County Limerick During the Irish Famine:
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"Potato not fit food for man or beast."
J. Heffernan, Murroe Dispensary in the Limerick Chronicle,
March 21, 1846.County Limerick During The Great Hunger​​​
By Loretto Horrigan Leary
December 9th 2024
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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.
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.
Unlike Inglis, Coyne disregarded poverty. Like most tourists, he did not stray into Limerick City's "Old Town," which had the poorest citizens. His comparison to the clean streets of New York in 1841 demonstrates his lack of knowledge of that city. New York's most prominent issue for citizens in the mid-1800s and beyond was how to dispose of its garbage.
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​On May 19, 1841, only four months before Coyne and his illustrator traveling companion W.H. Bartlett began their Irish travels, the Limerick Reporter gave an intake account of the Limerick City Workhouse: "Each pauper is inspected by the doctor and, when approved of, is removed to the preparatory ward where they are stript of their clothes, their hair cut off, and washed from head to foot, after which they are cloathed-the men, in a coarse linen shirt, cord trousers, frieze jacket, which only reaches below the hip, a red cap, and shoes and stockings-the women are similarly washed, their hair cut off, and dressed with shifts of the same description of linen as that worn by the men, striped coarse, short frocks and grey wrappers of coarse linsey-woolsey, resembling in shape a coal porters frock and a head cap resembling a child's "dowd," tied under the chin, which only covers half the head. The women get grey stockings and shoes, the same as the men."
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The poverty gap in Limerick existed long before the first crop of potatoes withered and died in September 1845. Just under 19 miles away from the city, on February 18, 1841, the eighteen-year-old Charles Barrett remembered the food riots ten years earlier and witnessed the opening of the third poor law union in Ireland. Rathkeale Workhouse admitted its first paupers in July. This young man would know scarcity and want in Ireland.
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Built to house 660 inmates, Rathkeale Workhouse, at the height of the Famine, added more buildings, such as a fever hospital and "sleeping galleries," to accommodate a further 247 inmates. Fever was the first sign of illness due to consumption of bad potatoes. Dispensary doctors all over the county, in Kilpeacon, Murroe, Kilfinane, Kilmallock, Clarina, Patrickswell, and Newcastle West, in the autumn of 1845 and spring 1846, reported a significant increase in patients with fever and stomach issues. "Fever and smallpox have lately appeared which seem to have been generated by the use of diseased potatoes," Doctor O'Connell stated from the Kilmallock Dispensary. Doctor Herbert in Kilfinane also saw an increase in fever patients and added, "stomach complaints are very prevalent, which are attributed to badness and insufficient food." Doctor Heffernan in Murroe stated the facts bluntly, "Potato not fit food for man or beast." All the doctors agreed that there was a need to increase public works and apprehension for "the breaking out of disease." It was in this climate of scarcity, want, disease, and death that Barrett was raised.
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"The poor people living in their little thatched cabins, tried to be brave and hid their hunger as long as they could. Then the awful pang of hunger brought them out to eat the weeds, grass, and other unhealthy things which in the end brought on fever which accompanied the Famine. These poor creatures were found on the roadside, in the fields, and in their little cabins with the half-eaten weeds in their mouth. All this went on through 1847, and people were dying so rapidly that they did not give them proper burial," a Knocknabooly West, County Limerick resident informed School's Collection transcriber Kathleen Taylor.
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In Bauranague, on November 11, 1936, ninety-five-year-old Máighréad Ní Chonghalaig recalled the bad times. "I was only a young little girl growing up that time when the right bad times were in Bauranague, but tis well I remember a woman, that lived in Leahy's place now, and she used go to Kilcolman for the meal that was given out to people who were badly off. Her name was Biddy McGrath, and sometimes, faith, they wouldn't have the meal to give them, and they used to give them biscuits, kind of little cakes. When Biddy used come home with some of the biscuits usen't we go back to her and she used give us some of them. But, thank God we weren't badly off, but tis to get these little cakes we'd go to her. We were little girls growing up at that time and tis how we used steal over to Biddy's for the biscuits."
Richard Anglim, 45, informed his daughter Eily in 1936 that the Famine severely affected Ballykenny, in Kileedy County Limerick. "One of the saddest stories of famine days is connected with a family that lived near Kileedy. They had no potatoes and consequently suffered from starvation and want. A terrible malady resembled fever was raging at the time. It is not known exactly what the disease was but three or four people who lived in the house got it and they all died of the disease. A few neighbours from the locality undertook the burial of them. They put hay around the corpses as it was a very contagious disease and they buried the creatures coffinless in the graves. It was impossible to get coffins at the time because there was such a demand for them."
