Even a kind landlord could not save the people of Crossmolina
Irish emigrants leaving for Liverpool on board the paddle steamers Nimrod and Athlone during the Great Famine. Picture: Illustrated London News/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Crossmolina In 1837, the parish of Crossmolina had 12,221 inhabitants, of whom 1,672 lived in 358 houses in ‘a good main street and two converging ones’ in the town.
Crossmolina town had a certain status with a sub-post office, revenue and constabulary police stations, petty sessions held weekly and four fairs a year. About a third of the land in the parish was arable with the remainder comprising bog and mountain, ‘the greater part reclaimable’, according to Samuel Lewis, but little improvement had taken place in agriculture.
There were four centres of worship in the parish: three in the town – the Established Church (C of I), Methodist and Roman Catholic – and another for Catholics in Kilmurry. James Fraser, who visited Crossmolina shortly before the Famine years, described it: ‘This small town, which is part of the large estate of Sir Roger Palmer, Bart., is of modern date. It principally consists of low slated houses, forming two streets, weekly markets are held but little business is done’.
Crossmolina was well used to dealing with famines in the past as memory of want was a recurring experience, but by 1846 it had become clear that something exceptional was unfolding. On August 21, John McGrath of the Crossmolina RIC, was reporting on ‘this Sub District and surrounding neighbourhood’ to the Relief Commission. The potato crop, he reported, was in ‘the most miserable condition’:
Clearly, the situation demanded immediate and united action if the worst was to be avoided, a challenge not just to the landlords but to all in positions of leadership in Crossmolina and its environs.
Bartholomew Costello was parish priest of Crossmolina (1841-89) and vicar general of Killala diocese, a considerable figure who was in line for an appointment as a bishop on three separate occasions. His Crossmolina counterpart in the Established Church was Richard Quintus St George (1835-72).
An evangelical Protestant, St George was close to Archbishop Power le Poer Trench of Tuam, and his successor, Thomas Span Plunket, who both sought to end what they regarded as the relaxed approach of his clergy and to instil in them a proselytising spirit that would lead to open warfare between the churches during and after the Famine.
While St George was theologically at one with Trench’s and later Plunket’s missionary zeal, his friendship with the gentry and his ‘financially beneficial marriage to the daughter of a baronet’, somewhat moderated his evangelical zeal. His curate, Henry St George Caulfield Knox, the son of Annesley Knox of Rappa Castle in Ardagh parish and curate in Kilfian married St George’s daughter, Ann Cordelia, and the two clergymen worked closely together.
While there was occasional tension in Crossmolina between the Catholic and Protestant clergy, in the main the relationship was one of mutual respect and co-operation. However, the nature of the time was that there was effectively very little contact between Catholic and Protestant clergy, apart from a distant suspicion moderated by genuine respect as was the case with St George and Costello.
Two related factors were to disturb that social and religious equilibrium. One was the sudden arrival of Famine times with an intensity beyond living memory. The other was the failure, indeed refusal, of many landlords to respond to the crisis. It was the legal responsibility of the landlords to resource the Ballina Union, but as the famine crisis widened and deepened it was clear that some landlords in the greater Crossmolina area were unwilling or unable to accept that task. Inevitably, once the major landowner, Sir Roger Palmer, notoriously refused to pay his dues or get involved in a local relief committee, lesser landlords like John Walsh of Castlehill followed his example.
The response of the landlords to their civil responsibilities varied across the spectrum from Pratt and Arran, who felt obligated to accept their responsibilities as landowners, to Palmer who blithely ignored the plight of his tenants. Born in 1802, Sir William Roger Palmer, an absentee landlord with 48,741 acres mainly in the Ballina and Killala areas, made little contribution to the relief of his tenants, apart from early on gifting two sums of £50 to the Crossmolina soup kitchen and of £20 to the Killala Relief Committee. He had invested in ‘a splendid mansion’ beside Albert Gate, Hyde Park, London in March 1846 and a month later was attacked for his ‘luxurious living’ while people died of starvation in the hovels on his estate’.
