Week 2 Wednesday & Thursday

Our class left Dublin on Wednesday morning for our 3 day field trip to the west of Ireland. I felt compelled to post a history lesson but you are free to skip it.

In the 18^th and early 19^th century most of Catholic Ireland was stripped of their land and herded to western Ireland where the land was rocky and poor. They were told “go or be executed”. We first stopped in Strokestown, the site of the estate of the Anglo-Irish Mahon family from about 1671 until 1982. In November 1847 the patriarch of the family and landlord of the surrounding estate, Major Denis Mahon, was assassinated by several local men in an incident that became infamous across Ireland and Britain at the time. The killing was motivated by the removal of starving tenant farmers from the estate lands during the Irish Potato Famine of 1845. I looked at the list of families evicted and it chilled me to see there were 7 Kelly surnames and 47 Kelly family members evicted! I would expect that most of them perished or immigrated soon after that and I may have family roots to some of them.

We then stopped at Tom Hennigan’s Irish heritage house that includes his family’s 3 bedroom house that he was born in 62 years ago. This man’s family suffered through the famine in that house and eventually came to own it. He talked to us for 2 hours about his family’s experiences and it was riveting. He stressed the fact that people lived in Ireland for over 8,000 years before the great famine and only relied on the Potatoes for several hundred of those years. His position was that Ireland did not have a food shortage, but Britain took the Irish food (Ireland was a net exporter of food during the famine years) and sent it elsewhere in the world. As I stated in my last post during the famine years of 1845 – 1850 Ireland lost 2.5 million of its population, 1.5 million to famine death and 1 million to immigration to avoid the famine.

It brought things home for me and was very troubling to see the names in print of the 7 Kelly families and 47 people that were evicted from the Mahon estate, when they almost certainly had nowhere else to go and nothing to eat.

Okay, now to lighten things up. We stayed the night at a nice hotel in the town of Westport. I walked around after we arrived and sent my friend John O’Malley a picture of J J O’Malley’s pub, kiddingly asking him if it might be a distant relative. To my surprise John responded saying his grandmother and grandfather were born in Westport and that pub belonged to one of his cousins! All of our group spent time (lots of it) singing and drinking at Matt Malloy’s pub. A great place for traditional Irish music! Fun time for all!

Pictures: The list of people forcibly removed from their homes during the great famine in County Mayo; Tom Hennigan’s 3 room house where his family lived through the famine; DCU classmates in the Westport pub.