How Did The Great Irish

Famine Change Ireland

and The World?
PART TWO
Student Activities:
Irish Emigrants to Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 664
The Journey of Irish Workhouse Girls to Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 673
The Irish Diaspora Is Our Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 681
How Did Ireland Change After the Great Irish Famine? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 685
The Great Irish Famine and the Quest for Irish Independence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 693
Language and the Great Irish Famine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 702
Emigration From Ireland Before the Great Irish Famine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 708
The Impact of Irish Immigration on Port Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 716
Immigration Policy and the Irish . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 721
Annie Moore: Ellis Island’s First Immigrant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 726
Immigrants at Ellis Island: Radio Drama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 733
Preparation for Emigration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 737
The Emigrant’s Trunk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 748
The American Wake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 752
Dance as Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 761
 Irish Emigrants to Australia
BACKGROUND

I
n this activity, students read from Soinbhe Lally’s The Hungry Wind, learning about the fate of Irish
families sent to workhouses and to Australia during the Great Irish Famine.

While immigrants to North America from the Great Irish Famine generally financed their journeys with
their own resources or with private programs of Assisted Emigration that included those funded by
landlords, Irish immigrants to Australia arrived under different circumstances. Before 1837, Australia was
a penal colony with convicts supplying the labor to English settlers. The British called sending prisoners to
distant colonies transportation.
Wicklow’s Historic Gaol (jail) in Australia has been restored to the period when it housed some of the
almost 50,000 Irish who were sent as convicts to Australia. Some of the convicts sent to Australia were
hardly more than children. Their offense? Stealing a loaf of bread. The Gaol’s database has the stories of
some of those who made new lives in Australia. Students might check the website:
http://www.wicklow.ie/heritagegenealogy/gaol/main.html.
As The Hungry Wind opens, the Great Irish Famine sweeps through Ireland, Marya and Breege Gilbride,
their younger brother Packey and their widowed mother are evicted from their home and sent to the
workhouse. The girls are separated from their mother and brother and begin the grim daily life of the
workhouse. The only consolation is that there is a schoolroom and the girls have a chance to learn to read
and write.
Occasionally, as the girls work in the laundry or scrubbing the halls and ward, they hear news of their
mother from Irish-speaking women who live in her ward. The girls’ friend Hannah is attacked by the Master
of the Workhouse. When Hannah accuses him at a hearing with the Board of Guardians, she is accused of
lying and being deceitful.
As the famine worsens, more people beg to be admitted to the workhouse and the wards become more crowded.
A new Matron reduces their rations to thin gruel and she neglects to see that the workhouse is maintained and
cleaned. The crowding and the squalor brings fever to the inmates of the workhouse who are not strong enough
to fight the disease.
Marya recovers after a frightening time among the dying in the fever shed outside the workhouse. When
she brings an old woman a drink of water, the woman tells her fortune in Irish promising that the worst is
over, that the hungry wind is spent. When Marya is better she joins the other girls at a house where
workhouse children were sent to avoid the fever in the workhouse.
While she is at the children’s house, Marya meets her friend Seamus, another workhouse inmate, who tells
her that he plans to escape from the poorhouse and stowaway on a ship bound for Canada. Marya steals a
loaf of bread to give him for his travel; however, Seamus is caught leaving the workhouse and charged with
stealing workhouse clothes and a loaf of bread. He never tells where he got the bread.
When the epidemic of fever is over in the workhouse, the children are sent back. Marya and Breege find
out that Packey and their mother had died of fever. Other children discovered the deaths of the parents and
family members and a great keen (lament for the dead) goes up in the workhouse.
School resumes and the girls learn how to write a letter. Marya decides to write a letter to her uncle Tom
who was transported to Australia for stealing food for his hungry family. Kind ladies who visit the
workhouse promise to find Tom in Australia and help the girls contact him.
(Note: This activity can be used in conjunction with The Journey of Irish Workhouse Girls to Australia.)

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
The Hungry Wind (Chapter Twenty-Two)
664
 ADDITIONAL READINGS
“Emigration of Orphans from Workhouses in Ireland,” in John Killen, ed. The Famine Decade. Belfast:
Blackstaff, 1995. pp 183-184.
Reid, Richard and Cheryl Mongan. ‘A Decent Set of Girls:’ The Irish Famine Orphans of the ‘Thomas
Arbuthnot.’ Yass: Yass Heritage.
Lally, Soinbhe. The Hungry Wind. Dublin: Poolbeg, 1997.
CLASSROOM MATERIALS
U-2 recording of “Van Diemen’s Land” from the album Rattle and Hum
Copies of Lally, Soinbhe. The Hungry Wind. Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1997

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will be able to:
Compare and analyze the choices presented to characters in The Hungry Wind.
Interpret song lyrics as they apply to emigration.
Describe the role of workhouses in Irish history.
Explain the factors that led to Irish emigration to Australia.

STANDARDS
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.
ELA 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression.
ELA 4: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for social interaction.

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Read historical narratives, myths, legends, biographies, and autobiographies to learn about how historical
figures lived, their motivations, hopes, fears, strengths, and weaknesses.
Explore the lifestyles, beliefs, traditions, rules and laws, and social/cultural needs and wants of people
during different periods in history and in different parts of the world.
View history through the eyes of those who witnessed key events and developments in world history by
analyzing their literature, diary accounts, letters, artifacts, art, music, architectural drawings, and other
accounts.
Interpret and analyze information from textbooks and nonfiction books for young adults, as well as
reference materials, audio and media presentations, oral interviews, graphs, charts, diagrams, and electronic
data bases intended for a general audience.
Make distinctions about the relative value and significance of specific data, facts, and ideas.
Use a few traditional structures for conveying information such as chronological order, cause and effect, and
similarity and difference.
Establish an authoritative stance on the subject and provide references to establish the validity and
verifiability of the information presented.

665
DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. analytical thinking
. probe ideas and assumptions
. reflective thinking
. draw conclusions
. view information from a variety of perspectives
. interpret information and data
. conceptualize and observe
. reflect upon content/form opinions
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
English Language Arts
Arts

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. After 1837, emigration to Australia was encouraged by the government and by private individuals who
subsidized the passage for immigrant laborers. There was still a demand for more workers, including
women who would work as domestic servants. Between 1848 and 1850, when Irish workhouses were
overcrowded, 4,000 Irish girls between 14 and 18, who were classified as workhouse orphans, were sent
to New South Wales. Ask students if this program suggests that workhouse inmates were looked upon as
little more than prisoners in Australia.
In chapter 22 of The Hungry Wind, Marya and Breege are offered the choice between staying on in the
workhouse or emigrating to Australia. Students will read the chapter. What factors do Marya and Breege
consider in making their decision?
2. Have students listen to U-2’s “Van Diemen’s Land” from their album, Rattle and Hum. What does the
singer promise those who fight for justice? Van Diemen’s Land is now called Tasmania. It was the site
of a notorious prison called Port Arthur.

ASSESSMENT OPTIONS
Ask students to write a letter to Marya and Breege advising them whether to stay in the workhouse or to go
to Australia. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each choice? Ask them to predict the outcome
of each choice and advise the girls which option to take. Would they be better off in Australia?

TEACHER REFLECTION
This activity is the first of two activities for students reading The Hungry Wind, a story about the Australian
emigration plan for workhouse girls. We highly recommend this book for class adoption or literary circles.
Students have thought about Marya and Breege in the context of the choice between the known and the
unknown. We highly recommend this book for class adoption or for literary circles. The second activity is
The Journey of the Irish Workhouse Girls to Australia.
Current research has shown that a significant number of Irish girls designated as famine orphans had
parents; however, their parents were unable to provide for them. Some of the girls were later able to send
for family members with government-assisted emigration. In field tests of this activity, students discussed
the difference between leaving Ireland with no family left behind and leaving Ireland knowing parents were
still alive.

666
ADDITIONAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE
For advanced students:
What do students think about transportation? Does it make sense to send American prisoners to foreign
countries that may need their services?

667
The Hungry Wind

668
 The ti '1 9f~ 1/!ll ~cJ

and ~ lkhind him "WaS Mis& Kmmn. The

clletk 'YiU last m en~.. He cm:ricd a pen and~
«All ~ wlw are~~ t~ve and
siX(e€:n ye an and are otphant..i s:'C'Uld up," f he
Master ~id: The~ wa-s a coinmo~ion . A rmmha-
of girls &Dlnd up. .
~Stmd in li.n~ by ~ ~~,. ~11.ey stood by 1he
·wan 'Nhile the Master ooLm~ed dtanc. He rumed ro
the heudcd gen~ ~ 'ltTwcnty-iducc: in ill~ The
dem mt down u Miss Wilm.~ table~ ~ a pco
froot his pxke~ and di.wed ic mlO chc Wkwell.
*As ynu sec:. tb~ .-oc~t ~pidemi.-c has lieft
the Chairman of ~ Buatd s:airl
JtJ.&n}r orp.han:s 2 ~
lQ i hc be.a rid·i:d 8(:" 'l~ma n ~ H(: 'u L"ned and
poinm:I :u &cq;c. ~ gid. whats your Jiam.ef
~B.dgid~ :a
.. Brigid "Wb.acl ...
.:.;Brigid • ~ ~ your hruwuri:a
ott No.. no ~ I mean your .1i111.1.m:a.me. "What is ynuc
mr.Da.l1lC' :a
g;Gilbridc. :ti

"While the C:lWrmm intaTogata1 '8.-~. . th~

otb.C£ Gu.ardiuis 'W3flrcd up ::md dawn inspecting
th~ gU:L. Matya Juwcrccl her eyes.. embHrll.S~
by vhd.r we.me scrUJrin~
~Al-(; yot.i 1n good hcahhl~
~. . ynur hnnaur."'
~And of good. clw-ac.R:r~"' He: tlll"ned m Mi&S
~

669
 ~~k'.:1'1e LLJll~
61
1 know of DDtbing :ap1mm: he& MW KfU1afl
zi

repW 4b.or w MttH ;any of chcsc girls. Z!

Lie de did .she: know2 Marr-1 thought.

rcmcmbuing me. w "Which ~ stot~ E:Iich gid '!R'aS
a.~ th~ ~ qu5tiom. 1bru cq>lics and ~
Kem.an~s tcstim.cmy to their good diatacttt ~
nattJ by .the de.tk. fie wrute furiously~ SC~ iU
;nc(:rv.als "° d:tb hb words with blotting-P3Jl«
When tht ch.airman q~ Hannah, the
Gua.rJians did not ~ to ~gnisc ha ii'.1$ -.:he
s:tOlC girl whom. they had ~ of deceit only
m months befnrr. Hu haic had growm s::ill.«:
rhe.n~ bur her name was .-be ${lmc. C..ould thq
hmrc: for gotten~ M-arya wondc7cd.. 1'.he Maner
luuk.~ throu~ the windo'l.'¥: h 1s back En Eb~
11

mom~ while H~ was ~jog qrncstioms..

Did. he not want tu ~~ I et~
'When Miss Kec~n w:a.or.: as:hd fur a charackX
rcfercnc~for Hannah ~-t: :atnwered ttuthfully:si
"Sjn.ce mc girl bas been iri t-ny c ;:irg~ I hi!Vre
noming m mmpbin nf conccm.ing her~ Ito

·Jbe Chairman of the Board fullshed ~ag

q ue:stion~. u:I will now gi vc you over co
Licuccnanr H(: 'Y:.:a he $i'4id.
·The hca.-do4. mm came- funwnl. and spokci. 1
ha vc: bc-~n. appoin t~d by the Emig.r~· ion
Commission to :9d~<: m itable [e..nile o.rphaRS
f 01 ~migr~tiun tu Au~ualiam :a llirya lisv<:ri cd
~ucnLi.l'cl.ly aru.-1 rrkd ro undcr~and whru- h~ w:i:ti:

670
 Tfi.:? HMtl~·ry Vt/i d

saying. .c Each of you will undergo a medical

rumination. Ym,J 'Wilt rcqu; r:c: ~ rek:.-~~ &om
your minister of rdigi0'1- Pa.tt.lg~ m Au.~trili:i
wru be· free and ~ Board of Guardians will
provide you jth, such dmhing as you w.i1ll need
for the voyage and wbseq_u.ettdy mAusuilia.
Hann ah clu.ti:hc:d Mary:a,.~f hand. M ary.i
u.ndcn.tood now why the BoKd of Gu.acdians
chose o.oit· 10 rem.ettllx.r Hannah. :Fut t.ht: pt.k.e of
nu.dltdng h~r, they Q)u]kl be rid. of bc1 from the
worl:h.ouR".. Ome mou.th less to &ed . Twcnty-
duu: le-ssl! if all. d..e gith went . The Guardians
rcprescn.tcd the: ratepayct"$.t. nQt the paor_ Tuey
would be. glad tu be rid of them..
.. ~ of yrnii who :1re inf~ i r~ cn1igr.u.ing
to Amtmlia Ra.ml ~,. me Cb.airman said .
B~ I~ af ~ and Marya nodded,.. All
twenty-du« giPk ~pcd forward.
r:Vc.ry goodr Altcaogements will be nta.d.e fOf
medical ~xami natii n n_ M eanwhi I~, you. may
obtain. irefc:.renca: mnd cammrffi-c:e- making ~
(';}omcs which you will meed. Tht: Boatd will
pravi~ m~ fur this. l hope fhsar: you wiH be
gntc6J to the :ratq>a.yen of thi~ Uninn who Mc:
pn>vid!ing_iSudi a .tiplcmlid opportunity fur you.:a
Atuya oJ!dy haJlf lhtentd. She thought of Tu.tn
and Susan .. Their baby wou!J he almost a~ old
now:. And ~t;i; w;1$ he wich. chem. in Ausrali.a?
During the ~kn .wfilch fu !owed, her feelings

671
Source: Soinbhe Lally. The Hungry Wind. Dublin: Poolbeg, 1997. Used with permission of Poolbeg Press.

672
 The Journey of Irish
Workhouse Girls to Australia
BACKGROUND

E
migration was a solution for many Irish who despaired of things improving in Ireland as the famine
wore on from 1845 through 1849. Larger farmers and middlemen had their own resources to finance
emigration. Smaller farmers and landless laborers were in a more precarious situation, and if they
were evicted, the choices were bleak. The evicted could go to the workhouse, or they could live along the
road. For some, there was a third choice. Some landlords offered their evicted tenants assisted emigration,
paid tickets to North America. This was not a generous gesture; it was cheaper than maintaining the poor
in the local workhouses. In some areas the Guardians of the district workhouse offered paid passage to
workhouse inmates to emigrate. Again, it was an economic expedient.
While assisted emigrants generally went to North America, in October 1847 the Guardians of the Ennis
Workhouse sent 47 girls, some as young as 14, to Australia on a government-paid plan that ultimately
financed the emigration of 200 girls. Some girls stayed in Sydney; others traveled inland to Yass. They
worked for settlers, married, and became members of the settled emigrant community in New South Wales
(O’Murchadha 223). This story of the girls who traveled on the Thomas Arbuthnot is the basis of Soinbhe
Lally’s The Hungry Wind.
This activity can be used in conjunction with Irish Immigrants to Australia.

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
Journey to Australia
Excerpts From Dr. Charles Strutt’s Diary
On Board an Australian Emigrant Ship
ADDITIONAL READINGS
“Emigration. A Voyage to Australia,” in John Killen, ed. The Famine Decade. Belfast: Blackstaff Press,
1995. pp. 215-219.
Hamilton, P. “Irish Women Immigrants in the Nineteenth Century,” in J. Jupp, ed. The Australian People.
Sydney, 1988.
Lally, Soinbhe. The Hungry Wind. Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1997.
O’Farrell, Patrick. The Irish in Australia. Kensington: New South Wales Press, 1987.
Reid, Richard and Cheryl Mongan. ‘A Decent Set of Girls:’ the Irish Famine Orphans of the Thomas
Arbuthnot, 1849-1850. Yass: Yass Heritage Project, 1997.
CLASSROOM MATERIALS
Copies of excerpt from Soinbhe Lynch, The Hungry Wind.

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will be able to:
Compare sources and draw conclusions about the experiences of Irish immigrants.
Analyze details about the emigrant’s passage to Australia and share conclusions.

673
STANDARDS
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
SS 3: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of the geography
of the interdependent world in which we live—local, national, and global—including the distribution of
people, places, and environments over the Earth’s surface.
ELA 1: Student will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.
ELA 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression.

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Explore narrative accounts of important events from world history to learn about different accounts of the
past to begin to understand how interpretations and perspectives develop.
Interpret and analyze documents and artifacts related to significant developments and events in world
history.
Analyze the roles and contributions of individuals and groups to social, political, economic, cultural, and
religious practices and activities.
Map information about people, places and environments.
Understand how to develop and use maps and other graphic representations to display geographic issues,
problems, and questions.
Interpret and analyze information from textbooks and nonfiction books for young adults, as well as
reference materials, audio and media presentations, oral interviews, graphs, charts, diagrams, and electronic
data bases intended for a general audience.
Compare and synthesize information from different sources.
Organize information according to an identifiable structure, such as compare/contrast or general to specific.
Develop information with appropriate supporting material, such as facts, details, illustrative examples or
anecdotes, and exclude extraneous material.
Recognize different levels of meaning.
Read aloud with expression, conveying the meaning and mood of a work.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. analytical thinking
. evaluate and connect evidence
. reflective thinking
. draw conclusions
. ask and answer logical questions
. interpret information and data
. consult and interpret primary sources
. make generalizations
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
English Language Arts
Family and Consumer Sciences

674
LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. Ask students to read the account of Marya and Breege’s journey from Ireland to Plymouth and from
Plymouth to Australia. What did the surgeon mean when he said the Irish girls were the “sweepings of
Irish workhouses?” If the surgeon calls the girls “sweepings,” how might we expect him to treat the
girls?
2. Where is the bilge? Why are the girls down in the bilge? Later on, we would call that part of the ship
the “steerage.” It was where later emigrant passengers to North America traveled. Students who saw
the film Titanic might remember the steerage passengers kept on the stairs behind gates while first and
second class passengers boarded the life boats.
3. Do students know what a hatch is? Where would they find hatches on a ship? What is the function of
a hatch? Privies are toilets. Are students familiar with the term rigging? Where is the forecastle?
4. Maura and Breege sing old songs that their mother sang to them. Why does singing those songs make
them feel better? How do students feel about the music in their lives? Are there songs they associate
with family members or with a particular time in their lives? Marya and Breege have been orphaned.
Why would songs their mother sang have special meaning to them? Would such songs help two young
girls going off to make a new life in Australia?
5. As a treat the girls received an extra raisin ration on Christmas day. Why would raisins be a good food
source to have on a long journey? Raisins are one of the foods hikers carry. Sometimes it is part of a
trail mix with peanuts and chocolate bits. Why would hikers choose these foods? Why didn’t the girls
just bring these foods along?
6. Have the students noticed the different climates the girls pass through on their way to Australia.
Through which regions do they travel? Why is it summer in Australia (or South Africa and South
America) when it is winter in North America and Europe? When the girls move their baths to catch the
rain water, they move small tin bath tubs that they used for washing. Why was it important to catch the
rain water?
7. The girls traveled by sea for four months to reach Australia from England. Today if students wanted
to travel from London to Sydney how long would it take? How many time zones would they pass
through? Many travelers from London to Sydney are offered the chance to break their journey with a
stop en route. Ask students to look at the routes of the carriers that go from London to Sydney. Where
would they pick to take their break?
8. Ask students to read the description of the Irish girls who traveled to Australia aboard the Thomas
Arbuthnot. Charles Edward Strutt, the ship’s doctor, kept a diary of the voyage. The girls left Plymouth
October 10, 1849; they landed in Sydney on February 8, 1850. How do conditions on the Thomas
Arbuthnot compare with conditions on the Inchinaan, Marya and Breege’s ship?
9. Ask students to trace the route of the Thomas Arbuthnot and the Inchinaan on a map. How long did it
take? Dr. Strutt describes the Thomas Arbuthnot as near Madeira on November 4th, crossing the Tropic
of Cancer on the 10th, at latitude 10 on the 16th, crossing the Equator on the 29th, sighting Trinidad
on December 6th, crossing the Tropic of Capricorn on the 7th, off the Cape of Good Hope on the 25th,
reaching 45 south latitude and 47 east longitude on January 1, 1850, sighting the south east cape of Van
Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) on the 24th and passing between the Eddystone and the land, passing Cape
Howe 65 miles to the west on February 2nd, arrived at Illawarra, the Heads, anchoring near Garden
Island on the 3rd and marching his girls to the depot at Sydney on the 8th. Plot the Thomas Arbuthnot’s
progress on a map. Find Sydney and Moreton Bay on a map of Australia.
10. Using the handout Excerpts from Dr. Charles Strutt’s Diary, point out that Dr. Strutt, the ship’s doctor,
took on additional responsibilities for the Irish girls. What were some of them? (He organized their
laundry days; he was concerned that the girls develop neat and orderly ways; he started a school; he
held religious services; he organized a Christmas treat for them.) Why did he feel they were important
things to do for the girls?
Dr. Strutt describes the girls keening on Christmas Eve. Where are they in the journey? What do
students think might be significant about rounding the Cape of Good Hope? A keen is the Irish cry for

675
 the dead, and it is the women who keened in Irish society. Why would the girls have keened on
Christmas Eve? Why did they associate that moment with death? Plum pudding is still the traditional
Christmas dessert in Ireland and in Great Britain; punch would be an alcoholic drink, usually hot
whiskey, water, lemon, and sugar.
11. Ask students to write a report about the scheme to send Irish workhouse girls to Australia, using
information from The Hungry Wind, Dr. Strutt’s diary, the chart of immigrant girls on the Thomas
Arbuthnot, and the engravings of emigrant ships.

