By Danny Ó Seachnasaigh
The partial failure of the potato crop in 1845 heralded the beginning of what has come to be known globally as the Great Irish Famine or Great Hunger, An Gorta Mór. In the following year of 1846 the potato crop would fail totally, with 1847 being forever cemented in the Irish psyche as ‘Black ’47’. Starvation, disease and death notwithstanding, overseas migration increased yearly in the mid-nineteenth century, and continuing trends of emigration for the remainder of the Victorian period would see the population of Ireland effectively halved from about 8.5 million to just 4.4 million by 1901. By the time of Queen Victoria’s tour of Ireland in 1849, one hostile newspaper outlet reported that ‘a visit of condolence’ would have been more appropriate. While much study has been devoted to such groups as the Society of Friends (more commonly called Quakers), scant attention has been granted to Methodist responses.
PALATINES
Many Irish Methodists today are descendants of Palatines who fled from the Rhenish Palatinate in western Germany when war and severe winters had desolated the economic viability of their homeland. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, during the reign of Queen Anne, Lord Southwell settled Palatine communities on his Irish estate in the modern-day townlands of Courtmatrix and Ballingrane in the parish of Rathkeale, Co. Limerick. This initial migration of Palatines into a rural rather than an urban environment, it was hoped, would cause them to live more virtuous lives, as cities were generally understood to be breeding-grounds for vice. John Wesley himself wrote admiringly of the absence of drunkenness in Palatine communities, as they lacked public houses in the countryside, instead brewing their own beer and cider. Living in accordance with a Protestant work ethic, the Palatines were an incredibly self-sufficient people who came to rely less on governmental or ecclesiastical support.
The Palatines lived on a more nutritious and varied diet than their Catholic neighbours, which accounts for their higher survival rate during the Great Hunger. They also experienced less emigration than the general population, as these figures (provided by the late Revd Dudley Levistone Cooney) for the Limerick circuit show: more Palatines left Ireland prior to the potato failure, with fewer migrating in the most severe years:
Year Emigrations
1844 25
1845 10
1846 13
1847 15
1848 18
1849 28
‘POPERY’ AND THE ‘PROVIDENCE OF GOD’
There is no lack of historical literature authored by Irish Methodist ministers from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards, some of which touches on the Great Hunger. With the impending centenary in 1860 of the arrival of Philip Embury and Barbara Heck from Limerick to New York, Methodists were keen to highlight Ireland’s importance in the promulgation of that denomination overseas, particularly in North America. The general opinion of these ministers is almost universal: that the root cause of the famine in Ireland was ‘popery’. Relayed in the following works and centring on the supposed stagnancy bred in Irish peasants by Roman Catholicism, they help to illustrate the contemptuous attitude that many Methodist ministers held towards that religion.
Revd Charles Henry Crookshank, who had arrived in Belfast with his family from Cayaga, Ontario, in 1841, was a child of about ten during the worst years of the Great Hunger. Writing retrospectively in 1888, he refers to the movement led by Daniel O’Connell in the 1840s to repeal the 1800 Act of Union, affirming that ‘God Himself interposed in judgement’ in the face of the Catholic dissension:
‘Trade had been good, prosperity had smiled on the people, and … there was abundance of food; but in the heart of the nation, the spirit of disloyalty smouldered … The seed had been deposited in the earth … when, in early July 1846, the hand of God was laid upon it.’
In Crookshank’s estimation, the calamity that had befallen Ireland was divinely ordained to prevent civil war in the country between those in favour of retention of the Union and those against it.
Revd William Crook, while recognising that Ireland mourned her lost population, also believed that this movement of people (Repeal) was ‘doubtless overruled for great good to other lands, in the wise Providence of God’. Crook placed blame for the famine more on Catholic indolence than on politico-religious dissension: since Catholics had a great many feast-days in every liturgical year, they engaged in less work per annum than Protestants and thereby became more dependent on the State or Church for succour. When he later visited America in 1882 on a fund-raising mission, he wrote from New York that he ‘had no conception of the extent Irish Methodism has been bereaved of her children’, having seen them ‘in scores and hundreds, of all ages and from every district in Ireland’. Crook was buried on the site of the Embury Heck Memorial Church in Ballingrane following his death in 1897.
