Famine history essay collection co-edited by Moyvore man

A Moyvore resident is the co-editor of a recently published collection of essays focusing on Dublin’s experience of the Great Famine.

Ciarán McCabe, a native of Lucan, County Dublin but resident in Moyvore, is joint editor of ‘Dublin and the Great Irish Famine’ (196 pp), which has been published by UCD Press.

Dr McCabe, well known to history aficionados in Westmeath for his facilitation of oral history workshops and his occasional lectures for Westmeath Archaeological and Historical Society, is a member of the teaching staff at Queen’s University, Belfast, alongside Castlepollard native, Professor Marie Coleman.

Co-editing the volume of essays alongside Dr McCabe are Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Associate Professor in Art History and Cultural Policy at University College, Dublin, and an expert in the visual culture of the Famine, poverty and migration; and Edenderry native Dr Ciaran Reilly, an authority on the history of Irish landed estates who teaches 19th and 20th century history at Maynooth University.

This book is not a narrative account of Dublin’s experience of famine in the late 1840s and early 1850s, but seeks to shed new light on the topic by following a thematic structure populated by new research from 13 eminent international scholars.

Surprisingly, in the large corpus of both academic and popular work on the events of 1846 to 1852, Dublin’s Famine story is a neglected area, and this monograph seeks to rectify that fact through an interdisciplinary approach.

The central themes are business life and industry; charity and philanthropy; institutions, healthcare and mortality; and cultural history and memory. Sub-topics focused on under these headings in the individual essays include the charitable work of Voluntary Charitable Societies (the focus of an essay by Dr McCabe) and the Society of Friends; suicide, childbirth, maternity and imprisonment; banking, trade (as examined by Dr Reilly, with interesting transnational connections), technology, art and literature.

In his study of Dublin’s Voluntary Charitable Societies, Dr McCabe ably charts a ‘vibrant and expanding charitable landscape in Dublin city’ that existed outside the framework of the oft-studied Poor Law system. Another essay of interest is Dr Georgina Laragy’s investigation of suicide in Famine-era Dublin. At the end of her fascinating investigation of a sensitive topic, Dr Laragy concludes that suicide during these times ‘became a proxy to help express the inexpressible’ nature of poverty in Dublin; what was regarded by society as an ‘abhorrent crime’ had became more ‘explicable’ than it had ever been before.

Dr McCabe is the publisher of the 2019 book ‘Begging, charity and religion in pre-Famine Ireland’ (Liverpool University Press) and is a social historian of poverty and welfare in Ireland, Britain and the wider world. ‘Dublin and the Great Irish Famine’ is available in all good bookshops at €30.