Jim Conwell Biography

By the mid 1840s, political and administrative life in Ireland had been dominated by the English for hundreds of years. The political and economic infrastructure emanated from Westminster and from a culture and class which could not have been more removed from the concerns of ordinary Irish people. The English Imperial mind-set regarded the Irish peasants as base, lazy and untrustworthy. Then the potato crop in Ireland suffered blight: a fungal disease which causes the leaves to die back and the potatoes in the ground to rot into a foul-smelling slime. The blight came three years in a row and that led to widespread and prolonged starvation amongst the Irish peasantry. When the government in Westminster was finally willing to take the situation in Ireland seriously, they instituted relief works which were designed to prevent the creation of permanent dependency in Ireland, a major fear of Victorian sensibilities. These relief efforts required travel and hard physical labour from people already starving and destitute. They also, perhaps deliberately, set out to destroy the connection between the people and the land. Certainly, the English landlords took the opportunity to clear the land of what they saw as unproductive tenant farmers in order to institute more efficient, scientifically-based farming. Ireland was an important source of food imports for the English mainland and most food produced in Ireland at that time was for export. This trade did not significantly diminish during the period of the famine. Those who did survive the hunger were encouraged to seek a new life in the Americas and thus many more died of disease and malnutrition on the famine ships. How much the English intervention contributed to the creation of an apocalyptic famine in Ireland is a matter of controversy to this day. What is beyond dispute is that it was apocalyptic. 

 

The census of 1911 shows, on my mother’s side, my great-grandparents – Thomas and Mary Boland - to be native Irish speakers living in Aghadiffin, Co Mayo. When the famine first occurred, they would have been 19 (great-grandfather) and 9 (great-grandmother). The same census shows my father’s household in Kilquire, also Mayo, the year before he was born but it gives no information about my paternal great-grandparents. The family story on my father’s side is that my father's grandfather farmed in a place called Carrownacross, near Swinford.  It happened that he -- a tenant farmer by necessity since all the land was owned by the English -- went to pay his annual rent on the day it was due.  The landlord had made sure that his own agent would arrive before my great-grandfather and he paid the rent, thus acquiring the farm.  Now, my great-grandfather, together with his wife and however many children he had, must vacate his home and his livelihood immediately.  And if he took too long, or needed some help -- the soldiers would be happy to come and throw all his furniture in a heap and burn the roof off his house to make it truly uninhabitable. My great-grandfather ended his life in the County Home (the poorhouse). His wife and his son, my grandfather, eventually managed to get work as gatekeepers on a level crossing for the railway.  This job came with a tied cottage and probably enough land to grow some spuds and cabbage. In addition, my grandfather worked on building the railway in that part of the country. For the rest, maybe life in the railway cottage was steady, the only excitement being the time when news of an oncoming train was not relayed to the crossing and the railway company had to find a new gate. 

 

I know nothing of the circumstances of my mother’s grandparents at the time of the famine but the districts where those families lived were particularly hard hit. The people who suffered the consequences of hunger were from an oral culture and what was written down, horrific as the accounts are, were written by well-meaning outsiders. In the place of those who are gone there is only silence. Nor did either of my parents ever mention the famine to me but I have increasingly wondered how much I have grown up in its shadow and how much the darkness I know inside of me has its heart in that catastrophe and the circumstances which made it possible. 

 

I can find the shadow of the Famine in much of my work but these poems are more direct references: 

 

FÉAR GHORTA

BLACK LIGHT

DISLOCATIONS

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Jim Conwell