Writing of his experience toiling ‘amongst the starving poor, the dying, and even the dead’ who were each in need of his attention in Newtownards, Co. Down, Revd Samuel Nicholson defied his fear of infectious disease in order to go about the charitable work of his God. Visiting the fever-ridden of town and countryside accommodated in both fever hospitals and workhouses, he relates that anywhere between six and 800 patients were being kept in temporary sheds. Nicholson was himself struck with fever, which left him unable to preach for several weeks. Mrs Nicholson noted that ‘other ministers of the town avoided the infected house and localities as much as possible; but my husband visited indiscriminately’. As well as visiting the sick, Nicholson went out of his way to find suffering persons in order to get doctors to certify them. He and his wife provided meals wherever they could, and set up a soup kitchen, although the unfortunate Mrs Nicholson related that ‘wretched creatures hung about the place, waiting for soup, till they sickened and died on the street’.
MINISTERS WHO DIED
Notable ministers who perished in the Munster region owing to their efforts were Revd William Richie, who died at Youghal on 23 July 1847 ‘in consequence of an attack of the malignant fever’ and is buried at St Mary’s Collegiate Church, and Revd William Starkie at Bandon on 17 September 1847. Revd James Sullivan, an Irish-speaker and a native of County Fermanagh, would expend himself during the most severe years of this period. He died in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, on 2 May 1851 at a relatively young age; in the obituary by his widow, Anne Hill, it was stated that his labours during those years led to his demise. Not long before his death he wrote that
‘… the past year has been one of unprecedented affliction. Fever and other diseases have been prevalent and fatal throughout the year. In a few weeks three thousand souls passed into the eternal world. Never shall I forget the scenes of suffering distress and I might say, horror, that I was called to witness. The cries and groans of the dying could scarcely be equalled except by what is seen on the battlefield.’
Revd Fossey Tackaberry, who was noted for perceiving the final instalment of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 with apprehension and dread, would go on to lose his own life after contracting typhus while working among the afflicted without concern for their creed. Known for his energy and vigour in preaching, in 1846 he had been appointed to preach on the Sligo circuit by the Methodist Conference. He would not, however, last beyond twelve months of his appointment, dying on 3 June 1847 at the age of 51. His journals are worth quoting to convey the harsh realities behind the cost of living at the time and the basic problems faced with the provision and distribution of Indian meal:
‘October 1. I believe things are now at their worst, and provisions higher than they will be before next August; but the people are within an inch of desperation. I think we will soon have thousands of tons of Indian corn from America, which has not yet had time to arrive, and prices must fall; but those who ought to soothe the public mind … are mad! They “must have their rents or their lands”, is the cry to a starving, maddened tenantry; but not a word of explanation or comfort … My heart aches for the people. A teeming population; no potatoes, and nothing in their stead!’
The potential for lawlessness is conveyed over a month later, but also the progress of charity with the opening of a soup kitchen:
‘November 28. O, the starvation I have witnessed the last three weeks! … we should have robbery and plunder on a broad scale … Hundreds in this country will, I think, die this year. On Thursday we got a soup kitchen opened. I purchased a few tickets for gratuitous distribution; but the poor do not much care for it without bread. The state of things is unfavourable to piety; the public … are so occupied with sights and tales of woe. There seems to be scarcely room for any subject but, “What shall I eat?” It is truly appalling.’
‘December 2. Within the last three weeks I visited, in town and country, about sixty of the poorest families I could hear of … Cottiers and conacre-men are very badly off; but squatters, hundreds of whom are in this country, worst of all.’
‘December 5. We have good congregations, but little beside which gives promise of revival … such is the state of the public mind that every subject is precluded but the all-absorbing one—food.’
Tackaberry, while continuously demonstrating his sympathy towards the Catholic poor who were suffering the worst, also continually refers to ‘popery’ as being the source of their suffering: ‘True, they are, for the most part, Romanists; but are they to be let die? … I have almost wished to be in America last week. What to do for the thousands who are starving I know not, and it is hard work to look at them.’
As can be garnered from the words of these Methodist ministers who personally dealt with those afflicted, the situation was harrowing. Accounts of Methodists preaching before crowds in the period are littered with incidences of men, women and children falling dead in the middle of their sermons. In the cases shown where ministers had actively sought to help the poor in various communities, whether through charity, guidance or visitation etc., the same ministers clearly display a sense that they did not understand how to relieve these people in the mortal world with the resources at their disposal; migration to the New World became the overriding aspiration of most persons during this period, their religion notwithstanding.
Danny Ó Seachnasaigh is a historian with an MA from the University of Limerick.
Further reading
D. Levistone Cooney, This plain, artless, serious people: the story of the Methodists of County Limerick (Glenageary, 2000).
P. Ó Concubhair, A remote outpost: the story of the Methodist Society in Tarbert, County Kerry: 1820–1960 (Kerry, 2005).
R. Ó Glaisne, Modhaigh: scéal pobail—scéal eaglaise (Báile Átha Cliath, 1998).