by Dermot Quinn
23/10/2010
At the outbreak of the Great Famine Ireland had an estimated population of 9 million, most of them living at or near the poverty line, often on the great landed estates. Irish landlords had the further problem of a disjointed landholding system that teetered on the edge of collapse and a new Poor Law rate introduced to support the workhouse system. This led a number of the large landowners to reduce their surplus of tenants by means of Assisted Passage schemes whereby the landlord paid towards the cost of exporting his tenants, usually to other far-flung parts of the British Empire.
Tenant families sub-divided the landlordís holding amongst themselves by communal arrangements, mixing parcels of good and bad land in fair measure. The pressure of the ever-growing population meant more and more sub-division until the resultant land allocations could no longer support a family and pay the landlordís rent. Since what was being grown there was the ubiquitous potato, this resulted in Irelandís greatest ever calamity.
From the landlordís perspective he lived (in fine style) on the income of these rents. The new Poor Law scheme now meant, however, that if the rent wasnít paid, and the tenants had to be evicted, they went into the workhouse, which resulted in an increased local Poor Law rate being levied on the very same landlord.
Tenant families sub-divided the landlordís holding amongst themselves by communal arrangements, mixing parcels of good and bad land in fair measure. The pressure of the ever-growing population meant more and more sub-division until the resultant land allocations could no longer support a family and pay the landlordís rent. Since what was being grown there was the ubiquitous potato, this resulted in Irelandís greatest ever calamity.
From the landlordís perspective he lived (in fine style) on the income of these rents. The new Poor Law scheme now meant, however, that if the rent wasnít paid, and the tenants had to be evicted, they went into the workhouse, which resulted in an increased local Poor Law rate being levied on the very same landlord.
The key figure on many such estates was the land agent. He formed a convenient buffer between the aristocratic owner and his lowly tenants. Not surprisingly, some land agents promoted Assisted Passage schemes for the economic benefits that would accrue to the estate, for the expansion of the receiving colonies in the British Empire, but often, admittedly, for the good also of the emigrants themselves. However, it was the landlord, not the well-paid agent, who had to come up with the finance for these grand schemes as well as facing the odium arising from any use of compulsion by the agent found necessary to clear the tenants from the land.
Major Denis Mahon inherited Strokestown Park House and estate and, after a long family legal battle, took possession in December 1845. He was immediately faced with a tenantsí rent strike which by 1847 had accumulated arrears of £13,000 to add to a further £17,000 of existing debts. Mahon then employed a land agent a distant relation, John Ross Mahon of Guinness and Mahon in Dublin, to restore the estate to working solvency. He urged a reduction in tenants to allow a new sub-division of land on which sufficient corn could be grown to both feed a family and to pay the rent asked. This could be done at a cost of £3-12s per family once-off (to Canada), set against eviction which would cost Major Mahon an annual Poor Law rate, at £7-3s per family per annum. Morality aside, the economics seemed unassailable, presenting a neat proposition on paper, at least. In April 1847, Denis Mahon set the plans in step, issuing 800 Notices to Quit to selected tenants while he arranged the financing.
Time was now of the essence so as to avail of the five months when access to ice-free Canadian ports was possible. Tenants would embark from Liverpool for the transatlantic voyage, it being the cheapest route, offering the best shipping terms and finance. The scheme covered 866‡ statute adults (children under 3 werenít counted, and those aged 3-12 counted as half adults). Tenants were induced to sign up by a range of stratagems with minimal compensation for dwellings and animals, on condition that their houses (hovels, really) were ìthrown downî to prevent squatters moving in. The emigrants were provided with passage money and extra provisions for the journey. Believe it or not, they had to make their own way to Dublin where they were then ferried across to Liverpool, at a cost to Mahon of 3s per adult. From there they would embark for the journey of 40 days or so by sailing ship to Quebec.
The ship selected by the Major for the first voyage was the Virginius a choice that would bedevil the Mahon name for ever afterwards as it became the iconic image of the Famine coffin ship. Of the 476 Mahon tenants aboard, 158 died at sea, mainly from fever. A further 109 perished at the quarantine station at Grosse ‘le, near Montreal, after the ship docked 12 August 1847 following an unusually long voyage of 63 days. The other Mahon passengers from this first batch, who travelled on the Erinís Queen, fared little better, with conditions there so bad below decks that the captain had to bribe the crew with a sovereign to go down to extract dead bodies, which even their relatives amongst the passengers were unwilling to touch.
