Three years after Captain Wynne wrote these words in a letter to Lt. Colonel Harry Jones, Chairman of the Board of Works, his countryman Captain Arthur Kennedy, Inspector for the Kilrush Poor Law Union, would come face to face with local scenes of suffering in County Clare. 

 

Credit is due to Captain Kennedy for making his daughter aware of the deprivation in Clare in 1849. However, seeing starving, half-naked children being subservient to a well-fed and well-dressed child is disturbing. I'll explain further: The cover of Tim Pat Coogan's book, The Famine Plot, is the Illustrated London News graphic from December 22, 1849. The picture shows a young girl standing on a cart distributing clothing to two scantily clad children below her. A woman in rags guides the two children on the street to reach up and take the clothes from the well-dressed daughter of Captain Arthur Kennedy. Everything about the Irish Famine is disturbing, but this illustration highlights the great divide in such a way as to make children aware of their subhuman existence and destitution.​

​Captain Kennedy's daughter wears a bonnet, cape, dress, bloomers, and shoes. She is handing clothes down to two children in vests and skirts, and they are barefoot. Remember, it is the bitter end of December. Actually, all the feet in the illustration are bare except Miss Kennedy's. It was common for the poor to pawn their clothes on a Monday to get through the week financially and repurchase the items by Saturday to wear to mass on Sunday. Such went the way of bonnets, coats, shawls, and shoes until the poor could not repurchase their clothing from the pawnbrokers. Eventually, the pawnbrokers would shutter their businesses one by one due to a lack of trade during the years 1845 through 1852. 

 

It was July 3, 1848, when 21-year-old James Slattery arrived from Liverpool at the port of New York onboard the Prince Albert. Slattery, a Kilrush native, left his mother, Honora, and father, Patrick, in Kilrush to join his brother, John, and two sisters, Mary and Margaret, in America. Over four years later, Slattery saved enough money to open an Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank account. In the course of his life, he worked as a porter, cartman, contractor, and finally as a baker. For a man who had, beyond a doubt, known hunger as a child in Kilrush, County Clare, this skilled occupation of "baker" must have seemed the peak of success. 

 

Just days before Slattery embarked on his journey, the Limerick and Clare Examiner declared in May 1848, "Nothing, absolutely nothing, is done to save the lives of the people – they are swept out of their holdings, swept out of life, without an effort on the part of our rulers to stay the violent progress of human destruction." 

 

Destruction of people and dwellings had caused County Clare to hold the unenvious spot of number one on the list of most people employed on the Public Relief Works in 1846. This paid relief of pennies a day was never enough to keep hunger or resentment at bay. In October 1846, anger among the locals about low pay rates on the board of works resulted in five men wearing ladies' hats bursting into the Ennis board office and assaulting a clerk. County Clare officer George Andrew was also pulled down from his horse and beaten. Outside of Ennis, on September 30, Mr. Kearney, officer for the Board of Works, was "hunted like a mad dog by the whole country population," according to author Cecil Woodham Smith, because the locals believed he was preventing relief works from starting in the district. In Ennistymon, the house of Mr. Millet, an engineer, was surrounded by 600 people in December 1846, and they "handled him roughly when he came out," as per Millet. The County Surveyor declared, "These people are dangerous." Captain Wynne, too was set upon in Ennistymon. He writes, "two hours were set upon attack and defense…with the sole purpose of holding us up to the assassin, and hallooing on a mob of about 1000 of the worst possible types." Tim Pat Coogan, no fan of Captain Edmond Wynne, calls him a "chameleon" who provided Charles Trevelyan the ammunition he needed in reports to close down relief efforts, which Trevelyan did in the latter part of 1847 when things got worse, much worse. 

 

Historian Cormac O Grada breaks the relief demands down into figures. People working on the public works in Clare reached 35,000, costing almost two thousand pounds daily. According to an engineer, the "cry continued for "more, more." A fellow worker called this a "cuckoo cry," a false cry for help. This blindness to true need did not escape Alexander Somerville, who wrote on February 12, 1847, from Ennis, "All that can be said of the peasantry of the west is comprised in the words, hovels, hunger, rags, rheumatics, weakness, sickness, death." Somerville traveled throughout Ireland during the famine and wrote about what he saw. 

 

Destruction through evictions had wreaked havoc in James Slattery's hometown of Kilrush. "I calculate that 1,000 houses have been leveled since November," Captain Kennedy informed the poor law commissioners in April 1848, "and expect 500 more before July." Maybe this spate of evictions and leveling of huts incentivized Slattery to leave Kilrush in July 1848 and head for New York via Liverpool, which was a cheaper fare. Had he and his family been evicted? We may never know. Nevertheless, Captain Kennedy leaves us a visual of the ejected people that is difficult to shake. They "betake themselves to the ditches or the shelter of some bank, and they exist like animals til starvation or the inclemency of the weather drives them to the workhouse. There were three cartloads of these creatures, who could not walk, brought for admission yesterday, some in fever, some suffering from dysentery, and all from want of food." This is the Kilrush that James Slattery left in July 1848, and this is the Kilrush that his parents, Honora and Patrick Slattery, must remain in. 

