From nowhere to anywhere! —The Famine Roads of Ireland

From nowhere to anywhere! —

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.

Greyhounds, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night

Fabulous photo - Great context. 

I saw this photo on the Facebook page 'Mount Talbot - A Journey through the ages'. It totally piqued my interest for one reason... Ghosts!

'This is and extraordinary photo of Matthew Dolan of Cloonlaughlin, Mount Talbot who was born in 1842. It is not everyday one can see a photo of a person who lived through and survived the Famine in Ireland, the population of Cloonlaughlin was halved as a consequence of the great hunger, the largest drop of any of the townlands in our parish. This photo dates to the 1st or possibly second decade of the 20th century, the dress of Matthew is very different to what was worn even a few years after this time, the suit jacket is longer and a very unique shape, made no doubt by Tailor Kelly of Corrocot. He stands tall and proud, his white beard and large hat hiding a face that had witnessed enormous changes in the country. He lived through the famine, land war, Boer war, the rise and fall of Parnell, the lesser famine of 1892, the Plan of Campaign, the passing of the final Home Rule Bill, World War 1, 1916 Rising and possibly the War of independence and Civil War too. (special thanks to Matthews great grandson John for photo).'

His living memory of the Famine era and the Land League agitation would have been extraordinary. He looked quite the dandy in that three-piece suit. The waist-coat looks quite contrasting. The long swallow-tail coat style is unusual. Ironically, just such a coat was described to me by my father in a story he told me about the time a ghost terrorised his greyhound in a stable beside a ruined estate house near Killimor. Turned out that a man had hanged or shot himself, (I disremember which) in that very same stable in the 1880's and his ghost had been seen there many times, ensuring the locals gave it a wide berth. 
My father was teaching in Raheen, between Killimor and Lawrencetown in 1938, staying in 'digs' in Killimor and had just started kennelling his greyhound (which he raced in Galway) in the old two-storey stable, at very little cost!. He couldn't understand why the dog was off form and one winter's evening he went down to walk and feed the dog after teaching school. He described how after galloping the dog on a misty evening, in the fading light, he was drying and brushing the dog before locking him up for the night. 
He was just brushing the dog's hind-quarters, when the dog became terrified, backing into a corner whimpering. He looked around to see an old man, 'dressed in an old-fashioned swallow-tailed, frock-coat, hat and breeches' raising a stick and coming down the stairs towards him. Needless to say, he wasted no time running for the door, followed by the dog, and no doubt the ghost. He never went back there, but he told me that story maybe twice over fifty years. Until now I was picturing a gentleman, in a dress suit, with swallow-tail dinner jacket, but now I see that it was the style for the country folk. 
You see, even in folk-memory there are little telling details that substantiate or anchor a tale, a minute observation or aside, without which the story could be dismissed as just another story to pass the winter evening around the turf-fire.
And who said there's no such thing as ghosts!

#Ghosts #Ghosttales #Ghosttours #Haunted

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