‘Coming to terms with The Great Famine – Welcoming the new Scholarship and the Renewed Interest’ Speech by President Michael D. Higgins at the official opening of "Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger"
The Printworks, Dublin Castle, 7 March 2018
A Theachtaí Dála,
A Uachtaráin Ollscoil Quinnipiac,
A dhaoine uaisle,
A chairde,
Is cúis áthais dom bheith anseo libh tráthnóna leis an taispeántas speisialta mar chomóradh ar an Gorta Mór a oscailt. Traosláim le gach duine a bhí pairteach, agus iad uile a bhí cabhrach leis an tógra seo, a chur ar fail, tógra atá ag túirt aitheantais do cheann des heachtraí is tábhachtái i stair ár muintir sa mbaile agus i gcéin.
Members of Dáil Éireann,
President of Quinnipiac University,
Distinguished guests,
Dear friends,
It is an honour for me to be here with you this evening to perform the official opening of Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger. This is an exhibition that reflects in a powerfully visual way not only the centrality of the Famine of 1845 to 1852 as a defining event in the making of modern Ireland but as one of the defining events in nineteenth-century global history. It is of immense importance too to those scholars studying the evolution of economic ideology and theory in the 19th century and indeed how ideology replacing had its effect on policy, and of course this exhibition will be the source of a recalling of the enduring bond that exists between the citizens of this country and those millions of American citizens who today are proud of their Irish descent.
May I then begin by thanking, mar Uachtarán na hÉireann as President of Ireland, all those who have contributed to bringing this remarkable collection of historical and contemporary art and literature to our shores. The exhibition would not be here today without the tireless commitment of Dr. John Lahey, the President of Quinnipiac University, a university which has emerged as a leading centre of understanding of An Gorta Mór through the establishment of the Great Hunger Museum and most recently, the Great Hunger Institute under the leadership of Professor Christine Kinealy.
The quality of both the planned programme of events and the selection of art on display is a testament to the dedication and skill of the staff of the Museum - Professor Niamh O’Sullivan, Claire Puzarne and Ryan Mahoney.
May I take this opportunity to congratulate and commend them all. I would also like to acknowledge the generosity of all those who contributed their financial resources to facilitate what is a considerable artistic, cultural and educational undertaking.
I was honoured to be asked to contribute the preface to the catalogue of Coming Home, edited by Professor O’Sullivan. In that preface, I echoed some words I spoke at the National Famine Commemoration at Glasnevin Cemetery, when I stood amidst the largest burial ground for the victims of Great Hunger. There, I made reference to a great silence generated by the Famine.
As new scholarship emerges all of us must be open to revising our accounts. I would see difficulties now in using the term ‘the Great Silence’. New scholarship has brought to our attention valuable new local accounts.
Yet, while there was a silence observed consciously as policy by the official organs of state, whether British or Irish, this is a different order to the numbed unwillingness, or even incapacity of, communities throughout this State to deal with what was for them a painful past.
Such post-famine communities, we must remember, included the survivors of the Famine, and indeed some who may have profited from it, as a totally new agricultural economy and society was introduced.
Those in the new adjusted holdings, lived side by side with the outlines of what had been houses, homes and famine villages, in what Breandán Mac Suibhne - adopting a usage first employed by Primo Levi - has termed a ‘grey zone’, a space in which the distinction between those who committed moral outrages and those subject to them is blurred for the purpose of survival in the present, yet inescapably in the shadow of an event national in its impact, but unequally so. The most vulnerable of our Irish of An Gorta Mór, lacked the means to flee and died. Those who had a dung heap, tools, harness or an animal to sell, had the capacity to flee and would become part of the human tide of emigration to the United States.
For a time, it was a silence in which some Irish historians - particularly those who prided themselves on an austere commitment to a history that they felt must be liberated from what was considered the nationalist fervour of a John Mitchell or Michael Davitt - were accused of participating as part of an affected neutrality as to historiography.
Thirty years ago, the late Brendan Bradshaw suggested that the Great Hunger confronted Irish historians with the ‘catastrophic dimensions of the Irish past’ – a past that could not be contained within the verities of a ‘value-free’ history.
