Prelude

It was the summer of 1845, the weather not very different from the usual pattern of intermittent rain, sunshine and seasonal temperatures. Thoughts were turning naturally enough towards prospects for the harvest, the vital bounty of grain and potatoes that sustained the Irish people. The signs were good and expectations high after some poor harvests earlier in the decade. Beyond the horizon but unknown to the eight and a half million inhabitants of the island, invading forces, this time in the biosphere, were gathering strength. Two years earlier, a mysterious disease had ravaged potato crops in North America. From there, transatlantic traffic carried the disease to Europe. Geography was no barrier. By the early summer of 1845, the infection had reached Belgium and some other parts of continental Europe. With remarkable rapidity, the disease crossed the Channel. By August 1845, it was debilitating potato crops in the south of England. The following month, it had reached several parts of eastern Ireland. From Waterford and Wexford, there were alarming newspaper reports of a pestilence, as yet unnamed, attacking the potato fields. The nauseous stench of decay marked the progress of the disease. The leaves on potato stalks were turning black and the infection was spreading in all directions.

During the depths of the harshest year of the Famine, ‘Black ‘47’, it may seem a little curious that leading Irish members of parliament were occupying themselves with matters of population and population counts. Such interests were not of recent vintage. The Irish were a much-counted people. Censuses and census-type surveys dated back to the seventeenth century and continued into the eighteenth century in large part driven by the insecurities of the British state and the Established Church in Ireland. Unlike Britain, the great majority of the inhabitants was Roman Catholic, of Gaelic and Old English stock, and hence suspect on grounds of religion and loyalty. The penal laws against Catholics and Protestant dissenters were progressively relaxed during the eighteenth century. By the end of that century, individuals within the Catholic community were expressing an interest in ascertaining the size and relative strength of the Catholic population. The first initiative of this kind was formulated by Edward Hay, scion of a prosperous landed family and later a leading advocate of Catholic rights, who in 1795 proposed a national religious census. The outbreak of regional rebellions in Ireland in 1798 put paid to this idea.

But the spirit of the age favoured such empirical inquiries, in part stimulated by the contributions of Thomas Malthus and his critics on the progress of population. Early in the new century, the political economist Thomas Newenham arranged with southern Catholic clergymen the collection of population estimates for their parishes. These partial surveys were published in his Population of Ireland and View of Ireland. A series of other informal surveys followed. There was even a suggestion that the Catholic clergy were especially well placed to conduct population counts. A prefiguration of later, Famine-time initiatives was the attempt by Daniel O’Connell's ‘Popish Parliament’ to organise a national religious census in Ireland in the 1820s. O’Connell was a strong critic of the 1821 statutory census which had reported a national population of 6.8 million.

County Galway

Ardrahan, Kilmacduagh Diocese

Commentary

The Catholic parish of Ardrahan was in Kilmacduagh diocese at the time of the Death Census. The Catholic parish was coextensive with the civil parish of the same name. Its population was reported in the statutory censuses at 3,805 in 1831, and 4,191 in 1841 (about 1,000 more than the 3,200 inhabitants that Revd Quin estimated for his parish in 1847). This implies a rate of increase of about 1 per cent per year between 1831 and 1841. In 1841, 44 per cent of the housing was classified as fourth class and the female illiteracy rate was 81 per cent. These two measures of poverty and disadvantage are included in this and later commentaries to give a rough indication of living standards in the localities. It should be noted, however, that it is not always possible to map data precisely from civil parishes, as in the population censuses, on to Catholic parishes. This qualification is unlikely to make much difference in practice to the patterns of literacy or housing quality locally.

Patrick Bodkin Quin had long-standing connections with Ardrahan. Arriving from Peterswell parish, he had been parish priest of Ardrahan from at least as early as 1834, when he is recorded as contributing £1 to the O’Connell annuity that year. He farmed locally, was a supporter of the Repeal Association, was a prominent advocate of Catholic rights, and was a member of the Ardrahan Relief Committee during Black ‘47, when he signed a memorial to the Lord Lieutenant protesting at the temporary termination of Public Works (the memorial is replicated below). It seems reasonable, therefore, to infer that his knowledge of the locality was extensive, and he was a prime candidate to report on Famine deaths in the area. Quin did not live long beyond the submission of his report, for in early September 1847 the Galway Mercury announced his death:

We sincerely regret to be obliged to state, that another of the venerated Priesthood of Ireland has fallen a victim to that most dreadful malady, fever, and yielded up his soul into the hands of his Creator, on the morning of Sunday last [29 August].

