Throughout the county there are Famine graves, workhouses, untended lazy beds where potatoes were planted and deserted houses. Many of the roads we travel on began as Famine relief projects. A mass grave in Swinford is a chilling reminder of the brutality of the times. Now Swinford Hospital, it was once a workhouse where 564 inmates were buried without coffins. There were nine workhouses in Mayo: in Swinford, Claremorris, Ballina, Castlebar, Killala, Belmullet, Ballinrobe, Newport and Westport.
The Deserted VIllage in Slievemore on Achill Island is one of the visibly stark reminders of the harrowing experiences of Famine victims. The village of about 100 stone cottages was occupied prior to the Famine. The cross at Doo Lough Pass between Louisburgh and Leenane is poignant, as it commemorates the fate of a group of starving, desperate people of all ages, who made a fruitless journey from Louisburgh to Delphi on foot seeking relief. Many died en route.
The experience of the peasantry around the time of the Famine sealed their relationship with the Catholic Church. Priests such as James Hughes, the parish priest of Newport-Pratt (known today just as Newport) sought relief from the authorities, though none was forthcoming, as Alexis de Tocqueville recounts in his Journey in Ireland, July-August 1835:
“During the whole of the month of July the parish priest of Newport-Pratt, James Hughes, had written numerous letters to the press, calling the attention of the public to the desperate plight of the peasantry in his neighbourhood and pleading for help to relieve them.”
De Tocqueville goes on to describe what he saw on his visit to Newport-Pratt in the summer of 1835:
“On the edges of the sea beside the great ocean is a population a little poorer than the rest of the Irish population, that is to say they actually die of hunger there when the potatoes fail as they did last year….The parish priest accompanied us from cabin to cabin, thus causing us to see a collection of misery such as I did not imagine existed in this world.”
For the preceding two hundred years or so, Catholics had been prohibited from owning or leasing land, holding positions in society, voting or being educated. The result was a nation of starving people with high unemployment and absentee landlords, whose rents--collected from poor tenants, who were paid minimally for farm work--were sent to England, paving the way for the disaster which ensued in the 1840s when the blight hit.
Approximately one million people died and the same amount emigrated during the Famine. Those who survived began to prosper until another blight hit in the 1870s. With landlords evicting tenants and misery and hardship revisiting the area, 15,000-20,000 tenant farmers came out in force at a ‘monster meeting’ in Irishtown, near Claremorris, to demand an end to landlordism. From this show of strength, Michael Davitt formed The Land League in 1879, in Daly’s (Imperial) Hotel in Castlebar and Charles Stewart Parnell was elected leader. The period of agitation which ensued is known as The Land Wars. Michael Davitt’s birthplace in Straide is a museum dedicated to the history of the Land Wars, which marked the beginning of a new era in Irish history, one where the emergence of a democracy became imaginable.
The Irish War of Independence, fought by the Irish Republican Army against British forces from 1919-1921, resulted in several incidents in Mayo, including the West Mayo Brigade ambush in Kilmeena which is commemorated with a cross. Memorials and plaques are all around the county from Ballycastle to Ballinrobe and Claremorris to Carrowkennedy.
With the legitimacy of the new Irish state established in the 1920s, following the Civil War, the people of Mayo were free to build a new history, built on tourism, farming, fisheries and trade.Through defensive towers, monuments and the visible influence in parks and woodlands of the old Anglo-Irish dispensation, the signs of the county's turbulent history are etched into the very landscape, now to be visited and enjoyed in cherished peace and treasured quiet.