suffered worst during the Famine were, by and large, not those which had the opportunity of leaving a written testament of what had happened to their district and their people. Most of those who died were from Irish-speaking communities. Equally in English-language communities, many of those who disappeared were illiterate. We rarely have their own words, in either language, to describe their experience of famine.
To have no record of the voices of many of those most badly affected by the hunger, diseases and deaths caused by the Famine is a notable gap indeed in our record of those terrible events. The perspective of those who saw their districts depopulated by death, eviction and emigration is not the one which is to the fore in official documentation of the period. On those rare occasions where official documents afford us a passing opportunity to hear the voice of those who suffered most, we find them translated and filtered by the perspectives of the writers who recorded them for us.
One reason which has been advanced by economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda for so little attention having been given to the folk memories and oral traditions about the Famine is the fact that much of the source material is in the Irish language. He argues that many of the researchers in the field have been simply unable to deal with material in Irish. While it is true that a lot of the best material recorded from the oral tradition is in Irish, there is also a rich, parallel and interlinked tradition in the English language. A lack of understanding of the Irish language is hardly an excuse applicable to the equal neglect of the English-language folk material. Perhaps some other explanation is needed.
There appears to be a perception that the vivid accounts afforded by a folk history of the Famine would be emotive and therefore unacceptable to many historians. There has indeed been a fashion in Irish historical studies to make accounts of the Famine, and other events, as detached and unemotional as possible, with the avowed aim of giving a more scientific and balanced analysis of events. This is partly due to an effort to play down emotive areas which had been, or could be, open to exploitation by nationalist propagandists. It was, and is, often considered safer to avoid those elements which risk the arousal of emotions and passions.
For a broadcaster, a folklorist or non-academic reader of history, in search of a human and gripping account of the great hunger, it seems odd that some of the most vivid and graphic accounts of a narrative should be ignored, avoided or sanitised to provide a more clinically detached and politically acceptable version of history. Some revisionist concerns are understandable in the context of the often highly-charged debates surrounding Irish historical facts and fictions. However, it should also be noted that other historians feel that the glossing over of the human suffering of famine has been a disservice to both the victims of the calamity and to the writing of history itself.
The reluctance of many historians to engage with the evidence of folklore seems to be based on the false premise that the folklore of the Famine, by dint of its nature as folklore, carries a nationalist interpretation of the causes, events and effects of the calamity. A close examination of the folk material might well disappoint the nationalist propagandist as much as it might pleasantly surprise the revisionist. Perhaps this volume will serve as an introduction for all concerned.
There are, however, a few popular images which seem to crop up when the folk record is dismissed by historians and others. Yet, having examined the folklore of the Famine in detail, the most common of these images seem much more prominent now than they were in the context of that genuine folklore recorded with diligence and understanding by the expert scholars and field-workers of the Irish Folklore Commission some fifty or sixty years ago. These modern impressions of what the folk memory of the Famine actually consisted of seem to be as pervasive as they are erroneous and unrepresentative of the tradition as a whole.
Today’s populist images of the callousness and meanness of the British government, in the person of Queen Victoria and her fabled fiver, or of food-laden ships exporting much-needed food from Ireland during the height of the distress, rarely play a part in the thousands of traditions that were passed on orally within the post-Famine communities themselves.
There are, however, strongly attested traditions about many facets of the story of the Great Irish Famine and it is on these that I have focused. They include vivid pictures of the social conditions in which the ordinary people lived before the blight struck at the end of the summer of 1845. Among other things, we learn how they built their houses and how they existed before disaster struck (Chapter 2: Before the Bad Times).
There are many descriptions of the sudden and disastrous arrival of the blight and the decimation of the potato which followed. In an effort to understand the reasons for this disaster, the folk mind explained it as a type of divine intervention. It was widely felt that the blight was a punishment from God for people’s previous abuse of abundant crops of potatoes immediately before the Famine (Chapter 3: Abundance Abused and the Blight).
