The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  In the late winter, sooner than in many other parts of the country, Esther saw the emergence of what people called Black Fever, fiabrhas dubh, known by physicians as typhus. By February 1846, T. Harrison, medical officer of the dispensary of Ballinasloe, wrote that ‘fever has been more prevalent within the last three months than in former years.’ The Loughrea dispensary, a little to Esther’s west, reported that in six weeks there had been an increase of 308 patients all due, said the resident medical officer, to ‘heavy rains, want of food, and bad clothing.’ Marching side by side with hunger, typhus darkened the swollen faces of the victims, and finished them. During the spring and summer of 1846, Esther Larkin saw people collapse from it in fields and on roadsides around Lismany. She recognised it. There had been a terrifying outbreak when she was a child, in 1816–7.

  Lice infected with Rickettsia, the bacteria of typhus, communicated the disease from sufferer to sufferer. The mere squashing of an infected louse on the skin permitted invasion by the minute bacteria. The excrement of the louse contained Rickettsia also. The extension of a helping hand to the ragged elbow of a sufferer’s coat could release the invisible and fatal powder of dung. Hence, clergy, nuns and doctors who tended fever patients, handled their tattered clothing, comforted them with a hand to wrist, shoulder or forehead, readily became victims. In Clougheen, East Galway, the doctor, the apothecary and three priests all died of it in the space of ten days. Many witnesses mentioned the mousy stench of the disease, how it drove one backwards when the door of an infected house was opened.

  A deadly relapsing fever emerged almost simultaneously. It was sometimes named Yellow Fever, fiabrhas buidhe, because it produced a jaundiced appearance. Relapsing fever was also transmitted by lice, but the bacterium was carried on the body and limbs of the louse, not in the stomach. This fever raged five or six days, but then passed. But after perhaps a week it hit again. There could be as many as three or four relapses, any of them fatal.

  Both fevers between them carried a generic name: Famine Fever. Under their attack, it became apparent that a fever hospital needed to be set up in every Poor Law union. Ballinasloe Poor Law union would in the first instance provide accommodation for fever-convalescent cases in its idiot wards, until a fever hospital to accommodate sixty-four patients could be built. The progress of disease amongst the people around Esther would render both arrangements inadequate.

  The gentlemen of the Nation tried to convey to their better-off readers a panorama of a disastrous west, Connacht, that is, and of parts of Munster. Galway and Cork were counting deaths, but the Nation had heard, as Esther had, of proud families pledging themselves to starve rather than beg. Hundreds of thousands waited for typhus to deliver them ‘from the griping horrors of want.’ For there was a powerful sense that ‘worse is coming. Hospitals yelling with delirious starvelings—churchyards fattening—drugs at famine price—doctors at fault—and parish coffins at a premium—to this state will the Government permit this country to be reduced.’

  At the end of the first winter of the Famine, O’Brien told his friends in the ’82 Club that he was going back to the spring sitting in Westminster merely to fight the Coercion Bill the Irish landlords wanted, the proposed new act of Parliament which would give the administration in Ireland special powers to deal with unrest, and to urge more positive options. ‘A year of warfare,’ O’Brien later argued in line with his attitude that spring, ‘would cost England a far greater amount of money than would have been sufficient … for the whole number of those who have disappeared from the register of our population.’

  In London, in the chilly House, pale, tall, intense O’Brien’s methods of delaying a new Coercion Bill to crush rural outrages were to make endless speeches, call for divisions on small amendments to clauses, rally a small group of Irish parliamentarians to engage in interminable discussions of every possible clause. The Speaker had in the meantime appointed him to a House of Commons Select Committee on Scottish Railways. On 3 April, O’Brien told the Speaker he refused to serve until Ireland’s problems were addressed by something more effective than a Coercion Bill and an occasional sale of inedible Indian corn.

  In the previous session of the House, Daniel O’Connell and his son had announced the same intention, not to attend select committees. The Liberator was by now, however, moving in another direction. He saw the chance of an alliance with Lord John Russell’s Whigs, and decided to serve on committees after all. To the young men he yet again seemed to have given ground. Smith O’Brien, who was not a ground-giver, still wanted ‘outdoor relief,’ not the workhouse system which would soon be shown to be horrifically inadequate. Outdoor relief was to be paid for by a tax upon all landowners, including absentees; that is, a tax on O’Brien’s own class.

  The Speaker warned O’Brien that a failure to serve on committees would put him in contempt of Parliament, for which he could be imprisoned. Images of the Tower of London rose in O’Brien’s mind, but he held ground. On 30 April 1846, while the House was deliberating O’Brien’s case, O’Brien stood by the Parliamentary Library door, ‘in a state of great excitement, frequently clasping his hands together in a very agitated manner.’ The vote went against him. The Speaker committed O’Brien to the Sergeant-at-Arms for an unprecedented imprisonment. The two rooms which were to serve for his detainment were not in the Tower downriver but off an open passageway between the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The first room was a cramped anteroom, the second ‘a low small (15 by 8 and 7 feet high), damp-looking and miserable room, with a trestle bed and a little deal table.’ Although he was permitted to go for short walks in the passageway, and could sit in the anteroom door reading, this was not nearly as cosy an imprisonment as the Liberator had enjoyed in Richmond bridewell. O’Brien found the rooms cold, with coconut matting on the stone floor, and because he refused to pay the daily fine imposed by the Speaker, the food seems to have been tea and dry toast. Though he did not know it, O’Brien was practising for coming steely disciplines of imprisonment.

  That past winter O’Brien had seen people near Sixmilebridge in Limerick eating potatoes an Englishman would not feed to his hogs. Now he had leisure to read of end-of-winter evictions. In East Galway, for example, in the area of Ballinglass on the Galway-Roscommon border, a Mrs Gerrard had evicted more than 60 tenants, nearly 300 people, for unpaid rent. The eviction, carried out by a detachment of the 49th Infantry and numerous constabulary, was described by a bystander ‘as the most appalling he had ever witnessed—women, young and old, running wildly to and fro with small portions of their property.’ That night the ejected families slept in the ruins; their neighbours were warned on pain of eviction against taking them in. Like the evicted throughout the country, they had now to live in scalps, burrows roofed over with boughs and turf, or in scalpeens, holes dug in the ruins of a ‘tumbled’ house. The nightmare which Hugh, years before, had tried to prevent in his own case, had come for these people.

  The Nation denounced Mrs Gerrard and publicly applauded another landlord, imprisoned O’Brien. But the other Repeal newspaper, the Pilot, dismissed O’Brien’s demonstration, and Tom Steele refused three cheers for O’Brien at the Repeal Association meeting in Dublin on the Monday following his imprisonment. ‘I cannot disguise from you,’ Smith O’Brien wrote from ‘his coal-hole,’ as the Times described it, ‘that the conduct of the Repeal Association has deeply disappointed me.’

  Mitchel, his friend John Martin, Meagher, the lawyer Doheny, another young Ireland lawyer named Richard O’Gorman, and the young woolbroker Terence MacManus all joined an ’82 Club delegation to go to visit O’Brien in London, to signify their support and respect. After their arrival, O’Connell met the group in his London lodgings and distracted and disarmed them by exchanging some banter with his adored infant grandson. ‘Meagher was obliged to push his chair back a little,’ Martin would later remember, ‘and to stuff his handkerchief in his mouth.’ When the delegation got to the point, asking O’Connell to accompany them to th
e House of Commons, the Liberator declined. The party went on without him. When at Westminster Palace, inside O’Brien’s dim, cramped anteroom, Meagher mentioned that the Liberator had declined to join their party, O’Brien merely smiled. O’Connell himself did in the end visit O’Brien, but it was unofficial, and arranged only after the Young Ireland delegation had left London. O’Brien was released by order of the Speaker after twenty-five days’ incarceration.

