Wounds

by Fergal Keane

  The newspapers of Kerry and Cork provide us with a picture of deepening distress over the Famine years. There was relief, but never enough. Concern by some landlords, but indifference and cruelty from others. In August 1846 the correspondent of the Cork Examiner reported that the potato crop ‘was not partially but totally destroyed in the neighbourhood of Listowel … the common cholera has set in there without a particle of doubt’.9 By autumn desperation had given way to rage. In November a crowd of up to six thousand came to Listowel ‘shouting out “Bread or Blood” and proceeded in the greatest state of excitement to attack the Workhouse … with the intention of forcibly helping themselves to whatever provisions they might find within the building.’10 They were stopped by the intervention of a popular priest.

  North Kerry was devastated. The Tralee Evening News of 16 February 1847 described how: ‘Fever and dysentery prevail here to a frightening extent.’ The ‘bloody flux’ reduced its victims to hopelessly defecating shadows who squatted and lurched in roads, lanes, fields, market squares, on the seashore and riverside, reduced by the mayhem of disease, covered in their own waste, uncared for, and, when they died, often left unburied. ‘Men women and children [are] thrown into the graves without a coffin,’ reported the Kerry Examiner, ‘no inquests inquire as to how they came by their death, as hunger has hardened the hearts of the people. Those who survive cannot long remain so – the naked wife and children staring them in the face – their bones penetrating through the skin.’11

  A parish historian recorded the deaths of eighty people in 1847, nearly half of whom were buried without coffins.* Kerry had the second-highest rate of recorded deaths from dysentery during the Famine. Starvation and disease would take the lives of around 18,000 people in just a single decade.

  Rural labourer in Famine era (Sean Sexton Collection)

  Thousands fled, emigrating to Britain and further afield. Taking ship to escape poverty was an established feature of life in the area and the expanding frontiers of North America offered opportunity. Garret and Mary Galvin from Listowel arrived in Canada with only meagre belongings but within a few years were farming thirty-six acres in Ontario, with twelve cattle, two horses, seventeen pigs and forty sheep. That was in 1826. Two decades later conditions were unrecognisably worse: the government logs of passengers do not even list their names. A few entries picked from the records of the year 1851, hint at the great migration:

  18 July: twenty-eight from Listowel make the crossing to Quebec on the ship Jeannie Johnstone.

  29 August: sixty-five from Listowel board for Canada on the ship Clio.

  26 September: thirteen from Listowel sail on the John Francis …12

  Passengers were often selected by their landlords, being of no further economic use on the land, or by the guardians of the workhouses, and sent away to North America with just the price of their fare.

  At Quebec the immigrants disembarked at Grosse Isle in the St Lawrence archipelago. Five thousand were buried there, the majority killed by typhus. A priest who went on board the arriving ships left an account of desolation:

  Two to three hundred sick might be found in one ship, attacked by typhoid fever and dysentery, most lying on the refuse that had accumulated under them during the voyage; beside the sick and the dying were spread out the corpses that had not yet been buried at sea. On the decks a layer of muck had formed so thick that footprints were noticeable in it. To all this add the bad quality of the water, the scarcity of food and you will conceive but feebly of the sufferings that people endured during the long and hard trip. Sickness and death made terrible inroads on them. On some ships almost a third of the passengers died. The crew members themselves were often in such bad shape that they could hardly man the ship.13

  A report from the government in Quebec noted that those ‘sent out by their landlords were chiefly large helpless families, and in many instances widows and their children’ and that they ‘were generally very scantily supplied … The condition of many of the emigrants, I need not inform you, was deplorable.’14 A priest gave the last rites to the dying. ‘I have not taken off my surplice today,’ wrote Father Bernard McGauran, ‘they are dying on the rocks and on the beach, where they have been cast by the sailors who simply could not carry them to the hospitals. We buried 28 yesterday, 28 today, and now (two hours past midnight) there are 30 dead whom we will bury tomorrow. I have not gone to bed for five nights.’15

  The Listowel passengers on the ship Clio were told to expect a sum of money from the Listowel Union on arrival. Nothing was sent and they were left ‘entirely without means’. The colonial government moved them on to where they might find work.

