Famine Times

“You walk with us though we are gone

our pain resides in you.

Forget us not though we are gone,

our memory honour true.

They starved us, slayed us, beat us down.

We walked to save our lives.

Though weakened, famished all we were

They cared not of our strife.

For pocket, power, wealth and force

they pushed us from our homes,

kept from us bounties we had grown

our cereals and stores.”

I’ll write your story lest the world

make err and forget you.

Your lives they were not lived in vain.

Your suffering was true.

Today we know not of your strain,

yet your plight lives on

in the minds and hearts of all who know,

Your memory lingers strong. 

******

As the boughs of the seven yews creek, the wind whispers, 

"*Cogar. There is a story here for you." 

*******

In the year of eighteen hundred and forty four, before the blight fell upon the country of Ireland, there was never such a show of potatoes. So plentiful were the crops that the people became used to having them. The farmers would *heal them in the ditches, throw them on the streets and sell bags of them for small *pennies. In those days, bread was seldom eaten, for *‘twas too expensive for most, and meat was the luxury of the wealthy. 

The food of the poor was the potato. It became the staple diet of the people about the year seventeen hundred. In some *districts, three meals a day were to be made of it. The districts were thickly populated then. Large families would eat in circular groups in the centre of their houses. Small families, would eat propped up *again' the walls. 

It was in the year of 1845 the *bad times came. It seemed there was a death below the ground. Some people say it was a strike of lightning that brought it. Others say that it was sent as a punishment by God on account of the people of Ireland being too careless of the potatoes the year before. When the seed was sown, little growth was to come. On those that grew, the leaves were spotted. The stalks withered and the potatoes decayed in the ground. Some farmers dug them and put what they could in pits only to come the next day and find in the pits filthy, odorous, black mush. 

What they could salvage, the farmers would. They were to be seen cutting the *eye out of the potato to keep for seed and using the rest as food. The few they had over, the farmers planted in new fields the next year, and the same thing happened. The potatoes failed for three *year. There was no food for the people without the potato, and no other food to be got without money from their sale, so they starved. 'Twas said that the "the cattle and other beasts throughout the country went mad with the hunger."

They called this "The Great Famine." In the years of the eighteen hundreds, there were potato famines, but it was in 1845 that the potato blight appeared. Accounts say it lasted to the year 1847, but many more would die in the years thereafter with the *famine fever that followed. Even the doctors that tended the sick were to be taken by it. 

America sent a cargo ship of food stores, but the landlord at Crookhaven, where the ship came into, took it and put it away in a place at Rock Island. He would give it to none but those that were able to pay. While the people starved, the stores were left to rot and then sunk at the bottom of the harbour.

The landlords and ruling class of the time were of little compassion. They kept the rule of no interference in the economies of their colonies. When they sent the *Indian corn, the "yellow," it was to be sold at low cost, they said. At the same time, *didn't they decide to keep the corn depots closed until the prices of the general food had gone too high. The Irish didn't know what the "yellow" was, nor how to prepare it anyway. 'Twas another weapon to turn the religious rebels.

"If you turned Protestant, you would get some of it. If you remained Catholic, you would get nothing."

*****

I listened closely as the wind whispered her story, a question coming to my lips. 

"Why didn't we eat other crops? Didn't we grow cereals and corns?" 

*****

The landlords and ruling class of the time were of little compassion. At that time, the Irish were as good as second-class citizens in their own country. Exports of grain poured out of Ireland *across the water to pay the farmers' rents. When the potato crop failed, they had nothing to eat. When they could no longer pay their rents, they were put out of the their houses that now stood on the lands the absentee English landlords had taken from them. Some forty families that could not pay the rents were evicted in the district of Abbeylara in Westmeath. They had to take to the roads.

Many roads were built during the famine, to give work to the poor. The men were made to work from six o'clock in the morning until ten o'clock in the night under poor light and only given tuppence. They would be fed with *stirabout out of *noggins. They built some of the workhouses too, to put them in. It was a shame and devastation for families, many having to separate going into them. They lived in horrid conditions, often being treated cruelly by the masters of the houses. The grounds around them were filled with their bodies. So many people died, they were not able to mark graves enough.

