Horrors of famine in Clare the backdrop for new Rachael English book

RESEARCH for her new novel The Letter Home really made Shannon author Rachael English think about the horrors of the Great Famine, particularly how it devastated west Clare, writes Owen Ryan.

The novel, which hit the bookshop shelves last week, looks at how the experience of the Famine still resonates today, over 170 years after it began.

One of the central characters is Jessie Daly, who has just arrived back in west Clare, after losing her job in the capital, and she begins to learn about what happened in her home place in the middle of the 19th century.

“Jessie is back at home after being in Dublin for a decade, she’s broke, she’s unemployed and she’s adamant she’s going back to Dublin in two or three weeks, this is only a short time to regroup.

“But through meeting a fella she was in school with she becomes interested in the story of a woman called Brigid Moloney who lived in the same area during the famine.

“Jessie discovers that Brigid lived on land now owned by her family, so she becomes interested in trying to find out what happened to Brigid. But the more interested she becomes the more turns the story takes.

“Part of the book is set in the present day, partly with Jessie in west Clare, partly with another character in the present day called Kaitlin Wilson who’s in Boston, and who’s trying to trace her family tree. The character that connects them in several different ways is Brigid Moloney who lived in West Clare in the 1840s. The story goes backwards and forwards between the 19th century and the present day.”

While the famine was one of the darkest times in Irish history, it has at times been neglected in the country’s consciousness.

Rachael said that she was struck by an article she read about one individual death in the Famine, and that helped set her on the path to writing about that period of  time.

“One of the things that provided a spark of an idea for it was an interview in the Clare Champion a few years ago with a historian who wrote a book about the famine in which he spoke about how one of the first recorded deaths of starvation in the country was of a widow who was walking from around Dysart into Ennis to try and find food for her children.

“When you hear things like that it really does stop you in your tracks, this woman walking into Ennis to try and find food.”

At the outset she admits she knew relatively little about the Famine, but was quickly gripped by the enormity of the events of the time, and by how hard hit West Clare was.

“I was kind of annoyed with myself that I knew so little. I knew the facts that we all learned in school and obviously over the years it’s something that we talked about a bit more and there’s been more interest in that period of history. But certainly my knowledge of the local story was very limited. I did become fascinated the more I started to read about it, the more you read about what happened in that part of the world. When times were difficult, during the worst of times, in parts of west Clare the treatment of people was notoriously bad, they really suffered.”

The Clare County Library website provides a huge resource for people interested in the time she says, with details of the names of those who died in the aftermath of the blight and in many instances some information about how they passed.

“They have records from the Kilrush workhouse, just hundreds and hundreds of names of people who died  in one year alone. I tried to count them but there were too many.

“But for part of 1850 and part of 1851 I took three surnames that’d be popular in the area, Keane, McMahon and McInerney. With just those three surnames alone, in one workhouse, in one county in one year there were 150 deaths. Entire families must have died.”

She says many of those who died were children, while adults were dying terrible deaths, left weakened by the dearth of food.

“A 50-year-old woman who died was described as a feeble old woman. A 50 year old man was found at the side of the road unable to speak, because he was so weak.

“When you start reading that sort of material it’s hard not to be completely fascinated by it, trying to imagine those lives in places we all know, those were the lives that people were living 170 years ago.”

For much of the writing she was confined to Dublin, with Covid-19 meaning travel restrictions were in place.

However, she did eventually get to travel to west Clare, where she tried to imagine what might have been happening during Famine times.

“Sometimes I think you need to walk around, look at the landscape and imagine what it might have been like 170 years ago. You look afresh at old collections of stones and stuff, and wonder if these were houses, who lived here, what happened to them, where did they go, all of those questions.”

Rachael was writing about two women who become fully aware of the scale of the devastation of the Famine, just as she was learning about the subject herself.

“I did find it easy to imagine that if you thought you had a personal connection how you would become a bit obsessed and it’d maybe change your perspective on your own life.”

Part of the novel is about how people share common experiences across generations, with the three characters having a certain commonality of experience.

“One part of the story is talking about the huge differences between life then and now, but it’s also talking about what the three women have in common.”

While the Famine is the background to The Letter Home, she says it is still a hopeful novel and there is humour within it.

“It’s dark at times because it’s impossible for it not to be. But I’d like to think that it’s ultimately hopeful.

“I would also like to think that certainly as far as Jessie’s story is concerned, because she’s a fairly lively character and she’s adjusting to being at home after years of living in Dublin, I’d like to think that there’s humour in Jessie’s story and her view of the world.”