Irish-American History

Lesson 7: What did happen?

Mass Evictions

During the period between 1849 and 1854 , ‘Over a quarter of a million people were evicted . The total number of people who had to leave their holdings is likely to be around half a million and 200,000 small holdings were obliterated.’ (1)
A number of landlords welcomed the clause as an opportunity to rid themselves ‘of the idle and the dishonest’(2) which is how the Marquis of Sligo described his actions. He managed to clear about one quarter of his tenants that way.

Landlords in the West of Ireland settled into full scale evictions, among them , Lord Palmerston , the Foreign Secretary in the British Government , Lord Clanricarde , the Post-Master General, Denis Mahon of Strokestown , the Marquis of Sligo and the Earl of Lucan , all of whom who had many ex –tenants shipped to Canada .

Palmerston told the Cabinet in a memorandum of March 31st 1848, ‘it was useless to disguise the truth that any great improvement in the social system of Ireland must be founded upon an extensive change in the present state of agrarian occupation, and that this change necessarily implies a long continued and systematic ejectment of smallholders and squatting cottiers’ (3)

The Earl of Lucan who owned over 60,000 acres in County Mayo , removed over 2,000 tenants and cleared the lands as grazing farms. Not only were houses tumbled , but often they were levelled or burned to prevent the family being evicted from taking shelter within the shell. A major concession on the Evictions , passed in May 1848 was that they would not be carried out before sunrise or after sunset and not on Christmas Day or Good Friday.

Denis Mahon , whose home is now the home of the Famine Museum in Strokestown, was murdered in November 1847 . He had by that time ejected over 3,000 people. In fact , on the advice of his agent , Mahon had offered his tenantry a choice ; the choice between eviction and assisted emigration. Not surprisingly , the majority opted for emigration to Canada. It is unfortunate for his reputation that the ships that he chartered for the purpose were in worse condition than the hovels the people were leaving. Suffering from malnutrition , with not enough supplies of food and water , as many as a quarter of his emigrants perished on the voyage , while the Medical Officer at Grosse Isle reported that the survivors 'were the most wretched, sickly, miserable beings I ever witnessed.’ (4)

Mahon shipped out 981 passengers on four vessels on two of these , the Naomi and the Virginius , there were 464 deaths. On the other two ships , Erin’s Queen and John Munn ,there were 100 and 55 of Denis Mahon’s tenants among the passengers respectively, and around 20 died on each . In total , of the 981 of the Strokestown tenants , 511 died en route to Canada. And as to why they went to Canada rather than the US, quite simply , it was cheaper .

Refugees from Lord Palmerston’s estates arrived in Grosse Isle on the Lord Ashburton in the same year out of Sligo. There were 174 of his erstwhile tenants on board . Virtually all of them were naked and at least half of them had to receive clothes from charities before they could leave the ship’ without offending public decency’.

Despite widespread criticism of the mass evictions in the newspapers and declamations from many pulpits , Lord Brougham made a speech in the House of Lords , March 23rd , 1846.
'Undoubtedly it is the landlord’s right to do as he pleases , and if he abstained he conferred a favour and was doing an act of kindness. If on the other hand , he choose to stand on his right , the tenants must be taught by the strong arm of the law that they had no power to oppose or resist …….. property would be valueless and capital would no longer be invested in cultivation of the land if it were not acknowledged that it was the landlord’s undoubted and most sacred right to deal with his property as he wished.’ (5)

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