In the times of the Great Hunger, the Irish were a *famished people. They became too weak and they perished. People were to be found dead on the roadside, collapsed in the ditches and the juices of grass on their lips. The people got so weak, they cared no longer where they lay down to let the land take them. The man with the cart would come then, and they'd be put into the back to be thrown together into the graves. Some said ten bodies were often buried in the same graveyard on the same day. It is said the people planted a tree on every grave to mark it out. When you see the trees, remember. Over a million were lost to the Hunger, two million there has also been mention of.

*******

"But didn't many people escape the Famine, leave on ships for Australia, Canada and America?"

The wind whipped, lashing the yew branches, creating an unmerciful crack.

*******

1,490 people of the West were made to walk, for miles along the canal to Dublin, then sent to Liverpool to board the ships. Coffin ships they were called, for they were as good as dead being on them. Some 463 of the 888 which could be counted, that travelled on from Liverpool, are known to have perished, many at sea. They were often thrown to the sharks. That was the time when the fever came bad, the Famine Fever. The districts were well populated before the Famine and the Fever that followed. After that, there were only a few people left to tell of it. The ruins of the houses stood still and empty, holding the ghostly memories of the times that had passed. In some districts, 'tis that for every four houses, there was only one left standing.

Despite all of this, the reaction of the suffering masses was one of an unsettling peaceful acceptance. One account tells of the *"skeletal crowd which petitioned for the help of the Marquess of Sligo in Westport, Co. Mayo" as being careful to avoid treading on his grass. In those days, a silence rested upon the countryside. The land, depopulated and devastated, was soiled with a sadness that wept on in the dew of the mornings thereafter, dripping from the edges of the leaves as I breathed through the boughs of the trees. 

********

"I have tasted their memories in the dripping of the dew. I have ached for our losses at the creaking of the yew. I have heard the recounting of many of their tales. I have stood upon the places host to their remains. Though the sadness has lifted, the memories have not gone, in the echoes of their footsteps, in our hearts they live on."

*********

*Hiberno English Glossary - all words with an asterisk are explained below, unless I've missed one, which sometimes I do. Find me on Instagram if you have any comments, need an explanation, or simply want to connect.

1.  Cogar: Irish language. "Listen." Used to capture someone's attention when you want to tell them something. 
2.  Heal in the ditch: I can't find a source on the origins of this. It comes directly from the written accounts of the Famine on Duchas.ie. In context, I understand it to mean, "throw."
3.  ‘Twas: Elision - It was.
4.  Pennies: Before euros and cents, there were pounds and pence. Before that, a different currency which also had pence. A penny = one pence.
5.  Districts: This is the common word used in the Duchas.ie stories to refer to the areas people came from.
6.  Again’: Elision. AgainST. 
7.  Bad times: Some people in Ireland referred to Famine times as The Bad Times.
8.  Eye of the potato: The points on the potato that grow out of them like tubers. 
9.  Three + singular: In the countryside, the noun after a plural number was often left singular. 
10.  Famine Fever: Typhus / Relapsing Fever
11.  Indian Corn: Maize.
12.  Didn’t + subject + verb (statement): Emphatic inversion of subject + verb. 
13.  Across the water: England.
14.  Stirabout: A porridge-type food made from oatmeal. Poor people made it from buttermilk and water. 
15.  Noggins: A type of mug made from wood.
16.  Famished: Starving. / Extremely hungry.  
17.  ‘Tis:  Elision. It is.

Source: *accounts of stories from Duchas.ie have been blended together, and combined with stories I’ve been told over the years while growing up in Ireland. This, in addition to numerous blog posts and books I have looked at on the subject. Some stories from the Folklore Collection have been linked. There are too many to link them all. 

The School’s Collection, Various Volumes and Pages under "Famine Times," by Dúchas © National Folklore Collection, UCD, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Main Image: The Old Haggardstown Graveyard, just up the road from where I live. 7 yew trees still stand within its grounds. It is believed they stand around a famine graveyard plot that has never been explored or marked.