Those words were written at a time when the historiography of the Great Famine was drawn from relatively thin furrows, confined to the economic and social history, which itself might reflect the relative failure to synthesise an adequate, truly interdisciplinary history. By way of contrast the American economist Joel Mokyr, in his substantive 1983 study of the structure of Irish agricultural production informed by the application of econometric methods to historical statistics, Why Ireland Starved, wrote that ‘Irish history is demographic history’.
There was not a silence that preceded the Famine. The published accounts of travellers all emphasise the poverty of the people. Those were accounts such as that of Hungarian Baron József Eötvös ‘Poverty in Ireland 1837’ with its dramatic figures. 10,000 families, with 10,000 estates, owning the land of Ireland – Lord Lucan had 60,000 acres, for example, and 45% of the tenants and their families were living precariously on holdings of under four acres.
I very much welcome all the more inclusive work which is now available to us. It is reflected, for example, in the new Cambridge History of Ireland which introduces a new generation of scholars to more work offers both new evidence, and opinions too, which will produce, I assure you, a most vigorous debate.
Given its impact economic and social historians studying the nineteenth and twentieth century have long had little choice but to place the Famine at the very centre of their work: K.H. O’Connell’s The Population of Ireland, 1700-1845, published in 1950, was very much a pre-history of the Famine; Raymond Crotty’s very valuable, insufficiently appreciated perhaps, study of Irish agriculture in 1966 was prefaced by a long historical exegesis in which the Famine was seen as an accelerant of the forces of economic and social change; and in the early 1960s Dr. Austin Burke made a study of phytophtora infestans, the fungus which gave rise to the Blight.
As a student of social history in the Sixties and Seventies, interested in Irish migration and post-Famine adjustment including Irish Church matters, I so want to acknowledge all of our debt to the North American scholars such as Kerby Miller, James Donnelly, Sam Clark and so many others. Their work, and work such as that of Clark on Land, Politics, People and so-called devotional revolution enabled and provoked such good work. Their interaction with Irish historians such as Cormac Ó Gráda and Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh has produced for us a rich stretching of perspectives.
Synthetic histories, however, were few. Memorably, the volume commissioned by the then Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, on the centenary of the Famine, took ten years to produce and was nearly half as long as was promised – though one can note that
Thomas P. O’Neill’s contribution to the volume has aged rather well. It was later when Éamon de Valera became President of Ireland that he felt he could wholeheartedly welcome a Famine history in 1962, with the publication of The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-49. The author, Cecil Woodham-Smith, was given a dinner in her honour in Áras an Uachtaráin following the award of a degree (honoris causa) to her by the National University of Ireland.
Coming towards the end of The First Programme for Economic Expansion 1958-63 perhaps miniscules of courage were being recovered.
Since the sesquicentennial commemoration of the Great Hunger, there has been a remarkable body of scholarship which has elucidated our understanding of the Famine, not least the synthetic accounts produced by Professor Kinealy.
This exhibition, and the Famine Folios published by the Great Hunger Museum, represent a valuable and continuing contribution to what we might call Famine studies – which involves an excavation of a past whose substance, to cite Brendan Bradshaw again, is formed by disaster.
What is most impressive in this exhibition is, perhaps, the invocation of the situation of an event whose horror was, we should never forget, tied to a time and place – we only need to consider the sketches of starving women and children drawn by James Mahony for the Illustrated London News which are on display here today.
To take one example from the Famine Folios, which engages the longue durée of Irish and global history - I mBéal an Bháis, by Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, begins an account of the shift from the Irish language to the English language from what may call the English conquest of Ireland of the sixteenth century through to the disdain for the language by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and the use of English by nationalist politicians. We might recall that it was James Connolly, not an Irish speaker but an astute historian in his own right, who incisively asked why Daniel O’Connell, a native Irish speaker, addressed crowds of the Irish rural poor in English, and what O’Connell’s decision revealed as to the long sweep of relations with our largest neighbour.
In the 1840s and 1850s, death, by those who had no means, and emigration, by those who had meagre means or a relative’s remittance, were concentrated on the Atlantic seaboard amongst the rural poor. These were the areas most dependent on the potato, and the areas in which the greatest proportion of the people spoke Irish.
