THE winding-down of the peculiarly low-key State commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Famine with an even more peculiar "celebration" event in Millstreet sees no diminution in the number of publications relating to the Famine coming into the book shops.
The effects of the Great Hunger in Connemara and East Tyrone are dealt with in two new publications: Patient Endurance - The Great Famine in Connemara, by Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill (Connemara Girl Publications, Pounds 9.95) and The Bell - Journal of the Stewartstown and District Local History Society (Pounds 4).
Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill is an accomplished historian who has already written two previous works on the Clifden region and her undoubted knowledge of and affinity with Connemara enhances this current study of the Famine years in the west of Ireland. It is a scholarly work whose factual records and statistics are leavened by searing stories of suffering and starvation. Members of the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, visiting Clifden, were told: (The people) are dying like dogs. One woman who had crawled the previous night into the outhouse had been found the next morning, partly eaten by dogs.
The book# was launched by the (now former) Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht Michael D. Higgins, who referred to some of the stories behind the statistics, such as that of Honor Flaherty, accused by her husband of cannibalism, or Maitin Melia, accused of burying his sister alive so as not to lose another day's rations by coming again to bury her when she died. The Minister should have gone to Millstreet and read those stories again to the young people gathered there it would have helped to redress the glaring impropriety of "celebrating" such tragedies.
The sixth issue of The Bell contains a number of articles an the Famine as it affected the Cookstown Poor Law Union in Co Tyrone. The northern newspapers referred to the crisis as "the Connaught famine", and while the picture in Co Tyrone differs only in degree from those in Clifden or Skibbereen, the constants were there in the form of starvation, fever, poverty and emigration. Again, it was the poor who suffered most; profits and small fortunes were made by others trading in foodstuffs. This first telling of the story of the Famine in the Cookstown area is a meritorious one. Cookstown is to remember its local, holocaust by erecting a memorial on the site of the paupers' grave.
As interest in the Famine commemoration wanes, the focus of attention is shifting towards the bicentenary of the 1798 rising next year. Appropriately, books on 98 in Wexford and Down/Antrim have already appeared. A little book on Dublin is the next to be noticed. It is Dublin in 1798 - Three Illustrated Walks, by Den is Carroll with illustrations by Orla Davin (South Hill Communications, Pounds 3). The attractive cover, showing Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy against a background, of Tailors Hall, provides in a short quotation the raison d'etre for the itineraries: "The people at the centre of the stirring events of 1798, bath United Irishmen and their enemies, were well known to each other. They lived in that area, a mile square, at the very centre of Dublin City."
The commentary for the walks is informative, succinct and laden with fascinating sidelights: at 3 College Green (then Daly's New Rooms) the infamous Buck English, having shot a waiter, "put the man on the bill for Pounds 50". 52 of Dublin's 500 drinking parlours were in Thomas Street Croppies' Acre, which with grim insensitivity was made a football pitch, holds the remains of Matthew Tone and Bartholomew Teeling - surely a spot calling for a suitable commemorative garden. The illustrations are precise though small, and the centre-pages map requires a few corrections. Walking the three routes mentioned should provide a stimulating and beneficial exercise.
Riocht na Midhe, Records of Meath Archaeological and Historical Society, Vol. IX, No. 3 (no price given), maintains the usual high standards set by editor Seamus Mac Gabhann and includes among its varied contents an intriguing article on the influence of freemasonry in Meath and Westmeath in the 18th century. "Many Masonic lodges were little more than meeting places for the prescribed United Irishmen," writes the author, Larry Conlon. Subsequently, freemasonry lost its Republican ethos and idealism as it became dominated by the gentry and nobility ...
The history of a carpet factory might not seem the most exciting subject for a book, yet Hidden in the Pile - Abbeyleix Carpet Factory 1904-12, by Mairead M. Johnston (Ahbeyleix Heritage Co. and Leinster Express, Pounds 14.95), manages to be bath an interesting and valuable record of the world- famed carpet industry in Abbeyleix which supplied floor coverings to big houses and clubs in Ireland, England, Europe and the US - and also far the ill-fated Titanic and its sister ship the Olympic. Abbeyleix carpets owed their fame and success to an invention, (the latch-hook) by Robert T. Flower, eighth Earl of Ashbrook, and to Ivo, Viscount de Vesei, who bought Flower's business and expanded it, using the revolutionary tool which came with the licence. The book is profusely illustrated. though only a few of the designs are in colour.
Residents of Dublin 4 may he interested in the village origins of Donnybrook as recorded by local poet and mechanic Richard Lattimore in his The Real Donnybrook (Kamac Publications. Pounds 4.95). This is a house-by- house, character-by-character account of life in the "Brook" in the 1950s, "when the horse was being replaced by the car and guards controlled traffic along O'Connell Street using white gloves as indicators". A pleasant trip down memory lane in the company of a talented story-teller.
Another author proud of his roots is M.F. O Canchuir, whose O'Conor Corcomroe - A Bilingual History (published by the author, Pounds 10) is probably as complete a record of the many O Conar/O'Connar/Connors clans as has yet been compiled. The book, in two sections (Irish and English) and with many illustrations, ranges from 80 BC to comparatively modern times and takes in the O Conors of Clare, Kerry, Sligo, Oriel, Wexford and other regions in a compilation of possibly every documentary and folkloric source available. The author uses and translates the work of such eminent historians as James Frost, Donnchadh O Corrain and Sean O hOgain and quotes extensively from publications of The Irish Texts Society, diocesan journals and other genealogical sources. The result should satisfy anyone of the name seeking information on this widespread family.