Why do the Irish not talk about 'The Famine'?

By Ciaran Tierney

Why, until now, has there been so little evidence of the Great Hunger of 1845 to 1849 on and around the streets, parks, and monuments of Ireland?

A former Hollywood scriptwriter, the people of a Cork village, and a Dublin taxi-driver were not the only ones to be struck by it.

But they decided to do something about it in recent years.

Sometimes you need to go away or talk to strangers to see your home place with clearer eyes or question why some things are somehow best forgotten or ignored.

After many years spent in Britain and the United States, it shocked Mark Kennedy upon his return to his native Galway that there was no public memorial to the greatest disaster in Irish history.

There was no place or statue in his city to commemorate the catastrophe that stole a million lives and forced up to two million to seek out new lives in North America. And Mark wanted to know why.

There was nothing to show friends from the U.S. when they visited the West of Ireland to explore their roots and understand why their ancestors took such arduous journeys.

Mark became a thorn in the side of the establishment in his city and faced many barriers, even much opposition, before opening the Celia Griffin Park near the old fishing village of the Claddagh in 2012.

Many business people didn’t want to know. He was opening up painful wounds from a time when a hundred ‘coffin ships’ set sail from Galway to the east coast of America, between 1847 and 1850.

Many of the passengers, fleeing starvation and deprivation, never made it to the other side. Those who did faced discrimination, hostility, and even deportation back to Europe after they arrived into the ports of Massachusetts and New York. 

There was strong antagonism towards the desperately poor immigrants from Ireland – no doubt considered a “s—thole” by the nativists of New York at the time.

Mark, who passed away in October 2016, decided to name the park in memory of a little six year old Galway girl who has now become a symbol for the most terrible time in the history of the West of Ireland.

In Cork, the people of Midleton took it upon themselves to remember the same catastrophe. They commissioned a sculptor, Alex Pentek, to commission a beautiful sculpture of nine eagle feathers in a park in the town.

Despite the oppression they faced themselves, the Choctaw Indians raised money to send to the starving Irish at the height of their suffering in Black 1847. It was the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars today, but was only marked publicly by the Irish in October 2015.

In Dublin, veteran taxi-driver Michael Blanch also noticed it. This terrible catastrophe seemed to have been erased from the Irish psyche.

Every now and then, a foreign tourist would sit into his cab and ask him if there was any memorial to the Great Famine in Dublin.

In the 1980s – long before poignant statues of gaunt, starving people were put in place by the banks of the River Liffey – Michael was struck by how there was no public acknowledgement at all of this terrible tragedy on the streets or in the parks of the Irish capital.

Blanch began a 15 year campaign to ensure that the people who died, survived, or emigrated would be remembered through a National Famine Commemoration Day.

Thanks to his efforts, legislation is set to pass through the Dáil (the Irish parliament) in the next few weeks to ensure that the terrible tragedy is remembered on the second Sunday in May each year.

Deputy Colm Brophy of Fine Gael, who brought the legislation before the parliament, said it was important that every school child in Ireland learns about the horror of the failure of the potato crop, which affected every town and village in Ireland.

Yet news that Ireland is to get a Famine Commemoration Day has been greeted with a huge online debate over whether or not Ireland really experienced a ‘Famine’ in the 1840s.

The Irish term for the worst time in Irish history, An Gorta Mor, actually means The Great Hunger. More and more people are now of the opinion that there never was a famine, but that the five years of starvation were the result of a deliberate policy of genocide by the British authorities who ruled Ireland at the time.

Historian Christine Kinealy, in a book called ‘A Death-Dealing Famine’, acknowledges that there has long been an argument that the deaths of a million Irish people were a triumph of doctrine over humanitarian considerations.

What is beyond doubt is that food was exported from Ireland to Britain during the worst years of the catastrophe.

Kinealy points out that official export figures are unreliable because Ireland was considered part of the British Empire in the 1840s, it was part of a ‘free-trade’ zone and there was little need to keep official data of food imports from one island to the other.

But, considering that a million died, shipping reports from the main British ports at the time are startling.

In 1847, the worst year of the Famine, almost 4,000 ships carried food from Ireland to the major ports of Liverpool, London, Bristol and Glasgow. Over half of them went to Liverpool, where many Irish people also ran out of money as they strove to make their way across the Atlantic.

