Lesson 8: Famine Amnesia
Even now , there is what Mike McCormack , National Historian of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in America , calls , 'A Conspiracy of Silence.' There are many people who have developed Famine Amnesia about what has left signs on the Irish Landscape even up until today for all to see.
Famine Amnesia
What I had not realised is that I had grown up in a town which had developed around the ‘Emigrant’ trade. In the late 18th Century , Warrenpoint consisted of two houses , one apparently belonging to a fisherman and the other to a nailer. The subsequent growth of the town came about because of ‘waves’ of Emigration.
The first of these were Presbyterian families leaving Cavan and Monaghan to join friends already established in America mainly in Pennsylvania. As ships were delayed , lodgings were needed and ship owners , who were always businessmen , built accommodation along the quays and then around what was to become one of the biggest squares in Ireland. This afforded great scope for traders to sell their wares to the outgoing travellers; everything from Patent Pills to Chamber pots, both very necessary for the journey. All of these facts, which were so redolent of life somehow got sublimated. I was unaware of any of the comic/tragic episodes which may have occurred during the Mass Emigrations because these things were never spoken about.
Even now, during my travels, I am constantly observing the effects on people in airports of Departures ,even though now , they are seldom as final as those which occurred in my home town less than 200 years ago. Carolyn Ryan in an article , ‘ Lest they Forget’ , identified the problem as 'Famine Amnesia.' (1)
‘Until very recently , historians didn’t study it. Artists didn’t paint it. Authors didn’t write about it . And plain folk didn’t want to talk about it.’ (2)
My introduction to the fact that Emigration shaped my world came with a visit to the Emigration Exhibit in the Ulster –American Folk Park in Omagh ,Co. Tyrone, where I first saw a handbill advertising the sailing of the Lady Caroline for St. John , New Brunswick in May 1847 , and I seem to have been writing about Emigration and Famine ever since. Declan Jones , a curator at the Strokestown Park Famine Museum in Roscommon said, ‘People had survived the Famine for different reasons. They had endured the humiliation and degradation of the Workhouse, which was horrendous , or they might have exploited their neighbours or whoever or whatever they could to guarantee their own survival. And they didn’t want to remember. There was in fact a conscious effort to erase all memories of the Famine.’(3)
This was exactly the same story where I had grown up. I was taught about the stories of the Fianna , Cu Chulainn, St. Patrick , Brian Boru but heard nothing of the more recent drama. A discreet veil had been drawn over the whole proceedings. Mike McCormack , National Historian of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in the United States , calls what happened 'A Conspiracy of Silence , ‘ in his work , ‘An Gorta Mor.'
Less than 10 miles from where I had grown up there had been an overcrowded Workhouse , where things had been so bad at one time that the master and the school teacher had both died of disease within a month of each other.
