ARRANMORE ISLAND IN THE GREAT FAMINE, 1846-8

by BREANDAN MAC CNÁIMHSÍ M.A
Donegal Annual 1973, No.3, Vol. X

Reproduced by kind permission of The Donegal Historical Society

Donegal figures prominently in the large volume of official reports which reached Dublin Castle during the famine years 1846-8. These were supplied by government officials who were charged with the responsibility of implementing the various aid-schemes which the government had initiated to help the famished population. Workhouse officials, the constabulary, landlords, their agents and bailiffs, and clergymen also gave first-hand accounts of how their own areas were affected by the potato failure. Though Donegal did not suffer the keen distress of such counties as Mayo or Cork, all reports point to a period of much hardship, of want, distress and disease. In these reports, two areas of Donegal stand out as being in particular distress-the Barony of Tirhugh which borders Fermanagh and comprises the towns of Ballyshannon, Bundoran, Donegal Town and Pettigo, and the Barony of Boylagh which covers Glenties and the Rosses districts. The parish of Templecrone or the Rosses was seriously affected, but the greatest degree of hardship was felt on the islands, and especially on Arranmore.

It is a principle of economics that as the demand for a limited amount of agricultural land increase more land of inferior marginal value is pushed into service. This lowers the living standards of people compelled to live on this land and invariably places them on a level of bare subsistence or starvation. Such was the case on Arranmore in the years leading up to the famine. The islanders held their land in rundale. The small plots of arable ground were subdivided, where necessary, to provide an allotment for a son or daughter on marriage. And, in time, these sons and daughters subdivided their allotments to provide dowries for their own children. Hence we had in Arranmore in that early period a population of over 2,000, holding miserably small pieces of arable land along the coastline and sharing the rest of the island with their neighbours as a commonage, where they grazed their cattle and sheep. These family-farms were so small, so irregular and so infertile that they could never produce enough food to sustain a growing family. So when the spring crops were planted the able-bodied men and boys went off to hiring fairs of the Lagan and Scotland to work while the women-folk remained at home to tend their little patches of potatoes which would help to ward off starvation in the ensuing winter and spring days.
The poverty of the Arranmore islanders in those pre-famine days in vividly depicted for us by Thomas Campbell Foster, a London attorney, who was engaged by The Times between August 1845 and July 1846. They conbey a grim picture of the squalor and destitution which he encountered in the Irish countryside during his journeying. Reporting from Gweedore, on the 3rd September 1845, he describes his visit to Arranmore a few days previously:

I landed at a village called Labgaroo, containing 24 cottages and almost the whole of it shockingly destitute, and a half-naked shoeless population immediately swarmed out and surrounded me, begging me to go into their cottages-such of them at least as could speak English-and look at their misery. Some thrust scraps of paper into my hands with petitions written on them, praying for assistance, to have their rents reduced and so on, such an assemblage of wretched beggar- like human beings I never saw. These scraps of paper or petitions were ready written, and some of them old and worn. They appeared to me to be intended to be ready to present to any stranger who might by chance during the summer visit the island. Picture to yourself the beggars who sometimes on Sundays lie about the pavements in the streets of London, dressed up to excite commiseration and who write with a piece of chalk on the flags: "I'm starving" and then lay themselves down beside the scrawl crouched up in a violent shivering fit as the people pass the from church, and you have an exact facsimile of the kind of people around me-the tenants of the marquis Conyngham-....At times I was informed, and I can well believe it from what I saw, that their destitution is horrible. They are, however, but a degree worse than the tenants of the mainland opposite (1).

