A famine story

 Strokestown Famine Museum is a very good telling of a complex story. It tells the story of the Strokestown Estate. Due to the special circumstances of the estate the story was ever evolving.

Three generations of up-and-comers spent as much money as they could borrow in order to appear more wealthy than they really were.

Finally, in the 1840s an agent was brought in to make the estate solvent. One of his strategies was to remove tenants. Around the walls were the summary statements and wider picture of the estate and Ireland, while in the middle of the room were primary documents - bills, letters, petitions.

The second focus was on the state of Ireland before the Famine in 1845. It described that the vast majority of the Irish population were already living in abject poverty. They lived in either one room stone cottages if they were lucky, but the majority lived in mud cottages. Food was limited to the potato, over 95% of their diet. They might have meat twice a year and they lived off their wild vegetation, much worse than I imagined. By contrast a Belgium peasant only relied on the potato for 30% of their food.

It was displayed that in 1845 there were 935,448 people holding land. Under 10 acres - 505,173, 10-20 acres - 187,582, 20-50 acres - 141,819 and over 50 acres - 70,441. My McGuiness family had 45 acres, so they were probably living in Grade 2 housing, as shown below.

A second class house, as described in the 1841 census was “a good farm house, or in towns, a home in a small street, having from five to nine rooms with windows”.

This is a picture of the McGuinness house in Feakle, which was built ‘over 200 years ago’ when Daniel and I visited Ireland in 2008.

Of course it has been renovated. It is still lived in by one of the McGuinness boys born in the 1950-60s (John I think).

Another thing that led to the Irish potato blight to be so devastating was that there was never any cross-pollination of plants. Next years crop came from seed potatoes kept from the previous crop. Although there were already different varieties of potato, Irish people almost totally relied on the lumper potato which grew on the poorest quality soil. We were constantly amazed when farmers and other locals commented on the poor quality of soil, when it seemed to us that the land was abundantly green and covered in vegetation.

The new agent intensified his efforts to push tenants out. Historically the landowners of any place were responsible for the care of the poor, unemployable and the starving. They had just built workhouses across Ireland, before the famine, as part of a move to make the poor more institutionalized and seeking any sort of poor relief totally undesirable. Unfortunately just as they were opened, the famine hit and thousands of people needed the support of the parish and the workhouses. People were given ‘fake jobs’ really being to build roads and dykes etc - civil infrastructure. It was the only way they could afford to buy food of any sort.

Tenants implored the landowners for either work or food. They were starving by 1846. By 1847, the agent decided to pay for the tenants to emigrate to Canada. However, he did not pay very much, and a great many died before arrival. About 1400 tenants walked for six weeks from Strokestown to Dublin. As a tribute to these people, in modern times an annual pilgrimage takes place in June that follows their path along the Royal Canal. (We were interested in canals later in our holiday, and whether our own ancestors might have used the canals too).

Getting to the ship was the safest part of the journey. Half of the group died on the voyage, or on the quarantine island Grosse Ile. They went in four ships, with the mortality rate in brackets: Naomi (46%), Virginia’s (56%), John Mann (41%) and Erin’s Queen (28%).

The next twist in the tale was the murder of the agent, shot one day when returning to his home from a Board of Guardian meetings. Quickly a number of men were arrested, and someone was executed. The exhibition posed that he  may have been innocent.

The characters above are the modern narrator, the arrested man, the wronged son-in-law, and the bereft mother of the arrested man. His family claim that he worked tirelessly for the tenants, but from a further distance of time it is hard to see that.

There were many responses to any famine story. This exhibition was made intense by the primary sources underpinning the wider perspectives. Petitions, quotes from eye witnesses,