The situation had not improved in January 1847 when the Cork Examiner sent its reporter to Skibbereen:
In huts I have visited, I have seen children reduced to skeletons, in some instances; in others bloated beyond expression by hideous dropsy, and creeping around the damp wet floors of their miserable cabins, unable to stand erect.…
It is too late to rescue the hundreds of diseased and stricken wretches from destruction—their fate is sealed without a hope—their earthly sufferings will speedily terminate.
In the following month Elihu Burritt, an American writer and philanthropist, crossed the Atlantic from his home in Boston to see for himself what could be done for the starving people. On 20 February the parish priest took him through the town of Skibbereen:
We saw, in every tenement we entered, enough to sicken the stoutest heart.... Half-naked women and children would come out of their cabins, apparently in the last stages of famine fever, to beg ‘a ha’penny, for the honour of God!’ As they stood upon the wet ground, one could almost see it smoke beneath their bare feet, burning with the fever.
We entered the graveyard, in the midst of which was a small watch-house. This miserable shed had served as a grave where the dying could bury themselves.... And into this horrible den of death, this noisome sepulchre, living men, women, and children went down to die....
Here they lay side by side on the bottom of one grave. Six persons had been found in this fetid sepulchre at one time, and with only one able to crawl to the door to ask for water. Removing a board from this black hole of pestilence, we found it crammed with wan victims of famine, ready and anxious to perish.
Next day Dr O’Donovan, the dispensary doctor, took Burritt to another part of the town of Skibbereen:
In one of these straw-roofed burrows eight persons had died in the last fortnight, and five more were lying upon the pestiferous straw. In scarcely a single one of these most inhuman habitations was there the slightest indication of food of any kind to be found, nor fuel, nor anything resembling a bed.…
A faint glimmering of light from a handful of burning straw would soon reveal the indistinct images of wan-faced children grouped together, with large plaintive still eyes looking out at us like the sick young of wild beasts in their dens. Then the groans, and the choked, incoherent entreaties for help ... would apprise us of the number and condition of the family.…
Let the reader group these apparitions of death and disease into the spectacle of ten feet square, and then multiply it into three-fourths of the hovels in this region and he will arrive at a fair estimate of the extent of is misery.
Cork, February 28, 1847. While waiting for the steamer, I wrote an earnest appeal to the people of New England for aid for the starving Irish. I trust my earnest entreaties will not be in vain.
Burritt’s entreaties were not in vain. His harrowing descriptions of Skibbereen helped to raise $100,000 in Boston to buy provisions for the starving Irish. The US government lent a warship to take over this food, and it arrived in Cork harbour in April 1847.
The state of Skibbereen was by no means unique. Indeed, in many other parts of the country, particularly in more inaccessible places further west, the death toll during the Famine was even higher than in west Cork. And those Americans who had given so generously were not to know that the worst of the Famine was still to come.
Episode 185
FEVER
The Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, believed there was a simple answer to starvation. Acting with a directness which would not shame the most modern relief agency, the Quakers set out to feed the people. In January 1847, as the Great Famine was moving into its third year, the Illustrated London News described how the Society of Friends’ ‘soup house’ in Cork city was providing nourishment to the destitute
at a loss, or rather cost, of from £120 to £150 per month to supporters of the design. The present calls are for from 150 to 180 gallons daily, requiring 120 pounds of good beef, 27 pounds of rice, 27 pounds of oatmeal, 27 pounds of split peas, and 14 ounces of spices, with a quantity of vegetables. Tickets, at one penny each, are unsparingly distributed.
Meanwhile the government’s cumbersome scheme of public works was breaking down—the starving were simply too weak and sick to earn enough to feed their families. An Act for the Temporary Relief of Destitute Persons in Ireland, passed in February 1847, was, in effect, an open admission by Lord John Russell’s Whig government that its policies had failed. Henceforth relief would be provided by the free distribution of soup.
