Cleveland's Memorial to the Great Irish Famine

The Irish Famine of the late 1840's ended up killing about a million people and forcing another million to leave the country. Many ancestors of Clevelanders left directly or indirectly because of this cataclysm. There is a beautiful memorial to "An Gorta Mor," the Great Hunger, on the banks of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland's Flats, right under the Detroit Superior Bridge and across from the Flat Iron Cafe. My Lakeland colleague Paula Blackman did the bronze figure of a mother and her children on the river-facing side of this monument.

Mass Graves In Haiti and in Ireland

Nobody knows how many people have died in the past 8 days in Haiti. We know neither how many or even the names of all the dead. Estimates vary widely, the latest I heard being from 100,000 to 200,000. I even heard that it's possible that more Americans have died in the Haiti earthquake than in the 9-11 attacks in America. Every night we see on television the unburied bodies in the streets of Port-au-Prince and the mass graves, where countless unidentified bodies are being buried.

My first thought is that we must try to help--to bring food, water, healthcare, and shelter to the living; and to bury the dead. And when this part of the emergency is over, we must help rebuild a better-functioning Haiti. These are our neighbors, our brothers and our sisters. I think every single American should help, even if it means contributing only a dollar. Some of us who are able should contribute much, much more. I heard this morning that Sandra Bullock has contributed a million dollars. And Lebron James has given $100,000.

My second thought travels across the Atlantic Ocean to the Irish town of Sligo, where I attended the William Butler Yeats Conference a few years back .

Just outside Sligo town is a cemetery for the dead of An Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger, the Irish Famine of the late 1840's. No one knows exactly how many died or were forced to emigrate from Ireland (to America, England, Australia, and elsewhere) because of the famine. It is thought that perhaps a million people died in the Irish famine, with maybe another million fleeing the country. My ancestors survived the famine, barely, and left Ireland for America in the 1850's. This same story holds true for probably 25% of Greater Clevelanders. Anyway, right outside Sligo there is the resting place of those who died of hunger or hunger-related disease. They were buried in mass graves--and their names are not known.

Disaster is part of the DNA of all humans. I know that the Irish don't forget how close we are to disaster. This is why we must feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, shelter the homeless, comfort those in sorrow, bury the dead. We are called on to perform the Works of Mercy, a lesson I first learned at St. William's School in Euclid and then at St. Joseph High School in Cleveland.

Potato Blight in North America This Year

The vector that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s made an appearance in my
Northeast Ohio garden this year. But in my case, it didn't attack potatoes (I hadn't planted any potatoes), but my tomatoes. Because of cold, wet weather this summer, tomatoes all over the Northeast of the United States (and I imagine Canada) have suffered from "Late Blight," as it is called.

Wikipedia's article on "Late Blight" or Potato Blight begins, "Phytophthora infestans is an oomycete or water mold that causes the serious potato disease known as late blight or potato blight. (Early blight, caused by Alternaria solani, is also often called 'potato blight'). It was a major culprit in the 1845 Irish and 1846 Highland potato famines. The organism can also infect tomatoes and some other members of the Solanaceae." For the complete article click on this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora_infestans

I have written about the Irish Potato Famine, An Gorta Mor, at other times in this blog. So there is a biological or genetic basis for the blight. But there also was a human basis for the starvation and suffering that followed. The almost unbelievable human suffering could have been mitigated. Famines are often human inventions.

"An Gorta Mor"--the Great Irish Famine

An Gorta Mor, "The Great Hunger," is what the Irish call the terrible famine that began in August of 1845. The famine, as horrific as it was, is the reason (or one of the reasons) my family and I are in America.

A. Introduction.

Nobody knows exactly how many people in Ireland were killed because of hunger and the inevitable diseases that followed the famine. A reasonable guess is about a million people; another million people were forced to emigrate from Ireland, and the ripples of this forced emigration continued for years and even decades. My family, the Coughlin side, came over around 1858, some years after the official end of the famine. Millions of peasants who survived the famine were jobless, landless, and still on the edge of starvation for a long, long time after the famine ended. The majority of those who died and those who emigrated were Irish-Gaelic speakers--a near death blow to the ancient language.

