Famine visited West Cork 180 years ago this month, bringing disease and death, writes Robert Hume.
The Great Hunger visited West Cork 180 years ago this month and wreaked devastation. But who was to blame?
Contemporaries claimed Irish labourers were being punished by God for idleness, or put the catastrophe down to persistent rain – even fumes from steam locomotives.
Nowadays, negligent landlords and British government policy are more likely to be held responsible, and the ugly issue of genocide raised.
‘One mass of famine, disease, and death,’ that’s how Father Theobald Mathew depicted Skibbereen in 1846. Dr Daniel Donovan, who ran the town’s relief committee, recorded that working people had been ‘reduced from a fine robust peasantry to a horde of hungry shivering wretches’.
The poor were ‘dying off like rotten sheep’ reported The Cork Examiner (December 16th 1846), while magistrate Nicholas Cummins described ‘famished and ghostly skeletons… their demonic yells … still ringing in my ears’.
American diplomat Elihu Burritt called Skibbereen a ‘little mud city of the dead and dying’. Bodies lay ‘mutilated and torn by pigs and vermin’ wrote another eyewitness, John Fitzpatrick (The Freeman’s Journal, 17 Feb. 1847).
Wearing the rags in which they had died, corpses were carried to the cemetery in a reusable parish coffin: the hinged bottom swung open, the body dropped into a mass grave, and the coffin returned to hang in the church.
According to the Examiner correspondent, ‘unaccountable and extraordinary apathy’ was found in Bantry, ‘a wild, dirty sea-port, with cabins built upon the rocks and
hills’.
Inhabitants depended entirely on potatoes for food: ‘We gets our potatoes when we can, ma’am; and that’s all’, American philanthropist Asenath Nicholson was told.
‘Where will Ireland be, in the event of a universal potato rot?,’ had asked Dr John Lindley ominously in The Gardeners’ Chronicle (September 13th 1845). Unable to be stored from one season to another, crop failure spelt disaster.
Before the germ theory of disease, most scientists maintained that the blight arose ‘spontaneously’ from the potatoes themselves, while ordinary folk referred to a ‘mysterious visitation’, and potatoes being ‘injured’.
Some blamed incessant rain – even fumes from the new steam locomotives. Not so British senior civil servant Charles Trevelyan, who declared the Great Hunger
English MP George Poulett Scrope agreed that the Irish themselves were responsible. Backward, stupid, idle and drunk, they were ‘human encumbrances’ to the long march of progress. In similar vein, English barrister Thomas Campbell Foster dubbed the people of West Carbery ‘indolent, careless, and unenergetic’.
However, some contemporaries were already pointing fingers at British absentee landlords who neglected their estates, and at Irish merchants who continued to export beef, cheese and wheat to Britain while their fellow countrymen were starving.
Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel dismissed reports of conditions in Ireland as exaggerated and contradictory, and turned a blind eye to large-scale evictions of labourers unable to afford their rent. His solution was to send Ireland ‘brimstone’, a nickname for hard American corn.
The blight returned with a vengeance in 1846 to destroy the entire potato crop. But the new Whig administration under Lord John Russell was against government interference. Father Mathew pleaded in vain to keep the supply of American corn going, and rebuked the commission which glibly concluded that Ireland had enough workhouses to prevent its people from starving.
Irish Nationalist John Mitchel was outraged: ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine’ to cull the Irish population.
‘Potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, he protested, ‘yet there was no famine save in Ireland’. Mitchel was found guilty of sedition and speedily transported to Van Diemen’s Land. Meanwhile, The Times (February 19th 1846) endorsed government policy, arguing that Ireland was ‘used to famines’, and that no public money should be thrown at an ‘act of God’.
That would mean ‘humbling the pride of this empire. By November 6th, when huge donations were reported in Irish savings-banks, the paper jibed: ‘A few more famines, and Ireland will become one of the wealthiest countries in the world.’
In reality, food was desperately short, and what little arrived was distributed by private charities, and was ‘hopelessly inadequate’, states Father Patrick Hickey (Famine in West Cork).
From October 1846 to May 1847, a quarter of the population of Ballydehob perished. In autumn 1847 Trevelyan even abolished soup kitchens: they were too expensive and encouraged idleness. For him, the Famine was ‘the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence’, a ‘remedy for the maladies of Ireland’, and a ‘bright light’ for the future.
Irish Famine memorial, Dublin
Hunger must take its course, to intervene would be acting against God’s will. In spring 1848, Trevelyan was awarded a knighthood for his ‘services’.
Since then, most historians have agreed that the British government failed to exercise its duty of protection, and treated the Irish like second-class citizens.
Arthur Griffith viewed this strategy as an attempt to eliminate Irish Celts, PS O’Hegarty labelled it ‘a deliberate policy of extermination’, and Tim Pat Coogan a planned act of ‘genocide’ by the British.
Whoever was to blame, one thing is clear: the consequences of the Great Hunger were catastrophic.
Over one million people died from starvation and disease.
At least another million emigrated. Ireland’s population plummeted from around 9 million in 1845 to 5.5 million in 1866.
West Cork was hit especially hard, and Skibbereen became internationally synonymous with famine.
Tom Guerin: SKIBBEREEN ‘cripple’ who came back from the grave
Tom was buried in a famine pit in Abbeystowry Cemetery, Skibbereen, in winter 1848.
His mother had placed him on the communal cart, believing him dead.
While the gravediggers were moving bodies to make more space, they hit him with a shovel on the knees and he gave out a cry.
They dragged him out but he was badly maimed.
As a ‘cripple’ – his own word – he had no way of earning a living independently, and every winter would enter the Skibbereen Union Workhouse.
Come the summer, he would travel around as a beggar, and became known as “the man who had risen from the dead”.
Tom died aged 65, in 1910.
He was interred in the same graveyard in which he’d been found alive.
The burial register records that he was married, and had died from heart disease.
Visit the exhibition at Skibbereen Heritage Centre to learn more about the Great Irish Famine.