The Marquis Conyngham, an absentee landlord, owned Arranmore and large tracts of mountainous land in the Barony of Boylagh. He never visited his estate and the management was left in the hands of his English agent, Benbow, who was also M.P for Dudley. Benbow visited the estate but once a year to collect rents. Russell his under-agent was responsible for the day-to-day affairs of the property. From Foster's report we can see that the Arranmore people were ill-prepared to face the failure of their potato crops in the black years of 1846-9. As early as August 1845 the general blight of the potato crop had become apparent in parts of Donegal, especially in Inishowen and in the poor-law areas of Ballyshannon and Donegal Town. But as the blight acted capriciously in 1845, the baronies of Boylagh and Kilmacrenan, which comprise some of the poorest land in the country, went practically unscathed. The poorhouse in Glenties which catered for the Rosses area and was opened on the first of May 1846, had but one inmate in the summer of '46. However, before summer rolled into autumn reports of new areas of blight became more frequent and the areas of distress became more widespread. Writing in August 1846 an anonymous correspondent to the Derry Journal said that he had seen enough of the potato disease in the Rosses to convince him that famine was awaiting a great proportion of the people if they did not get immediate relief. "I do not exaggerate", he stated, "when I say that I have not seen one sound pit of potatoes out of every ten and, in almost all, one-fourth at least is damaged and the disease frightfully progressing" (2). This correspondent held that the call for assistance was pressing but that there were an interest in making people believe that there was no want lest the government should lend assistance.

As the 1846 summer progressed the searing blight had turned whole healthy fields into a blackened mass. By August an official named Moore at Lochros Point, a coastguard station on the mainland, to the south of Arranmore, spoke of the rapid strides which the disease had made in the previous week: "Persons, who on Saturday thought from the appearance of the disease that they might struggle on for a little longer, had not been able to get a potato that they could use. We are in a frightful state", he wrote (3). From now on it became a usual sight to see gaunt-looking figures combing the potato fields for any potatoes which might have escaped the ravages of the disease. Sheep were killed on the mountains, and barns were raided stealthily by night in the hope of finding a hidden store of the crop. A constabulary report from Burtonport to Dublin Castle tells of the fate of one Mary Gallagher of Arranmore who was caught one night by a neighbour in the act of raiding his potato store. To brand her as a pilferer he cut off one of her ears completely and the other partially with a reaping hook (4). Some of the better-off islanders still had some of the 1845 crop on hand and were holding on to it in the hope that the scarcity would enhance the price when merchants from Skerria on the east coast of Ireland and from Scotland arrived, as was their want every year, for cargoes of potatoes. The smack Mariner which arrived in Rutland to ship a potato-cargo at that time was attacked by a large party of men in boats. Her rigging was torn and her deck fittings were smashed (5). A similar fate befell the Lady Frances and the Sea-Flower from Dublin, when they arrived to collect potatoes (6).

When the government meal scheme got under way, towards the end of 1846, Arranmore created insuperable problems for officials who were charged with the responsibility of bringing relief to the stricken islanders. Arranmore and the Rosses area were seriously lacking in the services and utilities which were indispensable for the setting up of government relief schemes. there were no roads which could be used as channels of communication between the large meal distribution centres and the Rosses. Moreover, there were no merchants of sufficient substance in West Donegal who could be depended on to import adequate quantities of meal to replace the potato as a staple article of food. There was also the risk that convoys of meal coming from Derry and Letterkenny to West Donegal would come under attack in the mountainous areas of Muckish Gap, Glendowan, Glenswilly or Barnes Gap, on their way to the Rosses. Coupled with this was, of course, the complete unpreparedness and neglect of many of the landlords and especially of the Marquis Conyngham. So intense was the hardship of the Rosses people in general and the Arranmore people in particular in the Autumn of 1846 that the government was obliged to rush a shipload of Indian meal or 'Peel's Brimestone' in the steamer Warrior from their main depot at Sligo to Rutland for distribution among the starving Arranmore people (7).

The Rosses term for 'Peel's Brimstone' was min dipsy. I have heard it called thus by Niall and Sally Sharkey of Lower Cruit, whose knowledge of the old language and history of the Rosses area is unequalled. Sally told me that she had often heard from her grandmother who lived during the Famine period that the meal was usually distributed in a rancid sodden state and, invariably, was heavily infested with maggots, weevil and other impurities. To make the Indian meal fit for human consumption it was allowed to simmer gradually over a slow-burning fire until all foreign bodies and impurities formed a scum on the top. This was then skimmed off and the meal was brought to the boil and cooked in the usual way. I have not been able to discover why the min or meal was called min dipsy. Perhaps some etymologists among the readers of the Bliainiris might have an explanation?

