Throughout the mid-twentieth century, most Irish histories and other writings on the Famine disclose the considerable influence of John Mitchel’s interpreta- tion of the event. While reflecting the central concerns of The Last Conquest of Ireland, they also tend to endorse the views expressed by its author. Although its polemical premises are seriously questioned and often refuted by later his- torians, the ghost of Mitchel is still present in the writing of the Famine today. Commenting on the influence of The Last Conquest of Ireland, Patrick O’Farrell has observed that “[n]othing written since – history, or novel, or play ‒ has been able to escape, usually by acceptance, but sometimes by qualification or reac- tion, from the central thesis of that book.”235That thesis, developed in the pages
of the Nation and the United Irishman and emerging in the forceful rhetoric of Mitchel’s book itself, eventually became not only the blueprint for the nation- alist reading of the Famine but also the interpretation that most powerfully shaped perceptions of the catastrophe in Ireland and the Irish diaspora. By late 1847, the Times recognized the possibility that the genocide theory would be generally embraced in Ireland. The result, warned the paper, would be a myth, “an historical lie”, which would assign the role of the culprit to England:
“In the dreadful winter of 1846”, it will be written and taught, “when the only food of the Irish Roman Catholics had perished, the Protestant Government
234 Quoted in Kinealy, This Great Calamity, p. 244.
of England refused to take any measures to convey food to that miserable
population, and sat with folded arms while two millions died.” 236
By virtue of its strong appeal to a people having endured years of hunger, death and dispossession, the nationalist story of the Famine did indeed become a myth in the sense of a traditional narrative embodying popular ideas. Whether or not that myth constitutes “an historical lie” is still a matter of dispute. Mitch- el’s allegation of genocidal intent effected by food exports and the “murder- ous collusion” between Irish landlords and the British government to get rid of “surplus population” by means of evictions and forced emigration has been re- vised and qualified, but the myth has proved endurable, not to say ineradicable. In 1847, the conservative politician and political economist Isaac Butt lashed out at British government policy, criticizing in particular its commitment to free trade. “Can we wonder”, he asked,
if the Irish people believe ‒ and believe it they do ‒ that the lives of those who have perished, and who will perish, have been sacrificed by a deliberate compact to the gains of English merchants, and if this belief has created among all classes a feeling of deep dissatisfaction, not only with the ministry
but with English rule. [original emphasis] 237
A letter published in the Galway Mercury deplored the terrible distress wit- nessed by the writer who was convinced that “any alleviation … need not be expected, at least from the Whig Government.” Such was the opinion of “almost the entire rural population”, he claimed: “They believe that the Government are determined to put to death one half of the people.”238Similarly, the Ballyshan-
non Herald asserted that “[d]readful hatred of England, of her institutions ‒ is widely diffused among the humbler orders in Ireland.”239In his biography of
John Russell, published in 1889, Spencer Walpole noted that “well-informed Irishmen even now assert that their fellow-countrymen have neither forgotten nor forgiven the manner in which Lord John Russell met the famine.”240Com-
ments such as these suggest that the nationalists’ interpretation of the event had gained credibility already during the Famine and that their notion of gov- ernment culpability rang true also to the lower classes. The Nation was partic- ularly anxious to promote the notion of British culpability since this was the
236 Times, 11 October 1847.
237 Isaac Butt, “The Famine in the Land”, in Deane (ed.), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing,
vol. 2, p. 162.
