Tipperary is an extensive enough county to have been subdivided into “north-riding” and “south-riding” terminology. Clonmel, situated in the southeast of the county, had a population swell of almost two thousand people from 1841 to 1851, illustrating the migration from countryside to towns as starving people stripped the landscape bare to find something to eat and were forced into nearby towns looking for work and beg for money or food. Not only was the land stripped of food but also of people.

 

According to author Edna Delaney, “Near Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, whenever the Earl of Donoughmore removed a tenant, he did not re-let the land but instead allowed it to remain idle” as far back as 1835. A visitor to the Earl’s estate, Knocklofty House, observed in the same year that the family lived in a “virtual siege” with pistols at the ready. Tipperarians were not going to sit back and do nothing in 1835. But by February 1846, accounts of destitution and starvation in Tipperary made the headlines.

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Clonmel was host to Alexander Somerville, who, on January 29th, 1847, described a scene reminiscent of a saloon on gunfight day in the Wild West of America. Somerville was investigating the famine in Ireland and noticed how travelers were heavily armed to protect themselves. Were the good people of County Tipperary putting those stolen weapons after O’Connell’s 1845 speech to use?

“As arming seemed the order of the day,” Somerville says, “I armed myself.” Instead of purchasing a gun, Somerville purchased food. “I took one of my carpet bags and emptied everything of luggage kind out, took it to the baker’s shop and purchased several shillings’ worth of loaves of bread, and to a general dealer’s shop and purchased a piece of cheese. I put them in my bag….ready, if any hungry Tipperarian …should present a blunderbuss at me, to put my hand into the bag, pull out, present, and throw him a bullet of bread.” It was a nice gesture, but it was clearly too big of a job for one man to prevent further deaths from starvation. Besides, it might be a good thing that didn’t happen for Somerville. As anyone from Tipperary can assure you, had the opportunity to trade bread instead of bullets presented itself, Somerville may not have lived to tell the tale.

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Somerville’s description of food being transported from Clonmel to hungry people in the surrounding mountains is particularly disturbing. It reminds us of the often forgotten and most insidious part of Ireland’s Great Hunger: when neighbors turn against each other in an effort to survive.

 

Somerville says, “As we passed along, groups of squalid beings were seen at road corners, or running from the multitudinous houses, hovels, huts, or cabins dotted on the slopes and in the bottoms of the streamlet sides, to see the meal go past them under the protection of bullets, bayonets and cavalry swords, on their way to feed the people in the mountains hunger-stricken like themselves, but to whom they would not let it go if bullets, bayonets and cavalry swords were not present.”

 

Although it is refreshing to read of assistance being given to the hungry, the fact that others in the throes of hunger would have ripped apart the fabric of society that keeps us humane and resorted to killing or maiming in order to be fed, letting fellow Irish neighbors starve stings, and stings badly. Our humanity as a nation of hospitable, friendly, and generous Irish people was waning. 

 

Turning to crime might also have been a way to get transported and given a better chance of survival. In 1849, the Tipperary Free Press begged court judges to transport “strong, able-bodied men” as a form of assisted immigration. Transportation was generally meant for criminals, not hungry people. But these were abnormal times, and hungry people tended to see crime as an option to survive, thus the need for heavily armed visitors to Clonmel in January 1847.

 

Ten months later, in November 1847, County Tipperary continued to bother the Prime Minister of England, Lord John Russell, giving the county an air of notoriety. “I have always thought that the tenant-right of Ulster took part of the property of the landlord to give the tenant,” Russell wrote to Lord Clarendon, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, “But I imagine the result is that the landlord gets more rent, and is less shot at than the landlord of Tipperary.” 