The botanical image that so transfixed the Irish public in the autumn-winter of 1845 was that of the putrefying tuber. The sense of foreboding and despair this inspired was captured in a contemporary oil painting – ‘The discovery of the Potato Blight’ – by the Cork-born artist, Daniel McDonald (1821–53). It has graced the cover of several histories of the Irish Famine. Yet the image of the mess of potatoes was symptomatic of a deeper malaise, of a social system that accommodated runaway population increase, leaving its people vulnerable to harvest failure. George Nicholls’ hastily compiled reports on a Poor Law for Ireland in 1838 spoke of a ‘reckless disregard of the future’. Weak landlordism, which might be seen as a consequence, though not a necessary consequence of seventeenth-century colonialism, had accepted or acquiesced in the proliferation of cottier and labouring households, most notably in mountainous localities and west of the Shannon. Strong landlordism would have meant a more interventionist ruling class exercising tighter control over household formation, accompanied by periodic evictions of squatters and smallholders as market conditions changed. To take a nearby comparator, this would have meant a tenurial regime more akin to that of Scotland where landlords were vigilant in controlling access to land and housing. This had a ruthless edge, so the Scottish historical alternative had its downside, particularly in the shorter term. .

The Death Census provides quantitative evidence on deaths in normal times and deaths during the early course of the Famine. This is the statistical spine of the work, and the numbers are potentially of great significance, relating to different parts of the country and different social and economic conditions. But some problems need to be addressed. In the first place, many parish priests were not in the habit of keeping burial registers, which helps explain why so few records are to be found in the archives. Of those that did keep registers, we might wonder if the priests were providing a comprehensive record of burials, even in ordinary times. When famine was ravaging their local communities, it is easy to imagine that overworked clergymen, some themselves weakened by faminerelated disease, might feel they had more urgent tasks than keeping a record of deaths and burials. As we noted, John O’Connell acknowledged as much when first introduced to the idea of a mortality count. We might also wonder if some clergymen failed to understand fully the instructions issued by the Repeal Association. Moreover, some might have been tempted to exaggerate famine mortality to score a political point or to secure financial or food aid for the famished amongst their parishioners. Clearly, the validity of the survey needs to be appraised.

The Death Census

Although the Death Census was conceived originally as a national survey, these plans were quickly scaled back; and, in the end, responses were received from one hundred parishes. This represents one in ten parishes, as there were just over one thousand Catholic parishes in the country in the 1840s. Viewed as a sample of the total this is quite a respectable sampling fraction. A more significant limitation is that the sample is far from being a representative one. A glance back at Map 2.1 confirms that the returns were geographically skewed. The constituent parts of the western archbishopric of Tuam are well covered – helpful as western parishes suffered heavily – and the south and south-west of the country are reasonably well represented. There are scattered returns from the north of Ireland.

On 5 April 1847 John O’Connell announced at a regular meeting of the Repeal Association that steps were being taken to ‘procure a census of deaths which have occurred and are occurring in Ireland from starvation’. He continued:

O’Connell had recently assumed the role of de facto leader of the Repeal Association. The organisation had been formed in 1840 by his father, Daniel, and enjoyed widespread support at both national and local level. Shopkeepers, priests, and other professionals filled the local leadership roles. While the elderly O’Connell remained the unchallenged figurehead of the Repeal movement, declining health impaired his effectiveness and in early 1847, sick and weary, he embarked on a pilgrimage to Rome. The ‘Liberator’, as he was known to his faithful followers, died en route at Genoa, Italy, in May 1847, aged 71. True to the principle of dynastic succession – a deeply ingrained feature of Irish life – his son John took control of the Association.