Records show that ports in some of the worst-affected parts of Ireland, including Ballina, Bantry, Ballyshannon, Kilrush, Sligo, Limerick, and Westport on the Atlantic seaboard, where thousands upon thousands were dying of starvation, were also sending food to the so-called mainland.

Oats, corn, and potatoes left Ireland for the ‘mainland’ while there was an on-going debate over whether or not the ports should be closed raging in British politics.

Merchants had pressed the British Government to keep the ports open and allow free trade to continue without intervention, even though the city councils in Belfast, Cork, Derry, Dublin and Limerick pressed for the ports to be closed so that food could be kept on the island of Ireland.

Mindful of the death and despair all around them, the cries from the Irish cities were ignored.

Under Sir Robert Peel, Indian corn was imported to Ireland following the first appearance of the potato blight in 1845. The main purpose of importing £100,000 worth of corn from America was to stabilise food prices, rather than to feed the destitute Irish.

Peel’s Government fell in 1846 with the Whigs, under Lord John Russell, coming to power in London.

This new Government decided to discontinue the policy of corn importation from America, leaving food importation to “market forces” even though there was far less food than in the previous year.

Merchants and grain producers, a powerful interest group at the time, campaigned to make sure that only a limited number of food depots would open in the West of Ireland, even as thousands were dying.

The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, John William Ponsonby, criticised the merchants for striving to keep prices up even in the midst of an appalling catastrophe.

“It is difficult to persuade a starving population that one class should be permitted to make 50 per cent profit by the sale of provisions whilst they are dying in want of these,” he reflected at the beginning of 1847.

Soup kitchens eventually replaced the public works programme which was introduced by the Whig Government, and grain imports to Ireland rose, but by then it was too late for the hundreds of thousands who died.

Some historians now agree that British Government policies deliberately led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Irish people, leading many people to proclaim that there never was a Great Famine.

It could be argued that it was a deliberate act of neglect, if not quite an act of genocide.

During the tense Brexit border negotiations before Christmas, many Irish people were shocked by how little ordinary British people knew about their own country’s history in Ireland. 

They don’t teach much, or anything, about the Great Hunger in British schools.

Now, thanks to a Dublin taxi-driver, Irish children will remember the million who died and almost two million who emigrated on a designated day in May of each year.

Whether we call it a ‘famine’ or ‘genocide’ at this stage is perhaps not as important as the fact that the people of the island are finally going to have a special day to honour and remember those who died. 

Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. Find him on Facebook here

Find Ciaran Tierney on Twitter,@ciarantierney

Ends.... 

Banned from the land that made us refugees ...

“Where e’er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies"

‘Thousands Are Sailing’, The Pogues


Between 1847 and 1850, a hundred ‘coffin’ ships sailed out from Galway Bay. The people who made it onto those ships were desperately impoverished and full of fear, and yet they saw themselves as hugely fortunate compared to those who were forced to stay behind.

They were the equivalent of today’s Syrian or Iraqi refugees. Their land had been stolen, the crops had failed, and they dreamed of new lives far removed from the conflict and turmoil which raged across their homeland.

Many were less fortunate, such as little Celia Griffin, aged six, from Connemara. Celia never had a chance in life and was found lying on the side of a road, just one of hundreds of thousands to die of starvation.

The ships were destined for the ‘New World’.                    

Not much empathy for the children of Syria
in President Donald Trump's USA

Poor country people from villages and townlands across the West of Ireland, many of whom could barely muster a word of English between them, sailed across the western ocean in search of a chance in life which had been denied them under the British Empire.

I think about those people most weeks when I bring foreign English students on a walking tour of Galway. I think of how forgotten they were for decades in Galway City, their point of embarkation.

It was only when a returned emigrant, the late Mark Kennedy, kicked up a fuss that the city and region honoured them with a wonderful Famine Memorial Park which opened eight years ago.

For many, the collective memories are still too painful … of poverty, of families torn apart, of the pain of long-term emigration. Most of those who made it to the other side – many died during the lengthy crossing – never got the opportunity to go home and visit their loved-ones again.

The Irish fugitives were near the bottom of the barrel in 19th century America. As they flocked into the Bronx, Hell’s Kitchen, or South Boston, it would have been unthinkable to imagine how their lives would have turned out if they had been denied entry at the US border.

Had the US president taken a hardline on emigration, had there been 19th century equivalents of Donald Trump and his “extreme vetting”, then countless Irish would have been turned back as soon as they reached the east coast of America.

