Three Famines by Tom Keneally

Author:Tom Keneally [Keneally, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2010-09-30T14:00:00+00:00

Evictions and subsequent emigration were not only part of the mythology of the Irish famine, but also of its bitter reality. The government in Westminster always intended that Irish landlords should be made to support by taxes the overwhelming bulk of relief handed to the Irish, and given that less and less rent was being paid by the peasantry, and by small and even larger farmers, a program of rigorous action would be undertaken by many Irish landowners. It was fuelled in part by a belief common to many landlords that their tenants were grudging payers of rent, and by the economic reality that some – certainly not all – of the evictors laboured under the necessity of paying off mortgages raised on their estates, and on the grand houses and castles built by their forebears in more profitable times.

Evictions were already well started by the spring of 1846. In East Galway, in the village of Ballinglass on the Galway– Roscommon border, a Mrs Gerrard had evicted for unpaid rent more than sixty tenants – 300 people, based on the average Irish family size. The eviction was carried out by a detachment of the 49th Regiment and numerous constables. That night the ejected families slept in hastily put-together shelters – their neighbours had been warned on pain of eviction against taking them in. Subsequently, they lived either in scalps, burrows roofed over with boughs and turf, or in scalpeens, holes dug in the ruins of a ‘tumbled’ (the remains of a) house. But Mrs Gerrard’s men or the police drove the evictees out of these too and onto the roads. There, many chose to die in the open, given that they had every excuse for giving up their souls.

A notorious evictor early in the famine was elegant military man and member of Parliament the Earl of Lucan, George Bingham, who owned over 60,000 acres in the Castlebar and Ballinrobe areas in County Mayo in the west. He was largely an absentee landlord, wild Mayo being admittedly a barbarous place for a man of the world to live. He declared as part of his motivation for the evictions that he ‘would not breed paupers to pay priests’. He evicted 2000 tenants from one parish in Ballinrobe alone, and tumbled – that is, smashed in – their houses.

During the summer of 1846 and into the late winter of 1847, Lucan’s ejections added to the burden of the local Board of Guardians, the worthies whose role it was to administer the workhouses. After his eviction of 2000 tenants, the Mayo Telegraph complained of ‘the shoals of peasantry’ crowding into the Castlebar workhouse. ‘We afterwards, at the dead hour of the night, saw hundreds of these victims of landlordism and Gregory-ism sinking on our flagways.’ (Gregory-ism referred to a law requiring tenants to give up their land if they wanted to enter the workhouse.) Some of the evicted people on the stones of the streets had green foam dripping from their mouths, as if they had eaten grass.

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