A formidable new bureaucracy had to be created and some 10,000 account books, 80,000 record sheets and 3 million ration tickets had to be printed before the new machinery could be set in motion. However, once they were fully in operation, the government soup kitchens saved more lives than any other measure taken during the Famine. By July 1847 more than 3 million people were being fed every day.
For many, however, the soup kitchens had come too late. People, weakened by starvation, were falling victim to fever and dying in their thousands. Deaths resulted principally from typhus and relapsing fever transmitted by lice; the ‘bloody flux’ or bacillary dysentery; ‘famine dropsy’ or hunger oedema; and scurvy. Fever struck not only the emaciated frames of the starving but also those who ministered to the sick and dying: in one year, for example, seven doctors died of fever in Cavan town, and Lord Lurgan, chairman of the Board of Guardians of Lurgan Union Workhouse, was a high-profile victim of typhus fever. Hordes of the poor brought disease eastwards to Dublin and Belfast in particular. Dr Andrew Malcolm, who worked day and night to treat those stricken by fever, recalled the influx of the starving into Belfast:
Famine was depicted in the look, in the hue, in the voice, and the gait. The food of a nation had been cut off; the physical strength of a whole people was reduced; and this condition, highly favourable to the impression of the plague-breath, resulted in the most terrible epidemic that this Island ever experienced.
The hospitals in the town were overflowing, the Belfast News-Letter reported in July 1847,
Yet hundreds ... are daily exposed in the delirium of this frightful malady, on the streets, or left to die in their filthy and ill-ventilated hovels.... It is now a thing of daily occurrence to see haggard, sallow and emaciated beings, stricken down by fever or debility from actual want, stretched prostrate upon the footways of our streets and bridges.
The fine summer of 1847 ensured that the grain harvest was excellent and kept the blight at bay. But the acreage planted with what few tubers had survived two years of famine was so small that the poor still faced mass starvation. Nevertheless, the government declared the Famine was over in September 1847. In the same month the distribution of soup stopped in almost all districts. Henceforth the burden of relief was to fall entirely on the workhouses financed by Irish ratepayers. This was, unquestionably, the harshest decision made by Westminster during the Famine.
The destitute were refused relief outside the workhouse. To gain admission, applicants had to accept the harsh institutional discipline and work at breaking stone, etc., and husbands were separated from wives, and mothers from their children. But because nothing else was offered to them, the starving crowded into the workhouses. In the densely packed buildings fever spread with fearful rapidity. The condition of Enniskillen workhouse was typical. The roof of the temporary fever hospital fell in on 7 January 1848, and it still had not been fixed when Temporary Inspector d’Arcy reported on 2 March. He came upon twenty-nine patients sharing beds in one small room; and, he continued,
Immediately previous to my visit there had been five children in one bed, three of whom were in fever and two in small-pox.... No statement of mine can convey an idea of the wretched condition the inmates of this house were in; I have frequently heard the horrors of Skibbereen quoted, but they can hardly have exceeded these.
Little wonder, then, that, for many of the starving, flight from Ireland overseas seemed the only option.
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bsp; Episode 186
EMIGRATION
In 1848 Michael Rush of Ardglass, Co. Down, wrote to his parents in America:
Now my dear father and mother, if you knew what hunger we and our fellow-countrymen are suffering, you would take us out of this poverty Isle.... If you don’t endeavour to take us out of it, it will be the first news you will hear by some friend of me and my little family to be lost by hunger, and there are thousands dread they will share the same fate.
In eleven years, during and after the Famine, Ireland sent abroad over two million people, more than had migrated over the preceding two and a half centuries. About 1,200,000 left the country between 1846 and 1851. For the vast majority, America was the preferred destination. Strict controls imposed by the United States government on its passenger vessels pushed fares up, but lax standards on British ships kept fares to Canada as low as £6 for a man, his wife and four small children. Vessels carrying timber from the St Lawrence to British ports had not enough cargo to take back even to serve as ballast; owners therefore gladly accepted destitute Irish into their holds, usually at Liverpool, the cheapest point of departure. These were the infamous ‘coffin ships’, grossly overcrowded and inadequately provided with food and clean water.
