by John Cunningham  

Editor's Note

Introduction

       Many great tomes have been written on the topic of emigration, books as thick as doorsteps, on emigration to Canada, the United States, Australia, Presbyterian emigration, Catholic emigration, Ulster Scots emigration, and every conceivable related theme.  With all this material down on paper it is obvious that I can only give general overview and some thoughts on this topic in the time available this morning.       

        Emigration is one of the great emotional issues in Irish historu, and it tends to have a very negative image.  People are generally seen as being forced to move from an idealised Ireland where everyone was happy and gay (meaning happy) and where roses grew around the door of the little white-washed cottage, and made to seek their fortune as exiles in a foreign land.

       Many of our songs and ballads seem to confirm this image.  However, even a cursory examination of the realities of emigration shows that while there is some truth in this rosy view of the process of emigration (in that it blames someone else for our having to emigrate) it is in general far removed from the reality.

       One of the commonest forms of Irish migration was that called chain migration, where some of the family went abroad and then, in dribs and drabs, the rest of the family were brought out as fast as money could be saved and sent home.  I recently heard of a reunion dinner dance in Braidwood in Australia, where over 400 people gatheredwhose common bond was that their ancestors had all emigrated, or in some cases been deported, to that country.

        They had all come from the vicinity of Pettigo, County Donegal, and adjoining County Fermanagh. Their common bond was dear old Ireland, but there were no resolutions passed asking to be sent back or taken back to Ireland or to the rushy fields of Pettigo. Whatever the hardships their ancestors had to endure getting to Australia, there was no rush to come back again to Ireland, apart from perhaps a sentimental visit to the ruins of the old homestead.         

        One interesting pairing there was that of the descendants of a Gallagher family who had been transported to Australia in 1849 for attacking a McCaffrey family who had taken their farm from the local landlord after they had been evicted for non-payment of rent.  Later the McCaffreys emigrated, and generations later the families sat side by side in Australia, with the old row consigned to the mists of time.  In a similar vein, I have a brother Mike in Calgary, Canada, who has spent more than thirty years of his life there. I asked him once why he didn’t come back and settle back again in Fermanagh. 

       Despite the emotional pull of home, the reality was that his children had grown up in Canada and thought of themselves as Canadians; he liked his American football and ice hockey on television.  He told me that the only time he was homesick in the Canadian year was when the sprig thaw came, the ice melted on the rivers, leaves appeared on the trees and grass began to peep through the snow.  Then for these two weeks he thought of Ireland and of coming home, but he and I both know he will end his days in Canada.       

        On the surface at least, it seems simple to judge the impact of emigration on our community by looking at the countryside around us.  Although they are getting scarcer or at least less visible, there was a time when any expanze of Irish countryside showed numerous ruined houses with thatch roof fallen inand lying open to the sky.  The families of these little farms had died out, migrated to another part of our country, or emigrated abroad.  They had left leaving simingly little to record their passing, only the mute walls of their homes.

        The greenery of afforestation has swallowed up many of these ruins, while others have succumbed to the JCB (a brand-name of construction machine) and their rubble used in roadmaking or cleared away to make a sire for a new house.  As the years go on, the visible evidence of emigration and depopulation gets less and less.

        But the little houses are not the only visual evidence of a missing population.  There are the empty county schools and halls, the derleict little country shops, the unsused roadside wells and the autumn hazelnuts hanging unplucked across the country roads which all tell of the population now long gone.

        But there is evidence of where these people went, how they got there, and how they are doing today.  All sorts of emigration records survive despite the ravages of the years.  Amazingly quickly in this computer age more and more of it can be rapidly accessed. The use of the Internet and personal computer has transformed genealogy and emigration studies.  Lookups of Griffith’s Valuation of Fermanagh in 1862 can now be done from a CD in one’s own living room where once it took a day trip to Belfast or Dublin.

