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

by Thomas Keneally

  Later, in 1847, when she was dealing matriarchally with the results of a second potato crop failure, Lady O’Brien would assure her son William with what appears to have been some truth that people ‘in this neighbourhood are so well taken care of that there is nothing like starvation, though no money has yet been asked for from Government.’ The people themselves may not have felt as rosy about their condition. But a daily ration of soup or gruel was handed out by a member of the Dromoland household—notably by Grace O’Brien—near two ash trees on either side of the road leading to Newmarket-on-Fergus. At Moohoun, Lady O’Brien organised a woman named Mary O’Grady to sell rice porridge at a penny a quart to save people going into Newmarket or Ennis futilely looking for food.

  Another example of a paternal landlord in that area of Ireland—the estuary of the Shannon—was Lord Monteagle, Thomas Spring-Rice of Mount Trenchard, who had been a Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1835. Meagher satirised him as a devotee of the benefits of the Union with Britain, but when during the Famine the local Office of Public Works ran out of money to pay people on public projects, Monteagle advanced £4,500 of his own; he reduced rents; and for his benefit and that of his tenants, he caused those still in arrears to emigrate.

  He did not operate in this way entirely at his own expense. From funds acquired in part through the sale of Crown land in Australia, the British government was willing to assist and even pay for the emigration of Irish settlers to leaven their convict brethren. The first group of Monteagle emigrants had been sent on the Aliquis in 1838. Most of them were more or less landless peasants of Hugh’s class, and a number of them settled in Goulburn and its surrounding country as farm labourers or maids. In the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, Goulburn, they would in the end occupy the same pews on Sunday as Hugh Larkin and Mary Shields.

  When the emigration schemes revived under the pressure of the Famine in 1847 and 1848, groups of thirty or forty of Monteagle’s people at a time arrived as free settlers in Sydney and Melbourne. Monteagle told his tenants, ‘Have your assets valued. I will take what they realise, forgive you the difference, and help you to emigrate. Otherwise, I shall be forced to evict you.’ He spent some money ensuring their humane passage, and even wrote ahead to colonial officials seeking their assistance for his former tenants. This was forced emigration, but to possess paternal landlords like the O’Briens, the O’Connells or the Monteagles was to be more fortunate than some hundreds of thousands of others.

  Towards the end of summer, as the peasantry observed the winsome flowers of their potato crops bloom in apparent health, the Liberator was in torment at the way famine had altered all politics. If early reports of another blight in some areas were correct, the idea of a ‘physical force’ rebellion might appeal to Young Ireland. Gavan Duffy was already about to go on trial for publishing in the Nation John Mitchel’s infernal articles on the railways. He would be acquitted, but his very arrest had made the young men combative and resentful of the Liberator. Duffy’s aged chief counsel, Robert Holmes, who had defended United Irishmen at their trials after the 1798 uprising, declared before the court that, the Irish light having been ‘extinguished by the foulest means that sword and tyranny ever practiced … any attempt to rekindle it is to be treated as sedition.’

  To counter these sentiments, O’Connell found it necessary to say at a general meeting of Repeal in Conciliation Hall one evening in mid-July, ‘If I were a Quaker I could not abhor violence more than I do.’ Meagher, though still reverential towards the Liberator, asked why, if the Liberator favoured the constitutional route over physical force, had not Repeal stood its own candidate in Dungarvan? Why at its first test had it knuckled under to Russell? Why had Repeal softened to some vague concept of ultimate federalism within Britain? John O’Connell moved, to boos from Meagher’s friends, that ‘The language of Mr Meagher was not language that could be safely listened to by the Association.’ Smith O’Brien, in London at the time, received a letter from a friend saying how amazing it was to see ‘Mr Meagher, a stripling, pitted against the great O’Connell.’

