1800-1900

John O’Hagan, Young Irelander

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Another famous republican agitator and writer also hailed from Newry. He was the Young Irelander John O’Hagan. His father, John Arthur O’Hagan was a prosperous local merchant who had attended the Newry School of Dr Henderson   of the time with John Kells Ingram (later vice-provest of Trinity College Dublin) where the master was Edward Lyons M.A.

 

 



John O’Hagan was born in Market Street Newry  on 19 March 1822. He was an able student and well schooled. At the age of twenty-three he was called to the bar and joined the Munster Circuit.

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Halliday’s Folly

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As stated on our Newry Workhouse series, Dessie McGennity’s family moved from the workhouse  to the castle above Chapel Street’s High Walk.  Des was only seven years old and remembers how frightening it could be.  On winter’s nights the wind howled ‘like a Banshee’ and made the shutters bang.  It was bitterly cold with the stone floors, walls and stairs.  There was an absence of heating and the outside toilet was ‘little more than a hole in the ground’. 

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Egyptian Arch

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The Egyptian Arch was completed in 1851 and was designed by William Dargan.  The design was based on the Pylon, or gateway to an ancient Egyptian Temple.  The latter of course is the origin of the name that we give to those giant steel structures that carry power lines between settlements.

 

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UnChristian Guardians 1860

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An editorial in the Dundalk Democrat of 21 July 1860 decried the miserliness of the Guardians of Dundalk Union in regard to the paupers’ diet. 
 
‘This ‘wise’ Committee led by the cheese-paring Lord Clermont deliberated for hours not on how they would make the victims of misrule and poverty more comfortable but to ascertain the length they could go in hurrying them to the grave without incurring the guilt of murder.  All to save a paltry one hundred pounds a year on diet. 
 
The unfortunate paupers have been in the habit of getting some soup made from the necks and hocks of meat.  A neck part of a forequarter was sent in once a week, the better part of which was given to the officers and the neck and inferior parts boiled into soup for the paupers.  Too good for them, the Committee deemed.  In future they were to taste only a cow’s head boiled into two hundred pints of water as soup!
 
The Dundalk Board take as their best example the pauper-starving Board of the Newry Union who act so shamefully as to send the poor to bed groaning on the two pence worth of food doled out to them during the day.
 
The editorial goes on in this vein, condemning the unchristian acts of men who know little of charity and whose penury (i.e. Newry Guardians) it would not be creditable to emulate.  It refers scathingly to the ‘Cow’s head Committee’.

Famine in Creggan

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I find it maddening in the extreme – given that all of my forebears suffered untold hardships in this vicinity through the years of the Great Hunger of the mid-nineteenth century in Ireland – to hear a supposed authority like the former head of PRONI [named below] – at a public meeting recently in Newry – claim that our area was little affected. 

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Meredith Chambre

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At all times in our history the English have been quick and extreme in exacting vengeance for any violent, direct action taken against landlords.  Occasionally a select Committee of the Commons was set up to enquire into the circumstances.  Such a Committee in 1852 took evidence from local big-wigs, clergy and the Attorney General for Ireland in the case of the attack upon Meredith Chambre of Killeavey earlier that same year.  Chambre was shot and wounded, but made a full recovery.

The people were suffering extreme distress after the Great Hunger that was just then drawing to a close and harsh landlords were evicting many of the surviving cottiers and peasant farmers to amalgamate their holdings and convert them to pasture.  Questions germane to this were posed to witnesses.  One must accept that most were conscious that they would be seen as reflecting their community’s [or legal] position.  The Attorney General insisted that Chambre had never dispossessed his tenantry and indeed, had expended