The Push and the Pull     

      Let us look at the two chief models of emigration: the “push model”and the “pull model."  We often tend to think of emigration in rather emotional terms.  If we take all the Irish emigration songs at their face value, it was a fear-filled, heartbreaking, tearful process, and no doubt for many it was.  People who were evicted, people who fled to escape poverty or religious persecution represent the “push” model of emigration -- those who emigrated because they had to.    

      On the other hand there is another less prominently noticed emigration model, the “pull” model -- that of people who were drawn or attracted from Ireland.  This attraction to emigrate could be stimulated by many things -- the promise of a section of land (640 acres in Kansas for free or ridiculously cheap) was a colossal attraction for an Irish farmer on ten or twenty acres.  Stories of fabulous wages abroad lured young men and women who slaved on the family farm year after year and seldom had the price of a drink or were able to pay their way into a dance.       

       The spirit of adventure or the simple wish to escape the stifling effect of the religious and moral regime in Ireland in the aftermath of the Great Famine were also great incentives to go abroad. Most young people are of an adventurous disposition. The sticks and stones and hard places of life have not yet taught them the caution that most people acquire as they grow older.  A dry comment I read somewhere recently suggested that if one had a problem they should ask a young person -- while they still knew everything. But the lure of adventure was hard to resist, especially when the chances of making one’s fortune at home in Ireland were so tiny, if not entirely nonexistent.

God’s Punishment        

        All religious bodies in Ireland took advantage of the Great Famine to strengthen the campaign against sin. They pinned the blame for the famine on the people themselves, or rather, on their sinfulness.  If they had not been living such bad and immoral lives (so ran the teaching), God would not have visited such a terrible famine upon them.  This theme has been used countless times by organised religion across all civilisations down through the centuries.  To escape another disastrous famine the people were told that they had to adhere to their religious beliefs more strongly, to be more prayerful, less promiscuous, to pray more, to drink less, etc.       

        It was all good staunch moral teaching, but allied to the strictness of Victorian values in England and Ireland it combined to pull a cloud of gloom over the whole of society.  Thou Shalt Not -- do nearly anything, except pray!  Emigration, especially for the young, was one way of getting out from under this gloomy atmosphere.  In England or America you could lie in your bed on a Sunday if you so desired and not be the talk of the parish or subject to a stern visit by the priest or minister.        

        You could go on a date with a boyfriend without being similarly the subject of local gossip or the intrusive attention of the local community.  The moral and religious finger-pointers ruled Irish society.   The country filled up with old spinsters and bachelors who neever had the nerve to run the local social gauntlet of gossip, teasing, and mocking laughter at their expense.   As an illustration of the survival and strength of this social control mechanism in Ireland I relate the following:

        About thirty years ago I suggested to an old couple I knew who had no car that I would take them out for a trip on a Sunday evening to places they had not been to for about fifty years.  They lived in a long stony lane, and to make things easier for me they said they would be waiting for me at the end of the lane.  I drove up and down the road looking for them, but as far as I could see they were not there.        

        Finally I spotted them--or rather, I spotted two heads peeking just above the heather in a field alongside the road.  They were, at the age of about seventy, lying in the long heather so as not to be noticed or talked about by their neighbours -- like two wary grouse they peered above the vegetation until they were sure it was me and then they could come out.  These people had grown up at the turn of the century and still hadn’t shaken off the feeling that local society was watching their every move.  Getting away from this atmosphere was surely a powerful incentive to emigrate.

The Great Famine

        Emigration from Ireland had been going on long before the Great Famine of 1845 to 1850.  The cod fishing industry of Newfoundland was backboned by Irishmen from Wateford and Wexford from the early part of the 18th century, and Ulster Scots frontiersmen were prominent in the early settlement of the United States and Canada.  But the Famine is still seen as the geat watershed of Irish emigration.       

