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Reflections on a visit to Ennistymon Union Famine Workhouse Memorial

Joyce Butler seeks as a writer and a mother to comprehend the enormity of the Famine

The Famine Memorial in Ennistymon, Co Clare

Joyce Butler
Thu Dec 30 2021 - 06:34

I visited the Ennistymon Union Famine Workhouse Memorial in the summer of 2018 during a trip to the Burren with my Dad. For some reason, of all the places we visited, and there were many, Ennistymon was the one I most wanted to see. In the weeks leading up to my trip, I came upon the name: Ennistymon. The sound and syllables evoked something haunting, that needed to be heard. A strange sadness, I could not explain.

On passing through the village of Ennistymon in the car with my Dad, I expected to see strikingly visible marks from the Famine, but there were none. I realise now that the land itself, where many starved to death, still quietly demands their stories to be told to those who will listen. As a mother, it was the women and children of Ennistymon Workhouse that called out to me with the most urgency.

Workhouses were a means to further detach the peasant from the land and in the case of Irish people, detach them from their Gaelic traditions, their families and their lifeblood. The Irish peasant of the 1840s loved the land. The labourers took pride in the potatoes they sowed, which flowered so beautifully in the late summer months. When the Famine struck their beloved fatai bana, the workhouse was still seen as a last resort by many. They called the road to it “an casan na marbh” – the pathway of death.

Ennistymon Union Workhouse was built on a six-acre site to the west of the town and designed to accommodate 600 inmates. The workhouse was opened on July 1st , 1842. During the Famine a 30-bed fever hospital was built on the site. The operation of the workhouse was overseen by an elected Board of Guardians (21 in number). These comprised of local magistrates, landlords and some better-off farmers.

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Even before the Famine, the majority of workhouse inmates were children. In 1847, when the Famine was at its height, 63,000 of the 116,000 inmates of workhouses were children. There were 90,298 children in workhouses by 1849. Despite the fact that a great number of them were unaccompanied on entering the workhouse, most were not orphans. Many of them had simply been abandoned by parents who had no other choice than to put them through the workhouse system while they themselves either emigrated, and sent for them when they had enough money, or tried to eke out some means of providing for them. Unmarried mothers and deserted wives were also often forced to abandon their children, so they could try and survive the horrific starvation and destitution that swept the country during those times.

Children were divided into three groups when they entered the workhouse system: males between 2 and 15; females between 2 and 15; and children under 2. Children under two who were not orphans or had been abandoned, were allowed to stay with their mothers.

The splitting up of families was one of the most heart-breaking aspects of the workhouse system. Children over two years of age were put into children’s wards. Many families never saw each other again and never knew if their family members had died or were alive.

In 1847, also known as Black 47, the epidemic of famine fever and disease ravaged the country. The workhouses had not been designed to treat sick people, but that year, every single person who was admitted was a patient. Many thousands died on the side of the road or outside the workhouse gates. The workhouses were by now dreadfully overcrowded and conditions so bad that people only sought to enter them as a place to die rather than on the side of the road.

On February 5th, 1847, Charles Finucane, the medical officer to Ennistymon Poor Law Union, reported on the state of the workhouse there. The fever hospital and infirmary were mostly full of sick children suffering from fever or bowel afflictions. There were three to a bed and some lying on floorboards. “On examining the minute books for meetings of the Board of Guardians for 15th January-19th February 1847, these were my findings:

The Medical Report from the meeting held on 22nd January 1847 shows that the following children died:

Kate O’Connor - 9 months, of diarrohea

Mary Walsh - 6 years, of fever

Sally Greene - 7 years, of fever

Michael Murphy - 1 year, diarrhoea

The medical Report for the following week, 29th January, shows a substantial increase in children’s deaths:

Mary Neville - 1 year, diarrohea

Michael Kennedy - 3 ½ years, diarrohea

Nance Keane - 3, diarrohea

Honor Cleary - 2, diarrohea

Biddy Ganden - 3, fever

John Finucane - 1 year, smallpox

Patrick Cusack - 6mths, diarrohea

Mary O’Connors - 4 small pox

Michael Collins - 8 decline

Michael Murphy - 3 weeks, bowel complaint

A report from the Vice-Guardians in March of the following year showed there was no sign of improvement within the workhouse. The dormitories were very badly kept, with filthy straw on the beds and under them. When they inspected the laundry they found washed clothes covered in vermin.

The workhouses were now breeding grounds for every type of disease, especially typhus and relapsing fever. Corpses were taken away on carts and thrown into pauper graves in the workhouse grounds then covered in lime. It is estimated that 20,000 people died in Ennistymon Workhouse and there is also a mass graveyard for children, who were buried without coffins.

Which brings me back to the start of my journey, which began, standing on a drizzly July morning at the site of Ennistymon Workhouse, now a Famine Memorial. The memorial was erected in 1995, the 150th anniversary of the Famine, and depicts an orphan boy (Michael Rice of Lahinch) aged approximately four years, standing at the workhouse gates, with a note pinned to his torn shirt. Across from him on the other monument is the head of an anguished mother, her two hands clenched in frustration above the text of the note:

There is a little boy Michael Rice of Lahinch aged about 4 years, he is an orphan, his father having died last year and his mother has expired on last Wednesday night, who is not about being buried without a coffin!! unless ye make some provision for such. The child in question is now at the workhouse gate expecting to be admitted if not he will starve.

Robs S. Constable

For me, as a mother, I cannot imagine the level of fear and distress that languished in the hearts of mothers roaming the countryside with their children, as they dug in a frenzy for a potato or a turnip. As a writer, I have tried in my mind’s eye to peel back the long years between now and then to view the Irish countryside as it was, with family, friends and neighbours dying of starvation and fever, while a thatched roof was literally torn down from over them. Until quite recently, the famine for me was far out in the distance. The only thing that really bothered me about it in school was that Ireland’s population decreased from 8 million to 3 million. Because as a child of 9 or 10, my logic was the population decrease was caused by emigration, not starvation.

As someone who has suffered and recovered from depression, I walk through life with empathy on the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet. Yet no matter how hard I try I cannot get to grips with the suffering and anguish of that time.

While researching my novella on the Famine, there were many evenings whenI looked again and again at the bag of potatoes in the kitchen, next to our fridge stocked so well with food, and could not understand the depths of poverty my ancestors were subjected to. But they have become a part of me simply through a love for my country, its people and the need to write the words of those who were not recorded or listened to. Their silence now holds the power to make us open our hearts to their stories, for they still very much have a need to be told.