Eliza Hankin’s Irish Roots – 12 September 2024

None of us magically appear out of nowhere.  We all have ancestors and some of Eliza Hankin’s ancestors were Irish as well as English.

Unless you are Irish, the Irish Potato Famine is probably just one of those stories set out in the history books – stuff that most of us instantly consign to the box labelled “Not Really Interested”.  For the people of Ireland who had to live through – or often die – during the famine years, the famine was not something that was merely an awkward item in compulsory history lessons – something that could be ignored.  When you are rich, you can always get food.  If you are poor, you starve to death or find somewhere else where there is food to eat. 

Often enough, the wealthier landowners paid the fares of the starving poor to help them leave Ireland.  It was cheaper to pay for a boat ticket than to buy food for the poor.  So the population of Ireland went down by at least half in the decades after the start of the famine in 1845. Margaret’s great, great grandparents arrived in Australia in the late 1840s.  Those who got to America, or Australia or Canada or New Zealand were in some ways the “lucky” ones.  They managed to get out of Ireland and survive the journey to countries far away and they then had the opportunity to work their arses off and may be provide food for their families – or rather for those family members who were still alive.

Eliza Hankin’s grandfather John McGillicuddy was not quite as lucky as those who got to America or Australia – but he was till lucky compared to the fellow countrymen he left behind on the west coast of Ireland.  John McGillicuddy made it out of Ireland but like thousands of other refugees, he only got across the Irish Sea where he was left stranded in Liverpool, Lancashire, England.  By 1900, Liverpool was being hailed as the Second Greatest City in the British Empire.  It certainly had a large population, and a privileged few in Liverpool were astonishingly rich, but most people in Liverpool were like John McGillicuddy – desperately poor and lucky only because if they used the last dregs of their physical strength, they were given the privilege of being able to live a few more years before their strength disappeared and they were crippled by old age.

John McGillicuddy married Eliza’s grandmother and they had many children.  When child mortality was high and when there was no welfare system to pay you an old age pension, having many children was the only rational way to spin your life out a little longer.  John’s wife was certified as insane because she saw the spirit of her dead child in a bed next to her.  Because his wife was insane, she was locked up in a Mental Hospital.  She eventually escaped from the Hospital - but only by starving herself to death – and John McGillicuddy then remarried.

I want to say that the population of the western parts of Ireland was “decimated” by the famine – but this would be factually wrong. “Decimated” comes from a Latin word which means “Lowered by 10%” – or 1/10^th smaller.  The population of western Ireland was actually “lowered” by significantly more than 10%, although no one is quite sure of the exact figures.  Often enough, the bodies were simply dumped in mass graves without names at all.

Finding traces of John McGillicuddy was very hard.  The Irish poor who were dumped in Liverpool – and they included my own ancestors – were simply “Irish” and the record keepers assumed that it did not matter where they came from.  Why should they care?  These wretched poor were often unable to speak English but only Irish – and it made such as a mess when the bodies of the dead Irish were left outside the gates of the Liverpool cemeteries.  John was asked on only one Census return to identify where he was born, and the answer written on the Census return by the “Enumerator” was extremely hard to decipher.  Eventually I worked out that John said he was born in Killarney.  

Being curious and wanting to find where John came from, I kept looking until I eventually found him and members of his family In Killarney.  Families with the McGillicuddy surname still live in the Killarney district – and there is even a mountain range called the McGillicuddy Reeks.  Wiki says the McGillicuddy Reeks “is a sandstone and siltstone mountain range in the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, Ireland.” According to Wiki, these mountains are 19 kilometres long and stretch from the Gap of Dunloe in the east to Glencar in the west.  Wiki claims the McGillicuddy Reeks is Ireland's highest mountain range.

Why would anyone who was not starving to death ever want to leave a place filled with aching beauty?  Why were people just like John left to die in their thousands and be forced to flee in even greater thousands?

The reason is simple enough.  John McGillicuddy had committed an unpardonable crime.  He was Irish and that meant he did not matter.  

But if the Irish do not matter, surely that means that no one anywhere can ever matter.?  It must be the truth that either we all matter or absolutely no one matters.

The name John McGillicuddy underlines the lack of importance given to the Starving Irish when they arrived in Liverpool.  John’s name was NOT “John” at all.  His name was “Sean” – pronounced Shawn.  His name was changed to make it seem like he was less “foreign”.  Getting his name right didn’t matter.  He was only Irish – and it was irrelevant that he had precisely the same legal citizenship as anyone else in the United Kingdom.  Sean McGillicuddy was a citizen of the country which was then called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland - just like the people of England, Scotland and Wales.