  In the same period Scots Highlanders were also being shipped out by their landlords. A Colonel Gordon sent his entire tenantry – 1,400 people from the islands of Barra and Uist – to Canada. But to those Irish who were forced into migration, and to those left behind, what mattered was their particular circumstance. Even if they had been aware of the sufferings inflicted on the Scottish and English poor it would not have ameliorated their sense of loss, or the accumulation of grievance that the Famine caused. Nor would it have disposed them to think more highly of the government and the landlords. The wider context is everything until it is nothing at all.

  My grandmother Hannah and her brother Mick and their friends were brought up with stories of the Famine as passed on by their grandparents. Moss Keane from Ballygrennan outside Listowel recalled his grandfather’s memories: ‘The families used to get sick and die. The fever was so bad in the end they used to bury the people by throwing their mud houses down on them; then they were buried. The English could relieve them if they wished … Many a person was found dead on the roadside with grass on their mouths.’16 As always the spirit world was invoked in memory of the dead. People told of meeting them along the road.

  They were in the ground but walking still.

  One story relates how a prosperous landowner came to gloat at a starving old woman. She was so ashamed of her plight that she boiled stones in the pot and pretended they were potatoes. ‘But when the time came, she found flowery bursting spuds in the pot.’17 Another tells of a great fiddler from the locality who was buried in a mass grave and whose music could still be heard on certain nights. I found out that there had indeed been such a man, a famous dancing master who died of exposure in Listowel Workhouse.*

  I met a woman walking past Ballydonoghue church one evening who turned out to be a family friend of the Purtills. Nora Mulvihill was born and reared here and came from a line that went back to the nineteenth century. Nora was middle-aged with grown-up children, and most evenings she walked the local roads to keep fit. Drive the roads of rural Ireland any evening and weather and you will see women like her, heads down and arms swinging. She knew the land and its stories.

  We drove to Gale cemetery where the dead of the Famine from Ballydonoghue were buried. ‘Do you know about the doctors that were here?’ she asked. I assumed she meant the medics who visited the workhouse during the disease epidemics. But no, Nora had another story. I would leave without knowing how to interpret what I was told. Maybe it was just a story, like so many of the others told over the generations by the old people, a story with some truth maybe or none, or maybe entirely true. But it was a story that lasted. ‘There was a house above in Coolard where there were doctors,’ Nora told me. ‘I don’t know who they were or what they were doing there, whether it was the one family or whatever. But at any rate they lived there through the hunger. At the time there was a lot of dead bodies lying around the place. People were falling on the roads. So the doctors sent their servants out to bring in bodies to them and they had a room upstairs in the house where they did experiments. When they were finished with them a man would come with a cart and take the corpses to the graveyard here.’ The man was known locally as ‘Jack the Dead’.

  A local historian, John D. Pierse, found an account of a ‘Dr Raymond [who] used to buy bodies for a couple of shillings from the lo
cal people … he’d come at the diseased part of the body and examine it … they used to do that wholesale.’18 The county archives showed that Dr Samuel Raymond was living in this area in 1843, on the eve of the Famine, and was still serving as a magistrate in 1862. It may have been that he was carrying out sample autopsies on behalf of the government. But in the memory of the place he is a ghoulish exploiter to whom the bodies of the dead were mere biological material.

  The stories offered the poor a promise that their suffering would be remembered, if not by individual names, then at least the manner of their death, a series of accusing fingers pointing out of the past at the English, the landlords, the big Catholic farmers who had food on their tables every night … at the whole army of their ‘betters’.

