Tag Archives: kerry

Remittances to Ireland on the rise again

Among my trove of letters from Irish relatives is a January 1921 correspondence to my uncle in Pittsburgh from his father in Ballylongford. With news of home and developments in the fight for independence, it acknowledges receipt of a postal order for 3 English pounds.

The amount was equivalent to about $12 at the time, or roughly my uncle’s weekly wage as a streetcar motorman. With 92 years inflation, that $12 is worth about $150 today, or 114 Euro.

“Your prosperity in America is a great consolation to me, your generosity and kindness since you left home,” the father wrote from North Kerry.

Such remittances are back in the news. Citing figures from the World Bank, The Irish Times reports that Irish emigrants sent home 610 million Euro in 2012, or 160 Euro more than in 2009 and double the figure of a decade ago.

A London-based hedge fund manger had this to say in a September story in The Telegraph:

“The new norm for Ireland and others across Europe will be quite literally living on reduced means and relying on a quite different economic model from their recent pasts. Quite different but not, we must add, altogether new. Having not depended on remittances for many decades, Ireland, like Portugal, will come to rely on these once more.”

The 2012 remittance figure is about 0.5 percent of Ireland’s gross national income, or half the percentage as in the 1980s, according to the Times. Remittances accounted for 3 percent of GNI in the 1960s.

I haven’t located the percentage for the 1920s as the very poor Free State emerged from the struggle for independence and civil war. Appreciate any sources of such information or hearing stories about remittances to Ireland.

Quinnipiac’s “Great Hunger” archive and museum

Spent the day at Quinnipiac University’s An Gorta Mor (The Great Hunger) archive collection and separate museum, a short drive from the Hamden, Conn., campus.

More than 1.5 million Irish died of starvation and disease between 1845 and 1850, and more than 2 million others emigrated aboard the “coffin ships,” many of them also dying before reaching Canada and the United States.

The Lender Family Special Collection at the Arnold Bernhard Library “includes over 700 volumes on the actual famine period and others focusing on peripheral issues that helped shape the events surrounding the tragedy.” For example, I viewed an 1846 townland survey of County Kerry.

I spent most of my time reviewing documents from the collection of British Parliamentary Papers, including quarterly reports of agrarian violence in the late 19th century and emigration returns from 1912 and 1913, the year my maternal grandparents left Kerry for Pittsburgh.

Special thanks to Robert A. Young, public services librarian, for helping to make the material available.

The museum, which opened in September, “is home to the world’s largest collection of visual art, artifacts and printed materials relating to the starvation and forced emigration that occurred throughout Ireland from 1845 to 1850. Works by noted contemporary Irish artists are featured, as well as a number of important 19th and 20th-century paintings.”

image

Many of the pieces are very moving, such as “The Leave Taking,” above, a 2000 cast bronze that shows about a dozen figure along a ship’s gangway. The detail here shows a child being carried to the ship while the mother is restrained at the dock.

The collection also contains a miniature version of “Famine Ship,” John Behan’s outdoor sculpture at the foot of Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, which I viewed after climbing the mountain in 2001.

More to say about the archive and the museum, but let me emphasize that both are worth the trip to Quinnipiac.

Popular politics and agrarian violence in Kerry, 1880s

I just finished Donnach Sean Lucey’s “Land, Popular Politics and Agrarian Violence in Ireland: The Case of County Kerry, 1872-1886.” The link contains a review of this 2011 academic text.

My interest in Lucey’s subject are twofold. First, my maternal great grandfather and great great grandfather leased a 5-acre parcel in Lahardane townland near Ballybunion during the period. Second, I am researching the murder of a nearby North Kerry farmer two years after the period detailed by Lucey.

My maternal ancestors would have been well aware of the Land League and later Irish National League activities in the area, especially in the nearby market town of Listowel. Their level of participation in rent strikes and other protests, if any, remains unclear to me at this point. Property records from the Irish Valuation Office indicate great great grandfather William Diggin was evicted from the farm during the 1884-1899 period, but his son John Diggin is shown as occupier of the same parcel from 1900 forward.

