Reilly The Famine Irish

Emigration and the Great Hunger
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6880-5
Verlag: THP Ireland
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

From a range of leading academics and historians, this collection of essays examines Irish emigration during the Great Famine of the 1840s. From the mechanics of how this was arranged to the fate of the men, women and children who landed on the shores of the nations of the world, this work provides a remarkable insight into one of the most traumatic and transformative periods of Ireland's history. More importantly, this collection of essays demonstrates how the Famine Irish influenced and shaped the worlds in which they settled, while also examining some of the difficulties they faced in doing so.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Reilly, Ciaran

Leseproben

Preface

Opening remarks by Tim O’Connor, chairman of The Gathering and former Irish Consul General in New York, at the Third Annual International Famine Conference at Strokestown Park House, 19 July 2013

I am delighted and honoured to open this timely and important conference which is taking place this year as part of our Gathering Ireland 2013 Initiative, which I have the privilege to chair. My thanks to Dr Ciarán Reilly for inviting me to make the opening remarks and to Ciarán and his colleagues at Maynooth University, particularly Professor Marian Lyons and Professor Terence Dooley, for their great support for The Gathering project generally. In the beautiful environs of Strokestown Park House, I must also make honourable mention of the Callery family, in particular Jim and Adeline, and to Caroilin for the fantastic work she has done in organising the overall Strokestown Gathering, which also begins today, and in which this Conference plays a key part. Could I also pay tribute to the great work of all involved in the Strokestown Famine Museum, a tremendous national asset, where our conference is taking place – General Manager John O’Driscoll and also Declan Jones and Patrick Kenny from the Westward Group, who have put so much into giving us this wonderful facility. I call the conference timely and important because it is both; timely because it sits right in the middle of The Gathering year, in which there is higher focus than ever before on the relationship between Ireland and its global family, and important because the subject matter of your deliberations shines a light right at the heart of that episode in Irish history which more than any other contributed to the reality that the Irish became an emigrant people, the Great Famine.

Firstly, however, a quick word about The Gathering Ireland 2013 initiative itself. A major feature of its origins was the need for a boost to our tourism industry. And it is certainly doing that. The Gathering, which is a government initiative and enjoys the strong support of the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste, was formally unveiled as a project by the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Leo Varadkar in October 2011. A project team was established in Fáilte Ireland, and Roscommon’s own Jim Miley, the project director, and his team have been doing a great job getting the project up and out there, under the overall political direction, and with the strong personal support of Minister Varadkar and Minister of State at the Department of Tourism, the West’s own Michael Ring. The overseas promotion and marketing for The Gathering is being expertly done by Tourism Ireland. I have the honour to serve in a voluntary capacity as the chairman of the Project Advisory Board. This is a group of people drawn from government, industry, academia, local government and the arts, and our role is to provide support and counsel to the project. It also includes Frank Dawson, the esteemed Roscommon County Manager and I want to take this opportunity to thank Frank for his wisdom and support. A word also about the great contribution being made by Frank’s colleagues in the city and county councils, local development networks and Ireland Reaching Out in the roll-out of the project around the country, and indeed that of the insurance company Irish Public Bodies, who put €1 million into a community fund, which the government matched, and which has helped greatly also in terms of supporting that community engagement.

However, the real heroes of the project are the people of Ireland who have embraced The Gathering in their thousands. As we speak, we have 4,200 Gatherings registered on our website. These are drawn from parishes, communities, groups, clubs, educational, cultural and sporting organisations, companies and families, all around the country – all stepping up to the plate to do their bit, to make their contribution – and extending an invitation to our people around the world to return and gather with us sometime during 2013. And as I keep reminding people, 4,200 Gatherings isn’t just 4,200 events and weekends. No, like this one in Strokestown, it is 4,200 committees meeting for months on end, planning, preparing, organising, thinking through, worrying, caring, inviting. The Gathering has been an enormous exercise in community engagement and endeavour, with big implications for the future. And the diaspora has responded. In their tens of thousands. As matters stand, visitor numbers are up over 6 per cent for the first five months of the year and over 15 per cent from North America, which is a great achievement at a time when tourism out of America as a whole is down 3 per cent. This is all very encouraging in tourism terms, and at The Gathering we are delighted about that. The tourism sector is a vital part of our economy, employing over 200,000 people and contributing 4 per cent to our national GNP. Of course, The Gathering goes beyond tourism, important as that sector is. In its essence it is about the enduring nature of the bond and connection that exist between those of us who stayed and those who left Ireland.