ASSESSMENT OPTION
Assume the role of one of the voyagers (captain, female emigre, ship’s mate, etc.) and keep a journal of the
passage to Australia.

TEACHER REFLECTION
This activity with its excerpt from Dr. Strutt’s diary and its demographic data and engravings, provides an
historical context for The Hungry Wind. Irish girls who arrived in Sydney were housed in the Hyde Park
Barracks until they were placed with employers. The Barracks, now a museum, has an exhibition of the
famine. It is also the site of the Australian Great Irish Famine Monument. Tom Power, the Chair of the Great
Famine Commemoration Committee, has described the monument as one which not only honors the famine
dead but also celebrates the Irish workhouse girls and other Irish survivors of the famine who contributed
to the development of Australia.
Teachers may wish to combine this activity with Irish Emigrants to Australia.

676
 Journey to Australia

The Irish girls arrive on their ship and are joined by the matron who will accompany them to Australia:
“So these are the Irish paupers?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the surgeon. “They are all here. The sweepings of Irish workhouses.”
“Why are they on deck? Why are they not below?”
“They are awaiting your instructions, ma’am.”
The women turned to the girls. “All of you girls, go below at once. You may not come on deck without permission.”
A sailor showed the way. There were two hatches with ladders leading below. The girls climbed down into the
between-deck.
The first thing that Marya noticed was the foul smell. “Bilge-water,” a sailor said. “You’re just above the bilge.”
It took several minutes to see in the dim light. The ceiling was low, allowing barely enough room to stand upright.
Bunks, two deep, were secured against the ship’s sides. In the middle, between the lines of bunks, were long tables and
benches secured to the floor. Their sea chests were already below, stacked in the empty spaces between the bunks and
the tables (pp. 164-165).

In the morning they were up and dressed before Matron came in. The hatches were opened and daylight lit up the
spaces below the hatches.
The Matron sorted them into what she called messes, each mess being the number of girls who could sit round a
table. Then she allocated work to each table, their days for scrubbing floors and for cleaning the privies and baths
which were in small partitioned rooms at the front end of the between-decks.
“You have an hour on deck to collect your rations and have breakfast. When you hear the bell, you will come back
down here to do your chores.”
They climbed up on deck, blinking in the bright light of day. The ship was cutting through the water at speed. A
fresh breeze roared in the sails and sailors shouted to one another high up in the rigging. The cabin boy perched on top
of the forecastle and whistled at the girls as they lined up for their day’s food and water allowance (pp. 173).

The days flew by. Sewing and knitting passed the time. Marya sang softly while she worked and Breege joined in.
They sang one of Mama’s old airs.
The door which led to the cabin opened and Eliza came in. She sat down on a form and listened. When the song
ended, she asked, “Do you know any more songs?”
Breege nodded and started to sing again. This time Marya took up the descant. Eliza sat perfectly still, as though
in a trance. When the second song ended she rose and went out as silently as she had come.
In a short while she came back with a book in her hand. “Would you like me to read to you?”
“Yes, please do,” voices chorused from around the room.
She read slowly, in a clear voice, a tale of knights and beautiful maidens. The story lasted for almost an hour. The
girls listened in rapt silence. When the story ended Eliza closed her book and rose. “I’ll read for you again tomorrow,
if you like” (pp. 178).
The weather grew hotter. Even when there was a breeze, the air was heavy with heat. They sat on deck wearing
their lightest dresses and their straw hats. Matron set the girls who did not have hats to sew cotton bonnets. Rosanna
was delighted with her bonnet. In spite of the heat, she found energy to walk up and down the deck to let one particular
brown-eyed sailor see how she looked in it.

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 Night-time was even worse. The between-decks was stifling but the surgeon superintendent still insisted on
locking the gratings over the hatches at night. It was hard to believe that it was December.
On Christmas Day there was an extra ration of raisins. They sat on deck and sang Christmas carols while the sun
blazed down (pp. 181-182).

Week by week the air grew temperate, then cold. They ran into heavy seas and strong westerly winds. Marya
remembered old Marya in the workhouse who read her hand. “The west wind will blow, and you will cross water.”
How strange that she could foretell that. The ship raced before the wind, pitching and tossing on gigantic swells. The
girls remained below deck. They occupied themselves with sewing and sometimes Matron read to them. Miss Eliza
did not read to them any more. Since the weather had grown colder, she stayed in bed. Marya could hear her cough­
ing at night.
The storms raged for weeks. They grew accustomed to the roaring wind and the shock of waves against the sides
of the ship. Sometimes when the hatches were opened, they saw lightning flashes and heard the road of thunder above
the wind and the sea. When the storms grew worse they carried the baths from the bathrooms and kept them under the
closed hatches to catch the water which came in when waves broke over the deck. The milk ration was stopped because
the cow and the goat were washed overboard (pp. 190-191).

Two weeks later, land was sighted. The sailors cheered and the girls rushed up on deck to see Australia. They still
had a long way to go, all the way round the south of the continent to the eastern coast. A breeze off the land carried
the scent of flowers. Marya remembered Miss Gillen’s lesson. It was summertime in Australia. The flowers would be
in bloom.
They busied themselves with washing and mending. The food ration was mouldy and insufficient but nobody com­
plained. It was only to be expected after four months at sea (pp. 194-195).

Source: Soinbhe Lally. The Hungry Wind. Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1997. Used with permission of the publisher.

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 Excerpts from Dr. Charles Strutt’s Diary

Tuesday 6 [November]
A fine day, with gentle fair breeze though somewhat variable. Only one or two still seasick. Took a list of the books
previous to instituting a school. Washing day and had some difficulty getting it fairly to work. The girls, however,
begin to find that some cleanliness and order are necessary, in which laudable idea I shall encourage them as much as
I can (pp.33).

Sunday 11 [November]
Very hot. Read the service and a sermon. Some of the girls made more noise than was seemly during prayers for
which I reprimanded them and stopped the lime juice of Miss Collins as she could not pick out the guilty ones. They
were talking and laughing but I hope next Sunday to have them in better order (pp. 34).

Friday 7 [December]
My girls have become much more orderly and tidy under constant steady pressure I keep up against holes, rags,
tatters and dirt. They are pretty good as a body (pp. 37).

Tuesday 25 [December]
We are off the Cape of Good Hope; the weather is frequently bad here so we must not complain of our rolling, nor
our wet deck. The latter is somewhat diminished in importance by the girls going barefoot—the Captain gave them a
supply of plum pudding and I made them five bucketfuls of punch, by way of cheering their spirits. ... I gave the girls
leave to make a moderate noise till 10 o’clock so altogether the day passed off well enough. Yesterday was devoted to
keening, that is, to deploring their fate, old Ireland, and their friends and relations. Seven or eight would get together
in a little circle and keep up a dismal howling, without any distinct words that I could catch. I dispersed one or two of
these clubs, and Mrs. Murphy routed the rest by giving public notice that the keeners should have no pudding today
which proved an effectual remedy for their grief, so they fell to dancing and singing instead. One of the girls laughed
heartily at the keeners; whereupon another in great wrath called her a shark [?] without any feeling. Altogether they
behaved very fairly.

Source: Richard Reid and Cheryl Mongan. ‘A Decent Set of Girls:’ The Irish Famine Orphans of the Thomas Arbuthnot, 1849­
1850. Yass: Yass Heritage Project, 1997. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

679
 Source: Noel Kissane, The Irish Famine, A Documentary History.
Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 1995. p. 168.
Used with permission of the author and the National Library of Ireland.

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 The Irish Diaspora Is Our Story
BACKGROUND

T
his activity is designed for students who have experienced emigration.

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
Irish Emigrants Leaving Home—The Priest’s Blessing
ADDITIONAL READINGS
Jonas, Susan. Ellis Island: Echoes from a Nation’s Past. Montclair: Aperature, Montclair State College and
the Department of the Interior, 1989.
CLASSROOM MATERIALS
Art supplies: paper, markers, water colors, crayons, glue, tape, needles and thread for binding, cardboard,
colored paper, book cloth, computer software for graphic illustrating.

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will be able to:
Produce artworks based on their experience of emigrating to the United States.
Write and illustrate stories for younger children about their experience as immigrants.
Collect and classify information for a class immigration museum.

STANDARDS
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.
ELA 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression.
ELA 4: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for social interaction.
Arts 1: Students will actively engage in the processes that constitute creation and performance in the arts
(dance, music, theatre, and visual arts) and participate in various roles in the arts. (Visual Arts)
Arts 2: Students will be knowledgeable about and make use of the materials and resources available for
participation in the arts in various roles. (Visual Arts)

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Interpret and analyze documents and artifacts related to significant developments and events in world
history.
Gather and present information about important developments from world history.
Classify historic information according to the type of activity or practice: social/cultural, political,
economic, geographic, scientific, technological, and historic.

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 Compare and synthesize information from different sources.
Use a wide variety of strategies for selecting, organizing, and categorizing information.
Produce oral and written reports on topics related to all school subjects.
Write stories, poems, literary essays, and plays that observe the conventions of the genre and contain
interesting and effective language and voice.
Learn some words and expressions in another language to communicate with a peer or adult who speaks
that language.
Know and use a variety of sources for developing and conveying ideas, images, themes, symbols, and events
in their creation of art.
Develop skills with a variety of art materials and competence in at least one medium.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. acquire and organize information
. present information
. communicate results of research and projects
. gather information
. interpret information and data
. utilize multiple resources in research
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
Arts
English Language Arts
UNITY AND DIVERSITY/MULTI-CULTURALISM
Similarities in experiencing emigration to America

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. Ask students to examine the engraving in the handout Irish Emigrants Leaving Home—the Priest’s
Blessing. The engraving depicts a group of people leaving their home to emigrate to the United States.
What do students notice about the picture? How are the people traveling? Will they travel in that manner
to the United States? Are there friends and family to say good-bye? How are people behaving? Why are
some people kneeling? Why is the priest giving them a blessing? Do students think the people who are
leaving will feel better with a blessing?
Students should write their own descriptions of what they notice about the picture.
2. Does the picture remind students of their own departures to the United States? How is the Irish engraving
similar to their departures? How is it different? Students can write and or illustrate their own accounts of
their departures to the United States. Where did they say their good-byes? Who was there to say good­
bye? What did people say or do? How did students leave their homes?
3. Students’ immigration experiences reflect different memories, different family histories and different
cultures. Students can make their own memory projects: scrapbooks, bulletin boards, tapes or videos that
describe their own stories of coming to the United States. Individual projects can become part of a class
museum. The class immigration museum can have its own opening, catalogue and reception for families
and friends.
4. Students’ immigration experiences make very interesting books for younger children. Students can turn
their stories of coming to the United States into books for younger children. The books can be picture
books or books with texts for young readers. The books can have four parts: the decision to come to the
United States, the departure from home, the trip, and the arrival in the United States. Young readers
would also be interested to know what makes the United States feel like home for the authors.

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 Students can brainstorm for ideas for their stories. They are encouraged to interview those who arrived with
them to ask them to recall their memories of the experience. If possible, they may want to make their texts
bi-lingual by writing their decision and departure scenes in their native languages with English translations
and their experiences in the United States in English with translations into their native languages. When the
texts are ready, students can prepare their texts for their books. They can add their own illustrations, maps
and photographs to the texts. Students can bind their texts and xerox copies for an elementary school class
or school library.

ASSESSMENT OPTION
Write an essay about conclusions after viewing the class museum or after reading the stories produced by
fellow students who emigrated to the United States.

TEACHER REFLECTION
This activity is based on the lesson for ESL students developed by a group of teachers at an Office of Multi­
culturalism, New York City Board of Education Workshop. English as a second language students can use
the visual representations of the Irish diaspora to prompt speaking and writing about their own
emigration/immigration experiences.
Students would profit from a trip to Ellis Island when they are planning their immigration museum
exhibition.

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 Source: Noel Kissane, The Irish Famine, A Documentary History.
Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 1995. p. 168.
Used with permission of the author and the National Library of Ireland.

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 How Did Ireland Change After the
Great Irish Famine?
BACKGROUND

R
ecent historical scholarship has suggested there was a trend toward falling marriage and birth rates
in Ireland even before the famine. In addition, emigration was substantial by the 1840s (Daly 117).
This activity looks at the continuation of those pre-famine trends and other factors which accounted
for a falling population in Ireland in the later decades of the19th century and the first decade of the 20th
century.
Teachers may want to refer to the activities Irish Immigrants to Australia, The Irish Diaspora is Our Story
and Who Was on the Jeanie Johnston?

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
Change in Irish Rural Structure
Cathleen ní Houlihan
The Touch
Put to the Rack
ADDITIONAL READINGS
Arensberg, Conrad. The Irish Countryman. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1959.[1937]
Daly, Mary E. “The Legacy of the Famine,” The Famine in Ireland. Dundalk: Dublin Historical
Association, 1986.
Lee, Joseph. The Modernisation of Irish Society: 1848-1918. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,1973.
O’Conaire, Pádraic, “Put to the Rack,” in Maureen Murphy and James MacKillop, eds., Irish Literature: a
Reader. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987, pp. 211-222.
O’Flaherty, Liam. “The Touch,” The Collected Stories of Liam O’Flaherty. II. ed. A.A. Kelly. Dublin:
Wolfhound, 1999, pp. 182-189.
O’Gráda, Cormac. “Winners and Losers,” Black ‘47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History,
Economy and Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Yeats, W.B., “Cathleen ní Houlihan,” The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1952. pp.
50-57.

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will be able to:
Identify trends in post-famine demographics and explain their significance.
Describe how marriages became an economic arrangement in rural Ireland after the Great Irish Famine.
Describe changes in Ireland after the Great Irish Famine.
Write short stories on the subject “Ten Acres.”

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STANDARDS
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
SS 4: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of how the United
States and other societies develop economic systems and associated institutions to allocate scarce resources,
how major decision-making units function in the United States and other national economies, and how an
economy solves the scarcity problem through market and nonmarket mechanisms.
ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.
ELA 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression.
ELA 3: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for critical analysis and evaluation.

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Define culture and civilization, explaining how they developed and changed over time.
Explain how societies and nations attempt to satisfy their basic needs and wants by utilizing scarce capital,
natural, and human resources.
Understand how scarcity requires people and nations to make choices which involve costs and future
considerations.
Read and view texts and performances from a wide range of authors, subjects, and genres.
Recognize different levels of meaning.
Write stories, poems, literary essays, and plays that observe the conventions of a genre and contain
interesting and effective language and voice.
Present clear analysis of issues, ideas, texts, and experiences.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. acquire and organize information
. reflective thinking
. think rationally about content
. ask and answer logical questions
. present information
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
English Language Arts
Arts

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. In his study of Ireland after the Great Irish Famine, Professor Joseph Lee (see Additional Readings)
observed that the population of Ireland continued to fall after the Great Irish Famine from 6.6 million in
1851 to 4.4 in 1911 and that the decline was due to the “long-term response of Irish society to this short-
term calamity” (Lee 1).
Lee goes on to identify six main factors that influenced that trend: changing rural class structure, rising
marriage age, declining marriage rate, declining birth rate, static death rate and emigration.
Ask students to study the handout of the chart Changes in Rural Irish Social Structure. What happened
to the number of landless laborers between 1845 and 1851 and between 1851 and 1910? By what
686
 percentage did they change?
The cottier was part of a system called conacre. Under conacre, an agricultural laborer worked a number
of days per year for a farmer in exchange for the land where he built a little cabin for his family, cultivated
his patch of potatoes, and planted an additional crop (Daly 18). What happened to cottiers in the decade
after the Great Irish Famine? What do students notice about the change in the number of cottiers between
1845 and 1851? 1851 and 1910? What about the rate of increase or decrease among small farmers? Is the
trend the same for larger farmers?
Ask students to write a short essay identifying the winners and losers after the Great Irish Famine and
using the data describing the changes in the Irish rural social structure to explain their answers.
2. The pattern of consolidation, making larger farms from smaller farms, increased competition for land and
pressure to acquire land. A quotation collected in one of the manuscripts of the Department of Irish
Folklore at University College, Dublin reads “Let a man go down to hell and open an Irishman’s heart.
The first thing he’ll find written across it is land” (Manuscript 1408, 141).
Land and the conditions of ownership and occupation became the central political question for the Irish
in the later nineteenth century. It was not simply a question of land reform: fair rent, fixity of tenure
(those who pay their rent could not be evicted), and free sale, but also offering to tenants the promise of
land ownership through a program of land purchase. The hope became law with the Wyndham Act of
1903.
One of the consequences of land consolidation after the Great Irish Famine was the increase in the
marriage age between 1845 and 1914: males from 25 to 33 and females from 21 to 28 (Lee 3). The
number of women who never married more than doubled between 1851 and 1911 (12 percent to 26
percent) (Lee 6). With higher marriage ages for women and more women remaining single, there was a
lower birth rate.
The transfer of land from father to a single inheriting son, and the provision of a dowry for a daughter to
be married to a farmer made marriage an economic arrangement. (The arranged match was not unique to
Ireland; it was a wide-spread practice among European country people.) In Ireland, however, it was so
important as to be the center of the structure of rural Irish society [Arensberg 72]). There are a number
of examples of made marriages and loveless matches in Irish literature of the end of the 19th century and
the early 20th century.
Ask students to read the dialogue between Peter and Bridget from Cathleen ní Houlihan. The scene is a
cottage in rural Ireland on the eve of the son’s marriage. Peter, the father, is discussing the dowry, 100
pounds, that Delia Cahel has brought to the household. What is the most important thing to him about
the upcoming marriage? What might the money mean to him? What is Peter’s attitude toward his wife?
How does she respond? Given their own beginnings, what does this match mean to them? Does land have
anything to do with his plans? Is Peter interested in his prospective daughter-in-law? What does he say
about her?
3. Ask students to read the excerpt in the handouts from Liam O’Flaherty’s story “The Touch.” Set on the
Aran Island, it is the story of high-spirited Kate Hernon, a farmer’s daughter who has fallen in love with
a farm laborer named Brian who is working for her father. When Kate’s father sees Brian looking at Kate,
he warns him that a man without a penny should not be looking at his daughter. What does Hernon say
to insult Brian? Why is Brian’s lack of land a reason for Hernon to sneer at him?
Red Mike Joyce, a second son, won’t inherit his father’s land; however, his father has the money to pay
for him to marry into the land of a household without a son. If Brian had money would that have made
a difference? Old Hernon tells Marcus Joyce if he added another hundred, “I’ll spit on my fist.” He refers
to the custom of men selling cattle or other livestock who spit on their fists to close a bargain.” Do
students think that Hernon spitting on his fist is an appropriate gesture to close this match? Why?
Ask students to work with a partner and write the dialogue between Kate and old Hernon when he tells
her she is to be married to Red Mike Joyce. What would she say? What would she do?
4. Ask students to read an excerpt from Padraic O’Conaire’s “Put to the Rack.” It is another story of an
arranged match between a man called Burke who has returned from America and the daughter of his old
friend Andrew Finnerty. Why does Finnerty agree to the marriage between his daughter and Burke? Mary
says she won’t marry Burke. Why does she marry him in the end?
5. There was an alternative to an arranged match; it was emigration. About 2,000,000 emigrated between
1848 and 1855 and another 3,500,000 between 1855-1914 (Lee 6). Emigration was a solution for sons

687
 who would not inherit the farm and for non-dowered daughters. (Some daughters worked in America and
came home with their own dowries and were able to control their own matches.) Those who went to
America often did so because it offered greater economic promise and more autonomy about life choices
like marriage partners.

ASSESSMENT OPTION
It may have been noticed that there were real winners and losers after the Great Irish Famine, and some of
the big economic winners lost a lot in human terms. Explore this theme, writing stories around the concept
of “Ten Acre.” The suggested scenario is this: a householder with five children living on seven acres has
the opportunity to acquire ten more acres of land. There is no ready cash to purchase the land. What
happens? What are a people willing to sacrifice in human terms in order to meet their economic goals?
The population of Ireland continued to fall until the middle of the 1930s (1936-37) and began to rise only
in 1951. While Ireland began to experience an economic recovery in the late 1950s, the 1961 census
reported Ireland’s lowest population since the Great Irish Famine. Historian Mary E. Daly has pointed out
that in that year Ireland shared with East Germany the distinction of having a falling population. How did
East Germany respond to the high rate of emigration?

TEACHER REFLECTION
The hunger for land consumes James Tyrone, the father in Eugene O’Neill’s play, Long Day’s Journey into
Night.
A classic anthropological study of the rural Irish, Conrad Arensberg’s The Irish Countryman investigated
marriage practices in west Clare in the 1930s and concluded that the transfer of land through the economic
match was the central feature of Irish rural life.
The examples of loveless matches and marriages are only a few of the many that are found in literature in
the Irish language as well as in English. A play written in 1959 by John B. Keane which is still performed
by amateur drama groups in Ireland is Sive, the story of a young orphan who loses her life crossing a bog
to meet her young man and avoid a match arranged by her aunt with a grotesque old man with a bit of
money.

