FATHER
LIAM SAYS: In March 1847 – when Ireland was devastated by famine
resulting from the repeated failure of the potato crop due to blight – Pope
Pius IX took the unprecedented step of issuing a letter urging Catholics around
the world to help the victims. He asked that they ‘assist the Irish who are now
tormented by hunger and worn out by pestilence’. He contributed £220 and authorised the
preaching of sermons in Rome that raised more than that sum. One of the acts most remembered in Ireland
from this time is the contribution of $170 made by the Choctaw Indians of Ohio,
poverty-stricken themselves. The
twenty-four year old Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Abdul Medjid Khan, gave
£1,000. He offered to give £10,000 but
was advised by the British Ambassador not to upstage Queen Victoria. The whole of the island of Ireland was then
part of Britain.
Victoria contributed £2,500 and members of her
family gave £3,700. She made two appeals
which were read in Anglican churches in December 1846 and in May 1847. The first raised about £170,000 and the later
one £30,000. These sums were channelled
largely through the British Association for the Relief of Distress in Ireland
and the Highlands of Scotland which was founded by the Jewish banker Lionel de
Rothschild in January 1847. It raised
£600,000 and spent most of it in Ireland.
That would be equivalent to about sixty million pounds today. Some of this money raised by the British
Relief Association helped the victims of famine in the Highlands who also
suffered the loss of their potato crop.
Rothschild contributed more from his own funds than
did all the Anglo-Irish landlords combined,
In 1850 a Dublin newspaper reported (and nobody contradicted the report)
that he and his family contributed ‘a sum far beyond the joint contributions of
the Devonshire’s, the Hereford’s, Lansdowne’s, Fitzwilliam’s and Herbert’s who
annually drew so many times that amount from their Irish estates.’ As a result of Rothschild’s organisation, the
paddle-schooner HMS Scourge swiftly landed ninety-six tons of food at Schull in
West Cork in February 1847, one of very many such voyages of mercy.
In the same month the United States Congress
authorised the Secretary of the Navy, John Mason, to have two sloops, The
Jamestown and The Macedonian stripped of their armaments and deployed to
transport provisions to Ireland – the only time that the U.S lent ships to
civilians. In March 1847 – at the same
time as the Pope’s letter – The Jamestown arrived in Cork with eight hundred
tons of food provided by the people of Massachusetts. The Macedonian followed in July. The Captain of The Jamestown, George de Kay,
who had been instrumental in obtaining the ships, paid the cost of the return
trip, about £4,000. More than one
hundred other cargoes of food also came from the United States. Money for Ireland was also collected in
Mexico, Argentina, Russia and in Canada, Australia, India and the West Indies.
The British Government of the day was, by contrast,
singularly unwilling to help – largely because of the economic theories then
adhered to. But individuals in Great
Britain were nobly generous. An Irish
historian, A M Sullivan, writing thirty years later records that: ‘from every
considerable town in England there poured subscriptions, amounting in aggregate
to hundreds of thousands of pounds.’
The number of destitute Irish, fleeing the famine,
who arrived in British ports, would have been immense. In mid 1846 Liverpool, which had a settled
population of about twenty-five thousand, had over one hundred thousand people
who were either in transit to North America or seeking shelter in England. In Liverpool ten Catholic priests died as a
result of ministering to these destitute people, many of whom were suffering
from famine fever. These priests died
between March and September 1847. They
were all English, three of whom were Benedictines. All are commemorated on a memorial cross at
St Patrick’s Church, Park Place erected in 1898.
The only other recorded clergyman in Liverpool to
die of Typhus at this time was the Unitarian, Revd. John Jones, who died on 23rd
June 1847. Ten doctors employed by
Liverpool’s Poor Law Guardians, together with nurses, officials and policemen
also died of the dreaded famine fever.
In the overcrowded and bustling port town there would have been little
welcome for the destitute arrivals who sought sanctuary in housing that had
already been condemned. Such airless and
lightless shelter was a breeding ground for disease. Many of them had made their way, with only
the clothes they wore, overland from the west coast counties of Ireland to
Dublin from where they sailed to England.
Many false promises had been made to them by their landlords, keen to
get rid of them. They were often offered
positions and prospects in the English properties of their Anglo-Irish
landlords – but it was only promises.