Some ships sailed directly from Irish ports, 11,000 from Sligo alone, for example. One ship leaving Westport, Co. Mayo, foundered with the loss of all on board, within sight of land, watched with horror by those who had just bidden them farewell. A typical ‘coffin ship’ was the barque Elizabeth and Sarah, built in 1762, which sailed from Killala, Co. Mayo, in July 1846 with 276 passengers. By law this vessel should have carried 12,532 gallons of water, but all it had was 8,700 gallons in leaky casks. Each passenger should have been provided with seven pounds of rations per week, but in fact no food was ever given out. All but thirty-two passengers had to sleep on the bare decks, and no toilets of any kind were provided. Forty-two died during the voyage, and the state of the vessel when it was towed into the St Lawrence in September was described as ‘horrible and disgusting beyond the power of language to describe’.
Fever flourished in the filthy and congested conditions on board these ships. The Larch, sailing from Sligo with 440 passengers, lost 108 at sea, most of them killed by typhus fever. All ships coming up the St Lawrence were required to stop at the quarantine station on Grosse Isle. Many died there. On Grosse Isle Robert Whyte attended the funeral of the wife of an emigrant from Co. Meath:
After the grave was filled up the husband placed two shovels in the form of a cross and said, ‘By that cross, Mary, I swear to avenge your death. As soon as I earn the price of my passage home I’ll go back and shoot the man that murdered you—and that’s the landlord.’
Another woman buried on Grosse Isle was the wife of John Ford, an emigrant from Co. Cork, whose grandson was to become the most distinguished founder of the modern automobile industry.
By the middle of the summer of 1847 the line of ships waiting for inspection at Grosse Isle was several miles long. Delays were inevitable, and fever continued to spread among those cooped up on board. The Agnes, for instance, arrived with 427 passengers, but after a quarantine of fifteen days only 150 were left alive. The vast majority arriving in Canada walked south to the United States. Many did not make it. It has been estimated that in the single year of 1847 a total of 17,000 emigrants perished at sea (mainly from typhus), 5,300 died on Grosse Isle, and nearly 16,000 more died in British North America, most of them while making their way on foot to the United States.
Great numbers simply crossed the Irish Sea. During the first five months of 1847 300,000 Irish paupers landed in Liverpool, pouring into a city which, until then, had a population of 250,000. Since there were not enough town police to control this Irish multitude, 20,000 citizens were sworn in as special constables and 2,000 soldiers were brought in and encamped at Everton. The immigrants brought ‘famine fever’ with them, and before the year was out 60,000 people in Liverpool had contracted typhus.
Meanwhile the Glasgow Herald reported:
The streets of Glasgow are at present literally swarming with vagrants from the sister kingdom, and the misery which many of these poor creatures endure can scarcely be less than what they have fled or been driven from at home.
Other Irishmen, excited by events in other parts of Europe, took up arms against the government.
Episode 187
THE BATTLE OF WIDOW McCORMACK’S CABBAGE PATCH
The year 1848—the Year of Revolutions. First, revolution in Sicily. Then, revolution in Naples. Next, on 23 February in Paris, as Victor Hugo recalls:
A shot rang out, from which side is not known. Panic ... and then a volley. Eighty dead on the spot. A universal cry of fury ... Vengeance!
King Louis-Philippe takes flight. France becomes a republic. Vienna falls to the revolutionaries in March ... so does Berlin ... and Budapest ... and Munich (where the mad King Ludwig runs off with an Irish dancing-girl) ... the pope is chased out of Rome. Every single city in central Europe with a population of 100,000 or more is convulsed by revolution in 1848. The old order is shaken to its foundations.
And what about Ireland? Here the Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy declares:
Ireland’s opportunity, thank God and France, has come at last! We must die rather than let this providential hour pass over us unliberated!