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 Change in Irish Rural Social Structure

Laborers Cottiers Farmers Large Farmers

(under 5 acres) (5 - 15 acres) (over 35 acres)

1845 700,000 300,000 310,000 277,000

1851 500,000 88,000 192,000 290,000

1910 300,000 62,000 154,000 304,000

Note: Mary E. Daley has explained that laborers and cottiers are often interchangeable terms, although some laborers would
have earned money wages and not been given land, whereas cottiers were mainly paid through land. Farm servants were live-in
laborers, mostly young.

Source: Joseph Lee. The Modernisation of Irish Society. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, pp. 2. Used with permission of Gill and
Macmillan.

689
 Cathleen ní Houlihan
Peter: Yes, I made the bargain well for you, Michael. Old John Cahel would sooner have kept a share of this a while
longer. “Let me keep the half of it until the first boy is born,” says he. “You will not,” says I. “Whether there is or is
not a boy, the whole hundred pounds must be in Michael’s hands before he brings your daughter to the house.” The
wife spoke to him them, and he gave in at the end.

Bridget: You seem well pleased to be handling the money, Peter.

Peter. Indeed, I wish I had the luck to get a hundred pounds, or twenty pounds itself, with the wife I married.

Bridget: Well, if I didn’t bring much I didn’t get much. What had you the day I married you but a flock of hens and
you feeding them, and a few lambs and you driving them to the market at Ballina? [She is vexed and bangs a jug on
the dresser.] If I brought no fortune I worked it out in my bones, laying down the baby Michael that is standing there
now, on a stook of straw, while I dug the potatoes, and never asking big dresses or anything but to be working.

Peter: That is true indeed. [He pats her arm.]

Bridget: Leave me alone now till I ready the house for the woman that is to come into it.

Peter: You are the best woman in Ireland, but money is good, too. [He begins handling the money again and sits
down.] I never thought to see so much money within my four walls. We can do great things now we have it. We can
take the ten acres of land we have the chance of since Jamsie Dempsey died, and stock it. We will go to the fair at
Ballina to buy stock. Did Delia ask any of the money for her own use, Michael?

Michael: She did not, indeed. She did not seem to take much notice of it, or look at it at all?

Source: W.B. Yeats. “Cathleen ni Houlihan,” The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1952. pp. 51-52.
Permission pending.

690
 The Touch
When old Hernon sees Brian looking at his daughter Kate, he warns him saying:
“You have only a small garden by your cabin door, two goats and a donkey. You have neither father, nor brother
nor sister. You have only your mother and she sick these last ten years and she depending on you in every way, just
like a new-born child. Nobody of your kin ever had land or shore to his name. Your kin were never better than scamps
and vagrants; just a lot of beggars that came to these parts at the time of the great famine.”

To make sure that Brian and Kate's attraction is ended, old Hernon approaches Marcus Joyce to resume
their talk of a match between their children. Since Hernon has no sons and his other daughters have emigrated
to America, Joyce's son would be marrying into Hernon's land. In this case, then, he brings the dowry:
“You were talking to me a little while back,” Hernon said, "about making a match.”
“That's right,” Marcus said, “I was thinking of my second son, Red Mike.”
“A fine lad," Hernon said. “One of the best. I find no fault with him. It was with the money you were offering
[with] him that I found fault. He'll be coming into my house if he comes. He'll be coming in to a place of two fourths
and a half, with two cows and the finest girl in the parish. Yet, you only offered...”
“I offered good money,” Marcus interposed.
“Yerrah!” said Hernon. “What did you offer but two hundred and a half?”
“And what would you want?” said Marcus. “Is it the riches of the Americas you think I have?”
“Add another hundred to it,” Hernon said, “and I'll spit on my fist."
“Three hundred and fifty sovereigns !” cried Marcus. “You king of devils.”
“For three hundred and fifty,” said Hernon, “I’ll throw into your side of the bargain that makings of a bull I have.
I know you're hankering after him.”

Source: Liam O’Flaherty. “The Touch,” The Collected Stories of Liam O‘Flaherty II. Ed., AA. Kelly. Dublin: Wolfhound Press,
1999, pp. 185, 188. Reprinted with permission of PFD on behalf of the estate of Liam O’Flaherty.

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 Put to the Rack
After 27 years in America, James Burke has returned to Galway. He calls into the shop of his old friend
Andrew Finnerty who has a daughter that Burke noticed and admires.

“I came home to get married, Andrew! I am tired of the life over there.”
“One of the Blakes has a fine farm for sale over at Knockmore, if you know the place. You'd get it for a thousand
pounds. He wants twelve hundred [pounds] and there is as fine a house as you ever saw.”
“Have you a car [horse-drawn cart]?”
“I have.”
“Yoke the horse at once and let us go and look at it.”
While the horse was being harnessed, they spoke as follows:
“You have a very bad memory, Andrew!” said Burke. “Don’t you remember that Christmas night long ago when
we gave our word that one of us wouldn’t want for a wife as long as the other had a daughter?”
“I do remember it, and I’ll keep my promise if what you tell me about the money is true.”
“If she herself is willing.”
“Why shouldn't she be?”
“Women nowadays are astonishing. Look at them in England. There is no limit to what they’ll do.”
Before the car reached the door the match was agreed upon.
A few nights afterwards Mary Finnerty and her father were together. He told her about the match. She was not sat­
isfied with her proposed husband and she said she never would marry him. Her father insisted that she should. Mary
swore that she would not.
All the same they were married.

Source: Padraic O’Conaire. “Put to the Rack,” Irish Literature: A Reader. Eds., Maureen Murphy and James MacKillop.
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987. pp. 214. Used with permission of Syracuse University Press.

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 THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE AND THE
QUEST FOR IRISH INDEPENDENCE
BACKGROUND

T
he Great Irish Famine had a powerful effect on the Irish independence movement. Irish immigrants
and Irish-Americans used the British government‘s famine relief policy as a rallying point for their
work for the cause of Irish nationalism.
Describing Irish-American nationalism, the Irish immigration historian Kerby Miller has written in
Emigrants and Exiles, “Although organized emigrant opposition to British tyranny has existed since the
early nineteenth century, the Famine generation created modern Irish-American nationalism, with its mass-
based, national societies and radical goals rooted in the republicanism of Young Ireland and the bitter
memories of ‘black ‘47.’” (Miller 334).
The famine policy of the Russell government regarded the Irish as on their own when it came to funding
relief for the Irish, and the Russell government not only stood by but facilitated mass evictions. The Irish
regarded that policy of one of abandonment; some have used the modern term genocide to describe the
failure of the British government to respond in a timely and appropriate way. British famine policy
strengthened the Irish drive for independence.
The Irish in America, many of whom were famine immigrants themselves or who were sending support for
famine relief from their own modest resources, supported the politics of the Young Irelanders and other
movements for Irish independence, such as the constitutional movement of Parnell, the physical force
Fenians, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
The Young Irishman
The West’s Asleep
William Smith O’Brien
Thomas Davis
Lament for the Death of Eoghan Ruadh O’Neill

ADDITIONAL READINGS
Davis, Thomas, Thomas Davis: Essays and Poems with a Centenary Memoir 1845-1945. Dublin:
Gill, 1945.
Keneally, Thomas. The Great Shame: A Story of the Irish in the Old World and the New. London: Chatto
and Windus, 1998.
Lee, Joseph. The Modernisation of Irish Society. 1848-1918. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1973.
Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
Moody, T.W. and F.X. Martin. The Course of Irish History. Dublin: Mercier Press, 1984.
O’Tuathaigh, Gearóid. Ireland before the Famine 1798-1848. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972.
Pearse, Padraic. Political Writings and Speeches. Dublin: Talbot, 1952.

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STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Students will be able to:
Describe the origins of Irish independence groups in Ireland and America.
Describe the way Irish-Americans took an active part in movements for Irish independence.
Describe the way that Thomas Davis’ prose and poems supported the cause of Irish nationalism.
Create a quatrain of two rhymed couplets in response to The Lament for Eoghan Ruadh O’Neill.

STANDARDS
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.
ELA 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression.
Arts 1: Students will actively engage in the processes that constitute creation and performance in the arts
(dance, music, theatre, and visual arts) and participate in various roles in the arts. (Music)

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Understand the broad patterns, relationships, and interactions of cultures and civilizations during particular
eras and across eras.
Investigate key events and developments and major turning points in world history to identify factors that
brought about change and the long-term effects of these changes.
Analyze the roles and contributions of individuals and groups to social, political, economic, cultural, and
religious practices and activities.
Examine the social/cultural, political, economic, and religious norms and values of Western and other world
cultures.
Recognize different levels of meaning.
Write original pieces.
Sing and/or play, alone and in combination with other voice or instrument parts, a varied repertoire of folk,
art, and contemporary songs, from notation, with a good tone, pitch, duration, and loudness.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. analytical thinking
. observe and Conclude
. view information from a variety of perspectives
. ask and answer logical questions
. communicate results of research
. consult and interpret primary sources
. identify patterns and themes
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
English Language Arts
Arts

694
LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. In 1800, The Act of Union abolished an Irish Parliament that had held limited legislative powers. In the
1840s, before the Great Irish Famine, there was a movement to repeal the Act of Union led by the Irish
lawyer and politician Daniel O’Connell who had been the first Catholic to enter the House of Commons
and who won not only Catholic Emancipation but wider religious liberties and other reforms. O’Connell
moved from reform to repeal of the Act of Union, but met more political resistance from his liberal
associates in the House of Commons.
While O’Connell pursued his campaign for Repeal through constitutional means, a group called the
Young Irelanders founded a weekly called The Nation in 1842 which supported the Repeal cause.
Thomas Davis was the most influential thinker of the Young Irelanders. As O’Connell was the center of
political unity and nationalism, so Davis was the center of cultural unity and nationalism; his writing
shaped the thinking of Irish nationalists. Ask students to read a passage from Davis’s The Young
Irishman. What does Davis ask of his listener? Davis wrote The Young Irishman five years before the
Great Irish Famine; yet, how does he describe Ireland? What does Davis say Ireland needs?
2. In addition to providing Ireland with a nationalist newspaper, the Young Irelanders set about to create a
national literature. When they proposed a ballad history of Ireland, Davis wrote that a ballad history
would make Irish history familiar. Ask students to read Davis’ The Lament for Eoghan Ruadh O’Neill
(Owen Roe O’Neill), a eulogy for the leader who had been responsible for the Irish victory at Benburb in
1646, a poem that gave the Irish pride in their historical past. O’Neill marched against Cromwell whose
scorched-earth campaign and land confiscations left the Irish tenants on their own lands; however,
O’Neill died, perhaps as a result of poisoning, on Nov. 6, 1649.
The word Sassanach [SAH-san-ach] means Englishman, but it also means Protestant. The rebel Hugh
Roe McMahon was executed in 1591; Red Hugh O’Donnell, chief of the O’Donnells, shared the Irish
defeat at Kinsale with Hugh O’Neill in 1601. He went to seek help in Spain where he died, perhaps by
poison, in 1602. The other Irish named in the poem fought with the Catholic Confederacy during the
Cromwellian wars (1641-49).
What did Davis admire about O’Neill? What does the poet wish for those responsible for O’Neill’s
death? What does the poem say about O’Neill’s relationship to his people? What metaphors does Davis
use for O’Neill? Is The Lament for Eoghan Ruadh a love poem? What details contribute the portrait of
O’Neill as a beloved? (In the tradition of the bardic poets, a conventional expression of the relationship
between the poet and his king/patron is that of lover to the beloved.)
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his family turned to this poem. What details in the poem would
have made it a choice for those grieving for the loss of Kennedy?
3. The Lament is written in quatrains of rhyming couplets. Can students write a quatrain of two rhyming
couplets that speaks to Davis’ poem?
4. Davis’ The West’s Asleep (see handouts) is an allusion to the traditional Barbarossa legend of the sleeping
hero who will awake in a time of a nation’s need. Many of Ireland’s songs and poems speak of Ireland’s
freedom in times to come. Here again Davis refers to places of past battles: Curlew’s Pass (Roscommon)
and Ardrahan (Galway) which were Irish victories over the Normans; Clanricarde fought and lost against
the forces of King William at Aughrim [Aw-grim], Galway, in 1691. How does the mention of earlier
heroes influence the mood of the poem? How would this poem be a comfort to a people with a history
of failed rebellions? What is promised when the west wakes up?
The West’s Asleep has been set to music and is a popular patriotic song. Students may want to learn and
perform the song. They can hear a recording of the song on the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem’s
album The First Hurrah!
5. O’Connell and the Young Irelanders disagreed about how to achieve their goal of the repeal of the Act of
Union. O’Connell was opposed to using violence; he was what is called a constitutional nationalist. The
Young Irelanders broke with O’Connell after O’Connell began to look to more pragmatic alternatives to
repeal; for them, there was no compromise on repeal. After the deaths of Davis (1845) and O’Connell
(1847), in the fourth year of the famine (1848), they staged a brief, poorly-planned, unsuccessful, armed
rebellion near Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary.
The leaders of the Young Ireland rebellion: William Smith O’Brien (see handout), Thomas Francis
Meagher (MAR), T.B. McManus, and Pat O’Donoghue were transported to Van Dieman’s Land

695
 (Tasmania) where the Irish lawyer John Mitchel had been exiled for calling for independence from
Britain even if it took physical force. The 1848 exiles became heroes to the Irish in America, especially
after a series of daring escapes by some of the prisoners (including Meagher and Mitchel) which brought
them to the United States where they toured speaking on behalf of an independent Ireland. These
speaking tours politicized the Great Irish Famine and gathered support from Irish and Irish Americans
whose opposition to British rule in Ireland had been heightened by the government’s failure to enact
relief measures that could have saved lives.
While the Young Irelanders failed as armed revolutionaries, they inspired a younger generation of
physical force nationalists who founded the secret Fenian movement on St. Patrick’s Day in 1858 in New
York. The Fenians operated on both sides of the Atlantic with Irish-Americans pledged to support
revolutionary activities in Ireland. The Fenian movement was inspired by the memory of the famine.
Many Irish-born and Irish-American who fought on both sides in the American Civil War believed that
their military experience was a training ground to prepare them for the liberation of Ireland. In September
1865 the Fenians met openly in Philadelphia. They succeeded in getting the Confederate supporter
Mitchel’s release from prison. There were splits within the Fenian movement, but the next year the
Fenians joined for two unsuccessful invasions of Canada.
One of the prominent early members was O’Donovan Rossa who had organized the Phoenix Society in
Skibbereen, the town that had become the byword for famine suffering. Rossa came to New York when
he was freed from an English prison in 1871 where he lived until his death in 1915. His body was
returned to Ireland for burial. It was at Rossa’s graveside that Patrick Pearse, who was to lead another
failed uprising in Dublin in 1916, spoke of the Fenian influence of resistance on his generation:
They think they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and
intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, that they have
provided against everything, but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian
dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace (Pearse
137).
The Great Irish Famine left its mark in Irish immigrants to the United States and the result was that it
politicized Irish-Americans and recruited them into actively working for Irish independence. Their
reception in the United States heightened their sense of alienation and exile. Ask students to write an
essay about the significance of one event or incident fostering an uprising, national movement, or other
major change in history. For example, what about the impact of one woman, Rosa Parks, sitting in the
front of the bus? How did the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska change an entire nation’s attitude
toward preserving the environment? Students also can discuss the impact of a potato blight on Irish
national politics.

ASSESSMENT OPTION
Study of the Great Irish Famine may explain current events in Ireland. Create a list of questions that you
would ask if you could interview some of the individuals mentioned in this activity and some of the leaders
of the groups seeking independence today. Then review news stories from the last few months and discuss
whether your questions can be answered. For example, the answer to “Why do you work so hard for
independence?” may appear to be more complicated after the peace talks are analyzed.

TEACHER REFLECTION
This is an ambitious activity that considers the part that the politicization of the Great Irish Famine played
in the development of Irish-American nationalism and the history of that nationalism in the movement for
Irish independence. The assessment suggests the wider question of the relationship between an immigrant
community and the home community and invites comparison with other American ethnic groups. Teachers
may want to use this activity with The Irish Brigade.

696
 The Young Irishman

After reminding his listeners, Gentlemen, You Have a Country, and challenging them to act as
citizens, Davis said:

And I do not fear that any of you will be found among Ireland's foes. To her every energy should be consecrated.
Were she prosperous, she would have many to serve her, though their hearts were cold in her cause. But it is because
her people lieth down in misery and riseth to suffer, it is therefore you should be more deeply devoted. Your country
will, I fear, need all your devotion. She has no foreign friend. Beyond the limits of green Erin there is none to aid her.
She may gain by the feuds of the stranger; she cannot hope for peaceful help, be he distant, be he near; her trust is in
her sons. You are Irishmen. She relies on your devotion. She solicits by her present distraction and misery. No! her
past distraction—her present woe. We have no more war bills: we have a mendicant bill for Ireland. The poor and the
pest-houses are full, yet the valleys of her country and the streets of her metropolis swarm with the starving (Davis
63).

Source: Thomas Davis. “The Young Irishman,” Essays and Poems with a Century Memoir 1845-1945. Dublin: M.H. Gill and
Sons, Ltd., 1945. pp. 63. Used with permission of the publisher.

697
 The West’s Asleep
Air: “The Brink of the White Rocks?”

I.
When all beside a vigil keep,
The West’s asleep, the West’s asleep—
Alas! And well may Erin weep,
When Connacht lies in slumber deep,
There lake and plain smile fair and free
Mid rocks—guardian chivalry
Sing oh! Let man learn liberty
From crashing wind and lashing sea.

I.I.
That chainless wave and lovely land
Freedom and Nationhood demand—
Be sure, the great God never planned,
For slumbering slaves, a home so grand.
And, long, a brave and haughty race
Honoured and sentinelled the place—
Sing oh! not even their sons’ disgrace
Can quite destroy their glory’s trace.

I.II.
For often, in O’Connor’s van,
To triumph dashed each Connacht clan—
And fleet as deer the Normans ran
Through Corlieu’s Pass and Ardrahan.
And later times saw deeds as brave;
And glory guards Clanricarde’s grave—
Sing oh! they died their land to save,
At Aughrim’s slopes and Shannon’s wave.

I.V.
And if, when all a vigil keep,
The West’s asleep, the West’s asleep—
Alas! And well may Erin weep,
That Connacht lies in slumber deep.
But, hark! some voice like thunder spake:
“The West’s awake, the West’s awake!”—
“Sing oh! hurra! Let England quake,
We’ll watch till death for Erin’s sake!”

Thomas Davis

Source: Thomas Davis. “The West’s Asleep.” Thomas Davis: Essays and Poems with a Centenary Memoir 1845-1945. Dublin:
M.H. Gill and Sons, Ltd., 1945. pp. 186. Used with permission of the publisher.

698
 William Smith O’Brien
by Stephen Smith the Elder

Source: Used with permission of the National Gallery of Ireland.

699
 Thomas Davis
by Henry McManus
Source: Office of Public Works, Ireland. Reprinted with permission of the Office of Public Works, Ireland.
700
 Lament for the Death of Eoghan Ruadh O’Neill
Time—10th November, 1649. Scene—Ormond’s Camp, Co. Waterford. Speakers—A veteran of Eoghan O’Neill’s
clan, and one of the horsemen just arrived with an account of his death.
I.
“Did they dare, did they dare, to slay Eoghan Ruadh O’Neill?”
“Yes, they slew with poison him, they feared to meet with steel,”
“May God wither up their hearts! May their blood cease to flow!
“May they walk in living death, who poisoned Eoghan Ruadh!
II.
“Though it break my heart to hear, say again the bitter words.”
“From Derry, against Cromwell, he marched to measure swords;
But the weapon of the Sassanach met him on his way,
And he died at Cloch Uachtar, upon Saint Leonard’s day.
III.
“Wail, wail ye for the Mighty One! Wail, wail, ye for the Dead!
Quench the hearth, and hold the breath—with ashes strew the head.
How tenderly we loved him! How deeply we deplore!
Holy Saviour! but to think we shall never see him more
IV.
“Sagest in the council was he, kindest in the Hall!
Sure we never won a battle—‘twas Eoghan won them all.
Had he lived—had he lived—our dear country had been free;
But he’s dead, but he’s dead, and ‘tis slaves we’ll ever be.
V.
“O’Farrell and Clanricarde, Preston and Red Hugh,
Audley and MacMahon, ye are valiant, wise, and true;
But—what, what are ye all to our darling who is gone?
The Rudder of our ship was he, our Castle’s corner-stone!
VI.
“Wail, wail him through the Island! Weep, weep for our pride!
Would that on the battle-field our gallant chief had died!
Weep the Victor of Benburb—weep him, young man and old;
Weep for him, ye women—your Beautiful lies cold!
VII.
"We thought you would not die—we were sure you would not go,
And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell’s cruel blow—
Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the sky—
O! why did you leave us, Eoghan? Why did you die?
VIII.
“Soft as woman’s was your voice, O’Neill! bright was your eye,
Oh! why did you leave us, Eoghan? Why did you die?
Your troubles are all over, you’re at rest with God on high;
But we’re slaves, and we’re orphans Eoghan!—why did you die?”
Thomas Davis
Source: Thomas Davis, “Lament for the Death of Eoghan Ruadh O’Neill,” Thomas Davis: Essays and Poems with a Centenary
Memoir 1845-1945. Dublin: M.H. Gill and Sons, Ltd., 1945. pp. 206-207. Used with permission of the publisher.
701
 Language and the
Great Irish Famine
BACKGROUND

O
ne of the casualties of the Great Irish Famine was the Irish language. The decline of Irish as a spoken
language began before the Great Irish Famine; the famine accelerated the process. English was the
language of instruction in the National Schools (1831), including schools attended by native Irish
speakers. The Irish leader Daniel O’Connell, himself an Irish speaker, used the English language to
promulgate his arguments for Catholic Emancipation and for Repeal. (See the activity Daniel O’Connell:
Irishman of the Millennium.)
The areas hit hardest by the Great Irish Famine were those with native Irish speakers. Steady post-famine
emigration from those parts of rural Ireland encouraged people to speak English to prepare for life in North
America, England or English-speaking countries. For these reasons people were choosing to speak English
instead of Irish. In North America, however, some recognized the importance of the language to national
identity. Their support for the language played a role in encouraging the foundation of the Gaelic League, a
movement to encourage the use of Irish as a spoken language.
In 1891, Douglas Hyde from Ireland visited New York and spent a lot of time with Gaelic Society members
around the city. He was particularly impressed with an Irish language school in the Bowery. Before he left
for Ireland he spoke to Irish-Americans about the importance of the Irish language. While he did not
advocate making Irish the language of the country, he called for Irish to be encouraged as a living language
and be honored on the same footing as English in teaching institutions (Dunleavys 166).When his friend
Eoin MacNeill called the meeting in July 1893, the Gaelic League was founded. It was devoted to
promoting Irish as a spoken language. Hyde had the model of the American Irish language organization that
Michael Logan had inspired twenty years earlier.
The Gaelic League was a remarkable organization; it cut across lines of religion, gender, age, and class to
unite Irish people who were interested in the Irish language. The Gaelic League organized classes, outings,
publications, summer schools, festivals, and language competitions. This interest in language contributed to
a growing cultural nationalism. The great moment for the League was in 1908 when its efforts succeeded in
making Irish a compulsory subject for those who wanted to study at the new National University. Hyde’s
work was honored later in his life when he was elected the first President of Ireland.
Today, Ireland is officially bi-lingual. While the number of native speakers, those whose first language is
Irish, has fallen in rural Ireland, there is an increase in Irish-speaking households in urban areas. Students
study Irish in school and the number of schools where subjects are done through Irish is growing. There is
an Irish television service and some 500 titles in Irish are published each year.