To the Canadian authorities this was a heartless Irish landlord dumping his disease-ridden paupers on the colony. They were unaware that on-board fever was actually confined to ships which sailed from ports where fever was already locally prevalent, as in Liverpool, where typhus was particularly virulent in the waterfront lodging houses where the emigrants stayed while awaiting embarkation. The common perception of such famine ships held in Ireland, to this day, was that over-crowding was the cause of the high death rate. However, the many emigrant ships from Germany were generally more crowded than British ships but they escaped such sickness on the voyage because there was no fever in their home port. Unaware of the fate of the first two ships Major Mahon even arranged two further voyages.
The irony of all this was that by 1848 the Irish people were so desperate that they fled the starved land without the inducement of any assistance schemes or compensation; hunger alone would most probably have accomplished by then what Major Denis Mahon had nearly impoverished himself to achieve the year before. The population of Strokestown fell by 20,000, little of which reduction could be attributed to the Assisted Passage project.
Feelings ran high in the Strokestown area when word reached there of the fate of the former tenants. At 5.50 pm on 2 November 1847, as he returned from a meeting of the Board of Governors at Roscommon workhouse, the Majorís carriage was fired on from the parapet of Doorty Bridge, near Four Mile House, and he died instantly. Within a few months a further nine landlords, as well as some middlemen, were killed. John Ross Mahon had already taken precautions (quite sensibly, when one reflects on his situation) from those who had threatened his life.
The Majorís successor, his son-in-law Henry Stanford Pakenham Mahon, moved to uncover the perpetrators, angered in particular by accounts of bonfires having been lit in celebration. He evicted all those who lived in the townlands near Doorty Bridge which, not surprisingly, soon resulted in arrests being made. Furthermore, a reward of £100 for information had been offered by the Lord Lieutenant, a hugely tempting sum at that time. All the Crown witnesses, and their families, were lodged in Ballybough police barracks, in Dublin and were given money to leave the Strokestown area after the trial, some going to America.
Three men were found guilty of Mahonís murder. Patrick Doyle fortuitously died of fever but Patrick Hasty and James Cummins were hanged in public outside Roscommon jail. Two other men, Michael Gardener and Michael Brennan, then stood trial as well, sensibly pleaded guilty and were transported. However, the man widely believed locally to have been the ringleader of the killing, Andrew Connor, escaped to America.
Pakenham Mahon, who took the precaution of never residing in Strokestown, proceeded ruthlessly to clear the land of unwanted paupers by the old-established method of police-assisted evictions, presided over by John Ross Mahon. So successful was this operation, over what was by a now a cowed and demoralised tenantry, that by 1851 he had returned the estate to solvency, without the need for any more of these costly schemes of social engineering.
Major Denis Mahon was, by the standards of his peers, a fair man. He would have seen himself as acting through the best of motives. His estate was on the brink of bankruptcy, struggling to provide a living for numbers of people that the land, his agent assured him, could not now or ever support. He believed he was only doing the humane thing, therefore, in reducing the population of the estate. As further evidence of Major Mahonís Christian concern, he could have pointed to his anxiety to set up a soup kitchen, his work in the Poor Law Union, his part alleviation of the 1846 rent, and his compensation from his own pocket of infirm tenants.
But the shadow of the coffin ship hangs over the Strokestown estate to this day. No matter that Denis Mahon had no knowledge of the conditions on board his ships, or the consequences of port fever, or that he had paid for additional supplies to sustain the travellers. In the court of liberal public opinion he stood condemned as among the worst of exterminating landlords, for there is no evidence that Mahon ever made any enquiries as to how his former tenants fared on their traumatic journey to the new world. He had set out at great trouble and expense to remove them from his land and was glad to be rid of the problem. That it was he who ultimately paid for the venture with his life and not the avaricious land agent who had so assiduously and profitably promoted the scheme to him, remains as a salutary lesson to all those in authority who follow the advice of others in matters for which the public will hold them to have been solely responsible.
D.Q.