Voices out of the whirlwind

THESE collections of folk-historical lore of the Great Famine are composed of recollections recorded mainly in the 1940s by the then Irish Folklore Commission.

Poirteir's introductory essay in the English-language volume (which appeared prior to the Irish-language one) could serve as recommended reading material for any student of history and folklore as well as for the local historian. He sums up most of the main points concerning the use of oral history and folklore material as historical source material - its value and its limitations.

Poirteir criticises both revisionist and nationalist-oriented historians for ignoring folklore and oral history material, in general, and concerning the Famine, in particular. He surmises that historians have done so in the case of the Famine possibly because there is such a large volume of documentary material from the period.

However, Poirteir points out that there is a major gap in the documentary knowledge of the Famine period. This gap arises because little or none of the documentary sources come from the perspective of the ordinary people from those who suffered most in the Famine - who had little opportunity of leaving a written testament and indeed were often illiterate and Irish-speaking primarily. The fact that much of the oral memory of the Famine has been recorded in Irish may have dissuaded researchers, but Poirteir points out that much of the oral material concerning the Famine is in fact in English, as one of these volumes demonstrates.

Poirteir asks whether the emotional nature of much of the oral material made it unattractive to academic historians who aim for a dispassionate view of things, but he makes the point that the glossing over of the human suffering of the Famine has been a disservice to both the victims of the calamity and to the writing of history itself. In any event, Poirteir claims that a close examination of the folk material might well disappoint the nationalist propagandist as much as it might pleasantly surprise the revisionist . . . today's populist images of the callousness and meanness of the British government, in the person of Queen Victoria and her fabled fiver, or of food-laden ships exporting much-needed food . . . rarely play a part in the thousands of traditions that were passed on orally within the post-Famine communities themselves". The emphasis in the oral accounts is almost entirely on the local situation and local personalities.

One of the prime sources of value of these books is the fact that they make archival material available. In fact, taken together, the two volumes comprise one of the largest published collections of folklore and oral history from Ireland. However, most of the pieces are relatively short and make for better research or broadcasting material rather than for a gripping, flowing read. Because very few of the pieces were recorded at first-hand from actual survivors of the Famine, but rather some 90 to 100 years alter the event, the accounts do not generally compare in terms of descriptive horror with accounts of contemporaries off other catastrophes in modern history such as those of certain participants in the world wars or of survivors of the extermination camps.

Indeed, several Famine accounts are stereotyped legends rather than historical memories. What has been described as a detached attitude" in accounts of the Famine has also been attributed to an inability to articulate the magnitude of the disaster or to suppression of traumatic memory and experience. This type of suppression has also been noted with regard to survivors of the Holocaust.

However, it is likely, as Poirteir claims, that the echoes of those silenced voices which we have in folk memory are the nearest we can get to the experience of the poor of the 1840s and 1850s".