The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration

by Robert Scally

Many thousands of Irish peasants fled from the country in the terrible famine winter of 1847-48, following the road to the ports and the Liverpool ferries to make the dangerous passage across the Atlantic. The human toll of "Black '47," the worst year of the famine, is notorious, but the lives of the emigrants themselves have remained largely hidden, untold because of their previous obscurity and deep poverty. In The End of Hidden Ireland , Scally brings their lives to light. Focusing on the townland of Ballykilcline in Roscommon, Scally offers a richly detailed portrait of Irish rural life on the eve of the catastrophe. From their internal lives and values, to their violent conflict with the English Crown, from rent strikes to the potato blight, he takes the emigrants on each stage of their journey out of Ireland to New York. Along the way, he offers rare insights into the character and mentality of the immigrants as they arrived in America in their millions during the famine
years. Hailed as a distinguished work of social history, this book also is a tale of adventure and human survival, one that does justice to a tragic generation with sympathy but without sentiment.

Genres: History, Ireland, European History

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Scott Pomfret · Rating 4 out of 5]

This somewhat academic but powerful and well-written history examines in minute detail the fate of a single Irish village in the pre-famine and famine era. Closely studying available records, the author traces the village’s very modest “rebellion” against English rule (including the murder of a large land holder) through its attempts to use the courts to secure the villagers’ hold on the land, and then through the depopulation occasioned by famine and crown functionaries willing to pay the village residents to emigrate to America.

Perhaps the most dispiriting section treats Victorian Liverpool, the point from which most Irish emigrants departed for North America. The author’s unrelenting examination of its poverty, disease, hatred of the Irish, and other injustice is difficult reading (typhus, of course, was known as the “Irish fever” which resonates in the era of coronavirus). What is more poignant is the author’s pointing out that these same emigrant Irish were to treat American blacks with the same murderous callousness in the United States not many years later.

The author is very candid about this history’s shortcoming: very few records give any insight into how the victims experienced the history they lived. All insight is gleaned from records written by others. One is left to guess about how this book’s subjects thought of themselves.

[mbm · Rating 3 out of 5]

During the winter of 1847-48-"Black '47"-when the potato famine ravaged Ireland, the town of Ballykilcline, County Roscommon, was hit hard. The problem "was above all about food, and therefore about land." Hopelessly behind in paying their rent, the tenant-farmers rebelled. Those who had taken advantage of an offer from their landlord, Major Mahon, and left for Canada perished en route. News of the disaster reached Ballykilcline and Mahon was murdered. Recriminations followed about "Papist plots" on the landlord's side met by stalwart resistance on the part of the tenants. This study of the Irish land system and the effects of the great famine shows how the land was divided; the influence of the "Gentlemen and the Squireens"; the hatred of the peasants for the "drivers"-the landlords' rent collectors and evicters; and the peasants' eventual emigration (paid for by the British crown) and their new lives in the United States. Scally is professor of history and director of the Glucksman Ireland House at New York University. His account will be of particular interest to academicians. Illustrated.

Scally does an excellent job of using historical facts to present a better picture of a devistated Ireland. Americans in particular often misunderstand the cause of the chaos usually blamed on the potato blight. In reality, the famine was only the "icing on the cake", which Scally explains well. The first half of the book is a very detailed description of Ireland in the days immediately preceeding the famine. The second half walks us through the once-green hills of a broken Ireland, passing sunken faces and hungry eyes. Scally has been accused of leaving historical fact for emotional imagination. I submit the idea that every historian must create something from imagination at some point. Although we can read facts, we must paint the scenes in our minds. This is an excellent book to read if you are already interested in "Black '47" and is also good for the serious reader who cares to explore the Emerald Isle of 150 years ago . . . this is also an important source for an Irish-American who would like to better understand his or her roots, like me. Perhaps those of us who have ties to the isle are more likely to appreciate the suffering that happened there.

A relentless, brilliant study. Scally digs deep, far beneath the generalities of our assumptions about the Famine. This is not an easy book to read, and not for the faint-hearted. My hair stood on end, and I was deeply grateful for it.

Robert James Scally's book gave me a very clear understanding of what transpired from about 1835 to 1850.