There are strong memories of the types of alternative food that the poor and hungry sought out when their main source of food was largely destroyed. The ingenuity and desperation of the people are clear in the stories recalled of dependence on the blood of animals, herbs and weeds, the scouring of the seashore and the devouring of the flesh of animals not normally eaten. The introduction and growing importance of other crops, such as turnips and cabbage, also lodged in the folk memory (Chapter 4: Turnips, Blood, Herbs and Fish).
The general absence of the potato and the scarcity of replacement foods, combined with the lack of money, inevitably led to widespread theft of foodstuffs. Stealing food is recalled in a number of stories which, at times, praise and excuse the thief because of force of circumstance. But the levels of deprivation are also reflected in tales of violence and murder, both of the victim and of the thief, if caught. Both poor and better-off took many and varied precautions to safeguard their stores of food against their neighbours and others. Yet, there are also examples of great understanding and kindness in the face of adversity where the basic honesty and dire necessity of the thief is recognised, sometimes even by the person from whom the food was being stolen (Chapter 5: ‘No Sin and You Starving’).
Undoubtedly among the saddest and most harrowing of the memories carried in tradition concern those who died of starvation (Chapter 6: Mouths Stained Green) or disease (Chapter 7: ‘The Fever, God Bless Us’). The pathetic attempts of families and individuals to stay alive left a strong impression on the minds of those who survived the horrors of the Famine. Stories abound about bodies of young and old being found along the road, outside houses and farms, in the poorhouses and fever hospitals. Among the most heart-rending pictures are those of people attempting to feed the starving only to see them die, their weakened bodies unable to cope with the sudden intake of food.
The terrible deaths of the hungry were at least equalled by the horrors of death from myriad famine-related diseases such as relapsing fever, typhus, cholera, and dysentery. The understandable fear of contagion from those already suffering from disease led to many measures being taken for self-preservation by those lucky enough to have escaped the ravages of disease. This often led to a lonely death in their homes for the families affected by disease, shunned by their fearful neighbours. Nevertheless, the names of many of those who tried to help the victims of disease in make-shift ‘fever huts’ were still fondly recalled in their neigbourhoods a hundred years later. Some of these were traditional healers who pitted their skills against the famine fevers, others were simply neighbours who bravely tried to minister to the sick and dying. Many of the helpers died in their attempts to help others.
Another element of the period which has remained strong in the folk memory is the horror of the poorhouse. The stigma of having entered the poorhouse was often cast up at those who managed to survive these disease-ridden refuges. Some of the recollections of the poorhouses are stark and depressing. Many of those who worked in them are depicted as cruel and heartless and the conditions are constantly remembered as being harsh and inhuman. What help the poorhouses provided to the army of destitute people, who crowded into them despite the stigma, seems to have been largely forgotten (Chapter 8: The Paupers and the Poorhouse).
Often, even the relief food which kept so many alive during the worst of the hunger is mentioned with disdain and distaste. The use of Indian meal had been limited or totally unknown before it was introduced by the government as a relief food. Many failed to cook it properly and suffered the consequences. As well as the dislike of the ‘yellow male’, the distribution of it was often seen as being marked by corruption, injustice and cruelty. The distributors of the meal were often accused of favouring themselves, their friends and cronies, while cheating or ignoring others in desperate need. Many of the images which come to us through the oral tradition paint vivid and detailed pictures of the physical distribution of the meal from depots and boilers. Tales of unfair treatment are matched by other stories of the distributors being outwitted and cheated in turn by local people who had quickly learned to play the system to their advantage (Chapter 9: Boilers, Stirabout and ‘Yellow Male’).
Relief food was also distributed as a means of payment on some public works set up to relieve distress. In other cases cash payment was made on these schemes. The stewards and supervisors of these public works are often remembered for their harshness, but sometimes also for their achievements in road building. The works themselves are seen as having been of varying benefit to the people of each area in the long term. Many are depicted as having been worthless to all but the landlord, and sometimes not even to him. Yet men and women flocked to these public works and there are hundreds of accounts of the conditions workers lived in and the kind of payment they got (Chapter 10: New Lines and ‘Male Roads’).
