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How Clare fared in The Great Famine


Ciarán Ó Murchadha pictured near the grave of John Busteed Knox, former editor of The Clare Journal, in the old Drumcliffe Graveyard in Ennis.  Photograph John Kelly
THE first identified victim of starvation in Ireland during The Great Famine was a widow near Dysart and the last recorded starvation death, in April 1851, was a man in Ennis. It’s just one of the chilling facts outlined in a new book by Clare historian, Dr Ciarán Ó Murchadha.

Some unsavoury episodes over the previous decade aside, commissioners of the 1851 Irish Census concluded that the results “are, on the whole, so satisfactory, demonstrating as they do the general advancement of the country”.
In his bracing book The Great Famine: Ireland’s Agony 1845 – 52, Clare historian, Dr Ó Murchadha compellingly refutes the commissioners’ superficial analysis by systematically charting the destruction of the potato harvests, the degradation inflicted by the relief programmes, the swell of fever pandemics through the workhouses, the mass clearances, the haemorrhaging emigration and the consequences of this seminal event in Irish history.
Shortlisted for the prestigious Longman – History Today Book of the Year international award, The Great Famine threads devastating eyewitness accounts of the daily horrors of the cataclysm through the political narrative of the period, fluently integrating recent scholarship and emphasising local and regional studies.
“There’s been a huge amount of work done on The Famine over the last 20 years but, until now, it hasn’t really been assimilated into the overall Famine knowledge base,” Dr Ó Murchadha explains.
“Nobody understands the minutiae of their area better than local historians. If you add their passion for the locality to rigorous academic standards, you get an extraordinary insight into these years.” 
Dr Ó Murchadha, whose 1998 publication Sable Wings over the Land chronicled The Famine in Clare, also wanted to reassess The Famine experience and its legacy.
“In my own work, I felt I had achieved a certain perspective,” he says. “I felt I would be able to say things here that had been insufficiently stressed – or maybe not stressed at all – and, overall, to take a new look at The Famine.”
Teasing out the impact of Westminster legislation during the 1840s on individual Irish localities proved a major challenge when writing the book but so, too, were the personal sacrifices of completing the project, while working full-time.
“You’re tired by the end of the day’s teaching,” explains Dr Ó Murchadha, who is a staff member at St Flannan’s College in Ennis.
“Over the three years of writing, I’d come home, load up on coffee and spend the rest of the night working, sometimes until after 12. My weekends and my holidays were consumed by it, taking its toll on my social network.”
Public works – schemes like road-widening introduced by a liberal government politically opposed to feeding the starving and which employed over 700,000 at their height – and workhouses actually accentuated the ravages of The Famine. The extent to which eligibility for these forms of aid was cynically manipulated proved particularly shocking. 
“Officials, from Charles Trevelyan [Treasury] to the Poor Law Commissioners to the masters of the workhouses, used the regulations to exclude people from relief,” says Dr Ó Murchadha.
“In this way, relief programmes became an inhumane bureaucratic exercise, the most hideous example of box-ticking you can imagine. If you didn’t fulfil certain categories, you were deemed not to be hungry, even if you were dying in front of an official’s face.”
As The Great Famine catalogues its monumental record of abject suffering, it emerges that Clare suffered excessively. Tellingly, the first identified victim of starvation in Ireland during The Famine was a widow near Dysart and the last recorded starvation death, in April 1851, was a man in Ennis. A reporter in West Clare in 1846 wrote how locals “died as the birds do when the frost comes”, while coffin-less burials were widespread and dead children were brought to burial in panniers slung on donkeys. 
New legislation equipping local boards with the discretion to dispense relief exacerbated the fraught conditions of the poor and landlords capitalised on this by initiating mass clearances of their estates. Clare recorded the highest overall rate of eviction in Ireland. From 1849 to 1854, one in every 10 person in the county was permanently ejected, prompting one journalist to ask if the government’s intention was “to make Clare one vast abattoir”.
Over two million – one-quarter of the Irish population – emigrated in the period 1845-52. The consequences for those who left and those who remained were seismic. “Many of these emigrants had never previously ventured outside their local areas,” explains Dr Ó Murchadha.
“Suddenly, they found themselves transported thousands of miles, from a rural to an urban landscape, where the inhabitants didn’t speak their language and, in so many cases, loathed their Irishness and Catholicism.
“For those who stayed behind, there was another kind of devastation: the landscape was significantly emptier and they were wrestling with guilt. Frequently, their survival had been at their neighbours’ expense. This sense of survivor guilt inevitably became embedded in the Irish psyche.”
Central to an understanding of The Famine is the prevalence of providentialism, the belief that the Famine was an opportunity to reform Ireland, among the British government, as the upbeat report on the 1851 Census suggests.
“It was endemic in political circles that The Famine was punishment for the Irish people’s sins,” he says. “It was never specified but for many ideologues, one major sin was Catholicism and providentialism informs many of the laws passed for Ireland after 1847.”
At the book’s close, the author explores one of the most controversial aspects of The Famine – was the British state guilty of genocide? It’s a question historians have tended to sidestep. The answer, he suggests, hinges on definitions.
“If you’re taking about a Jewish-style holocaust, a deliberate attempt such as by the Nazis to annihilate an entire people, then it’s not that kind of genocide,” Dr Ó Murchadha explains.
“There is a case for asking if the British deliberately used the Famine to thin out the ranks of the Irish by allowing mass death and emigration after 1847. Of course, it was never admitted at the time so it can’t be proven. But the question is certainly valid.”
Drawing on contemporary diaries, correspondence and newspaper reports, Dr Ó Murchadha evokes and articulates the searing realities of the catastrophe with authority and compassion. Lucid, astute commentary is complemented by a storyteller’s eye. Sifting through the evidence, even from a distance of over 160 years, the author was moved by the experience.
“I was overwhelmed by it,” Dr Ó Murchadha says. “I thought I knew The Famine but it’s only when you look at the everyday horrors you realise it was on a biblical, colossal scale.
“Of course it affects you. You’re hit by so many sensations it eventually has a deadening effect – much as would’ve happened contemporary observers. But I’m as fascinated by it as ever.”
The Great Famine: Ireland’s Agony 1845 – 52 is published by Continuum.

 

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