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'The Living Were Out of Their Feeling': A Socio-Cultural Analysis of the Great Famine in Ireland, Poddle Room, Dublin Castle, 28 March 2018President Michael D. Higgins states, in the preface to the catalogue that accompanies the Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger exhibition in the Coach House, Dublin Castle, that ‘An Gorta Mór was a defining moment in the history of modern Ireland and a turning point in the history of our people’. My own belief is that the Great Famine of 1845-52 has an even greater, a more profound, significance. It is not an exaggeration to say that it was the most catastrophic event in modern Irish history. The Famine was central to the modern Irish experience, to shaping Ireland as a nation in the modern world. My former colleague at UCC, Professor Joseph Lee places the Famine in a wider context, describing it as ‘the greatest single peacetime tragedy in the history of any western European country since the Black Death’ in the Middle Ages.Before turning to the theme of this morning’s famine reflections, let me offer you some contextual information.Background: Pre-Famine IrelandThe Irish population had more than trebled in the century before the Great Famine, from approximately 2.5 million in 1750 to about 8.5 million in 1845. Ireland was very poor by contemporary European standards. With the exception of the north-eastern counties around Belfast, and the cities of Dublin and Cork, the Industrial Revolution largely by-passed the country. The vast majority of the people, some 85 per cent of them, lived in the countryside where they attempted to eke out a living on tiny plots of land or as agricultural labourers. The rapidly escalating population put pressure on food and land resources. Between one-half and two-thirds of the pre-Famine Irish population were exclusively or heavily dependent on a single source of food, potatoes, a situation that was fraught with danger, and this danger was encapsulated in the fact that there had been 14 partial failures of the potato crop between 1816 and 1842. Sequence of crop failures in the mid and late 1840sIn the autumn of 1845, a fungal disease, phytophtora infestans, commonly referred to as potato blight, appeared in Ireland for the first time, and affected about one-third of the main crop of potatoes. The 1846 crop was a total failure and it was in the winter of 1846 and spring of 1847 that the real impact of the Famine began to be felt. The 1847 potato crop was sound but the yield was small, as only a fraction of the normal crop had been sown. In 1848, there was again a complete failure, compounded by a very poor grain harvest. In 1849, there was a partial failure. It was the repeated failures of the potato crop over a period of years that made the situation so catastrophic.Mass death, social convulsion and dislocation are the perceptible signs of famine, in Ireland’s case the loss of 2.5 million people, almost 30 per cent of its pre-Famine population, to death and emigration in a seven-year period. Less obvious and altogether more difficult to assess is the emotional and psychological impact on individuals and on society generally. The title of this morning’s famine reflections, 'The living were out of their feeling', is how one individual recalled the Famine at the time of its centenary in the 1940s. In the oral tradition of the Great Famine, in inherited memory, the times were out of joint one hundred years earlier, and so were the people. The late 1840s and early 1850s were years of abnormality, and the behaviour of the famine-stricken – the starving, the diseased and the dispossessed – was equally aberrant. My address this morning attempts to interrogate the abnormality of the times and the people’s behaviour. It explores the cataclysm of the Great Famine through the senses – the sight, sound and smell of human suffering and death – and assesses the impact and legacy of these experiences for survivors.Most of the Famine's 1 million deaths were caused by one or more of the many contagious or communicable diseases that raged with great malignity during these years, particularly typhus and relapsing fever, dysentery and diarrhoea, and several others. During famine, two factors, often working in tandem, facilitate the occurrence of epidemics. These are the impairment of the individual immune system by starvation and the loss of community resistance to the spread of disease. Several phenomena contribute to disease diffusion, including increased migration, mendicancy and vagrancy; neglect of personal and domestic hygiene; and overcrowding of public institutions such as hospitals, workhouses and prisons. The impact of the prevailing infections was magnified by their occurrence at a time when disease causation and prevention were not properly understood, and before the scientific discoveries in medicine that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century.The remainder of the Famine deaths are attributable to dietary deficiency diseases such as scurvy and pellagra, and to starvation. The earliest signs of the physical effects of under-nutrition are loss of body fat and wasting of skeletal muscle. Sidney Godolphin Osborne, an English Anglican clergyman and philanthropist who visited several Irish workhouses in mid-1850, observed that starvation in Ireland was physically distinctive and could not be mistaken. He recorded that the starving body wasted to a skeleton; the skin became rough and very dry, almost like parchment; the eyes receded into the head and took on a dull, painful look; the face and head, from the wasting of the flesh and the prominence of the bones, appeared skull-like, and there was a pronounced facial pallor; the hair on the heads of starving adults and children was very thin and often came out in patches; the skin over the chest