Over a thousand people came to the foot of Croagh Phadraig in Mayo last Sunday to the national famine memorial at Murrisk.
A beautifully troubling sculpture of a coffin ship is the centrepiece of the memorial gardens.
Family duty kept me from attending, but I hope that next year I will be there.
That’s my entirely truthful excuse for not attending.
However, I wonder what explanation the British government has for not sending a representative?
It did not go unnoticed that the political descendants of the people who actually caused “An Gorta Mor” weren’t at Murrisk.
A few days after the commemoration I was able to get out there myself.
I walked from Westport to Murrisk and back. That is now, I am told, to be the annual Famine memorial walk.
It was a shimmering day in West Mayo.
Hard to imagine that such only a lifetime before my grandparents were born here the term “we’re from mayo god help us!” was in common usage in Ireland.
Mayo is THE Famine county.
On my way out to Murrisk I stopped by the Westport quay. On a day like it was it simply a crime against your soul not to sit by the lobster straps, nets and assorted paraphernalia of the men of the sea.
I fished here as a boy from the quay and out in Clew bay on a boat wonderfully named the “Seumas Mac a dang dang”.
During the Famine years huge amounts of grain and agricultural produce were exported from this quay to Britain.
There was no food shortage in this county let alone this island.
The term “Famine” irks those people academically concerned with those awful years.
I continue to use the term because it is the generally understood term in common English usage.
http://www.irishholocaust.org/
They are quick to rebuke anyone in contact with them about the use of the word “Famine” when describing what happened to the Irish people in those years.
“Famine” implies that the place ran out of food and people starved.
The island of Ireland had plenty of food; even in the west there were field upon field producing grains and cereals.
As they say on their site:
“As no Jewish person would ever refer to the ‘Jewish Oxygen Famine of 1939 – 1945’, so no Irish person ought ever refer to the Irish Holocaust as a famine.”
Quite.
The people of Mayo starved when the county was ruled by the most powerful empire the word had ever known.
Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom. The Ottoman Empire and the Choctaw Indians were moved to do for the starving Irish than our rulers in London.
In those horrible years the British state lost all moral authority to rule here. They never got it back.
For me this isn’t a matter of historical discourse, not should it be for anyone who is of Ireland.
Last year that I found that my father’s mother had an uncle who died in childhood in the Famine years.
Their parish was right in the middle of Mayo’s An Gorta Mor.
The genealogist conjectured that it was probably a Famine related death.
He was born in 1846 they remained in the same house in North Mayo by the time the British census of 1851 was compiled.
The family were there, but he wasn’t on the list of people in the house.
I have more work to do on this.
Some deaths in those years were simply not recorded because there were so many of them. Officials were overwhelmed by the scale of the calamity.
I recall my friend John Waters discovering that a great grand uncle of his had also died in childhood in his ancestral parish in South Sligo. A death notice in the local paper said that John’s relative had “died of starvation”. There was no money available for a proper burial.
On discovering this chapter in his clan’s story my buddy form Roscommon was unequivocal.
“What we have here is a crime, multiplied by a million, and it was a crime. For that is what it is.”
Agreed John. The Famine, the Irish holocaust was a crime.
Anyone thinking to make mocking racist “humour” from that crime are beneath contempt.
