A harp gently opens Along the Western Seaboard, the second song on Declan O’Rourke’s Chronicles of the Irish Famine. An equally gentle acoustic guitar joins the harp.
And that is the album’s artful approach. If one didn’t understand English and only heard the melody, one would easily misinterpret the lyrics’ actual message: We begged, we prayed, but no one listened.
But you do understand English. The English may have stolen the Irish land, but the Irish stole the English language.
O’Rourke’s words tell the story so well, it is often difficult to continue–knowing we are listening to verified horror.
Declan O’Rourke Along Western Seaboard
Heavenly Father
This song is told through the voice of a parish priest. The Irish population was 80% Catholic and naturally it turned to it for temporal succor. Surrounded by suffering and the priest begs God for help:
Lord what can we do now, oh good lord what can we do
When we need to feed so many, and there’s not even for the few
Lord what can we do now, oh good lord what can we do
They are starving! They are freezing!
And their clothes have all worn through.
Daniel O’Connell
Daniel O’Connell
Since little help seemingly came from Above, a few on terra firma did their best. The Great Emancipator Daniel O’Connellsaid to the House of Commons at the Famine’s height in 1847:
Ireland is in your hands, in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself. I solemnly call upon you to recollect that I predict with the sincerest conviction that a quarter of her population will perish unless you come to her relief.
Their own fault
As was the case then (and too often the case now), the perpetrators– the English–blamed the victim–the Irish– for their own misfortune.
The common view by those “with” was that the Irish poor had brought about their own situation. Thus they deserved the tragedy and if the British were to assist them, it meant with many strings attached despite the reality that, “they have no strength to help themselves.”
Send chicken feed and sand.
If any father had treated his children the way that the priest’s Father allowed his children to be treated, he would have been prosecuted.
Declan O’Rourke has an amazing voice and a mesmerizing stage presence. He also writes great tunes. He released his first album, Since Kyrbran, in 2004 and has steadily continued releases since then.
Irish Famine
Warner Brothers Records released O’Rourke’s Chronicles of the Irish Famine, on October 27, 2017. When I first heard about the album I thought that he had covered a collection of traditional songs. How could any contemporary composer come up with a whole album’s worth of new music on such an old topic? He must have researched and found established songs written since Ireland’s mid-19th century’s Gorta Mór. Songs that related to one of the sadly too many of human history’s famines that Help would have minimized or eliminated had Help decided to.
15 Years
But O’Rourke wrote all with occasional assistance and it took him 15 years to complete. I suppose it was one of those projects when Inspiration alone cannot lead to Completion. He did a remarkable job of portraying the Famine’s nightmares without being maudlin.
Siobhan Long wrote in The Irish Times: “O’Rourke mines the darkest corners of the horrors of the Irish famine with a sensitivity that animates a raft of highly personal stories.”
Declan O’Rourke Chronicles Great Irish Famine
Clogman’s Glen
Over the next 12 days I will write about each of Chronicle’s songs. “Clogman’s Glen” opens the album.
If you’re watch your player’s timer, you’ll notice that for the first five seconds there is silence. Then O’Rourke inhales deeply. To sing such a collection of sad tunes, a moment is needed. Knowing what is ahead, we all need to take a breath.
At 11 seconds, a slow fiddle precedes O’Rourke’s gentle voice beginning his narrative. Rather than dropping us immediately into the Great Famine’s monstrosity, Declan brings us to Clogman’s Glen, an actual settlement on the side of a lake, called a Clachan. Life is difficult, but the inhabitants survive. The song’s narrator recalls…
Ah, do you remember when, my love
Oh my love, do you remember when
When we were young and life was hard
But beautiful in Clogman’s Glen?
English Rule a Recipe for disaster
By the mid-19th century, the English had herded the Irish peasants onto small plots of land to make room for pasturing beef cattle, but even with only an acre and a half, a family of six could grow enough potatoes for a year.
Potatoes grew well, even on poorer acreage. Potatoes were nutritious and easy to cook, and they could be fed to pigs and cattle and fowl. And families did not need a plow to grow potatoes. All the peasant needed was a spade–and a strong back. And they could grow potatoes in wet ground and on mountain sides where no other kinds of plants could be cultivated.
As much as it is a stereotype about potatoes and the Irish, it was the English policy that resulted in more than half of the Irish depending on the potato as their diet’s staple. Almost 40 percent ate almost entirely potatoes, with some milk or fish as the only other source of nourishment. If anything interfered with the annual potato crop, the peasant starved.
Declan O’Rourke Chronicles Great Irish Famine
The Blight
It is easy to forget that an atrocity often begins with quiet notice. There is always a time of seeming normalcy before the atrocity headlines. A time “before the winter’s icy chill, And cold stiff wind swept through and blew.”
There had been occasional and localized crop failures, but in the early 1840s the incidence suddenly increased. And in 1845 half the crop failed.
And that is the point. Recalling that the majority of the 19th century Irish were poor, living off the land, they had been able to survive with the land’s beauty around them, but they were already living on the edge of catastrophe.
In today’s language, Living check to check.
Declan O’Rourke Chronicles Great Irish Famine
Yeats
Irish poet William Butler Yeats described Ireland’s Easter Uprising in 1916 as a “terrible beauty.” That same phrase equally applies to this album. The beautiful playing often belies the terror the Irish Famine wrought upon the millions who suffered, who died, who tried to escape. (Irish Times review)
Clogman’s Glen
Declan O’Rourke Chronicles Great Irish Famine
The Pawnbroker’s Reward
O’Rourke also is an author. On October 31, 2021, Gill Books published The Pawnbroker’s Reward and like Chronicles, the story is set during the Irish Famine. It is the story of the ua Buachalla family and shows the famine as it happened through the lens of a single town – Macroom, Co. Cork – and its environs.
Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the Sea wrote of the novel: ‘A powerful and gripping piece of writing from a born storyteller, a tale shaped with the lyricism of a songwriting giant.’
And it turned out that Pawnbroker was the first of a trilogy. On September 21, 2023, Gill publishedA Whisper from Oblivion. It continues the anguished stories begun surrounding Macroom in Pawnbroker.
And not surprisingly at all, it is a gripping read.
Declan O’Rourke Chronicles Great Irish Famine
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