Of Famine and Green Beer

By John Leo, USNews & World Report, 
March 24, 1997

The good news is that efforts have begun to reconnect
Irish parades with the true story of the past.

The 1997 St. Patrick's Day parades commemorated the 150th anniversary of “Black ’47,” the worst year of the Irish potato famine. “The Great Hunger” was the most searing event in Ireland’s long and sad history. It killed a million Irish and drove a million and a half more to America. Among them were Ellen Burke and Thomas Leo, my great-grandparents.

It was the last big famine in Western Europe and the greatest loss of life in the century between the Napoleonic wars and World War I. When a wind-borne fungus wiped out the potato crop, the Irish died of yellow fever, dysentery, typhus, and starvation. They ate dogs and rats, often dogs and rats that had already eaten human corpses. When one English traveler spat out some gooseberry skins from a passing carriage, a mother raced to pick up the skins and place them in the mouth of her starving infant. The roadways were littered with bodies of people with green stains around the mouth, from eating grass as a desperate last meal. Some were found with bark and nettles in their mouths.

In the beginning, the British made many honest attempts to help, some of them heroic. Later, politics and what we would today call "compassion fatigue" sealed the fate of the Irish. A New York State law requires schools to teach about the famine, and some of those who lobbied for the law wanted teachers to say that the British intentionally managed the famine to kill off as many Irish as possible. It's fairer to say that rescue efforts, often halting and grudging, were colored by a hands-off, free-market philosophy and the fact that the Irish were a despised people in a captive society, semi-enslaved for 600 years, and therefore regarded as primitive, stupid, and hopeless.

An ocean of dead. The voyages that brought the dazed and starving Irish to America were a cross between the scramble of the Haitian boat people and the middle passage of African slaves. Fever broke out, but there were no medicines. The stench of excrement filled the holds. The Irish were jammed in like cordwood, gaining a bit more room as dead bodies were heaved overboard. During one storm 178 immigrants were shoved down among the cattle, where half of them quickly suffocated. If crosses and tombs could be placed on the water, one American official said at the time, the Atlantic would look like a huge cemetery stretching from Ireland to America.

In America, the Irish faced the same contemptuous attitudes they had to bear at home, this time centering more on their Catholic religion. The Know-Nothings and other nativists campaigned against the Irish in much the same way that the Klan organized against blacks. A few convents and churches were burned. “No Irish Need Apply” signs appeared in store windows.

The rural Irish, entering an urbanized and industrial culture, arrived in much worse shape than most immigrants and bore the psychic marks of an increasingly sick and violent society back home. They were quickly identified in the public mind with poverty, disease, alcoholism, crime, and violence.

Much of this was an accurate portrait of the Irish at the time. Irish violence was often astounding. Bodies floated in New York City's East River almost every day. At one point, the city jail population was 90 percent Irish. Police vehicles that rounded them up were called “paddy wagons,” the wagons that carried all the hopeless Paddys to their natural home. Cartoonists drew pictures of the Irish as crazed monkeys, and good citizens wondered about a permanently unfit underclass and the possibility of genetic inferiority. Does any of this sound familiar?

Almost in the blink of an eye, the Irish "erupted" out of allegedly permanent underclass status, as one author put it, pouring into the middle class and taking political control of Boston and New York. Along the way, the St. Patrick’s Day parade, once a defiant show of strength against Protestant power, gradually declined into a pointless annual march of aging suburbanites and drunken collegians staggering along in funny hats.

The good news is that efforts are under way to reconnect the Irish and their parades with their roots in famine, poverty, and despised immigrant status. Commemorations of the famine, both here and in Ireland, have become fund-raisers to combat famine in Africa and Asia. Seminars and conventions on the Irish famine often have surprisingly little material on Ireland and a lot on the problem of world hunger today. “We are allergic to famine,” said Mary Robinson, president and national icon of the confident and rapidly changing Irish Republic. She is widely known as a “faminist.”

Two summers ago my daughter and I climbed halfway up a mountain in the raw and empty west of Ireland to inspect a large Celtic cross, placed strategically in the middle of nowhere. We thought it would be a monument to the famine But we didn't expect the inscription: "to all those who walked this way in the great famine, and to all those who walk this way now in the Third World.” A very nice touch. Congratulations, Ireland.