  The Listowel Workhouse was the repository of the doomed. Those who ended up in this cramped, disease-ridden barracks had lost all hope of survival on the outside. A doctor treating smallpox sufferers found that ‘three or four fever patients are placed in beds that are unusually small’. He witnessed two children die soon after arriving ‘probably being caused by the cold to which such children were exposed to on account of being brought in so long a distance’.19 The doctor found the body of a newborn baby in the latrines. A record for the 22 March 1851 documented the deaths of sixty-six people in the workhouse, of whom forty-nine were under the age of fifteen.

  Out of this misery grew an ambitious scheme. A report at the height of the Famine quoted the Listowel Workhouse master as saying ‘the education of the female children appears to be very much neglected … very few could even read very imperfectly. Only one or two make any attempt at writing.’20 The remedy to illiteracy and the prospect of death from starvation or disease was to pack thirty-seven girls off to Australia. They were among 4,000 Irish girls selected to find new lives in the colonies. Most ended up marrying miners or farmers in the outback. In the great departures that followed the Famine, some of my own Purtill relatives took ship for America, settling in Kentucky and New York, and bringing with them a memory of loss to be handed to the coming generations. Their children would learn that as many as half a million people were evicted from their homes during the Famine; that the government failed the starving when it might, through swifter action, have saved hundreds of thousands; they learnt that the poor were damned by the incompetence of ministers and by their rigid ideological beliefs, the conviction that the market was God; that the poor should learn a lesson about the ‘moral hazard’ of their own fecklessness; that too much charity would weaken the paupers’ determination to help themselves – and that all of this was part of God’s plan. It was not genocide in the manner I have known it. Genocide takes a plan for extermination with a defined course set at the outset. But it was a moral crime of staggering proportions.

  The Famine changed the world around the Purtills. But they survived. How? Were they tougher than others? I will never know. There is only one narrative of the Famine when I am growing up. This is of English infamy, the clearances and evictions and the workhouse. But it is not the whole story. The story of survival and its psychological costs is not told: how some of the bigger Catholic farmers also evicted tenants, how the vanishing of the labouring class created the room for bigger farms, and how the Famine set in train the destruction of the landlord system. Hunger begets desperation, begets fierce survival strategies, and these beget shame which begets silence.

  I find myself going back to Brendan Kennelly’s ‘My Dark Fathers’. I do so because I believe there are parts of history only the poets can convey, the deeper emotional scars that form themselves into ways of seeing things that inhabit later generations. Brendan told me he had written the poem after attending a wedding in north Kerry. A boy was called upon to sing. He had a beautiful voice but was painfully shy. So he turned to face the wall and in this way was able to perform. Kennelly was transfixed. He saw in that moment the shame of survival that had stalked his ancestors and mine.

  Skeletoned in darkness, my dark fathers lay

  Unknown, and could not understand

  The giant grief that trampled night and day,

  The awful absence moping through the land.

  Upon the headland, the encroaching sea

  Left sand that hardened after tides of Spring,

  No dancing feet disturbed its symmetry

  And those who loved good music ceased to sing.

  Since every moment of the clock

  Accumulates to form a final name,

  Since I am come of Kerry clay and rock,

  I celebrate the darkness and the shame

  That could compel a man to turn his face

  Against the wall, withdrawn from light so strong

  And undeceiving, spancelled in a place

  Of unapplauding hands and broken song.21

  Writing twenty years after the Famine, the lawyer and essayist William O’Connor Morris visited Kerry and found that ‘the memory of the Famine, which disturbed society rudely in this county … has left considerable traces of bitterness’.22 There is an entry in the diary of the landlord Sir John Benn Walsh which recalls a dinner held by the workhouse guardians. It is towards the end of the Famine. Benn Walsh is shocked to find that there are ‘three Catholic priests and a party with them who refused to rise when the Queens health was drunk and a cry was raised of “long live the French Republic” … this little toast shows all the disloyalty in the hearts of those people’.23

  The bitterness curdled across the Atlantic into the Irish ghettos of America’s east coast, where hatred of England grew into a revolutionary political force that would return to Ireland, reaching back to the eighteenth century for its defining theme: only total separation from England could cure the ills of Ireland. The lives of the Purtills were transformed in the decades after the Famine but not through armed struggle in a quest for national sovereignty. It was the campaign for land that showed the Purtills and their like what it meant to win.