Agrarian violence, euphemistically called “outrages,” was widespread during the period, especially in the north-central Kerry triangle between Listowel, Tralee and Castleisland. The activity ranged from maiming cattle to murder. As Lucey writes:

By the end of 1882 Kerry had become synonymous with agrarian violence and was one of the most disturbed counties in Ireland.

He goes on to detail how the violence was driven by complicated and overlapping motivations, including Fenian-inspired nationalism, anti-landlord rent disputes and family feuds. Not surprisingly, most of the violence was perpetuated by young, unmarried men who did not own or lease land and were not their family’s oldest son and thus in line to inherit such a role. They were late 19th century rural gang-bangers, called “moonlighters,” causing alcohol-fueled trouble for kicks as much as for any social or political reasons.

Which brings me to the case of farmer John Foran (Forhan, in some documents), who was shot to death near Listowel in July 1888. His trouble started in 1883, when he obtained the farm of another man who fell a year behind in his rent. The community shunned, or boycotted, Foran and his family to such a degree that it was reported he could not obtain a coffin to bury is wife.

Foran’s situation reached the attention of the English Parliament in London two years before his murder, and it was propagandized in anti-Irish home rule political fliers during the 1892 elections, four years after his death. English lawmakers continued to discuss the Foran murder as late as 1909, when the original tenant was reinstated to the farm. Foran’s daughter Nora, who immigrated to Pittsburgh, continued to seek remuneration for her father’s death as late as 1925.

Readers with information about the Foran murder or other late 19th century political activity and agrarian violence in North Kerry are encourage to contact the blog. Meanwhile, thanks to Donnach Sean Lucey for his excellent and enlightening work on the subject.

Kerry drink drive, rural isolation (Part 2)

Some quick folo-up on the last post about County Kerry passing a measure to allow limited drink driving in rural areas, in part to allow isolated residents more freedom to socialize at the nearest pub.

The Irish Independent has this story about a pub-owning couple in Kilflynn (between Listowel and Tralee) who have been driving home their customers for the past 15 years.

The Irish Times has an in-depth story about the closing of nearly 100 rural garda stations across Ireland, including one near Kilflynn. (See map with story). To be sure, many of the stations were open only part time, and “564 Garda stations will remain – significantly more than Northern Ireland, for example, which has 86 police stations for a population of 1.5 million people, with further closures planned; and Scotland, which has about 340 stations for 5.2 million people.”

But a County Galway woman quoted in the story sums up the concerns of many rural residents:

“Rural Ireland is slowly – and not even slowly – being closed down. Everything they are legislating for in Dublin has a huge impact here, and it will eventually close villages down. Why would young people come back here? Even to farm? The barracks is gone … the health centre will be next. The post office will be next. You can’t come out for a drink any more. People who for all their lives had the pub as their social outlet have had that taken away.

Kerry allows limited drink driving on rural roads

Expect waves of news coverage and lots of late-nite television jokes about County Kerry Council’s vote on allowing limited drink driving on rural roads.

The measure by Kerry councillor Danny Healy-Rae passed earlier this week on a 5-3 vote, with 12 absent and seven abstaining. Healy-Rae, a pub owner, said his measure is designed to ease the isolation of elderly rural residents, many whom might be riding slow-moving tractors to fetch a few pints.

Full implementation of the measure requires the Department of Justice to issue rural permits.

The Kerryman’s digital edition quotes the surviving family member of someone killed by a drunken driver as being “appalled, repulsed [and] ashamed” of the vote. Expect to see more backlash in the weeks ahead.

Here’s a round up of some of the headlines already ricocheting around the Web.

This isn’t good for Kerry and for Ireland. Anything that hints of promoting or tolerating drink driving (or drunk driving, as we say in the US) is bad news.

Surely there are better solutions to alleviating rural isolation, which is a real problem in Ireland.

New Famine books, and agrarian violence in Kerry

The Washington Post reviews two recent books about the Great Famine (an Gorta Mor): “The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy,” by Tim Pat Coogan; and “The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People,” by John Kelly.

Kelly and Coogan have both written polemics against the British government of the day and its inadequate response to Ireland’s nightmare. They sustain their arguments with sound materials. Kelly, an American, is cool and prosecutorial in tone. He has the facts, ma’am, and his book is an accessible, engrossing history of horror. Coogan, the Irish author of controversial popular biographies of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera, as well as a history of the Irish Republican Army, is fiercer and angrier. He sounds like the witness who saw the crime.

