Mary Kenny
The Hunger – RTÉ’s documentary on the Famine – certainly was a landmark achievement in television history, using resources with great skill. It was unsparing in some of its distressing detail – not flinching from mentioning incidents of cannibalism – and in attributing shocking behaviour to ordinary Irish people as well as to the British authorities, and the heartless evicting landlords. Lord Lucan sure was a stinker – evicting three hundred homesteads from his 60,000 acres in Co. Mayo.
People whose families benefited from slavery are asked to acknowledge their historical guilt, and make amends”
But Irish Catholics who survived, the experts claim, often grew ‘hard-hearted’, and denied others the charity and compassion they should have extended. It has long been a theme of that fine historian, Prof. Joe Lee, that the middleclass Irish benefited from the Famine, since the poor ‘spalpeens’ were cleared from the land.
People whose families benefited from slavery are asked to acknowledge their historical guilt, and make amends. Will those of us who are descendants of Famine survivors also be asked to account for our family’s record?
The Hunger made it clear that the poor were indeed the victims, and they carried their bitterness with them when they emigrated”
My maternal grandfather came from a farming family in east Co. Galway. These ‘yeomen farmers’ were exactly the people who Joe Lee has in mind as profiting from the land clearances.
When my mother asked her father about family memories of the Famine, he apparently replied: “Yes, it was very sad about the poor people.” The ‘poor people’ were the victims, but it was as if they weren’t really connected to respectable farmers.
The Hunger made it clear that the poor were indeed the victims, and they carried their bitterness with them when they emigrated. Understandably.
Judgements
And yet, I wonder if it’s fair to generalise about entire groups, and to pronounce judgements on whole classes. Prof. Kevin Whelan, who I greatly admire – his book Religion, Landscape and Settlement in Ireland is terrific – said that after the Famine “we became a very pious but not a religious people”. We changed, he said, from a natural spirituality into a nation of ‘craw-thumpers’ – a performative form of piety for the sake of display.
But most of us can also look back on family history and see sincere religious traditions. Even Gay Byrne’s interviews with various celebrities for his series The Meaning of Life illuminate a genuine religious tradition, often inherited through mothers and grandmothers. From Imelda May to Ronan Keating, younger people still held on to that thread.
The Hunger is brilliant, but it’s still not the last word on this terrible time, and its aftermath.
***
I interviewed the late Conrad Russell, direct descendent of Lord John Russell, the Whig Prime Minister between 1846 and 1852, and responsible for policies in Ireland. Conrad, last child of philosopher Bertrand Russell, was an academic historian and he admitted to me that his ancestor had been, regrettably (he said), profoundly anti-Catholic. And that this had played a part in his approach to Ireland.
***
A genius whose music rose above deaf ears
December 2020 was marked as 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth, considered to be the greatest of all musical composers.
Fifth Symphony
Everyone, surely, knows Beethoven’s famous Fifth Symphony. But when I was a rookie reporter, our News Editor used to say to us: “Remember, when Beethoven’s Fifth is played, somebody is hearing it for the first time.” This was a reminder to us not to assume that everything is familiar to everyone: but it was also a tribute to the symphony’s universal renown.
Beethoven had a difficult life: his father beat him brutally, and his mother died young, as did four of his siblings, in a family of seven. (He was baptised a Catholic.) He began to grow deaf in his late twenties – a dreadful blow for a musician.
The Fifth Symphony was disparaged when it was first played. The famous four-note introduction – ‘dah-dah-dah-dah’ – was considered an unacceptable innovation. Yet, once heard, it is unforgettable, and has proved adaptable to many variations and interpretations, including morse code.
Genius
Beethoven was blessed with genius, but he also worked ceaselessly – discarding draft after draft of compositions. Perhaps the disability of his deafness made him even more of a perfectionist.
In the 1960s, there was a celebrated debate on BBC between the formidable intellectual, Marghanita Laski, and a couple of doctors who were advocating abortion rights. “Would you permit an abortion to a woman in poor health, who had too many children, married to a cruel husband, living in reduced circumstances?” she asked. An ideal candidate, they agreed. “Then,” said this left-wing bluestocking, “you would just have killed Beethoven.”
Beethoven had a hard life and his late string quartets reflect that melancholy. But it was a life which left an imperishable legacy.
