Local history: Priests succumbed to fever while tending Mayo Famine victims

By Tom Gillespie

AT the height of the famine in 1847 the situation in Castlebar was desperate. Thousands were coming in from the countryside seeking relief.

Starving people were lying down in groups in the yard of the vacant workhouse - closed for lack of money and fever. The crowding only helped to spread disease.

At that time in Castlebar there were four priests - Richard Gibbons, the parish priest, James McManus, Peter Geraghty and Michael Curley. Sadly, the first two died of fever attending the sick and dying. They are both buried in the old graveyard where a committee erected a monument in their honour.

Private help came from many quarters to the starving people. Parishes and churches from all over the world sent money and food.

The Society of Friends (Quakers) established feeding and relief centres all over Ireland. Help came from India, from the Choctaw tribe in the US and from the recently established St. Vincent De Paul Society.

During the famine the population of Castlebar dropped by 40 per cent - from 5,170 to 2,950. In Mayo as a whole the population fell by 29 per cent.

In 1846, 552 children were baptised in the Castlebar parish. The previous year there were 130 marriages in the parish. In 1847 there were 40.

Business in the town collapsed. A group of people, led by Fathers Geraghty and Curley, bought a quantity of wool and employed about 100 people in weaving and dyeing and making suits which were then sold for 10 shillings each.

The committee also raised subscriptions, mostly from England, to buy seed for the surrounding farmers so they could sow crops again.

The census of 1841 shows the population of Mayo was 388,887, almost four times that of today.

Nine-tenths of the people of Mayo depended on the potato for their only food, so failure of the crop meant disaster.

In 1800 there were five million people in Ireland. There had been a huge explosion of the population due to a growing reliance on the potato, the increasing sub-division of land, the growth of the conacre system on which thousands of families depended.

The worst and poorest land on hills, mountains and even bogs was developed for the growing of potatoes.

The average marriage age for girls was 16 and for boys 18. Families were large so there was a huge increase in population, especially among the poorest counties of the west.

The scale of the disaster was immense. By the middle of 1847 three million people were being fed at relief centres all over the country. Even by modern standards that would have been a huge undertaking.

The British government, led by Sir Robert Peel, faced additional difficulties apart from the practical task of buying and distributing food. Some of these difficulties included a lack of information. It took ages to convince Dublin and London that there was a major crisis.

In the areas where hunger was greatest there were scarcely any shops to distribute food. As a result people flocked into towns seeking help.

The economic theory at that time was free trade and the idea of a government actually interfering with private trade by buying and distributing food was bitterly opposed by the trading classes.

The corn laws, which Peel wanted to abolish, were designed to keep out foreign importers of corn and this was a very divisive issue in England. There was, too, prejudice against Ireland, and especially against Irish Catholics.

To many the famine was an act of God to punish the Catholic Irish for their lazy and indolent ways and their superstition. The ruling and wealthy classes lorded it over the ordinary people, but Peel imported huge amounts of Indian corn from the US. However, there were difficulties in finding mills to grind the corn and it was not easily digested - ‘Peel’s brimestone’ it was dubbed.

Stories of people deliberately getting arrested to be fed in Castlebar goal were reported in The Connaught Telegraph.

The workhouse in Castlebar, where the Sacred Heart Hospital now stands, opened in 1842 for a capacity of 600 people. However, because of overcrowding the authorities had to rent other premises such as Walshe’s Brewery to accommodate 1,952 people by 1850.

In the early 1840s the government spent twice as much on the maintenance of the jail than it did on the infirmary, both in Castlebar, leaving in no doubt the whereabouts of their priorities.

The 3rd Earl of Lucan, George Bingham, was known as ‘The Exterminator’. He chose this time to increase his lands, clearing villages such as Drumconlon and Aughadrina of hundreds of people to facilitate pasture, building sheds from the stone of their houses.

Castlebar historian the late Brian Hoban researched the period when oven one million people died of starvation in the country, while many more emigrated to Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia.

The first account of potato failure reported in the Castlebar area in the local papers is in 1845. In 1846 there was almost total crop failure.

The year 1847 was perhaps the worst year with little or no food available and the widespread occurrence of typhoid and other diseases. This year became known as Black ’47.

Castlebar probably suffered more than other areas as the potato was the staple diet, while thousands who had been experiencing hardship or had been evicted in outlying areas advanced to Castlebar in search of relief.

As the hardship spread tenants were experiencing extreme difficulties in paying their rents. The response of the landlords varied. Some where sympathetic and rarely treated their tenants harshly.

Sir Robert Blosse-Lynch in Balla treated his tenants well, as did George Henry Moore, while Sir Charles O’Malley supplied grain to his tenants.

As the situation worsened landlords experienced financial problems and while some continued to provide relief, others used the situation to clear their lands of tenants and increase the size of their holdings in an effort make them more viable.

Lord Lucan, who had no love for Irish Catholics, is quoted as saying he ‘would not breed paupers to pay priests’. For example, he evicted 200 families so that Simpson, a Scots Presbyterian, might have a holding of 2,000 acres.

The village of Aughadrina was also cleared by Lucan’s agents and developed into a racecourse.