Erasures

Letters

Vol. 20 No. 16 · 20 August 1998

From David Craig

As I read Colm Tóibín’s enthralling piece about the history of the Great Hunger in Ireland (LRB, 30 July), and noted his wish for the ‘living, speaking voice’ and ‘the perspective of those who were not administrators or politicians or landlords’, I began to think that at any moment he would make use of Thomas Gallagher’s Paddy’s Lament: Ireland 1846-47, which teems with such material. Gallagher, an American writer whose father had emigrated from County Roscommon, was able to get close to the Famine itself and the ways in which people suffered, retaliated and escaped, because he used, in addition to a great many contemporary newspapers and official records, the 2600 pages of transcribed interviews, conducted in 1955, with people ‘old enough to remember their parents’ stories of the famine’. These are stored in the Irish Folklore Department at University College, Dublin.

From them, via Gallagher, we can learn how the first smell of the potato rot, like ‘the bilge water of a ship’, stole over the countryside and made the dogs howl. (I heard on Barra how the same thing happened in the same year in the Scottish Hebrides.) The fog that was common during that damp July is still called the ‘potato fog’. Starvation soon followed, people began to fight for turnip cuttings, pick up fish offal with their toes in fish markets, and gather nettles from graveyards to make broth. They died exhausted, their ‘entire alimentary canals, from mouth to anus … completely empty’, or their intestines destroyed by gangrene so that their ‘stools would resemble water in which raw meat had been washed’.

People expressed their despair in hopeless sayings: ‘There will be nothing for us but to lie down and die.’ ‘If the English desert us now, God in His glory they’ll never see.’ ‘I swear by the broken heart my mother died of, the hand of God is in this. It’s a curse that has fallen on the land.’ Jeremiah Hegarty of Galway died in a ditch of starvation because, worried that his family would be evicted, he had refrained from eating the barley earmarked to pay the rent. Many others were less well behaved and stole sheep, leaving behind the head and the bell and skinning the carcass on a flat tombstone before taking the flesh back to be cooked in a hiding-place. The farmers retaliated by building pits full of spikes: the thief fell in, was held there by his pierced feet and then clubbed to death. So people were reduced to eating rats, dogs, the carcasses of diseased cattle and ‘the joints of starved horses’.

It was the death of a whole culture. The quietness of the stricken countryside came to be called ‘the famine silence’. Sports and pastimes ‘disappeared’, said an old woman. ‘Poetry, music and dancing stopped. They lost and forgot them all … The Famine killed everything.’ The starving tenants who could not pay their rent were evicted, their houses ‘tumbled’ – torn down with crowbars and ropes. One woman demolished her own house in the belief that she would be paid five shillings for the work – she did not get it.

Gallagher’s work should be seen as central to the history of the Hunger. In Brecht’s phrase, it ‘watches the people’s mouth’, giving primacy to what people themselves said as they were caught up in history’s terrible wave. When Tóibín writes that ‘there has not been much attempt’ to catch their ‘living, speaking voice’, he is sliding uncomfortably close to the hist or ian of the Highland Clearances, J.M Bumsted, who wrote in The People’s Clearance (1982) that it was difficult to get close to the cleared people because they largely lacked ‘the skills of writing and the ability of fluent self-expression’. It was my disbelief of this that led me to travel through Scotland and eastern Canada, ‘watching the people’s mouth’ and gleaning the hundreds of stories of clearance and famine that I recorded in On the Crofters’ Trail. If only Scotland had had done the work of those 22 interviewers who wrote down the oral record of the Irish events!

David Craig
Burton-in-Kendal

From Joseph Nuttgens

An Irish friend, on realising how ignorant I was about Irish history, once lent me Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger. This book shocked me and has haunted me ever since. It describes how an English woman, a representative of the Methodist Church sent to find out the facts, came to Skibbereen. In one part of the town she found a market trading in an apparently normal way but, as she went into the poorer parts, she became aware of the emptiness of the streets and of an odd silence. When she looked through the door of an apparently empty house she found a family dead from starvation, and then she found others. I am still amazed and horrified that the wealthiest nation in the world should have allowed such a disaster to strike its own – proclaimed – citizens. Perhaps the reason for the Great Silence is stupefaction at this realisation.

Joseph Nuttgens
High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire