Kilrush in Full

Day Seventeen:  June 19th Part One

If you can't drink beer you can drink Jameson.

We had hardly looked at Kilrush yet. We were planning to check out of Crotty's and travel to the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry.  We were just going to take a few more photographs and try to match a historic photo to the current view.  These are a few views of Kilrush— little changed in the downtown since the time of my great-grandmother's birth.  

The market square

Its large monument

The row houses on Frances Street, the second-widest street in Ireland.  Quite a source of pride in this land of road narrowness.

After we payed for our room and meals, the owner stepped out to the square with us in order to point out the direction to the Shannon River Ferry that would shortcut a longer trip around the estuary.  Our proprietor's' name was Rebecca Brew and she talked about some of the recent history of Kilrush and its recent ups and downs in the Celtic Tiger boom period and later 2009 bust.  She also talked about how the famine of the 1840s still affects people here—how people today still don't like to talk or think about the famine and its horrible effects.  Looking at our historic photo she pointed out the two grain mills in the distance.  These became workhouses for the poor during the Great Famine.  These places were of absolute last resort.  Destitute people might work processing seaweed for fertilizer all day and then often still go to bed with no food.  She said that she thought their demolition was unfortunate and hasty, and that she wished people had thought more of their importance as an example of famine hardships.  

She then asked me how our family had fared in "the coffin ships" —as those boats crossing to the United States were called at the height of the famine.  It occurred to me that if my family had suffered losses in their journey they might have also avoided mentioning it to the next generations.  It made me very curious about the timing of their passage, if it really was during the worst of it, and the survival of Mary Shannon's seven siblings.  I do know that four survived to adulthood as they all died in Chicago. One died as an infant, (date unknown) and the other three fates are unknown.  Had Mary Shannon been born in the U.S. or did the family leave after her birth?  This question makes a big difference in terms of the hardship of the crossing.  Famine victims were often so weak that they died en route or shortly after.

With Rebecca's information on the photo we left and went in search of our modern version photograph.  I also left more sobered than I had yet felt on this trip. 

Kilrush circa 1900

Vintage and Today pictures of Kilrush.  The six houses on the right are the same as the houses behind the masts in this shot. The houses to the left of that group are gone now.  There is a gate which is just visible in the old shot that is still there.  The towering pair of mill/workhouses would have been to the left of the low warehouses in the modern shot.  I love this kind of comparison.  I doubt it will be as compelling in blog scale and small photographs. 

We had seen some old boats that looked almost like the ones above in the old photograph.  They were dry-docked across the marina in a locked repair facility.  Steve encouraged me to trespass onto the property for a better photo opportunity.  We slipped in past a sliding metal gate after a repair truck had passed through.  As he photographed these relics, I sought out a couple of men I saw working out of one of the buildings.  As nicely as I could I said as they spied me approaching, "We are nice American trespassers! Hello!"  One of the men said "If you're nice we will forgive the American and trespassing parts."

I explained that we were looking at these old photos and that we wondered if the relics in the yard were vestiges of those old ships.  They said no, that the wooden boats in the yard were built in the 1950s for cargo handling and all had pilot houses and no sails (they still look similar in Steve's and my opinion).  We soon found out that these guys really knew what they were talking about.

The man in the middle was Michael Mulqueen, the other is Peter MacMillan.  They are seen here disputating the matchup of my historic photo with today's shoreline across the way.  Peter had even lived in one of the houses for seven years.  They named every owner, and pointed out the quay wall gate in both the photo and in reality.  This was all done with lots of cracks, insults and fun as you can see from my face.  Peter's wife Kim Roberts was also a historian on Kilrush and knew where many collections of photos were held.   The man in the back of the photo came to join us. His name was Stephen Morris  Though a New Zealander he was a total boat expert.  He took a look at a second photo that someone had provided my cousin Ray in the 1950s when he had come to Kilrush.  He told us immediately that that boat was a turf boat, used to sail cut turf (peat fuel) up the Shannon River.

Stephen had been hired by a sailing education nonprofit to recreate a turf boat for the training of youth in sailing, working with photos and the draftsmanship of a Dublin naval architecture professor. He was especially interested in our photo and asked where we had gotten it because he had never seen it.  He thought it would have been very helpful in the process of recreating the turf boat design. The boat he had built was named the Sally O'Keefe, after the wife of a still living turf boat operator named Marty O'Keefe who today is 102 years old and lives in New York.  The Sally O'Keefe is in Kilrush harbor and can be viewed.

The Sally O'Keefe turf boat, also called a Shannon Hooker.  Internet photo.

What a treasure trove we trespassed upon when we found these three men on our last day in Kilrush.
Peter and Stephen were very humble about their knowledge of the area as in the case of Peter he had only been in the area thirty years, and Stephen as mentioned was a Zealander.  But they all knew so much to flesh out these thin photographs of so long ago.

Stephen the boat builder was particularly poignant in his talk with us.  He recommended we go back to Carrigaholt and speak to Dodo Carmody of Carmody Pub as he was the town's oldest, sharpest, most-interested historian with a particular interest in the boats of the Shannon.  We plan to do this after our week in Kerry.

I asked Stephen why there was so much famine here when there was also so much fish to eat.  He said that people didn't really eat fish then—they exported it to Spain and France.  There had been a herring die-off and many fisherman had sold their larger boats that were sea-worthy leaving much smaller craft to use at this critical time.  There were special permissions to be obtained to fish as well; these permits were much controlled by the British authorities.  And the population was two times what it is even today.  These factors prevented fish from being available in quantities large enough to relieve the starvation.

He told us of a sad story.  A number of starving people set off from Carrigaholt pier to come to find relief in one of Kilrush's five workhouse or relief centers.  They were all turned away for lack of room.  That night many returned on the ferry to Carrigaholt.  The ferry sank and drowned forty people.

Stephen said he had also built a replica of one of the famine ships. In his research for that project, he was told of a local shipwright and his family who built three of their own ships and made it to America in them. In his researches he could find no mention anywhere in Ireland of this feat.  Only in the United States were there relatives and accounts of the success of the survivors.  Stephen pointed out that in his opinion there is Before the Famine Ireland and After the Famine Ireland.  For the combination of reasons of survivor guilt, pain and embarrassment people did not talk about the Great Famine at all, or at least very little.  He said that many Irish don't even like to eat fish today because it carries the stigma of being "famine food."  Some of this is changing as there is now a Great Famine Commemoration event that travels to different affected regions each year.  It was held in Kilrush in 2013.

This completely serendipitous meeting with these three guys in coveralls was one of the best glimpses of the region and its historical context.  I promised I would send the photo of the turf boat to Stephen Morris if they provided us with the code to let us back out the locked gate.  We thus escaped our break-in to prison, got in the car again,  and caught the Shannon Ferry for Kerry.

A relative plies the Shannon River yet again in 2015