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
Daniel O’Connell, Do you understand Irish?
The Language Question
ADDITIONAL READINGS
Daly, Dominic. The Young Douglas Hyde. Dublin: Irish University Press, 1974.
Dunleavy, Janet E. and Gareth. Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modern Ireland. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991.
Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala. The Pharaoh’s Daughter. rev. ed. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1990,
pp. 155.

702
 CLASSROOM MATERIALS
Local community newspapers written for specific ethnic groups, such as Hispanic, Chinese, or Italian
newspapers

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will be able to:
Describe the significance of language as part of a country’s cultural identity.
Describe the relationship between immigrant or ethnic organizations and their contributions to their home
countries.

STANDARDS
SS 1: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in the history of the United States and New York.
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
ELA 3: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for critical analysis and evaluation.

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Study about different world cultures and civilizations focusing on their accomplishments, contributions,
values, beliefs, and traditions.
Know the social and economic characteristics, such as language, that distinguish different cultures and
civilizations.
Gather and organize information about the traditions transmitted by various groups living in their
neighborhood and community.
Recognize how traditions and practices were passed from one generation to the next.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. analytical thinking
. draw conclusions
. conceptualize
. reflect upon content
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
English Language Arts

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. Ask students how immigrants to the United States stay involved with their family and friends back home.
Students can share experiences of phone calls, emailing, faxing, letter-writing and visits. Are students
familiar with newspapers or magazines designed to keep our immigrant communities in touch with news
at home?

703
2. Some immigrants or immigrant groups get involved supporting projects at home. They contribute to
building programs, philanthropic and cultural funds. Some immigrant groups advocate for political action
or positions that will benefit their countries of origin. Can students offer any examples of these kinds of
activities?
These activities remind us that our worlds can be as wide as our vision and our hearts, and that emigration
and a commitment to life in the United States does not cut us off from our interests and aspirations for
our countries of origin. Such activities are often a combination of service and social activities. Some
involve sharing common interests like music or sports. Still others offer opportunities for immigrants and
the community at large to gather and celebrate national holidays, often with special food and
entertainment. What can students share about their experiences with such groups? Ask students to talk
with members of local cultural, fraternal, music, sports, or service organizations about their activities,
their outreach to new immigrants and the pleasure they receive from their involvement in such
organizations.
3. Sometimes an immigrant or an immigrant group makes a very special contribution to the cultural life of
the home country. One such man was Michael J. Logan of Brooklyn. Logan emigrated from Ireland in
1871. He became a teacher and later the principal of Our Lady of Victory School in Brooklyn. In 1872
Logan wrote to an Irish-American paper saying the Irish language was essential to national identity and
national identity fostered national pride. His letter led to the founding of a Philo-Celtic Society in Boston
in 1872. By 1886, there were fifty such organizations which were organized to promote the study of the
Irish language and Irish culture. They had classes and they contributed Irish articles to Irish papers and
journals. Logan finally founded a monthly journal called An Gaodhal [an GALE] to promote the teaching
of Irish and an interest in Irish literature among native Irish speakers. Ask students how materials written
for specific ethnic groups can be important for maintaining cultural traditions and communication.
4. Contemporary poets writing in the Irish language have encouraged especially people with “school Irish.”
Foremost among the poets writing in Irish is Nuala ní Dhomhnaill: poet, teacher, writer for radio and
television, and tireless advocate for the Irish language. Her work has been translated into English by
many of her fellow poets including Paul Muldoon, with whom she has collaborated on two volumes of
his versions of her poems. Her work has also been translated into continental languages and Japanese. Ní
Dhomhnaill has pledged to use her poet’s voice to keep the Irish language as a vital force. Her remarkable
poem “Ceist na Teangan” [KESHT NA TAHN-gan], literally, The Language Question, but translated by
Muldoon as “The Language Issue,” begins with the striking metaphor:
“I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant”
and it concludes with
“in the lap, perhaps, of some Pharaoh’s daughter.”

Do students recognize the allusion (Exodus 2: 2-10)? What does Moses have to do with the Irish
language? Is there any suggestion of a connection between gender and language? (Ask students who
taught them language. What is the consensus of the class?) Are women expected to take on the
responsibility of passing on the language? If students were to respond to Ni Dhomhnaill with another
Biblical quotation: “Cast your bread upon the water: for thou shalt find it after many days” (Ecclesiastes
11:1), what would they be telling her?
5. Ask students to read the handout Daniel O’Connell, Do You Understand Irish? It is striking that the point
of this story—O’Connell’s cleverness—turns on his ability to speak the Irish language; yet, O’Connell
encouraged the use of English as the language of practical politics.
The European Union is supporting lesser used languages like Irish, Welsh, Breton, Catalan, and Basque.
Ask students to report on one of the designated languages.

704
 Students might also survey people about the matter of practicality, an issue that is often raised when
talking about major and minor languages. Here are some popular stereotypes about high prestige
languages:
High prestige Low prestige
Easier to learn Hard to learn
Widely used Use limited
Can deal with modern ideas Not able for science, technology
Familiar sounds Difficult sounds to pronounce
Ask students whether they think that English is a difficult language to learn. If students in the class know
a second or third language, ask them to share key words and phrases for the other students to learn.

ASSESSMENT OPTION
Report on examples of immigrant or ethnic organizations in the United States who have made a contribution
to the culture of their country of origin. (For example, cite the work of Irish-Americans Michael Flatley and
Jean Butler in creating the Irish dance company Riverdance.)

TEACHER REFLECTION
This activity covers the relationship between immigrants, particularly immigrant organizations, and the
contributions they have made to their home countries. The activity also focuses on language and identity
and the matter of major and minor languages. This is an opportunity to introduce students to the Irish
language with tapes of song and children’s rhymes.
Teachers may wish to use materials in the activity Language and Identity: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man and Seamus Heaney’s “Traditions” to explore the way the Irish language has
influenced English as it is spoken in Ireland.

705
 Daniel O’Connell, Do You Understand Irish?

One time when Daniel O’Connell was in England he was invited to tea with powerful peers who did not like him
and wanted to kill him. The servant girl attending them was Irish and an Irish-speaker and she did not want any harm
to come to O’Connell.
She asked O’Connell, “Daniel O’Connell, do you understand Irish?”
“I do,” said he, “what do you want to say?”
“There is a thing in your cup that would kill hundreds. Turn off the light and switch it, if you can.”
“If it is true,” he said, “may your dowery be a good one.” O’Connell did nothing except take a gold ring from his
finger and throw it under the table. The English looked for it and O’Connell switched his cup. When they attended to
the ring, they started to drink their tea and when one of the Englishmen took his swallow, he collapsed and died.

Source: Tomás de Bháldraithe. The Irish of Cois Fhairrge, Co. Galway. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. 1945.
pp. 73. Translated by Maureen Murphy, Great Irish Curriculum Committee. Reprinted with permission of the Governing Board
of the School of Celtic Studies of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies.

706
 The Language Question

I place my hope on the water

in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant

in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,

then set the whole thing down amidst

the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river

only to have it borne hither and thither,

not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps, of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

Trans. Paul Muldoon

Source: Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, The Pharaoh’s Daughter. rev. ed. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1990. pp.155.
Used with permission of the publisher.

707
 Emigration from Ireland Before the
Great Irish Famine
BACKGROUND

B
etween 1700 and 1776 Irish emigration to the United States was substantially Ulster Presbyterian
(sometimes called Scots Irish). The historian Kerby Miller estimates one-fifth to one-fourth of Irish
immigrants were Catholic, perhaps another one-fifth were Anglican, and 55-60 percent were
Dissenters (not Anglicans), primarily Presbyterians from Ulster (Miller, 137). In most cases the settlers had
resources—cash or skills—to see them settled in North America.
Some Ulster farmers brought their native Irish (Catholic) servants with them. Immigrants were generally
young, single, relatively wealthy and skilled; however, during a peak period of high emigration in the late
1720s, many Ulster emigrants went to North American as indentured servants. While that profile peaks
between 1770-1775, it continued through the first two decades of the nineteenth century (Miller 153, 155).
According to Benjamin Franklin, it was the descendants of these Ulster immigrants who played significant
roles in the politics and in the fighting forces of the American Revolutionary War, particularly in
Pennsylvania (Doyle 110).
After the American Revolution, there was a shift away from immigrants who were indentured servants to
those who could afford to pay their own passage. The 1789 letter from Phineas Bond, British Consul in
Philadelphia, to the British Secretary for Foreign Affairs Lord Carmarthen, describes that change (see the
handouts in this activity). Bond’s letter suggests that those Irish arriving who financed their own passage
and who came with some resources would make good settlers. Bond’s letter also suggests that emigrants
increasingly were expected to have the capital to emigrate.
By 1840, more than half of the emigrating Irish traveled on tickets provided by family or friends in America
(Miller 271). Poor people, especially those in Munster and Connacht, who did not have the resources to
emigrate were caught in what economists call a poverty trap. They were unable to assemble the capital that
they needed to take advantage of the opportunities in America. This activity will prompt students to consider
other kinds of poverty traps.
In The Great Irish Famine, Cormac O’Gráda introduces his reader to the concept of the poverty trap. He
explains in his glossary that “an economy, group or individual, finds itself in a poverty trap if it cannot,
through poverty, respond to incentives that would better its condition” (77-78). O’Gráda applies the term to
the situation that poor laborers found themselves in in Ireland before the Great Irish Famine. Their
impoverished status prohibited them from accumulating the necessary capital to emigrate to North America.
Emigration to North America offered better economic opportunities for small farmer and poor, landless
laborers, but it required funds for trans-Atlantic travel and for immigrants to settle into a new environment.

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
Letter from Phineas Bond
Letter from John Doyle
Homeless in the Boom
ADDITIONAL READINGS
Doyle, David. Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America. 1760-1820. Dublin: Mercier, 1981.
Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles. Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
O’Gráda, Cormac. The Great Irish Famine. Dublin: Gill Macmillan, 1989.

708
 CLASSROOM MATERIALS
Articles on families caught in a poverty trap

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will be able to:
Explain why poor Irish laborers and their families could not take advantage of emigration.
Define and explain the concept of a poverty trap.

STANDARDS
ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.
SS 1: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in the history of the United States and New York.
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
SS 4: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of how the United
States and other societies develop economic systems and associated institutions to allocate scarce resources,
how major decision-making units function in the United States and other national economies, and how an
economy solves the scarcity problem through market and nonmarket mechanisms.

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Read historical narratives, myths, legends, biographies, and autobiographies to learn about how historical
figures lived, their motivations, hopes, fears, strengths, and weaknesses.
Interpret and analyze documents and artifacts related to significant developments and events in world
history.
Explain the literal meaning of a historical passage or primary source document, identifying who was
involved, what happened, where it happened, what events led up to these developments, and what
consequences or outcomes followed.
Know some ways individuals and groups who attempt to satisfy their basic needs and wants by utilizing
scarce resources.
Identify and collect economic information from standard reference works, newspapers, periodicals,
computer databases, textbooks, and other primary and secondary sources.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. observe and conclude
. think rationally about content
. acquire and organize information
. synthesize information
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
Economics

709
LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. Some of the earliest Irish arrivals to North America came as indentured servants who worked off their
passage after they arrived. The letter from Phineas Bond to Lord Carmarthen says this practice is
changing. How is it changing? Does Bond think it is a good idea? Why?
2. It was often difficult for Irish emigrant families to travel together, so one family member would go out
to North America first and send the money for passage to other family members. John Doyle’s letter of
January 25, 1818, to his wife Fanny in Ireland tells her something about his passage and his first
impressions of America. How does Doyle describe his journey? What was hardest for him? What were
Doyle’s first impressions of the United States? Why does he think that it is a good place for him and for
Fanny and Ned (see handouts)? If Doyle’s neighbors read his letter would they have been willing to
endure the hardships and go? Why?
3. The Irish economist Cormac O’Gráda estimated that the cost of one person’s passage and money for the
first few months in North America was the equivalent of a working man’s wage for the year. Why
couldn’t poor laborers and their families take advantage of better opportunities in North America? How
would a government-sponsored program of assisted emigration have helped the laboring poor? How
would it have helped the growing demand for land and for work?
4. Because of their poverty, the poor were unable to emigrate to better their living standards. Their situation
is an example of an economic concept called the poverty trap. A poverty trap means the poor individuals
or groups are prevented from taking advantage of opportunities that would better their lives. Ask students
to write about situations that reflect the poverty trap. For example, a college education or training in a
trade would help individuals to improve their income, but course work costs money. A car would assist
individuals in getting a better job, but it takes a salary to pay for a car. Discuss solutions to these and
other poverty trap dilemmas.

ASSESSMENT OPTION
Phineas Bond refers to the passengers as redemptioners or indentured servants. Write a first-person account
of what it would feel like to be indentured because you have no other way to escape the famine and emigrate
to America.

TEACHER REFLECTION
Teachers might use this activity with the activity A Call for Help in 1846: The Rush Letter. Newsday’s cover
story on February 27, 2000, “Homeless in the Boom,” describes the increase in the number of Suffolk
County, New York, residents seeking emergency housing. Between 1997 and 1999 the number of families
in the county’s shelter system increased by almost 13 percent, to about 249 a month. While the booming
economy has caused a decline in unemployment and the number of welfare cases, the demand for
emergency housing has increased because of the lack of affordable housing. “It used to be solely a central
city problem, but it’s spreading,” said Debbie Pickford of the Department of Housing and Urban
Development in Washington. “The cost of housing is rising to a point where people who are working even
can’t meet the rent, and that’s becoming increasingly a double-edged sword of a good economy.” Discuss
with students how this current event is similar to Ireland in the late 1700s, and how it is different.

710
 Letter From Phineas Bond

Letter from Phineas Bond, British Consul in Philadelphia to Lord

Carmarthen (1789):

Formerly, my Lord, a large portion of the passengers from Ireland were redemptioners or indentured servants.
Those who could not redeem themselves by paying their passage money within a limited time, were indentured for a
term of years to any master who would advance the price of their passages. Those who came out as servants were
indentured in Ireland for so many years to the master or owner of the vessel and the original indenture was either
assigned or a new one given upon their arrival in America to the first person who would pay the price demanded for
their time.
The laws of Pennsylvania require certain freedom dues to be allowed by the master to the servant upon the expi­
ration of the term of servitude. Lately, my Lord, few redemptioners or servants have arrived here from Ireland, the pas­
sengers from thence have been chiefly such as have paid their passage before they embarked; in this sort of trade there
is very little risk and great profit, the passengers who have arrived in the Delaware this year from Ireland have been
for the most part people in tolerable good light with some property beforehand and who have come to settle as farm­
ers or to engage as artificers in some branch of manufacture. A large embarkation of this description of passengers as
well as of redemptioners and servants is expected in the course of next year.

Source: Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1896, I, pp. 643-645. Extract from Edith Abbott, Immigration:
Selected Documents and Case Records. New York: Arno Press, 1969 [1924], pp. 9-10. Permission pending.

711
 Letter From John Doyle

Letter from John Doyle to Fanny Doyle (in Ireland), January 25, 1818:

Oh, how long the days, how cheerless and fatiguing the nights since I parted with my Fanny and my little angel.
Sea sickness, nor the toils of the ocean, nor the starvation which I suffered, nor the constant apprehension of our crazy
old vessel going to the bottom, for ten tedious weeks, could ever wear me to the pitch it has if my mind was easy about
you. But when the recollection of you and of my little Ned rushes on my mind with a force irresistible, I am amazed
and confounded to think of the coolness with which I used to calculate on parting with my little family even for a day,
to come to this strange country, which is the grave of reputations, the morals, and of the lives of so many of our coun­
trymen and countrywomen.
As yet it’s only natural I should feel lonesome in this country, ninety-nine out of every hundred who come to it are
first disappointed. Still, it’s a fine country and a much better place for a poor man than Ireland. Much as they grumble
at first, after a while they never think of leaving. One thing I think is certain, that if emigrants knew beforehand what
they have to suffer for about the first six months after leaving home in every respect, they would never come here.
However, an enterprising man, desirous of advancing himself in the world, will despise everything for coming to
this free country, where a man is allowed to thrive and flourish without having a penny taken out of his pocket by the
government; to act and speak as he likes, provided he does not hurt another, to slander and damn government, abuse
public men in the office to their faces, wear your hat in court and smoke a cigar while speaking to the judge as famil­
iarly as if he was a common mechanic. Hundreds go unpunished for crimes for which they would be surely hung in
Ireland; in fact they are so tender of life in this country that a person should have a very great interest to get himself
hanged for anything.

Source: William D. Griffin. The Book of Irish America. New York: Time Books, 1990. pp. 119-120. Permission pending.

712
As the Economy Surges, Housing Costs Are Soaring,
Forcing Out More Families1PageA1

713
BoOm's Down Side
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714
Source: “Homeless in the Boom,” Newsday, February 27, 2000. ©2000 Newsday, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

715
 The Impact of Irish Immigration on
Port Cities
BACKGROUND

I
rish fleeing their famine-stricken country in the 1830s through the 1850s crowded into the port cities of
Britain, particularly Liverpool, and of North America, especially Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.
Destitute, many stayed in those cities, bringing with them poverty-related disease and social problems
like homelessness.
In his study of the famine, eviction, and emigration from the townland of Ballykilcline, Co. Roscommon,
Robert James Scally follows the evicted tenants to Liverpool where they were to get on an emigrant ship to
North America. Scally estimates “...that at least two of every three emigrants were from Ireland during the
1830s and 1840s” (184). The poor emigrants waiting to board ships were hungry, ragged, often in poor
health. Some never left Liverpool but instead drifted into greater despair in the alleys around the Liverpool
docks.
In the years leading up to the Great Irish Famine, Dr. William Henry Duncan had brought significant
improvements in public health to Liverpool. Housing improved, sewers and drains were built, sanitation
was improved and a law was passed prohibiting using cellars as living spaces (Woodham-Smith 273). But
the poor arriving through Liverpool crowded into those closed cellars, forty people were found in a single
basement room (Woodham-Smith 275). Fears of the officials about disease spreading in such conditions
were realized. A missionary working in the Liverpool slums who died himself of typhus found eighteen
people dying of fever in a cellar; he found eighty-one in another and sixty-one “in every stage of fever” in
a third house (Woodham-Smith 278).

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
Pauper Immigration to Liverpool 1847-1852
Redburn: His First Voyage
ADDITIONAL READINGS
Melville, Herman. Redburn: His First Voyage. New York: Doubleday, 1957.
Noel, Frank. “Black ‘47: Liverpool and the Irish Famine,” in E. Margaret Crawford, The Hungry Stream:
Essays on Emigration and Famine. Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, 1997, pp. 123-136.
Scally, Robert James. The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995.
Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will be able to:
Gather statistical information about the Port of Liverpool and draw conclusions.
Simulate the organization of a refugee camp, anticipating the needs of the refugees.
Describe the complex process of preparing for refugees at a refugee camp.
Explain how a turning point in Irish history affected the English port city of Liverpool.
Explain the reaction of an Irish man described by Herman Melville.

