Kerry Girls (2 page)

While the majority of Kerry landlords were absentees, they were represented in the area by these agents or middlemen. In a lot of cases, the latter were more feared than the actual landowner. They managed the estates of the absentees, set the rents, let and sublet the land. They were the ones who had the power to call in the bailiffs, evict tenants and put them on the side of the road.

The tenants were also separated from their landlords by culture, religion, language and a great sense of dispossession. Many of these Catholic tenants were now paying rent to families who had driven their ancestors out of the land they had previously owned for generations. On their part, the landlords did not have a great sense of security and did not relish living among what they saw as a disgruntled, unreliable peasantry. As a result, the major landowners lived elsewhere, some in other parts of Ireland but mostly in England. Rents collected to fund their extravagant lifestyles on their English estates were the main objective of this landowning class.

An addition to the landownership problems was the practice of subdivision. By 1841, the growth in population, resulting from marriage at a younger age, meant that land distributed among a number of sons, over a couple of generations, led to each holding becoming smaller and smaller until it was barely enough to support a family.

Social and living conditions in Kerry in the first half of the nineteenth century were diverse and wide ranging. At the top of the social ladder you had the aforementioned landlords, living outside the county, where they looked after their other estates, their commissions in the (British) army and/or their seats in Parliament. Next you had a slowly emerging merchant class in the towns, who lived in substantial houses with servants and a prosperous lifestyle. These were mostly Protestant, but since the Repeal of the Penal Laws in 1782, a Catholic minority of business people was emerging. In the country you had a small number of ‘strong farmers’, those who held 30 acres or more. Survivors of the famine, who were interviewed in the 1920s by Bryan MacMahon all agreed that ‘comfortable’ farmers were not in serious distress during these times.
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The average tenant farmers were those with between 5 and 30 acres. On this acreage they were living at subsistence level. Then you had the cottiers and labourers, who were the most numerous, and it was this section of the community who were wiped out during the Famine. A cottier or labourer might have half an acre, where he would grow potatoes and build a cabin. He would pay the farmer for the land, usually about £5 (1800s) or, more often, with his labour. This plot of ground was an essential need; without it he starved. These cottiers and labourers usually kept a pig and hens and most lived in one-roomed mud houses without windows or chimney. The 1841 Census classification distinguished between four types of houses. Fourth-class houses were defined as ‘all mud cabins having only one room’.
11

Imagine four walls of dried mud (which the rain, as it falls, easily restores to its primitive condition) having for its roof a little straw or some sods, for its chimney a hole cut in the roof, or very frequently the door through which alone the smoke finds an issue. A single apartment contains father, mother, children and sometimes a grandfather and a grandmother; there is no furniture in the wretched hovel; a single bed of straw serves the entire family.
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These labourers and cottiers in Kerry at this time had a very low standard of living. They were poorly clothed and very few had shoes. A detailed enquiry into rural poverty reported in 1836 that an agricultural labourer could, on average, count on 134 days of paid employment in a year.

The cottier or labourer would have married young, men at 18 or 19 and girls at 16 or 17, and had a large family. The labourer’s children, mostly the males, who did not get settled on their parents subdivided acreage, would offer their services as ‘
spailpíns
’ at hiring fairs to strong farmers in other parts of the country, in particular West Limerick and Cork, or they would attempt to emigrate if at all possible. There was little or no opportunity for paid work, or indeed apprenticeships, open to women. Their living conditions would not have equipped them with the experience for the usual housekeeping duties that would have led to employment with the merchant class or the ‘Big House’.

We know from the 1841 Census that male illiteracy topped 60 per cent on a countrywide basis. This figure would then be higher for females, as education for girls would not have been regarded as a priority by parents. Girls would be ‘kept at home’ in greater numbers to look after younger siblings, assisting with the daily farming – digging potatoes, footing turf, helping with any harvesting, baking bread and boiling potatoes, sewing and washing whatever few clothes they had in nearest streams or rivers.

The difficulties of isolated communities and lack of financial resources affected the attendance of pupils at ‘pay schools’ as they were known, which existed in most areas in the early half of the nineteenth century. They had started as traditional ‘hedge schools’ where classes were held outdoors in the bogs and corners of fields, in order to avoid detection by the authorities during the times of the Penal Laws when education was banned for the Catholic community. These ‘pay schools’ were now settled in permanent outhouses or cabins and as the name suggests, the pupils paid a fee to the teacher. Families were willing to pay these small sums if they could at all afford them, to have their children learn not just the usual reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, all through the medium of Irish, but for some of the more advanced pupils – from families of the merchant class or strong farmers – the rudiments of Greek and Latin, in private schools in the towns in Tralee, Killarney or Listowel. In 1831 the National Education Board was established by the Government ‘for the education of the poor in Ireland’ and from early 1840s the hedge schools were gradually replaced by free national education. This education was through the medium of English and had both cultural and language challenges.

In North Kerry, Slieveadara National School opened on 1 December 1843, replacing the existing Ardoughter Hedge School. While this new school was well built in stone and slated, multi-denominational and free, these National Schools were not without their problems. All instruction was to be given through English even though the first pupils were not used to reading English, ‘as the little English they possessed was oral, and they had seldom if ever seen the written English script’.
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Each pupil was to commit to memory the following ‘poem’ and it was recited every morning:

I thank the goodness and the grace,

Which on my birth has smiled

And made me in these Christian times,

A happy English child.
14

While some of the families would have been able to read or read and write, most would have spoken either Irish or a Kerry version of Hiberno-English. Although the Irish language had started to decline by 1845, about 30 per cent were speaking Irish on the eve of the Famine, it was disproportionately those who spoke Irish as their daily tongue who died or emigrated.

