It may seem invidious to introduce two books on the Great Famine with a quotation from a third book about food, but here goes:
The food was nearly all home-made; wholemeal bread, oaten meal flour, ground on the farm, made into stirabout, potatoes all floury, first quality butter, bacon raised, killed and cured on the premises, milk unadulterated ad libitum for everyone and everything, and honey bees in almost every garden.
This description of the food eaten on a farm in north County Dublin in the years immediately preceding the Great Famine of 1845-47 is quoted in Land of Milk and Honey, by Brid Mahon (Mercier Press, £7.99). It is a reprint of folklorist Mahon's story of traditional Irish food and drink, first published in 1991 and still retaining all its flavour. Now that we Irish are learning that wholesome food, produced in Ireland, is beneficial to both body and economy, this book, with its rich menu of culinary history, social comment and fascinating oddments about the fine foods of the country through the ages, should be on everyone's table.
Another book from Brid Mahon, While Green Grass Grows (Mercier, £8.99), is subtitled "Memoirs of a Folklorist" and tells her own story from her early days in the Folklore Commission to her emergence as a noted novelist, journalist, theatre critic and scriptwriter. Along the way she met many interesting characters (Walt Disney, J.R.R. Tolkien and Burl Ives among them) and relates many, mostly amusing, anecdotes about them and other eccentric visitors to the Folklore Commission. Largely, however, this is a personal, and fascinating, collection of memoirs and snippets of cultural history from a skilled writer with a deep knowledge and love of her subject.
The two books on the Great Famine, mentioned at the start, take two different approaches, one national, one local, to their dismal subject. Annals of the Famine in Ireland, by Asenath Nicholson, ed. Maureen Murphy (Lilliput Press, £9.99), was first published in London in 1850 and is here presented, with an informative introduction and footnotes, by the Professor of Curriculum and Teaching of Secondary English at Hofstra University, New York. The Great Famine in South-West Donegal 1845-1850, by Pat Conaghan (Bygones Enterprise, Killybegs, no price given) examines the local impact of famine in a remote corner of Ireland.
Asenath Nicholson, an American reformer, came to Ireland before the Famine to distribute bibles in Irish and English, then stayed to bring relief to the starving in Dublin and the West of Ireland. She was outspoken, critical of the government and indefatigable in her efforts to help the hunger-stricken Irish.
Her narrative is extraordinarily vivid, with a style and a vocabulary surprisingly modern, and her commentary on Irish history and topography, religion in general and, of course, the Famine itself makes this book a document of historical importance. Hear her on the black bread distributed in Co Mayo as reward for men's labour: "It was sour, black and of the consistency of liver . . . The colour was precisely that of dry turf, so much so that when a piece was placed upon a table by the side of a bit of turf, no eye could detect the difference . . ." A far cry, indeed, from the whole meal bread of the pre-Famine Co Dublin farm!
Pat Conaghan makes a significant point in his introduction to the book on the Famine in South-West Donegal: "In the absence of information showing a high death rate, people have sensibly concluded that the degree of distress in this part of Donegal was not as bad as in other areas. They have formed the opinion that food from the seashore and from the sea kept people alive during the worst of the Famine years." In support of this thesis, he quotes from the Ballyshannon Herald of 30th September 1845: ". . . the herring shore at Bundoran is literally covered with them . . . the boats are not able to contain the immense quantities taken at each haul; even the bathing ponds are full of these delicious fish, which are very large and rich." Granted that this was before Black '47, yet one is tempted to suggest that similar shoals of herring may have frequented the Donegal coast - and others - in later famine years. Why were they not harvested then?
Conaghan's book provides much detail about the effects of the Famine in south-west Donegal and, in a useful addition, devotes a chapter to "The Famine Ships" which left Donegal, Derry and Mayo ports laden with emigrants. Not all of these vessels reached their destinations in the New World - the Exmouth, for example, was lost shortly after leaving Derry in April 1847; only three of her complement of 240 passengers and eleven crew survived.
Local history journals, happily, continue to flourish. Two excellent issues to hand are Duiche Neill - Journal of the O'Neill Country Historical Society", Vol. II, edited by Charles Dillon (£10), and Mizen Journal, edited by Mary Mackey, Michael O'Donovan and Paddy O'Leary (Mizen Archaeological and Historical Society, £5). Both volumes are well printed on quality paper and are lavishly illustrated. While Duiche Neill concentrates on 16th- and early 17thcentury history, with em phasis, understandably, on Hugh O'Neill and his wars, the Mizen Journal contains a more varied but equally interesting range of subjects.
Richard Roche is a writer and historian