        If we look at County Fermanagh, we see that the population according to the 1841 census was 156,481.  In 1851 it was 116,047.  This is a decline of 25 per cent and amounts to 40,434 persons missing, either through death, migration, or emigration.  This is a massive decline, and moreover, one that this County has never recovered from.  The exodus set in motion by the Famine has never really halted, and today Fermanagh has only about one third of the population it had in 1841.        

        Of the eight baronies in County Fermanagh, that of Magheraboy (which runs from Enniskillen toward the west, and takes in the villages of Derrygonnelly, Grrison, and Belcoo) was worst affected, losing 31 per cent of its population.  Of the other baronies, Clanawley and Clankelly lost about thirty percent each, while the nearby Barony of Coole in the eastern end of the County lost about 28 per cent of its population.         

         The Barony of Lurg in the west (which includes the villages of Kesh, Ederney, and Lack) declined in population by 27 per cent. Those “least” affected were the Baronies of Magherasteffany, Knockninny, and Tirkennedy, which declined by 22 percent, 20 per cent, and 13 per cent, respectively.   Tirkennedy, which suffered the least decline includes Enniskillen, the county town and Tempo, but this small decline here may reflect migration from other parts of the county into Enniskillen, as well as the population of the workhouse, the largest in the county.       

        In some individual townlands the percentage of population decline was even greater than this, but there is no way of telling whether or not this was due to famine, emigration, or the movement of people to other areas.   The village of Belleek grew in numbers during the famine, as also did the village of Lack, suggesting that people had moved there from townlands nearby. This was probably on account of food being given out in the villages -- the name Boiler House Lane in Lack definitely indicates this.         Other townlands grew on account of evicted people moving into them. 

         Taking a look at some of the townlands in the Belcoo area from the 1841 and1851 census figures, we see something of the famine in this area and its effects.  We have no way of knowing if the population changes we see were the result of death, migration, or emigration.   For example Aughlish, which went from 53 persons in 1841 to 33 ten years later; Belcoo East, from 66 people to 62; Belcoo West declined from 64 to 44 -- a loss of almost one third of the population of the townland in that decade.  And Carneyhill -- from 72 to 45, again a loss of about one third.   Belnaleck, a catastrophic loss of 61 people, as it declined from 180 to 119 -- again a loss of about one third of its population.   

        Unfortunately, the detailed census sheets for these dates have been destroyed.   Some were burned in the Four Courts fire in Dublin in 1922, but the vast majority [of Irish census records] were pulped by the authorities to make new paper, thus depriving us of unimaginable detail about our ancestors for most of the 1800s.  It used to be thought that it was very difficult if not impossible to find documentary evidence relating to genealogy and the study of emigration, but happily this is no longer true.        

         There are major institutions in Ireland and overseas who can now help you to trace your ancestors with a degree of success undreamed of twenty or thirty years ago. 

        In Ireland, we have the Northern Ireland Public Records Office in Belfast (PRONI) and its southern counterpart, the National Archives, in Dublin.  Here you can consult almost all the major sources such as the Tithe Appoltment Books of the 1820s and 1830s; Griffith’s Valuation (1862) for County Fermanagh; the 1901 and 1911 Censuses for Ireland (the 1911 available only in Dublin); passenger lists for emigrant ships; emigrant letters which survive from this period; those Estate Records which survive, listing tenants and their rental payments, church records of all denominations in Ireland; and all sorts of other clues as to our past, from lists of convicts transported to workhouse admission books which tell of those who sought refuge within their walls during the Great Famine.   

         These institutions have an enormous range of records, but county Heritage Centres and libraries now have many of these sources, the Ulster Folk Park in Omagh has a very large database of emigrants and their destinations, and don’t forget our own Fermanagh County Library, which is on a par with the best in Ireland.  Emigrants have been the economic lifeblood of many a family at home in Ireland in the last 150 years.  In 1950, the weekly letter with ten shillings or a pound in it kept the wolf from the door of many a house, and bigger amounts helped pay for a new cow when the old one died or for a secondhand tractor or a suitably grand wedding for a favoured neice or nephew.      

