A local historian, John D. Pierse, found an account of a ‘Dr Raymond [who] used to buy bodies for a couple of shillings from the local people … he’d come at the diseased part of the body and examine it … they used to do that wholesale.’18 The county archives showed that Dr Samuel Raymond was living in this area in 1843, on the eve of the Famine, and was still serving as a magistrate in 1862. It may have been that he was carrying out sample autopsies on behalf of the government. But in the memory of the place he is a ghoulish exploiter to whom the bodies of the dead were mere biological material.
The stories offered the poor a promise that their suffering would be remembered, if not by individual names, then at least the manner of their death, a series of accusing fingers pointing out of the past at the English, the landlords, the big Catholic farmers who had food on their tables every night … at the whole army of their ‘betters’.
The Listowel Workhouse was the repository of the doomed. Those who ended up in this cramped, disease-ridden barracks had lost all hope of survival on the outside. A doctor treating smallpox sufferers found that ‘three or four fever patients are placed in beds that are unusually small’. He witnessed two children die soon after arriving ‘probably being caused by the cold to which such children were exposed to on account of being brought in so long a distance’.19 The doctor found the body of a newborn baby in the latrines. A record for the 22 March 1851 documented the deaths of sixty-six people in the workhouse, of whom forty-nine were under the age of fifteen.
Out of this misery grew an ambitious scheme. A report at the height of the Famine quoted the Listowel Workhouse master as saying ‘the education of the female children appears to be very much neglected … very few could even read very imperfectly. Only one or two make any attempt at writing.’20 The remedy to illiteracy and the prospect of death from starvation or disease was to pack thirty-seven girls off to Australia. They were among 4,000 Irish girls selected to find new lives in the colonies. Most ended up marrying miners or farmers in the outback. In the great departures that followed the Famine, some of my own Purtill relatives took ship for America, settling in Kentucky and New York, and bringing with them a memory of loss to be handed to the coming generations. Their children would learn that as many as half a million people were evicted from their homes during the Famine; that the government failed the starving when it might, through swifter action, have saved hundreds of thousands; they learnt that the poor were damned by the incompetence of ministers and by their rigid ideological beliefs, the conviction that the market was God; that the poor should learn a lesson about the ‘moral hazard’ of their own fecklessness; that too much charity would weaken the paupers’ determination to help themselves – and that all of this was part of God’s plan. It was not genocide in the manner I have known it. Genocide takes a plan for extermination with a defined course set at the outset. But it was a moral crime of staggering proportions.
The Famine changed the world around the Purtills. But they survived. How? Were they tougher than others? I will never know. There is only one narrative of the Famine when I am growing up. This is of English infamy, the clearances and evictions and the workhouse. But it is not the whole story. The story of survival and its psychological costs is not told: how some of the bigger Catholic farmers also evicted tenants, how the vanishing of the labouring class created the room for bigger farms, and how the Famine set in train the destruction of the landlord system. Hunger begets desperation, begets fierce survival strategies, and these beget shame which begets silence.
I find myself going back to Brendan Kennelly’s ‘My Dark Fathers’. I do so because I believe there are parts of history only the poets can convey, the deeper emotional scars that form themselves into ways of seeing things that inhabit later generations. Brendan told me he had written the poem after attending a wedding in north Kerry. A boy was called upon to sing. He had a beautiful voice but was painfully shy. So he turned to face the wall and in this way was able to perform. Kennelly was transfixed. He saw in that moment the shame of survival that had stalked his ancestors and mine.
Skeletoned in darkness, my dark fathers lay
Unknown, and could not understand
The giant grief that trampled night and day,
The awful absence moping through the land.
Upon the headland, the encroaching sea
Left sand that hardened after tides of Spring,
No dancing feet disturbed its symmetry
And those who loved good music ceased to sing.
Since every moment of the clock
Accumulates to form a final name,
Since I am come of Kerry clay and rock,
I celebrate the darkness and the shame
That could compel a man to turn his face
Against the wall, withdrawn from light so strong
And undeceiving, spancelled in a place
Of unapplauding hands and broken song.21
Writing twenty years after the Famine, the lawyer and essayist William O’Connor Morris visited Kerry and found that ‘the memory of the Famine, which disturbed society rudely in this county … has left considerable traces of bitterness’.22 There is an entry in the diary of the landlord Sir John Benn Walsh which recalls a dinner held by the workhouse guardians. It is towards the end of the Famine. Benn Walsh is shocked to find that there are ‘three Catholic priests and a party with them who refused to rise when the Queens health was drunk and a cry was raised of “long live the French Republic” … this little toast shows all the disloyalty in the hearts of those people’.23
The bitterness curdled across the Atlantic into the Irish ghettos of America’s east coast, where hatred of England grew into a revolutionary political force that would return to Ireland, reaching back to the eighteenth century for its defining theme: only total separation from England could cure the ills of Ireland. The lives of the Purtills were transformed in the decades after the Famine but not through armed struggle in a quest for national sovereignty. It was the campaign for land that showed the Purtills and their like what it meant to win.
II
The Landlord and his agent
wrote Davitt from his cell
For selfishness and cruelty
They have no parallel
And the one thing they’re entitled to
these idle thoroughbreds
Is a one-way ticket out of here
third class to Holyhead.
Andy Irvine, Forgotten Hero, 1989
Tenant farmers like Edmund Purtill had few guaranteed rights before the land campaign of the late nineteenth century. Although the rate of evictions had declined considerably, they endured in the collective memory. Joseph O’Connor lived six miles outside Listowel on the lands of Lord Listowel and described his family’s eviction at Christmas time in 1863:
They came on small Christmas Day [6 January, the Feast of the Epiphany] in January 1863, bailiffs, peelers an’ soldiers, an’ had us