  It was to deal with the oratorical challenges of remarkable Mr Meagher, and the journalistic ones of Mitchel, that O’Connell finally drafted two peace resolutions to present for the approval of Repeal’s over-large, dozens-strong committee at Conciliation Hall the next week. The press and public turned up to watch, with the galleries full of fashionable and nationalistic young men and women. The Liberator himself was bravely present, his authority as Ireland’s redeemer at stake as he asked Young Ireland to vote for and accept his two principles. The first proposition declared Repeal’s task to be ‘the amelioration of political institutions by peaceable and legal means alone;’ the second, that it would pursue its aims while ‘abhorring all attempts to improve and augment constitutional liberty by means of force, violence or bloodshed.’ In the Liberator’s febrile mind, lives, and the continued flow of succour from Lord John Russell, depended on acceptance of both proposals.

  Meagher and Richard O’Gorman both objected to the use of the verb in ‘abhorring all attempts.’ John Mitchel deferentially asked the chair if this proposition to which O’Connell wished to bind Ireland applied to other countries? After all, the Liberator had fellow feeling for armed rebellions elsewhere in the world. Mitchel asked, could George Washington, one of O’Connell’s heroes, have acceded to the Liberator’s proposals?

  O’Connell replied improbably that Washington’s war had been a defensive one and therefore just. Then, said Mitchel, either you acknowledge the abstract possibility of such a defensive war in Ireland, or else you should embody Quakerism and the turning of the other cheek in the Association rules. In the end the committee voted to refer the propositions to a meeting open to full membership later in the month. Obviously, thousands would attend, and dilute the voices of Young Ireland.

  Tireless Smith O’Brien was back in Ireland. But though a committee member, he was at the time of the inconclusive meeting giving an earlier arranged speech in the town hall of one of the worst afflicted towns, Kilrush, County Clare, as hapless country people drifted in from shattered cottages to the neo-Gothic Kilrush workhouse. Looking at the national ruin, O’Brien told his audience, it was impossible to condemn outright the option of physical force in all circumstances. This was reported and interpreted as a warning to the Liberator that O’Brien would not stand for the expulsion from Repeal of ‘the young men.’

  He made sure he attended the climactic meeting, which took place at Conciliation Hall over two evenings at the end of July. But O’Connell himself chose to avoid the turmoil and was in London, awaiting reports. His son John represented him. The gallery around the hall was again packed with observers and the young men and women, from families at least physically immune from famine, who were Meagher’s preferred and stimulating audience. An O’Connell lieutenant named Captain Broderick was in the chair, and O’Brien, under attack for what he had said in Kilrush, was called on early to speak. O’Brien argued that Young Ireland had merely embraced ideas which the Liberator had expressed in the monster meetings. And while it was easy enough for both sides to tie each other up in the knots of rhetoric, with hungry and fevered Ireland not far removed from the door of Conciliation Hall, the need to chase abstractions with the aged Liberator and his supporters annoyed and frustrated O’Brien, who saw a parallel between this hairsplitting and that which had characterised Jewish high priests on the eve of the Roman conquest of Israel. ‘The factions of Jerusalem struggling for the upper hand at an hour when the catapaults of Titus were beating down the gates, furnish a stock example of national folly. But Ireland, it was plain, was about to encounter a worse calamity than siege or sack.’

  The next evening supplied the moment of the debate best remembered, endowing Meagher with a soubriquet which would serve him on three continents. The Liberator’s Repeal-warden-in-chief, Tom Steele, stood up to challenge the young orator for his chronic ingratitude to the Liberator. Stop equivocating, he said, and stand up and
repudiate violence outright, except for defence.

  To Meagher this served as invitation to make the clarifying and focusing speech he had prepared. He rose to catcalls and interjections from older men, and began by re-stating his principles. ‘A Whig minister may improve the province—he will not restore the nation.’ By the clear gleaming of Conciliation Hall’s candelabra, Meagher refused to accept Steele’s accusations of ingratitude. ‘No, my Lord, I am not ungrateful to the man who struck the fetters off my arms, whilst I was yet a child, and by whose influence, my father—the first Catholic to do so for two hundred years—sat for the last two years in the civic chair of an ancient city. But, my Lord, the same God who gave to that great man the power to strike down an odious ascendancy in this country … gave to me a mind that is my own.’