By September 1846 a meal depot had been set up at Burtonport and, in October, Robert Russell, the Marquis' agent, pleaded with the Dublin authorities to send him a large supply of meal as his tenants had neither corn nor potatoes. "There is not", he said, "a stone of meal to be got in all the parish, which has a population of 10,000" (8). Francis Forster of Roshine Lodge, Burtonport, who had superseded Russell as agent, pleaded for 30 tons of oatmeal to be sent to Rutland immediately, saying that no opinion could be formed of the want in the Rosses district, particularly the island of Arranmore (9). He described how 200 people from that island had come to his house in a body on the 3rd October 1846 and complained that they had not a morsel to eat. They demanded meal but could not get it. Forster said they then took up a threatening attitude towards him but that they went away quietly after exacting a promise from him that he would try to get a supply of meal immediately (10).

By December 1846 the demands for meal at the Burtonport depot had become so pressing and persist and that the government official there, Gem, had to make an urgent report to the Dublin authorities. He said he feared that the starving people of the Rosses might revolt if they saw meal in the government stores and he was not allowed to issue it to them. He reported that the people of Arranmore and the Rosses were almost in a state of starvation. A heavy fall of snow had blanketed Donegal that winter and the main roads of supply from Letterkenny and Glenties were impassable. Carts which had gone to Letterkenny for meal were forced to turn back empty. The sorry state of the Rosses mainlanders he said was even "surpassed by the complete exhaustion and distress of the Arranmore islanders" (11). Gem pleaded with the Dublin officials to open the meal depot at Burtonport at once for if this were not done he could not answer for what a famished multitude might do (12). While the Arranmore people clamoured for meal outside the Burtonport depot, Gem sent off another urgent message to Dublin stating that the distress of the wretched people was heartrending. He implored that something to be done for them immediately. The Rosses people could not get meal to purchase. The carters had stopped bringing in supplies. There was absolutely nothing in the place of food. Just then the steamer Warrior with a cargo of meal aboard arrived at Burtonport but weighed anchor later without depositing any meal. She sailed off to Gweedore leaving the distraught Gem to calm the famished Rosses folk. He told angry listeners that it was bad economic policy to issue meal from a partially-filled store. Issues of meal should only be made from full stores. "I am endeavouring as far as I can", he told the authorities, "to convince them of this, but I have found that a man with an empty stomach will not reason soundly" (13).

This of course was the great cardinal fallacy or miscalculation of those economists who were charged with the task of implementing the government relief schemes in Ireland. To them the economic laws of demand and supply, and laissez-faire or the untramelled and unfettered forces of buying and selling on the open market, were sacrosanct and could not be set aside even under the most acute conditions of distress and famine.
And so 1846 drew to its bleak close and black 1847 brought no hope of amelioration to the sorely tried Arranmore people. Pestilence, dysentery, scurvy and fever, which are the usual concomitants of famine, began to assume epidemic proportions. Common fevers in Donegal were an Fiabhras Dubh or typhus and an Fiabhras Ballach, or maculated fever known as relapsing fever. When a member of the household fell victim to one of those fevers it soon spread to other members and whole families were decimated. The tragedy of this particular malady is brought to life for us very vividly in Seosamh Mac Grianna's telling of a famine episode Ar an Tráigh Fholamh. This is the story of Cathal Ó Canainn who went off to the teach brat or soup-kitchen to collect his portion of broth, carrying the dead body of his brother, Art, on his back. Seosamh describes how Cathal hoisted the corpse onto his back: Fuair Cathal giota de rópa, agus thóg sé an corp ón leabaidh agus chuir dhá iris ann mar a bheadh cliabh ann and when he reached the soup-kitchen, where hungry crowds pressed around the coire or cauldron, Cathal thrust into their midst still carrying his dead brother. Nobody took notice of him:

Bhí trí nó ceathair de dhroimeanna ag lúbarnaigh idir é féin agus an coirce. Chonaic sé cúig nó sé de lámha ag gabháil trasna ar a chéile taobh istigh de bhéal an choire; soithigh a mbualadh ar a chéile agus iad á ndórtadh. Chaill bean dhubh, a raibh súile tintrí aici, a seaspán san anraith. Chuaigh Cathal isteach ina háit agus chuir an gogán a bhí leis isteach thar bhéal an choire. Leis sin beireadh greim taobh thiar ar an chorp a bhí ar a dhroim agus tarraingeadh amach ón choire go garbh é. Chuaigh sé cúig nó sé do choiscéimeanna amach agus thit sé....(14)