One of the bitter man-made legacies of the Famine period is the one left by the attempts of some evangelical Protestant groups to proselytise. They became known as ‘soupers’, for their efforts to gain converts from Catholicism by offering food and other comforts in return. While many religious organisations and individuals are remembered for their unconditional charity, including the Society of Friends and many Church of Ireland clergy, the stigma of souperism lasted into the twentieth century. There is much bitterness, and some humour, in the accounts of proselytising which have been passed on in tradition (Chapter 11: ‘Soupers’, ‘Jumpers’ and ‘Cat Breacs’).
The burial of the one million who died during the Famine has left its mark on the landscape as well as on the minds of the people of Ireland. Graveyards, famine pits, ditches, fields and the ruins of dwelling houses all hold the remains of those who died. There are chilling stories of the incredible efforts made to see to it that family and friends got a proper burial in a consecrated graveyard. Often it was impossible for the survivors to bring their dead to a graveyard and many makeshift burial places were made to cope with the huge numbers who died. Many were buried without coffins. Others were wrapped in a simple sheet in a straw covering. Coffins with sliding bottoms were employed in many places so that they could be reused when the body had been dropped into the single or mass graves. Sometimes houses were tumbled on whole families who had died of fever because their neighbours were too frightened, or too weak, to carry their diseased remains to the graveyard. Horrible pictures remain of unburied corpses being eaten by animals (Chapter 12: The Bottomless Coffin and the Famine Pit).
The Famine and its aftermath swept away not only the cottier and labouring class but also, to a large extent, the landlord. The Irish landlord was often castigated by the British government, as well as by ordinary Irish people, for being responsible for the state of Ireland at the time of the Famine. The images which traditional accounts give us of landlords are of the good, the bad and the ugly. Landlords who made efforts to help their tenants in distress are recalled with fondness and thanks, but the majority of memories centre on the heartlessness of the landlord class. Landlords were perceived as callous in their demands for rent from people who were in dire straits. They were seen as abusing relief measures to benefit themselves and their favourites, and popular imagination interpreted their final demise as being a divine retribution for their cruelty (Chapter 13: Landlords, Grain and Government).
The greatest odium seems to have been reserved for those members of the community who acted as agents for the landlords. They were often seen as having turned on their own, so that they and their families might benefit from the suffering of others. They were cursed and reviled by the people for what they did, on behalf of the landlords or on their own behalf. They shared this communal dislike with other members of the community who were seen to prosper by grabbing the land of those who died or emigrated, either by buying it below its value, or by taking it in lieu of unpaid debts, run up with shopkeepers and gombeen men who supplied food on credit during the period of distress (Chapter 14: Agents, Grabbers and Gombeen Men).
Mass evictions, during and after the Famine, have remained one of the most strongly resented and often retold results of the period. The deserted and tumbled dwellings of the landscape often continued to carry the names of those who had been evicted, and those who had evicted them, many years after both were dead and gone. Individual evictions and the fate of the homeless are often remembered in great and telling detail (Chapter 15: ‘A Terrible Levelling of Houses’).
Emigration had been a fact of Irish life for years before the Great Famine, but the scale of panic emigration caused by the returning blight and grinding hardship of the Famine often led to a portrayal of the Famine as being the beginning of emigration en masse. The Famine did, however, see a switch in the areas of greatest emigration, from north and east to south and west. Final destinations also changed, with the United States of America becoming the main hope of a new and better life.
We have accounts of the preparations people made before heading for the ports. There are memories of the hardships of life on board and what awaited the emigrants on the other side. Emigration, ‘free’ or otherwise, engendered mixed emotions. On the one hand, there was the relief of escaping hunger and death and the hope of a new life overseas. On the other hand, there was a fear of the unknown perils of the voyage, and bitterness, resentment and loneliness at having to leave family and friends behind (Chapter 16: The Coffin Ships and the Going Away).