Jerry Mulvihill last year sent me his ‘The Truth Behind the Irish Famine’. He has commissioned four articles to prepare 46 illustrations, responses, to a wide body of comments on the Irish Famine, made between 1845-1850. Of the Western Seaboard conditions he quoted American Philanthropist Asenath Nicholson:-
“These poor creatures are in a virtual bondage to their landlords and superiors as is possible for mind or body to be. They cannot work unless they bid them, they cannot eat unless they feed them and they cannot get away unless they help them.”
As Professor Kevin Kenny has observed, emigration therefore contributed to the decline of the Irish language, while making it more common on the streets of the United States than it had been at any point in that century. As Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh has made clear, the Famine accelerated this process – emigrants in this wave to the United States and Britain spoke a native language with, in his words, ‘little transactional value’.
This, of course makes a powerful and chilling cultural statement as to how such a circumstance had come to be. The outcome of a lengthy sustained cultural assault, with one’s own language devalued, meant that the migrants from the West of Ireland brought into the immigration flow had, most of them, simply for survival reasons, to have both Irish and English, or be on the way to such competence.
This reminds us that the Great Hunger took place in what has been called the first age of globalisation. It is an occurrence at the very heart of an international trading empire that was unprecedented in its capacity to mobilise trade, finance and the material thought necessary, and reflective of, a national tendency and purpose to sustain a liberal order. In Ireland the land was a resource, the people an impediment to adjustment to an inevitable rational order.
In the nineteenth century, Irish society was itself integrating, or being integrated, into this order – not solely through the Act of Union - but through the increasing influence of the market economy on the organisation of rural and urban society. The widespread subsistence on potato cultivation is often cited, and indeed it was cited by nineteenth century British political economists, as a symptom of backwardness, a backwardness attributed to an unreformable people.
Behind the laissez faire assumptions of that century lay of course some old notions of the cultural supremacy of what was perceived to be the rational order and the backwardness of those, for whom one had undertaken an obligation through political union, but whose culture you had to find as irrevocably lesser and backward.
A century earlier in 1767 David Hume had written:-
“the Irish from the beginning of time had been buried in the most profound barbarian – and ignorance, and as they were never conquered, even indeed, by the Romans from whom all the Western world derives its culture, they continued still in the most rude state of society and were distinguished by those vices to which human nature, not tamed by education, nor restrained by laws, is forever subject”.[1]
A century later Winston Churchill would write:-
“We have always found the Irish to be a bit odd. They refuse to be English.”
Yet, it was so easily forgotten, fortified by such ideological prejudice, that the 3.3 million landless labourers in 1840s were providing labour services, in exchange for plots for potato cultivation, to farmers who were themselves becoming increasingly integrated into a global economy, producing high-quality wheat for export to the growing cities of Britain.
Breándan Mac Suibhne has provided us with a remarkable new history in his new book The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland and has encapsulated many of his ideas in both his contribution to the catalogue and the Famine Folio Series.
In his study of the townland of Beagh in West Donegal, he not only tells that story of integration into the market order, but of, in his words, the end of moral indignation in the face of despair and disaster, and of the fate of rural poor – for it is from those families that the casualties of the famine came. It vividly describes a process of marginalisation, of the consolidation of holdings on the eve of the Famine, the extinguishing of commonage – all facilitated by the instruments of a new technology of the state, the ordnance survey.
Above all, I believe it is that concept of the ‘grey zone’, of the later inevitable consequences that would flow from the cohabitation of those who gained with those barely survived, both under the shadow of the memory of those who left or who died, which can have the capacity to still haunt us today.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Irish political economy was transformed in what is a quite distinctive path to modernity – one characterised not by an indigenous resource based on modernisation as economists often understood it, but by a structure of production shaped by the global economy.
In 1840, crops accounted for over two-thirds of net agricultural output. In 1908, they accounted for only one-seventh. The landscape was given over to beef and dairy production – to paraphrase Thomas More it must have seemed as if cattle would ‘eat up and swallow down the very men themselves’, as the houses, huts and potato fields gave way to pasture and reign of the grazier. The 1911 census records only 4.4 million inhabitants – a little less than half that in 1841.
If the Great Hunger was not the sole foundational event in the formation of the Irish diaspora – after all, over a million Irish people emigrated to North America between 1815-1845 – it did, however, create the single largest exodus of people from this island in our history. Between 1846 and 1855, 2.1 million people left this island, more than in the previous two and half centuries combined. 1.5 million of those fled to the United States.