They wouldn’t have had enough food to survive the return journey and, if they did, the numbers who died in the Great Famine would have been vastly higher.

Given our terrible history, it was shocking to wake up this weekend to discover that “extreme vetting” – bordering on fascism – has now been introduced just an hour’s drive south of where those coffin ships departed from Galway Bay.

Last October marked the 15th anniversary of Shannon Airport’s complicity in the US ‘war on terror’
At the stroke of a president’s pen, Muslims from seven countries have been banned from entering the US.

Marking 15 years of Shannon Airport's use
as a US military base last October

Persecuted in their own country and no longer welcome at the end of an arduous journey, Syrians refugees in 2017 have quite a lot in common with the Irish who escaped from the discrimination and hardship imposed by the British Empire.

The Irish died in their thousands on coffin ships in the 1840s and now Syrians are dying on makeshift boats as they make their way across the Mediterranean.

Back then, the Irish were seen as a threat, deeply unpopular, rebellious spirits, who could not be trusted on the streets of New York or Boston.

Today, Muslims are the new “enemies”, even though, strangely enough, Saudi Arabia (who provided the vast majority of the 9/11 bombers) is not on Trump’s list of seven banned countries.

Amazing, too, how Yemen is on the list, considering it has been bombed to bits by US “ally” Saudi Arabia over the past two years. Yemen is on the verge of famine, but any Yemeni who turns up at a US border will be deported and sent back home.

The targeting of an entire race, nation, or religion has brought up understandable comparisons with 1930s Germany.

Back then, good people were afraid to speak out while their Jewish neighbours were being forced to wear yellow stars to make them more identifiable in a growing climate of hatred and intolerance.

Given our own troubled history, it’s incredible to think that racial profiling is now taking place on Irish soil.

The US ‘pre-clearance’ at Shannon was supposed to make travelling easier when it was introduced in 2009, but now it could lead to people being discriminated against for no other reason than their country of birth.

It is unthinkable to imagine the kind of hostility a Yemeni or Syrian would have to deal with if he or she was to try to board a flight to the US at Shannon.

Imagine, the land where hundreds of thousands of people were made refugees is now about to let a powerful nation, motivated by xenophobia and fear, discriminate against refugees on Irish soil.

Of course, Irish people have already been turning a blind eye to what’s being going on at Shannon Airport for the past 15 years.

President Donald Trump's anti-Muslim measure has
caused huge controversy in Irealnd

Last July, for example, 85 civilians – among them almost a dozen children – lost their lives in a bombing in a small Syrian village.

Combatants had targeted a village in Northern Syria which had been held by Islamic State (IS) or Daesh fighters.

The combatants or “terrorists” who carried out this attack on Tokhar stop almost daily in Shannon to refuel their aircraft.

The terrorists were US soldiers. But there was no minute’s silence, no protest, and the bombing did not even merit a mention on BBC or RTE news.

People in Ireland or the UK only found out about it thanks to RT, the Russian channel, and Britain’s Channel 4.

How can we care about the loss of innocent lives when we are not even told about them by many segments of our media?

Most of us just shrug when we hear that over 2.5 million US soldiers have landed in ‘neutral’ Shannon Airport since the beginning of the ‘war on terror’ in 2001.

We didn’t protest when US soldiers who pass through Shannon murdered hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Syria over the past decade.

We didn’t protest when planes carrying munitions, helicopters, and even deadly chemical weapons to aid the Israeli occupation of Palestine passed through Shannon.

We didn’t protest when prisoners were renditioned through Shannon on their way to be tortured at Guantanamo Bay.

Mind you, we can’t be sure about that one … because not one person in authority in Ireland has ever searched a US military plane during 15 years of Shannon’s use as a military base.

But surely, finally, it’s time to protest now. Is it acceptable that people in uniforms standing in Co Clare can now prevent people from getting onto a ‘plane on the basis of their nationality alone?

The Americans have made a mockery of international law by effectively turning a civilian airport into a military base. Now they want to discriminate against refugees before they even leave Ireland.

In light of our own terrible history, can Irish people really stand idly by when we hear that racial profiling has become a fact of life just an hour south of where the ‘coffin’ ships once set sail from Galway Bay?


Shannonwatch, who have monitored the US military use of ‘neutral’ Shannon Airport for the past 15 years, have organised a protest at the airport this coming Thursday (6pm)

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