Finally, we have the folktales, legends, anecdotes and folk poetry which encapsulated community experience and belief in stable and recognisable traditional forms. Some of these stories were widely told and believed all over the country. Many of them reflect a belief that goodness was rewarded and meanness punished. Some of them tell of miracles, others of curses, yet others afford a glimpse of humour in the face of adversity. This body of tradition was a product of the society in which it existed. It offered people an opportunity to deal with the harsh realities which surrounded them in forms which seemed to make the disaster more easily understood and remembered. These narratives also functioned in other ways by expressing the wishes of the community as to how they would have preferred communal life and values to be (Chapter 17: Of Curses, Kindness and Miraculous Food).
One of the difficulties in dealing with the reliability of oral tradition is to recognise and separate the genuine historical material from other material which functions at another level. Even where we have accounts of historical events passed on with great accuracy, the gap in the time from the actual happening to the time of collection poses certain difficulties. Where verifiable historical detail has become imbedded in accounts, the task of evaluating the accuracy of events is easier, but we must remain aware of the possibility that the passage of time may cause distortion.
The enormity of the Famine has led some historians to focus on it as the beginning of certain trends in Irish society. However, many of these trends can be traced to pre-Famine times and the events of the Famine are now seen as having accelerated and accentuated them. This may also be the case with the folk memory of the period. Accounts of all aspects of the Famine, like emigration, eviction and souperism, for example, had also occurred before and after the Famine itself. Because of the historical similarity in the incidents that happened in these related time layers, it would be surprising if, on occasions, some chronological compression did not occur. Some of the accounts given as happening during the Famine may, therefore, have happened some time before or after the Great Famine itself, but the thematic similarity in the incidents, remembered and recounted over a period of a hundred years, will have linked them to the more concentrated focus of lore concerning the Great Famine of the 1840s. The neat chronological demarcations afforded to scholars by hindsight and the written record are not the prime concern of the folk record. That caveat should not lead to the richness and accuracy of much of the oral tradition being undervalued.
The transmission of lore can be seen as happening in a number of ways. Within a traditional community, folk material can be transmitted through that community in ‘parallel’, to the contemporary members of that community, or ‘vertically’ to the children who form the next generation of that tradition. The constancy and accuracy of tradition can often be ascribed to the corrective mechanism implicit in that double axis. Where elements of tradition were in danger of being changed in transmission, the awareness of that tradition by other members of the ‘parallel’ community saw to it that the ‘vertical’ tradition also adhered to the known facts and forms of tradition.
The incredible memory of practised traditional storytellers in Ireland has been commented on by many authorities. Many of them made conscious and successful efforts to maintain the integrity of their traditions. One study of this phenomenon, in which I studied the craft of Micí Sheáin Néill, a renowned storyteller from the Rannafast Gaeltacht in Co. Donegal, demonstrated his ability to render word for word retellings of traditional stories, even though there was almost 50 years between his various recorded versions of these long and involved folktales.
Undoubtedly there were huge variations between the ability of specialist storytellers and the efforts made by those passive tradition-bearers who would not normally have functioned as storytellers. They only did so when pressed to in the absence of those who were held in high regard as storytellers by traditional communities. But the passing on of local historical lore was not seen as being the preserve of the specialists alone. Differing types of folklore were valued and passed on for differing reasons.
Even where these traditions seem to depart from historical fact, they may maintain a functional value as examples to reinforce the cultural norms or ideals of the community, of how it was felt that, for example, kindness would be rewarded and lack of kindness punished. Many of these formalised narratives predate the Great Famine of the 1840s; some of them can be identified in international oral tradition, while others have only a localised currency.
Part of the work carried out by scholars is the task of sifting through all the various forms that the lore has taken in the tradition, so that the particular properties and functions of each genre can be established and more fully appreciated.
Although we cannot now totally recapture the experiences of the ordinary people of Famine Ireland, it is surely incumbent on us to make every effort to listen to what we still can hear of those silenced voices, in all the forms or genres available to us.
I feel that the echoes of those silenced voices which we have in folk memory are the nearest we can get to the experience of the poor of the 1840s and 1850s. Survivors, as well as victims, suffered hunger, lost loved ones and neighbours, suffered the ignominy of the poorhouses and the dangers of the fever. Many of those who lived to tell the tale had witnessed the dying days of individuals, families and communities who would otherwise have lived and perished without mention in official records.