716
STANDARDS
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Investigate important events and developments in world history by posing analytical questions, selecting
relevant data, distinguishing fact from opinion, hypothesizing cause-and-effect relationships, testing these
hypotheses, and forming conclusions.
Identify historical problems, pose analytical questions or hypotheses, research analytical questions or test
hypotheses, formulate conclusions or generalizations, raise new questions or issues for further investigation.
Interpret and analyze documents and artifacts related to significant developments and events in world
history.
Interpret and analyze information from nonfiction books.
Use a wide variety of strategies for selecting, organizing, and categorizing information.
Relate new information to prior knowledge and experience.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. acquire and organize information
. analytical thinking
. ask and answer logical questions
. participate in interpersonal and group activities
. work with others to solve problems
. communicate results of research and projects
. set up hypotheses and alternate courses of action
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
English Language Arts
Mathematics
Science

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. Ask students to read the handout Pauper Immigration to Liverpool 1847-1853, calculating the percentage
of the number of paupers per total number of arrivals each year from 1847 to 1853. Graph the
information. What trends do students notice in the data?
2. Robert James Scally (see Background) includes quotations from Herman Melville’s descriptions of the
Liverpool poor in his novel Redburn: His First Voyage. Ask students to read the first passage from
Redburn: His First Voyage (see handouts). Melville describes the beggars who appear daily at the gates
through which sailors and dock workers passed. How had poverty affected the lives of each person
Melville describes?
Then, ask students to read the second passage from Redburn: His First Voyage. What could have
happened to drive the man running from his family to such despair? Students can write scenarios of the
events leading up to such a frantic, self-destructive dash for the river.

717
 3. Today there is still concern about public health issues when famine, war, and natural disasters dislocate
poor people who flee their homes for an uncertain road or for a refugee camp. Working in groups,
students can simulate the parts that a group of non-government volunteers (Red Cross, Salvation Army,
American Friends Field Service, Trócaire) would play in setting up a camp for refugees fleeing from
famine. Provide students with the charge that they are to organize a refugee camp. The background of the
camp is as follows:
There are 1000 people to be cared for at the facility: 114 elderly men and women; 187 men
over 16; 283 women over 16 and 416 children under 16. Students will have to create
committees to handle: temporary housing (what kind of housing, allocation of housing), food
(food supplies, food preparation and distribution, access to food), sanitation (water supply,
toilets, washing facilities, vermin control), public health (field hospitals, famine-related
diseases: cholera, dysentery, typhoid, typhus, chronic diseases), media/public relations
(information campaign, fund raising for current crisis, press releases, interviews with media),
education and training (mother/children: nutrition and public health, day care
program/schooling for children) and conflict resolution (protocols for handling resolution of
disputes between individuals and groups, establishing community relations between volunteer
staff and refugee leaders).
Each committee will design an action plan for its area of responsibility. What resources would it take to
accomplish each task? What factors do they have to consider? What resources are available or difficult
to get—such as water, medicine, and food? How can the dignity and privacy of the refugees be
maintained? What happens when weather is a problem, refugees die, or children need schooling? The
plan should be based on research about how such refugee camps operate. (Contact relief organizations or
log on to their websites for information about their programs.)

ASSESSMENT OPTION
Using Herman Melville’s description in the handouts Redburn: His First Voyage and Pauper Immigration
to Liverpool 1847-1853, write a one-page description of the impact of Irish immigration on the city of
Liverpool. What do you think would be the issues the city government would have to address? How do you
think the public would be affected? How might they respond? What did the Irish emigrants expect and
need?

TEACHER REFLECTION
This activity was very effective in the field, especially when students learned they would be responsible for
figuring out how to supply something as basic as clean water. They rose to the challenge of working
cooperatively to solve contemporary problems. Students could follow up with planning and executing a new
magazine program or brochure about their camp and to design and produce a newsletter.
Students were intrigued by a story, heard from an Irish colleague, about the hazard of unintentional
consequences:
Rats were a problem in a refugee camp. The staff decided to offer a can of food as bounty for
every dead rat. Refugees quickly found that the cans were valuable. There was the food in the
can, of course, but a can could be used as a cup, to carry food, to store food, to trade. Refugees
got busy getting rats to bring in for bounty. Then some enterprising refugees thought since the
way to get valuable cans was rats, they should start breeding rats to increase their supply!
The students said they would never forget that example. They learned that it would be a reminder to think
of all possible consequences of an action or an action plan.

718
 Pauper Immigration to Liverpool 1847-1853

The disastrous return of the potato blight in 1846 and the inadequate response of the British authorities in terms
of relief triggered off a flight of destitute people seeking escape from the horrific conditions in the Famine countries.
Liverpool, Glasgow, Cardiff, Swansea and Newport were swamped with Famine refugees.
Liverpool is the only port for which reasonable data exists concerning pauper immigration. Edward Rushton,
Liverpool’s stipendiary magistrate [salaried magistrate] noticed the number of Irish immigrants arriving in unusually
large numbers in October 1846. During 1847 this immigration assumed crisis proportions. Table 1 illustrates the scale
of Irish immigration into, and through Liverpool, over the whole crisis period.

The Estimated number of Irish landing at the Port of Liverpool, 1847-53

Year Passengers who were Total Irish

evidently paupers
1847 116,000 296,231
1848 94,190 252,772
1849 80,468 240,925
1850 77,765 251,001
1851 68,134 283,503
1852 78,422 232,331
1853 71,353 233,652

Of the 296,231 people landing at Liverpool from Ireland during 1847, 116,000 were described by Dr. Duncan as
“half naked and starving.” However, the Irish en route to America also made demands on local accommodation and
often claimed relief.
Over the intercensal period 1841-51, the Irish-born population of the borough of Liverpool increased by 34,174
or 69 percent and the spatial distribution of the Irish in Liverpool indicates that the majority of Famine immigrants
went to the established Irish areas (Noel 124).

Source: Frank Noel, “Black ’47: Liverpool and the Irish Famine,” in E. Margaret Crawford, The Hungry Stream. Essays in
Emigration and Famine. Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, 1997. pp. 123-136. Permission pending.

719
 Redburn: His First Voyage

The first time that I passed through this long lane of pauperism, it seemed hard to believe that such an array of
misery could be furnished by any town in the world. Old women, rather mummies, drying up with slow starving and
age; young girls, incurably sick, who ought to have been in the hospital; sturdy men, with the gallows in their eyes,
and a whining lie in their mouths: young boys, hollow-eyed and decrepit; and puny mothers, holding up puny babies
in the glare of the sun, formed the main feature of the scene.
Often I witnessed some curious, and many very sad scenes; and especially I remember encountering a pale, ragged
man, rushing along frantically and striving to throw off his wife and children, who clung to his arms and legs; and in
God’s name, conjured him not to desert them. He seemed bent upon rushing down to the water and drowning himself
in some despair, and craziness of wretchedness.

Sources: Herman Melville. Redburn: His First Voyage in Robert James Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland. Rebellion, Famine
and Emigration. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. pp. 201, 204. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

720
 Immigration Policy and the Irish
BACKGROUND

G
rosse Isle is a small island in the St. Lawrence River about thirty miles downstream from the city of
Quebec. It was selected as Canada’s quarantine island in 1832 because Canadians were afraid that
the passengers of ships arriving with infectious diseases could infect the population. (The Port of
New York used hospitals on Ellis Island for the same purpose later in the century.) Shortly after, a cholera
epidemic demonstrated that the quarantine station was inadequate for the number of passengers who might
arrive with contagious diseases.
Having experienced the cholera epidemic, the Grosse Isle workers were familiar with the dangers that the
exodus from the Great Irish Famine posed for their staff and facilities, and, of course, for the general public.
Canadian ports were more vulnerable than American ports to an influx of the poor because the cost of
passage to Quebec was half the price of the cost of passage to American ports (Quigley 25). The cheaper
price also appealed to landlords like Major Denis Mahon of Strokestown who were offering the price of
assisted emigration.
There is some doubt as to the exact number of the Irish who set out for Canada. Michael Quigley, who has
examined the primary sources, has estimated that there were at least 100,000 Irish who arrived in the St.
Lawrence in 1847, of whom 20,000—perhaps 30,000—died on shipboard or in the fever sheds of Grosse
Isle (Quigley 38-39). When the Canadian Parliament asked for immigration restriction, the staff at Grosse
Isle was anticipating coping with thousands of immigrants dying of typhoid and typhus. Their predictions
were realized.
(Note: This activity can be used in conjunction with The Impact of the Irish on Port Cities and The Irish
Diaspora is Our Story.)

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
Should Irish Immigration be Restricted? (2 versions for differentiated instruction)
ADDITIONAL READINGS
Grosse Isle Website: http://parc5canada.risqu.qc.ca/grosse_ile/
MacKay, Donald. Flight from Famine: The Coming of the Irish to Canada. Toronto: McClelland and
Stewart, 1990.
Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford,
1985.
O’Hanlon, Ray. The New Irish Americans. Niwot: Roberts Rinehart, 1998.
Quigley, Michael. “Grosse Isle: Canada’s Famine Memorial,” Éire-Ireland, xxxii, I (Spring 1997), pp. 20­
40.
CLASSROOM MATERIALS
Resource materials related to Elian Gonzales (see learning experiences)
Resource materials related to immigration laws

721
STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Students will be able to:
Explain how the 19th century Irish immigration experience is an appropriate case study when studying
immigration policies.
Compare the experiences of different immigrant groups at different points in United States history.
Examine primary sources and draw conclusions about immigration opinions and policies.

STANDARDS
ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.
ELA3: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for critical analysis and evaluation.
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Interpret and analyze documents and artifacts related to significant developments and events in world
history.
Analyze evidence critically and demonstrate an understanding of how circumstances of time and place
influence perspective.
Explain the literal meaning of a historical passage or primary source document, identifying who was
involved, what happened, where it happened, what events led up to these developments, and what
consequences or outcomes followed.
Identify historical problems, pose analytical questions or hypotheses, research analytical questions or test
hypotheses, formulate conclusions or generalizations, raise new questions or issues for further investigation.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. analytical thinking
. draw conclusions
. take and defend positions
. view information from a variety of perspectives
. ask and answer logical questions
. probe assumptions for accuracy and viewpoints
. consult and interpret primary sources

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. Ask students to read the appeal from the Canadian Parliament to Great Britain asking that immigration
from Ireland and Great Britain be restricted. Why was the Canadian Parliament so concerned about
immigrants from Ireland? The Grosse Isle quarantine station was located on an island in the St. Lawrence
River east of the city of Quebec. Why was the quarantine station on an island?

722
 2. Ask students to read the 1847 report from the Grosse Isle staff and answer the questions about the sick
and dying Irish immigrants at the quarantine station. Despite the public health problems posed by
immigrants, did Canada and the United States have a responsibility to open their doors to Irish
immigrants from the Great Irish Famine?
3. The Statue of Liberty in New York harbor holds up a symbolic lamp to welcome new immigrants to the
United States; however, today many people call for restrictions on immigration. During the period from
1924-1965, immigrants were admitted based on national origin quotas. After 1965, immigrants were
given priority on the basis of family reunification. How do students feel about an “open door policy” and
why do they think open immigration is controversial? Does the United States have a responsibility to
open its door to refugees from war and natural disasters? What kind of immigration policy would they
favor?

ASSESSMENT OPTION
Write letters to local congressional representatives explaining views on the question: Does the United States
have a responsibility to open its doors to refugees from war and natural disasters?

TEACHER REFLECTION
Students might consider the Irish as a case study of the effect of the 1965 change in the immigration laws,
immigration reform that favored family reunification over national origin. Before 1965, the Irish had a high
quota based on the number of Irish who had immigrated into the United States before 1924. When the law
changed in 1965, the Irish were disadvantaged. A 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act tried to redress
the imbalances of the 1965 law, but did so by including labor laws that imposed severe penalties on
employers who hired undocumented aliens. The work of the Irish Immigration Reform Movement, founded
in 1987, led to a system of lottery visas passed by Congress that allowed the Irish and other disadvantaged
groups to settle in the United States with “Green Cards.”

ADDITIONAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE

For advanced students:
Research the complexities of immigration law and share observations with the class.
(Note: The discussion in this activity will undoubtedly raise the question of whether a Cuban boy, Elian Gonzales, who
was found floating in an inner tube after his mother and others drowned while trying to leave Cuba for Florida, should
have been returned to his father. Students may wish to research the series of events surrounding this dilemma,
commenting on the social, political, economic, and psychological implications.)

723
 Should Irish Immigration be Restricted?

A) In 1847, the Canadian Parliament appealed to Great Britain to restrict immigration from Ireland and Great
Britain.
The arrangements or the reception of the sick at Grosse Isle, the quarantine station, have proved wholly inadequate
to the unexpected emergency; the entire range of buildings intended for the use of immigrants generally, at the station,
have been converted into hospitals, and are still insufficient for the numerous and increasing sick. While the people of
the province are most desirous to welcome to the colony all those of their fellow-subjects who may think it proper to
emigrate from the parent country, we are convinced that a continued emigration of a similar character to that which is
now taking place, is calculated to produce a most injurious effect upon our prosperity. We beseech (beg) your Majesty
not to permit the helpless, the starving, the sick and diseased, unequal and unfit as they are to face the hardships of a
settler’s life, to embark for these shores, which if they reach, in too many instances they only find a grave.

Questions:
1. Why is Canadian Parliament concerned about the large number of new immigrants from Ireland and Great Britain?

B) Reports from the staff at Grosse Isle, Quebec quarantine station in 1847. Dr. Douglas:
Every vessel bringing Irish passengers has lost many by fever and dysentery on the voyage, and has arrived here
with numbers of sick. Seventeen vessels have recently arrived. The number of passengers with which these vessels left
port was 5,607. Out of these 260 died on the passage and upwards of 700 have been admitted to hospital, or are being
treated on board their vessels, waiting vacancies to be landed.
Mr. Buchanan: Out of the 4,000 or 5,000 immigrants that have left Grosse Isle since Sunday, at least 2,000 will
fall sick somewhere before three weeks are over. They ought to have accommodations for 2,000 sick at least in
Montreal or Quebec, as all the passengers are half dead from starvation and want before embarking; and the least bowel
complaint, which is sure to come with change of food, finishes them without a struggle. Hot weather will increase the
evil.

Questions:
2. According to the report by Dr. Douglas, what percentage of the passengers on the ships from Ireland either died
or are severely ill?

3. According to Mr. Buchanan, why do people on board fall ill so quickly?

4. Why is Mr. Buchanan concerned about what will happen in the future?

Edited for purposes of The Great Irish Famine Curriculum.

724
 Should Irish Immigration be Restricted?

A) In 1847, the Canadian Parliament appealed to Great Britain to restrict immigration from Ireland and Great Britain.
The place we have to receive the sick at Grosse Isle is not large enough for the present emergency. All of our build­
ings have been made into hospitals and it still is not enough for all the sick who are arriving. While people in Canada
wish to welcome Ireland for Canada, we are convinced that if people like those who are coming keep coming, the peo­
ple of Canada will suffer. We beg your Majesty not to let the helpless, the starving and the sick who are not able to
face a new life here leave Ireland for Canada. If they do come to Canada they too often find only their grave.

1. Why does the Canadian Parliament ask Great Britain to stop sending the poor Irish to Canada?

2. Why does the Canadian Parliament believe that Canadians will suffer if the poor Irish keep coming?

B) Reports from the staff at Grosse Isle, Quebec quarantine station in 1847.
Dr. Douglas: Every ship with Irish passengers has lost many of them to death by fever and dysentery. Every ship
arrives with people who are very sick. Seventeen ships have come recently. Of the 5,607 people who left Irish and
English ports, 260 died on the way and about 700 are in our hospitals or are being treated on their boats waiting for a
bed in a hospital.
Mr. Buchanan: Of the 4,000 or 5,000 who left Grosse Isle since Sunday, at least 2,000 will be sick in the next three
weeks. There needs to be places for them to stay for these two thousand at least in the cities of Montreal or Quebec.
All of the Irish were half-dead from hunger before they got onto the ships for Canada. Even a little bowel upset which
comes with a change of food will kill them. The hot weather will make things even worse.

Questions:
1. How many people did Dr. Douglas say died or were ill? What percentage of the number who left port are
dead or ill?
2. What does Mr. Buchanan say causes people to get sick so quickly?
3. What will happen to some of the people who leave Grosse Isle?
4. What must the cities of Montreal and Quebec prepare for?
5. Why will hot weather make things worse?

Edited for purposes of The Great Irish Famine Curriculum.

725
 Annie Moore:
Ellis Island’s First Immigrant
BACKGROUND

E
llis Island started as a sandbar barely above high tide level, but when the federal government decided
to locate the immigration depot in New York Harbor, Ellis Island was selected and was enlarged to
14 acres. Annie Moore is considered to be Ellis Island’s first immigrant. The building Annie Moore
entered on January 1, 1892, was a wooden structure that was destroyed by fire in 1897. It was replaced by
the fireproof, brick and stone Moorish-looking building we know today. It opened in December 1900. The
island acreage was increased again to accommodate additional buildings. 1907 was the peak year for
immigration: 1,004,756 passed through the Port of New York; 11,747 in one day at Ellis Island (Kinny 141).
There is a statue of the young Annie Moore at Ellis Island. She was the first person to step ashore at the new
immigration depot. In this activity, students will read the New York Herald account of Annie Moore’s arrival
at Ellis Island. The article calls Annie a “steerage passenger.” Steerage passengers, who paid the cheapest
fares, traveled in crowded conditions in the lowest part of the ship.
(Note: This activity can be used in conjunction with Preparation for Emigration and The Emigrant’s Trunk.)

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
First Immigrant on Ellis Island (2 versions for differentiated instruction)
Annie Moore Monument
Annie Moore’s Life in America
ADDITIONAL READINGS
Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughters in America. Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins,1983.
Kinny, Paul. “Chronology,” in Susan Jonas, ed. Ellis Island, Echoes from a Nation’s Past. New York:
Aperature Foundation, 1989. pp. 140-141.
Loughrey, Eithne. Annie Moore: First in Line for America. Dublin: Mercier, 1999.

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will be able to:
Describe the significance of the experience of Annie Moore arriving at Ellis Island.
Compile a list of questions that they would ask immigrants.
Create letters responding to the concept of diversity of New York.

STANDARDS
SS 1: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in the history of the United States and New York.
ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.
ELA 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression.
ELA 4: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for social interaction.

726
PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Know the roots of American culture, its development from many different traditions, and the ways many
people from a variety of groups and backgrounds played a role in creating it.
Describe historic events through the eyes and experiences of those who were there.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING

INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. acquire and organize information
. observe and conclude
. synthesize information
. reflect upon content/form opinion
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
English Language Arts
Arts

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. Ask students to read the handout First Immigrant on Ellis Island. How did Annie and her fellow
passengers get to the island from their ocean liner the Nevada? Why did officials at Ellis Island give a
ten-dollar gold piece to the first steerage passenger to land at Ellis Island? Cabin class passengers (First
and Second Class passengers) were taken directly to the piers to be landed. Steerage passengers were put
on the ferry (John E. Moore) and taken to Ellis Island. Why were steerage passengers treated differently
than cabin class passengers? Do students think that immigration officers should treat all passengers the
same regardless of how much they paid for their ticket? How was Annie treated when she stepped
ashore? What was the first question Annie was asked? Why?
First Immigrant on Ellis Island mentions only one question Annie was asked. What other kinds of
information would officials at Ellis Island want to know about arriving immigrants? Working in groups,
ask students to make a list of questions that they would ask if they were a United State Immigration
Officer working at a registry desk at Ellis Island.
2. Not much is known about what happened to Annie Moore in the year after she arrived in New York. An
Irish writer wrote a book called Annie Moore: First in Line for America which imagines what life was
like for Annie. The story is based on what we know about Irish immigrant life in New York at the turn
of the century.
There are two things about this story of Annie that were not typical of the Irish girls who arrived in New
York at the turn of the century: she was reunited with her parents and she works in a laundry rather than
in domestic service. Irish young people generally emigrated and sent money back to support their parents
at home. While Irish immigrant women worked sewing for the garment industry, many preferred
domestic service for its better wages and working conditions.
One of the things that the fictional Annie likes about New York is its diversity. Ask students to read the
passages about New York diversity in the handout Annie Moore’s Life in America, and write a literary
letter to a class partner about the passage. Have they had an experience that made them feel better about
a new neighborhood, a new school, camp, a group? Do students share Annie’s eagerness to meet new
people from diverse background? What do they do to take advantage of an opportunity to learn about
different people?

727
ASSESSMENT OPTION
How would it feel to be Annie Moore or one of her brothers? Write a journal entry, describing observations,
reactions, and feelings.

TEACHER REFLECTION
The handout First Immigrant on Ellis Island can be used as a listening activity. This is a good activity to
use as a preparation for a class field trip to Ellis Island. In field tests of the activity, students had thoughtful
discussions on steerage and the matter of class. A very effective illustration of steerage and class is the scene
from the Titanic when steerage passengers are barred from getting up to the boat deck.

ADDITIONAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE

For advanced students:
Historians know about Annie Moore because she was the first immigrant to land at the new (1892)
immigrant depot at Ellis Island. What was there before the new depot? What happened to the old depot?
Using print and non-print sources, students can write reports about what they find.