238 Quoted in the Times, 8 March 1847. 239 Ballyshannon Herald, 17 September 1847.
main premise of the nationalist agenda. Already in 1846, the paper claimed that “[t]he Irish people … are expecting absolute famine day by day … and they ascribe it, unanimously … to the greedy and cruel policy of England.”241Yet
somewhat contrary opinions were also voiced. Although Fr Joseph Guinan conceded that the government must be held largely responsible for “the famine slaughter”, he was averse to the perpetuation of bitter recollections. “There is no use now in indulging in bitter reflections or recriminations”, he wrote in 1908, because “the famine is past and gone like a frightful dream, and the bitter mem- ories it has left are now well nigh forgotten.”242For another man of the Church,
Canon Peter O’Leary, those memories were still very much alive in the twen- tieth century. His story “The Hunger” vividly recalls the trauma of the Famine years and it leaves the reader in no doubt as to who, in the author’s opinion, was responsible for the misery endured by the starving people:
That was the way things were then, ugly and hateful and loathsome[.] ... And, to make matters altogether worse, it was not really by the will of God that things were so. It was that way because of the will of the people[.] ... There was sent out food from Ireland that year as much – no! twice as much – corn as would have nourished every person living in the country[.] ... [I]f you had spoken to the gentlemen of England at that time of a law to protect the people, they would have said you were mad[.] ... To crush the people down and to plunder them, to put them to death by famine and by every
other kind of injustice – that’s why the English made laws in those days. 243
Contradictory perceptions and interpretations are evident also in the Irish Folklore Commission material. As noted earlier, informants generally explained the famine in providential terms as a punishment from God. This would suggest that the survivors and their immediate descendants did not credit the notion of genocidal intent on the part of the British government. There is no general condemnation of British rule, and public figures such as Trevelyan and Russell, who were frequently under attack in the Irish press, are not even mentioned in the accounts. Cormac Ó Gráda has observed that the reason for this was pos- sibly that such figures “were remote and unfamiliar to the underclasses most at risk”,244while Carmel Quinlan has noted that “the folklore of the famine is con-
cerned with local events”, and that “[i]t is likely that people saw no further than their local calamity.”245Thus it would seem that Mitchel’s central thesis had in 241 Nation, 14 March 1846.
242 Guinan, The Famine Years, pp. 4, 32.
243 Peter O’Leary, Mo Sgéal Fèin/My Story [1915] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 52. 244 Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999),
p. 197.
fact not been rooted in public consciousness; the rage and accusatory language of his diatribe are conspicuously absent from the folklore accounts, and when any resentment is expressed, it is mostly directed at landlords, agents, shop- keepers and landgrabbers. Although the issues of responsibility and blame were not specifically addressed in the questionnaire, there were some unsolicited an- swers suggesting that there was at least some knowledge of and dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of the crisis. “The English did not want to stop the famine”, claimed one informant, and went on to “prove” his charge by say- ing that “[t]hey kept one cargo of yellow meal until it went bad after it had ar- rived from America and they threw it into the Liffey.”246In a statement that lays
blame on landlords as well as England, William Powell of Cork asserted that
the Famine was man-made. It was our rulers that saw to it that our food was shipped away to England from us, and left the people here starving[.] … The men in power were all Protestants[.] … They were in league with England and it was their delight to see the population decreasing by the thousands
dying with hunger and what followed.247
There are intimations of Mitchel’s ideas also in accounts referring specifically to food exports. An informant from Westport, County Mayo, stated that
[i]n the year 1847 fourteen schooners of about 200 tons each left Westport Quay laden with wheat and oats to feed the English people while the Irish were starving. This happened one morning on one tide and was repeated several times during the famine.
A farmer from County Clare lamented that “a shipload of American corn com- ing would pass a shipload of Irish corn going out of Ireland to England”, and Richard Delaney of Wexford tersely claimed that “[a]lthough people died, there was plenty of food in the country.”248Nevertheless, statements like these are rel-
atively few. On the whole, the folklore accounts disclose a sense of rudimentary, unfocused resentments, as if people really did not know who to blame.
