Recalling the Great Famine in Kilrush

KILRUSH Mayor Ian Lynch is seeking support for a proposal that the West Clare town should host the 2013 National Famine Commemoration Day.

The area was especially badly hit by the Great Famine, which ravaged the country from 1845 to 1852.
Drogheda in County Louth will host the 2012 commemoration, the fifth successive event but Mayor Lynch is seeking the support of his council in a bid to host the memorial next year.
Clare had the highest number of evictions, in proportion to its population, of any county in Ireland in the years 1849 to 1854, when nearly 10% of the population was permanently evicted. Kilrush Poor Law Union experienced the highest level of evictions in Clare in the same period.
“Following contact from genealogist Paddy Waldron and several discussions in relation to Kilrush’s connections to the Famine and suitability for such an event, I am proposing the motion to Kilrush Town Council in order to prepare a submission for the hosting of the 2013 event,” Councillor Lynch explained.
Paddy Waldron is a founding member of the Clare Roots Society in April 2006.
“Kilrush has such a deep history and the Famine is something that is sometimes overlooked. I feel it is important that we recognise the past,” the town mayor said.
Councillor Lynch noted Kilrush’s links to the Famine don’t just apply to the workhouse, which was located in the town.
“Kilrush’s history in relation to the Famine goes beyond the mass graves and the Kilrush Union House. A mass drowning occurred when a ferry travelling across the mouth of Poulnasherry Bay sank. Many passengers were going back to the west after being refused admission to Kilrush Workhouse. They are almost lost in the archives, as is the case with the Edmond, which sank in Kilkee Bay, with a complement of Famine emigrants,” Councillor Lynch said.
In Ignatius Murphy’s book, Life and Death in West Clare 1845-1851, Poor Law Inspector Captain Kennedy, who arrived in Kilrush in November 1847, found that Kilrush Workhouse was being run in an inefficient manner.
“Such a tangled mass of poverty, filth and disease, as the applicants presented, I have never seen. Numbers in all stages of fever and small pox mingling indiscriminately with the crowd and all clamouring for admission. I had them separated as quickly as possible. It was really an appalling sight,” Captain Kennedy reported on a day that almost 200 people were admitted to Kilrush Workhouse.
“The workhouse in Kilrush served the entire Loop Head Peninsula, or the Kilrush Poor Law Union as it was officially known. So any commemoration could not be confined to the town and could take in the wider West Clare area.
“Paddy Waldron met Minister Jimmy Deenihan a number of times in his role as chairman of the Council of Irish Genealogical Organisations and will certainly try to encourage him to support an application from Kilrush,” Councillor Lynch concluded.