Journey of faith to Johnstone
Just over 150 years ago, the Emerald Isle of Ireland was transformed into a hideous, vegetational wilderness.
In the summer of 1845 a horrible black fungus known as ‘The Blight’ turned green fields into muddy morasses of rotten potatoes.
Half of Ireland’s eight million inhabitants depended on potatoes for food. During the next four years, more than a million hollow-eyed men, women and children, with bones protruding through their skin, perished agonisingly of starvation and disease.
Amidst degrading scenes of squalor, emaciated humans made in the likeness of God roamed the countryside like wild animals, scrounging scraps of food and ravenously devouring anything edible they could lay their hands on.
In the land of the saints was a hell on earth. In the realms of life and light there was death and darkness.
As the population plummeted, one million destitute Famine Irish - from Skibbereen to Donaghadee - followed in the footsteps of heroic Celtic missionaries like Aidan, Brendan,
Derek Parker knew many of Paisley’s secrets – the grimy and the good.
He wandered every corner in search of the clues that would unlock Renfrewshire’s rich history.
These tales were shared with readers in his hugely popular Parker’s Way column.
We’ve opened our vault to handpick our favourites for you.
Columba and Finnian and emigrated to North America and Britain for a place in the sun instead of the mist.
Because of their proximity to Ireland, West of Scotland towns like Paisley - with their textile mills, engineering factories, coal and ironstone mines, and road and railway construction projects - became home to Irish potato blight fugitives.
Today, memories of these grim years of environmental holocaust are evoked in the 150th anniversary celebrations of a historic local church.
In photographs, letters and newspaper articles, parishioners and clergy at St Margaret’s in Johnstone reveal how a hayloft at an old cotton mill in McDowall Street was opened on October 31, 1852, as a place of worship for the town’s Catholic population which burgeoned in the wake of the Famine Years.
The newly-founded church was dedicated to St Margaret, an AngloHungarian princess who fled civil war in England and settled in Dunfermline, Fife, eventually marrying King Malcolm Canmore.
The hayloft soon became too small and two years later the priest, Father William Patterson, supervised the construction of another church in nearby Graham Street.
The building - now the parish hall - was used as a church on Sundays and a school for the rest of the week.
On December 26, 1875 - following sterling work by Father William Chisholm - the parishioners moved into their present church at Graham Street.
St Margaret’s remained the sole parish for Johnstone’s Catholics until well into the 20th century when new parishes were established at Christ the King, Howwood (1948), St Aidan’s (1960), St Anthony’s, Spateston, and Our Holy Redeemer, Elderslie (both 1969).
Today St Margaret’s remains the parish for Johnstone north of the Beith Road and the nearby village of Kilbarchan.
It stands as a memorial to a pilgrim journey of faith from the Emerald Isle in the Black Forties to a new land of hope and promise in and around Paisley.