  II

  The Landlord and his agent

  wrote Davitt from his cell

  For selfishness and cruelty

  They have no parallel

  And the one thing they’re entitled to

  these idle thoroughbreds

  Is a one-way ticket out of here

  third class to Holyhead.

  Andy Irvine, Forgotten Hero, 1989

  Tenant farmers like Edmund Purtill had few guaranteed rights before the land campaign of the late nineteenth century. Although the rate of evictions had declined considerably, they endured in the collective memory. Joseph O’Connor lived six miles outside Listowel on the lands of Lord Listowel and described his family’s eviction at Christmas time in 1863:

  They came on small Christmas Day [6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany] in January 1863, bailiffs, peelers an’ soldiers, an’ had us out on the cold bog before dawn. They burned down the houses for fear we’d go back into them when their backs were turned and took my father and the other grown up men to the Workhouse in Listowel with them. They did that ‘out of charity’ they said because Lady Listowel wouldn’t sleep the night, if the poor creatures were left homeless on the mountain. They left me and my brother Patsy to look after ourselves. We slept out with the hares, a couple o’ nights, eatin’ swedes that had ice in the heart o’ them an’ then we parted. He went east an’ I went west towards Tralee. I must ha’ been a sight, after walkin’ twenty miles on my bare feet an’ an empty belly.24

  Cast into destitution by the landlord, Joseph turned to the only means of lawful survival open to him and joined up with the very Crown forces that had turned out his family. In his early teens, O’Connor became a soldier with Her Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot. The British Army saved him from starvation.

  But these were the last years of the old landlordism. Sixteen years after the O’Connors were driven onto the roads of north Kerry, the rest of rural Ireland was gripped by an agrarian revolution that, for the most part, eschewed the gun in favour of civil defiance. By the time the Land Le
ague was formed in 1879 the whole edifice was ready to topple. The Famine had wiped out the rents on which many landlords depended. Rates became impossible to pay. Bankruptcy stalked the landed gentry. ‘An Irish estate is like a sponge,’ wrote one lord, ‘and an Irish landlord is never as rich as when he is rid of his property.’25 Gladstone had already begun the process of strengthening tenants’ rights in 1870. Reform created its own momentum. The Land League would take care of the rest.

  Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt were second only to Michael Collins in my father’s pantheon of greats. It was Parnell, Eamonn said, who gave people back their dignity. Parnell and Davitt were very different men, in temperament and background. Parnell was a Protestant landowner, liberal and nationalist, a brilliant political tactician and leader of the Irish Party at Westminster. His fellow MPs knew him as a man of ‘iron resolution … impenetrable reserve [with] … a volcanic energy and also a ruthless determination’.26 Michael Davitt was the child of an evicted family from County Mayo, brought up in the north of England where he went into the mills as a child labourer, losing his arm at the age of eleven in an industrial accident. Davitt began his political life in the Fenians and in 1870 was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour for treason. He was twenty-four years old at the time and endured a harsh regime as a political prisoner. Yet Davitt emerged from jail convinced that violence would never achieve a complete revolution. In this he foreshadowed by a century the experience of the IRA prisoners in the Maze prison. Davitt became an internationalist in prison, seeing the Irish farm labourer as part of the worldwide struggle of the oppressed. Passionate, approachable, he provided the organisational genius of the Land League.

  My father occasionally spoke of him, but always the doomed glamour of Parnell, Pearse and Collins shut out the light. Yet Michael Davitt did more than anybody to change the lives of my forebears. I only came to appreciate him in later life – this internationalist and socialist and campaigning foreign correspondent, who made the journey from revolutionary violence to a true people’s politics.