This article is from page 14 of the 2013-05-14 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 14 JPG
PRESIDENT of Ireland Michael D Higgins praised the work of the people in West Clare who worked to prepare for the National Famine Commemoration.
Speaking after the event from Glynn’s Mills, he described the performances by the local people as “a very fine production by the people of Kilrush”.
He paid special tribute to the drama piece, which had brought a tear to his wife’s eye.
“Sabina’s training is in the theatre and she is a founding member of the Focus Theatre with Deirdre O’Connell, and she identifies very clearly with it. That was a very moving piece. The [piece] about the eviction scene and the starvation scene was also very realistic. It is just simply a fact,” he said.
The president had spent almost an hour meeting with local people, hav- ing his photograph taken and signing copies of the Commemoration booklet.
“It was a great pleasure to come down to Clare. Earlier I was over in Carrigoran in the parish of Newmarket where I spent a long time,” he told reporters, referring to his childhood home.
The President who received his primary and secondary school education in Clare was well informed of its famine history.
“Clare had a particularly bad time with the famine because the blight lasted into the sixth year, and that meant you were still losing people. I think the deaths in Kilrush in one 18-month period were about 1,400 or 1,500. I remember seeing it when I looked at the figures over in Ennistymon,” he said.
“At one stage the two work houses in Kilrush and Ennistymon, the number in the workhouse exceeded the number in the population. And then in five years Kilrush itself lost 50 per cent of its population, but obviously for those who survived who are related this is very, very important event in terms of collective memory,” he added refereeing to information supplied to him by the Kilrush and District Historical Society.
“And then there are those who left and some of those would have died on the way to North America. If they were heading for the Canadian ports they were probably at far greater risks.
“Really in a curious way, I made reference in my own speech, that the ‘London Times’ was often unsympathetic during the middle of the famine, but 20 years afterwards said how a great mistake had been made, because now the Irish were in the country that was one of the most powerful in the world, and they would never let people forget the famine and who was responsible for it,” said the president.