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What IS for Supper Ma?
from Issue #12 August 2004
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In Ireland during the years of 1845 through 1850, a shipwrecked human body was cast on shore. A starving man extracted the heart and liver. That was to be the heartiest feast that he and his perishing family had feasted upon in a very long time. The great Irish famine was in full swing. It began with the failure of the national potato crop, which left acre after acre of Irish farmland covered in black rot. This led to rendering the harvest inedible and further led to a domino effect: the rocketing of food prices skywards. All of this ultimately led to the death of as many as one million Irish from hunger and disease.
Old Lady evicted from her home
Photo courtesy of The National Library of Ireland
During this period in Irish history, many of Ireland’s poor couldn’t afford the price hikes and were forced to eat the blighted and rotted potato. Peasants who did consume it, found their villages soon overrun with cholera and typhus. A recorded story tells us about a poor forlorn girl, upon who hearing that her mother was gripped with cholera hastened to her bedside only to find her dead. She had a deep religious devotion. Desiring a decent internment for her darling mother, she was driven to the shocking necessity of carrying her mother’s corpse upon her own back for three long miles. This simply to obtain a coffin and a final resting place. The dismal consequences of her loving devotion to her mother were that she herself died of cholera the very next day.
This picture published by Harpers Weekly in 1847 ran with the caption:
“The balance of trade with Great Britain seems to be still against us. 630 paupers arrived at Boston in the steamship Nestoria, April 15th, from Galway, Ireland shipped by the British Government."
Irish farmers, who had food rotting in their stores, were unable to pay their British and Protestant landlords. The landlords evicted tens of thousands of peasants who then crowded into dirty and disease infected workhouses. These workhouses paid them a pittance for their labour. Other landlords paid for their tenants to immigrate, sending hundreds of thousands of Irish to America. Even immigration turned out to be no escape as unscrupulous ship-owners often crowded hundreds of desperate Irish into small vessels. The ships came to be labelled, “Coffin Ships.” Sadly, only two thirds of the ships of human cargo ever reached American soil.
The Ships Deck, from where the corpses of the dead where thrown into the Atlantic Ocean.
Photograph taken is of a replica ship that is situated in a Museum in Ireland.
Let us consider how the other nations of the world responded, and view what was happening to disease-ridden Ireland and her people during this horrendous and arduous famine.
The Rev. John Hughes, D.D., Bishop of New York speaking from the Broadway Tabernacle on March 20th, 1847 gave a lecture on the Irish Famine and immigrations and in his speech said,
“The year 1847 will be rendered memorable in the future annals of civilization, by two events; the one immediately preceding and giving occasion to the other, namely, Irish famine, and American sympathy and succour. Sympathy has, in its own right, a singular power of soothing the moral sufferings of the forlorn and unfortunate. Where is no heart so flinty, but that, if you approach it with kindness, touch it gently with the magic wand of true sympathy, it will be melted, like the rock of the wilderness, and tears of gratitude on the cheeks of the sufferer, will be the prompt response, to those of interest, of pity, of affect in imagination, he will have discovered on yours. Who will say that Ireland is not an unfortunate sufferer? But since her sufferings have become know to other, and happier nations, who will say that she is forlorn? America offeres her, not a sympathy of mere sentiment and feeling, but that substantial sympathy which her condition requires. When the first news of your benevolence, and of your efforts, shall have been wafted across the ocean, it will sound as sweetly in her agonized ear, as the voice of angels whispering hopes. It will cause her famine shrunken heart to expand again to its native fullness, whilst from day to day the western breezes will convey to her echoes of the rising wing, the swelling chorus, the universal outburst, in short, of American Sympathy.”
Clothing Distribution during the Irish Famine
Starving Irish Family
Photo courtesy of The National Library of Ireland
Irish village during the famine
Photo courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
While Britain provided much relief for Ireland’s starving populace, many Irish were infuriated at Britain’s delayed response. Ireland further charged that the underlying causes of the famine could be traced to centuries of British political oppression. Population figures indicate that the total deaths resulting from famine and disease, combined with immigration numbers show that Ireland’s population dropped from 8 million to 5 million. If Irish nationalism was dormant during the first half of the nineteenth-century, the Famine convinced Irish citizens and Irish-Americans of the urgent need for political change. Much of the population today feel justified in their belief that the modern political situation in Northern Ireland harkens back to the days of British and Protestant landlord rule during the Great Famine. It is nearly unthinkable with today’s technology to imagine that this only happened a hundred and fifty years ago.
Eviction scene during the famine
During the course of research for this article, I have traversed the gamut of emotions. My intent was not to cast blame, but rather convey a sentiment of how Ireland suffered and endured extreme hardship during one of the darkest periods in Irish history.
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