728
 First Immigrant on Ellis Island
Annie Moore Heads the Procession of Those Registered at the New Federal Depot

One of the happiest children in New York last night was Annie Moore, a pretty fifteen-year old Irish girl, who with
her two brothers, arrived on the Guion line steamship Nevada, from Queenstown yesterday. For Annie was reserved
the privilege of being the first steerage passenger to land at the new immigrant depot on Ellis Island.
Every preparation had been made to begin the work of landing immigrants at the new depot when the transfer
steamer John E. Moore ran into the Ellis Island basin at 11 o’clock in the forenoon with the 107 immigrants from the
Nevada. The big double doors leading to the main stairway near the center of the building were open and at the head
of the stairway stood Colonel Weber, Superintendent of Emigration, while near him was Mr. Charles Hendley, who
came all the way from Baltimore to register the first immigrant to land at the new depot.
“Here they come!” exclaimed one of the gatemen as a chorus of whistles from the steam vessels in the vicinity
announced that the immigrants were landing. Three tremendous cheers went up from the employers and Colonel Weber
was surprised to see a rosy-cheeked ... girl skipping up the stairs two steps at a time. She was at the head of the col­
umn and immediately behind her were her two brothers.

First to Land
When Annie saw the grave-looking gentleman waiting to receive her she hesitated for a moment, but the crowd
behind pressed on, and before she knew it she was entering the big room north of the registry desks.
Treasurer Manning led her up to one of the desks, where Mr. Hendley, pen in hand, was waiting.
“What is your name, my girl?” asked Mr. Hendley.
“Annie Moore, Sir,” answered the girl. Annie was from County Cork and she was bound for her parents’ home at
No. 32 Monroe Street, this city.
The ordeal of examination over, Annie and her brothers passed down one of the aisles leading through the registry
department to the room beyond, where Colonel Weber stood waiting with a ten-dollar gold piece, which he presented
to Annie, wishing her at the same time, a Happy New Year.
If she had been surprised at the attention shown her before she was now absolutely dumfounded. She blushed and
stammered and finally managed to ask
“Is this for me to keep, Sir?” She was assured that it was...
Annie was then hurried along to the local waiting room, where she found her parents, and in less than half an hour
from the time she landed, she was on her way to the city to spend the rest of New Year’s Day.

Source: New York Herald, 2 January 1892, p. 2. Annie Moore, First in Line for America by Eithne Loughrey. Mercier Press, Cork,
Ireland. pp. 40-42. Used with permission of Mercier Press.

729
 First Immigrant on Ellis Island
Annie Moore Heads the Line of Those who Arrived at Ellis Island

One of the happiest children in New York last night was Annie Moore, a pretty fifteen-year-old Irish girl who
arrived with her two brothers on the ship Nevada from Queenstown yesterday. Annie was the first person to land at the
new immigrant depot.
The ferry John E. Moore arrived at Ellis Island at 11:00 with 107 immigrants from the Nevada. The big double
doors to the main stairway were open and Colonel Weber, Superintendent of Emigration stood at the top of the stairs.
Mr. Charles Hendley came from Baltimore to register the first immigrant.
“Here they come!” cried one of the gatemen. All the boats in the area blew their whistles. The workers gave three
cheers. Colonel Weber was surprised to see a young girl skip up the stairs two at a time. She was at the head of the
line. Her two brothers followed.
Annie stopped a little when she saw the men. She was taken to a desk where Mr. Mendley was waiting.
“What is your name, my girl? asked Mr. Hendly.
“Annie Moore, Sir,” answered Annie. She said she was from Cork and was going to live with her parents at 32
Monroe Street. When Annie had answered all of the questions she was taken to Colonel Weber who gave her a ten-
dollar gold piece. He wished her a Happy New Year.
“Is this for me to keep?”
She was told it was hers.
Annie then hurried to the waiting room to meet her parents and in less than a half hour from the time she landed,
she was on her way home to spend the rest of New Year’s Day.

Source: New York Herald, 2 January 1892, p. 2. Annie Moore, First in Line for America by Eithne Loughrey. Mercier Press, Cork,
Ireland. pp. 40-42. Used with permission of Mercier Press.

Edited for purposes of The Great Irish Famine Curriculum.

730
 Annie Moore and Her Brothers, Cork

Source: Photograph by Maureen Murphy. The Great Irish Famine Curriculum Committee.

731
 Annie Moore’s Life in America

Annie’s friend from the laundry, Sophia Rostov, invited her to visit her family at home. Their hos­
pitality to Annie makes an important difference in the way she feels about New York:
Annie’s visit to the Rostov family marked the turning point in her adjustment to her new life. It began to dawn on
her that New York was full of people she could make friends with, and with this realization, the feelings of fear, iso­
lation and loneliness which had plagued her since she had arrived disappeared at last. In their place a new confidence
grew, and she began to look around her with a fresh zest and curiosity she had not felt before.

Annie hoped to go to school but her family needs her wages from the laundry. She and her father
talk about her dream for an education and he says they can put a little money aside for her future and
she can keep her overtime:
Annie was touched. Indeed she would save hard—but her biggest goal now would be her independence. Her
dreams of betterment were no longer confined to education. She longed to travel and see more of this huge country, to
learn more about all the very different kinds of people in it. That was one of the things she loved about America. People
had come here from every country in the world to make a new life. No wonder it was called the New World. It was so
different from Cork where you’d never seen a black person or a Chinaman. You only read about them in books.

Source: New York Herald, 2 January 1892, p. 2. Annie Moore, First in Line for America by Eithne Loughrey. Mercier Press, Cork,
Ireland. pp. 71-72. Used with permission of Mercier Press.

732
 Immigrants at Ellis Island:
Radio Drama
BACKGROUND

I
n this activity, students will be presenting a radio play about the immigration experience at Ellis Island.
Few American experiences have the human drama of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in the peak
years between 1892 and 1924. In 1907, 11,747 passed through Ellis Island in a single day (Jonas 141).
This activity involves students simulating the drama of an immigrant’s arrival in the Register Hall at Ellis
Island.
This Background information can be read aloud to the students, to inspire them to begin their research.
People who arrived from Ireland during the Great Irish Famine landed directly at the docks along the East
and Hudson rivers. After the Great Irish Famine, New York State began to require immigration formalities,
to protect both the immigrant and the state. Later, jurisdiction for immigration switched from state to federal
authority and the federal government built the immigration reception depot at Ellis Island. The first
building, a wooden structure, burned and was replaced by the brick, rather moorish-looking building we
know today.
Immigrants traveling third class who arrived after January 1, 1892, were processed at Ellis Island. In 1924
more restrictive requirements stipulated that immigrants obtain visas at United States consulates in their
home countries, and undergo screening before embarking.
Immigrants arriving at the Port of New York traveling cabin class (First or Second class) were taken to city
piers to disembark; Third Class (steerage) passengers were transferred to a ferry that took them to Ellis
Island for processing. Immigrants were directed to a flight of stairs leading to the second-floor Registry hall.
As they climbed the stairs, doctors from the Public Health Service watched carefully for new arrivals who
might be coming with medical problems that included difficulty breathing or walking, signs of contagious
diseases, or mental or emotional problems. Individuals who were identified in that brief screening were
marked with chalk and sent for further examination. Such individuals could be detained or even deported.
Immigrants who successfully passed the medical screening were interviewed by inspectors who worked
from the Manifest or List of Alien Immigrants that arrived with each ship. Manifests included the following
information for each passenger: full name, age (year/months), sex, marital status, occupation, ability to read,
ability to write, nationality, last residence, port of embarkation, port of entry in the United States, final
destination in the United States (state, city, town), whether the individual had a ticket to her/his final
destination, the name of the person who paid the individual’s passage, how much money the individual
possessed, whether the individual had been in America before and when, whether the individual was joining
a relative (name and address), whether the individual had ever been in prison or almshouse or supported by
charity, whether the individual was a polygamist, whether the individual was a contract laborer, the
condition of the individual’s health, whether the individual was disabled, and their contract ticket number.
Inspectors checked the immigrant’s responses to questions against the information on the manifest. They
might ask additional questions about whether an immigrant had a job waiting; they might ask to see the
money the immigrant said she/he had. If there were any doubts about the information an immigrant gave,
the person would be detained for further questioning. Those who satisfied the inspectors were given landing
cards and were free to collect their baggage from the first floor and proceed to the ferry.
This activity can be used in conjunction with Annie Moore: Ellis Island’s First Immigrant, The Emigrant’s
Trunk, and Preparation for Emigration.

733
RESOURCES
ADDITIONAL READINGS
Jonas, Susan, ed. Ellis Island: Echoes from a Nation’s Past. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1989.
Novotny, Ann. Strangers at the Door: Ellis Island, Castle Garden and the Great Migration to America.
Riverside, CT: Chatham Press, 1971.
Pitkin, Thomas M. Keepers of the Gate: A History of Ellis Island. New York: New York University Press,
1975.

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will be able to:
Share research findings about Ellis Island.
Create and perform a radio play based on the immigrant experience at Ellis Island.
Describe different experiences of immigrant groups arriving at Ellis Island.
Locate countries of origin of immigrant groups.

STANDARDS
SS 1: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in the history of the United States and New York.
SS 3: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of the geography
of the interdependent world in which we live—local, national, and global—including the distribution of
people, places, and environments over the Earth’s surface.
ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.
ELA 4: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for social interaction.
Arts 1: Students will actively engage in the processes that constitute creation and performance in the arts
(dance, music, theatre, and visual arts) and participate in various roles in the arts.

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Produce oral and written reports on topics related to school subjects.
Learn some words and expressions in another language to communicate with peer or adult who speaks the
language.
Investigate key turning points in New York State and United States history and explain why these events or
developments are significant.
Gather and organize information about the important accomplishments of individuals and groups, living in
their neighborhoods and communities.
Map information about people, places, and environments.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. acquire and organize information
. participate in group activities
. synthesize information
. make decisions about process

734
 . conceptualize
. utilize multiple resources in research
. identify patterns and themes
. communicate results of research and projects
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
English Language Arts
Arts

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. Ask students to assemble, if possible, the arrival information about a family member or family friend or
acquaintance who immigrated to the United States. Beginning with the information required on the
manifest, ask students to collect further information about the circumstances of the immigrant’s
departure, locate the home country, the journey from home to the port of embarkation, the ship’s voyage,
and any other details about the passage to the United States. (This can also be done by inviting local
immigrants as guest speakers.)
What were the circumstances that led to the decision for the immigrant to leave home? Did the immigrant
have any adventures even before boarding the ship to travel to the United States?
If students do not have access to all of the information, they can choose a member of an immigrant group
who passed through Ellis Island to study. Students can also read the background information on
emigration from Ireland during the Great Irish Famine and assume the role of an immigrant.
2. Students can then begin to write a five-minute radio script about their subject arriving at Ellis Island,
being stopped for medical reasons (and what happened), waiting on a bench and worrying about the
interview, and the interview with the inspector. Ask students to put themselves in place of their
immigrants. What is going through their minds as they arrive at Ellis Island? What emotion do they
experience when they see people stopped and taken out of line? The person removed might be someone
the immigrant knows. How do they feel seeing someone’s bad luck? Could they be next? What to they
do and think about as they sit waiting their turn with the rest of their lives hanging on what might happen
in the next few minutes?
The script can be a dramatic monologue where the student steps into the immigrant’s character and
creates the scene and situation for the reader or viewer. It could also be a dialogue with another passenger,
with medical personnel or with the inspecting officer. Students who are bi-lingual may wish to give their
script extra authenticity by adding an interpreter who will translate the student’s answers into English for
the inspector. The goal is to take the facts of the immigrant’s arrival at Ellis Island and make the
immigrant’s experience at Ellis Island a vivid one.
3. Many students will be relying on print and non-print records for the story of their immigrant family
member’s arrival. While that information is valuable, written records do not convey the emotions of an
immigrant arriving and going through their interviews with immigration officers. An interview with a
recent immigrant would be an opportunity to talk about the feelings people experience in such situations.
What questions would students ask? Would the interview help the writer understand how the immigrants
felt arriving at Ellis Island?
4. Working in pairs or trios students will practice their scripts and add sound effects and music for their
mini-drama.
Students can present their radio plays to the class; the plays can be recorded and put on a master tape of
class immigration experiences. What have students learned about their immigrant’s experience? What
have students learned about turning experience into drama?

735
ASSESSMENT OPTION
Write a one-page reflection about how the radio play may assist listeners in comprehending the experiences
of the immigrants at Ellis Island.

TEACHER REFLECTION
Ellis Island is a popular field trip especially for middle school students studying immigration. For the
students the stairs and Registry Hall are large spaces; their experience researching their family members
going through Ellis Island gives personal meaning to that historic space. In field tests, while not every
student found a compelling immigrant story, there were several dramatic family stories to share with the
class.

736
 Preparation for Emigration
BACKGROUND

E
migration from Ireland did not begin with the Great Irish Famine. The famine accelerated the rate of
emigration from rural Ireland, a phenomenon that continued for 100 years after the famine. The years
from 1880-1920 constituted the second major period of emigration to the United States. For example,
between just the years 1882 and 1908, nearly 310,000 Irish girls passed through the Port of New York.
Unlike other immigrants who came as families to the United States, young Irish girls emigrated on their own
and sent money back to support their parents. Money from America was often the only cash income in the
household. (See the activity The Emigrant’s Trunk for additional background and learning experiences.)

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
Going into Exile
Thousands Are Sailing
The Feeney Family

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Discuss why the Irish continued to emigrate even after the Great Irish Famine ended.
Describe the reactions to emigration from the perspective of the emigrants and the sponsors.
Analyze the skills and knowledge that would best prepare emigrants to the United States.
Explain the description of two Irish children going into exile.
Write letters to prospective immigrants describing life in New York State.

STANDARDS
SS 1: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in the history of the United States and New York.
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.
ELA 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression.
ELA 4: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for social interaction.

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Know the roots of American culture, its development from many different traditions, and the ways many
people from a variety of groups and backgrounds played a role in creating it.
Identify individuals who have helped to strengthen democracy in the United States and throughout the
world. Describe historic events through the eyes and experiences of those who were there.
Know the social and economic characteristics, such as customs, traditions, child-rearing practices, ways of
making a living, education and socialization practices, gender roles, foods, and religious and spiritual beliefs
that distinguish different cultures and civilizations.

737
 Understand the literary elements of setting, character, plot, theme, and point of view and compare those
features to other works and to their own lives.
Recognize different levels of meaning.
Read aloud with expression, conveying the meaning and mood of a work.
Write stories, poems, literary essays, and plays that observe the conventions of the genre and contain
interesting and effective language and voice.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. analytical thinking
. probe ideas and assumptions
. reflective thinking
. draw conclusions
. think rationally about content
. view information from a variety of perspectives
. acquire and organize information
. conceptualize and observe
. reflect upon content/form opinions
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
English Language Arts

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. Ask students to read the handout Going into Exile, or to take turns reading it aloud to fully appreciate the
story. Mary and Michael Feeney are teenagers who are leaving their home for a new life in America. Why
are they leaving? Do they have to leave? Do they have other options? There is a good chance they will
never see home again. How does that knowledge affect Mr. Feeney, Mrs. Feeney, Mary and Michael?
What do you notice about the relationship between father and son and mother and daughter? Do they
understand each other’s feelings? Are they sympathetic to each other? Does Mary’s mother wish she had
Mary’s chance? Use the text to support your observations.
2. If you were going off to make your life away from your family, what would you need? What resources?
What skills? What knowledge? What experience?
3. Michael and Mary would have come to America in the 1920s. No doubt, Michael would have started out
working in the building trades; Mary would have worked as a maid. Most young Irish who emigrated had
their passage paid by a relative who lived in America who often sent some extra money for clothes and
for other travel expenses. The relatives usually met the new arrivals and helped them find work. The new
immigrants would, in turn, be expected to help other relatives. Ask students to suppose that they were
sponsoring a relative to come to America. What does that person have to know about living and working
in New York? What would be most surprising to that person about life here? Ask students to write a letter
telling him/her about what to expect. What knowledge and skills would be necessary?
4. Complete the handout The Feeney Family as an exercise in comparing and contrasting the private and
public behavior of family members. Compare the responses of those leaving with those staying in Going
Into Exile and “Thousands are Sailing.”

738
ASSESSMENT OPTION
Write a short essay about emigrating as a teenager, written as a first-person account, focusing on concerns
about knowledge and skills required to survive in America.

TEACHER REFLECTION
This activity provides students with the opportunity to consider Irish immigration to the United States in the
context of their own or their family’s immigration experience.
This activity was field tested where the discussion of how emigration affected members of the Feeney
family was part of an interdisciplinary language arts/social studies unit on immigration. Students talked
about the conflict of emotions the young Feeneys felt: the excitement of the possibilities life offered in
Boston and the wrench of exile. The culminating activity was a class trip to Ellis Island. Students were
asked to look at the statue of the Irish immigrant girl Annie Moore, the first person to set foot on Ellis Island,
and to think about what she would have felt as she stepped off the launch.
Teachers may want to use this activity in conjunction with the activities: The American Wake, Dance as
Communication, Monuments to Young Immigrants, The Emigrant’s Trunk, and Irish Domestic Servants in
America.

ADDITIONAL LEARNING EXPERIENCES

Prepare of a list of emotional responses to emigration, accompanied by a description of why the word was
chosen. Example:
excitement
“Excitement” because stories about America, although based on folklore, letters, and rumors,
described a world of riches and opportunities.