Discussing the reasons why the nationalist reading of the Famine eventually became so prominent, Kerby Miller suggests that “it may be significant that public criticisms of government policy and emigration became ubiquitous only in the Famine’s latter years ‒ after decimation of the lower classes” when rela- tively well-to-do tenants began to flee the country, thereby threatening “strong farmers, shopkeepers, and clergymen with a loss of cheap labor, valuable cus-
246 Quoted in ibid., p. 73. 247 Póirtéir, Famine Echoes, p. 211. 248 Ibid., p. 210.
tomers and devout parishioners” [original emphasis].249The fact that, by this
time, the Catholic Church, constitutional nationalists and even conservatives were all critical of the government and of what was perceived as forced emigra- tion triggered by British policy would support Miller’s inference. The American traveller William Balch, who toured Ireland in 1847-48, claimed that “a class of the people” set “all their misfortunes and misery … to the account of English interference ‒ high rents, heavy taxes, potato rot and all.”250So as the famine
wore on, an increasing number of Irishmen from different walks of life tended to blame the British government for the disaster. Yet it was the Irish emigrants in America, especially those who felt that they had been forced into exile, who most readily concurred with the nationalist view of government culpability. Statements such as “I’ll never forgive that government [the British] the longest day I live”, and “I’ll never forgive the bloody English government that allowed a man to be treated worse than I’d treat a dog [,] … and what’s more, I teach my children to hate them too”251reflect the abiding bitterness of many emigrants
who were evicted in Ireland. Thus the fears expressed by some sections of the British press such as the Illustrated London News and the Times that emigrants would carry “bitter hatred” with them into “regions that owe no fealty to the Crown of England” and there “keep up the ancient feud at an unforeseen ad- vantage” proved well-founded.252That hatred, fuelled by bitter memories of the
Famine, was a fundamental push factor leading to the emergence of the Fenian movement in the late eighteen-fifties. Given the hardships endured by the Irish poor during the Famine, it is hardly surprising that nationalist allegations of British misrule, dispossession and forced exile appealed to survivors on both sides of the ocean. According to Patrick O’Farrell, it was “[w]ell-fed national- ists” and “those who fled Ireland and their descendants” who “echoed Mitchel back into the process of comprehending Irish history itself; this was the version of the Famine which took on a continuing dynamic form.”253 In the next chap-
ter, I consider to what extent this version informs Liam O’Flaherty’s fictional account of the Famine.
249 Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 308.
250 Balch, Ireland As I Saw It, p. 214.
251 Quoted in Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Famine, p. 228.
252 Illustrated London News, 3 April 1852; Times, quoted in the Nation, 5 May 1860. 253 O’Farrell, “Whose Reality? The Irish Famine in History and Literature”, p. 5.
2. “A TERRIBLE AND MOVING VISION”: Liam
O’Flaherty’s Famine.
Liam O’Flaherty (1896-1984) started to write his novel Famine in March 1933, apparently with the expectation that it would be finished by September. But in July, he wrote to his publisher, Victor Gollancz, complaining that he was bordering on a state of insanity because “after writing fifty thousand words of Famine I had to scrap the whole and reconstruct, and now I’m in a devil of a way.” He estimated that it would take “at least another three months to finish it”, apologized for being behind time, but promised that Gollancz would “have a good thing by December.”1 That promise turned out to be premature as the
work was to occupy him, off and on, for another three years. During that pe- riod, O’Flaherty led a wandering life which took him to a number of Europe- an countries as well as to the United States, and he was intermittently beset by personal and financial difficulties.2 Undoubtedly, such distractions would
have impeded O’Flaherty’s ability to concentrate on his writing. But the long gestation of the novel also suggests that he encountered considerable problems with composition, in spite of the confidence exuded by his letters to friends and associates. “I think Famine is going to be great”, he confided to John Ford in June, adding that “I’m going to hammer out every word from the depths of my soul.” In December that same year, he told his agent that he was expecting ‘‘big things’’ from the novel and that he felt “confident” of its success.3 That
the writing of this novel had indeed involved a great artistic and emotional struggle for O’Flaherty can be gleaned from a letter he sent to Gollancz shortly before the completion of the manuscript. “I shall be glad to have done with it”, he wrote, “as it has nearly broken my heart. I hope it’s worth something after all this trouble.”4
The novel was finally published on 11 January 1937, and the reviews indicated that Famine definitely was “worth something.” The Irish Book Lover called it “a su- perb achievement” in which O’Flaherty had “shown a terrible and moving vision of the Famine”, bringing to readers “the dreadful reality of famine.” The reviewer declared that it seemed “as though the memory of this tragedy had seized upon the writer rather than that he had merely chosen it as a subject.” O’Flaherty was
1 A.A. Kelly (ed.), The Letters of Liam O’Flaherty (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1996), p. 269. 2 George Jefferson, Liam O’Flaherty: A Descriptive Bibliography of his Works (Dublin: Wolf-
hound Press, 1993), p. 49.