       A big legacy from abroad could put a humble farmer into the superfarmer category and allow him to progress from a donkey and creels to a Ford motorcar without going throught the stages of donkey and cart and horse and cart which normally lay in between. The local graveyard might suddenly have the biggest and best headstone erected.  It said that it was to commemorate someone’s dear departed mother and father, but it also said “Haven’t we done well as immigrants in America?” because their address was usually at the bottom.

After the Famine

        The two greatest effects of the famine and emigration in Ireland were in relation to land and to marriage.  Before the famine a social system called “run away” had a disastrous effect on the country. Young people could marry almost as soon as they wished.  The young couple only had to “run away” to a neighbor’s house and the girl had to be married before she could return to her parents’ house.

         Neighbours gathered in and a dance was held and nothing untoward happened at all, but the couple had to be married.  They were given a plot of land, probably subdivided from the existing farm and the locals threw up a cabin for them.  In this way they set off into married life with little or no money.  It was a recipe for disaster and disaster frequently happened.         

         The famine wiped out a great many of this cottier class in Ireland -- those having less than five acres of land.  After the famine the old practice of marrying young and subdividing the land ceased entirely.   The eldest son got the farm and did not marry until he was nearly forty.  The rest of the family could stay and work on the farm for their keep.  The main alternative was emigration.       

         The subdividing of farms was forbidden after the famine.  A new agricultural movement had spread across the country in what was known as the squaring of the land.  Before this time, the people had generally lived in little clahans or groups of houses and they held a patchwork of little fields and plots all around.  There were constant rows about pathways and boundaries and rights of way which usually broke out on fair day evenings when the men (and often the women) fought with sticks and stones.

        To stop this, the landlords squared out the land in little farms as we see them today, with a house in the middle of a group of fields. This farm was not allowed to be subdivided and gives us the basic Irish landscape which we see today and which most people do not realize is less than two hundred years old.  But a talk on emigration would not be complete without a discussion of the role of the American parcel in the lives of those of us who remember them.   

        After the last war (WWII) when rationing was still in force Americans were encouraged to send parcels of food and clothing to the relatives back here.  They usually arrived near Christmas, but could come joyfully and unexpectedly at any time of the year, and I think they lasted until the mid 1950s.  Aladdin never opened his cave with half the excitement and expectancy with which we ceremoniously opened our American parcels.  Good judges of character like my mother managed to get lots of work out of us first by saying that the parcel would not be opened until the byre was cleaned, the turf and water brought in, and the dishes washed.

        But in a matter of minutes every possible chore was done and we all sat around in anticipation.  I enjoyed the American comic strips that my uncle sent, there was coffee and sweets, what our American cousins called candies.  One person I talked to remembers a lump of bacon which had miraculously not gone bad during the journey of two weeks.  And then there were the clothes.  I know the American hears were in the right place, but it would have taken a small army to put me in a pair of canary yellow pants and send me to school!       

         Some years after the parcels ceased my mother was taken on a trip to America where she met many of those who had contributed to our childhood pleasure.  My mother had been reared on a diet of Hollywood America and she was a bit shocked to find that most of her relatives lived in little terrace houses in big, intimidating dirty cities like Philadelphia.  Her verdict when she came back from America was, “Do you know, there was some of them we should have been sending parcels to!”     

       In many ways it wasn’t what was in the parcels but the surprise of their arrival and the magic of imagining what might be in them. God be good to those who sent them. Down the last century and a half, our emigrants have poured uncountable millions back into Ireland.  In Ireland during its early days of independence, just like Pakistan and other Third World countries today, the entire economy depended on money sent home by emigrants.         

        I know we are more than remiss in failing to give this due recognition to our emigrant relatives.  The fabric of home and hearth was held together by our emigrants’ money and perhaps of all the impacts of emigration on our communities, that is the biggest impact of all.