It is maddening for one all of whose forebears lived through the horrors of the Great Hunger of the mid-nineteenth century in Ireland, to hear a supposed authority like the former head of PRONI – at a public meeting recently in Newry – claim that our area was little affected.  Since he had control of the extant records of the period, he ought to know better.  You the reader can glean the truth from History of Newry Workhouse.  Perhaps, however, the situation was less severe in the rural heartland of South Armagh, which came under the Castleblaney and Dundalk Poor Law Unions?  To the contrary!

The evidence given to ‘The Commission for inquiring into the conditions of the Poorer Classes in Ireland [1836]’ and ‘The Report of the Devon commission [1845]’ portrayed conditions in rural Ireland – and especially in the parishes of Upper Creggan and Lower Creggan, as even more backward than those in towns.   Overpopulation relative to agricultural conditions imposed at the time; the total dependence of the cottier and labouring class on the potato; insecure tenure, and subsistence farming were all contributory factors which left a large proportion of the population vulnerable to a cyclical virus of one crop [only, the potato] leading to a famine of catastrophic proportions.

This article concentrates on the named parishes as that other did for the Newry Union. Perhaps the population results – deaths from famine and disease and enforced emigration – best tell the story.   The population of Upper Creggan, which had, like the rest of Ireland been rising at double figure levels for decades, dropped by 17.6% between the 1841 and 1851 censuses [the worst was over by that latter date, but famine effects persisted for at least another year].  The population of Lower Creggan [a smaller parish] dropped by 16.7% over the same period.  This was higher than the county drop [16%] if slightly lower than the national average of 20%.  The West and South West were especially hardly hit, but the percentage in not as radically different as Dr Treanor or others would have you believe.

Statistics hide a multitude of personal and family calamities.  They also help to disguise the disaster that befell the most vulnerable, cottiers and labourers who held no lease and were the first, and the hardest to be hit.  Whereas the total number of houses in the two parishes dropped from 5,105 to 4,436 over the period, an 11% drop, homes in the Class IV category – one-roomed cabins – declined by 77%, from 1,488 to 346.  Their former tenants formed a disproportionate fraction of those forced onto the roads, into workhouses and onto the coffin ships.

The Commission {1836} interviewed clergymen of the parishes and other local notables about living conditions.  The general consensus was that the poor lived on potatoes and a little milk, except during the winter when milk was unavailable.  Though oats were grown as a cash crop [to pay the rent and tithes (a compulsory payment to support the Established Church, obligatory even on Roman Catholics)] some poor lived on oaten porridge too.  The [Protestant] Rector of Creggan said that clothing was poor but warm, mainly of frieze: the others, that generally people couldn’t afford frieze, although it was freely on sale at fairs: their clothing was ‘miserable indeed’, ‘a variety of shreds and patches’; that the poor were ‘very badly clothed’.  Estimates of labourer’s wages varied from £7 to £11 a year: around 6d a day with diet, 9d without diet.  They all agreed that there was no work in the winter.  Most clergymen thought wages were paid chiefly not in money but in provisions, conacre rent and the rent of the cabin.  Rev. William McAlister thought the labourer’s £8 a year wages went on: cabin, garden and turf-ground £3; conacre £1.5s; housework 15s; food and clothing £3.  This breakdown illustrates how locked into the barter system the cottier was.  He sold his labour to pay for rent and conacre.  When the potato from the conacre failed, his lifeline was gone.
Elsewhere here we have noted how, ten years later when the Government temporarily attempted to relieve the worst distress with relief work schemes, people fought to join and waited for workers to collapse so they might take their place, to earn just 8d a day.

All witnesses to the Commission agreed that conditions had visibly worsened since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.  Father Michael Lennon noted, ‘a great proportion of the land has since fallen out of lease, exorbitant rents have been imposed on small farmers who in turn raised the rents of the cottiers’ cabins, wages have decreased and people are less constantly employed’.  Homes were ‘lowly thatched huts built with mud’, ‘wretched cabins of stone and clay without chimneys .. doors bad and windows worse.’  Beds were of chaff, straw, a shake-dowen on the floor.  Landlords, all agreed, were absentee:  amalgamation of holdings was taking place, with the dispossessed becoming labourers.  Father Lennon testified that ..’in three instances petty landlords have ejected their tenants out of three townlands’.  Though not all landlords were bad.

The Devon Commission [1845] reported on the state of law and the practice of landholding in Ireland.  Father Lennon said the average farm was between 5-20 Irish acres with the greater number of farms being under10 acres.  He highlighted the contentious practice of landlords drawing straight lines of division so that farmers did not know where to plough.  Tenants were obliged to sell their produce when market prices were low.  He pleaded for better co-operation between landlord and farmer –presaging the improvement that would take forty years, and the long campaign of the Land league to bring about:  fair rents, fixity of tenure, freedom of sale and compensation for improvements undertaken.   Not only was his plea ignored but the Government dumped the results of its own two Commissions.

Mary Comiskey wrote of the Famine in these two parishes and described the ‘assisted emigration’ 1848-1850 of orphan teenage girls to Australia and South Africa [again detailed elsewhere herein] as ‘The Dispatch of the Innocents’.  The Australian colonies had accepted about 20,000 male emigrants and they badly needed girls to remedy the disproportion of the sexes.  The emigration authorities supplied the ships to convey the girls from Plymouth.  The Union assisted passage to England on the first leg.

Mary poignantly retells some of the oral traditions that persist in relation to these awful times.  From her father she heard a story of her great great grandmother who dug for several hours and couldn’t get enough sound potatoes to fill a small skillet pot.  Stories reveal also a strange phenomenon where travellers, stepping on the spot where child famine victims are buried, get lost or mysteriously ‘bound’ within a certain field overnight.  It was considered a ‘cry from the innocents who died from hunger at that time’.  Her father told her too of the careful harvesting of the charlock – a weed that grows among corn – to add as a herb to famine soup.  He talked too of a field which ran along the lane of their house, indented into their farm but not theirs.  It had been sold to a neighbour in famine times for a bag of meal, with the promise that the field would be returned at a later date.

Mary Comiskey’s Famine in Creggan Parish is available at Newry Library.  This fine local historian has written several notable works of local history. 

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