and upper part of the stomach was stretched so tight that every angle and curve of the sternum and ribs stood out in relief. Invariably, there were sores between the fingers, the ankles were often swollen and most of the starving were afflicted with gastro-intestinal diseases, either dysentery or chronic diarrhoea.Osborne's depiction of the physical changes wrought by famine is particularly graphic but far from unique. The most pervasive and enduring image of the Great Famine is that of the skeleton, the spectre. The skeletal appearance of the starving, the physical shrinking, was noted by doctors, relief workers, travellers and contemporary writers. Physical wasting – the worn, haggard, shrunken appearance of face, body and limbs – was a powerful and affecting sight. In a celebrated letter, the prominent Cork merchant Nicholas Cummins informed the Duke of Wellington that he had encountered 'ghastly skeletons', 'phantoms', 'frightful spectres' in west Cork, in mid-December 1846. In the following month, a member of the Society of Friends or Quakers described the people of County Mayo as 'walking skeletons; the men gaunt and haggard, stamped with the livid mark of hunger; the children crying with pain; the women in some of the cabins too weak to stand'. According to a doctor practising in Cork, one-third of the city's population during the first half of 1847 consisted of 'shadows and spectres, the impersonations of disease and famine'. These individuals had flocked there from the surrounding countryside and were bound for the grave. A colleague corroborated his account, recording that 'crowds of wretched people constantly arrived from the country and stalked through the streets like ghosts'.Many individuals were struck by the physical changes in children. A doctor in Schull, County Cork, reported in March 1847 that it was impossible to distinguish between famine-stricken boys and girls. He stated that children in the last stages of famine and fever were virtually lifeless, and when picked up, their legs swung and rocked 'like the legs of a doll'. In December 1846, a resident of Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim noted that the local children bore ‘the anxious look of premature old age' on their faces. About the same time, late 1846, a Presbyterian clergyman in Ballina, County Mayo, reported that children in the local workhouse were ‘a hideous sight … their heads had become bald and their faces wrinkled like old men and women of seventy or eighty years of age'. By the beginning of February 1847, children in Sligo were described as ‘worn down almost to skeletons and resembled withered old persons'. [The resemblance of babies and children to aged people is a feature of starvation, and is commonly described in current literature]The antithesis of physical wasting is the bloated body, another powerful famine image. This condition, which is caused by the accumulation of fluid in the body and is known as oedema or dropsy, is indicative of extreme and prolonged food deprivation. There were many contemporary references, particularly during the winter of 1846-7, to the limbs and bodies of the living swelling until they burst. One of the most graphic and probably the best known is that attributed to Revd Dr Robert Traill, the Church of Ireland rector of Schull in west Cork, who described mortality in the parish at the beginning of February 1847 as 'frightful and fearful'. In a vivid depiction, he stated that the starving, whether they were young or old, were 'almost without exception swollen and ripening for the grave'. Many of the prevailing diseases had colour associations. Relapsing fever was known as fiabhras buí, yellow fever, because of the frequent presence of jaundice. Those suffering from typhus fever were often covered from head to foot with dark, almost black spots and typhus was consequently referred to as fiabhras dubh, the black fever. Similarly, the dietary deficiency disease scurvy was known as cos dubh, black leg, because the legs often turned completely black up to the middle of the thigh. Dysentery was colloquially known as 'the bloody flux' and during the Famine this vile disease was characterised by seemingly uncontrollable evacuations of blood and mucus. A west Cork doctor claimed that it was easy to detect those who were suffering from dysentery as the floors and surrounds of their cabins were usually marked with clots of blood.The powerful visual impact of starvation and disease was compounded by their olfactory qualities. Many doctors referred to the peculiar smell which clung to the clothes and bodies of the poor, particularly the sick. A doctor in Schull associated starving children with 'the smell of mice'. Another commented on the mouldy smell which was perceptible about the persons of starving people. A County Clare physician observed that 'the sooty and peat-smoke odour of former times' had given way to a more offensive, sickening and readily recognisable one. In west Cork, this was colloquially known as 'the smell of the grave'. The dispensary doctor at Goleen described it as 'a cadaverous, suffocating odour', a 'peculiar mousy smell' that surrounded those suffering from 'starvation fever'. Such a smell, he said, was invariably 'the forerunner of death'. These were the odours surrounding the living. Those emanating from the dead, from uninterred decomposing bodies, were even more offensive.The sufferings of the sick and the starved could also be heard. Nicholas Cummins, the Cork merchant previously referred to, informed the Duke of Wellington in December 1846 that their 'demonic yells' were still ringing in his ears days after his return from a fact-finding tour of west Cork. Another visitor to the same area in the following year referred to 'the agonising shrieks' of the starving. A. M. Sullivan, journalist, barrister and nationalist MP, who grew to manhood in west Cork during the Famine, recalled the 'crowds of gaunt, cadaverous creatures' who gathered around the roadside soup kitchens, where they 'moaned and shrieked and fought and scuffled'. The terms 'whining', 'groaning' and 'wailing' occur time and again in contemporary accounts. A visitor to Cork in early April 1847 found that in the poorer parts of the city 'the low, unbroken wail of children ... the wail of suffering and pain' was ever present. 