Sights walking to our first stop of the day in Dublin:
The Famine Statues, designed and crafted by Dublin sculptor Rowan Gillespie, were presented to the City of Dublin in 1997. They commemorated the Great Irish Famine that lasted from 1845-1849. During the famine, approximately one million people died and so many more emigrated, the island's population fell by approximately a quarter! No event in history has had a more profound effect on Ireland and the worldwide Irish community than that of the Great Irish Famine.
Beginning in 1650, significant numbers of Irish emigrated to the US, many of whom were Protestants from Ulster in the northern part of the island. The Industrial Revolution drew many emigrants to British manufacturing cities around 1700. Half of all textile factories closed in Ireland by 1770 which forced many workers to look for employment across the Irish Sea. By 1800, a quarter of the Australian population were Irish convicts. The numbers of Irish leaving their homeland peaked during the famine years of the mid 19th century as the Irish sought a better life abroad.
In the ten years following the Great Famine, 1.5 million Irish emigrated to the US and a further 340,000 to my native Canada. In the 1800s, 60% of all immigrants to Canada were Irish. I know my father's mother's family were among those who made their way to eastern Canada. I had no idea that 50,000 Irish emigrated to Argentina to farm.
Hunger is a very emotional subject in Ireland where waves of dispossession have pushed people off the land they relied on to feed themselves. When the country went through periods of intense poverty such as during the Potato Famine, the need to travel to survive and find work was paramount.
At other times, it may simply have been that more interesting or better paid jobs lured them elsewhere. Women may have left in hope of meeting a husband but others left under pressure from families, often in disgrace.
Oppressive laws and social norms have also driven people away from Ireland over the centuries. When the Penal Laws were enacted after the Reformation, they penalized the practice of the Roman Catholic religion and imposed civil disabilities on Catholics in Ireland. They succeeded in their aim of breaking down the wealth and status of Catholics, so staying at home would have been intolerable to many.
Attempts to rebel against the regime led to forced emigration in the form of transportation to penal colonies. Even with the creation of the Irish state in 1922, not all children in the Republic felt equally cherished. Unmarried mothers and their children left or were sent abroad. Four thousand orphan girls were sent overseas because they were considered a burden on society. Petty thieves, caught for stealing no more than an apple to feed a loved one, faced deportation to the other side of the world.
Gay people struggled against harsh social prejudice as gay acts weren't decriminalized until 1993. In 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage.
Between 1852 and 1910, the museum reported that 5 million people left Ireland and 500,000 lost their homes - just staggering numbers. No other European country has ever lost so many people relative to its size. From 1851-1860, 100,000 Irish arrived in Australia to pursue their dreams in the Australia Gold Rush. In the 1950s, two out of every five young adults left Ireland. From the 1940s to the 1970s, nurses left in droves to join the National Health Service in Britain. So many left, too, to fight wars abroad that were not their own, they were called Flight of the Wild Geese!
Although the games associated with the GAA, primarily hurling and Gaelic football, have historically been played in other countries by Irish-born immigrants, this has started to change recently as Gaelic games prove their worth even without the cultural history.
In time, some of these forms were adapted and became part of popular entertainment on the American stage. The early 20th century arrival of sound recordings, radio and movies brought Irish talent to even bigger audiences. The Irish fiddle helped contribute to the growth of bluegrass music. Irish step dancing is now taught as far away as Israel and China of all places! I never had a clue that step dancing joined with African American moves to become tap dance, did you?
Irish music had a considerable influence in the development of music in the US because the music skills they and others brought combined with existing forms to create American folk music. Fiddle players with their repertoire of dance tunes made the biggest impression. The transition from the fiddle neck to the finger board of the banjo wasn't difficult for a musician to make and this allowed many fiddlers to adapt to the banjo when it gained in popularity. Those two instruments became particularly associated with the new American music known as Appalachian and 'old time music' which laid the foundations for Country and Western.
Many performers with no Irish heritage have been influenced by Irish songs. Versions of Irish tunes have been recorded by Johnny Cash, Louis Armstrong, and Bob Dylan. During the mid 1990s, the Irish dance show Riverdance developed modern forms of Irish dance and music for global audiences. Both the leading female and male dancing parts, played by Jean Butler and Michael Flatley, were American born.