Some of the tradition-bearers recorded by the expert collectors of the Irish Folklore Commission were people whose own families had been evicted, people who had buried the dead, received charity, worked on relief schemes and existed on relief food. Others were those who benefited from the Famine as their families increased their holdings by getting the land of those who died or emigrated.
Many of these survivors of the Great Irish Famine lived into this century with a store of personal and communal memories of the bad times. Not everyone had the same story to tell. The memories and the telling of them varied from person to person and from place to place, depending on individual circumstances and experience. Undoubtedly many memories and stories of the horrors of the Famine were suppressed consciously and unconsciously for a variety of reasons. Other elements were simply forgotten or reshaped with the passage of time.
While we are not fortunate enough to have a written record from the ordinary people of the period, we are exceedingly fortunate in having a very rich and detailed source in the folk memory which was collected and preserved within one hundred years of the Famine.
The material in this sampling of the English language folk memories of the Great Irish Famine was collected in two ways (see Appendixes I and II). About half of it is the result of a questionnaire circulated by the Irish Folklore Commission in 1945, and the other half was collected from 1935 on by the Commission’s full-time and part-time collectors, who were later incorporated into the Department of Irish Folklore in University College Dublin. Indeed, it is evidence of the persistence of the oral tradition in Ireland that 150 years after the Famine, field-workers are still able to collect material from the living tradition.
Most of the material quoted comes from the children and grandchildren of the people who were eye-witnesses to the Famine.
The collectors who worked for the Commission were experts in the lore and traditional learning of the areas in which they worked and lived. They sought out those individuals who had gained a reputation as masters of ‘seanchas’ or traditional lore in a given area and carefully recorded their words for posterity. They knew the storytellers, the community and the shared folklore which was their communal property.
We are forever in the debt of such expert folklore collectors as Tadhg Ó Murchú and Seosamh Ó Dálaigh in Kerry, Seán Ó Cróinín in West Cork, James G. Delaney in the Midlands, Michael J. Murphy in the north-east, Michael Corduff in Mayo, Seán Ó hEochaidh in Donegal and many others who worked so diligently all over the Irish countryside.
The full-time and part-time collectors of the Irish Folklore Commission recorded their material in a number of ways over the years. The earliest collections were carried out with pen and paper only. The collectors painstakingly wrote down verbatim each and every word of the storytellers, singers and other bearers of tradition. Later came the use of wax cylinder recordings made on portable Ediphone machines, which allowed the informants to tell their tales with little or no need for constant repetitions to facilitate the collector, who could then go home with the recording to transcribe every word of the recorded voice from the cylinder to the page. Sadly the Irish Folklore Commission was under-funded and very few of the wax cylinders could be kept for posterity. In fact, what happened was that following transcription, by which time their value as sound records had been greatly degraded, the cylinders were returned to the Folklore Commission in Dublin, pared and sent back to the collectors for re-use. Apart from some exceptional Ediphone recordings now safely archived in the Department of Irish Folklore in University College Dublin, the only reflection we now have of these early recordings is the careful transcriptions made by the collectors and sent to the archivist Seán Ó Súilleabháin, who organised their classification, binding and safe storage in the archive.
Sound recording proper began with the occasional use of mobile recording units which cut disks in situ, and developed during the 1950s with the ready availability of cumbersome, but portable, tape-recorders. The difficult and time-consuming work of transcription continued but, from that period on, the original sound recordings made by the collectors could also be kept and safely stored in the archive.
Another method of collecting, which was used on many occasions by the Irish Folklore Commission, was the use of questionnaires. Hundreds of these were sent around the country to school teachers, local historians and other individuals who knew their locality and its traditions well. A series of questions was devised for each of these questionnaires. The collector then made inquiries in his or her own area for information on the various queries about customs, beliefs, practices, local lore, legends and traditions of all sorts.
A questionnaire on the Great Irish Famine was distributed all over the country to mark the 100th anniversary of the Famine in 1945. The resulting answers came to thousands of pages of manuscript which are now held in the Department of Irish Folklore in UCD.