Having been part of The Gathering project for three years now, I have enjoyed a particular vantage point in terms of being able to observe it all close up and to reflect on the new insights about the nature of our relationship with the diaspora that are emerging as a result of the project. In doing so, I stress that I am not an academic scholar and these observations are personal ones of my own. Think of them as findings from the field, some of which may have validity in your eyes and some which may not – I will leave that to your own good judgement as scholars of the area. The other point I would make is that this is an evolving story and our understanding of its essence is changing as we learn more. What I do know for sure is that The Gathering has injected a significant new dynamic into the diaspora space in the Ireland context and I think it is only right that those of us who care about the relationship between us and our scattered kith should try to draw as much as we can from what it is telling us.

One obvious feature that The Gathering has served to shine a particular light on is the question of why 70 million people around the world regard their identity as Irish – what is such a sense of connection by so many people, including after several generations, all about? I suppose one of the thoughts that I have had on this as the year has progressed is that it may perhaps have to do with the DNA of the Irish. I asked a scholar friend of mine to put a number on the length of time Irish had been the spoken language of the people of the island of Ireland until its decline and loss in the nineteenth century. He said about 2,500 years. So the case can be made that the Irish – and I know there can be a big debate about that term, but let’s at least say ‘the people living on this island’ – were a communal, clan-centred, cohesive, close-knit society with our own language for over two and a half millennia. And then, less than 200 years ago, two seismic events intervened to change everything – the dramatic decline in the use of Irish as a spoken language, and the Great Famine, which resulted in a huge portion of our people either dying or emigrating. As we know, that process of emigration has continued apace in the 170 years or so since then, accelerating in the decades after independence in 1922. As a result, there are now multiple times more people of Irish identity living overseas than there are in Ireland itself, a remarkable reality.

A thought occurred to me from all of that – it could be argued that the 170 years or so since the Famine is actually a very brief block of time in the context of two and half millennia and not enough to alter the fundamental DNA of the Irish in terms of being a people of community and kinship. And that therefore, whether we are aware of it or not, that context has meant that the process of separation involved in emigration over the generations has resulted in a sense of, can I call it, psychic loss, for both sides – both for those who left and for those who stayed. A bit like the sensation for twins who are separated at an early stage in life and experience during their subsequent lives apart a sense of not being quite fully whole.

Before I’m taken to task by the scholars, let me fully acknowledge that there is a further dimension of course in the Ireland story in the form of the relationship with England and the consequences of that, including through the plantations of the northern part of the island during the seventeenth century. The story of the Ulster Scots in the Ireland narrative and the significant numbers of that community who emigrated during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, particularly to North America, is an important piece of our demographic and diaspora jigsaw in its own right and deserving of a full study of its own. However, I don’t believe it takes from the basic point I’m making above about what I would call the indigenous Irish.

I have two other interesting fragments from the field to share with you, both taken from The Irish Times. Firstly, in an interesting article on emigration on 21 March 2013 in The Irish Times, Irial Glynn from University College Cork included a quote from a great Maynooth professor of my era, Fr Liam Ryan, and it went like this: ‘Emigration is a mirror in which the Irish nation can always see its true face’. A fascinating observation by a great scholar. Secondly, on 29 June 2013, The Irish Times reported on the Kennedy Gathering in Wexford the previous day. This involved the visit by over thirty members of the Kennedy clan commemorating the visit to Ireland fifty years ago of President Kennedy. The report...