Reflections On a Summer Sea by Trevor Norton

Author:Trevor Norton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2001-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

With the truce of 1921 the army withdrew and the real trouble began. The Treaty of Partition was signed and civil war broke out between the forces of the newly-formed Irish Free State commanded by Michael Collins (‘the Big Fellow’) and republican rebels led by Eamon de Valéra (‘a cross between a corpse and a cormorant’). Skibbereen barracks were taken over by Government troops, so Republican ‘Irregulars’ mounted an unreliable cannon on the top floor of the Bank of Ireland across the street. Although it battered the barracks, it also blew the roof off the bank.

Skibbereen had always been a place to leave. Almost every venture failed and even the railway closed down. ‘It’s a fine place to commit suicide in,’ a local boasted. There had been one setback after another, but one disaster was the worst of all . . .

On I July 1845 Father Mathew left Cork City and travelled through fields of potatoes that ‘bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest’. When he returned only seven days later, he ‘beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation’. All over Ireland the plants perished, every potato turned to slime. It was the deadly murrain . . . vegetable gangrene . . . potato blight.

Year after year the crops rotted in the fields. There was no cure and no salvation. ‘We are visited by a great calamity which we must bear.’

Eye-witness descriptions of the suffering around Skibbereen are beyond belief:

‘Famished and ghastly skeletons . . . two hundred such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe.’

‘. . . a rampart of human bones . . . this horrible den . . . a mass of human putrefaction.’

‘Seven wretches . . . under the same cloak, one had been dead many hours, but the others were unable to move either themselves or the corpse.’

‘Dead children lying by the roadside . . . nothing can exceed the deplorable state of this place.’

The sole employment was on public works. The Rapids Quay at Lough Ine was repaired, but much of the work was designed to be as repulsive as possible to discourage malingerers.

Some worked and others just lay in the streets, but either way they died. By the time the famine was over, the population of the district had been halved and, in Ireland as a whole, one and a half million had perished and over a quarter of the population had emigrated. It became the greatest migration of people in the history of Europe. It was 1966 before Skibbereen arrested the decline in its population. Even today Ireland has only two thirds as many people as before the famine. Strangely, even the Bohanes, who had tales about everything, had none of the famine.

Some of the survivors of the ‘coffin’ ships to North America carried a sprig of hawthorn or meadowsweet from home to put down roots in the New World, and thus Irish America was born, with a legacy of bitterness to nurture.

Oh son! I loved

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