Like the 1916 Rising and War of Independence/Civil War years of 1919-1923, the 1845-52 Famine is one of the most explored periods of Irish history. It remains a topic of vigorous sociopolitical debate and compelling human interest due to new historical approaches and new research details.

For myself, I’ve just cracked open “Land, Popular Politics and Agrarian Violence in Ireland: The Case of County Kerry, 1872-86,” by Donnacha Sean Lucey. The book explores the post-Famine, Land War (Cogadh na Talún) period leading up to the Home Rule effort of the late 19th century.

My great, great grandfather and great grandfather worked the same 5-acre farm plot in Lahardane townland in North Kerry from at least 1864. The next in line, my grandfather, emigrated in 1913, leaving the property to a younger brother. It remains in the family today.

Reaching Out Ireland/North Kerry

My maternal grandmother and grandfather were both from North Kerry; she from Kilelton townland near Ballylongford; he from Lahardane townland near Ballybunion.

So I was excited to find the North Kerry Reaching Out heritage project, which is affiliated with Ireland Reaching Out.

The national effort is described as “reverse genealogy” and “entails the tracing and recording of all the people who left and seeking out their living descendents worldwide. Those identified or recognised as persons of Irish heritage or affiliation are invited to become part of a new extended Irish society.”

The Kerry effort focuses on people with ties to these villages: Listowel, Ballyduff, Lisselton / Ballydonoghue, Ballybunion, Asdee, Ballylongford, Tarbert, Duagh, Lyreacrompane, Lixnaw, Moyvane/ Newtownsandes, Knockanure, Finuge and Kilflynn.

Here’s the website’s Guide to North Kerry.

As much as I love all of Ireland, there something unique about North Kerry. I get a special feeling whether walking the beach at Ballybunion, hiking to the top of Knockanore Hilll or ambling through the narrow streets and books shops of Listowel. There’s something in my DNA that knows this is home.

Her emigration, 100 years ago

One hundred years ago, in mid-September 1912, Honorah Ware boarded the passenger ship S.S. Baltic at Queenstown, Ireland. The 20-year-old farm girl from rural Kilelton townland in northwest Kerry was bound for the American city of Pittsburgh.

Her journey began with a seven-mile trip to the railway station at Listowel. She probably was joined by an 18-year-old girl from nearby Ballylongford who also was bound for relatives in Pittsburgh. The 65-mile trip to Queenstown, now called Cobh, included stops in Tralee, Killarney, Mallow and Cork city.

The young women likely spent a night or two in a boarding house before taking a lighter out to the Baltic anchored in the harbor. Remember, this was five months after the Titanic sank in the icy waters of the north Atlantic. Imagine what must have going through their minds.

The crossing took eight days. Nora and the other passengers were processed at Ellis Island on Sept. 21, 1912. From there she took a 300-mile train trip to Pittsburgh.

Like many young Irish women of the period, Nora spent her early years in America working as a household servant, or domestic. She married a Kerry man in 1924, at age 33, and they had six children, including my mother. In 1959, I became the seventh of Nora’s 12 grandchildren.

Nora died in 1983, shortly after her 93rd birthday. She never lost her Kerry brogue, but she never got back to Ireland, either. I have had the pleasure of walking the north Kerry headlands and Shannon estuary of her birthplace.

At this centennial of her emigration, I honor her memory. God love her.

Just wanted to post a pretty picture. This is from Feb. 2009 trip to North Kerry.

Modern eviction drama in Co. Kerry

The story reads like something out of 19th century Ireland. A farmer is being evicted from his land. His rural neighbors rally to his side.

But this drama is playing out in modern day County Kerry.  The Bank of Scotland is in the role of the villain instead of an English landlord and his ruthless agent.

Here’s coverage from the Kerryman newspaper. Here’s an interesting blog post from Maggie Land Blanck with lots of historical background about 19th century evictions, mostly in County Mayo. Maggie’s great collection of artist renderings and even a few photos of evictions in rural Ireland is worth the click over to her site.