The one major study of Famine folklore carried out before the 1990s refers only to the material gleaned from the replies to the questionnaire and makes no specific mention of the excellent and copious material in the general manuscript collection. This is Dr Roger McHugh’s chapter on ‘The Famine in Irish Oral Tradition’ in The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History.
There had also been a major collection carried out through the national schools in 1937–38. With the co-operation of the Department of Education, teachers throughout the 26 counties (to which the experience was confined on account of the Northern Ireland Department of Education’s failure to participate) encouraged and guided schoolchildren who were given the task of making a collection of folklore from their family and neighbours. There was a wonderful response to this scheme and, apart altogether from the high intrinsic value of the material collected in areas where full-time or part-time collectors had not yet had an opportunity to do their own collecting work, it alerted the staff of the Irish Folklore Commission to the strength of various aspects of folk tradition around the country. It also highlighted individuals and areas particularly rich in certain types of lore and created a large network of valuable contacts, many of whom were of assistance in developing the Questionnaire system and providing answers to the Famine Questionnaire which was undertaken seven years after the Schools’ Collection. The results of the Schools’ Collection includes thousands of references to the folklore of the Famine.
The thousands of pages of manuscript material collected by the Irish Folklore Commission, and preserved for further generations, gives us a rare opportunity to learn about the Great Famine from the perspective of the people whose voice is usually lost with the passage of time. It comes to us in their words, with their memories and choice of images strongly linked to local places, individuals and events. These are the words of men and women who grew up surrounded by the physical and psychological legacy of the Famine. They echo what they heard from their parents and neighbours who experienced the reality of it.
It is not the type of statistical material you will find in official documents. It is not a definitive overview or an analysis of the catastrophe in context. It is more a series of memories, personal narratives and interpretations of the events from the perspective of ordinary, often illiterate people. Those individuals in London and Dublin who played such a prominent part in the official history of the Famine do not appear in the folk history. The names which do appear are those of family and neighbours, local agents, landlords and clergy. The folk history is strongly tied to the locality in which it is found, with the obvious advantages and disadvantages which that carries. It does not provide us with figures to analyse, with details of administrative policy or the debates which surrounded its formation. The context given is almost entirely local. We have to go to other sources to fill in the historical context of the events described if we are to attempt to quantify them.
The picture which folklore gives us is broken and fragmentary, but that in itself is no reason to undervalue it. These thousands upon thousands of shattered pieces of memory can still form part of the mosaic of our understanding. We must rely on other research to sketch the outlines of these pictures into which the fragments of folklore can be fitted. The varieties of shape, colour and texture of the traditional folk material can give us a fuller, deeper and more varied picture than would otherwise be possible.
Not only can the folk material offer us an opportunity to view the events of the Famine from a perspective rarely afforded us by other sources, it also paints a picture of what was believed to have happened by the generations who lived directly after the tragedy.
Where the reality of historical happenings in a particular area can be established by local studies, this may or may not be in harmony with the accounts collected by folklorists in these areas a hundred years after the events. To compare and contrast the versions of history provided by oral and written sources is part of the process which is necessary to properly debate the trustworthiness of oral tradition as an historical source.
It is hoped that, by making a representative selection of the folklore of the Famine available in this book and the radio series which accompanies it, local historians will have the opportunity to review the oral traditions of their own area within the context of their other sources. Whatever the final results of such comparisons may be, there is another element of the folk history worthy of note.
Even in the cases where the oral tradition and other historical approaches part company on the actual events of the Famine, the oral tradition still holds an importance of its own which has rarely been studied or remarked upon by historians. If the folk record, as we have it, is an accurate description of the way in which ordinary people in the generation after the Famine viewed and understood the events which so changed their own lives and the history of their country, then the dynamic created by those beliefs has an importance of its own.
The accounts collected by the Irish Folklore Commission in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s from people born in the last half of the nineteenth century is unlikely to be vastly different from the memories passed on to, and by, their departed neighbours in America, Australia, Britain and the other destinations of the post-Famine diaspora. At this remove it is impossible to establish how much the folklore of the Famine interacted with other versions and interpretations of Famine history, but the oral traditions which ordinary people had heard, at home and abroad, surely formed part of their own understanding of the history of Ireland during the Great Famine.