  On 6 June that year, as Ireland endured its summer, Daniel O’Connell, with his son John and other Repeal MPs, visited the house of Lord John Russell in London. Rumours quickly got around Conciliation Hall and all the newspaper offices in Dublin that a new alliance was planned between the Liberator’s Repeal MPs and Russell’s Whigs. O’Connell, frantic about the blight, saw this as the best way to elicit from the government at Westminster generosity towards Ireland. To the Young Irelanders it seemed the sort of alliance which had served Ireland poorly in the 1830s when the Whig Prime Minister Melbourne had depended on the support of the O’Connell members for survival. It would also ensure that Repeal became a dead issue. The Nation attacked the alliance, beginning on 13 June and continuing for months. ‘NEVER TRUST A WHIG…. Dream not that those Whigs are going to save you from your landlords; but pray that the Almighty might put it into your landlords’ hearts to save you from the Whigs.’ At a weekly Repeal meeting at Conciliation Hall, more strenuously and more vocally than the newly released 43-year-old O’Brien, the 22-year-old orator Meagher found his authoritative and, said some, patricidal voice. Reluctantly recognised by the chair, he uttered a most thorough-going attack on the alliance, a speech which one of the Liberator’s lieutenants could describe only as ‘malevolent.’

  Meagher believed in oratory as the supreme artful weapon, a matter of style, cadence and the application of controlled but massive energy. The genial but yearning dandy had studied the styles of Carlyle, Lamartine and Emmet, and possessed an exceptional gift: he was potent in imagery but he was sparing of the indulgent rage which is a trap for young activists. Meagher, said Duffy, ‘was at that time a youth of twenty-two, who had scarcely heard his own voice in a college debating society, and had not written a line for the public beyond one feeble copy of verses in the Nation.’ But now, ‘he began to address the Association in language such as it had never heard—the language not only of conviction … but of passion, poetry, and imagination.’

  Meagher demanded:

  what was the condition of the people—what was the condition of the country—during the reign of the late Whig government? Your commerce—did that thrive? Your manufacturers—were they encouraged? Your fisheries—were they protected? Your wastelands—they were two million acres—were they reclaimed? How fared the Irish artisan—how fared the Irish peasant? Where one pined, as he yet pines, in your beggared cities, the other starved, as he yet starves, upon your fruitful soil.

  The sneers of the Repeal officials Steele and Ray, the hostility of John O’Connell, could not halt the boy. The Poor Law Commissioners, Meagher said, mainly Englishmen and Scotsmen, were examples of Whig mercy. They had been authorised to impose upon the Irish an alien form of relief. ‘The poor houses were soon stocked with vermined rags, and broken hearts, with orphan childhood, fevered manhood and desolate old age. Whilst those coarse specimens of the Tudor Gothic were being thus filled, your custom house was drained—and now it stands upon your silent quay.’ His attack turned to an easy target, Dublin Castle. There was gaiety in those courts, he said, and brilliance amongst the visitors. ‘But were there bright eyes, and happy hearts, and busy hands, in the tenements of the Liberties?’ So, he called with desolating irony:

  Name your terms to the Whigs…. Lease them your vote for another experimental session … pat down your demands to their crippled powers of concession … give over your notions about self-governance … speak no more than the Irish genius, the rearing up of Irish art, the planting of an Irish flag … sustain the new police. Be tactful, that is, be partisan—be sensible, that is, cease to be honest—be rational, that is, conceive the poorest possible opinion of your country.

  Meagher had referred during his oration to the late Davis as ‘our leader and our prophet,’ and in the uproar of applause and dissent which followed his Promethean speech, Steele, the chief Repeal warden, moved a motion that the Irish people acknowledged no leader but O’Connell. The Liberator in London was assured that the sentiment of the meeting, once ‘the fascination of Meagher’s speech was off,’ was entirely against Young Ireland. But throughout the country thousands of Irishmen and women who still had a mind for politics, were grateful to Meagher for so powerfully and bravely stating their own misgivings about O’Connell and Lord John Russell.

  Later in the summer, when O’Connell’s support for the Whigs had brought Russell to the prime ministership of Great Britain, the Liberator compounded the sin of the Whig alliance by favouring Russell in an especial manner—agreeing not to run a Repeal candidate in the northern seat of Dungarvan against the Prime Minister’s candidate. Meagher’s new, heady, almost loving rage, was cemented in place by this decision:

  Go into the churchyard—write Fool upon every tombstone that commemorates a Volunteer—and thank your God that you live in an age of common sense, with philosophy and starvation. Aye, write the sarcasm upon the gravestone of a Volunteer … the Citizen soldier of 1782 was a fraud! He did not sign petitions for outdoor relief but levelled his gun with free trade.

