Exhibition explores Famine devastation

THE devastation caused by the Famine in the county has been recalled as part of an exhibition created by Clare County Archives. The exhibition will be showcased at Clare County Council headquarters, Áras Contae an Chláir, New Road, Ennis for the duration of Heritage Week, finishing on September 9.

The exhibition will explore each union and its electoral divisions and also the physical location of each of the eight workhouses in Clare.
Examples of figures in the workhouses are available from County Archives’ Minute Books that have survived. Such figures show, for example, that in Kilrush Union in May 1851, a total of 5,171 persons were receiving relief from the workhouse and its auxiliary workhouses; in Ennistymon in April 1850, a total of 2,713 were accommodated in the workhouse, while another 5,020 received outdoor relief and in the Ennis Union in December 1849, the total accommodated in the Ennis Workhouse was 2,676, while 11,519 were receiving outdoor relief.
Extracts featured in the exhibition give an example of the misery of the workhouses and what the inmates had to endure. Gleanings in the West of Ireland by Reverend SG Osborne, written c 1850, related the conditions of the workhouses in Ireland, following his visit to workhouses in the west, including Clare, Galway and Mayo.
“If you had many hundreds of children suffering from chronic diarrhoea or dysentery, I presume you would not place them by 30, 40, 50 or 60 in a ward, two, three, sometimes four, in the same bed; sometimes four so placed in a narrow bed, that two of them have their heads on the pillow, two their heads on the foot of the bed – this even when the disease is dysentery.
“Water is not an expensive article. Cleanliness, when the people are in masses, becomes a necessary element to the common safety. You would not then leave very many hundred children utterly unwashed for weeks and weeks together. You would not leave them in filthy rags, as well as unwashed.”
In March 1846, a Public Works Act was passed to provide employment for those affected by the famine.
In Clare the returns showing the numbers employed on the Public Works Scheme at the end of 1846 was 28,929. Captain Edmond Wynne, inspecting officer of the Board of Works in the Relief of Distress in the County of Clare reported in December 1846, “Although a man not easily moved, I confess myself unmanned by the extent and intensity of suffering I witnessed, more especially the women and little children, crowds of whom were to be seen scattered over the turnip fields, like a flock of famished crows, devouring the raw turnips, mothers half naked, shivering in the snow and sleet, uttering exclamations of despair, whilst their children were screaming with hunger.”
Reports from the Scariff workhouse of 1847 detail that, “The workhouse is so overcrowded with paupers that a disease almost amounting to a plague has broken out there amongst its inmates, the deaths there averaging from four to 12 daily. It is horrifying to behold a donkey cart laden with five or six bodies, piled over each other, going to be interned and not a person attending the wretched cortege except the driver.”
Passages are included in the exhibition giving examples of the evictions taking place, practically wiping out townlands. Up to 1,000 persons were evicted from one the Vandeleur estates alone in the latter part of the 1840s.   From 1849 until 1854, it is believed that nearly one-tenth of the Clare population had the misfortune to be forcefully expelled from their home.
One such land agent, who was responsible for mass evictions in Clare, was Marcus Keane, known as The Exterminator General of Clare. Keane was believed to have managed almost a quarter of the land area of the county. An example of his ruthlessness was his eviction of 30 families on the Westby Estate in East Clare, an additional 30 families from a townland in Kilrush (185 people) and in Kilmaley, his evictions resulted in four of its townlands being cleared.