'It never ceased', he said, 'but filled the air, following even long after one had left those quarters'. Such dissonance reinforced the absence of many of the sounds of social normality, especially laughter and the sounds of children at play. A member of the Society of Friends, travelling from the midlands to Donegal in December 1846, reported that he had not heard a poor person laugh since he left home. Another Quaker, who visited Erris, County Mayo, in May 1847, was informed that 'misery and starvation' constituted the sole topic of conversation and that all the fun was gone from the cabins of the poor. The visitor discovered this domestic transformation for himself, reporting that the peasantry’s natural vivacity and capacity for fun and merriment had been 'starved out of them'.The Famine was both an individual and a mass experience, a reductive one, with profound physiological and psychological consequences. One way of gauging the social response is through the famine stress model suggested by an American anthropologist, Robert Dirks. This model posits three distinct phases in the communal response to famine: 'alarm', ‘resistance', ‘exhaustion'. The alarm phase is triggered by the onset of famine and prompts a co-operative response at community level, one marked by the sharing of food and other resources among friends and neighbours. This period is one of soaring food prices and intense activity as individuals and families move about searching for food and relief. There is an increase in the number of spontaneous and concerted outbreaks of violence, often occurring where food and other commodities are in storage or transit.As the physiological effects of famine become more pronounced and individuals weaken from hunger, a protracted phase of resistance sets in, during which individual and communal generosity evaporates. The focus shifts increasingly from social reciprocity to the narrower one of the atomic family unit. Friendship, kinship and neighbourly ties are gradually severed. Food preparation and consumption take place in secret and supplies are hidden. Conservation of energy becomes paramount and all unnecessary activity ceases. People congregate only where there is a possibility of obtaining sustenance. The search for alternative food sources intensifies and becomes increasingly desperate. Lawlessness and physical violence continue to increase but tend to be less concerted and sustained. Eventually, resistance gives way to exhaustion and this, the final phase of famine, is marked by the collapse of the family unit. Within the household, food sharing becomes increasingly discriminatory. The elderly are seen as a drain on provisions. Tolerance towards children does not erode as quickly, although a time invariably arrives when they too receive disproportionately small amounts of food. Homicide, suicide, infanticide and the abandonment of children increase at this stage and provide further evidence of social disintegration.The Irish experience accords broadly with the anthropological famine stress model of ‘alarm’, ‘resistance’, and ‘exhaustion’. The failure of the main potato crop in autumn 1846 for the second successive year sent panic waves through the country. There was massive social dislocation as the distressed flocked to towns and cities in search of relief and employment or descended on the sea ports in a migratory rush. There was an explosion in recorded crime, from 6,300 cases in 1844 to almost 21,000 in 1847. Many of these were public order offences, often involving food rioting, large groups of people who attacked mills and corn stores, shops, soup kitchens and food convoys, particularly in midland and Munster counties. Food rioting was essentially confined to a ten-month period, September 1846 to June 1847. Thereafter, the physically and emotionally shattered peasantry were too debilitated to engage in effective mass protests and the food riots degenerated into the furtive food stealing that characterised the later years of the Famine.As the famine crisis deepened, human sensibilities became increasingly blunted. Society was reduced to the microcosm of the family and eventually to that of the individual, to a Darwinian survival of the fittest. The temporal and geographic impact of the Famine varied but the worst affected parts of the country appear to have reached the exhaustion or final stage by late 1846-early 1847. Evidence from Mayo indicates signs of social disintegration as early as December 1846, what the writer described as the unravelling of 'the bonds of domestic affection'. He specified fathers deserting their families, children compelling their parents to beg, and parents barring their adult children from the family home. Similarly, reports from west Cork during the same period, the winter and spring of 1846-47, suggest that the prevailing emotions were apathy and fatalism, indifference to the plight of others, even of close family members. The most striking change detected in popular attitudes and behaviour was in relation to death and the dead. In mid-December 1846, a Cork Examiner reporter concluded that the familiarity of the west Cork peasantry with death had ‘rendered them indifferent to its ravages'. The abandonment of traditional funerary rites and customs, and the disrespect shown to the dead were stark features of the Famine and were commented on by many observers. A Dublin Quaker, Richard