Skeletoned in darkness, my dark fathers lay
Unknown, and could not understand
The giant grief that trampled night and day.
In her brilliant work ‘That the Science of Cartography is Limited’, Eavan Boland takes us to the emptiness and erasure of the ‘famine roads’ (the ‘public works’ projects that the British attempted to create – as an insane way of paying starving labourers, so as not to give them famine relief, with nothing in return). Boland describes coming to a wood, on the edge of Connacht, and her partner speaking:
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
The starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
And ends still.
The musician and singer Christy Moore incants in a repeated, soft, howl what happened on ‘A Single Day’ in Ireland – 14 September 1847, at the height of the Famine. On that day, as thousands of people lay starving, ships sailed out of Cork Harbour with
147 barrels of pork,
986 casks of ham,
27 sacks of bacon,
528 boxes of eggs,
1,397 firkins of butter,
477 sacks of oats,
720 sacks of flour,
380 sacks of barley,
187 head of cattle,
296 head of sheep,
and 4,338 barrels of miscellaneous provisions
– on a single day.
And on this same day, in the capital city on the other side of the island, away from the starvation and disease:
The Lady Mayoress held a ball
At the Mansion House in Dublin
In the presence of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
Dancing continued until the early hours,
And refreshments of the most varied and sumptuous
Nature were supplied with inexhaustible profusion.
On a single day.
Desmond Egan, in his 1997 collection Famine, looks at the legacy of the Famine in Ireland today – the vital question of how such an event continues to shape the people and culture now. And he reflects on the taboos it has left, particularly that of shame, of behaviour that cannot be spoken of:
The stink of famine
hangs in the bushes still
in the sad celtic hedges
you can catch it
down the line of our landscape
get its taste on every meal
listen
there is famine in our music
famine behind our faces
it is only a field away
has made us all immigrants
guilty for having survived
has separated us from language
cut us from our culture
built blocks around belief
left us on our own
The sun has sunk into the sea, blurred by low cloud, only another half an hour or so of light. I walk to the path that leads back inland, Egan’s words still in my head. That sense of erasure, being cut off from the land, from your culture. And how all Irish people alive today only exist because their ancestors somehow survived. But the multitude of different experiences that the word ‘survived’ encompasses …
*
Back at the house now, dark outside, I light the stove and return to Colm Tóibín’s powerful essay on the Famine, ‘Erasures’, published in the London Review of Books. I’m intrigued this evening by what he writes about this particular question of survival, and its meaning; he seems to be striking at the heart of a taboo in nationalist portrayals of the Famine, when he says ‘an entire class of Irish Catholics survived the Famine; many, indeed, improved their prospects as a result of it, and this legacy may be more difficult for us to deal with in Ireland now than the legacy of those who died or emigrated’. He then details his father’s own local research in his home town, where he discovered the workhouse was buying oatmeal at £2 a ton in October 1845, by the winter that had doubled to £4 a ton, and by the end of 1846 it was £20 a ton. Some Catholic farmers and traders had made a killing out of the Famine years – literally and metaphorically. Tóibín then makes this point, which shouldn’t be seen as taking away British responsibility, but rather spreading the responsibility in a way that reflects the reality of what took place:
It became increasingly important, as nationalist fervour grew in the years after the Famine, that Catholic Ireland, or simply ‘Ireland’ (the Catholic part went without saying), was presented as a nation, one and indivisible. The Famine, then, had to be blamed on the Great Other, the enemy across the water, and the victims of the Famine had to be this entire Irish nation, rather than a vulnerable section of the population.
And the ways that people survived were often as terrible as the ways that people died. All across the south and west and north of Ireland, parents had to make choices about which of their children might live, and which would die. Fathers and mothers chose to stop eating so that their children might have the little food left. In thousands of cottages, families who had barely enough for their own survival bolted their doors when they saw starving strangers, sometimes even their own relatives, coming up the tracks. Dying people littered the sides of roads, some crawling into graveyards so that they would at least die on consecrated land, corpses were often unburied, neighbours were found skeletal in their beds, having ‘turned their faces to the wall’. These were the memories that people lived with afterwards, memories that carved themselves into the minds of survivors, but could hardly be spoken of. Your family had only survived because others had starved. This left a legacy of shame, as well as anger, in the Irish psyche which it is hard to overstate. ‘The shame … that the just man experiences at another man’s crime: the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist.’
Another man’s crime. More than a million human beings dying not because of anything they had done wrong, and supposedly part of the ‘commonwealth’, part of ‘Great Britain’! This is the aspect my brain still cannot process, this is why an inchoate rage builds in me. Everything I’ve grown up with, everything I’ve been taught, tells me that you cannot write like this, you must be ‘measured’, you must be calm. No. Not this time. Not about this. In Trevelyan’s account of the ‘Irish Crisis’, as he called it, the famine ended in August 1847.fn13 In reality, the winter of 1847/8 was one of the most terrible periods for starvation and deaths, but Trevelyan had decided in autumn 1847 that the British ‘relief’ efforts should be wound down. The soup kitchens were closed, with millions still destitute and starving. Even in the workhouses thousands were dying – in Limerick workhouse alone 130 people were dying every week that autumn. But Trevelyan had had enough – in his chilling phrase it was time to let ‘the operation of natural causes’ take effect:
‘It is my opinion that too much has been done for the people.
Under such treatment people have grown worse instead of better.’
And then he set off for France for a fortnight’s holiday with his family. He was knighted by Queen Victoria the following year, on 27 April 1848, in recognition for his ‘services’ during the ‘Irish Crisis’, and was rewarded financially as well, with the payment of a year’s extra salary for services rendered to the Crown and empire. A little later, with the Famine still raging, an editorial in the Dublin Freeman’s Journal asked these three questions: