Stories of the Famine
Welcome to the Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum of Fairfield’s collection of personal stories and firsthand accounts from the Great Hunger.
In this section, we are proud to present a series of narratives that bring to life the experiences of individuals and communities from every county in Ireland during this tragic period in history. Each story has been meticulously researched and written by our own Loretto Horrigan Leary, who has delved into historical records, letters, and diaries to uncover the voices of those who endured the famine. Through these accounts, we aim to honor the memory of the millions who suffered, celebrate the resilience of the human spirit, and draw lessons for our present and future.
We invite you to explore these stories, reflect on the personal and collective struggles of the past, and join us in commemorating the enduring legacy of the Irish people.
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"Potato not fit food for man or beast."
J. Heffernan, Murroe Dispensary in The Limerick Chronicle,
March 21, 1846.
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County Limerick During The Great Hunger
By Loretto Horrigan Leary
December 9, 2024
The gap between the haves and have-nots in County Limerick was vast, even decades before the Famine. "I think no American traveler would enter Limerick without exclaiming in the principal street, "How very like New York!" The tall and handsome brick houses, the iron railings, the broad and clean sidewalks, and something, it struck me too, in the dress and style of the people reminded me very forcibly of my own country." This observation by J. Stirling Coyne in the autumn of 1841 shows a one-sided view of Limerick and ignorance of New York.
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Seven years earlier, in 1835, Scottish travel writer Henry David Inglis wrote of Limerick city, "I know of no town in which so distinct a line is drawn between its good and its bad quarters." The Limerick Food Riots five years prior may have honed Inglis's ability to detect social injustices more
acutely than Coyne's. Nineteen separate acts of food confiscation by the poor of the "Old Town" resulted in shops, boats, and food carts being robbed of oatmeal, butter, and flour. The poor could not afford this food, and on Friday, June 25, 1830, over 200 people in Limerick took matters into their own hands.​
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“Clones and the western districts of the county were suffering while we see droves of bullocks... winding their weary way to some port to be shipped to Liverpool. The dead-cart of the workhouse most impertinently intercepted a drove of those bloated natives in a narrow street of our town and the dead-cart stopped, that the living luxuries walking into the maw of England might pass on.” The Northern Standard December 1846.
County Monaghan During the Irish Famine
By Loretto Horrigan Leary
October 30, 2024
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When Mary Austin deposited her hard-earned forty dollars on Saturday, May 12th, 1855, the information she provided to the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank clerk revealed significant historical details about her home county of Monaghan. Fighting and the linen industry would all be remembered in County Monaghan in the years leading up to and long after Mary Austin’s departure.
Mary was listed as working in the female needle trades as a cap maker. Over a century later, her hometown of Clones would become known as the birthplace of the Clones Cyclone, Barry McGuigan, the featherweight boxing champion. It is also the hometown of Irish novelist Pat McCabe, author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto. McCabe’s work is often set in small town Ireland and is described as being dark and violent.
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​Mary Austin arrived in June 1841 from the port of Liverpool to an unlisted destination in America. We don’t know her age, but we do know that she is one of many pre-famine immigrants who left Ireland due to a decline in the linen industry in the North of Ireland. We know that due to the location of Clones, she may have walked to the departure port of either Dundalk or Newry and then traveled to Liverpool. For over two years and ten transactions, Mary saved $132.66. She withdrew it all on September 12th, 1857, and then closed her account.
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"Women and little children, crowds of whom were to be seen scattered over the turnip fields, like a flock of famished crows, devouring the raw turnips, mothers half-naked, shivering in the snow and sleet."
Captain Edmond Wynne, District Inspector for Clare. December 24, 1846. County Clare during the Great Hunger
By Loretto Horrigan Leary
September 30, 2024
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.
County Cork During the Famine: Arise Ye Dead From Skibbereen, And Come to Cork To Welcome Your Queen.
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Ellen McCarthy, North Street, Skibbereen, aged 87 in July 1938.
By Loretto Horrigan Leary
August 26, 2024
When writer Joseph Sterling Coyne and illustrator William Henry Bartlett traveled the length and breadth of Ireland in the early 1840s, their words and pictures depicted a pastoral island. Their 1842 double volumes, The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland, provide a rare view into the life and folklore of the Irish before Famine reared its ugly head. After leaving Killarney, Coyne & Bartlett forsake the "uninteresting" interior road to Millstreet in North Cork and head south instead. "I began to retrace my route to Macroom," Coyne says, "highly gratified with my visit to these romantic scenes, which, had they ​
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been thrown in any other part of Europe, would have been a favorite pilgrimage for lovers of the picturesque."​
Nothing Could Be More Distressing Than The Clanking of The
Crowbars Demolishing The Cabins Mingled With The Most Pitiful and Heartrending Shrieks of The Women and Children: County Tipperary During The Irish Great Hunger.
By Loretto Horrigan Leary
July 15, 2024
County Tipperary native Edmund Butler boarded the Albania in the middle of August 1848. The young journalist left a country facing a third year of famine and foreign ridicule for a failed rebellion. Three years earlier, Daniel O’Connell, the great orator, had spoken under a banner emblazed with the accusation, “England has given us ignorance and bigotry, starvation and rags” at his October Monster Meeting in Tipperary town. “The theft of firearms rose,” according to author John Kelly in the period after O’Connell’s 1845 speech.​
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Evidently, in The Last Stage of Actual Starvation - County Kerry in The Years of The Great Hunger
By Loretto Horrigan Leary
June 1, 2024
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Mister Enright had an unpleasant job in the civil parish of Kilnaughtin, even in the best of times. His job, "burying the dead," previously allowed the deceased a final act of respect by lowering them into the grave in their own coffin. One coffin, one body, both being absorbed back into the soil that was now failing the population of County Kerry. This was an impossible feat for Enright in 1847 in Kilpaddoge, in the Barony of Iraghticonnor.
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Hundreds of Poor, Starved People Toddling Feebly Down The Street and Going Up The Dublin Road.
By Loretto Horrigan Leary
April 26, 2024
Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport, and Media, and Chair of the National Famine Commemoration Committee Catherine Martin TD announced that this year's National Famine Commemoration will take place in Edgeworthstown, Co Longford, on Sunday, 19 May 2024. The town was founded by the Edgeworth family, which included the renowned novelist Maria Edgeworth. The family was involved in many charitable efforts during the famine.
Nothing but the Bones: Co. Galway in the Years of the Famine
By Loretto Horrigan Leary
March 20, 2024
When Catherine Houlihan deposited $100 into her bank account on May 10, 1854, she had lived on Ward’s Island in New York for over three years. Her parents, Owen and Ann, still resided in Drumscar, Gortanumera, just a short distance from Portumna in County Galway. By 1854, Catherine had already seen the worst effects of the Famine. In her new home in America, she would help alleviate the pain and suffering of others.
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God Alone Can See the End ~ County Leitrim During The Great Hunger
By Loretto Horrigan Leary
February 25, 2024
“In 1841, Leitrim had 155,297 people; over the next ten years, the county lost 43,400 people; by 1871, it lost a further 16,335. And the decline continued steadily until 1996 when it reached just over 25,000.”
How Mohill and Co Leitrim emerged from the Great Famine
Fiona Slevin, 2020
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