Seosamh's very fine telling of this tragic episode of the famine period is based, no doubt, on something which happened in the Rosses during the famine and the story was passed down in folklore from generation to Seosamh's own time.
As already stated 1847 did not bring the relief from blight that the islanders had hoped for and the destruction of the potato crop was total. Not a single healthy potato stock could be seen throughout the island. The islanders already ravaged by two crop failures were, healthwise, at their lowest level of resistance to the virulent fevers which had got a grip of their humble homesteads. Completely undernourished they fell easy victims to the onslaught of the disease. So desperate was their position then, and so moving were the anguished cries of their women and children for food, that many of the menfolk took to their boats and waited to waylay cargo-ships which piled along the north-west coast of Ireland. In June, the vessel Larne of Belfast with a cargo of wheatmeal on board and bound for Westport became becalmed near Owey Sound. She was boarded by a party of Arranmore people armed with hatchets and hammers. They broke the hatchway and took twelve bags of meal. Before the Larne could escape another party of islanders came aboard and took three tons of meal with them. The attack on the Larne was reported by a coastguard official in Rutland to the Dublin authorities and was described by him as 'a diabolical act of piracy'! (15)

He recommended that 'severe action be taken to bring the culprits of this shameful deed to justice' (16). A few mornings later, before the islanders had stirred from their slumber, a strong party of police, coastguard and excise officers arrived to search Arranmore. They found fifteen bags of meal hidden in sand on the west side of the island and brought it back to Rutland with them. The government meal depot on Burtonport pier was also raided frequently and as boats had been used during the raids it was surmised that the culprits were from Arranmore. Members of a starving family on the island were later charged and tried at Lifford Assizes with the attack on the Larne. They were given a stiff jail sentence but those who informed on them, islanders also, had to leave Arranmore and it was necessary to keep them in Lifford Jail to shield them from the Molly Maguires or Clann Mhalaidh who wished to wreak their own brand of retribution on them.

To add to the islanders' distress in 1847, a new landlord appeared on the scene. This was Walter Chorley of Belfast, better known as Charlie Beag to the islanders. Chorley belonged to that callous clique of unprincipled land speculators who came to the fore during the famine period. They bought up, at a give-away price, estates which had become seriously encumbered due to the famine. Under the Poor Law Act the upkeep of destitute tenants who entered workhouses was made a charge on their landlords. The Marquis Conygham's Arranmore burden was so crushing and the poverty and distress of the islanders so complete that he pleaded with the authorities that Arranmore be constituted as a separate Poor Law district which merited special consideration. This was granted in 1847 soon after Chorley took over the management of the island. Chorley considered that Arranmore was seriously overpopulated and much too heavy and encumbrance on himself under the Poor Law Act. He therefore decided to cut the population by half immediately. He realised that the surplus of population was due to the rundale system of tenure which created division and subdivision of farms so he set his face sternly against rundale. Only the families of those who could show title to their land as rent payers were allowed to remain on the island. He consolidated the farms of those who were able to show that they paid rent and he ordered the rest to leave the island forthwith. As a gesture of goodwill towards those he sought to banish, he promised he would hire a ship to bring them to America or they could enter the Glenties workhouse. Those who were too ill or too weak to make the journey across the Atlantic were landed by currach on the mainland. Slowly and fearfully they set off on foot for the grim grey world of the workhouse as poor, bedraggled, starved specimens of humanity. It seemed to them that the last vestiges of pride had been stripped from them and, henceforth, they would be considered as mere paupers without right or privilege in strange and hostile surroundings.

Glenties workhouse was grossly overcrowded in 1847 and 1848 and this made living conditions appalling for inmates. Fever spread quickly among them and a large proportion of those who entered in health succumbed to the attack shortly after admittance. Official reports show that the death rate at Glenties was about the highest in the country. This was understandable because the ground on which the workhouse stood was swampy and unhealthy and as the building itself was on lower level than the surrounding grounds the house was always flooded in wet weather. A Poor Law official who inspected the workhouse in November 1847 wrote that he found it in a filthy condition (17). There was a most offensive smell in every part of the house but especially in the dormitories. The floors were not properly cleansed and it was apparent that the necessities of nature (by which he meant dysentery) were performed without due regard to decency and cleanliness. The straw in the beds was old and musty and the ventilation was non-existent. Conditions there were so bad, even by 1847 standards, that the authorities were compelled to sack the matron for gross dereliction of duty. An official of the Society of Friends who visited this workhouse in the winter of 1847 paints a terrible picture of the place.

