hungry voices

8/3/2019 Hungry Voices

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Hungry Voices

Lyrics in memory of the Irish Famine

Giles Watson

2011



No Banshee

I paid my rent and tilled the earthClaiming my birthright;

I dug in deep, and then it rose:The sweet smell of the Blight. Wife and daughter, strapping son,I lost them, one, two, three;Hungry screams to curdle blood – No banshee, no banshee,I need no banshee to call for me.

I took passage to New York,Sailing steerage class.Typhus took some where they slept,Dark eyes glazed as glass,

And when we made our landfall,Unmoved by bribe or pleaThey left us to starve afloat – No banshee, no banshee,I need no banshee to call for me.

They call me Bogus American,The Irish Frankenstein;They gave me boots and uniform

But none of them are mine.Confederate or Union man –

Which one shall it be?They’ll line me up and shoot me down – No banshee, no banshee,I need no banshee to call for me.

To the tune of ‘Bay of Biscay’. “Bogus American” and “Irish Frankenstein” arereferences to two racist cartoons which depicted “the Irishman” as a simian monster. Many Irish immigrants fled the Famine of 1845-1852 in order to seek a better life in

America, only to find themselves embroiled in the American Civil War a few years later.Enormous numbers died en route to America, either of starvation or typhus, and diseaseridden ships were often quarantined when they arrived, resulting in further deaths.



Laissez-Faire

We’ve hearts and minds the same as yours But Englishmen don’t care –

They suck us dry and watch us die And call it laissez-faire.

Our landlords live in manor houses All across the isle; We share lodgings with our pigsFor we’re the rank and file:

We’re rank because we have no pail From which to drink or bathe;

We file along for Indian Corn,Then march into the grave.

Negro and Hibernian:The black man and the pale,

We’re balancing like bits of meat On the English scale.They cut off Peel and coalesced;Trevelyan and Routh – So politely, they declinedTo fill an Irish mouth.

They’ll sign us to the Board of Works To build a useless road,

And as we’re dying, urge us on To tote another load,

And when our children are all dead,Demolished every house,They’ll expect us to subsist On nettle, weed and mouse.

If famine came to London town

What would the English do?They’d say that it is fine to starveSo long as it’s not you, Idolise Free Trade and make

A profit where you can;Sit inside your country house

And stuff your fellow man.

To the tune of ‘The Little Drummer Girl’.



Skibbereen

Nicholas Cummins, with five men all loaded with bread,Came on the starving, their eyes fixed and staring ahead

And in their dark hovels, no skerrick of food to be seen: Wan walking skeletons dying in Skibbereen.

Six famished wraiths were huddled amongst the piled straw And as he approached, they clawed at him across the floor:Four children, a woman, a dead man lying slumped in between – They would never survive to see spring come to Skibbereen.

Cummins turned round, and stepping without he espiedTwo hundred such phantoms surrounding him on every side,Howling like demons as hunger devoured from within

And death spoke through each foetid cavernous grin.

He trod among corpses, some half-devoured by rats, And reaching behind him, a woman tugged at his cravat;Her newborn she held out in fingers that showed every bone

And he wept with rage at the sins he could never atone.

“Hail to you Wellington, this is our own Waterloo: We meekly stand by and pretend there is nothing to do. We claim this is Providence; nothing could be more obscene,

For God turned a Devil the day He condemned Skibbereen.”

To the tune of ‘Dunlavin Green’.



Rodack

A breaker far from shore, A tress of knotted wrack,

An oak tree from the shireBecame a ship, a wreck.

Famine ate her flesh,Lightning lit her shroud,Gave her to the fish

Where the blennies shoaled.

England built her engine,Ireland filled her full,Famine fuelled her endingGranite gripped her hull.

Sea devoured a peerage,Typhus strangled hope,Nobles sunk with steerage,

Winkles grazed on rope.

Blight and salt beneath them,Tide their only pulse,

Anemones shall wreath them

With flesh as red as dulse.

'Twas Christ who sealed their wager And Mary gave them help,But prayers sluiced with water

Are slippery as kelp.

Rodack is Irish Gaelic for ‘seaweed growth on submerged wood’.



The Song of Michael Shaughnessy

As I went out walking one November mornI spied a young damsel, her face was forlorn,

She said, “I’m an orphan, and barely alive, So throw me in prison, the better to thrive.

Our crop it was putrid, it turned into slime – So I hoped for mercy, and that is my crime.Now put me in shackles – I’m sure they will be More kind than the hunger that’s chafing in me.

