Famine focus

THERE is a horse buried in the graveyard at Ballyara, near Tubbercurry, Co Sligo. The Pride of Ballyara won the Gold Cup in 1845, and from the winnings his owners, the Mullarkey family, bought food for the starving people of the area. When the horse died they buried him in the local cemetery and placed a headstone over his grave.

Dr Thomas Flynn, Bishop of Achonry, which diocese includes Ballyara, brought the inscription to the notice of The Irish Times at the Dr Douglas Hyde conference in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon at the weekend. The theme this year was "The Great Hunger". The conference was opened by Minister of State Avril Doyle, who described the Irish as "a First World people with a Third World memory". She said a consequence of this was our response to contemporary famines and concern for the poor of the modern world - but, she added, we must also assume a far greater responsibility towards our diaspora, the greater part of which originated with emigration during and alter the Famine.

"Half of all Irish people born in Ireland since 1841 have emigrated," she pointed out. As such Ireland has to face the complexity of the world," she said.

"Circling the cultural wagons, as in the de Valera era, creates a stifling stasis immured behind cultural tariff walls. This effort at constructing a cultural cocoon necessarily involves a retreat into an idealised past rather than an openness to the future. At its best, the result was populist nostalgia, a cloying elegy for a lost world. At its worst, it involved racist, xenophobic and cultural chauvinisms, unrelenting in their hostility to otherness.

"Ireland can no longer afford this reactionary modern mobilisation under faded ancient banners," Ms Doyle stressed.

In his inaugural lecture, Prof Louis Cullen of TCD, speaking on the politics of the Famine and of Famine historiography, warned against seeing Famine events through contemporary debate. He criticised what he saw as the preoccupation with the role of British policy during the Famine as "a very narrow, single track and unsophisticated focus still singing sweetly of Ireland wrongs He continued that recent writing in Irish history has become "suffused with the theme or charge of political revisionism". He was also critical of recent demands for an apology from Britain on the matter which, he said, had been "given some status by the leader of the Opposition uttering it in the Dail and offering a parallel to the contemporary issues of responsibility for the Holocaust, America's dropping of the atom bomb, or Japan's notorious wriggling on the question of responsibility for its colonial wars in Asia, or the brutality of its prison camps".

Brendan O Cathaoir of The Irish Times spoke about the first year of the Famine in which, he said, "suffering was deep and widespread. There was sufficient food in the country but the poor had not the means to purchase it".

He also said it was not an "organised famine . . . like Stalin's routing out of the Kulaks but Ireland was considered a diseased body in need of the harsh medicine of political economy. He also referred to the Lenten Pastoral of 1846 from Archbishop John McHale of Tuam who blamed the "infidel colleges for the Famine", referring to the new colleges planned for Belfast, Cork and Galway. Dr McHale instructed the faithful to fast; "an unnecessary injunction to the half starved peasantry", remarked Mr O Cathaoir.

Dr Kevin Whelan of the Royal Irish Academy, speaking on the cultural consequences of the Famine, noted how it sped up the Anglicisation of Irish agriculture and the elimination of the old Rundale cluster style of living of the people.

"The warm web of charity which the Irish poor constructed to support themselves now unravelled," he said. "Hospitality shrivelled and the bonds within extended families and between neighbours loosened. And the outside world treated them coldly."

Eva O Cathaoir gave a vivid talk on workhouses at the time and the policy of enforced misery that was employed in them. One workhouse in Ballinrobe, she said, had been described as "the ultimate in semi savage life". She referred to the workhouse in Swinford which Michael Davitt's mother left rather than be separated from her children and which probably played a significant role later, in inspiring him to found the Land League.