Legacy of genocide
Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the
Famine
Edited by Tom Hayden
Published by Wolfhound Press
Price £16.99
My grandfather left Tralee in 1917 at the age of 28 and
never returned to Ireland again. He changed his name,
we think, from Killane or Killeen to Lane when he
arrived in Wales some two years later. He almost never
spoke about Ireland or the family he had left behind
and he did not possess a single photograph or artefact
of any kind as a reminder of his previous life.
Once or twice, however, his wife and children came
across him, a man physically as hard as nails and prone
to bouts of spectacular violence, sitting in the
darkness late at night with tears streaming down his
face.
When asked why, he would simply reply that he wanted to
go home. These rare displays were considered by those
around him as maudlin self-indulgence and, from all
accounts, were dismissed as embarrassing and generally
unmanly behaviour. Violence, it seems, was infinitely
preferable to tears.
This outstanding collection of essays gathered together
by Tom Hayden made me remember the story again because
I realised, I am ashamed to say for the first time,
that my grandfather was a product of the Famine. His
parents were amongst those survivors who did not
emigrate. It placed those little fits of tearfulness -
and violence - in a different light altogether.
What is the legacy of the Famine? What is the
psychological effect on the descendants of those who,
despite the best efforts of the British establishment,
survived it? At first, the question seems impossibly
abstract. How could the Famine affect anyone three or
four generations on?
The answer lies in some of the most powerful
contributions in this fine collection of essays; those
by Irish Americans. Although these are intensely
personal and, I presume, written independently of one
another, there are recurring themes which run through
many of them; an indefinable sense of loss, of not
really knowing who one is, the lack of material things
such as heirlooms, photographs, family furniture; of
desperate and ultimately futile attempts to piece
together family history and most of all an
overpowering, deafening, silence about the past - or
rather about the Famine. It was, quite simply, never
spoken about by its survivors because of its shameful
associations. A massively important piece of Irish
history has been lost forever.
Peter Quinn writes: ``Somewhere in the mass of
statistics compiled on the Famine - bowls of soup
distributed, evictions, deaths from fever, departures,
etc - are my ancestors. Over the years as I poked at
the fringes of those lives, as I tried to piece
together some coherent record of the long dayís journey
of my family from Famine Ireland to the Bronx of my
childhood, I came to realise that in their
particularity, in their individuality, these people
were beyond my knowing. They had been swallowed by the
anti-romance of history, immigrant ships, cholera
sheds, tenement houses.''
d in this paragraph, Ray Yeats also comes very close
to answering myquestion about the legacy of the famine:
``I am afraid of the Irish Famine. It is a combination
of ideas, facts, history and images from my imagination
which echoes strongly in the close personal history of
my family and more frighteningly in my recent
experiences. Irish and hungry, Irish and poor, Irish
and emigrated, Irish and dead. A fate from which our
noble history could not protect us, centuries of
endurance and all for nothing. I have always been
afraid that I would never have enough, and not just
enough food, but talent, knowledge, character and
indeed everything that is thought to be essential for
life.''
Recently, during a panel discussion on the Politics of
Remembrance which was held in Derry as part of the
Bloody Sunday weekend, the historian Edna Longley
accused the Irish, particularly those in the north, of
something she called `nemophilia', the rather unsavoury
fetishisation of commemoration which, she sagely
informed us, is related to necrophilia.
Leaving aside the gross insensitivity of coming out
with such a statement in front of the Bloody Sunday
families and leaving aside her abject, snivelling
whatever-must-the-British-think-of-us Uncle Tommery,
reading these essays with their ever-present motif of
lack of commemoration, lack of history, lack of memory,
makes me even more angry about that crass and stupid
comment now than when I first heard her say it.
In the meantime, please read this book. Read
particularly John Waters' excellent contribution and
start to get as angry as he is: ``When I speak about it
in public, I make a point of saying, unequivocally,
that the Famine was an act of genocide, driven by
racism and justified by ideology.''
d when the Uncle Toms down south start cringing just
remind them of the motto on the Holocaust memorial in
Jerusalem: ``Forgetfulness is the way to exile:
remembrance is the way to redemption.''
by Fern Lane
Honouring our dead
Book review
GREEN RIVER - In Honour of our Dead.
Published by Beechmount Commemoration Committee.
This booklet is one of the best and most professionally
produced commemorative booklets that I have ever seen.
It is also one of the most comprehensive as it not only
mentions IRA Volunteers and Sinn Fein personnel that
have died in the course of the struggle, but also the
many other republicans from the Beechmount district of
Belfast who may have died of natural causes but whose
commitment to our republican ideals never wavered and
whose loss was felt by the republican family.
The booklet says what republicans all know; that the
struggle for national liberation isn't just fought out
on the streets but in the houses of those unsung heroes
whose doors where never closed to the Movement and in
the hearts and minds of so many ordinary people.
In the introduction the Committee acknowledges that
Republicans have hurt and killed people in the course
of the struggle and expresses their sympathy to their
families.
However, the book is about commemorating the republican
dead and marking the 25th Anniversary of the Beechmount
Commemoration Committee.
The booklet also uses many photos of those
commemorated, which puts faces to people and gives them
a presence that words on their own can't. Getting those
photos must have been a pain-staking task for the
Committee.
What is also true of this booklet - and it would be
worthwhile if those who denigrate republicans take this
on board - is that the booklet tells the story of our
communities. It explains that this struggle has gone on
for as long as it has because the people in the North
have stood up to the injustices of unionist rule and
collectively they have paid a heavy price in the
struggle for justice, equality and peace. That
sacrifice is what this booklet is about. It can't be
dismissed by those who want the clock turned back
before 1969.
The booklet will be launched and go on sale at The
Felons Club on Friday 27 February.
By Ruairi MacDomhnaill
![[An Phoblacht]](http://republican-news.org/graphics/title_gifs/aprn.gif)