How The Connaught Telegraph chronicled the famine years
By Tom Gillespie
AS a newspaper with a pedigree of over 193 years, The Connaught Telegraph has chronicled the happenings, good and bad, as they impacted on Co. Mayo over that period.
Founded in 1828, proprietor and editor Lord Frederick Cavendish wrote first hand accounts of the ravages of the Great Famine when blight devastated the potato crop from 1845 to ’49.
The majority of the population in Mayo totally depended on the crop, the failure of which first became apparent in September 1845.
Damage to the crop that year was only partial and most had enough to get through winter. Government relief measures and local charity also helped. But 1846 brought disaster. Most of the crop was destroyed by the blight, particularly in the west.
In August, The Connaught Telegraph reported: "The dreadful reality is beyond yea or nay in this county. From one end to the other the weal has gone forth that the rot is increasing with fearful rapidity.
"We regret to say no description of potatoes have escaped. One thing is certain, the staple food of the people is gone: and the Government cannot too soon exert themselves to make provision to provide against certain famine."
As the death toll mounted, the countryside was seized with panic and despair. There were mass gatherings throughout the county where lamentations went out to landlord and government.
One such public demonstration was held in Westport in August 1846. The Connaught Telegraph reported: "About mid-day some thousands of the rural population marched into town to have an interview with the Most Noble Marquis of Sligo: he talked with them: deplored the visitation with which God had afflicted the land: told them he would instantly state their condition to the Government, in order to obtain them relief; and that as to himself, he would go as far as any landlord in the country to redress the grievances of his tenantry.
"The Noble Marquis assured them that no exertions of his should be spared to obtain for them, from Her Majesty's Government, immediate employment."
As a relief measure, the government imported large quantities of maize from America which became known as 'Peel's brimstone' because of the ill effects it had on the digestive system. Local relief committees were established.
Workhouses soon became overwhelmed by numbers seeking admittance and many were turned away. Relief schemes introduced in 1846 included giving employment on public works such as road making, breaking stones, drainage works, pier and bridge building.
The Corrib to Mask canal was one such scheme. Men were paid eight to 10 pennies a day, while women and children got six pennies. Some unscrupulous overseers favoured relatives in granting employment, often at the expense of the most needy.
Over the period 1841-1851, the population of Co. Mayo fell by 29 per cent from 388,887 to 274,499.
Emigration became a long term legacy of the Famine with each successive census showing a steady decline in the population to a low of 109,525 in 1971.
Swinford District Hospital was the former Union Workhouse for Swinford. The workhouse was officially opened in 1846 and was in use up to 1926. Disease was rampant, and people were dying so fast from starvation and fever that the grave was left open to receive corpses.
After two successive years of blight, many people chose to eat whatever seed they had rather than risk planting. Ironically, in 1847 there was no blight, but there was no crop either. 'Black 47' saw the advent of fevers such as typhus, which rapidly spread through the weakened population.
Workhouses were crammed with fever patients. Auxiliary workhouses were opened and fever sheds erected.
A Dr. Daly reported from Newport in May 1847: "Fever, dysentery and diarrhoea are greatly on the increase, beginning with vomiting, pains, headache very intense; coming to a head in about seven days, relapsing again once or twice, from which death occurred through mere debility or diarrhoea, caused and kept up by bad food, principally Indian meal, supplied to them in small quantities, and which they invariably swallow after only a few minutes boiling and sometimes cold and raw.
The greatest mortality is among the labourers, men and women, on public roads, in cold, wet, boggy hills."
Many who cared for the sick and hungry caught fever themselves.
In April 1847, The Connaught Telegraph reported the death of Rev. Patrick Pounden in Westport of fever, ‘caught in the discharge of his sacred duties, and rendered fatal by the exhaustion of mind and body in the course of his unremitting labours for the relief of the poor and needy - the famishing and the dying - in his extensive district'.
The starving sick crowded into towns in the hope of securing help. The Connaught Telegraph reported the situation in Westport in September.
"From the town to the Quay, on the Workhouse line, the people are lying along the road, in temporary sheds, constructed of weeds, potato tops . . . . on the road to Rosbeg, similar sheds are to be met with, with poor creatures lying beneath them. On the Newport line, the same sickening scenes are to be encountered."