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We also know that tenants in the Limerick area who could not secure funding for assisted immigration responded by buying tickets with rent money owed to the landlord. The Limerick Chronicle recounted in November 1848 "this knavery and fraud of run-away tenants," of whom thirty or more "comfortable" farmers had disguised stacks of straw as wheat and "decamped to America." One way or another, the people would escape this living nightmare that surrounded them.
The population in Rathkeale, just over 4,000 in 1841, had dropped by 13% in 1851. Over 1,500 people had either died or emigrated in a decade from the area. Rathkeale is 12 miles from Knocknabooly, 8 miles from Kileedy, and 37 miles from Bauranague. Charles Barrett was one of those who emigrated. Surrounded by suffering and living on the outskirts of a city divided in wealth and impoverishment, Charles, now 36, headed for Liverpool, a cheaper passage, sometime in the spring of 1851 with his 26-year-old wife Ellen (King). From there, they boarded the Argo. The ship's manifest also lists Michael Barrett, 32 years old, possibly Charles' brother. During the trans-Atlantic crossing, out of the 380 passengers onboard, two expired. Patrick and Rose Moran lost their 2-and-a-half-year-old child, and Thomas and Margaret Sturgent's six-month-old died.
On Thursday, May 1, 1851, Charles and Ellen Barrett arrived in New York. James Nunan (Noonan) from Rathkeale arrived that same year. By October 7, 1853, Eliza, his sister, was looking for him. She'd last heard from over a year ago, July of 1853, when he wrote from Dayton, Illinois. Alone and possibly afraid, America would be difficult for new immigrants like Eliza Noonan or Charles and Ellen Barrett to navigate.
Charles' mother, Hester (Enright), was still living in Ireland, but his father, Patrick, was deceased when Charles Barrett opened his Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank account on November 21, 1854. We do not know what became of his three siblings. Charles deposited twenty dollars, lived on Birmingham Street in Ward 7, and listed his occupation as a shoemaker. This was a skilled trade. Did Charles Barrett acquire this skill in Ireland? Did the well-heeled citizens of Limerick city employ him? On Argo's manifest, Charles is listed as a mason and thirty years old upon arrival in New York in 1851. Once again, we are left with more questions than answers. By July 28, 1857, one year after the failed Young Ireland rebellion leader William Smith O'Brien returned from Van Diemen's Land to his home, Cahermoyle House, near Ardagh in County Limerick, Charles Barrett withdrew $12.11 and closed his account.
In the 1860 US Census, Charles and Ellen still live in the 7th Ward, 2nd District. No children are listed. In 1870, Charles still lived in New York with Ellen, and he is listed as Chas, a Journeyman, possibly describing the ending of his apprenticeship as a shoemaker, leaving him free to be hired independently while Ellen kept house. Maybe Charles even made shoes for his fellow Limerick man, Bartley O'Donnell, who soared in "pedestrianism" and, by adding 15 years to his age, seemed to defy all walking records and science later in his life. Ellen is now 40 years old, and he is 55. They can both read and write, and Charles is a citizen of the US. Again, no children are listed. By 1880, Charles was 67, widowed, and lived with John (70) and James (40) Durrworth, widowers. By this time, Charles lists his occupation as a Husker, the term used for a factory worker, and he is listed as a boarder at his new address. John Durrworth is the head of the household and "keeps house," while his son James works as a carver in a hotel and is also listed as a boarder.
Charles Barrett had known only scarcity and want in Ireland. He tried to survive, leaving with his young wife Ellen in 1851. But the harshness of life would not leave Charles and his wife Ellen alone. The Barretts had known only want in America as well. They arrived ready to work and hoped for a better life. Maybe, on that cold Tuesday in November 1854, when Charles opened his EISB account with twenty dollars, they were both briefly filled with optimism for a better future and believed brighter days lay ahead. At least, I hope they were. But somehow, the brighter days didn't happen for Charles and Ellen. Instead of climbing the ladder, they descended it. She died at a young age with no children, and he went from Shoemaker to Journeyman to Husker, living as a renter in another man's home.