And when you arrest me in the name of the Queen,There’s Dom Ginelly – he’s aged seventeen – Take him in handcuffs for stealing some rope;He knows transportation is his only hope.

John Austin, Charles Ruddy, why they’re younger still – O, say you’ll transport them – I hope that you will – For they quelled their hunger by stealing a sheep,Both of them foundlings and too weak to weep.

And here’s Owen Eady – he knows what’s involved – For to be a felon he’s firmly resolved. He’ll gladly choose prison, kind Sir, I repeat,

With chains on his legs and with something to eat.”

Well, I got a letter from Van Diemen’s Land: “These convicts you sent us – we can’t understand – They’re meek, they’re obedient, they’re callow and scared; For converse with criminals they’re quite unprepared.”

As I went out walking one morning in JuneTo view the fair fields and the valleys in bloom,The corpse by the roadside, she rose and she said,

“You would not arrest me, so now I am dead.”

To the tune of ‘Her Mantle So Green’. Michael Shaughnessy was Assistant Barrister in Mayo, an appointee of the Crown. The names listed in the song are those of teenagerswhom, in his mercy, he had transported to penal colonies in the Famine years. The nameof the girl – like those of thousands of others – is unrecorded. The first two lines of the final verse are taken from the traditional Irish song, ‘Her Mantle So Green’.



The Blight

Grab hold of the potato As the soil is giving birth:

A firmness that will ground youIn the pure and peaty earth.Splice it with your spade-blade

And glimpse the creamy white,Then pray it won’t turn grey

With the creeping of the Blight.

The stench hangs over Clifden And Connemara quails:The crop was growing lushly But it withers and it fails.

You can grope for consolationsBut all of them are trite,For hope fled to the heavens

With the sweet smell of the Blight.

Phytopthora infestans,Its scientific name:In Latin or in GaelicThe hunger is the same.The spores drop from the leaves

And they wash down out of sightTo penetrate each tuber

With the blackness of the Blight.

Grab hold of the potato;It detaches from the root:

An earthy pagan blessing,The child of stem and shoot.Boil it fast, and eat it,Lest out of wrath, or spite,

The gods should turn it rotten And the flesh collapse in Blight.

Your landlord, he is absent,He lives somewhere in Surrey:So long as you are paying rentHe has no cause to worry,For profit doesn’t give a damn For any pauper’s plight,

And con-men find a way to gain,

Yes, even from the Blight.



Grab hold of the potato;Pulp squelches in your hand:Invoke the gods of Erin,

Your connection with the land.Cu Chulainn is weeping;

The Morrighan takes flight,For crows alone shall thriveOn the ravage of the Blight.

To the tune of ‘Young Ned of the Hill’.



Quarter Acre

We’re your lords and masters, Renowned for elocution;

We’ve derived a formula Defining destitution: You rent a quarter acreSo you cannot be poor,Though bailiffs and the famine feverPound upon your door.

And no one will protect youUnless he is a Quaker.Starve and die. You occupy

A quarter of an acre.

My name is William Gregory,M.P. for Dublin city;I need a flutter now and thenSo there’s no room for pity. My horse turned lame at Ascot – I fear it cost me dear,

And I don’t give a bugger If your bairns have diarrhoea.

We’re your lords and masters, We’ve got it all worked out. We’ve pushed it through our ParliamentSo there’s no room for doubt.

Your Saviour made it plain to you:“To God and Caesar render.”

You want assistance? Quit the land,Be abject, and surrender.

This ruling it is law, you know,

There’s no room for debate: Precisely what’s required For clearing my estate.

Yes we have done with charity;It opens up the sluice.

You can’t survive without my help? Then you’re no bloody use.

And no one will protect youUnless he is a Quaker.

Starve and die. You occupy A quarter of an acre.



This song is not an exaggeration of the opinions of William H. Gregory, Conservative M.P. for Dublin city between 1842 and 1847. It was he who suggested the infamous and practically genocidal Quarter Acre Clause which stipulated that the destitute were noteligible for famine relief if they occupied more than a quarter of an acre of land. Families found it necessary to surrender their homes as well as their lands in order to make

themselves eligible for assistance, and the end result was mass homelessness and massdeath. When Gregory defended his proposal in the Commons, he remarked that many M.P.s had “insisted that the operation of a clause of this kind would destroy all the small farmers. If it could have such an effect, he did not see of what use such small farmerscould possibly be.” (See James S. Donnelly Jr., The Great Irish Potato Famine , Stroud, 2001, p. 102.) Gregory himself inherited a large Galway estate, but frittered away itswealth on gambling in the late 1840s and early 1850s: in the same period, in other words,when a million people starved to death in Ireland. One of the few institutions, secular or spiritual, to come out of the famine years with a commendable record was the Society of Friends, colloquially known as Quakers, which established life-saving soup-kitchens (and

courageously manned them at the height of Famine Fever) long before the British government set up watered-down versions of its own.