Webb, who visited Erris, County Mayo, in May 1847, stated that the pre-Famine Irish poor were very aware of the credit and respectability attached to a large, well-conducted funeral, but popular funerary customs and traditions had been swept away like chaff before the wind. Webb added that in the worst affected parts of the country, funerals excited little attention and even less emotion, and were rarely attended by more than a handful of relatives and friends.By the beginning of 1847 mortality in Skibbereen was so great that death and funerary rites were regarded with 'perfect indifference', according to a local Catholic clergyman, who stated that the people were oblivious to everything other than obtaining a morsel of food. A similar response to famine deaths was detected in the Cork union workhouse. The doctor reported that workhouse children died ‘like bubbles bursting on the stream', and their mothers reacted with little emotion. This type of reductive imagery is frequently encountered in the contemporary literature. Some commentators referred to people appearing 'to die by inches'; others compared famine deaths to candles burning down, imagery suggestive of the silence and inexorability of death. The workhouse poor were accorded as little sympathy in death as in life. As mortality increased exponentially in the Cork union workhouse during 1847, the master was forced to resort to desperate measures. He informed the poor law guardians in August that he had sent out the accumulating corpses late at night and, in his own words, ‘got rid of them somewhere'.Some commentators suggested that the practice of interring the dead at night or early in the morning originated in the shame felt at society’s inability to give the deceased a proper Christian burial. The indignities that were heaped on the Famine dead are further revealed in the resort to re-usable coffins, so-called ‘sliding’ or 'trap-coffins', which were fitted with a hinged bottom that swung open like a trapdoor when released. The demand for coffins was so great at the height of the Famine that even these contrivences proved inadequate, and corpses were increasingly buried without coffins. In late February 1847, the secretary of the Skibbereen famine relief committee reported that the dead were being 'thrown' coffinless into graves [thrown was the word used, which is indicative of callous disrespect and disregard]. Many of the dead were denied burial in hallowed ground, and were interred wherever they fell – in ditches, corners of fields, behind their cabins. Many were in such an advanced state of decomposition that their rudimentary homes were simply pulled down around them and set alight. As mortality increased, bodies were left unburied and were eaten by vermin and dismembered by pigs and scavenging dogs. Shame might explain burial at night or early in the morning but the abandonment of the dead suggests a more profound stage of famine. A number of possible explanations were posited, including fear of infection, lack of money to purchase a coffin, and the difficulty of procuring enough able-bodied men to carry the corpse or open the grave. Many of those whose luck ran out in the late 1840s and early 1850s undertook their final journey in a hinged or ‘trap’ coffin, a device that might ultimately be regarded as the symbol of the social disintegration of the Famine years. In the wake of the catastrophe, a physician in Bantry in west Cork constructed three large crosses from the timber of one such coffin. The inscription on one of the crosses captured the singularity and scale of the Famine tragedy, and the fate of some of its victims:During the frightful famine plague, which devastated a large proportion of Ireland in the years 1846/7, that monstrous and unchristian machine, a ‘sliding coffin’, was, from necessity, used in Bantry union for the conveyance of the victims to one common grave. The material of this cross, the symbol of our Redemption, is a portion of one of the machines, which enclosed the remains of several hundreds of our countrymen, during their passage from the wretched huts or waysides, where they died, to the pit into which their remains were thrown. The survivors of the Great Famine and their descendants viewed the event apocalyptically. Charles Gavan Duffy, editor of the Nation, the newspaper of the Young Ireland movement, claimed that the Famine had violated the very laws of nature, and caused the social and moral collapse of the country. In the late summer of 1849, after a harrowing journey through the south and west of Ireland in the company of Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish author, biographer and historian, Duffy commented editorially that Ireland was in ruins, ‘morally a beggar, physically a spectre’, an observation that applied both to the individual and the collective. Duffy’s experiences in the south and west in 1849 led him to conclude that the Famine had created what he called ‘a new race in Ireland’. Although the tone and content of Duffy's lengthy exegesis in the Nation was intentionally propagandist, it did convey a famine reality – the physical and psychological degradation of the individual and the wider Irish community. The Famine caused death, eviction and emigration on an unprecedented scale. The living and the dead were debased and defiled. Families were physically and emotionally torn asunder. Long cherished social customs, ties and observances were eroded. Communal certainties and supports were undermined. Man was reduced to the primal. These profundities, in all their elemental rawness, constitute both the public and the private memories of the Great Irish Famine, and this is before we even begin to consider the role of government, and the political response to this calamitous occurrence. ................
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