739
 Going Into Exile

Patrick Feeney’s cabin was crowded with people. In the large kitchen men, women, and children lined the walls,
three deep in places, sitting on forms, chairs, stools, and on one another’s knees. On the cement floor three couples
were dancing a jig and raising a quantity of dust, which was, however, soon sucked up the chimney by the huge turf
fire that blazed on the hearth. The only clear space in the kitchen was the corner to the left of the fireplace, where Pat
Mullaney sat on a yellow chair with his right ankle resting on his left knee, a spotted red handkerchief on his head that
reeked with perspiration, and his red face contorting as he played a tattered old accordion. One door was shut and the
tins hanging on it gleamed in the firelight. The opposite door was open and over the heads of the small boys that crowd­
ed in it and outside it, peering in at the dancing couples in the kitchen, a starry June sky was visible and, beneath the
sky, shadowy gray crags and misty, whitish fields lay motionless, still and somber. There was a deep, calm silence out­
side the cabin and within the cabin, in spite of the music and dancing in the kitchen and the singing in the little room
to the left, where Patrick Feeney’s eldest son Michael sat on the bed with three other young men, there was a haunting
melancholy in the air.
The people were dancing, laughing and singing with a certain forced and boisterous gaiety that failed to hide from
them the real cause of their being there, dancing, singing and laughing. For the dance was on account of Patrick
Feeney’s two children, Mary and Michael, who were going to the United States on the following morning.
Feeney himself, a black-bearded, red-faced, middle-aged peasant, with white ivory buttons on his blue frieze shirt
and his hands stuck in his leather waist belt, wandered restlessly about the kitchen, urging the people to sing and dance,
while his mind was in agony all the time, thinking that on the following day he would lose his two eldest children,
never to see them again perhaps. He kept talking to everybody about amusing things, shouted at the dancers and
behaved in a boisterous and abandoned manner. But every now and then he had to leave the kitchen, under the pre­
tense of going to the pigsty to look at a young pig that was supposed to be ill. He would stand, however, upright against
his gable and look gloomily at some star or other, while his mind struggled with vague and peculiar ideas that wan­
dered about in it. He could make nothing at all of his thoughts, but a lump always came up his throat, and he shivered,
although the night was warm.
Then he would sigh and say with a contraction of his neck: “Oh, it’s a queer world this and no doubt about it. So
it is.” Then he would go back to the cabin again and begin to urge on the dance, laughing, shouting and stamping on
the floor.
Towards dawn, when the floor was crowded with couples, arranged in fours, stamping on the floor and going to
and fro, dancing the “Walls of Limerick,” Feeney was going out to the gable when his son Michael followed him out.
The two of them walked side by side about the yard over the gray sea pebbles that had been strewn there the previous
day. They walked in silence and yawned without need, pretending to be taking the air. But each of them was very excit­
ed. Michael was taller than his father and not so thickly built, but the shabby blue serge suit that he had bought for
going to America was too narrow for his broad shoulders and the coat was too wide around the waist. He moved clum­
sily in it and his hands appeared altogether too bony and big and red, and he didn’t know what to do with them. During
his twenty-one years of life he had never worn anything other than the homespun clothes of Inverara, and the shop-
made clothes appeared as strange to him and as uncomfortable as a dress suit worn by a man working in a sewer. His
face was flushed a bright red and his blue eyes shone with excitement. Now and again he wiped the perspiration from
his forehead with the lining of his gray tweed cap.
At last Patrick Feeney reached his usual position at the gable end. He halted, balanced himself on his heels with
his hands in his waist belt, coughed and said, “It’s going to be a warm day.” The son came up beside him, folded his
arms and leaned his right shoulder against the gable.
“It was kind of Uncle Ned to lend the money for the dance, father,” he said. “I’d hate to think that we’d have to
go without something or other, just the same as everybody else has. I’ll send you that money, the very first money I
earn, father ... even before I pay Aunt Mary for my passage money. I should have all that money paid off in four
months, and then I’ll have some more money to send you by Christmas.”
And Michael felt very strong and manly recounting what he was going to do when he got to Boston, Massachusetts.
He told himself that with his great strength he would earn a great deal of money. Conscious of his youth and his strength
and lusting for adventurous life, for the moment he forgot the ache in his heart that the thought of leaving his father
inspired in him.
740
 The father was silent for some time. He was looking at the sky with his lower lip hanging, thinking of nothing. At
last he sighed as a memory struck him. “What is it?” said the son. “Don’t weaken, for God’s sake. You will only make
it hard for me.” “Fooh!” said the father suddenly with pretended gruffness. “Who is weakening? I’m afraid that your
new clothes make you impudent.” Then he was silent for a moment and continued in a low voice: “I was thinking of
that potato field you sowed alone last spring the time I had the influenza. I never set eyes on the man that could do it
better. It’s a cruel world that takes you away from the land that God made you for.”
“Oh, what are you talking about, father?“ said Michael irritably. “Sure what did anybody ever get out of the land
but poverty and hard work and potatoes and salt?”
“Ah yes,” said father with a sigh, “but it’s your own, the land, and over there’—he waved his hand at the western
sky—‘you’ll be giving your sweat to some other man’s land, or what’s equal to it.”
“Indeed,” muttered Michael, looking at the ground with a melancholy expression in his eyes, “it’s poor encour­
agement you are giving me.”
They stood in silence fully five minutes. Each hungered to embrace the other, to cry, to beat the air, to scream with
excess sorrow. But they stood silent and somber, like nature about them, hugging their woe. Then they went back to
the cabin. Michael went into the little room to the left of the kitchen, to the three young men who fished in the same
curragh with him and were his bosom friends. The father walked into the large bedroom to the right of the kitchen.
The large bedroom was crowded with people. A large table was laid for tea in the center of the room and about a
dozen young men were sitting at it, drinking tea and eating buttered raisin cake. Mrs. Feeney was bustling about the
table, serving the food and urging them to eat. She was assisted by her two younger daughters and by another woman,
a relative of her own. Her eldest daughter Mary, who was going to the United States that day, was sitting on the edge
of the bed with several other young women. The bed was a large four poster bed with a deal canopy over it, painted
red, and the young women were huddled together on it. So that there must have been about a dozen of them there. They
were Mary Feeney’s particular friends, and they stayed with her in that uncomfortable position just to show how much
they liked her. It was a custom.
Mary herself sat on the edge of the bed with her legs dangling. She was a pretty, dark-haired girl of nineteen, with
dimpled, plump, red cheeks and ruminative brown eyes that seemed to cause little wrinkles to come and go in her little
low forehead. Her nose was soft and small and rounded. Her mouth was small and her lips were red and open. Beneath
her white blouse that was frilled at the neck and her navy blue skirt that outlined her limbs as she sat on the edge of the
bed, her body was plump, soft, well-molded and in some manner exuded a feeling of freshness and innocence. So that
she seemed to have been born to be fondled and admired in luxurious surroundings instead of having been born a peas­
ant’s daughter, who had to go to the United States that day to work as a servant or maybe in a factory.
And as she sat on the edge of the bed crushing her little handkerchief between her palms, she kept thinking fever­
ishly of the United States, at one moment with fear and loathing, at the next with desire and longing. Unlike her broth­
er she did not think of the work she was going to do or the money that she was going to earn. Other things troubled
her, things of which she was half ashamed, half afraid, thoughts of love and of foreign men and of clothes and of hous­
es where there were more than three rooms and where people ate meat every day.
She was fond of life, and several young men among the local gentry had admired her in Inverara. But...
She happened to look up and she caught her father’s eyes as he stood silently by the window with his hands stuck
in his waist belt. His eyes rested on hers for a moment and then he dropped them without smiling, and with his lips com­
pressed he walked down to the kitchen. She shuddered slightly. She was a little afraid of her father, although she knew
that he loved her very much and he was very kind to her. But the winter before he had whipped her with a dried willow
rod, when he caught her one evening behind Tim Hernon’s cabin after nightfall, with Tim Hernon’s son Bartly’s arms
around her waist and he kissing her. Ever since, she always shivered slightly when her father touched her or spoke to
her. “Oho!” said an old peasant who sat at the table with a saucer full of tea in his hand and his gray flannel shirt open
at his thick hairy, wrinkled neck. “Oho! indeed, but it’s a disgrace to the island of Inverara to let such a beautiful woman
as your daughter go away, Mrs. Feeney. If I was a young man, I’ll be flayed alive if I’d let her go.”
There was a laugh and some of the women on the bed, said: “Bad cess to you, Patsy Coyne, if you haven’t too
much impudence, it’s a caution.” But the laugh soon died. The young men sitting at the table felt embarrassed and kept
looking at one another sheepishly, as if each tried to find out if the others were in love with Mary Feeney.
“Oh, well, God is good,” said Mrs. Feeney, as she wiped her lips with the tip of her bright, clean, check apron.
“What will be must be, and sure there is hope from the sea, but there is no hope from the grave. It is sad and the poor
741
have to suffer, but...” Mrs. Feeney stopped suddenly, aware that all these platitudes meant nothing whatsoever. Like
her husband she was unable to think intelligibly about her two children going away. Whenever the reality of their going
away, maybe for ever, three thousand miles into a vast unknown world, came before her mind, it seemed that a thin
bar of some hard metal thrust itself forward from her brain and rested behind the wall of her forehead. So that almost
immediately she became stupidly conscious of the pain caused by the imaginary bar of metal and she forgot the dread
prospect of her children going away. But her mind grappled with the things about her busily and efficiently, with the
preparation of food, with the entertaining of her guests, with the numerous little things that have to be done in a house
where there is a party and which only a woman can do properly. These little things, in a manner, saved her, for the
moment at least, from bursting into tears whenever she looked at her daughter and whenever she thought of her son,
whom she loved most of all her children, because perhaps she nearly died giving birth to him and he had been very
delicate until he was twelve years old. So she laughed down in her breast a funny laugh she had that made her heave,
where her check apron rose out from the waistband in a deep curve. “A person begins to talk,” she said with a shrug
of her shoulders sideways, “and then a person says foolish things.”
“That’s true,” said the old peasant, noisily pouring more tea from his cup to his saucer.
But Mary knew by her mother laughing that way that she was very near being hysterical. She always laughed that
way before she had one of her fits of hysterics. And Mary’s heart stopped beating suddenly and then began again at an
awful rate as her eyes became acutely conscious of her mother’s body, the rotund, short body with the wonderful mass
of fair hair, growing grey at the temples and the fair face with the soft liquid eyes, that grew hard and piercing for a
moment as they looked at a thing and then grew soft and liquid again, and the thin-lipped small mouth with the beau­
tiful white teeth and the deep perpendicular grooves in the upper lip and the tremor that always came in the corner of
the mouth, with love, when she looked at her children. Mary became acutely conscious of all these little points, as well
as of the little black spot that was on her left breast below the nipple and the swelling that came now and again in her
legs and caused her to have hysterics and would one day cause her death. And she was stricken with horror at the
thought of leaving her mother and at the selfishness of her thoughts. She had never been prone to thinking of anything
important but now, somehow for a moment she had a glimpse of her mother’s life that made her shiver and hate her­
self as a cruel, heartless, lazy, selfish wretch. Her mother’s life loomed up before her eyes, a life of continual misery
and suffering, hard work, birth pangs, sickness and again hard work and hunger and anxiety. It loomed up and then it
fled again, a little mist came before her eyes and she jumped down from the bed, with the jaunty twirl of her head that
was her habit when she set her body in motion.
“Sit down for a while, mother,” she whispered toying with the black ivory buttons on her mother’s brown bodice.
“I’ll look after the table.” “No, no” murmured the mother with a shake of her whole body, “I’m not a bit tired. Sit down,
my treasure. You have a long way to travel today.” And Mary sighed and went back to the bed again. At last some­
body said: “So it is, and may God be praised.” The change from the starry night to the gray, sharp dawn was hard to
notice until it had arrived. People looked out and saw the morning light sneaking over the crags silently, along the
ground, pushing the mist banks upwards. The stars were growing dim. A long way off invisible sparrows were chirp­
ing in their ivied perch in some distant hill or other. Another day had arrived and even as the people looked at it,
yawned and began to search for their hats, caps and shawls preparing to go home, the day grew and spread its light and
made things move and give voice. Cocks crew, blackbirds caroled, a dog let loose from a cabin by an early riser chased
madly after an imaginary robber, barking as if his tail were on fire. The people said good-bye and began to stream forth
from Feeney’s cabin. They were going to their homes to see to the morning’s work before going to Kilmurrage to see
the immigrants off on the steamer to the mainland. Soon the cabin was empty except for family.
All the family gathered into the kitchen and stood about for some minutes talking sleepily of the dance and of the
people who had been present. Mrs. Feeney tried to persuade everybody to go to bed, but everybody refused. It was four
o’clock and Michael and Mary would have to set out for Kilmurrage at nine. So tea was made and they all sat about
for an hour drinking it and eating raisin cake and talking. They talked of the dance and of the people who had been
present.
There were eight of them there, the father and mother and six children. The youngest child was Thomas, a thin
boy of twelve, whose lungs made a singing sound every time he breathed. The next was Bridget, a girl of fourteen,
with dancing eyes and a habit of shaking her short golden curls every now and then for no apparent reason. Then there
were the twins, Julia and Margaret, quiet, rather stupid, flat-faced girls of sixteen. Both their upper front teeth pro­
truded slightly and they were both great workers and very obedient to their mother. They were all sitting at the table,
having just finished a third large pot of tea, when suddenly the mother hastily gulped down the remainder of the tea in

742
her cup, dropped the cup with a clatter to her saucer and sobbed once through her nose.
“Now mother,” said Michael sternly, “what’s the good of this work?”
“No, you are right, my pulse,” she replied quietly. “Only I was just thinking how nice it is to sit here surrounded
by all my children, all my little birds in my nest, and then two of them going to fly away made me sad.” And she
laughed, pretending to treat it as a foolish joke.
“Oh, that be damned for a story,” said the father, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, “there’s work to be done. You
Julia, go and get the horse. Margaret, you milk the cow and see that you give enough milk to the calf this morning.”
And he ordered everybody about as if it were an ordinary day of work.
But Michael and Mary had nothing to do and they sat about miserably conscious that they had cut adrift from the
routine of their home life. They no longer had any place in it. In a few hours they would be homeless wanderers. Now
that they were cut adrift from it, the poverty and sordidness of their home life appeared to them under the aspect of com­
fort and plenty.
So the morning passed until breakfast time at seven o’clock. The morning’s work was finished and the family was
gathered together again. The meal passed in a dead silence. Drowsy after the sleepless night and conscious that the part­
ing would come in a few hours, nobody wanted to talk. Everybody had an egg for breakfast in honor of the occasion. Mrs.
Feeney, after the usual habit, tried to give her egg first to Michael, then to Mary, and as each refused it, she ate a little
herself and gave the remainder to little Thomas who had the singing in his chest. Then the breakfast was cleared away.
The father went to put the creels on the mare so as to take the luggage into Kilmurrage. Michael and Mary got the lug­
gage ready and began to get dressed. The mother and the other children tidied up the house. People from the village
began to come into the kitchen, as was customary, in order to accompany the immigrants from their home to
Kilmurrage.
At last everything was ready. Mrs. Feeney had exhausted all excuses for moving about, engaged on trivial tasks.
She had to go into the big bedroom where Mary was putting on her new hat. The mother sat on a chair by the window;
her face contorting on account of the flood of tears she was keeping back. Michael moved about the room uneasily, his
two hands knotting a big red handkerchief behind his back. Mary twisted about in front of the mirror that hung over the
black wooden mantelpiece. She was spending a long time with the hat. It was the first one she had ever worn, but it fit­
ted her beautifully, and it was in excellent taste. It was given to her by the schoolmistress, who was very fond of her,
and she herself had taken it in a little. She had an instinct for beauty in dress and deportment.
But the mother, looking at how well her daughter wore the cheap navy blue costume and the white frilled blouse,
and the little round black hat with a fat, fluffy, glossy curl covering each ear, and the black silk stockings with blue
clocks in them, and the little black shoes that had laces of three colors in them, got suddenly enraged with...She did-
n’t know with what she got enraged. But for the moment she hated her daughter’s beauty, and she remembered all the
anguish of giving birth to her and nursing her and toiling for her, for no other purpose than to lose her now and let her
go away, maybe to be ravished wantonly because of her beauty and her love of gaiety. A cloud of mad jealousy and
hatred against this impersonal beauty that she saw in her daughter almost suffocated the mother, and stretched out her
hands in front of her unconsciously and then just as suddenly her anger vanished like a puff of smoke, and she burst
into wild tears, wailing: “My children, oh, my children, far over the sea you will be carried from me, your mother.”
And she began to rock herself and she threw her apron over her head.
Immediately the cabin was full of the sound of bitter wailing. A dismal cry rose from the women gathered in the
kitchen. “Far over the sea they will be carried,” began woman after woman, and they all rocked themselves and hid
their heads in their aprons. Michael’s mongrel dog began to howl on the hearth. Little Thomas sat down on the hearth
beside the dog and, putting his arms around him, he began to cry, although he didn’t know exactly why he was crying,
but he felt melancholy on account of the dog howling and so many people being about.
In the bedroom the son and daughter, on their knees, clung to their mother, who held their heads between her hands
and rained kisses on both heads ravenously. After the first wave of tears she had stopped weeping. The tears still ran
down her cheeks, but her eyes gleamed and they were dry. There was a fierce look in them as she searched all over the
heads of her two children with them, with her brows contracted, searching with a fierce terror-stricken expression, as
if by the intensity of her state she hoped to keep a living photograph of them before her mind. With her quivering lips
she made a queer sound like “im-m-m-m” and she kept kissing. Her right hand clutched at Mary’s left shoulder and
with her left she fondled the back of Michael’s neck. The two children were sobbing freely. They must have stayed
that way a quarter of an hour.

743
 Then the father came into the room, dressed in his best clothes He wore a new frieze waistcoat, with a gray and
black front and white back. He held his soft black felt hat in one hand and in the other hand he had a bottle of holy
water. He coughed and said in a weak gentle voice that was strange to him, as he touched his son: “Come now, it is
time.”
Mary and Michael got to their feet. The father sprinkled them with holy water and they crossed themselves. Then,
without looking at their mother, who lay in the chair with her hands clasped on her lap, looking at the ground in a silent
tearless stupor, they left the room. Each hurriedly kissed little Thomas, who was not going to Kilmurrage, and then,
hand in hand, they left the house. As Michael was going out the door he picked a piece of loose whitewash from the
wall and put it in his pocket. The people filed after them, down the yard and on to the road, like a funeral procession.
The mother was left in the house with little Thomas and two old peasant women from the village. Nobody spoke in
the cabin for a long time.
Then the mother rose and came into the kitchen. She looked at the two women, at her little son at the hearth, as if
she was looking for something she had lost. Then she threw her hands into the air and ran out into the yard.
“Come back,” she screamed; “come back to me.”
She looked wildly down the road with dilated nostrils, her bosom heaving. But there was nobody in sight. Nobody
replied. There was a crooked stretch of limestone road, surrounded by gray crags that were scorched by the sun. It was
something in her head that was singing.
The two old women led her back into the kitchen. “There is nothing that time will not cure,” said one. “Yes. Time
and patience,” said the other.

Source: Liam O’Flaherty. The Collected Stories I. Ed., A. A. Kelly. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, pp. 151-160.
Used with the permission of the estate of Liam O‘Flaherty.

744
 Thousands Are Sailing
You brave Irish heroes, wherever you be,
I pray stand a moment and listen to me
Your sons and your daughters are going away,
And thousands are sailing to Amerikay.

Refrain:
So good luck to those people, and safe may they land.
They are leaving their country for a far distant strand.
They are leaving old Ireland, no longer to stay.
And thousands are sailing to Amerikay.

The night before leaving, they are bidding good-by,

And early next morning, their hearts dip a sigh.
They do kiss their mothers and then they will say,
“Farewell, dear old father. We must now go away.”

Their friends and relations and neighbors also,

When the trunks are all packed up, all ready to go.
Oh, the tears from their eyes, they fall down like the rain
And the horses are prancing going off for the train.

Refrain
When that you reach the station, you will hear their last cry,
With handkerchief’s waving and bidding good-by.
Their hearts will be breaking on leaving this shore.
“Farewell, dear old Ireland. Will we ne’er see you more?”

Oh, I pity the mother that rears up the child

And likewise the father who labors and toils.
To try to support them he will work night and day,
And when they are reared up, they will go away.

Refrain.

Source: Traditional song arranged by Planxty, Words and Music album. Permission pending.

745
 The Feeney Family

Read the story “Going into Exile” and the song “Thousands are Sailing.” First you will answer questions and write
about what you have read. You may look back at the story and the poem as often as you like. Then you will be asked
to write an essay.

Complete the chart with words or phrases that describe the response of members of the Feeney family to Michael
and Mary's leaving home to go to America. What is the difference between their private feelings and their public
behavior?

CHARACTER PRIVATE FEELINGS PUBLIC BEHAVIOR

supporting supporting
information information

Mr. Feeney

Mrs. Feeney

Mary Feeney

Michael Feeney

How were the feelings of the characters similar? How did they differ? Discuss your answer using details from the story.

746
 What does “Thousands are Sailing” tell us about those who leave Ireland and those who stay? What kinds of
feelings do those who leave have? What about those who stay? Use descriptions from the song to support your
answer.

Choose a line or lines from the poem. Discuss the meaning of your selection and explain how it applies to “Going
into Exile.” Use ideas from BOTH the poem and the story in your answer.
In your answer, be sure to include:
The line or lines you have selected from the poem
An explanation of how your selection applies to “Going into Exile.”

747
 The Emigrant’s Trunk
BACKGROUND

T
he items selected for the trunk that would accompany an emigrant from Ireland were often useful, but
emotionally charged. Choices about what to pack were not often clear, as young Irish teens did not
know what they might need in America. The young people were packing for a voyage from which
they would not return. There would not be a second chance to take something of personal value. This
activity explores what was packed, and what was left behind.
(Note: This activity can be used in conjunction with Preparation for Emigration.)

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
Excerpts from The Year 1912
ADDITIONAL READINGS
O’Cadhain, Máirtín. “The Year 1912” in The Road to Bright City, translated from the Irish by Eoghan
O’Tuairisc. Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1981.
CLASSROOM MATERIALS
Cardboard, scissors, and other craft supplies for creating a model of an Emigrant’s Trunk.

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Students will be able to:
Consider the levels of meaning in the emigrant trunk passage of The Year 1912.
Describe the personal and historical significance of Irish emigrants preparing a trunk for departure to
America.
Interpret the symbolism of the objects placed in the Emigrant’s Trunk.
Create a personal trunk as if emigrating from Ireland.

STANDARDS
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
ELA 1: Students will actively engage in the processes that constitute creation and performance in the arts
(dance, music, theatre, and visual arts) and participate in various roles in the arts.
ELA 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression.
Arts 1: Students will actively engage in the processes that constitute creation and performance in the arts
(dance, music, theatre, and visual arts) and participate in various roles in the arts. (Visual Arts)

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Read historical narratives, myths, legends, biographies, and autobiographies to learn about how historical
figures lived, their motivations, hopes, fears, strengths, and weaknesses.
Explore narrative accounts of important events from world history to learn about different accounts of the
past to begin to understand how interpretations and perspectives develop.
748
 Study about different world cultures and civilizations, focusing on their accomplishments, contributions,
values, beliefs, and traditions.
Interpret and analyze information from textbooks and nonfiction books for young adults, as well as
reference materials, audio and media presentations, oral interviews, graphs, charts, diagrams, and electronic
data bases intended for a general audience.
Recognize and understand the significance of a wide range of literary elements and techniques, (including
figurative language, imagery, allegory, irony, blank verse, symbolism, stream-of-consciousness) and use
those elements to interpret the work.
Understand how multiple levels of meaning are conveyed in a text.
Develop their own ideas and images through the exploration and creation of art works based on themes,
symbols, and events

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. probe ideas and assumptions
. reflective thinking
. draw conclusions
. view information from a variety of perspectives
. participate in interpersonal and group activities
. communicate results of research and projects
. interpret information and data
. conceptualize and observe
MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
English Language Arts
Arts

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. An emigrant daughter’s trunk is an important symbol in Máirtín O’Cadhain’s story, The Year 1912. Read
the passage from the story aloud and ask students to look at the list of things that Maureen, the emigrating
daughter, put into her trunk. What significance might each of the objects have for her?
Do students or their families have experience coming to America? What did they bring with them from
home? Ask students to discuss The Emigrant’s Trunk with their families and report to the class what their
families packed into their trunks when they moved away from home and/or emigrated.
2. In Ireland, emigration was often associated with death. The Kerry storyteller Peig Sayers said, “Going to
America was the nearest thing to death.” Does the trunk in The Year 1912 suggest anything about death
to the mother? To Mary? To the reader?
Between 1911 and 1920, 74,977 Irish girls arrived in the United States. Many like the protagonist of
Máirtín O’Cadhain’s story The Year 1912 emigrated from the west of Ireland; they left never to return.
Does that fact support the mother’s association of the trunk with death? Ask students what words support
their conclusions.
3. Ask students to make a list of items that they would pack in their trunk, keeping in mind size and weight.
Ask them to write an explanation of their choices.
4. Students can construct an artifact of their trunk.