Eating and Drinking: Soda bread with salt butter is one of the main tastes of home for many emigrants. In our almost ten days here on the island, the only 'brown bread' we've seen so far at our B&Bs has been soda bread, not the whole wheat bread we're used to at home.
For many Americans, the quintessential Irish meal is corned beef and cabbage traditionally eaten on St. Patrick's Day. Few know that the dish is almost unheard of back in the old country, though! One thing we have seen on Irish menus is bacon and cabbage - no thanks!
If you travel anywhere, you're sure to see an Irish pub somewhere as they're all over the world. They're considered an unofficial embassy which give people who aren't Irish a taste of Ireland and a fond memory of the country of those who are! Here's a good trivia bit for all you trivia buffs: O'Neill's is the most common pub name with more than 3,000 Irish pubs worldwide! Guinness beer, Steven's newest favorite beverage, is made right here in Ireland, of course. Just yesterday, we toured Jameson's distillery, the biggest selling whisky in the world, and sampled some of its products, too. What a tough time we're having, huh! More on Jameson's in a later post!
Shanghai if only at its Disneyland Castle!
The Famine Statues, designed and crafted by Dublin sculptor Rowan Gillespie, were presented to the City of Dublin in 1997. They commemorated the Great Irish Famine that lasted from 1845-1849. During the famine, approximately one million people died and so many more emigrated, the island's population fell by approximately a quarter! No event in history has had a more profound effect on Ireland and the worldwide Irish community than that of the Great Irish Famine.
The cause of the famine was blamed on a potato disease commonly known as potato blight. Although blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland, where one third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food, was made much worse by a host of political, social and economic factors which remain the subject of historical debate.
Gillespie's gut wrenching statues told of the heartbreak in such a way I wondered if he had relatives that died in the famine or had to leave their home as a result. How sad, though, it took well over 100 years for such a significant event in the country's history to be recognized with the public memorial.
Right across the street was Epic: The Irish Emigration Museum that told the story of the Irish diaspora and how this small island had had a huge impact on the world. It was news to me that more people of Irish descent live abroad than live in Ireland! Did you know that Milwaukee, Wisconsin, of all places has the largest celebration of Irish culture in the world with 250 acts on 17 stages that lasts a week?!
In the ten years following the Great Famine, 1.5 million Irish emigrated to the US and a further 340,000 to my native Canada. In the 1800s, 60% of all immigrants to Canada were Irish. I know my father's mother's family were among those who made their way to eastern Canada. I had no idea that 50,000 Irish emigrated to Argentina to farm.
Beginning in the 6th century, Irish men and women of faith left home to share their religious beliefs with others in all corners of the globe. Irish people have helped provide emergency relief to people overseas hit by disasters such as earthquakes, famine and civil war regardless of of the cause of the disaster, the beliefs or political views. A priest called Tony Byrne helped so much in the Nigerian civil war he became known as The Green Pimpernel!
An important question the museum posed was why have so many Irish people decided to emigrate. "We emigrate because we cannot stay, because we want to go, or a mixture of both." Three elements are strong in the story of Irish emigration: hunger, work and community.
Attempts to rebel against the regime led to forced emigration in the form of transportation to penal colonies. Even with the creation of the Irish state in 1922, not all children in the Republic felt equally cherished. Unmarried mothers and their children left or were sent abroad. Four thousand orphan girls were sent overseas because they were considered a burden on society. Petty thieves, caught for stealing no more than an apple to feed a loved one, faced deportation to the other side of the world.
Gay people struggled against harsh social prejudice as gay acts weren't decriminalized until 1993. In 2015, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage.
Between 1852 and 1910, the museum reported that 5 million people left Ireland and 500,000 lost their homes - just staggering numbers. No other European country has ever lost so many people relative to its size. From 1851-1860, 100,000 Irish arrived in Australia to pursue their dreams in the Australia Gold Rush. In the 1950s, two out of every five young adults left Ireland. From the 1940s to the 1970s, nurses left in droves to join the National Health Service in Britain. So many left, too, to fight wars abroad that were not their own, they were called Flight of the Wild Geese!
I hope the above facts and figures weren't too much of a downer. I realized to gain any sort of understanding of what constitutes Ireland today, it was critical to learn what factors contributed to its history.
