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Chapter 1. The Story of Ballykilcline
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1 1 The Story of Ballykilcline { And what a people loves it will defend. — John Hewitt, The Colony, in Pete Hamill’s Forever The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. —Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting The particular path of contention has an important impact . . . because each shared effort to press claims lays down a settlement among parties to the transaction, a memory of the interaction, new information about the likely outcomes of different sorts of interactions, and a changed web of relations within and among the participating sets of people. —Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 In the third year of the Great Famine and the thirteenth year of their contentious rent strike, the people of Ballykilcline were forced from their Kilglass Parish homes in Roscommon by British government agents, who evicted them from Ireland. In seven struggling groups during 1847 and ’48, the several hundred tenants—couples, children, single and old people—trudged to Dublin, crossed the Irish Sea to Liverpool, and embarked uncertainly on the great rolling Atlantic to New York City. Their landlord, the Crown, paid for their passages to America to rid the countryside of such troublemakers. Their exodus was a stunning end to a long chapter of extraordinary resistance to Crown authorities in a place that had witnessed withering famine distress and social chaos in the late 1840s and even earlier. The end of their remarkable rent strike was one event among several that happened around Strokestown in 1847 which forever altered Ireland, England, Scotland , Canada, and the United States. A second forced emigration from the area at virtually the same time involved nearly a thousand tenants evicted by Strokestown landlord Major Denis Mahon. More than half of 2 Chapter One Mahon’s evictees died before or upon reaching Quebec’s quarantine station at Grosse Ile in the St. Lawrence River (Dunn 2002; Dunn 2001, p. 9); those who survived were in terrible condition. Only months later, Ireland and England were stunned by the assassination of landlord Mahon , who was ambushed in his carriage as he rode home from a meeting to his Strokestown manor house. The three events—the Ballykilcline and the Mahon evictions and emigrations and the murder of Mahon—had significant repercussions for Ireland, even at the highest levels of government. The name Ballykilcline figured in parliamentary debate over government-subsidized emigration schemes in 1848 when Lord Monteagle argued about hypocrisy in the Crown’s scheme for Ballykilcline in one session and later hailed the scheme’s success (Gray 1999, pp. 193, 307). The illness and death of Mahon’s emigrants aboard ship and in Quebec caused Canadian officials to protest vehemently to London about the deplorable state of the arriving Irish. The killing of Mahon turned British public opinion against the Irish people in the throes of Black ’47, the harshest year of the Great Famine (Kinealy 1997, p. 132), thus stoking the enmity of the Irish into the far future and across the wide Atlantic. Mahon’s death, and other murders , brought the harsh Coercion Act down on Ireland that December. Such measures—usually temporary—gave the government emergency powers to quell lawlessness and disturbances (Lalor 2003, p. 216). Moreover , it exacerbated local sectarian divisions, charged religious antagonisms , and generated a diplomatic controversy between England and the Vatican, which subsequently ordered a curtailment of priests’ political activities in Ireland before Young Ireland’s weak rising in 1848, when priests stepped in to steer the Irish people away from taking action. (Campbell 1990, p. 30). Young Ireland was a nationalist and cultural organization (Lalor 2003, p. 1161). But what was it about their circumstances that put Kilglass’s ten thousand or so natives in such a pivotal and conflicted position? What was the local situation that made what they did evoke such repercussions, like the ripples when a stone drops in the water? And what became of the poor people around whom the chaos and controversy swirled, the evicted tenants of Ballykilcline and their Kilglass relatives and friends? The people of Ballykilcline had themselves been tenants on the Mahon estate for the forty years ending in 1834 when, through a middleman, the Mahons leased the townland from Crown authorities (Scally 1995, p. 5). One or more of the striking farmers were early suspects in Denis Mahon’s murder in 1847 (Fox memo, Nov. 26, 1847). And among Mahon’s dead on [34.228.7.237] Project...