Kerry Girls (6 page)

There was a clause in the rules that allowed parents of children under 2 years, if they were ‘desirous’, to arrange to ‘have an interview with such child at some time in each day, in some room in the workhouse to be appointed for that purpose’.

The discipline and diet were equally harsh. The minimum of food was provided twice a day – breakfast and dinner. Breakfast consisted of stirabout made from oatmeal or a mixture of Indian meal, oatmeal, rice and buttermilk. Depending on the finances of the Board of Guardians, the stirabout had higher levels of rice and less of the oatmeal and Indian meal. Dinner, in the middle of the day, was meant to consist of potatoes and buttermilk but with the potato scarcity from 1846 onwards was sometimes a thin meat and oatmeal soup or brown bread. If a supper was given it was bread and milk.

Workhouse interior 1845,
London Illustrated News.

Each workhouse conformed to a standard day. Inmates were called to rise at 6 a.m. with breakfast soon after. Work took place until a meagre dinner at 12 p.m. and then back to work again until 6 p.m. Supper, if served, was between 6.30 and 7 p.m. and then it was straight to bed at 8 p.m. Once a week the inmates were washed and the men shaved.

Able-bodied men were expected to work in the fields, women in the preparation of food, laundry and general housework. Boys and girls under the age of 15 in theory attended classes but these were spasmodic and, due to the numbers (what is now called the teacher/pupil ratio), they were unmanageable for any teacher. On 9 October 1851 the master of Listowel Workhouse reported that the Bedford schoolmaster requested an assistant ‘as it is impossible for one person to pay proper attention to 466 children in one class; all boys’.
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The Minutes of the Board of Guardians in Listowel also noted in their report on 12 September 1849:

The Master begs to report that the education of the female children appears to be very much neglected at the Workhouse school. On yesterday when the Emigration Officer examined the girls, many of whom have been 2 years or more at this school, very few could even read very imperfectly. Only one or two make any attempt at writing.

The emigration officer requested the Matron to bring this matter under the serious attention of the Vice-Guardians. However, the Vice-Guardians, having discussed the matter, decided not to remove Miss Nolan, the teacher, ‘in consideration of her excellent moral character’ but it was not the first time that they had ‘endeavoured to stimulate her to more energetic discharge of her duties’.

James Hack Tuke, a Quaker from York, England visited Ireland on a fact-finding mission and in the autumn/winter of 1847–48. He visited many workhouses, particularly in Connacht and in his report wrote ‘Nearly two thirds of the inmates of Union houses of Connaught are, as may be expected, children, many of them orphans.’ He was shocked by the neglected condition of the children. He stated:

In many Unions, due to their bankrupt state, there are no books and no means whatever for providing the necessary books or school requisites; and thus we see hundreds of children wholly idle and unemployed where a few pounds expense would enable them to be taught.
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Articles 31, 32 and 33 dealt with religious rules. They were principally included in an effort to keep warring religious factions in line. Article 31 dealt with ministers of any religious persuasion who went into the workhouse to give religious assistance or instruct children. They were strictly ‘confined to inmates who are of the religious persuasion of such minister, and to the children of such inmates’. Under Articles 32 and 33 it was allowed that ‘inmates of 15 years and upwards, being of sound mind’ could change the denomination of the religion which had originally been entered on the register. To counterbalance this, the minister involved in a change of religious persuasion of an inmate had to report the matter to the Master of the Workhouse, who in turn would report to the Board of Guardians and they would take the final decision. There was obviously good reason for these three articles, and indeed in each of the Kerry workhouses, we have incidents where inmates were accused of changing their religion for several different reasons and of ministers of both Roman Catholic and Established Church accusing each other of proselytising.

As the Famine continued in Kerry, all of the workhouses suffered from severe overcrowding. The numbers within the workhouses rose dramatically, auxiliary workhouses were opened in each of the towns to cope with the huge numbers of destitute arriving on a daily basis. This overcrowding gave rise to unhygienic conditions, leading to disease, and it was these diseases that in the main were responsible for the high death rates both in the workhouses and later in the fever hospitals. Lying in close proximity at night on planks covered with straw mattresses and a few rags, with very little ventilation, the only toilet facilities were covered cesspits.

The overcrowding and lack of basic hygiene was a recipe for disaster. Prevalent in the population already were the usual cases of tuberculosis, diarrhoea, flu and chest complaints from the damp environment. Added to those now came typhus, dysentery, smallpox, relapsing fever and cholera. The very young and the very old, already in a state of malnutrition, were unable to put up any resistance. The arrival of fever on the heels of the potato famine had another detrimental effect on the population. The ‘black fever’, as typhus was called, as it blackened the skin, was spread by body lice and was carried from location to location by beggars and homeless people. Together with tuberculosis it engendered such fear and superstition into families that normally kind and hospitable people shied away from their neighbours and became unsympathetic and unwelcoming. Some of those who were struck down by fever in their cabins were left to die and in a number of cases, relief workers who were exposed to the diseases succumbed themselves and died.

In Kerry, a number of priests died as a result of contracting famine-related diseases, some caught in the squalid conditions of workhouse ministering. Fr John Gallivan, Ballyferritter, Revd Michael Devine PP, Dingle, Fr Thomas Enright, Tralee, Fr Patrick Tuohy, Castlemaine, Fr Jeremiah Falvey, PP, Glenflesk, Fr John Donoghue PP, Kilgarvan all perished.
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The Presentation and Mercy nuns, not long arrived in Kerry, were soon working in the great effort at providing some sustenance for their pupils, rather than teaching and educating as they had planned. The nuns in Listowel started with thirteen children, feeding them with breakfasts – bread, a mug of boiled rice and milk. ‘During 1847 alone, the nuns in Listowel distributed 31,000 breakfasts to their starving female pupils.’
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In Killarney the nuns set up a hospital in the partly finished Catholic cathedral and visited the fever-stricken in the crowded lanes, sometimes to coffin the dead.
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In Dingle the nuns turned their school into a part hospital, part cook-shop. All this work brought great danger to the nuns themselves and resulted in numbers of them catching fever and some dying.