John Mitchel, a Presbyterian solicitor from Co. Down, is convinced that, though God had sent the potato blight, the British created the Famine. In his newspaper, the United Irishman, he preaches revolution.
But this is no time for a revolution in Ireland. Hundreds of thousands have died. And starvation and fever will kill many more before the year is out. Mitchel is arrested in May, convicted of treason-felony and transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Charles Gavan Duffy is arrested in July. Other members of Young Ireland, planning rebellion, are apprehended and held in chains. William Smith O’Brien, a Protestant landlord from Limerick and an MP, agrees to raise the standard of revolt.
At first the prospects look good. Enthusiastic Young Ireland meetings take place in the counties of Meath and Limerick, and 50,000 assemble on the mountain-side at Slievenamon in Co. Tipperary. O’Brien tours the counties of Wexford and Kilkenny, and by the time he reaches Mullinahone in Co. Tipperary he has 6,000 men armed with pitchforks, pikes and fowling pieces.
But O’Brien has made no arrangements to feed his rebel army. He tells his followers to go home and get enough food for four days and ‘oatmeal, bread and hard eggs’. These people cannot do that. Soon, though, he is joined on 27 July by Terence Bellew McManus, a Fermanagh man, with volunteers brought over from Liverpool, O’Brien has no more than forty men following him. As they march towards Slievenamon they confront a force of police at Ballingarry on Saturday 30 July. The constables take refuge in Widow McCormack’s house, a two-storey stone farmhouse standing in a cabbage garden. The police barricade the windows, using Mrs McCormack’s mattresses and furniture, tearing down her mantelpieces, and taking doors off their hinges.
Then Widow McCormack comes up the road: she is frantic—her four young children are inside. O’Brien calls a truce so that the children can be brought to safety. He and McManus open the garden gate, walk up the path and O’Brien climbs onto a window-sill, shakes a constable’s hand, and says that it is not their lives but their arms they want. Then some insurgents begin throwing stones. The police fire two volleys. A man falls dead; another is severely injured; O’Brien is shot in the leg; and the rebels flee from the scene. The Young Ireland rebellion is over.
The Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch is Ireland’s sole contribution to the Year of Revolutions. The English historian Thomas Carlyle writes:
Ireland is like a half-starved rat, that crosses the path of an elephant. What must the elephant do? Squelch it—by heavens—squelch it.
The government has rushed special repressive legislation through parliament and flooded the island with troops. But, showing remarkable
restraint, the authorities do not ‘squelch’ the Young Irelanders. Not a single person is executed. O’Brien is arrested and condemned to be transported to Van Diemen’s Land. One of the earliest photographs taken in Ireland shows him sitting proudly in a good suit with his jailers holding an enormous key. He and John Mitchel are treated as ‘gentleman felons’ and given separate cabins on board their prison ships and supplied with books and a servant each.
That summer the potato blight returns with deadly force. News of the rebellion causes charitable contributions from Britain to dry up. Hundreds of thousands of starving people have no choice but to become inmates of the workhouses. Officially the Famine is over, but people continue to die. As late as June 1851 there are as many as 263,000 men, women and children in the workhouses.
The year 1851 is a census year. The terrible toll of the Famine is revealed. The population of Ireland in 1841 was given as 8,175,124. In 1851 it is 6,552,385. The Census Commissioners, taking into account the normal rate of increase, reckon that a loss of at least two and a half million has taken place.
Episode 188
THE FENIAN BROTHERHOOD
In attempting to calculate the impact of the Great Famine, modern scholars refer to ‘excess mortality’. They reckon that there were 1,082,000 ‘excess deaths’, not counting ‘averted births’, that is, unborn babies who died when their mothers died. The western province of Connacht suffered most, with much of Munster and southern Ulster not far behind. Those who died were drawn from the lowest rungs of society, the cottiers and rural labourers and their families.
A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process Page 51