  Meagher, with a Davis-like romantic ignorance of war, hailed the sword ‘as a sacred weapon; and if, My Lord, it has sometimes taken the shape of the serpent and reddened the shroud of the oppressor with too deep a dye, like the anointed rod of the High Priest, it has at other times, and as often, blossomed into celestial flowers to deck the freeman’s bow.’ He conjured up three instances of recourse to the sword, all of them ones the Liberator had praised. First, the rebellion early in the century of Andreas Hofer, an old-fashioned Tyrolese patriot who drove the Bavarians out of a traditionally Austrian area; then the American rebellion; and thirdly, that of the Belgian patriots. ‘Abhor the sword—stigmatize the sword? No, my Lord, for at its blow, a giant nation started from the waters of the Atlantic and by its redeeming magic, and in the quivering of its crimson light, the crippled Colony sprang into the attitude of a proud Republic—prosperous, limitless and invincible. Abhor the sword—stigmatize the sword? No, my Lord, for it swept the Dutch marauders out of the fine old towns of Belgium—scourged them back to their own phlegmatic swamps and knocked their flag and sceptre, their laws and bayonets into the sluggish waters of the Scheldt. My Lord, I learned that it is the right of a nation to govern itself, not in this Hall but upon the ramparts of Antwerp. I learned the first article of a nation’s creed upon those ramparts, where freedom was justly estimated, and where the possession of the precious gift was purchased by the effusion of generous blood.’

  ‘This,’ said Duffy, ‘was thrilling music.’ A spate of oratory ensuring for the young man almost instantly the initially mocking but ultimately heady title of Meagher of the Sword, seemed to shift the earth beneath Conciliation Hall. John O’Connell was panicked into interrupting, causing the speech to remain unfinished, like some valiant bugle call when in mid-chord the bugler is cut down. He was convinced, said John O’Connell, ‘that it would not be safe for the Association to allow Mr Meagher to proceed…. The question was not should a young man be put down? But should a young man put down the Association?’

  O’Brien made a short, final, withering protest, no flashiness to it, and all the more scarifying to those listening. ‘You are charged,’ he told the Association, ‘with being a people who will never give fair play to an adversary. You are charged with being willing slaves to any despot who may obtain the reins of power at a particular moment.’ Then he simply walked out, silencing some, causing others to scream abuse. He was followed by Meagher himself and most of the Young Irelanders, including Meagher’s schoolfriend Patrick Smyth, John Mitchel, Gavan Duffy, and a number of women from the gallery.

  Meagher was pursued out on to the Liffey quays by Captain Broderick, who had been in the chair, and there was a scuffle. In Broderick’s mind, it was malicious for Meagher, the spoilt youth who spoke like an angel both of light and division, to have induced the man nobody could afford to lose, Smith O’Brien, to vacate Repeal.

  Reacting to the stand of Thomas Francis Meagher, one of Gavan Duffy’s trio of young women poets, versifying under the pen name ‘Speranza,’ wrote:

  Unbought—unsold—unstain’d, undoubted man!

  Stand fast—take breath—time shows who Will and Can.

  In her early twenties, Speranza, whose real name was Miss Jane Elgee, was the daughter of a Protestant lawyer long deceased, and her verse had made her already a national figure. The poet W. B. Yeats would later recount how she had been influenced to begin writing by the death of Davis. Gavan Duffy found her tall, elegant, with ‘flashing brown eyes and features cast in an heroic mould.’ The name Elgee, she believed, was a derivative of Alighieri, and she suspected she bore Dante’s blood, toying with the idea that the great poet had re-found his voice in her.

  She would later marry the surgeon Sir William Wilde, but that did nothing to temper her unfeigned outrage. Like her dresses, her poetry might be sometimes over-elaborated, favouring quirky metres, but she excited Irish readers of her day to such a degree that in the future her son Oscar O’Flahertie Wills Wilde would find it hard to achieve a literary presence independent of his mother’s.

  ‘Liberty’s torch is bright!’ read a poem typical of her tendency to gild the lily of metre:

  The light

  May mock our tyrant’s scorning,

  For millions of hearts will be kindled ere noon

  And the freedom we dreamed of in darkness, full soon

  We’ll achieve in the light of the day.