Entire families who did not get as far as the workhouse or fever hospital, devastated by hunger, sickness and weakness, simply laid down in their cabins or on the roadside and died. Those who died in their cabins remained among the living for days as their families were themselves too weak to move the bodies.

Hunger was one thing, but it could be combated, tackled and efforts made to alleviate it to some extent. Fever, however, threw up an almost impossible challenge. The continued poor hygiene, open drains, families living together in large numbers in substandard housing and no effective medicines all contributed to its spread.

Fr John Sullivan, parish priest of Kenmare, reported that on more than one occasion he visited houses where the corpses of father, mother and sometimes up to seven children lay side by side on a bed of straw.
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Fr Sullivan was a tireless and active defender of his community. He kept up a continuous correspondence outlining the destitution, misery and desolation of his people with everyone from the Lord Lieutenant, and Sir Charles Trevelyan, Secretary of the Treasury to Earl Grey himself. He wrote on the 30 April 1849 to Sir William Sommerville, Chief Secretary for Ireland, at Westminster:

Kenmare Workhouse … Built originally for 500 paupers and therein was congregated for a considerable time, not less than 2400 paupers. The treatment the poor people received therein was enough to horrify the most hardened … women raised out of bed at before 5 o’clock in the morning, three hours before day, after getting 7ozs of meal made into stirabout with a finish of sugar on it, they are bundled off again to try and keep some warmth.
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A report in the
Kerry Evening Post
of 10 March 1947 records:

At Kilquane, a parish to the west of Dingle, one fifth of the inhabitants have already fallen victims to famine and disease. On Monday last, the decomposed remains of a father and his three children who had laid dead for eight days, were conveyed in baskets to be buried.
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From 1847 onward the Poor Law made landlords liable to pay rates for any tenant with land worth £4 or less. Landlords and their agents reacted in different ways. A number saw this as a heaven-sent opportunity to get rid of troublesome non-paying tenants. Others were more benevolent and lowered their rents or tried to provide employment, but these would have been in the minority. Many of the landlords just summarily evicted tenants to lower the taxes that they themselves would have to pay, leaving the tenant with no other option but to emigrate, if they could afford the fare, or alternatively take themselves and their family into the nearest workhouse for shelter. While tenants protested, ‘any protests that now occur [were] the desperate expressions of a people literally maddened by hunger, disease and fear of death’.
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According to the court and constabulary records, possibly as many as 45,000 families and 250,000 family members lost their homes and land in Munster and were put out on the road in the hungry years between 1846 and 1852.
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Numbers of these evicted families added to the crowds trying to gain access to food and shelter in the workhouses.

Having gained admittance to the workhouse, there were very few ways out
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Death was the main exit from this wretched place. Deaths were so numerous that corpses were carried on special carts day after day to be thrown into mass pauper graves or pits in specially set-up burial grounds either adjacent or in some cases within the workhouse grounds and covered in quicklime. Some had coffins which were specially constructed so that the bodies could be released into the graves directly and the coffin reused. The irony of this was that dying people got themselves admitted to the workhouse so that they would have a coffin and not be left to finish their lives on the side of the road or abandoned without a Christian burial. Traditionally there was a great respect for the dead, for the customary funeral wake and the customs and rites associated with a local death. These customs and rituals, which by necessity were abandoned during the Famine, became the norm again when that era was over.

Three of the workhouses in this study have a field nearby where hundreds of bodies were buried without names or any identification. These grounds are now titled Teampall Bán, ‘God’s Acre’ and the roadways approaching them are usually titled Cosán na Marbh, ‘Pathway of the Dead’.

According to Monsignor Padraig Ó Fiannachta of Dingle, some 5,000 people died in the Dingle Union during the Famine years. Many were buried in the graveyard which overlooks the town on the side of Cnoc a’ Chairn, a short distance from the then workhouse, later the hospital.

In Kenmare the Old Kenmare Cemetery as it is now known is just outside the town. The graveyard was the site of an early monastic settlement founded by St Finian of Innisfallen, who died at the end of the seventh century. The Church of St Finian is in now ruins. The Famine plot in this cemetery is also the resting place of upwards of 5,000 local people buried there between 1845 and 1852.

Aghadoe is the site of Killarney’s Famine Graveyard. This was one of the few Unions where ‘paupers’ appear to have been deliberately buried away from the vicinity of the workhouse. The full tragedy of how many souls were buried under this hilly and picturesque ground may never be known.

In Listowel, with seven years of extreme hardship, initially the dead from the workhouse were buried in Gale Cemetary, a short distance outside the town on the Ballybunion road. We know from the Workhouse Minutes that approximately 2,000 were buried here, more than half of these were under the age of 15.
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In February 1850, such were the numbers needing burial on a daily basis, a new purpose-built paupers’ burial ground was opened a short distance from the workhouse, known locally as Teampall Bán. Between February 1850 and March 1852, 2,665 people were recorded on the Minutes as buried there. John Pierse, who has conducted significant research in this area, says that this number recorded may have been minimised by workhouse management and the Guardians, as it would indicate failure of the system and point out to the paupers’ justification for their fear and detestation of the workhouse.
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