The Dingle Peninsula itself suffered much death and starvation from 1845 onwards and there were specific reasons for this. The Peninsula of Corkaguiny was made up of ‘several wretched villages’
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with densely populated coastal communities and one main urban centre – the town of Dingle itself.

These ‘wretched villages’ were in fact groups of small cabins and huts clustered together in what were called
clacháns
. They were composed of families and their few animals, generally on very poor stony or boggy land, trying to eke a living.

There was no one focal point with the exception of Dingle itself, which had very poor communication links to the rest of the county. Dingle was 30 miles from Tralee over backbreaking, and in winter impassable, mountain boreens and was 10 miles from Ballyferriter or Dunquin over unmade roads. In December of 1847, the Dingle Guardians on the Board of the Tralee Poor Law Union petitioned for a temporary workhouse to be set up in Dingle. This was to be ‘for the reception of the poor now reduced to such a state of hunger and weakness as to render them perfectly unable to travel to Tralee’. De Moleyns, the principal landlord, also pointed out regarding the peninsula that ‘not a single magistrate or gentleman of property resided within it; and that co-operation between Catholic and Protestant clergy was highly unlikely since conversions from amongst the lower orders had brought about a state of religious warfare’.
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The vast majority of the population of Corkaguiny spoke Irish as their first, and in most cases only, language, which created another communication barrier between them and the Poor Law Guardians in Tralee as well as with the representative of the Poor Law Commissioners in Dublin.

Corkaguiny had two major landlords: Richard Boyle, 9th Earl of Cork, and Thomas Townsend Aramberg De Moleyns, Lord Ventry.
The Times
of London on 6 January 1849 published a column entitled ‘Evictions in Dingle’, quoting the
Limerick Chronicle
and detailing recent evictions carried out by Lord Ventry: ‘Total of recent evictions from Lord Ventry’s property near Dingle, 170 families, 532 souls
…
have been ejected by a posse of bailiffs acting under the power of English law.’
17

Lord Cork owned land in almost all parishes in the Barony of Corkaguiny, including the Blasket Islands, at the time of Griffith’s Valuation, as well as in other parts of Kerry. Lord Ventry, whose house was at Burnham was for the most part an absentee landlord. Lewis mentions that the family lived for much of the time in England and the house was occupied by their agent, David Thompson.
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Ventry Estates was in trust in chancery for the forty-one years in which Thomas Townsend Aremberg de Moleyns held the title – from 1827 to 1868. This 3rd Baron Ventry was absent for many of the earlier years and was wounded in the Peninsular War. He was disabled when he returned. Because of his injuries his tenants knew him as ‘An Tiarna Bacach’ (the Lame Earl).

From 1833 onwards a proselytising campaign was launched on the Dingle Peninsula and it was the one successful protestant missionary effort in Kerry. Lord Ventry, his wife Eliza and the Agent David Thompson were most active in pressurising Catholics to convert to Protestantism. David Thompson was able to exert pressure on tenants when setting rents – lower rents would be offered to those who would convert. Revd Charles Gayer, who arrived in Dingle in 1833 as private chaplain to Lord Ventry, is the name most associated now with the Famine Proselytising Campaign.

Protestant colonies and school houses were established in Dunquin, the Great Blasket Island, Dunurlin, Kilmalkedar and Ventry. Twenty Irish-speaking teachers were sent to the area. Two notable convertees from a Roman Catholic family who were very influential in alerting the authorities to the impending doom were Matthew Trant Moriarty and his brother Thomas. While at school Thomas and his family came under the influence of his Protestant Irish teachers, prompting three of the Moriarty brothers – Matthew, Thomas and Denis – to become clergymen of the Church of Ireland. Matthew T. resided at Ventry during the Famine and was one of the first to give a voice and highlight the increasing distress.
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From 1845 onwards he was writing to the
Kerry Evening Post
, initially forecasting and then describing the horror in February 1847:

Picture to yourself … a Parish, with all its villages depopulated by emigration to eternity or America, many of its wives and children deserted; all its fields uncultivated; the hearts and hopes of many yet in it broken; it’s Church-yard filled – that is Ventry.
20

Between 700 and 800 destitute people converted to the Church of Ireland, many of whom reverted later. The issue of soup to the poor was used during the years 1846–1851 to convert Catholics to the Established Church. Those who ‘took the soup’ were called ‘Soupers’ and it is a term still used today. Lady Ventry, assisted by Mrs Hickson and Mrs Hussey, established one of the earliest soup kitchens and they distributed one pint of soup per person each morning.

The
Kerry Examiner
of 8 February 1847 records:

The state of the people in Dingle is horrifying. Fever, famine and dysentery are daily increasing, deaths from hunger daily occurring. From all parts of the country, they crowd into the town for relief and not a pound of meal is to be had in the wretched town for any price.

Men who come home from the [public] work die almost and suddenly; and are often left three or four days waiting to see if their friends could scrape together the price of a coffin, and sometimes in vain.
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More people died from disease – hunger, typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy, bronchitis, pneumonia and cholera – than actual hunger in the Dingle Workhouse. The
Kerry Evening Post
of January 1847 reported:

Starvation … fever and dysentery are doing their work here. Six persons died in one lane in this town [Dingle] in one day. The dead are now buried without coffins. Whole villages to the west are in fever. It is almost deplorable to hear the children crying at every corner of hunger … The people are dying particularly to the west of Dingle by wholesale of starvation, fever and dysentery.
22

Temporary fever hospitals had been set up in Dingle and Castlegregory It is estimated that up to 5,000 people died and were buried in paupers’ graves at the foot of Cnoc a’Chairn, which overlooks Dingle town.