B. Causes of the Famine

1.--population growth in Ireland [coming]

2. Monoculture of the Potato

As astonishing as it might seem, a very large portion of the Irish population (perhaps one-third), especially in the west and south of the island, survived principally on a diet of potatoes. Potatoes were supplemented by a little butter, milk, some eggs, and in places close to the sea, by cockles, mussels, oysters, and other seafood. The poor had very little meat to eat, and the largest portion of their calories came from potatoes. Estimates of how much potatoes the Irish peasantry ate challenge credulity. It is thought that some people ate about 12 to 14 pounds of potatoes per day--and very little else (see the Cormac O'Grada source, pages 17-18). Estimates are that a third of the population of Ireland (nearly three million of an estimated 8 to 9 million people before the famine) survived principally on potatoes. Why didn't they have beef or pork when many of the Irish lived on some of the world's greatest grazing lands? It's because this precious meat was for the rich or for export. Believe it or not, during the Great Famine, Ireland was an exporter of food! While a million people died from hunger and disease! And why a potato monoculture? Because potatoes were the best hope of staving off hunger and disease; potatoes had the nutritional value of maize, but at a fraction of the cost. The Irish fields were incredibly productive in the amount of potatoes that could be grown per acre of land, and potatoes are very rich in vitamins and minerals. By the way, much of these potatoes were fed to pigs and cattle--the export foods. To a great extent, the Irish peasantry did not own the lands they farmed. They had to devote a good portion of their farming and labor to making the rent payments. This land ownership situation combined with many other factors to make the lot of the Irish peasantry very fragile indeed--always at the edge of disaster. And Between 1845 and 1851 (and beyond), in the very grip of tragedy.

3. British Land Policies.

I don't know all that much about the impact of land policies on the Great Famine. But I do know that by the mid 1800's Ireland was mostly a country of renters. Because of the English "Plantation" [this involved ethnic cleansing; removal of Irish Catholics from the land; and in many cases, genocide] and various Penal Laws, it was rare for Irish Catholics to own their own land. The laws were created to keep Irish Catholics landless and in poverty. In the best of times, the Irish peasantry (and that's who many of us are descended from) was that close to disaster and starvation. Some Englishmen said the lazy Irish deserved their fate. But if you take a ride around Ireland today you see the stone walls, fields, and structures built by these "lazy" people. In many cases, they actually "built" the soil. They carried by hand sand, seaweed, and cow droppings and created soil where there was none before. The Great Hunger was not caused by Irish laziness!

4. The Blight Vector.

The vector that caused the potato blight, Phytophthera infestans, apparently arrived in the summer of 1845 and was first noted in the press on September 6 of that year (O'Grada, p. 32). this particular fungus had already infested potato crops in the USA and continental Europe. But the impact on Ireland was particularly devastating because a third of the population utterly depended on the potato for life itself.

C. Impact of the Famine.

1. Deaths.

Nobody knows exactly how many people died of the famine in Ireland. I've seen estimates up to 1.5 million people (the New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition, 1974, estimated mortality at 2-3 million!). The most common estimate I've seen is about a million dead. Some proportion of these died directly from starvation; but a more typical situation involves contracting diseases while in a weakened state: typhus, cholera, "famine fever." Children under 10 and adults over 60 were the first to die and the most vulnerable.

2. Emigration and Overall Population Crash

It is estimated that there were about 8 million people on the island in 1845 (estimates go up towards 9 million). The famine (and diseases related to the famine) are thought to have killed about a million people. Another million people emigrated--to the USA, to England, Australia, Canada, and elsewhere. Even after the famine was over, the population continued to crash: the situation in Ireland was still quite desperate, so much so that entire families fled for their lives (including my own!). This emigration continued until the population of the island was about 4 million people at its nadir, around 1940--half of what it had been in 1845. Whole areas of the south and west had been depopulated. Until this day, Ireland has fewer people than it had in 1845. The population of the Republic of Ireland is a little over 4.4 million people right now; the population of Northern Ireland is around 1.75 million people. Altogether, around 6 million people live on the island in 2008, where once 8 to 9 million people lived there.

3. Impact on the Culture.

A culure doesn't come through as devastation so great as the Irish Famine without being changed. I don't think I have the perspective to comment on the cultural impact definitively, but I have some guesses. My guess is that the famine, and especially the British response to it, played a role in Ireland attaining independence from Great Britain. The great Irish patriot John Mitchel once said, "The Almighty sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine" (see O'Grada, p. 3). Independence didn't come right away, but the die had been cast.

I also think that the famine had an impact on Irish cultural and moral values. It probably led to even later marriages and the enshrinement of celibacy--how can you get risk having children outside of marriage in an era before birth control when children are the first victims of hunger. O'Grada states, "Earlier historians usually painted a very bleak picture of social life in Ireland after the Famine. Pre-Famine Ireland, by contrast, seemed a gregarious and cheerful place, where family ties extended far and people were neighborly, where puritanical scruples counted for little, and where peasant life was rudely egalitarian" (p. 65). I wonder if an extreme puritanical Catholicism emerged after the Famine, extending its reach and influence into our own times. I am almost positive that this is the Catholic atmosphere I was brought up in. Recently I've come to think that maybe the American refugees of the Famine have a more intense puritanical Catholicism than even the Irish living in Ireland. How could that be? The conservatism and puritanism seems more intense the farther you get in time and place from the homeland.