3 Kelly, The Letters of Liam O’Flaherty, pp. 274, 278. 4 Jefferson, Liam O’Flaherty, p. 50.
to be commended for having written “not only a story but a history told in terms of men and women ... truly real and alive, in their strengths and weaknesses, their vitality of spirit.”5 Sean O’Faolain, too, wrote an essentially positive review,
saying that Famine was “O’Flaherty’s best novel.” He saw it as “tremendous” and “biblical” and declared it “the best Irish historical novel to date.” Still, he did have some reservations, the main one being that “the historical comment ... breaks the mood” by bringing in “the ‘as we have seen’ style of the historian.”6
Some more recent critics, too, have maintained that O’Flaherty’s strategies of incorporating historical facts and historical explanation into his narrative of the Famine are problematic. James Cahalan finds it unfortunate that O’Flaherty “cannot resist adding textbook-styled explanations of the dramatic events he de- scribes”, while Margaret Kelleher points to the “awkward ... clumsy generaliza- tions” that characterize O’Flaherty’s framing passages which, as a result, “remain at a remove from the rest of the story.” She also observes that he is not unique in this respect; the problem of integrating historical explanation within the famine story is one that besets most novelists who take on the subject.7 Why is it, then,
that this problem should be so acute precisely in famine literature? Patrick O’Far- rell has suggested that, especially in representations “from below”, the problem arises because “mass peasant history on the dimensions of the Irish Famine is beyond - too big for - the conventional dimensions of the novel and for the par- ticular imperatives that govern it.” In the case of O’Flaherty’s novel, he argues, it is the focus on the victims’ experiences that makes it difficult for the writer to com- municate the essential meaning of the event, to make the story comprehensible. Because it is “beyond the natural capacities or range of his choice of characters to make sense to the reader of what is happening”, O’Flaherty is forced to “insert unattributed lumps of school-text history” into his narrative.8 What these critics
imply, then, is that his novel lacks artistic unity.
In order to illustrate O’Flaherty’s problems of unity and meaning, O’Farrell juxtaposes them to what he considers the success of Mitchel’s Famine story in the same area. Mitchel, he writes,
solved the artistic problem of the Famine and made it both accessible and comprehensible in an essentially historical way: he had, using historical methods, blamed it on the English. What more was there a novelist could do to make it readily intelligible?... Mitchel had discovered - or contrived -
5 M.L., Review of Famine, in The Irish Book Lover, xxvv (1937), pp. 22-23 [22, 23]. 6 Sean O’Faolain, Review of Famine, in Ireland Today, II:2 (1937), pp. 81-82 [81, 82]. 7 James Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (Syracuse: Syracuse Uni-
versity Press, 1983), p. 143; Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine, p. 137.
the principle of artistic unity which could convey the essence of the Famine with a simplicity which blended reality with rage, and which mixed nation- alist propaganda with the elements of high drama into a plotted tragedy of
the blackest hue [original emphasis]. 9
As I suggested earlier, it is hard to deny the effectiveness of The Last Conquest of Ireland. Mitchel’s forceful rhetoric and the assertiveness of his arguments defy even modern readers who have the benefit of hindsight and accumulated historical facts to challenge his conclusions. But quite apart from whether or not Mitchel’s historical explanation is acceptable as the truth, one might also consider how and to what extent his account as a whole conveys meaning and “essence.” The Last Conquest of Ireland foregrounds the political aspects which Mitchel saw as crucial in turning the failure of the potato crop into a major disaster. The meaning of the Famine is to be found in Ireland’s long history of oppression, in the political and economic imperatives which led to “starvation amidst plenty” and made a mockery of famine relief and, above all, in the dia-