Tag: Ramblings

Remembering and Solidarity

Saturday 19th May, Doolough Co. Mayo

Registration from 12.45pm in Louisburgh Town hall

Beginning at 1.30pm

Walk Leaders: Richard Moore, Fatin al Tamimi

Music: Lisa Lambe

Famine Walk 1988-2018

Register online here (alternatively you can raise sponsorship for Afri – just bring this to the registration desk on the day) and see who’s going on Facebook

Download the brochure or the sponsorship form

Saturday 19th May 2018 will see the 30th anniversary of the Doolough Famine Walk. Afri first organised the walk in 1988 to commemorate the Great Hunger of 1845-50. Regions such as Mayo illustrated how a natural setback such as potato blight can mutate to disaster in the context of unchecked market forces, lack of democratic structures and resources, and a pitiless, moralistic ideology. While some £9.5 million was eventually spent on late and poorly-designed ‘Relief’, £14 million went to sustain the military and police forces.

Our walk retraces a journey of horror which occurred on 30th/31st March 1849. Two poor-law commissioners were to assess people in Louisburgh, entitling them as ‘paupers’ to meagre relief rations. The inspection never happened, but the people were instructed to appear at Delphi Lodge at 7 the following morning. They walked the hilly road in wintry, even snowy, conditions. At Delphi Lodge they were refused food, or admission to the workhouse, and so began their weary return journey, on which many, even hundreds, died.

Afri, drawing on the local history of Louisburgh and Doolough, recalls the dead and displaced of the Great Hunger – and all those facing the same grotesque and avoidable cruelties in today’s world, from the so-called ‘War on Terror’ to the indignities of ‘Direct Provision’. We walk the famine road to remember the causes of hunger and poverty in our world – political, military, economic and environmental – and our failure to learn the lessons of our own history. Our Walk Leaders eloquently represent the spirit of resistance and transformation:

In the twentieth-anniversary year of the Good Friday Agreement we welcome Richard Moore, who was blinded as a 10-year-old child by a rubber bullet fired by a British soldier during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He reacted by founding Children in Crossfire, declaring: “I learned to see life in a different way. I may have lost my sight, but I have my vision”.

2018 is also significant in that it marks the 70th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, and in this context, we are honoured to welcome Fatin Al Tamimi, Chairperson of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

The extraordinary voice of Lisa Lambe will provide the music for this year’s walk. We are delighted to have Lisa as part of this year’s walk line up.

Register online here (alternatively you can raise sponsorship to help Afri continue our work – just bring this to the registration desk on the day) and see who’s going on Facebook

Read an article about the Famine Walk and BBC Radio 4 Ramblings Show.

Find out about our ‘Music From A Dark Lake’ CD, a compilation of songs from past Famine Walks.

Afri Famine Walk 2017, Doolough, County Mayo. Photo by Derek Speirs

Sometimes you really do count your blessings. There I was, in November 2016, setting out from Louisburgh Co. Mayo on a cold wet autumn morning, wondering whether my right leg, mildly strained in a recent tennis match, would manage the eleven-mile famine walk to Doolough.

How trivial an ‘injury’ in the context of the 1849 tragedy the walk commemorates. Hundreds of starving men, women and children, ordered to tramp those eleven miles to Delphi Lodge, were denied an audience, let alone the relief they sought, by the men of power. Many died by the roadside on their despairing return trail.

Afri’s Famine Walk happens each May, but this was a re-enactment for BBC Radio 4’s ‘Ramblings’ series. Local historian Mary O’Malley painted a poignant scene around her own family story, and Joe Murray set the context of Afri’s work for justice, human rights and sustainability.

Yours truly was to handle ‘the broader history’; thank goodness for Cork University Press’s superb Atlas of the Great Irish Famine! Its unique blend of scholarly analysis and humane reflection dispelled some of my clouds of ignorance about that great lacuna in our history and culture.

The Atlas breaks the twin silences of the survivors and the scholars, whilst respecting the irrevocable silence of the over one million victims. It allowed me to sketch some of the broader background to Doolough’s tragedy, along with some nuggets of salutary and surprising information.

Things I never knew: fish and seafood did form part of the pre-Famine fare of those who could obtain them. Ireland’s potato-based diet, though fatally precarious, made the pre-Famine population healthier than the European average.

By the Nineteenth Century almost all major Irish towns were ports. Westport had nearly half its population in manufacture in 1821 – but in cottage and artisan production which soon drowned in the tide of new imported factory commodities. Continue reading “Ramblings and the 2017 Famine Walk” →