Described as ‘a Protestant Tory renowned for his absenteeism and non-payment of rates’, Palmer was accused of ‘looking with indifference not only upon the misery of the population in general but upon his own tenants in particular’. Worse still, Palmer exploited relief measures for personal purposes, as in using government grants to carry out drainage on his estates which were intended to give employment to the destitute but instead were used to employ comfortable farmers with good-sized holdings – in order to ensure the payment of their rents to him.
Inevitably the clergy was forced to help fill the gap – especially in the early days when the Protestant clergy were driven not just by their Christian solicitude but because as representatives of the Established Church they believed that part of their official remit was to care for all citizens. The drawback was that, in a context of religious suspicion, the contribution of the Protestant clergy and the growing regard in which they were held by Catholics in Crossmolina and its hinterland, gave rise to accusations of proselytism and souperism.
A meeting was held in 1847 of the Catholic bishop, Thomas Feeny, and the priests of Killala diocese, to discuss charges of proselytism and souperism against evangelical Protestants. The accusations were fuelled by evangelical Catholics like Fr Patrick Malone, the then administrator of Ballina and a strong influence on Bishop Thomas Feeny. However, even though Malone made the snowballs, Costello, as vicar-general and the public face of Catholic reaction, was expected to throw them. Accusations of proselytism and souperism emanated from Costello’s pen and made his participation in the newly-formed relief committee in Crossmolina problematic.
In a flurry of letters to the , Costello built the case for Protestant proselytisation on behalf of Bishop Feeny and the Catholic clergy. The Protestant Dean of Killala, James Collins entered into the debate, questioning and contextualising incidents that Costello referred to in a number of parishes in Killala diocese that Costello believed constituted proselytisation.
In October 1847, in the T , Costello accused St George of giving a coat and blanket each to two children at Fahy in Kilfian parish but when John Jordan, the parish priest of Kilfian, forbade the children to attend the Established Church and they obeyed him, St George called on the children and took back the clothing he had given them. Collins checked out the story and discovered that the Knoxes, St George’s daughter and son-in-law, had been assisting the family since Christmas 1846 and that no pressure was put on them to conform to the Protestant faith. He told Costello that he was misinformed, but Costello responded by saying that there were cases of proselytism ‘in every parish in Tyrawly except Killala’.
St George, usually of a private and relaxed disposition, felt impelled to intervene in the debate in response to Costello’s letters, specifically in response to a letter that suggested that in Crossmolina money ‘given for other purposes’ was used for proselytisation. St George intimated that he felt obliged to respond in view of the generosity of those who had given him ‘funds to be made use of for the indiscriminate relief of suffering’. He summarised in four points the reservations Costello had that he was able ‘to discern amidst the clouds of dust which the vicar general has raised. First, that funds, given for general relief, have been made use of for the purpose of making proselytes’. Secondly, that in Crossmolina, the orphans are brought to church guarded. Thirdly, that the pews of our church are empty; and fourthly, with respect to the Penal Laws’. Methodically, carefully and robustly St George responded to Costello’s charges, in the process establishing a strong presence in word as already he had established in deed in the critically deteriorating conditions in Crossmolina and surrounding areas.
But as the crisis continued and people died of starvation or from cholera, the appetite for accusation and counter-accusation soon dissipated and reason prevailed. The dust soon settled on the religious controversy as Costello, St George and St George’s curate, Henry Knox led the local response to the growing numbers in distress. In particular, the St George and Knox families stepped into the breach and their selfless devotion to the starving people of Crossmolina and its hinterland was often all that stood between them and death.
When the Quaker, William Simms, visited Crossmolina town in 1847, he found Mrs St George, the rector’s wife, making soup but ‘no one else appeared to be doing anything in the place which contains 2,000 inhabitants, one-half of whom are in a state of desperate want’. When Richard Webb, a Quaker, called on the St Georges in May 1847, he found the soup kitchen ‘in constant operation’ with people flocking ‘from all parts of that populous and afflicted district’. St George and his family, he reported, were ‘indefatigable in their efforts for the relief of distress’. There were at one time seven soup kitchens operating in Crossmolina and that number, Tony Donohoe wrote, ‘was necessary to attend to upwards of a thousand starving people’.