A methodology has been worked out in some other countries so that the folk material can be used as source material by historians and others. As yet, in Ireland, no generally acceptable methodology, based on the particular characteristics of the Irish oral tradition, has been arrived at between folklorists and historians. While this work now seems to have started here, adjustments are necessary to fine tune imported models to suit Irish conditions. Until such a customised system of evaluation is accepted here, I hope that this sampling of the English-language folklore of the Famine will demonstrate the richness of detail available in it.
I have also prepared a similar collection of the Irish-language folklore of the Famine for broadcast by RTÉ Radio 1 and Raidio na Gaeltachta, and for publication by Coiscéim as Glórtha ón Ghorta.
My intention in both works is not to analyse the material in any detail or in a scholarly fashion, but to give an idea of the variety of experience recorded in oral history and the very human way in which the Great Famine of the 1840s was remembered one hundred years after the event.
All the material I have used comes from the Main Manuscript Collection of the Department of Irish Folklore in University College Dublin, including the Questionnaire material. Footnotes comprise the abbreviation IFC followed by volume number, separated by a colon from the page numbers. Dates, when included, are those given to the collector by the informant when available. As the texts have been heavily edited, reference numbers refer to the total contribution of the individual informant or collector as the case may be. Lack of time and space did not allow me to investigate further some four or five thousand other references to the Famine in the Schools’ Collection, and the material quoted in this volume is just a fraction of the material available in the sources used. I hope my selection gives a representative sample of the tradition to those who might otherwise be unaware of its range and richness.
Finally, I wish to thank Professor Bo Almqvist, Head of the Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin, for his permission to quote from the manuscript collection there.
Gabhaim buíochas fosta leis an Ollamh Cormac Ó Gráda agus leis an Ollamh Séamus Ó Catháin a chuir comhairle orm faoi ghnéithe eagsúla den ábhar. Tá mé féin freagrach as aon locht atá ar an saothar.
2
Before the Bad Times
In the hundred years before the coming of the potato blight to Ireland, the use of the potato had spread rapidly and saw other produce, such as butter, grain and meat, gradually disappear from the tables of the poor and become confined to the tables of the better-off or to the export market. Oats had become a cash crop in most of the country as dependence on the potato grew.
The cottier system expanded to the point where one-third of the population was living in one-roomed cabins and the labourers existed on what was basically a potato wage, providing the farmers with cheap labour. On the eve of the Famine there were two to three million cottiers, labourers and their families, many of them living in clustered settlements on previously unpopulated hillsides and poor marginal land, where the spade and lazy-bed cultivation allowed a perilous existence on a diet dominated by the potato. The land was held under the conacre system and the cottiers could be evicted at will by farmers.
The population explosion had seen rapid growth from one million to over eight million people in 250 years, half of that growth taking place in the 75 years before the Famine.
In 1836 the Poor Inquiry Commission reported that about two and a half million people in Ireland were living in such poverty that relief measures would be needed to help the huge number of landless and destitute in one of the most densely populated countries in Europe.
As the population grew, holdings continued to be sub-divided and on the eve of the Famine most Irish farms were small: half of them were less than five acres and in the west of Ireland only a quarter of the farm holdings were five acres or more.
Seán Ó Domhnaill, b. 1873, Scairt na nGleobhrán, Ballylooby, Cahir, Co. Tipperary
The typical local farmer held no more than ten Irish acres. Many held much smaller places. However, owing to this poverty he found it difficult to till his wheat, oats or potato plot. He often got help from his neighbours, a fact which gave rise to the now well-known word ‘meitheal’ [communal work party].