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Sources:
1. The Schools Collection Duchas.ie
2. Aspects of the Great Famine in Limerick by Mainchin Seoighe
3. Paddy's Lament by Thomas Gallagher
4. These My Friends and Forebearers by Grania R. O'Brien
5. Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York by Tyler Anbinder
6. The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland by J. Sterling Coyne, Illustrations by W.H. Bartlett
7. Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City by Martiun V. Melosi
8. Irish Relatives and Friends by Laura Murphy DeGrazia and Diane FitzPatrick Haberstroh
9. The Great Irish Famine Online, University College Cork
10. The Workhouses of Ireland: The Fate of Ireland's Poor by John O'Connor
11. The Workhouse: The Story of An Institution by Peter Higginbottom (Online)
12. An Atlas of Irish History by Ruth Dudley Edwards
13. The National Archives: US Census Research Online
14. Family Research: Family Research.org (Online)
15. Tyler Anbinder, Cormac Ó Gráda, and Simone Wegge, "Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database, 1850-1858," version 3.0, September 13, 2019, accessed via https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/work/0k225b85w
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County Monaghan During the Irish Famine:
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.
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By Loretto Horrigan Leary
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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.
​In the fourteen years since the Roscius delivered Mary Austin to America, County Monaghan experienced destitution on par with the West of Ireland and Skibbereen. Fighting and the decline of the linen industry dominated these changes, and Monaghan was still recalling its painful past until the latter part of the twentieth century.
In 1801, the Act of Union placed Ireland firmly under the control of British Rule. This resulted from the 1798 Rebellion, which fueled anti-loyalist sentiments among Catholics and Protestants who had taken, or were alleged to have taken, the United Irishman oath. Although the significant battles took place in the northern counties, the south also saw its share of fighting. Monaghan, however, was close enough to the epicenters of northern battles that sufficient support was garnered to create groups of fighters. Four men in the Monaghan Militia, who adamantly denied they were United Irishmen, left a lasting impression due to an orchestrated scene at their executions. According to historian Guy Beiner, “they were marched in front of their regiment to the tune of the ‘Dead March in Saul,’ forced to kneel in front of their coffins and shot by a firing squad.” Monaghan’s geographical location to the six counties of Ulster would mean that forgetting the Rebellion of 1798 was impossible.
The land in Monaghan had been sublet and divided repeatedly because of the growth of the linen industry during the Industrial Revolution. The more tenants on the land, the more rent a landlord could garnish—and so, Monaghan became densely populated. As per historian Patrick Duffy, “The resources of the land clearly had become too fragmented, farms had become minuscule, there were too many people with limited or no access to land, and fewer and fewer of these had access to non-farm incomes.”
However, as machines replaced human work, the heavily populated areas that were once spinning and weaving their way to economic security in cottage industry style became unemployed and financially unstable. Tenants could not pay rent, and absentee landlords, not witnessing the circumstances firsthand, did not understand the situation but demanded rent payments.
When Mary Austin emigrated from Monaghan in 1841, the county's population was 200,422, and the main industry source was linen spinning. 185,000 people were living in rural areas. The “linen industry’s spinning and weaving crafts were in rapid retreat,” as per Duffy. The migration from Ulster began decades before the Irish Famine. Mary Austin, a cap maker in the female needle trades in New York City in 1855, is an example of that earlier migration. Mary left when things were bad but were about to get worse. In Duffy's words, “County Monaghan’s experience of the Great Famine reflected very much its peripheral situation in south Ulster.” Monaghan borders Fermanagh, Armagh, and Tyrone, all in Northern Ireland and under British rule.
On August 24th, 1846, County Inspector James J. Sanderson reported his observations from his travels in County Monaghan to the Relief Commission, stating that the blight had ravaged the entire county’s crop. According to his eyewitness report to relief commissioners, Carrikmacross, Castleblayney, Clones, and Glasslough districts were severely affected, with “fields perfectly withered and black and vegetation has to all appearance ceased.” Later that year, in December, The Northern Standard newspaper criticized the government for its laissez-faire policy of non-interference in the market. “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. This week 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.” This critique is highly unusual because the newspaper was traditionally strongly unionist.
Poorer people in rural areas still relied on potatoes as their staple diet. The extent of suffering and starvation accelerated once that crop failed, and no seed was left to replant, compounded by the decline of the linen industry and the ignorance of absentee landlords. “When excluding the towns,” says historian Michelle McGoff McCann, “Monaghan experienced the third heaviest rural decline in Ireland at almost 30 percent between 1841 and 1851.”
A statement dated May 1st, 1847, showing workhouse accommodation in Ireland, shows that Monaghan's workhouse, built to house 900 inmates, added space for 300. By 1848, according to Duffy, Clones workhouse had, “2,600 inmates, and another 4,000 people were obtaining outdoor relief.”
