Horror stories of how Famine affected Cork recalled in book

THE Great Famine is almost seared into Irish genetic memory. It is one of the most traumatic events in Irish history and there is no shortage of families with tales from the era that continue to haunt and horrify.

But while there are many national studies, there remain exceptionally few dedicated to Cork, bar Michelle O’Mahony’s Famine In Cork City.

Reissued ahead of the 180th anniversary of the beginning of the Famine next year, it focuses on Cork’s workhouse - the level of documentation makes it the ideal case study.

It allows the Dunmanway-based historian and consultant to track levels of issions (which tell a lot about the level of poverty), the gender balance (oft-times reflecting women whose husbands had died or emigrated for work), and most poignantly the devastating effects of the Famine and its aftermath on children (“old before their time and denied their childhood innocence”), both from malnutrition and disease.

The workhouse was the place of last resort for the desperate. There was such an aversion to it - because the quality of life there was generally lower than on the outside, even for the poorest of the poor - that the uptake in issions is indicative of how bad things had become in Cork as the Famine took hold, especially after the second failure of the potato crop in 1846, which meant any food reserves people had had been exhausted.

While the workhouse was a bleak place, and indeed the policy was to penalise poverty in peculiar logic that it would somehow encourage people to better themselves (self-reliance rather than relying on the state), it was not without some good intentions.

For instance, O’Mahony points out that the guardians running the institution honestly did want to help as many people as possible, even if that meant cutting corners when it came to the quality of food on offer.

And, indeed, the food could make people sick - milk would go off quickly and if Indian meal was not cooked properly it would tear a person’s innards.

She also notes that, tragically, this ambition to do the most good actually led to severe illness and death, because it saw the workhouse take in far more people than it could house, which in turn led to poorer hygiene and the easier spread of illness such as cholera or typhus.

One thing I hadn’t really appreciated is that time in the workhouse could only be transient. For some reason, I had it in my head that once you were in there, you were sort of stuck there, but O’Mahony points out that many issions were only for a few days, until the most pressing needs had been addressed.

Some children were itted multiple times, often still wearing workhouse-issued clothing from their last time there. Indeed, at some points as many of 60% of inmates were children, and the itting officers wrote that they were “agents of their own pauperism” rather than being victims of circumstance and tragedy.

This was not a specific cruel view meted out to Irish people; it was the prevailing view behind the whole poor law system that led to the workhouses being created.

Cork’s workhouse is still a facet of city life. It persisted long after the Famine had gone, and it is still personal to many families as they look back on the past, my own included.

May 16, 1879: Born in the workhouse was my great great granduncle Thomas Leonard, son of a shoemaker of the same name from age West (either my great great grandfather or his son) and a Hannah Hayes.

March 13, 1881: Thomas dies in the workhouse after contracting measles.

In the years since, the building evolved and became recast as St Finbarr’s Hospital, where, longer ago than I’d like to think, yours truly was born.

O’Mahony demonstrates very deep and detailed scholarship, with the book immaculately and rigorously rooted in primary sources such as newspaper reports, medical records, salary returns, and the minutes of board meetings.

All of this allows her to piece together a narrative not only of the workhouse system, but its struggles to cope in the face of the carnage of the Famine - the poor law system having been designed to deal with destitution and desperation, not mass starvation on top of it.

Some of the details she unearths are quite stark, such as when she notes that the workhouse spent less on food at the bleakest points of the Famine, in part because the cost of burials was so substantial.

In May, 1849, at the peak of the cholera epidemic that followed the Famine, she points out that 1,000 yards of flannel was needed for burial shrouds, along with 150 planks for coffins and 150 barrels of lime.

“Death and the accelerated pace of death were synonymous with life within the workhouse,” she notes elsewhere. Between autumn, 1846, and May, 1847, 10,000 people were buried in Father Mathew’s cemetery, St Joseph’s.

I actually know the cemetery on Tory Top Road reasonably well. My father’s ancestors have a plot there, with the first burial being my great great great grandfather Daniel Mahony (we had no ‘O’ then, and often an E) who died around 1840.

The plot, if memory serves, is very close to the Famine mass grave.

I still don’t know how the family ended up in the city - they were farmers from Knockavilla - but by the time 1845 rolled around, Daniel’s son Daniel had taken to the high seas in the merchant marine, presumably either to family left on land or because he was the only family left at that stage.

This is an excellent book for anybody with an interest in the history of Cork and will remain an essential work for years to come.