In what we might call the post-Famine adjustment, between 1856 and the signing of the Treaty in 1921, over 4.5 million people left our shores, nearly three-quarters arriving in the United States. That figure, as Kevin Kenny has reminded us, exceeded the total population living on the island of Ireland at end of the nineteenth century.
Many of those of us in Ireland are the descendants of those who remained. We are descendants of remnants. Between 1862 and 1870 five of the seven in my grandfather’s family in Co. Clare emigrated to Australia. The State was, for a long time, reticent and uncertain as to its approach to interpreting and latterly, commemorating the Famine. Until the 1970s the school curriculum privileged John Mitchell, who identified the locus of responsibility for the Famine in the conscious intention and policy of the British State, particularly in the policies of the Treasury, rather than James Fintan Lalor, whose analysis of the unequal distribution of land and soil remains the most searing contemporary description of the contributory causes of the Great Hunger.
It was my predecessor as President, Mary Robinson, who invoked the ghosts of the silent and silenced victims of the Great Famine to draw attention not only to our own history, and to our diaspora, but to those who in our contemporary world continue to suffer famine.
On May 26th 1847, 30 vessels with 10,000 emigrants were waiting at Grosse Ile. On May 31st, 40 vessels were waiting in a line extending two miles down the St. Lawrence River.
When in 1994, President Robinson visited Grosse Ile, thirty miles from Quebec City, where thousands of Irish emigrants died in quarantine awaiting entry into British North America, she spoke of famines in the contemporary world, and of our responsibility to stop them.
For is it not the case that if the British state of the nineteenth century had the capacity to prevent the Great Hunger, how much more do we, with our science and technology and vastly greater resources, not have the capacity to combat hunger today?
As President of Ireland I often ask myself when I read of contemporary refugee and migratory movements, can be envisage what it was like for the Irish fleeing from the Famine of that Christmas of 1846 into the New Year of 1847 in nine days – between the 18th January 1847 and the 26th day of that month 173,000 Irish presented for Poor Law Relief in Liverpool. Half would try to get to the United States, a voyage of 4 weeks and in the meantime they were available as prey for all those who exploit the migrant. How much our ethical memory could teach and inspire us if we allowed it to be.
Dear friends,
I am so pleased that the State, through the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, is firmly supporting this exhibition and the accompanying programme of events. I understand that Professor Kinealy and her colleagues have already met with members of the Inspectorate of the Department of Education and Science for the purpose of engaging with schools and students throughout the country. What a fine resource it will be.
It is also so important, practically and symbolically, that the Exhibition will move from this place, from this old seat of the administration of Ireland for centuries, to the West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen from July to October, and from there on to the Glassworks in Derry from January to March next year.
Skibbereen and its surrounding townlands, as some of the art in this exhibition details, suffered terribly during the Great Hunger. The Abbey Cemetery still stands today, with the Famine dead buried beneath it, as a reminder of blianta an droch shaoil, the years of the bad life. How inadequate that phrase sounds.
I so want to welcome all of the new empirically-based scholarship. I do want to refer to the great achievement that the publication from University College Cork that The Atlas of the Great Irish Famine represents. It is in that publication that Professor William Smith tells us, in his contribution, how Skibbereen and Schull got the title of ‘Two Famine Slain Sisters of the South’. In Skibbereen, of a population of 43,266 in the Spring of 1847, 22,241 died, 997 emigrated, 535 to the United States, 262 to England.
We should also recall that the Famine afflicted all sections of the rural poor across this island, irrespective of creed – the Quakers compared the town of Newtownards in County Down with Skibbereen, so numerous were the dead, so it is so appropriate that this exhibition should travel and be experienced across Ireland.
It will also enable citizens across the country to access the work of modern masters in the visual arts and of sculpture such as Rowan Gillespie and John Behan, and artists who captured the effects of the Famine directly such as Daniel MacDonald, whose work has been recovered and presented thanks to the efforts of Professor O’Sullivan.
May I conclude by thanking all those who have contributed to bringing this landmark exhibition to Ireland. So many will benefit from their work.
Go raibh mile maith agaibh. Beir beannacht.
[1] David Hume, The History of England:Volume I, Harper: New York, 1879.