Playing the World: On a happier note, we next read and learned that the love of sports is considered quintessentially Irish! As the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) is a pillar of Irish society, it wasn't surprising that Irish emigrants have brought Gaelic games with them around the world. Today, a fifth of the GAA clubs are outside Ireland. Though the majority are in the UK, the US and Australia, Gaelic games are also thriving in such unexpected places as Malaysia, Kuwait, Mongolia and South Korea! The first Gaelic Games Club in the Arabian Gulf was established in Saudi Arabia in 1984.
I hadn't known that American baseball had an 'Irish era' where a number of the players were either Irish or of Irish descent. That was because the game was so similar to the Irish game of rounders.
The Discovering and Inventions section gave the museum a perfect opportunity to point out the key discoveries the Irish have made to science, medicine and technology: high speed photography in 1904, the first Caesarean section, the first submarine commissioned for the US Navy and the first sub for Napoleon! Perhaps the biggest accomplishment was the invention of the typhoid vaccine that saved 100,000 lives in the world.
The Leading Change gallery was the most enlightening for me as I didn't have a clue as to the number of people of Irish descent and origin who have achieved the highest offices abroad. To list just a few:
-US Presidents Grant and JFK - more on his Irish connection in an upcoming post,
-PM Chaim Herzog of Israel,
-Britain's PM Tony Blair,
-Australia's President Paul Keating,
-New Zealand's PM Jim Bolger,
-Mexico's President Alvaro Obrego,
-President Bernardo O'Higgins of Chile as well as four Spanish Prime Ministers. Not included are all the Irish who have fought for human rights and championed the underdog like Bob Geldof and so many others.
Of course not everyone who left Ireland went on to lead a life his or her relatives back home would be proud of. Some achieved notoriety through criminal exploits like the legendary outlaw Ned Kelly, or achieved infamy just by their bad luck like Mary Mallon. Known as Typhoid Mary, she spent 26 years in isolation after it was found out that she was a healthy carrier of typhoid fever and had caused 51 outbreaks of the deadly disease as a cook in the Northeast US prior to WW I. "Machine Gun" Kelly was another of the unsavory characters who made his way to the US.
Music and Dance: Sharing the Tradition: The Irish love of music traveled with the Irish as they sought a better life far from their shores. The mass emigration in the mid 19th century saw traditional music and dance carried to Britain and the US.
Did you know that three members of The Beatles, John, Paul and George, were all of Irish descent?! I know Steven and I will learn lots more Beatles' trivia when we take the Magical Mystery Bus tour while we detour through Liverpool for a few hours in a month's time.
If you travel anywhere, you're sure to see an Irish pub somewhere as they're all over the world. They're considered an unofficial embassy which give people who aren't Irish a taste of Ireland and a fond memory of the country of those who are! Here's a good trivia bit for all you trivia buffs: O'Neill's is the most common pub name with more than 3,000 Irish pubs worldwide! Guinness beer, Steven's newest favorite beverage, is made right here in Ireland, of course. Just yesterday, we toured Jameson's distillery, the biggest selling whisky in the world, and sampled some of its products, too. What a tough time we're having, huh! More on Jameson's in a later post!
At the end of our tour through Ireland's many triumphs and tragedies, it was a hoot watching how hundreds of landmarks worldwide light up in green to celebrate the small island, its diaspora and heritage. What great kudos to the country's tourism board!
We were really lucky seeing the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio but never lit up in green!
My three older brothers were born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, but I thought that was Scottish territory, not Irish!
I took a special delight in seeing these celebrations as Steven and I met on St. Patrick's Day in a small fishing village in Mexico way back in 1981 when he was on vacation from Denver and I was on vacation from Ottawa!
Next post: The Kilmainham Gaol and Irish nationalism.
Posted on September 3rd, 2019, from near Kinsale in southern Ireland.
What a brilliant post of Irish history and culture -- from the horror of the famine to the "foot-tapping" joys of Irish music. xoxoxo
ReplyDeleteThanks, Lina, for your comments as I endeavored to bring the museum alive as it was very insightful for us and provided a great appreciation and understanding of all that is Ireland as we began our month-long drive around the country.
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