Surviving Poverty in Free Ireland

Picture this: It’s a freezing cold morning and the four of us brothers are encased in the collapsed mattress, which reeks of excrement and urine and is the home of millions of fleas and lice that feast nightly on our bodies.

Church bells ring out as they do every day, giving mass times and portents of yet another brutal day at school. You struggle to light a fire with wet scraps of wood and sodden peat. Your soaked shirttail is beginning to stiffen with the cold and your ears, nose and toes and fingertips tell you it’s freezing in here.

That would be a sample winter morn in our house, except for getting the monthly food docket. These were distributed by the gentlemen of St. Vincent de Paul and were worth five shillings; and we could get some sausages and rashers and butter for the bread.

In the time of the potato famine in the 1840s, people could get soup from charities if they converted to Protestantism. They thus became known as “soupers,” a reviled class of traitor among us Catholics. Likewise, during the 1940s, the gentlemen of St. Vincent de Paul were quite insistent that our mother make us attend to our religious duties, with an implied threat of no further relief if we were not diligent. Most so-called charities have that hidden agenda, namely, we want you to follow our dogma. Of course, there is also the gratification of doing good for lesser mortals.

Personally, I was glad for the extra food at the end of the month, but I didn’t like the religious coercion. I’m a bit cynical about charities as a rule, but it seems to me there is an exception called Concern Worldwide. It feeds the people and then empowers them to create their own sources of wealth, housing and sustenance. Concern it is.

Concern Worldwide is an organization on hand wherever the winds of famine blow. It was founded in Ireland by Father Aengus Finucane because of a historic memory of what befell Ireland when famine nearly destroyed that country in the 1840s.

During Ireland’s famine, there was no shortage of food outside of the potato. Around the country of Ireland, the fields were rich with corn, wheat, barley and vegetables, and the air was filled with the sound of cows, sheep, pigs and goats. So why did more than a million people die and millions more flee the devastation and horrors only to die early deaths in England, America or Australia? Because the British government’s policy of adherence to the noble tenets of laissez faire and private enterprise dictated that food must be exported for profit and not wasted on charity. Plus the fact that the victims were adjudged guilty of being poor and dependent on one crop, an attitude that passed from the Brits to our Irish masters.

If you haven’t read “Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt, my brother, it may be difficult to comprehend being hungry in free Ireland.