The
Catholic Church was a “net winner” from the Great Famine as the urban
Catholics who survived it were more likely to be regular Mass-goers than
the largely rural poor who died, enabling the church to increase its
influence on the population at large, a prominent academic has claimed.
Prof
Breandán Mac Suibhne of National University of Ireland, Galway told the
West Cork History Festival in Skibbereen that it was perhaps “vaguely
perverse” to suggest the Great Famine assisted Irish Catholicism to
become a dominant force in the lives of Irish people, but it did
influence how religion impacted on people’s lives.
“There
was a survey in the 1830s on religious practices in Ireland where
Catholic priests were asked by the State how many hearers were at Sunday
Mass, and attendance at Sunday Mass is a canonical requirement among
Roman Catholics, if you don’t go to Sunday Mass, you are going to hell,”
he said.
“As
late as the 1970s the figure was like 92 per cent or 93 per cent, but
back in the 1830s, the figure for the country, as a whole, was something
like 30 per cent so high Mass attendance by Irish Catholics is very
much a modern phenomenon and, certainly back in the 1830s, it was
nothing like it was in the 1970s.
“In
fact, the only place in the 1830s where Mass attendance among Irish
Catholics was anywhere near the 1970s level were places like the
southeast, in Wexford and the big cities, Dublin, Belfast and Cork, but
in traditional parts of the country, like here and the west, generally
levels were low.
“For
people in these areas, religion was not chapel-oriented and clerically
directed devotion like Sunday Mass was not important to them... their
religion was one of holy wells, and season festivals, and prayers and
priests were important for only a couple of things – Baptism, marriage
and death.
“So
before the famine, people did not take any great interest in many of
the devotions... Confession and Communion and Confirmation didn’t matter
to them – they cared that their children were baptised, that people got
married and that the dead received the last rites – these are the
biggies.Prof
Mac Suibhne said the low rate of Mass attendance among people in more
rural western counties could not be explained by a lack of churches and
priests as there were an abundance of both churches and clergy
throughout the country by the time the potato blight struck in the
1840s.
“The
Catholic Church was a net winner out of the famine in that the people
who died out of the famine were disproportionately people who didn’t go
to Mass – the highest levels of mortality among people in Mayo, for
example, were people who wouldn’t know Sunday Mass.”
Prof
Mac Suibhne pointed out that the 10 counties in which excess mortality
was highest during the famine were, in descending order: Mayo, Sligo,
Roscommon, Galway, Leitrim, Cavan, Cork, Clare, Fermanagh and Monaghan –
all counties with large rural populations.
The
net effect was that as the population fell due to death and emigration,
the Catholic Church was increasing both its numbers of churches and
personnel with both the ratio of priests to people and the ratio of nuns
to people both increasing throughout the 19th century.
“What
you get in the 1850s is serious hard-core proselytisers hitting the
country in the form of the Redemptorists – these are the storm troopers
of Roman Catholicism, ‘Do you reject Satan and his works?’ and they made
Confession, Communion and Confirmation rites of passage in
Catholicism.”
He
said that by the 1870s, Mass attendance among Catholics had reached the
90 per cent level and the State had played a role in helping the
Catholic Church become such a dominant force when it allowed Catholic
priests become school managers when rolling out the national school
system.
“You
ended up with a de facto Catholic school with a Catholic priest as
manager and a de facto Church of Ireland school with a Church of Ireland
rector as manager – that gave immense power to the Catholic Church who
could pick the teacher and be responsible for the operation of those
schools.”
Prof
Mac Suibhne said souperism, where evangelical Protestants offered food
to starving peasantry if they converted to Protestantism, did occur but
the impact the famine had on Irish Catholicism through the
disproportionate deaths of non-Mass going Catholics should not be
underestimated.
Focusing
on how people actually died from diseases such as dysentery, typhus and
cholera, Prof Mac Suibhne said it was not correct, as John B Keane had
his character Bull McCabe say in The Field, that no priest died during
the famine as clergymen of all denominations died in numbers.
Irish Catholic Church set to go back to the future by embracing laity and women
]He
said scholarly analysis put the numbers who died during the Great
Famine in the years 1846-1851 at somewhere between 1.08 million and 1.49
million with death more likely to come from disease due to increased
transmissibility resulting from social dislocation than to lowered
resistance.
“Predictably,
the weakest, the most dependent in society were disproportionately
represented among the dead. Infants and elderly people died in great
numbers,” Prof Mac Suibhne said, who has documented the social impact of
the Famine in rural Ireland in his book The End of Outrage.
In
addition to the huge death toll and the ensuing decades of emigration,
the other notable impact of the famine was the moral degradation – “the
brute reality of famine is that it ‘reduces’ people, pushes them below
the waterline of what had [been] understood to be civilised behaviour”.
Speaking
in Skibbereen, Prof Mac Suibhne related the story of how 12-year-old
Johnny Finn, of Carhoogarriff in nearby Rosscarbery, had cut the throats
of neighbours, Mary (6) and Jerry Donoghue (4), and stolen a bag of
oatmeal flour that their mother had in the house in the spring of 1847.
Finn
was arrested eight days later in the poorhouse in Skibbereen and a
local magistrate, Philip Somerville, took a statement from him with the
assistance of Constable Michael Jordan translating from Irish, because
Johnny Finn could speak no English.
Mr
Somerville noted Finn said “the two children were there by themselves,
that he found a knife in the house and that with the knife, he killed
both children... and that he killed the two children to get the flour as
he was hungry”, and that he gave the flour to his family but never said
how he got it.
A
local dispensary doctor in Skibbereen, Daniel O’Donovan (39), relayed
another story how a woman called O’Driscoll came to his surgery to get
medicine for her husband only for another woman to enter the surgery and
beg him for something for a sick child.
The
O’Driscoll woman berated the other woman and remarked that she
effectively wished all her own children dead so ill were they as a
result of famine and disease. “Bad luck to them for children, I have
five of them sick and I would think myself lucky if they were all dead
before morning.”
It
led Dr O’Donovan to observe: “The most singular effect produced by the
horrors of the famine now raging is the severance of the ties of
consanguinity... the destruction... of the ardent domestic affections
that formed perhaps the strongest trait in the character of the Irish
peasant.”
Prof
Mac Suibhne noted that the old Fenian leader, Jeremiah O Donovan Rossa,
who was a teenage neighbour of 12-year-old Johnny Finn in Rosscarbery
during the famine, similarly noted “the degradation into which want, and
hunger will reduce human nature”.
And
he noted how O’Donovan Rossa told a fellow émigré in New York much
later in life how he had gone home to Ross one evening during the famine
and his mother had no dinner for him, so he went and bought a bun for a
penny but never shared it with his mother or his sister or his
brothers.
And
he told how O’Donovan Rossa later wrote of his selfishness: “I am proud
of my life, one way or another, but that penny bun is a thorn in my
side, a thorn in the pride of my life – it was only four ounces of
bread... but if ever I feel any pride in myself, that little loaf comes
before me to humble me.”