Rachael English: The legacy of the Famine years continues to reverberate today
Rachael English for Weekend Feb 12, 2022
I knew her picture long before I knew her name or her story. A tall, emaciated woman, dressed in rags, is accompanied by two little girls. All three are in their bare feet. One of the children has turned her face away from the artist, as if ashamed of her family’s destitution.
Over the decades, the black and white drawing has become one of the defining images of the Famine. The woman, Bridget O’Donnel, was from Kilmacduane Parish in County Clare. In 1849, she was heavily pregnant and sick with fever when men came to evict her. When she refused to leave, they began knocking down the cottage anyway.
Bridget was carried to another cabin where a priest gave her the last rites. She survived, but her baby was stillborn. Her thirteen-year-old son also died.
All of this is known because what happened to her was recorded by a journalist from the Illustrated London News. In a revolutionary move, James Mahony allowed Bridget to speak in her own voice. She was a real person, not a statistic, not part of a faceless mass of misery.
Neither did the accompanying images attempt to sugarcoat what Mahony found in west Clare. Another drawing showed a family attempting to live in a makeshift structure while all around them houses have been destroyed.
The article, part of a series, was published three days before Christmas in 1849 and caused a stir in London and beyond. Since then, it has been studied as part of the history of reporting. By giving a voice to a starving woman from the edge of Europe, Mahony helped to change the nature of journalism.
I can’t claim that Bridget O’Donnel inspired my new book — by the time I read her interview, I’d already started writing. But her story, and her image, were a constant reminder of how people suffered and of how the legacy of those years continues to reverberate today. Every street and townland has a story to tell.
To explain more, I need to take a step back.
Sometimes, book ideas come quickly. You read or hear something, and almost immediately the potential for a novel comes into view. You focus on the characters and try to sketch out a basic plot.
isn’t one of those books. There was no single moment of inspiration. Rather, the idea took shape slowly, and even when it was fairly clear in my head, I pushed back against it. For a start, I’d already written several chapters of another book. More importantly, I’m not a historical novelist. Admittedly, I have written books partly set in the 1970s and 80s, but I knew that pursuing this idea would involve delving into the past in a way I hadn’t done before. I had a lot of learning to do.
And yet, my interest persisted.
As is often the case, the process started when I was in the middle of something else. A search for appropriate last names for County Clare-based characters brought me to the genealogy section of the County Library’s website. From there, I made my way to the 1901 census records — and became transfixed.
The documents contained relatively few people over the age of seventy, and it occurred to me that those who were listed would have had clear memories of the Famine. At around the same time, I came across a local newspaper article that referred to a widow from County Clare whose death was one of the first officially recorded as being from starvation. She died in 1846 while walking to Ennis in search of food for her children.
I began to appreciate how little I knew about the impact of the Famine on the county in which I grew up. It’s estimated that between 1841 and 1851 Clare’s population declined by more than a quarter. There were also a staggering number of evictions. Of course, it’s possible to measure the numbers who died from starvation and disease and the numbers who emigrated. What’s harder to calculate is the trauma of the people who survived, including those forced into exile.
Again and again, I found myself returning to the Clare County Library website which contains a significant number of documents from the period, including the article about Bridget O'Donnel. They make for difficult reading. Records from the workhouse in Kilrush reveal an astonishing catalogue of needless death. From March 1850 to March 1851, hundreds upon hundreds of deaths were recorded there. Entire families were claimed by fever and hunger.
During that year, sixty-four residents with the last name McMahon died. Thirty- four McInerneys are listed and fifty-seven Keanes. One, Margaret Keane, was just five weeks old when she died from smallpox.
There are few descriptions of those who lost their lives. Those that are included are heartbreaking. Fifty-year-old Biddy Cahill was described as a ‘feeble old woman’, while Martin Connors, who was the same age, was said to be ‘speechless from cold and want'. Many of those who perished were children. Two-year-old John Cahill was ‘a mere starveling’ while Biddy Eustace, aged four, was ‘a mere skeleton’.
Quite a few books have been set during the Famine, but it struck me that what I hadn’t come across was a novel in which present-day characters are forced to grapple with its long-term legacy.
And so, two of the three main characters in were born. Jessie Daly has returned to west Clare after a humiliating experience in Dublin. In her own words, she’s a journalist who ‘writes soft words about soft lives'. Having long dismissed her hometown as bland and parochial, the intervention of an old school friend forces her to think again. She begins to see how the ghosts of the 1840s and 50s are all around her.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Kaitlin Wilson realises that despite her family being steeped in Irish customs and rituals, they know little about the circumstances in which their ancestors arrived in Boston and about the challenges that awaited them there.
Jessie and Kaitlin are connected by a third woman, a young mother called Bridget Moloney. In the mid-1840s, she loses almost everything. Every day is a battle for survival. The more I wrote, the more it mattered to me that Bridget be a fully rounded character, not just a victim of historical cruelty. Despite enduring unimaginable deprivation, she has an intense will to live.
When I started the book, I was aware that those who left Ireland for America often found it difficult to adjust to their new lives. What I had underestimated was the level of hostility against them. In Boston, many residents viewed them as a sickly, tattered bunch who drank too much and stole food from American mouths.
Neither had I given much consideration to the fact that America was on the eve of civil war. People had other causes and concerns. Ultimately, the decision by a significant number of Irish immigrants to fight on the Union side helped to erode some of the prejudice against them. It was the start of their long road to acceptance.
But that’s another story.
- The Letter Home by Rachael English is published by Hachette Ireland in trade paperback, €13.99