The inmates were half-starved half-clothed. The day before they had only one meal of oatmeal and water. There was not a full day's food supply in the house. Their beds of dirty straw were laid out in rows on the floor, with 6 or 7 persons crowded together under one rag. There were no blankets. The rooms were hardly bearable for filth. The living and the dying were stretched side by side under the same filthy covering. No wonder that disease and pestilence were filling the infirmary and that the pale haggard countenance of the poor boys and girls told of sufferings too terrible to contemplate (18).

Those islanders who had been dispossessed by Chorley and were strong enough to undertake the American journey left Arranmore for good in the winter of 1847. They set off on foot from Burtonport for Donegal town where Chorley had promised a ship would be waiting to bring them to the new world beyond the Atlantic. When they arrived in Donegal town no ship awaited them and we are told by a contemporary Belfast journalist that these poor Arranmore islanders were plunged into such terrible misery and destitution that, had not the charitable inhabitants of Donegal town cone to their aid, many would have perished of sickness and starvation (19) A Donegal town resident had told the same journalist that these poor miserable tenants, so summarily cleared out of Arranmore by Chorley, reached Donegal town in a condition which was 'indescribably miserable' (20). Eventually they got away to America in one of the infamous coffin-ships. Those who managed to survive the long arduous sea-voyage made their way to the shores of the Great Lakes where the skills they had brought with them from their island home stood them in good stead. Many more generations of Arranmore were to follow in their wake during the 19th and 20th centuries and they also made their abode in the cities and ports on the shores of the Great Lakes where their forefathers of the famine period had blazed the trail. Cf.H.O'Hara, "Beaver Island: The American Arranmore", Donegal Annual, 1968.

No story of the famine period on Arranmore would be complete without a tribute to that great religious organisation, The Society of Friends, or the Quakers. They hired two government steamers 'The Albert' and 'The Scourge' in Liverpool in 1847 to bring a cargo of peas, rice, meal, biscuits and beef to Arranmore and to the most distressed areas on the Donegal coast. They also shipped to Donegal the big cauldrons or coire in which they prepared broth for the poor people at their soup-kitchens. Officials of this religious society visited Arranmore from time to time during the famine years and so a short passage from a report of Arranmore written by William Bennett to the headquarters of the society in March 1847 would, I think, be a fitting closure to this talk:

Throughout the island there was a remarkable equality, one mass of deep-sunk poverty, disease and degradation. There were the same gaunt looks in the men, and peculiar worn-out expression of premature old age in the countenances of women and children, but the latter still clutched, with an eagerness I shall never forget, at some biscuit I had brought with me, when offered them to eat with their seaweed; very different from the apathy and vacant stare with which the sight [of food] was regarded by those in whom the very desire and volition [for food] were past(21).

Those of us who can claim kinship with the victims of those terrible times in the Rosses will ever be indebted to the Quakers for the succour and comfort they brought to Arranmore in the black years of famine when our forefathers' distress was most pressing and acute and when friends were few and far between.

1. The Times, 10 September, 1845.
2. The Londonderry Journal, 29 April, 1846.
3. Famine V (IUP Series), p.26, pag.248.
4. CSO; O.P. 1847 Co.Donegal.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Famine V, p.190, pag.210.
8. Ibid., p.145, pag.567.
9. Ibid., p.147, pag.569.
10. Ibid., p.147, pag.569.
11. Ibid.
12. Famine V, p.382, pag.804.
13. Ibid.
14. Seosamh Mac Grianna, An Grá agus an Ghruaim (Baile Átha Cliath) pp.84-5.
15. CSO, OP, 1847, Co.Donegal.
16. Ibid.
17. Famine II, p.53, pag.377.
18. Transactions of the Contral Relief Committee of the Society of Friends during the Famine in Ireland in 1846-7, (Dublin, 1852) Appendix III, pp.165-6.
19. Denis Holland, The Landlord in Donegal, p.92, Belfast, 1858.
20. Ibid.
21. Transactions, etc., Appendix III, p.166.