 

The situation in Ireland worsened as the potato crop failed again and again. According to Dr. Ciarán Reilly of Maynooth University, over a quarter of a million people in Ireland were left homeless due to evictions in the years 1845-1852. By 1847, County Tipperary had the highest percentage of evictions in the country, 10 times more than that of Fermanagh, the county with the lowest rate. Evictions displaced the tenants from their cottages and promoted The Tipperary Vindicator to declare the following outcry against evictions: 

 

“We do not say there exists a conspiracy to uproot the ‘mere Irish’; but we do aver, that the fearful system of wholesale ejectment, of which we daily hear, and which we daily behold, is a mockery of the eternal laws of God.” The newspaper continued to describe the fate of those evicted—“The ditch side, the dripping rain, and the cold sleet are the covering of the wretched outcast the moment the cabin is tumbled over him; for who dare give him shelter or protection from the ‘pelting of the pitiless storm’?”  

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In May 1849, a notorious mass eviction occurred in Toomevara, County Tipperary. The landlord, Reverend Massey Dawson, expelled 500 tenants from his properties in and around the village. Thanks to the Tipperary County Council and Library Service, we have  The Tipperary Vindicator’s account from May 26th about the catastrophic scenes of human suffering. The report describes a group of ten to twelve men, armed with crowbars and backed by about 40 police officers, descending on the village. The atmosphere was chaotic as families were ushered out of their homes into the rain, carrying their few belongings. The heart-wrenching cries and screams of the tenants echoed as their homes were demolished. A week later, the same newspaper reported scenes akin to a contemporary refugee camp. The destitute had built makeshift shelters in ditches and along roadsides on the outskirts of the village. Father Meagher, the Parish Priest, counted 116 such huts on Fethard Street alone. 

 

The Nenagh Guardian further reported on the Toomevara Evictions as follows: “The number of persons altogether evicted were – husbands 100, wives 58, children 313, other persons, lodgers 103, making as well as we could ascertain, 576. “There were 40 or 50 cabins leveled,” says our contemporary. “Many pulled down by the tenants themselves.” The day was unfavorable for the unfortunate people, as the rain commenced to descend at 12 O’Clock and continued without intermission until six in the afternoon.” Why would people tear down their own homes, you might ask? Because more often than not, they were paid to do it. So hungry they wanted money to purchase food, they dismantled the roof over their heads and the four walls keeping it up.

 

The Freeman’s Journal describes in heart-wrenching detail the suffering caused by such evictions by the “crow-bar men.” 

 

“On last Monday, the agent of Lord Clonmel, attended by the sheriff, police and bailiffs, evicted nine poor families, in all fifty souls, from the townlands of Ballinamoona and Carrough. 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.”

 

It would take Edmund Butler, our newly arrived immigrant from Clonmel, another ten years to deposit money into the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in New York. Butler, born March 19th, 1827, had left his mother, Mary (Slattery), and four siblings, two brothers and two sisters in Clonmel. Thanks to the US Census, we know Butler was one of the lucky few who did well in America. 

 

By 1854, Butler was a junior editor at the New York Tribune. In 1861, he was appointed the position of army lieutenant six months into the the Civil War. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery and victory at the Battle of Wolf Mountain- defeating the Sioux and Cheyenne led by Chief Crazy Horse. Butler retired from the army in 1891, aged sixty-four, and became a lawyer. He died three years later on a trip to France. 

 

In hindsight, Edmund Butler, although deserving of his award for bravery in battle, defeated a nation of people fighting for land they previously owned and wanted to get back. Does that sound familiar? 

 

Sources:
The Coffin Ship by Cian T McMahon
Letters from Ireland During the Famine of 1847 by Alexander Somerville  Edited by K.D.M. Snell
The Graves are Walking by John Kelly
1847 by Turtle Bunbury
Irish Famine: a Documentary by Colm Toibin and David Ferriter
Plentiful Country by Tyler Anbinder
These My Friends and Forbearers by Grania R. O’Brien
The Great Irish Famine: A History in Four Lives by Edna Delaney
Irish Immigrants of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank by Kevin J Rich