The case for a Death Census, as John O’Connell's pronouncement makes clear, locates it within both the immediate crisis of the Great Famine and the longer-term demand for repeal of the Act of Union of 1800. Its genesis was, therefore, deeply political, and drenched in criticism of the British parliament. John's stated intention was to reveal to the world the terrible events unfolding in Ireland, and reflected his view that many people in Britain, including most MPs, were failing to recognise the severity of the crisis. This was despite the fact that the O’Connells and other Irish MPs had been informing parliament about the Irish situation for the best part of a year.

Introduction

The year 1847 has gone down in history and memory as Black ‘47. It was the second year of the Great Famine. Hunger, destitution and death were everyday occurrences. Among those best placed to convey a picture of the unfolding tragedy were the priests of the Catholic Church who ministered to three-quarters of the population. Living among people, many of whom were illiterate, particularly so in the Gaelic-speaking areas west of the Shannon and in south Munster, they were articulate witnesses for their people. They saw the Famine at its worst and some of them died in the course of their duties, mainly from epidemic fevers. This was true also of clergymen of other denominations, medical doctors and poor-law administrators, whose professions brought them in close contact with the disease-infected victims of hunger. We have seen in the last chapter that the Death Census was fundamentally a statistical survey, though one that needs to be handled with care. Its proponents wanted to quantify the effects of famine on mortality across Ireland by comparing the number of deaths between October 1846 and April 1847 against the same period a year earlier. However, in addition to providing this information most of the respondents included vivid testimony, often running into many hundreds of words on conditions in each of their parishes. They wrote about hunger, disease, swollen stomachs, insanity, emigration, death; a few even included lists of the names of the dead. Some spoke critically of political economy, proselytism, outrages, inadequate soup rations, tight-fisted rate payers, and of course of landlords, particularly if absentee. Some wrote haunting individual stories of the suffering they had witnessed, of parishioners unburied by the roadside, of workers collapsing on the public works, of families dying in the filth and cold of their cabins. They might also acknowledge acts of charity and benevolence, and profess loyalty to their ‘gracious Queen’. The panacea of repeal of the Union found frequent expression, as well as words of heartfelt devotion to the ‘Liberator’, Daniel O’Connell. Politics aside, these eyewitness accounts offer unique, personal, and frequently harrowing insights into the ravages of the Great Famine at one of its worst stages.

A million dead. A million fled. That is how one distinguished writer summarised the devastating consequences of the Great Famine in Ireland. In season after season in the later 1840s, a mysterious plant disease destroyed the potato crop which was the main source of food of the labouring classes. Hunger stalked the land, followed in quick succession by killer diseases. notably typhus, which preyed upon those weakened by famine. Malnutrition, disease, suffering, and, finally, death, sealed the fate of a million or so souls. As in famines elsewhere, those most affected were the poorest. In Ireland, these were the cottiers and the rural labourers, as well as a sprinkling of town labourers, who even in the best of times struggled to make a living. But these were the worst of times. When a population census was taken in 1851 at the end of the famine, a quarter of the population had vanished through death or emigration. This collapse was brutally compressed within the space of a few years.

In the context of Irish history, it was the greatest disaster since the other great famine of 1740–41. Taking a wider view, relative to population size, the catastrophe ranks among the most severe famines of the modern world. It retains an important place in the psyche of the Irish people and the Irish diaspora to this day. In recent decades, its history has become the focus of considerable scholarly and popular attention. In particular, a tremendous amount of work has been completed on mortality, emigration, relief efforts and the wider political, social and psychological consequences of the calamity, though highly politicised accounts such as genocidal interpretations of the Famine no longer enjoy wide currency. Our understanding of the Great Famine is now much more comprehensive and nuanced, as well as being firmly located in a comparative context.

Yet much remains to be retrieved and understood, particularly at the level of the rural poor. The ‘holy grail’ in terms of grasping the experience of the crisis surely must be a set of famine diaries produced by those most badly affected, small farmers, cottiers and labourers. Such personal accounts have never materialised, though at least one fake diary captured the public imagination in the 1990s.