In Kilfian, St George’s curate, Henry Knox and his wife (St George’s daughter) fed 300 families and 300 beggars a day at their family home. Day after day, seven soup kitchens were surrounded by ‘tottering skeletons’ during the terrible spring of 1847.
In response, Costello wrote to the Quakers praising the work of Protestant clergy and their families and St George was generous in reciprocating. Early in 1848, he wrote to the vice-Guardians of the Ballina Union: ‘When the Relief Committee was in existence, the only person who was willing to assist me or join in the application was the Roman Catholic clergyman, Reverend Mr Costello.'
During the Famine years, Costello played a huge part in the work of the Relief Committee. In particular, he developed a close working relationship with Major Mervyn Pratt, landlord at Enniscoe, working with him on the Crossmolina Relief Committee, gathering funds, converting the funds into food and distributing it to relieve the terrible distress. Tony Donohoe wrote: ‘The evidence is there to be read in the letters to the Chief Secretary, the Mansion House Committee, the Quaker records and other agencies, signed by both these men’.
The history of Enniscoe, from ancient times had a lively narrative through succeeding centuries. After 1798, Colonel George Jackson was made Military Governor of Crossmolina and in 1834 a descendant, Madeline, married her cousin, Mervyn Pratt of Cabra Castle, Co Cavan. The Pratts struggled in the courts to establish Madeline’s claim to her inheritance – expending two-thirds of the estate in the process – and eventually moved into Enniscoe in 1836.
Mervyn Pratt’s reputation as a responsible landlord preceded the Famine years. In February 1844, the commented favourably on his tenants’ attachment to Pratt as ‘a most generous and indulgent landlord’, and instanced the fact that they had conveyed 30 tons of his coal from Ballina quay transporting it by cart to Enniscoe.
Pratt, never known to have evicted a tenant for non-payment of rent during the Famine years, had a reputation for his active concern for his tenants and those in extreme distress in the Crossmolina area. It seems that Pratt established the first soup kitchen in Enniscoe in 1846 and later, as chairman of the Crossmolina Relief Committee, which was set up on October 17, 1846, he established another soup kitchen in Crossmolina as well as supporting yet another soup kitchen in neighbouring Moygownagh.
Pratt’s philanthropic spirit was all the more commendable in that, at the time, he was himself under financial pressure due to legal cases relating to his estate. In 1848, an indication of the financial pressure he was under was the auction that took place in June of that year. Little wonder that in the same year proceedings were taken against Pratt for defaulting as a ratepayer. The sum outstanding was £117.
But because Pratt had embarked on an extensive project of draining the land and building roads, he was better placed than others to take his responsibilities seriously when the Famine began to bite. His son, Joseph, followed in his father’s footsteps and it is an indication of the goodwill their philanthropy engendered that the Pratt reputation endured and purchased community support that meant the Pratts and Enniscoe were untouched through the political strife of the early twentieth century.
In September 1846, George Vaughan Jackson warned the Chief Secretary that there were but fifteen tons of oaten meal in Ballina, none in Crossmolina (and other areas) and ‘no other kind of food available for the population’, and it was not until January that a constabulary report indicated that the Ballina depot was open and that Crossmolina could ‘obtain there any meal which their funds could purchase’.
During that time, on December 29, 1846, a report to the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends estimated the parish of Crossmolina as having ‘20,000 inhabitants, one-half of whom are in a state of destitution. The village of Crossmolina contains 2,000 inhabitants, one-half of whom are in a state of desperate want’. A few years later, possibly around 1850, a letter written by Costello gives alternative figures as well as a graphic account of the ongoing desperate situation in Crossmolina:
The famine situation was so dire that the building of the new church in Crossmolina, initiated by Costello in 1844, had to be put on hold and was eventually only completed in 1860.