Captain Kennedy’s Daughter

I wear wee shoes upon my feet And on my head a bonnet;

My father drives a wagonload And I am riding on it, And when we stop, then I lean out,The crowd about me presses.My lily hands don’t shake at all

A-handing out the dresses.

I know not if they’re girls or boys, Their cheeks are all so hollow.They totter after on bare feetScarce strong enough to follow.Their ragged parents urge them on,Their faces lined with sorrowSince Colonel Crofton VandeleurDeprived them of tomorrow.

Twelve thousand people dispossessed,Left to die in ditches:They hobble on a-shiveringFor want of shoes and britches.Though I am small, come one come all,

The cart is heavy-laden. You’re shy of adult charity? You’ll take it from a maiden.

To the tune of ‘The Maid Who Sold Her Barley’. Captain Arthur Kennedy’s daughter is depicted handing out clothes for the destitute in an 1849 illustration for the IllustratedLondon News. Kennedy, a Poor Law inspector of an unusually compassionatedisposition, was deeply critical of the mass evictions which left thousands homeless inthe Kilrush union between 1847 and 1850. Kennedy, who was honest as well as charitable,himself admitted “that there were days in that western county when I came back from

some scene of eviction so maddened by the sights of hunger and misery I had seen in theday’s work that I felt disposed to take the gun from behind my door and shoot the firstlandlord I met.” Vandeleur and other landlords claimed that Kennedy’s estimates of thenumbers rendered homeless were inflated, but a House of Commons select committeevindicated his figures by comparing the number of farms marked on the 1841 OrdnanceSurvey maps with the number still in existence at the end of the decade. Vandeleur wasshown to have evicted over a thousand people on his estate alone.



Coffin Ship to Canada

On a coffin ship to CanadaI took my chances;I left my pig, my ma, my pa

And all my romances.

The Elizabeth and Sarah Sailed in the summer;She went my some wayward star – No steerage was glummer.

Two hundred and seventy-sixPassengers aboard her;She was built for thirty-two.

We slept without order.

There was no toilet and no food;She took on no water.There was nought but poverty

Abaft and athwart her.

Forty-two, the poor souls who Were thrown o’er the gunwale But we survived, kept just alive

Like rats in a tunnel.

Relapsing fever and dysentery Stalked us below deck;The cellarfuls of dying

Awaited us in Quebec.

This is the crowning mercy Thanks to our landlord:Our passage paid, our dead betrayed,

Anger eating all on board.

Chorus:

On a coffin ship to Canada,Like felons on trial:Starved on departure;Dead on arrival.

The Elizabeth and Sarah was an 83 year old ship when she sailed from Killala to Quebecin May 1847. A navigation mistake by the captain considerably lengthened the journey,

resulting in appalling mortality amongst the passengers.



Sacred Wrath

Two million of us left the land; Another million died;

You can’t deny the sacred wrath That calls this genocide.

The priest who bids you perish – To be patient and beseechThe providence of God – has naughtBut blasphemy to preach.He’s sold his soul to England, Her perfidy to prate:He says that you must waste away;

It’s your God-given fate.

Political economy Left a million dead.The grain we grew was not for you;They exported it instead.The starving flocked upon the pier,The Blight smell, it grew rank,

And still they carried wheat and barley Up the old gangplank.

The British car of conquestRides on, and we have rushedTo stop it in its tracks;

We fear not to be crushed. A Paddy with a blunderbuss Will never flinch or run.It took a nation shamedTo turn a hurley to a gun.

This song is written in the voice of John Mitchel (1815-75), and Irish nationalist

journalist, historian and revolutionary activist, whose post-1850 writings promoted theview that the British government committed genocide against the Irish people in theFamine years. Revisionist historians have argued that his insistence that Ireland had more than enough food to be self-sufficient, were it not for massive exports, wasexaggerated. It is, however, true nevertheless that profiteering merchants made fortunesout of exporting thousands of tons of valuable foodstuffs whilst the people starved.Whatever the exaggerations made by nationalists like Mitchel, there can be no doubtthat the violence of their language was provoked by the rapacious activities of capitalists, whom the British government did nothing to discourage, at a time when thenumber of British troops occupying Ireland was greater than those stationed in India.



Captain Kennedy’s Daughter

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