Memory Ireland: Volume 3: The Famine and the Troubles

6 Narrating Sites of History Workhouses and Famine Memory

152 6 Narrating Sites of History Workhouses and Famine Memory N I A M H A N N K E L LY Emblematic of a dark period in a troubled colonization, the workhouse is a dirty word in Irish history. Its system, buildings, and sites comprise a challenging representational struggle between erasure and reconstruction in remembrance. Workhouses took years to build, employed thousands in the building process, subsequently housed hundreds of thousands from 1840s onward and yet remain a quiet aspect of Famine memory in visual and material culture.1 The absence of extensively conserved workhouses is a consequence of life going on after the Famine, as some sites became utilized for different purposes and others succumbed to politically motivated destruction.2 Workhouses have collective historical connotations beyond their strong literal connection to Famine-era pauperism. Though few of the buildings remain structurally intact at the start of the twenty-first century , workhouses remained a feature of Irish life for the poverty-stricken who found themselves alone in the world up to the mid-twentieth century, 1. More than 11,000 men across Ireland were employed at any one time on the building project as they were all built simultaneously (O’Connor 1995, 90). During the height of the Famine, workhouses featured as sites of popular protest and were depicted in related news print illustrations: “Demonstrations outside the workhouses—institutions that were a visible and countrywide symbol of poverty—also became a common way of protesting at the inadequacy and inefficiency of the relief provision” (Kinealy 2002, 127). 2. Since Irish Independence, remaining workhouse sites have mostly become county homes, district hospitals, or county hospitals. Narrating Sites of History 153 and the “poorhouse” was a dreaded destination. The buildings were emotive colonial signifiers in the post-Famine era, shadowed by connotations of social deprivation, minimal comfort, and untimely death. Consequently, by the 1930s, many workhouse sites were destroyed or damaged because they were deemed symbolic targets of civil unrest and political action, not dissimilar to attacks on the “Big Houses” of descendants of the landed gentry. There are no fully conserved or recreated sites inclusive of workhouse dormitories, dining halls, and infirmaries in the country.3 Written accounts of workhouses typically outline the rampant nature of illnesses in the workhouses , with matrons, clerks, and physicians often succumbing to death along with inmates.4 This essay focuses on heritage tourism and collective memory as interlinked concepts epitomized by narratives of modernity, where forged connections between history, visibility, voice, narrative, and naming are enacted at two workhouse museum sites to make history readable : the Dunfanaghy Workhouse Heritage Centre in County Donegal and the Donaghmore Workhouse Museum in County Laois. At Dunfanaghy and Donaghmore a complex collective past is capitulated through the naming of selected ordinary subjects of history. Conjuring collective remembrance at these sites thus negotiates a leap from narration of individuals’ experiences to grappling with statistical information pertaining to a wider historic event that had extensive societal repercussions. Whether by means of personal stories or collective remembrance, it is issues of agency that most categorically manipulate the pressure and weight of a negative history.5 Connectivity between spectatorship and voice are decisive in my 3. Commemorating such places, and their records, now relies on local tourist information concerns and the aleatory interventionist enthusiasm of local historians or interested individuals or groups. There are abstracted representations such as in the Famine rooms at the Johnstown Irish Agricultural Museum and Famine Exhibitions, County Wexford, where the “Entrance Door to Callan (Co. Kilkenny) Workhouse” is presented as an altered artifact among others in an exhibition setting. 4. For example, the Ballinrobe Workhouse was described in these terms in an article in the Mayo Constitution, on March 23, 1847 (Mayo County Library 2004, 81–82). 5. As noted by Claire Hackett and Bill Rolston, “storytelling is far from simple, uncomplicated and non-contentious” (2009, 372). Their study of the use of storytelling for victims of political violence in Northern Ireland traces the tensions, problems, and potentials between 154 Niamh Ann Kelly reading, as at both sites the narrative representation of a woman or girl elucidates that her figure or identity presented through her Famine story cannot simply be regarded as her story, nor as only a local story. Each woman’s or girl’s story represents a departure from silence, as un-speech becomes speech, but also delineates the depth, breadth, and nature...