  Another of Duffy’s stars who reacted to Meagher’s speech was an adolescent girl, Mary Anne Kelly of Killeen near Portumna, East Galway, about 10 miles from where Esther Larkin lived. Mary Anne, known as ‘Eva,’ was the brave, pretty, well-read and naively yearning daughter of a prosperous, austere but nationalistic gentleman-farmer, and had been fifteen when her intellectually vivacious mother and sisters had first persuaded her to send Duffy verse.

  Down, Britannia, brigand down!

  No more to rule with sceptred hand:

  Truth raises o’er thy throne and crown

  Her exorcising wand.

  When the soft maiden of Killeen opened her mouth, fire came forth. Like Speranza, Eva was a literary sensation, but she remained in Galway, for some years yet.

  ‘Young Patriot, bend thee lowly,’ she wrote now, apostrophising Meagher:

  A mighty spirit silently

  Breathes o’er thee true and holy.

  The Nation’s third muse, a woman in her early twenties, Miss Ellen Downing from Cork, who wrote under the name ‘Mary,’ later to become a nun, also approved of Meagher, as did the leading male poet, the alcoholic librarian Mangan.

  The walkout of Young Ireland, praised as it might be by rhymesters, was now lambasted by Catholic and Protestant press alike. But definite news of a blight more sudden than that of the year before, and universal throughout Ireland, overshadowed the quarrel. Father Mathew, the Capuchin friar who was the champion of Irish temperance, wrote to Trevelyan: ‘On the 27th of last month [July], I passed from Cork to Dublin, and this doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest. Returning on the 3rd instant I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. In many places the wretched people were seated on fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly.’ Esther again found her East Galway potatoes reduced to muck. Putrefaction of the crop might well now be the norm for the future, a permanent curse. Young men raged, but many older people wondered if God had found out their secret sins and imposed an endless, annual punishment.

  The East Galway farmer Peatsaí Callanáin, who lived not far from Esther, knew by heart a Famine ballad, ‘Na Fataí Bána’ ‘The White Potatoes,’ in which one verse refers to a sudden total obliteration of the potatoes by 1 August that year. The refrain might credibly be put in Esther’s mouth:

  It is my woe and misery that potatoes are blackening in every corner of the world, the stalks are old and withered from the 1st of August, flowerless and lifeless as if it were November … It is just one thousand and eight hundred years, two score and six more, since our Saviour descended from Heaven, that the potatoes of the world were destroyed … The hospital and the poorhouse are full, and the people are being buried deep in the clay; and our only food is yellow m
eal morning and evening.

  The secretary of the Killimor Relief Committee (Killimor being some 7 miles south-west of Laurencetown) put the problem more prosaically when he wrote to Sir Randolph Routh, Commissariat General, at Dublin Castle in a letter on 10 October 1846:

  There has been no oatmeal sent into this market and as for potatoes I regret to have to state that there is scarcely a potato for miles around. The consequence therefore is that the poor are obliged to travel to either Ballinasloe or Loughrea, a distance of twelve miles, for a few stone of meal.

  On whose authority could Esther now counsel her sons? The countryside was full of young men prepared to raid even by daylight canal barges carrying produce for sale and export, or to ambush the wagons, loaded with grain or livestock on their way to ships, passing through the Laurencetown area. Such gestures of traditional grievance and corrosive fear were still labelled ‘outrages,’ and they tripled in number in the first full year of Famine. Hugh Larkin might be lost to his family in a region whose name was not even known to the landlords of East Galway. But the conditions of the time ensured that the landscape was full of his hungry reincarnations.

  John Eyre, the East Galway landowner who had signed Esther’s petition to the Lord Lieutenant in 1840, and who owned the prime estate of Eyrecourt south of Laurencetown, would on 27 October 1846 request military protection for the boats carrying provisions on the Grand Canal from Ballinasloe to Shannon Harbour en route for Dublin. More concerned about attacks on wagons, Walter Lawrence, resident magistrate in Laurencetown, named on Hugh’s New South Wales application for reunion, echoed Eyre’s request for protection. Lawrence recalled that ‘during the Terry-Alt disturbances in this county, a military party was stationed at Laurencetown.’ The need was more acute now, as Laurencetown was ‘a great thoroughfare’ for the transit of provisions to other parts of the county.