His standard of living was very low; he and his family depended mostly on the potato crop for their sustenance. His corn crops were sold to pay the enacting landlords, the Jellicos, Wallpoles, Jacksons and Waterparks. Of course the population generally was then double what it is now.1
Laurence Mc Intyre, b. 1865, Kilcrossduff, Shercock, Co. Cavan
The people were living in very poor circumstances before the Famine. From 30 to 35 shillings an acre was the rent paid to the landlords for farms in this neighbourhood. The farms were small. Some had four to five acres, very few had twenty acres, others had only two acres, a woman called Anne Collins had only one acre, there were people had an acre and a half, the average sized farm in this part would be about seven acres. The had no ploughs and they dug the land with loys, big old loy [láí, a type of spade]. They lived mostly on potatoes.2
Seán Ó Duinnshléibhe, Glenville, Fermoy, Co. Cork
Wheat and black oats were grown by the farmers who limed their lands well, as is shown by the great many old kilns in the district. The limestone was quarried both at Kildinan and Ballyhooly to make plant food i.e. to release plant food.
At Kildinan was a flax-mill. The proprietors supplied seed to the farmers. This factory employed about 200 and gave the farmers and their hands useful employment at home preparing the flax for factory. The poor in this way had a means of earning some money for their support. Acres upon acres were grown in ridges, no one made drills in those times, as plenty men were available to attend the crop.3
William Doudigan (O’Dowd), b. 1863, Redbray, Tullaghan, Co. Leitrim
An old man near here, Phelim Maguire, said to be 106 years [born 1838], said swapping was a great go in his young days, that is when neighbours had surpluses of different kinds of crops, say one strong in hay, another in potatoes, they exchanged the surplus, balancing the superior quality of one with a greater quantity of the other. Say 10 cwt. of turf for 1 cwt. of hay.
Days in swap [meant] exchange of labour. One man giving another days at a set job, say building or roofing a house that had to be finished up quickly and he paid him back at some such similar work. This gave rise to ‘on you’ ‘It’s on me’. He has a day on me in the bog or at the haystack. I have to go to him or send a man in my place. A man counted as good as a horse, that is if a man came with his horse and cart, say carting hay for a day, I must give him two days single labour without horse.
In the case of fishing boats, with say a team or crew of five men, seven shares were made of the catch: one for each man, one for the boat and one for the tackle. The last two shares necessary, as one man might own boat and tackle.4
Barney Gargan, b. 1860, Tierworker, Bailieboro, Co. Cavan
The population was very big before the Famine. There was a house on nearly every four acres of land around here, and some people had only two acres, and some had only one. The population was three or four times thicker before the Famine. If you cross Tierworker Mountain you will see where they set potatoes in ridges on it. The ridges are there still. You would wonder at anybody setting potatoes in such places where there is nothing but heather and long grass, but the place was so thickly populated at the time that they had to plant potatoes there.5
Thomas O’Flynn, John Melody, Attymass, Ballina, Co. Mayo
They had few cattle or sheep as they had little place to keep them. Most families owned a cow and a calf only and those near the mountain owned a few sheep each. As many as could possibly manage it also kept a couple of sheep in addition to the cow and calf. The land supported the household for they lived on potatoes and, now and again, had oatmeal cakes and butter and milk.
The corn was sold to pay the rent and taxes. Flax was sown, a few quarts by each farmer, out of which they made their linens, and wool provided the heavier clothing which was also made locally.
Bed clothes were torn up and used as clothing. Men wore short knee breeches, long tailed coats, high hats, white linen shirts, long stockings and nailed boots. Women wore a cloak with a white linen head cloth.
Extensive use was made of credits. The district had its ‘gombeen’ men who charged four shillings for the loan of a pound for a year. The loans were taken out when the seed was sown, as there was then scarcely any potatoes left, and repayment was made in November. Certain days of the week were appointed for the loaning of money and again for repayment. Only quite recently the direct descendant of the most notorious gombeen man in the district died and left a fortune of over £30,000. These were Catholics. Two families of Protestant gombeen men disappeared about 60 years ago.
Shopkeepers gave credits in the same way and repayment was made in November or before Christmas. The custom has survived in the seed and manure business still, and even when some farmers can pay cash, they put off settling their accounts until November and lose cash discounts by doing so.
Wages were small 6d. to 10d. per day and long hours were worked.6
Seán Ó Duinnshleibhe, Glenville, Fermoy, Co. Cork