  Older cynics in Repeal said that for all occasions florid young Meagher had a sublimely metred, ex tempore speech carefully written, which he delivered with rehearsed spontaneity, and more intensity than grace. But there were grounds for passion that summer. Meagher’s oratory coruscated across the Irish scene as had Davis’s verse earlier, but the Ireland it cast light on was a skeletal presence, tall and ravaged, loosened by malnutrition from all politics, and from all allegiances except grief and the dream of the succulent, blood-enriching, vanished potato.

  Everywhere, particularly in the west and south-west, the coastguard and the commissary were disobeying their superiors and yielding to the pleas of scarecrow Irish. Authorised or not, during June and July, the Limerick depot sold 500 tons of Indian meal per week, while in Cork 600 tons were sold weekly.

  Esther and her sons had probably used every culinary dodge and food source to avoid using the yellow meal, Peel’s brimstone. That was a matter of pride, for they were still afflicted with hope. Esther found it impossible to imagine that the blight had survived the previous winter and retained any power to strike the new crop. In many areas people had survived to this point by selling off their peat-smoky clothing or anything of value. High price oatmeal or low price corn had prevented their buying the yearly pig. In millions of cases their only reserve was the new potato crop. Waiting for it, hundreds of thousands had spent the summer on Board of Works projects, building for wages roads which went nowhere, hauling down hills as a make-work, digging railway cuttings for railways which would never come. All this was authorised by the Board of Works lest the peasantry develop a sense of entitlement. In the limestone wilderness of the Burren of Clare can still be seen Famine roads of limestone chippings, beginning nowhere discernible, going nowhere discernible. Beside them lie piles of rock fragments where family groups signed up by the Board of Works supervisor in the area sat down to break stones. In Lismany area, some of the public works available to Esther and her sons included making a new road in the direction of Somerset House and digging drainage-ditches around the Belview estate. Daily ouput was measured by surveyors. It was not easy work for a woman of forty, whose best hopes for life had already been defeated.

  In the Nation, John Mitchel published his own gloss on all this:

  In the first year of the famine, then, we find that the measures proposed by the English government, were, first, repeal of the Corn Laws, which depreciated Ireland’s only article of export; second, a new Coercion Law, to torment and transport the people; and third, a grant of £100,000
to certain clerks or commissioners, chiefly for their own profit, and from which the starving people derived no benefit whatever. Yet, Ireland was taunted with this grant, as if it were alms granted to her. Double the sum (£200,000) was, in the same Session, appropriated for Battersea Park, a suburban place of recreation much resorted to by Londoners.

  Whatever their politics, Lucy O’Brien at Cahirmoyle and the O’Briens at Dromoland felt bound to exercise stewardship towards their threatened people. In that, they were like the debt-ridden Liberator, whose son Maurice managed the Derrynane properties of the O’Connells. Maurice had sent the family sloop to Cork to buy produce to sell to their people for cost. In a different spirit from that of Trevelyan, ‘I wish you to be as abundant with the people as you possibly can,’ O’Connell would write to his son.

  Even for the itinerants drifting along the road from Ennis to Newmarket, the O’Briens claimed to have some responsibility. Their initiatives towards their own tenantry included leniency on rent, feeding people outdoors, participation in public works and later, relief committee work, encouragement of well-conducted emigration schemes and—especially in the case of Sir Lucius’ O’Brien—frequent letters to the decision-makers. He tried to enlighten Bessborough, the new Lord Lieutenant appointed by Russell to deal with the crisis. He wrote to Redington, the Under-Secretary, who had been to Harrow with his brother William Smith O’Brien, Routh the Commissary-General in Dublin, and members of the Cabinet at Westminster, about the true condition of Ireland. A public works project started under the aegis of Sir Lucius was the 9-mile stone wall which still surrounds Dromoland estate. Certainly, it benefited the estate, but would not have been of priority to the O’Briens. Sir Lucius seems to have seen it as an exotic though useful enterprise whose chief worth was that it provided work and wages for hundreds, but he was shocked by the poor health and weakness of some who presented themselves for work.