President Higgins recounts adversity endured in Donegal during An Gorta Mór

President Higgins was in Milford on Sunday for a laying of a wreath in honour of those who died and emigrated during An Gorta Mór.

The President said: “The location of this year’s National Famine Commemoration here in Donegal is particularly welcome given the deferral of the hosting of the 2020 event in Donegal due to the pandemic. 

“The setting here at the old site of the Milford workhouse is also so appropriate given the adversity endured by the people of Donegal in the face of poverty, hunger and emigration throughout the 19th century and in particular during the Great Hunger. 

“It is indeed a singularly appropriate venue for such a commemoration, as Hugh Dorian of Fánaid, while in the Milford Poor Law Union, wrote a most extensive account of An Gorta Mór and its transformation of his homeplace, an account which has been brought to the public by Breandán Mac Suibhne and David Dickson.

“This peerless account of the Famine ‘from below’ is so well distilled in the old Irish proverb, “Ní thuigeann an sách an seang” [The satiated will never understand the emaciated].

President Higgins stressed that the role of laissez-faire economics must be included in any description as to the causes of An Gorta Mór.

“Crucially, in response to an escalating loss of life, Britain could have prohibited the export of grain from Ireland, especially during the winter of 1846-47 and early in the following spring, when there was little food in the country,” he said.

“Even in the brief period when meal was imported, the government could have taken steps to ensure that this imported food was distributed to those in greatest need. 

“The government could have continued its soup-kitchen scheme for a longer time which was effective for just six months, from March to September 1847, despite it providing food for up to three million people, and proving to be both effective and inexpensive. Its decision to end it prematurely was again a policy of non-interventionism, supporting the Whigs’ beliefs as to how government and society should function.

“It failed to do so. Daniel O’Connell visited the building now known as Áras an Uachtaráin (then the Viceregal Lodge) to plead with the Viceroy to stop the export of grain. The nationalist Freeman’s Journal, reporting that the delegation had been received “very coldly”, stated that Lord Heytesbury’s attitude to the Irish poor could be summed up by the phrase, “They may starve”.

President Higgins spoke of the devastating effect of the famine on the people of Donegal. He reminded those gathered that during the Great Hunger, Donegal had a population of nearly 300,000 people, more than two-thirds of whom were involved in agriculture using but one-third of the county’s land. 

“The diet of the time consisted of potatoes and, where available in some areas, herring, salt, stirabout and milk,” he said. 

“Clothing was meagre and wretched; furniture in the hovels was pitiful, and bedding was scarce. Living conditions were overcrowded and smoky. There are many European accounts as well as British ones reporting such conditions in the 1830s. 

“Despite the 1838 Poor Relief Act providing some assistance for the poor, very little impact was felt by the starving and diseased population. The workhouses failed to provide reasonable living conditions, were substandard and in a poor state.  

“James Hack Tuke, a young Quaker from England and a sympathetic witness who would later distribute relief on behalf of the Society of Friends, was appalled by what he witnessed. He described the destitute in Donegal as “crying from hunger”. 

“When he visited the Glenties Workhouse, he realised that the condition of people in receipt of official relief was little better, reporting: ‘Their bedding consisted of dirty straw, in which they were laid in rows on the floor. […] The living and the dying were stretched side by side beneath the same miserable covering, […] disease and pestilence are filling the infirmary. […] The pale, haggard countenance of the poor boys and girls told of sufferings which it was impossible to contemplate without pity.’”

As the decade wore on, the workhouses reported outbreaks of typhus among their inmates and as a result could not admit more in need.  

“Destitution reigned in Donegal during the harsh winter of 1846/47, despite some relief from a Belfast charitable association,” said President Higgins.

“The parish of Glencolmcille lost 17% of its population through disease, starvation and emigration.  

“Conditions on Arranmore were described by an American visitor in 1847 as ‘no food, apart from bits of turnip and seaweed. And still the blight continues to spread.’

“With workhouses full to capacity, fever and pestilence stretching from Ballyshannon to Moville, high unemployment, and relief slow in coming owing to primitive transportation and the distance from Dublin which was the centre of famine relief, emigration to Canada, America and Scotland was desperately sought, seen as the best route out of the misery for those who could manage to find the fare.

“Emigration from the region was principally through the port of Derry, creating communities such as the ‘Stranorlar Diaspora’ in places such as Greenock in Scotland, Brunswick in Canada, and elsewhere in Australia and the United States. 

“Owing to this widespread emigration, communities such as Stranorlar grew in strength abroad, and at the height of the Famine emigrants embarking from the port of Derry numbered over 12,000.

“Of the 80,000 Irish who settled in Scotland between 1846 and 1851, most of whom left from Derry, many landed in Glasgow, but more than half (41,275) were repatriated back to Ireland by the civic authorities in the subsequent five years.”

In an article entitled ‘Irish Destitution and Disease in Glasgow’ the Glasgow Courier newspaper declared: “Without the slightest exaggeration, this city is now in as bad a condition as respects Irish pauperism and disease as any city or town in the most afflicted districts of Ireland itself. Independent of the Infirmary and every other customary receptacle for fever patients being quite filled with these persons, they are to be seen every day squatting in swarms on the river banks beside the bridges, and individuals are often found stretched in a state of suffering, and covered with rags and filth, in the public thoroughfares.”

By 1850, the official death toll of An Gorta Mór in County Donegal was in excess of 13,000 people. The death toll across Ulster was approximately 111,000 people. 

President Higgins said: “The toll is likely to be higher still given that baptismal records are an insufficient means of tracking deaths, as many infants perished before they were baptised, some in transit as they, along with their families, flocked to new lands. 

“The legacy of the famine in Donegal is seen today in the so-called paupers’ graveyards, in heritage items that include the huge iron boiling pots for soup scattered around the county, in the abandoned 19th-century villages.

“In districts where the landlords were absent or uncaring, the poor were especially vulnerable. Captain Jones, an agent of the British Relief Association, described the condition of poor in Dunglow and Mullaghderg as ‘wretched’ remarking that, ‘they belong to nobody and nobody seems to take much interest in their welfare. They are, therefore, in the hands of the British Relief Association to keep them alive.’

“His statements give an insight into the importance of private charity in assisting the poor, especially in marginalised or peripheral areas where government relief was totally inadequate and the local landowners were absentee.”

The President also spoke about evictions, which had begun before the famine.

He said they added homelessness to the problem of hunger. Of all of the Ulster counties, Donegal witnessed some of the highest eviction rates – standing at almost 16%

President Higgins pointed out that approximately 40,000 people died or emigrated from County Donegal alone between the years 1846 and 1851. 

He said: “However, it was not simply the demographic loss that made the Great Hunger so devastating. Evictions, which were followed by the destruction of the houses of the poor, together with the gradual move to pastoral farming, would change the landscape forever.”

President Higgins also addressed the cultural loss that was experienced.

“Perhaps most stark was the damage to the Irish language,” he said. 

“In the early part of the 1800s, approximately 40% of the population of Ireland spoke Irish. Those who died or emigrated in the Famine were disproportionately Irish speakers, mainly because the Famine hit rural areas hardest, areas which had the highest rates of Irish speakers. 

“By 1861, a decade after An Gorta Mór, the number of Irish speakers had almost halved to 24%. This decline continued for some years, reaching a low of 18% around 1926.

“As a descendant of a Great Hunger survivor from the Rosses in West Donegal put it, reflecting on the wider cultural impact of the years of suffering on her community: ‘Recreation and leisure ceased, poetry, music and dancing died. These things were lost and completely forgotten. When life improved in other ways, these pursuits never returned as they had been. The Famine killed everything.’”