THAT Irish-America has made of Ireland can bemuse and amuse, especially around St Patrick's Day, when the history we play with is about as authentic as a plastic shamrock. But where have Irish-Americans been able to form a true view of what the Irish part of their hybrid name means? How open has anyone been about their distinctive heritage? How silent have they - and we - been about the pain of their origins?
What were the Irish, in their own consciousness, and in the view of others, when barefoot, half-naked, sick, heartbroken and knowing themselves to be despised, they broke from the past and began their American lives? A myriad of questions arises about the passage out of Ireland. One kind of person was forced to become another kind: how did that process unfold? And what was it like from inside from within the individual life?
These mysteries have recently been approached with respect and with energy by a professor of history at New York University. Robert Scally spent 10 years working on The End Of Hidden Ireland, yet it reads not like dry scholarship, but like a novel, or poetry, unashamed of the pity and anger its story cannot but evoke. Perhaps this is because there are differentiated people in it. Robert Scally centres his panorama on the 100 or so families hunted, finally, in 1847, from the townland of Ballykilcline, in Co Roscommon. He goes with them from their tumbled cabins in the bog to the square in Strokestown, where they were rounded up for the four-day journey to Dublin, and then he sails with them to Liverpool, and he accompanies them through their humiliations there, until he must leave them, where they fall out of history, as they huddle into steerage to cross the ocean to New York.
It was a terrible journey. On the road to Dublin most of the ragged band were "debilitated from at least a year of hunger, and some probably still suffered from the fevers and dysentery that were rife in the townland during the previous winter ... With hordes of others from the townlands trekking the same route and thousands dying along its sides, the roads leading from the interior to the outports in the spring of 1848 were a sight that nearly all observers carried away as their most lasting "memory of the Famine." The sight - not the sound. Scally remarks that "in contrast to their history before and after the journey, the demeanour of Irish peasant crowds in transit during the Famine years was almost invariably described as passive, diffident and quiet."
We know the aversion the sight of the emigrants aroused in the people oft the towns they passed through on their way to, the ports. We know very little about their own feelings. "But nearly all descriptions; note their silence," Robert Scally says, redeeming their sensibility from the silence of history.
The End Of Hidden Ireland does draw on a wealth of historical sources. But it is above all through the exercise of imaginative sympathy that Robert Scally brings these people to life. And the sympathy is born when he follows the ragged band back to their lost townland. This is where they, briefly enter the record when - foolishly vaingloriously - they began a rent strike against their Westminster rulers, in 1834. That was the true beginning of their journey. They were evicted and forcibly emigrated in the end. But the transition from village to urban slum had begun much earlier than the actual time of eviction and emigration, "reaching them in small, imperceptible increments, disguising the fates that awaited them".
The Ballykilcline families were just a dot in the huge picture of Famine migration - at its height 150 years ago this year - a migration which, with what Robert Scally calls "its special quality of fleeing," and "the odour of racial hatred surrounding the emigrants' treatment . . . bears more resemblance to the slave trade or the boxcars of the Holocaust than to the routine crossings of a later age".
Driven from the deep secrecy of their settlements, and fleeing hunger and disease, those who survived the horrors of Liverpool took the early ships, the "coffin ships" to the New World. In steerage "the families of farmers and cottiers died inches apart, within each other's intimate reeks and pleadings below decks The steerage was a form of captivity, of absolute powerlessness "that even the poorest had not known before and that reduced many who once thought themselves strong to the level of their children. If seen as a separate, temporary nation afloat it might be said that the inmates of the emigrant steerages were suffering a second famine, one that was quite blind to the name or history of its victims." The Ballykilcine people, like most of the Famine migrants, must have arrived in the New World quite stripped of particularity - quite anonymous.
But that was a fertile anonymity. Back in Ireland, they had long endured an inhuman anonymity. Their individual names and histories had always been a matter of indifference to the people with power over them. In return, they did nothing to assist their masters to comprehend them. The "incoherence" of the townlands and their settlements was their protection. The rent strike in Ballykilcline was never quite understood even by His Majesty's Commissioners against whom it was directed. "A tangle of evasions, dodges and fluid identities often defied the order that colonial rule required everywhere."
The peasant Irish had their own, secretive system, "and with that system, ruinous as it was, also went all the essentials of their way of life. Their means of resistance - conspiracy, pretence, foot-dragging, and obfuscation - were the only ones ordinarily available to them, `weapons of the weak' like those employed by defeated and colonised peoples everywhere. The destruction of the townland community, whether by improvement, eviction, or emigration, inevitably threatened the survival of their language, their family and community systems, and the authority of tradition, including the distinct form of Christianity peculiar to moral Ireland before the Famine. The tenacity with which the peasantry held onto all this, and the catastrophic force of events eventually needed to pry them loose, attest to the value they placed on the life the townlands contained."
They were quite bare of material possessions, these people, and none of them owned any of the land. The local notables didn't know their names, and could hardly distinguish them from each other, and never knew how many Irish were living on a given piece of land, or understood the working arrangements between those people. Even the piece of land - far more important than the people who lived off it, though the people had lived there for centuries - didn't have a name assuredly known to the rulers. The first eviction notices ordered the people to "to quit possession of the Crown lands called or known by the name of Ballykilcline, otherwise Killytullyvarry, Bungariffe, and Aghamore or by whatsoever other name or names the same or any subdenomination thereof maybe called or known ... "
Because they were distant, both geographically and psychologically, the landlords needed middlemen to execute their wishes, such as the wish to make their land "perfectly untenanted". When the Ballykilcline people tried, in the 1840s, to assert that they were not tenants of the Crown and did not have to pay rent to the Crown, the threat of eviction was brought down. It was hanging over them when the hunger began and title to the land became an academic matter, because the only future on the land was death by starvation. The threats were made, and the punishments administered by a hierarchy of middlemen, in descending order from the landlord's agent down to - in this place - "an ambitious opportunist and casual profiteer" by the name of Cox.