4. Impact on the Irish-Gaelic language.

The percentage of people who spoke Irish-Gaelic had been declining before the Great Famine.It is said that one-third of the Irish population could speak Irish in 1845 (still, that's close to 3 million people!). In the generation previous to that, about 40% could speak Irish (O'Grada, p. 67). Already by that time, Irish had faded in the area around Dublin known as "The Pale." And in many parts of Ulster, where the British and Scottish plantations were thriving, Irish was in steep decline (in some parts of Ulster, the language remained very vital and dynamic--think of Donegal). The reasons for the decline are hardly mysterious. If survival demands that you speak English--you will speak English, and you will encourage your children to speak English.

Irish also declined because it was, in some situations and times, illegal to speak the language. And children were often physically punished--beaten-- for speaking the language.

A hugely important reason for the decline of Irish is the cultural imperialism of English (and this is still a powerful factor!). Everything important and many things that are fun, especially these days, appear in English. Newspapers, magazines, textbooks, instructional manuals; music, radio, television, every aspect of pop culture. English is a cultural bully all over the world.

Despite this thousand-pound gorilla, Irish didn't totally disappear. But it did become more like the language of the poor, of the peasantry, and no longer the language of law, business, or the powerful and influential tools of culture. That is why the famine had such a devastating effect on Irish; the people killed or forced to emigrate were, to a large extent, the speakers of Irish. Those who stayed behind had to learn to speak English to survive. The result was an ever-shrinking pool of native Irish speakers who used Irish in their everyday lives.

D. Never Again

There are times when we cannot do anything about a disaster. But often we can do something to prevent, to mitigate, or to clean up. We are currently able to feed everyone on earth--at least at the level of sustaining life. Let's not mistake the "the invisible hand" of capital or the "hand of God" from something we can deal with or have caused. We are God's hands and legs on earth. If people are hungry, let's feed them--even if we think that somehow their starvation is their own fault. "An Gorta Mor"--never again!

Here is a poem I wrote, imagining the anger of the Irish after the Great Famine:

An Gorta Mór, The Great Hunger
(Ireland, 1840’s)

Most of the world just watched
As a million of our poor starved to death,
Another million forced to flee to other lands:

They said, “This is the hand of God!” or
“The ‘invisible hand’ of capital will set things aright.”

We won’t forget who gave us bread
Who put their prayers into action
Who gave us shelter—

And who let our mothers and our babies die.

Who could blame us if we slit the throats
Of those who held the “invisible hand” of fate?

Our knives will be cold hard steel.
We’ll make the invisible visible!


(Robert M. Coughlin
12 April 2007)


References. Despite the reputation of Wikipedia as an untrustworthy source, I suggest you check it out on this topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Potato_Famine

Here's a scholarly resource: O'Grada, Cormac. The Great Irish Famine. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

An Gorta Mór (The Great Famine in Ireland)

“An Gorta Mór: An Fath Mo Clan a D’fhág as Éirinn”

(Le Robaird Mícheál Ó Cochláin)

Bhí mo shin-seanathair, Conn Ó Cochláin, a rugadh i meán an Gorta Mór áit éigin in iarthair Contae Chorcaí, Éire, in aice le baile “An Scoil” ó “An Sciobarín”. Bhí sé an mac Dónal Ó Cochláin is Máire Ní Crualaigh. Bhí 2 dheartháir, Jeremiah is Bartholemew, aige agus aon deirfiúr amháin, Cáitlín. Bhí Dónal feirmeoir bocht. Níor sé úinéir talún.

Sa bhlíain 1857 ó 1858, bhí Dónal, Máire, Jeremiah, Bartholemew, Cáitlín is Conn ag dul ar imirce go dtí Méiriceá, sa baile i “Scipio Town,” i Contae Cayuga, Nua-Eabhrac. Thosaigh siad ag deanamh feirmoireacht an talamh in aice le “Cork Road” (An Bóthar Corcaigh”). B’fheidir go labhair siad Gaeilge i Scipio Town.

Translation:

"The Great Famine: The Reason My Family Left Ireland"

(by Robert Michael Coughlin)

My great grandfather, Cornelius Coughlin [also spelled Coghlin] was born in the midst of the Great Famine, somewhere in West County Cork, Ireland, [possibly] near the towns of Skull or Skibbereen. He [Cornelius] was the son of Daniel O'Coghlin and Mary O'Crowley. He had 2 brothers, Jeremiah and Bartholemew, and only one sister, Catherine. Daniel [Cornelius's father] was a poor farmer. [As far as we know] he never was a land owner.

In the year 1857 or '58, Daniel, Mary, Jeremiah, Catherine, and Cornelius emigrated to America, to the town of Scipio in Cauyuga County, New York. They [then] began to farm the land near Cork Road. It's possible that Gaelic was spoken in Scipio Town [because so many Cork emigrees lived there].