“We stop the presses with great regret to announce that the potato Murrain has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland. The crops about Dublin are suddenly perishing. Where will Ireland be in the event of a universal potato rot?”
Gardeners’ Chronicle and Gazette, London, Sept. 13, 1845
There has been one subject the Irish haven’t talked much about . . . as if it could really be forgotten.
Too painful. Too horrific, too difficult to explain, because in many ways it didn’t make sense. So for more than a century, the topic has been dealt with by stoic Catholic silence. It was no secret, for it severely wounded the country of Ireland and dramatically changed the face of America. But the subject wasn’t talked about.
The subject was the Irish potato famine, which began to take its human toll just about this time of year exactly 150 years ago, in the fall of 1845.
It began with an airborne virus that rotted the potato plant as it fruited and that spread quickly across Ireland, where the peasant population had become totally dependent on it for nutrition. The average Irish male at the time consumed 8 to 14 pounds of potatoes a day. With the potato crop blackened by rot, the Irish peasant lost his income and main source of food for his family. Other foods he could not afford to buy. Other foods, such as wheat and corn, cattle and hogs, were owned by the English landlords and exported. So with no potatoes to eat and little help from the outside, the Irish began to starve to death.
“In fruitful County Cork, whose seaports are thronged with vessels laden with food for England, the rate collector told a tragic tale. In some houses he found the corpses of whole families, dead for some time. Some houses were completely deserted. Along the ditches were bodies badly mangled by animals. The poor creatures who were still alive were walking ghosts.”
Thus wrote Gerald Keegan, an Irish schoolteacher who kept a diary during the famine. To escape starvation, he and his young wife emigrated to Canada but, already weak, fell sick aboard ship and died upon arrival on the Canadian shore.
“Before the famine, the Irish were some of the healthiest people in Europe,” says Frank Sheridan, the Irish consul general in Chicago. “They ate potatoes supplemented by milk and honey. This was a mono-diet but it sustained them. It was a good diet compared to other European peasants.
“Then came the famine, which not only destroyed lives, families, entire villages, but it destroyed their values. The Irish peasantry had been a communal society, but the famine destroyed the sharing. You could not help out your neighbors because you had nothing yourself. The Irish were humiliated by this.”
At the time of the famine, Ireland’s population had swollen to 8 million. By the time it subsided, 1 million people had died and more than 2.5 million had escaped by climbing aboard ships for Canada, Australia and, mostly, America. With a population today of 5 million, Ireland has still not recovered its human numbers.
When the Irish came here, they didn’t talk much about it and the story of the famine was not passed down from generation to generation.
“Six thousand miles away made it easier to block out, and so our great-grandfathers said nothing,” says Mary Pat O’Connor, an Irish-American who lived 13 years in Ireland.
“The famine became the shameful secret in the family,” says Dan Casey, a Scots-born Irishman now living in Chicago.
Ending the silence
A group of people in Chicago want to talk about it now. And they are. The Chicago Irish Famine Commemorative Committee has hooked up with several Chicago theaters to help educate people not only about the Irish famine, but also about famine as it exists worldwide today and to raise money to stop it.
“It is amazing how many people have heard of the Irish potato famine but know absolutely nothing about it,” says Ina Marlowe, producing artistic director of Touchstone Theater, which this season has two plays by Irish or Irish-American writers on the schedule: “Wonderful Tennessee,” by Brian Friel, which closed in October, and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” by Eugene O’Neill, which opens in February.
“So many of us in the theater have fallen in love with Irish plays that we thought we could use audience space to talk about the Irish famine. When you have a play about a culture, you should know more about how it was formed. The famine played a significant role in the culture of modern Ireland and in the culture of Irish-Americans.”
So Touchstone, along with Steppenwolf Theatre, whose showing of Friel’s “Faith Healer” just ended, and the Goodman Theatre, which will be showing O’Neill’s “A Touch of the Poet” next spring, decided to have one night set aside after each of the four plays in which the audience would be invited to stay on and learn about famine. The Irish famine of another century and famine going on in Africa and Asia in this century.
“The people who stay and listen are surprised at the sheer numbers of the Irish famine,” says Casey, who is co-chair of the Chicago Irish Famine Commemorative Committee.
“There is so much they didn’t know. For instance, when word of the famine got out, there were three groups in America that responded and wanted to help: the Quakers, who set up soup kitchens in Ireland, the Jews along the eastern seaboard, and the Choctaw Indians, who had themselves suffered starvation when being moved by our government from their homelands to a reservation in Oklahoma. Theirs was the Trail of Tears and they did not forget the pain. So they voted to donate their entire treasury of $170 and give it to the starving in Ireland.”
The goal: Help people today
Casey and his Chicago group have dedicated themselves to raising $100,000 for famine relief in memory of the Irish famine of long ago. The money will be given to CONCERN, an Irish not-for-profit relief fund that tries to combat famine worldwide.
Of all the cities in America where Irish immigrants settled, Chicago so far has raised the most money for famine relief in this commemorative effort.
“We have $35,000 so far,” says Casey, “and there is no doubt that we will reach our goal. The theater in Chicago is certainly giving us a boost.”
“With the help of the theaters, using their stages after plays to educate people, we are trying to do this: in memory of all those millions who died in Ireland and on the way here in boats, we now are trying to help the living,” says O’Connor, who is also on the committee.
“In the Irish language there is no word for immigration,” she says. “The word they use is `exile.’ Years ago in Ireland I visited my grandfather’s sister, who was old and lived in County Claire in a house beside a small road. It was a road, she told me, that when she was young, she sat and watched all the young men walk by on their way to the boats … leaving Ireland for good.
“Hanging beside her fireplace was a thick braided string–about two fingers thick–and she told me she made it. What is it, I asked her. A tie for the boys, she said. A tie? Yes, she said. She collected little scraps of cloth and braided them into ties and then handed them out to the Irish peasant boys leaving Ireland because she thought they would have a better chance of getting a job in America if they wore a tie. She saved this last one all those years. You see, Ireland was still recovering, and they still remembered. They just didn’t talk about it.”
Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on
wild higgledy skeletons
scoured the land in ‘forty five
wolfed the blighted root and died.
So wrote Irish poet Seamus Heaney about the famine. The Irish potato famine of 150 years ago. But it could be a famine of today.
In theaters around Chicago these next couple of months, the subject is going to be treated differently now. People are going to be asked to stay on. And talk about it.