 

The Kilrush Union had witnessed intense misery. In the summer of 1847, 62 percent of the population of this area was receiving government aid. "In 1848," says Prof. Christine Kinealy, "the Kilrush Union had achieved the same notoriety amongst relief officials as Skibbereen had two years earlier. Despite a population fall of up to 50 percent in some parts of the union," Kinealy says, "up to 50 percent of those who remained continued to be in receipt of Poor Law Relief." This grim reality led the Illustrated London News to declare on December 15, 1849, "Kilrush,…, will be celebrated in the history of pauperism." By 1849, the English government had set up an inquiry to investigate the continued suffering at Kilrush Union.

 

Evictions in Clare continued to increase until 1854, resulting in a rate of 97.1 persons per thousand thrown out of their homes. "A county that comprised only 3.2 percent of the population of Ireland," historian J.S. Donnelly tells us, "experienced 8.3 percent of a total number of officially recorded evictions between 1849 and 1854." These evictions resulted from the Encumbered Estates Act, which permitted financially strapped landlords to sell their properties. Our traveling reporter Somerville astutely noted in February 1847 that evictions only bettered the situation of the landlords. "The landlord, having no expense to incur," Somerville says, "is not particular in pulling down a house, or a dozen or a score of them." Opportunistic English capitalists were inclined to take advantage of the falling land prices in Ireland. Still, in Clare, the people would not let this happen. The Marquis of Thomond sold off 48,000 acres in Clare and Cork in 1857; most of the buyers in County Clare were locals, defying the wishes of the Whig government to rid Ireland of the Irish. 

 

As famine dragged on, so too did diseases associated with it. Typhus, then called Irish Fever, was believed to have been caused by starvation; it eventually overwhelmed workhouses and hospitals. In November 1848, Dr. Cullinane reported from Ennis that fever was still prevalent among patients. "I fear the epidemic is far from exhausted," he cautioned, adding that 400 patients still suffered in the Clare Fever Hospital. 

 

In February 1851, Dr. Richard Robert Madden filed his 6th report regarding the 1849 government inquiry into the excessive needs of the Kilrush Union. The following is an excerpt from that report by Dr. Madden. 

 

"We may now go back to Kilrush. — The task of deciding on the applications for admission into the workhouse on the occasion I have referred to required indeed no ordinary degree of mental composure. The consideration of the claims of each batch of famine-stricken paupers that was admitted, was made amidst din of frightful sounds of human voices, expressive of entreaty, remonstrance and authority, or else on the other hand of suffering, of mortal anxiety, and of despair — screams of children admitted being taken away from mothers, shrieks of daughters parting with fathers whom they knew would never see again, sobs and moans of women about to be separated from their husbands: — a babel of shrieks and supplications. Amidst these cries, that of a poor child about eleven years of age (a fine, intelligent looking boy as I ever saw), all the time I was in that hall prevailed over the others exclaiming — "Ah, mammy, mammy; don't leave me, mammy. I won't stay here without you. Oh, mammy, dear, sure you won't leave me in this place!" 

 

Imagine a mother placed in a position to abandon her 11-year-old son to workhouse officials so that he may have a chance at survival. This is no "cuckoo cry." A mother and son separated, possibly for eternity.

 

Three years later, another son, John Fitzpatrick, placed an Information Wanted ad in the Irish American on February 4, 1854. "Of Mrs. Fitzpatrick, from Kilrush, County Clare, Ireland, who landed in New York per Antarctic, November 18, 1853, and supposed now to be in some part of Pennsylvania. Her son, John Fitzpatrick, who is now in the care of the Commissioners of Emigration, on Ward's Island, is anxious to hear of her whereabouts." 

 

One can only hope that this Kilrush family found each other and that this was the mother who left her son at the Kilrush Workhouse in 1851— but sadly, we will never know. 

 

Sources:
1.    The Famine Plot by Tim Pat Coogan
2.    Letters from Ireland During the Famine by Alexander Somerville Edited by K D M Snell
3.    The Workhouses of Ireland: The Fate of Ireland's Poor by John O'Connor
4.    Irish Relative and Friends: From Information Want Ads in the Irish American by Laura Murphy DeGrazia and Diane Fitzpatrick Haberstroh
5.    The Great Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion by Christine Kinealy
6.    The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People by John Kelly
7.    The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham Smith
8.    The Great Irish Potato Famine by James S Donnelly JR
9.    Black '47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory by Cormac O'Grada
10.    Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York by Tyler Anbinder
11.    Rags to Riches: Tracking the Famine Emigration for Ireland to New York by Tyler Anbinder (Online database)