As the crow flies, less than eighteen miles away from Clones, in the parish of Clontibret, on March 11th, 1847, Cecelia McPhillips arrived at her neighbor’s house. Cecelia had begged all that day and gathered what food she could to feed her four hungry children, now standing on Jane Forsythe’s doorstep. It was not an unusual tradition to allow a neighbor in to cook food. The family was brought inside and fed. The following day, one of the children, Pat, fell ill. The two women lay him on a bed of straw beside the fire, and within an hour of remaining unresponsive, Pat was dead. On March 13th, Cecelia McPhillips carried her son’s body to Saint Coleman’s Church of Ireland graveyard.
At eight o’clock, Benjamin Beatty, the schoolmaster of Clontibret parish, was passing by the church and saw “a woman with a spade trying to bury a child.” When he asked her why she was burying him without a coffin, Cecelia told him she “could not secure one” according to Beatty. After including the archdeacon, Fr. Russell, in the circumstances of Cecelia's predicament and her son’s death, Beatty was given the money to provide a coffin for young Pat and told to buy Cecelia breakfast. Fr. Russell then sent word to the police to come and investigate the youngster’s death. An inquest was carried out by the local coroner, Charles Waddell, and concluded on March 15th that Patrick McPhillips had “no marks of external violence. On one foot was an ulcerated sore, the result of walking great distances with his mother in search of food.” Patrick’s body was “emaciated.” The Doctor who examined his body, Stanley Christian, concluded that the cause of death was a result of “exposure to cold and want of proper nourishing food.”
Another famous native of County Monaghan was Charles Gavan Duffy. Born in 1815 in Monaghan town and raised by the local parish priest, due to the premature deaths of his parents, Duffy became involved in editing newspapers and is historically remembered as the editor of The Nation. Later in his career, Duffy would become the Prime Minister of Victoria in Australia. As a writer and editor, Duffy and his Young Ireland compatriots wrote extensively on the land question and parliamentary opposition in the years leading up to the failed Young Ireland Rebellion of July 1848. The shadow of the failed 1878 rebellion was still being cast across Monaghan and remembered among its natives.
By 1851, the population of County Monaghan had fallen to 141,000. Patrick Duffy states, “the decline in house numbers is probably the most dramatic of the sweeping nature of the changes across the countryside.” The University College of Cork project, The Great Irish Famine Online shows the population of Clones in the Barony of Dartree in 1841 at 2,877. By 1851, it had decreased to 2,319. Mary Austin was one of those 558 people who left or died in the decade after 1841.
People left before the famine due to reduced employment in the linen industry; when the potato crop failed in 1845 and again in the following years, the population of Monaghan felt double the pain—high unemployment and requests to pay rent led to destitution or emigration. The walking distance to the ports of Dundalk or Newry may have counteracted County Monaghan's mortality rate during the years of the Irish famine. Many Monaghan natives had already traveled those routes to England and Scotland as migrant laborers.
A non-catholic from Ulster was given a numerical identifier of 1 in the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank records. When asked by the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank clerk on May 12th 1855, Mary Austin, depositor number 230, was given the numerical identifier of 0.5. Her mother, Mary Bragau, was living in New York, and her father, William McElroy, was deceased. Mary Austin had one daughter, who was also a Mary. She lists her husband as James. Is James Austin, depositor number 229, her husband? He was born in 1827 in Glasgow and emigrated to New York in 1853. Is that score of 0.5 significant of one of her parents being of the protestant faith or that she converted? Like all things related to the Irish Famine, we may never know. However, the few details she supplied to the EISB clerk on that Saturday in May 1855 are rich details about County Monaghan’s history before and after the famine. Details that are still significant in the memory of many County Monaghan natives to this day.
Sources:
1. The Irish Coroner: Death, Murder and Politics in Co. Monaghan 1846 – 78 by Michelle McGoff McCann
2. An Atlas of Irish History by Ruth Dudely Edwards
3. Irish Rebellions 1798 -1921 by Helen Litton
4. Atlas of Irish History by Sean Duffy
5. Atlas of the Great Irish Famine editited by Crowley, Smyth and Murphy (essay by Patrick Duffy titled Mapping the Famine in County Monaghan)
6. The Famine in Ulster edited by C. Kinealy and T Parkhill (essay by Patrick Duffy titled The Famine in County Monaghan)
7. Forgetful Remembrance by Guy Beiner
8. The Workhouses of Ireland by John O’Connor
9. Insight Guides: Ireland
10. Tyler Anbinder, Cormac Ó Gráda, and Simone Wegge, "Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database, 1850-1858," version 3.0, September 13, 2019, accessed via https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/work/0k225b85w
11. The Great Irish Famine Online by University College Cork