"The qualifications for this detested role were few but well suited to Cox's talents, cunning, indifference to scorn or threat, and bilingualism. In the midst of the turmoil and misery of the 1840s, he browsed zestfully on a variety of opportunities that presented themselves in the gap between the lower deputies of the landlords and the subtenants of the townlands, subsequently establishing himself as a comfortable farmer in the area, still remembered for his shady dealing during the Famine."
A whole range of Irish people did very well out of the Famine. But the ones Robert Scally cares for are gone - though not very long ago. Their traces are visible. The boggy, empty, rushy land you can see from the road into Rooskey is where Ballykilcline was. Archaeologists, connected with Prof Scally, are working there, on the eloquent physical fragments of the hidden Ireland. And the townland went on existing, in memory. Prof Scally himself met a descendant of one of the families who crept back to live in that bog after the Famine, and he could recall the names of all its inhabitants, and the exact extent of their holdings.
They are close to us in some ways, the people who went on to become Americans. Yet in other ways they leave even our most penetrating imaginings behind. They suffered shocks unimaginable to us today. They had never been outside their known 10 or 15 miles. Their livelihood came from within their community. Even the education sought in the town schools by the favoured small farmers left them lettered, but innocent of the world.
And then, they were offered a lavish" bounty to clear out. Some of them could no more go than the water or the grass of the place could have gone. A Patrick Connor, for instance, was one of "six heads of family who refused the emigrant bounty after all was lost, knowing that he and his many dependants would be ejected, starving, and in fever, in what he called `the land of their nativity'."
ROBERT Scally, and now his readers, knows something about these obscure people precisely because they were Crown tenants, and because they attempted a mild and legalistic rebellion, and the bureaucracies in Dublin and London preserved the petitions addressed by these people to the Crown Commisssioners. The petitions are increasingly desperate. "That on the 26th of May your petitioners were turned out of their houses and dwellings ... That your petitioners if they are deprived of their crops and till age will, with their families, be thrown on the world, and doomed to ruin and starvation..."
But there was no response or even reply to the petitions. "Though most of the petitions begged for an early reply, few offered a `return address'," Robert Scally says. "It was possibly because no replies ever appeared that many other of the petitions bore resemblance to prayers, to which no answer was expected." In these hopeless petitions "the false and resentful humility that would become a permanent part of their demeanour as emigrants was already visible".
The people of Ballykilcline became, through the actions of the Crown, what they had feared - "strangers in the land that gave them birth". They could not have envisaged these ruptures. As Scally says: "The time when nearly every family would expect to lose some of its members to emigration had not yet arrived, and the forced removal of whole townlands was a sight that none had yet seen." But 1847 was the end of all. The emigrant ship or the poorhouse were the only options left to the blameless poor. A passage in this beautiful book describes it thus: "In their profoundly localised mentality, the intimately familiar spaces and shapes of their everyday surroundings, more than any abstract idea of Ireland as a nation, contained the meaning expressed in their petitions as `the land of their birth'. What would later become `the myth of exile' was an emigrant nationalism, suffused with bitter hindsight. But as they took the first steps on the road out and in the preceding months of distressful waiting among the emptying cabins, the sensations of loss were of their only place of belonging, a living grief not yet abstracted by time and distance.
They crossed the Irish Sea to Liverpool, sharing the boats with the cattle and wheat and pigs they had failed to raise in sufficient abundance to justify their own existence. "Peasants who had never seen seagoing ships of sail or steam now saw hundreds in motion at once. They had just left a world in which a few cabins of piled stones and turf were the centre of life and know saw gigantic geometrical walls of granite, thousands of multistoried buildings lining the shore, crowds more numerous at a single glance than all strangers they had seen in a lifetime..."
The Irish were venomously hated in Liverpool. "The Irishman's squalor was thought to be as contagious as the diseases he carried with him." Scally's chapter on what was done to the Irish in Liverpool, and said of them, and how they internalised the bigotry directed at them, is all but unreadably painful. Melville was there in 1847. His account of a woman "in a dark alley dying for days with her two daughters in a vault 15 feet below the street, her blue arms folded to her livid bosom two shrunken things like children her `soulsickening wail' known to all around, epitomises the dehumanisation of the city at this time" says Scally. "When the young American appealed to those nearest by, an old woman rubbish-picker said she had `not time to attend to beggars and their brats'. Asking another where to take the woman, he was told, `to the church yard'. When reminded that they were alive and not dead, the old woman replied, `Then she'll never die. She's been down there these three days, with nothing to eat; that I know myself.' Finally approaching a policeman to help them he was told, `There now, Jack, go on board your ship ... and leave these matters to the town.'
Ballykilcline did not utterly disappear as a community until the Roscommon peasants had become American workers. But it did, then. And before that - of approximately 396 men, women and children recorded in Ballykilcline in 1846, 172 are missing by the time they arrive in New York. Some would have crept into another identity. But most must have been dead. "Their will and not mine be done," is a quotation from James Connor of Ballykilcline. Scally uses it as an epigraph.
Those first emigrants could actually see the coast of Ireland as they sailed past from Liverpool. They were on their way to a life of utterly unforeseen challenges. They were going to a democracy. "But with no experience of citizenship," asks Scally, "did their idea of freedom consist simply of being left alone?"
And who did they think they were, anyway? Now that self-consciousness had been forced on them? "Peering from the stern rather than the bow of the emigrant ship," this unforgettable book ends, "that backward glance at the incongruous palms and gaily painted houses along the shore near Skibbereen was not only their last sight of Ireland but the first sight of themselves."