The 'Path of the Dead’ led to Mayo Famine workhouse
By Tom Gillespie
THE Connaught Telegraph has the unique distinction of being one of the few newspapers to be published during the Famine years of 1845 to 1849.
Thousands of starving peasants flocked to the workhouse in Castlebar where the pathway to the building - where the Sacred Heart Hospital now stands - became known as ‘Cosán na Marbh’ - the path of the dead.
At that period Mayo was one of the poorest counties and had a population of 388,887, an increase of 25 per cent since 1821, the largest in rural Ireland, and four times that of today.
Tom Higgins, in his book Through Fagan’s Gate, relied on contemporary reports from the Connaught to paint a horrific picture of the ravages of the Famine.
Because of the refusal of the government to provide any financial assistance, the workhouse simply could not cope with the numbers applying for relief.
In the Castlebar Workhouse Poor Law area, thousands were seeking admission, and virtually the whole population was seeking ‘outdoor’ relief, but after January 1947 no official relief was ever again given.
Conditions within the workhouse were, by law, to be so harsh as to ensure that people would enter them only as a last resort, and the diet ‘must not be superior or equal to the ordinary diet of the local labouring classes’.
This was stipulated in the regulations. For adults the diet consisted of two meals a day as follows: Breakfast - eight ounces of stirabout (porridge) and a half-pint of milk. Dinner - three-and-a-half pounds of potatoes and one pint of skim milk. There was no meat or cheese in the diet.
Mrs. Cecil Woodham-Smith, in her book The Reason Why, described Castlebar Workhouse as ‘huge and forbidding. Built from blocks of grey stone, surrounded by high walls, standing outside the town on bare and treeless land, and appearing half fortress and half prison, immense wards with wooden platforms where the paupers lay on straw; bareness, chill, inhuman emptiness’.
During the Famine it was not uncommon to find the living and the dead stretched side by side on filthy straw on the ‘sleeping platforms’. In the long dormitory rooms there was only one turf fire at the far end, which often smoked, adding to the prevailing gloom.
A doctor on an official visit to Castlebar Workhouse recommended that the straw in the sleeping quarters be changed once a week.
Castlebar Workhouse had accommodation for 900 people but the number of inmates in 1848 was 2,500. Almost every person admitted was suffering from some complaint or in the grip of the first stages of fever.
The fever hospital in the workhouse was always full. People who died there were buried in a plot of ground at the back of the building, often thrown into mass graves, covered with lime, and the pits were left open until the corpses piled up. Sometimes a special coffin with a sliding bottom was used from which the corpse was dropped into the pit. Buried in a pauper’s grave - the ultimate stigma, the final degradation.
Voluntary Famine Relief Committees were set up in all the towns to raise funds and provide free food for the starving masses.
A record of proceedings of the Castlebar Poor Relief Committee from December 21, 1846, to January 15, 1847, recorded: On December 21, 1846, the committee reported that they had set up boilers capable of making 100 gallons of soup. Later they acquired boilers of 140 gallons capacity, and commenced the issue of ‘wholesome and nutritious soup made from beef of the best quality, thickened with oaten meal, and seasoned with pepper, onions and other vegetables’.
Each adult qualifying for relief was entitled to receive two pints of soup daily, one pint for each of the other members of his or her family, or the equivalent in meal, on payment of one half-penny.
The committee was later presented with an additional 100 gallon boiler by the Society of Friends in Dublin.
The committee acknowledged the generous contribution it received from many sources. The members were now confident that ‘disease had been checked’ and that the starving poor were being given some measure of relief.
The chairman of the Castlebar Relief Committee in 1846 was Rev. Richard Gibbons, parish priest of Castlebar, and he was assisted by clergy and lay people from across the religious divide.
The optimism of the committee was without foundation. The worst was yet to come.
Faced with a situation of disastrous proportions, what could the local clergy do, with starvation, disease and death the ever-present reality for their parishioners?
As the Famine wreaked its havoc on the town various types of fever became rampant, and the streets were crowded with beggars. The crowding helped to spread the fever. In the new jail 40 per cent of the 400 inmates died of the fever, as did the governor, the deputy governor, the deputy matron, the turnkey and the Catholic chaplain.
In the town and county the dead and dying were lying together and there was a great dearth of medical aid.
Those who were able-bodied and willing to work could find none. In September 1847, crowds of men stood in the streets of Castlebar, reaping hooks in hand, offering themselves for eight pence a day, but no landlord could afford to hire them, though the corm was ripe and falling to the ground.
People often remained dead in their cabins because there was no one to remove them. The townspeople were providing food for 1,200 people daily but eventually they had to give up for want of money. People flocked to the seaports, as emigration was the only way to escape the horror. The shops were empty. A gloom hung over the town.
A cholera hospital was opened in the stage-coach building at Ballymacragh on the Westport Road. It could take 20 beds. On one occasion two children who had slept one night on the street were suspected of having cholera. They were tumbled into a wheelbarrow and brought to the cholera hospital, but they were found to have only suffered from starvation and cold.