The light generated by this magisterial study extends far beyond Kerry. Gerard Lyne's deep roots in the Lauragh area help to elevate his book above dreary chronicle to sparkling social history. But what really informs it is the author's mastery of a vast array of primary and secondary sources.
This is a work of mature scholarship. Like Ciaran O Murchadha's recent monograph on the Famine in Clare (Clasp Press), Lyne's book transcends local studies. Among its riches is a delineation of the diaspora in microcosm.
The reader is taken first, with lingering topographical description, on a tour of the estate. One is then introduced to the Lansdownes, absentee landlords who devoted their energies to expanding the British empire and resisting Irish self-government.
The population of their Kerry estate had declined by almost a third between 1841-51. This did not satisfy William Steuart Trench, who was an ardent Malthusian when he arrived from Monaghan to take up the Lansdowne agency. He saw assisted emigration as "the only means of saving the estate from bankruptcy", and of "averting the most calamitous scenes of suffering, hunger and starvation".
During the struggle for survival in the harsh economic climate of the early 1850s, nearly 4,000 paupers were dispatched to join "the scattered debris of the Irish nation" in New York. Farm consolidation was achieved through mass emigration and human suffering. In 1850-51 alone, the number of tenants was reduced from 1,640 to 1,105. The author observes percipiently: "If the Famine spelt catastrophe for the great majority of the rural population, it also provided new opportunities for survivors and the strong." Attitudes hardened under the stress of famine.
Steuart Trench decided that for the future a rigorous system of population control should be imposed. No tenant, or son or daughter of a tenant, could marry without his permission. He was determined to stop the subdivision of holdings through the enforcement of iron rules, such as one forbidding hospitality.
The author agrees that compared to contemporary European conditions of tenure those of Irish tenants were not particularly onerous. Be this as it may, to borrow his colourful phrase, Trench kept the threat of eviction "permanently suspended over the heads of a chronically anxious and demoralised tenantry", reducing them to serfdom.
Meticulously fair, Lyne does justice to the complexities of the autocratic Trench, who was capable of benevolence. With a characteristic twinkle in his eye, he provides pen-pictures of a range of memorable figures: Trench's son, "Master Towney", who joined the Plymouth Brethren; their adversary, Fr John O'Sullivan, who "dearly loved a lord"; Edmund Fitzmaurice Donnelly, who championed the tenants and opposed hunting the wren; Peter McSwiney, "a litigious, fire-eating squireen"; and the author's own middlemen forebears "of the old stock".
Historiography and history rhymed for Lyne. One of his valued collaborators was Prof Tyler Anbinder, who had completed a study of the Lansdowne emigrants in New York. As a result, we are given an insight into their subsequent lives in the Five Points ghetto.
Lyne concludes that Steuart Trench purchased the silence of local Catholic clergy by rent reductions and other favours. While the priests had ministered to their flocks in time of famine and pestilence, it would appear that some of them at least succumbed to avarice, "arising perhaps from poverty". Furthermore, in the case of the key clerical figure, Fr O'Sullivan, establishing a convent in Kenmare took precedence over social justice. Is this beautifully printed and illustrated book a trifle long? The author carries his learning so lightly, and tells the story of his native place with such panache, one is reluctant to suggest that some chapters could have done with judicious pruning. Moreover, even Homer nodded. Gladstone did not visit Kerry during his first premiership (p. 394), or when he made his sole sojourn in Ireland in 1877.
In an eloquent address at the launching of his magnum opus, Gerry Lyne acknowledged his National Library colleagues as a community of learning, and paid tribute to a grandfather who awakened his wonder about the past.
Brendan O Cathaoir is an Irish Times journalist and author. A paperback edition of his Famine Diary will be published shortly