Workhouse Gaelic Screams

By Michael Noctor

Workhouse Gaelic Screams tells the story of an Irish family facing starvation, emigration or the workhouse.

This book gives a voice to the people who suffered so horrifically in mid-eighteenth century Ireland.

Irish history has never been told like this.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Noctor
• Release date: Mar 5, 2019

Book preview

Chapter One

Padraig

It was no shock to hear Peadar’s name called. I’d said as much to Mary. ‘I think Peadar’s gone.’ They were my very words. I knew by the look on the woman’s face. I’d said that too. ‘I knew by the look on Grainne’s face.’

Famine shame. Shame and embarrassment at her husband’s passing; as if she were to blame. She wasn’t to blame. God was to blame. So, what was I doing sat listening to the amadán, standing there all high and mighty, calling out the names with not a trace of sympathy? Blackguard. That’s what I wanted to think, but I was reluctant. There was fear, a notion that such a thought would bring on the wrath of God. That seemed funny. That almost made me smile; almost. It had been a long time since I had smiled. It could be a long time until I’d smile again. Still, it seemed ludicrous to fear God’s wrath when the weight of it was already forcing me downwards, to the grave, the mass grave, in the corpse-ridden ground. The famine over, and all that, and the ground ripe. What black mushy mess would come out of a ground containing the worms of a diseased people?

God was a blackguard. Another reluctant thought, but it was a real thought, so real I wanted to make it even more real, to scream - God is a blackguard! Look! Look what he’s done to us! Look what he’s doing to us! Look at us, for the love of God! - Almost another reason to smile; the love of God.

The list. The death-list. Thirty-three names. One of the shorter lists. Grainne wasn’t the only person with famine shame, and the famine over and done with. At least that was the talk, the word, the belief. I didn’t believe it. It wasn’t over for me. Or mine.

The amadán was the leader of the flock, the go-to person in times of hardship, Father O’Reilly. I didn’t belong to the flock, and Father O’Reilly had never put an ounce of food on my table. I’m not saying the priest was a bad man. I never asked. Neither did I have to ask about his table. He didn’t look like the rest of us. He didn’t have the hunger stare, the sunken face, the fear of imminent death in his eyes.

I didn’t know what brought me to mass. Hope perhaps, or nostalgia, like a glance over my shoulder to the warmth of cherished happier times. A momentary escape from the stark present. It was an exercise in self-delusion. There was no hope. Maybe it had to do with the look in Mary’s eyes, and silent mouth. Ask the priest for help. That’s what she seemed to be thinking; knowing I would not. Maybe it was through morbid curiosity, there was that, a desire to know who had passed during the week. Gone were the days of the wake and the celebration of a good man or woman’s life. Gone was my chance to pay my respects to Peadar; gone, as gone as my chance, as gone as my hope.

I held Grainne in my arms. I could feel her cringe from another sense of embarrassment. A once voluptuous and beautiful woman now reduced to skin and bone. A smile that once lit up many a room now replaced with rotting teeth void of calcium. A body void of nutrition. Dehydrated eyes too dry to shed a tear. My own eyes searching in vain for a trace of past beauty. My mind scanning the dark recesses of my memory to ignite past thoughts of impurity. To reawaken the unholy desire I’d had of bedding this red-haired once beautiful cailín. Another glimpse of happy and contented nostalgia. Another moment from the sweetness of the past, not that I was a man who would lay a hand on another man’s wife, and Peadar a friend of mine and if not a friend, certainly an acquaintance and a good man to share a bottle with, and a man to be envied not just for the beauty of his wife but for his sheer size; hands like shovels and big and brave enough to sort out the best of the rest with one shovel behind his back, and now decaying in the sad soil, carried in a sack o’er his brother’s shoulder, in the dark of night, in the dark corner of the cemetery, in the dark of the hand-dug hole, one more scanty funeral, one more victim, one more Irishman laid to rest and decompose from man to worm-infested slime.

‘Padraig, will you walk some of the way with me?’

‘I will Grainne.’

My mind drifting once more, as she places her arm through mine, to a time when I had walked with each arm linked by Grainne and my sister. The three of us merry from glasses of warm stout, and dizzy from dancing jig after jig, laughing, happy, content. My sister, like two of my brothers long in the ground, or maybe it just seemed long. The rate of passing time, always the same, yet snail-like through the current hardship. Three years had passed since the last family funeral in the winter of ’47. Three years that seemed like fifty. Fifty, the age Grainne seemed. That was being kind. Thirty, the age she was. The cruelty of time. The cruelty of hardship. The dual cruelty of the two combined.

We walk in silence, my mind still drifting to the past; a past where so much time was taken up looking to the future. A past that contained abundance, of sorts. We didn’t have much, but our bellies were full; and our hearts. There was joy. There was optimism. There was hope. Until the potatoes turned black. Until that which kept us alive, and full, and content, turned into slimy filth.

A silent walk, yet my mind unquiet. The finest fiddler, fiddling, whoops and hollers, laughter, so much laughter, craic agus ceol, and me leaving the shebeen feeling like the most handsome of handsome men and the two cailíní holding me up as much as I them. The proudest man in the west. On one arm, a sister of outrageous beauty and fiery temper to match; on the other, Grainne O’Toole, and what man wouldn’t give one of his eyes to be blessed to stare upon her with the other for the rest of his days, and nights, and me merry, no, not merry, but drunk and feeling as regal as any king, yet knowing that the true beauty of all the cailíní in Ireland was to be my bride, my partner for life, my Mary, and Mary now waiting in our hovel that was once a home, with our child sucking at her wizened and empty breast, and in that instant my mind gets the kick in the face that drags it kicking and screaming into the present, and I shut my eyes tight and fight to keep the fantasy of cherished times past to the forefront of my tired head. Sing for me Grainne. Let me hear your sweet voice. As if a man could make such a request of a grieving widow. A freshly grieving widow, aged beyond her years, yet the slight inkling of impurity rising from the darkness of my soul, pushing thoughts of my skeletal wife to one side and I, once again, young and virile and the envy of county Galway for walking with Grainne O’Toole linking me as if her sweet young life depended on that grip, tightening my arm to her soft and lavish breast. And now frail, fragile; as easily snapped as a dry twig under heavy foot.

My mind screaming. What kind of a man are you? Peadar fresh in the ground, and you thinking about laying down with his wife, his brand-new widow. A question that goes unanswered, for I am no longer a man. I am no longer human.

Chapter Two

Stars sprinkled like bright fairy dust against the blackness. Exhausted observation. Wretched. I, wretched, both physically and mentally. Energy spent. Legs weak. Not a drop left. All deposited in another man’s wife, another man’s widow; a man no longer to be considered friend nor acquaintance. Another sparkling spirit looking, observing and judging from above. Another passed good person looking through my soul, seeing me for