As we try to understand the past, we must not simplify the deeds

Today is Famine Commemoration Day — but let’s not stand on the street and applaud ministerially appointed ‘heroes’ of the 1840s, writes Breandan Mac Suibhne

COMING up to three o’clock on the afternoon of Monday May 29, 1848, Martin Melia of Ervallagh, near Roundstone, Co Galway, went to the house of neighbour, Valentine Audley, and asked for the loan of a shovel to bury his sister, Peggy.

The request surprised Audley. Peggy Melia, although “very weak”, had been seen walking towards Roundstone that morning. But he fetched Melia a shovel and then, with a nephew, John Audley, he accompanied him to the shore. And there, they found Peggy lying on the sand, drawing breath or snoring.

Just then, at about 3pm, Barbara Ashe was at the gable end of her house in Ervallagh. And down on the shore, a few perches from the house, she saw Martin Melia, surrounded by a few others, digging a hole in the sand.

Ashe went down to them. There she saw John Audley and his uncle Valentine Audley and Michael Ashe, all of Ervallagh, and a fellow called John O’Donnell. And she, too, saw Peggy Melia, lying beside the hole that her brother was digging. She was “snoring”.

Ashe told Melia not to bury his sister until she was dead. She told him to “give her fair play” and that when Peggy was “quite dead” she and the neighbours would cover her. Melia did not reply and Ashe went away.

When she had gone, Melia remarked to Valentine Audley that his sister “would die after she was put in the hole”.

He had then placed her in the hole, threw a scraw on her head and started to cover her with sand and stones.

He knew she would not recover, he said to those on the strand; and he could not be losing his rations, by coming again to bury her.

“I and others who were standing by,” remembered Michael Ashe, “told him not to bury her until she was dead — when he had thrown a few spades full of sand on her I went away to my work”.

Four or five days later, word of what had passed on Ervallagh strand reached John Dopping, the resident magistrate in Clifden, a paid official who reported directly to Dublin Castle. Dopping went out to Ervallagh to investigate. He was unable to convene an inquest, as there was no other magistrate present and the nearest coroner was “upwards of 70 miles from the place”, but presumably he had the body of Peggy Melia exhumed and reinterred.

Reporting the incident to Thomas Redington, the Under Secretary in Dublin Castle, he warned him that he would be shocked to learn that “such an occurrence has taken place in a Christian country”.

He had committed Melia to trial, he explained, but he himself then offered mitigation: “The wretched man could have had no object in the commission of this savage act but to save himself time and trouble, or possibly, to put an end to the suffering of his sister who must have been at the point of death.

“You will perceive,” he added, “that the persons looking on were scarcely less criminal in permitting the thing to be done — most of them, however, are children.”

And then he gave a brutally frank assessment of the inhabitants of Connemara: “The scene of the occurrence is within a mile of Roundstone, in a neighbourhood in which — as well as in other parts of Connemara — I regret to say some of the peasantry are scarcely human.”

Redington, for his part, impressed on Dopping that “every exertion should be used to secure the successful prosecution of the offender in this atrocious case”.

Dopping may seem a hardhearted man. Perhaps he was. And his remarks to Redington might suggest he had little love for the inhabitants of Connemara. But just two months earlier, in March 1848, he had reduced a courtroom in Galway city to tears.

There, John Connelly of Clifden had pleaded guilty to a charge of sheep stealing. An end should be put to such practices, Judge Tom Lefroy said, sentencing Connelly to three months’ hard labour, or no man’s property would be safe.

Dopping, who had investigated the theft, rose and addressed the court, saying that he felt bound to explain the circumstances of the case. Connelly and his family had been starving when he had stolen the sheep, he said — and one of his children had already died. And, Dopping continued, hearing that Connelly’s wife had eaten “part of its legs and feet after its death”, he had the child’s body exhumed and, sure enough, he found that “nothing but the bones remained of the legs and feet”.

When Dopping said those words, a “thrill of horror” ran through the court. “There was deep silence for several minutes,” one newspaper reported, “during which time many a tear trickled down the cheeks of those present. Even the court wept.”

And the prisoner was discharged.

Today, Sunday, May 17, is National Famine Commemoration Day. There will be an official ceremony at Edward Delaney’s Famine sculpture on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin at 12.30pm, when wreaths will be laid “in remembrance of all those who suffered or perished during the Famine” by Culture Minister Josepha Madigan and the dean of the diplomatic corps. Due to measures to combat the Covid-19 pandemic, the ceremony will not be open to the public.

In a statement ahead of the ceremony, Ms Madigan sought to link our current crisis with that of the mid-19th century. And for sure there are some parallels. Indeed, I wrote myself in these pages, in late March, that death without the ritual of wake and funeral, such as communities are experiencing these days, was connecting us across time with those who came before us through hard times, not least the Famine.

For Madigan the link, between now and then, is that there were “heroes” back in the 1840s.

“As we confront a pandemic today, let us recall that the Great Famine was a public health emergency in its own right. We think of the many heroes of the Famine years. People such as the doctors and nurses of the fever hospitals who put themselves at risk to care for others will always have our thanks for their sacrifice. As our society has changed and evolved, this commitment to helping others has never wavered and we see the same qualities of courage and commitment to others in our healthcare staff today.”

It is good to acknowledge the courage and commitment of all who work in a health service long mismanaged by successive Fianna Fail- and Fine Gael-led governments.

Still, I must admit to being a little leery of “heroes” being introduced into the National Famine Commemoration. The past is complex. People are complex. John Dopping was complex. And so, too, was Martin Melia, who buried his sister alive. And so were the neighbours who watched him do it. And so was the wife of John Connelly, who ate the legs and feet of her own dead child.

Much of what happened in the Famine was not black or white but grey.

The challenge for historians — the challenge for us all — is not to simplify the past, but to understand and explain it.

It is not to people the past with heroes — or villains.

‘I am a little leery of “heroes” being introduced into the Famine story. The past is complex. People are complex’