The Famine Roads of the west of Ireland make wonderful walking trails for us along the Wild Atlantic Way today, but ... they were often originally built as famine relief public works projects from March the 6th, 1846, when the Board of Works began funding worthy employment-creating projects in the hardest-hit localities, mostly along the relatively undeveloped, but heavily populated west coast. Ireland was in the grips of a devastating potato blight, which caused unprecedented death and disease amongst the nearly five million poorer people who were so reliant on the potato for survival and to pay the rent on their smallholdings. —
There was no food, there was no work. These road projects, some of them practical, useful and necessary, more of them follies or decorative, or worse, self-serving pork-barrel plans, with no other benefit than the improvement of large estates. —Work was work however, and work put food on the table. Day labourers were paid between 4 and 8 pence per day, just enough to go to the local government-operated food depot and buy a few pounds of Indian Maize, an American corn variety imported to Ireland from the US to provide food for the starving masses.
It was not given out free, even though the starving poor generally had no money whatsoever to buy food with, They had already pawned their clothes and spades and fishing nets just to see them over that dreadful 1846 winter and very wet spring.
Corn prices in early 1846 were set at 1 penny a pound, but when merchants and grain wholesalers complained to Peel and Trevelyan, corn prices went as high as 4 pence a pound. This meal ticket handout has to be viewed in the context of the time. In 1846 Ireland was a net exporter of grains, wheat, and other cereals, being shipped from the vast farms in Tipperary and the south-east to England, while people died of malnutrition and disease on the dockside. Many civil servants tasked with providing some sustenance to the poor were distraught at their lack of resources and food, and at being forced to hold the line Trevelyan had laid down, limiting interference in a market he thought would sort itself out, but which never did. —
Millions of Irish starved while Mr. Trevelyan debated the merits, or otherwise of interfering with the open market. He was a fan of Edmund Burke’s “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity,” a seminal economic treatise, encouraging laissez faire and unfettered market forces, the first sentence of which reads —“Of all things, an indiscreet tampering with the trade of provisions is the most dangerous”—
Years after the famine, the surgeon William Wilde recalled the summer of 1846 in an image of Connemara that evokes Samuel Beckett’s 'Waiting for Godot'.
“Each morning,” wrote Wilde, “ghosts of men [would] travel several miles” through an untreed landscape of untended fields and decapitated hills “to break up comparatively good old road, or commence an unnecessary new one, leading from nowhere to anywhere.” —
While there's no map of these roads per se, many are colloquially known as famine roads. There are hundreds of roads today like those in the photos all over the western seaboard, from Cork, to Donegal, essentially the Wild Atlantic Way today. I took those photos in the Burren in county Clare and in Connemara, near Maam, and near Moycullen.
While we refer to them as 'famine roads', truth is a lot of the current road system today in Connemara and in west Clare and in Donegal, Kerry, Cork, Sligo and Mayo, started off as relief projects, but later on were improved, widened etc and subsumed into our secondary road network. —
Remember, there was no road at all from Ballyvaughan to Galway, no roadway by the seashore, or through the mountains. from Galway to Clifden, no road from Clifden to Leenane and on to Westport, and out to Achill. No bridges, no cutaways, no pathways for any kind of cart to pass from one part of the western seaboard to another. What roads we had in 1840 were at best donkey trails or people paths. —
The British government in 1846 made £50,000 (pounds) available for relief work, for all pf Ireland, for which they invited tendering of proposed local road and relief works, that would prove worthwhile to the communities, and create jobs. Projects were proffered from nearly every county. Most of them were patronage and pork! From county Clare alone they had applications for over £500,000 of proposed works. —
In all by 1850 some £900,000 was spent on these projects, harbours, drainage of rivers, bogs, bridges, canals, road-beds, roads, oh, and lots of walls. —
Ironically, those roads, while they did open up the countryside to transport and trade, it also made the decision to leave Ireland easier, with better roads, poor people now had access by horse and car, or Bianconi coach to the far flung seaports of Galway, Sligo, Derry, Cobh, Cork, Kilrush and Limerick. A million and a half people left Ireland between 1846 and 1860, many of them were the more prosperous and able families, who could afford the cost of passage to the UK, America, Canada, Argentina and Australia.
Emigration has defined the Irish people and our psyche ever since.
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