749
ASSESSMENT OPTION
Identify the words and phrases that convey the emotions of the family members packing the trunk. Students
should explain their choices, considering the literal and symbolic meanings.

TEACHER REFLECTION
This activity was field tested in a Middle School where an artifact box project is part of the European
Holocaust unit. The emigrant’s trunk is an effective complement to that activity.
When this activity was field tested in social studies classes in one Junior High School it was found that the
students, many of whom were Carribean immigrants, had experience packing their own emigrant trunks. It
was a proud and thoughtful moment for each of them as they described their choices to their classmates who
listened attentively and understood the difficulties of planning for emigration, and that their immigrant
classmates were part of the larger American immigration experience.

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 The Year 1912

A halfpenny candle stood on a small press by the wall in the bedroom, smeared by a breeze coming by the edge
of the paper on a broken windowpane. Depth, magic, mystery of unfathomable seas, reflected by the guttering candle
flame in the trunk’s brass knobs. It was of pale yellow timber, the mother couldn’t at once remember where she had
seen that color before—the face of a corpse after a long wake in sultry weather. And a certain distaste kept her from
looking into the trunk, the same tabu which had kept her, though she had often tried, from looking at a corpse in a cof­
fin.
“Have you everything?” she asked the daughter keeping her eyes off the dimlit thing. There were all kinds of
things in it -a sod of turf, a chip off the hearthstone, tresses of hair, a bunch of shamrocks though it was autumn, stock­
ings of homespun, a handful of dulse, items of clothing, papers connected with the voyage across. The daughter took
her shoes, coat, hat and dress out of the trunk and laid them on the little press to put on her. During the week she had
often laid them out like that but the mother had never encouraged her, and early in the night she had implored her not
to put them on till morning.
The mother shut the trunk, threw the bed quilt over it. To keep it clean. She had long feared that the daughter once
she was in American clothes would be estranged from her, alien as the trunk.

Vocabulary: Press-cupboard
Dulse-(dulisk) and edible red seaweed

Source: Máirtín O’Cadháin. “The Year 1912,” in The Road to Bright City. Trans. by Eoghan O’Tuairisc. Dublin: Poolbeg Press,
1981, pp. 26-27. Used with permission of Poolbeg Press.

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 The American Wake
BACKGROUND

T
his activity uses the handout Going into Exile, found in the activity Preparation for Emigration,
emphasizing the Irish tradition of holding an “American Wake” before relatives left home. The ritual
of departure can be both sad and exciting for participants. Traditions of saying goodbye are carried
out very differently in various cultures.

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
Going Into Exile
Emigration Traditions
ADDITIONAL READINGS:
Danaher, Kevin. “The Wake,” In Ireland Long Ago. Cork: Mercier, 1991.
Miller, Kerby. Emigrants and Exiles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. pp. 556-561.
Schrier, Arnold. Ireland and the American Emigration 1850-1900. Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions,
1997. [1958], pp. 87-93.

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Compare and contrast the traditional Irish American wake with the bureal rituals of other cultures.
Appreciate the significance of emigration rituals to families and to cultures.
Interview immigrants from diverse culture to learn about special emigration rituals.

STANDARDS
SS 1: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in the history of the United States and New York.
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
ELA 1: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for information and understanding.
ELA 4: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for social interaction.

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Students will:
Know the roots of American culture, its development from many different traditions, and the ways many
people from a variety of groups and backgrounds played a role in creating it.
Explain those values, practices and traditions that unite all Americans.
Explore the meaning of American culture by identifying the key ideas, beliefs, and patterns of behavior and
traditions that help define it and unite all Americans.
Analyze the development of American culture, explaining how ideas, values, beliefs, and traditions have
changed over time and how they unite all Americans.

752
 Gather and organize information about the traditions transmitted by various groups living in their
neighborhood and community.
Recognize how traditions and practices were passed from one generation to the next.
Compare and contrast the experiences of different groups in the United States.
Explain the importance of analyzing narratives drawn from different times and places to understand
historical events.
Understand the roles and contributions of individuals and groups to social, political, economic, cultural,
scientific, technological, and religious practices and activities.
Support inferences about information and ideas with reference to text features, such as vocabulary and
organizational patterns.
Interpret and analyze information from textbooks and nonfiction books for young adults, as well as
reference materials, audio and media presentations, oral interviews, graphs, charts, diagrams, and electronic
databases intended for a general audience.
Relate new information to prior knowledge and experience.
Produce oral and written reports on topics related to all school subjects.
Organize information according to an identifiable structure, such as compare/contrast or general to specific.
Develop information with appropriate supporting material, such as facts, details, illustrative examples or
anecdotes, and exclude extraneous material.
Use standard English for formal presentation of information, selecting appropriate grammatical
constructions and vocabulary, using a variety of sentence structures, and observing the rules of punctuation,
capitalization, and spelling.
Revise and improve early drafts by restructuring, correcting errors, and revising for clarity and effect.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. acquire and organize information
. evaluate and connect evidence
. observe and conclude
. draw conclusions
. view information from a variety of perspectives
. gather information
. interpret information and data
. synthesize information
. reflect upon content/form opinions
. utilize multiple resources in research
. identify patterns and themes

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. Discuss the handout Going into Exile found in the activity Preparation for Emigration.
What do students notice in Going into Exile about the customs associated with leaving Ireland? So many
young people left that a ritual developed about their last days and especially their last night at home. The
party for Mary and Michael is called an American wake. A wake is usually a custom associated with the
dead.
2. Why did the Irish have a wake when people left for America? What are some of the things that go on
during an American wake? If you were an anthropologist, someone who studies groups and their cultures,
how would you describe the ritual of departure from rural Ireland?

753
 Now that Irish immigrants to the United States can go home easily and their families can visit them here,
the custom of the American wake has changed. While there is often a gathering to say good-by, there is
not the sadness that the Feeneys feel in the story knowing they are probably parting forever.
3. Students can interview people they know who came to America from different cultures. What kind of
things did those people do before they emigrated? Did informants spend the night with family and
friends? What did people eat and drink? Was there music? Did they wear different clothes? How did they
say good-by?
Ask students to chart:
What happened at an American wake in Going into Exile.
What happened at the wake of the person interviewed?
What rituals does your family follow when someone is leaving home for a long time or returning from
being away?
Ask students to complete the Emigration Traditions handout.

TEACHER REFLECTION
This activity continues the theme of looking at Irish immigration in the wider context of immigration to the
United States. It offers students the opportunity to investigate family history or to learn about another
culture’s rituals of departure.
The activity provides an opportunity to talk about how to interview a subject. How does one frame
questions? How can interviews be set up so that the person being interviewed feels comfortable responding
with stories? Students can also discuss how to be better listeners.

ADDITIONAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE

For advanced students:
Students can write a description of an American wake (or any other family get-together) from the point of
view of a silent observer. Include what is noticed about body language, food and eating behaviors, topics of
conversation and roles of individuals in group dynamics, location of individuals at the table and in the home,
etc. Comment on conclusions about the observations.

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 Going Into Exile

Patrick Feeney’s cabin was crowded with people. In the large kitchen men, women, and children lined the walls,
three deep in places, sitting on forms, chairs, stools, and on one another’s knees. On the cement floor three couples
were dancing a jig and raising a quantity of dust, which was, however, soon sucked up the chimney by the huge turf
fire that blazed on the hearth. The only clear space in the kitchen was the corner to the left of the fireplace, where Pat
Mullaney sat on a yellow chair with his right ankle resting on his left knee, a spotted red handkerchief on his head that
reeked with perspiration, and his red face contorting as he played a tattered old accordion. One door was shut and the
tins hanging on it gleamed in the firelight. The opposite door was open and over the heads of the small boys that crowd­
ed in it and outside it, peering in at the dancing couples in the kitchen, a starry June sky was visible and, beneath the
sky, shadowy gray crags and misty, whitish fields lay motionless, still and somber. There was a deep, calm silence out­
side the cabin and within the cabin, in spite of the music and dancing in the kitchen and the singing in the little room
to the left, where Patrick Feeney’s eldest son Michael sat on the bed with three other young men, there was a haunt­
ing melancholy in the air.
The people were dancing, laughing and singing with a certain forced and boisterous gaiety that failed to hide from
them the real cause of their being there, dancing, singing and laughing. For the dance was on account of Patrick
Feeney’s two children, Mary and Michael, who were going to the United States on the following morning.
Feeney himself, a black-bearded, red-faced, middle-aged peasant, with white ivory buttons on his blue frieze shirt
and his hands stuck in his leather waist belt, wandered restlessly about the kitchen, urging the people to sing and dance,
while his mind was in agony all the time, thinking that on the following day he would lose his two eldest children,
never to see them again perhaps. He kept talking to everybody about amusing things, shouted at the dancers and
behaved in a boisterous and abandoned manner. But every now and then he had to leave the kitchen, under the pre­
tense of going to the pigsty to look at a young pig that was supposed to be ill. He would stand, however, upright against
his gable and look gloomily at some star or other, while his mind struggled with vague and peculiar ideas that wan­
dered about in it. He could make nothing at all of his thoughts, but a lump always came up his throat, and he shivered,
although the night was warm.
Then he would sigh and say with a contraction of his neck: “Oh, it’s a queer world this and no doubt about it. So
it is.” Then he would go back to the cabin again and begin to urge on the dance, laughing, shouting and stamping on
the floor.
Towards dawn, when the floor was crowded with couples, arranged in fours, stamping on the floor and going to
and fro, dancing the “Walls of Limerick,” Feeney was going out to the gable when his son Michael followed him out.
The two of them walked side by side about the yard over the gray sea pebbles that had been strewn there the previous
day. They walked in silence and yawned without need, pretending to be taking the air. But each of them was very excit­
ed. Michael was taller than his father and not so thickly built, but the shabby blue serge suit that he had bought for
going to America was too narrow for his broad shoulders and the coat was too wide around the waist. He moved clum­
sily in it and his hands appeared altogether too bony and big and red, and he didn’t know what to do with them. During
his twenty-one years of life he had never worn anything other than the homespun clothes of Inverara, and the shop-
made clothes appeared as strange to him and as uncomfortable as a dress suit worn by a man working in a sewer. His
face was flushed a bright red and his blue eyes shone with excitement. Now and again he wiped the perspiration from
his forehead with the lining of his gray tweed cap.
At last Patrick Feeney reached his usual position at the gable end. He halted, balanced himself on his heels with
his hands in his waist belt, coughed and said, “It’s going to be a warm day.” The son came up beside him, folded his
arms and leaned his right shoulder against the gable.
“It was kind of Uncle Ned to lend the money for the dance, father,” he said. “I’d hate to think that we’d have to
go without something or other, just the same as everybody else has. I’ll send you that money, the very first money I
earn, father...even before I pay Aunt Mary for my passage money. I should have all that money paid off in four months,
and then I’ll have some more money to send you by Christmas.”
And Michael felt very strong and manly recounting what he was going to do when he got to Boston, Massachusetts.
He told himself that with his great strength he would earn a great deal of money. Conscious of his youth and his strength
and lusting for adventurous life, for the moment he forgot the ache in his heart that the thought of leaving his father
inspired in him.
755
 The father was silent for some time. He was looking at the sky with his lower lip hanging, thinking of nothing. At
last he sighed as a memory struck him. “What is it?” said the son. “Don’t weaken, for God’s sake. You will only make
it hard for me.” “Fooh!” said the father suddenly with pretended gruffness. “Who is weakening? I’m afraid that your
new clothes make you impudent.” Then he was silent for a moment and continued in a low voice: “I was thinking of
that potato field you sowed alone last spring the time I had the influenza. I never set eyes on the man that could do it
better. It’s a cruel world that takes you away from the land that God made you for.”
“Oh, what are you talking about, father?“ said Michael irritably. “Sure what did anybody ever get out of the land
but poverty and hard work and potatoes and salt?”
“Ah yes,” said father with a sigh, “but it’s your own, the land, and over there’—he waved his hand at the western
sky—‘you’ll be giving your sweat to some other man’s land, or what’s equal to it.”
“Indeed,” muttered Michael, looking at the ground with a melancholy expression in his eyes, “it’s poor encour­
agement you are giving me.”
They stood in silence fully five minutes. Each hungered to embrace the other, to cry, to beat the air, to scream with
excess sorrow. But they stood silent and somber, like nature about them, hugging their woe. Then they went back to
the cabin. Michael went into the little room to the left of the kitchen, to the three young men who fished in the same
curragh with him and were his bosom friends. The father walked into the large bedroom to the right of the kitchen.
The large bedroom was crowded with people. A large table was laid for tea in the center of the room and about a
dozen young men were sitting at it, drinking tea and eating buttered raisin cake. Mrs. Feeney was bustling about the
table, serving the food and urging them to eat. She was assisted by her two younger daughters and by another woman,
a relative of her own. Her eldest daughter Mary, who was going to the United States that day, was sitting on the edge
of the bed with several other young women. The bed was a large four poster bed with a deal canopy over it, painted
red, and the young women were huddled together on it. So that there must have been about a dozen of them there. They
were Mary Feeney’s particular friends, and they stayed with her in that uncomfortable position just to show how much
they liked her. It was a custom.
Mary herself sat on the edge of the bed with her legs dangling. She was a pretty, dark-haired girl of nineteen, with
dimpled, plump, red cheeks and ruminative brown eyes that seemed to cause little wrinkles to come and go in her little
low forehead. Her nose was soft and small and rounded. Her mouth was small and her lips were red and open. Beneath
her white blouse that was frilled at the neck and her navy blue skirt that outlined her limbs as she sat on the edge of the
bed, her body was plump, soft, well-molded and in some manner exuded a feeling of freshness and innocence. So that
she seemed to have been born to be fondled and admired in luxurious surroundings instead of having been born a peas­
ant’s daughter, who had to go to the United States that day to work as a servant or maybe in a factory.
And as she sat on the edge of the bed crushing her little handkerchief between her palms, she kept thinking fever­
ishly of the United States, at one moment with fear and loathing, at the next with desire and longing. Unlike her broth­
er she did not think of the work she was going to do or the money that she was going to earn. Other things troubled
her, things of which she was half ashamed, half afraid, thoughts of love and of foreign men and of clothes and of hous­
es where there were more than three rooms and where people ate meat every day.
She was fond of life, and several young men among the local gentry had admired her in Inverara. But...
She happened to look up and she caught her father’s eyes as he stood silently by the window with his hands stuck
in his waist belt. His eyes rested on hers for a moment and then he dropped them without smiling, and with his lips com­
pressed he walked down to the kitchen. She shuddered slightly. She was a little afraid of her father, although she knew
that he loved her very much and he was very kind to her. But the winter before he had whipped her with a dried willow
rod, when he caught her one evening behind Tim Hernon’s cabin after nightfall, with Tim Hernon’s son Bartly’s arms
around her waist and he kissing her. Ever since, she always shivered slightly when her father touched her or spoke to
her. “Oho!” said an old peasant who sat at the table with a saucer full of tea in his hand and his gray flannel shirt open
at his thick hairy, wrinkled neck. “Oho! indeed, but it’s a disgrace to the island of Inverara to let such a beautiful woman
as your daughter go away, Mrs. Feeney. If I was a young man, I’ll be flayed alive if I’d let her go.”
There was a laugh and some of the women on the bed, said: “Bad cess to you, Patsy Coyne, if you haven’t too
much impudence, it’s a caution.” But the laugh soon died. The young men sitting at the table felt embarrassed and kept
looking at one another sheepishly, as if each tried to find out if the others were in love with Mary Feeney.
“Oh, well, God is good,” said Mrs. Feeney, as she wiped her lips with the tip of her bright, clean, check apron.
“What will be must be, and sure there is hope from the sea, but there is no hope from the grave. It is sad and the poor
756
have to suffer, but...” Mrs. Feeney stopped suddenly, aware that all these platitudes meant nothing whatsoever. Like
her husband she was unable to think intelligibly about her two children going away. Whenever the reality of their going
away, maybe for ever, three thousand miles into a vast unknown world, came before her mind, it seemed that a thin
bar of some hard metal thrust itself forward from her brain and rested behind the wall of her forehead. So that almost
immediately she became stupidly conscious of the pain caused by the imaginary bar of metal and she forgot the dread
prospect of her children going away. But her mind grappled with the things about her busily and efficiently, with the
preparation of food, with the entertaining of her guests, with the numerous little things that have to be done in a house
where there is a party and which only a woman can do properly. These little things, in a manner, saved her, for the
moment at least, from bursting into tears whenever she looked at her daughter and whenever she thought of her son,
whom she loved most of all her children, because perhaps she nearly died giving birth to him and he had been very
delicate until he was twelve years old. So she laughed down in her breast a funny laugh she had that made her heave,
where her check apron rose out from the waistband in a deep curve. “A person begins to talk,” she said with a shrug
of her shoulders sideways, “and then a person says foolish things.”
“That’s true,” said the old peasant, noisily pouring more tea from his cup to his saucer.
But Mary knew by her mother laughing that way that she was very near being hysterical. She always laughed that
way before she had one of her fits of hysterics. And Mary’s heart stopped beating suddenly and then began again at an
awful rate as her eyes became acutely conscious of her mother’s body, the rotund, short body with the wonderful mass
of fair hair, growing grey at the temples and the fair face with the soft liquid eyes, that grew hard and piercing for a
moment as they looked at a thing and then grew soft and liquid again, and the thin-lipped small mouth with the beau­
tiful white teeth and the deep perpendicular grooves in the upper lip and the tremor that always came in the corner of
the mouth, with love, when she looked at her children. Mary became acutely conscious of all these little points, as well
as of the little black spot that was on her left breast below the nipple and the swelling that came now and again in her
legs and caused her to have hysterics and would one day cause her death. And she was stricken with horror at the
thought of leaving her mother and at the selfishness of her thoughts. She had never been prone to thinking of anything
important but now, somehow for a moment she had a glimpse of her mother’s life that made her shiver and hate her­
self as a cruel, heartless, lazy, selfish wretch. Her mother’s life loomed up before her eyes, a life of continual misery
and suffering, hard work, birth pangs, sickness and again hard work and hunger and anxiety. It loomed up and then it
fled again, a little mist came before her eyes and she jumped down from the bed, with the jaunty twirl of her head that
was her habit when she set her body in motion.
“Sit down for a while, mother,” she whispered toying with the black ivory buttons on her mother’s brown bodice.
“I’ll look after the table.” “No, no” murmured the mother with a shake of her whole body, “I’m not a bit tired. Sit down,
my treasure. You have a long way to travel today.” And Mary sighed and went back to the bed again. At last some­
body said: “So it is, and may God be praised.” The change from the starry night to the gray, sharp dawn was hard to
notice until it had arrived. People looked out and saw the morning light sneaking over the crags silently, along the
ground, pushing the mist banks upwards. The stars were growing dim. A long way off invisible sparrows were chirp­
ing in their ivied perch in some distant hill or other. Another day had arrived and even as the people looked at it,
yawned and began to search for their hats, caps and shawls preparing to go home, the day grew and spread its light and
made things move and give voice. Cocks crew, blackbirds caroled, a dog let loose from a cabin by an early riser chased
madly after an imaginary robber, barking as if his tail were on fire. The people said good-bye and began to stream forth
from Feeney’s cabin. They were going to their homes to see to the morning’s work before going to Kilmurrage to see
the immigrants off on the steamer to the mainland. Soon the cabin was empty except for family.
All the family gathered into the kitchen and stood about for some minutes talking sleepily of the dance and of the
people who had been present. Mrs. Feeney tried to persuade everybody to go to bed, but everybody refused. It was four
o’clock and Michael and Mary would have to set out for Kilmurrage at nine. So tea was made and they all sat about
for an hour drinking it and eating raisin cake and talking. They talked of the dance and of the people who had been
present.
There were eight of them there, the father and mother and six children. The youngest child was Thomas, a thin
boy of twelve, whose lungs made a singing sound every time he breathed. The next was Bridget, a girl of fourteen,
with dancing eyes and a habit of shaking her short golden curls every now and then for no apparent reason. Then there
were the twins, Julia and Margaret, quiet, rather stupid, flat-faced girls of sixteen. Both their upper front teeth pro­
truded slightly and they were both great workers and very obedient to their mother. They were all sitting at the table,
having just finished a third large pot of tea, when suddenly the mother hastily gulped down the remainder of the tea in

757
her cup, dropped the cup with a clatter to her saucer and sobbed once through her nose.
“Now mother,” said Michael sternly, “what’s the good of this work?”
“No, you are right, my pulse,” she replied quietly. “Only I was just thinking how nice it is to sit here surrounded
by all my children, all my little birds in my nest, and then two of them going to fly away made me sad.” And she
laughed, pretending to treat it as a foolish joke.
“Oh, that be damned for a story,” said the father, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, “there’s work to be done. You
Julia, go and get the horse. Margaret, you milk the cow and see that you give enough milk to the calf this morning.”
And he ordered everybody about as if it were an ordinary day of work.
But Michael and Mary had nothing to do and they sat about miserably conscious that they had cut adrift from the
routine of their home life. They no longer had any place in it. In a few hours they would be homeless wanderers. Now
that they were cut adrift from it, the poverty and sordidness of their home life appeared to them under the aspect of com­
fort and plenty.
So the morning passed until breakfast time at seven o’clock. The morning’s work was finished and the family was
gathered together again. The meal passed in a dead silence. Drowsy after the sleepless night and conscious that the part­
ing would come in a few hours, nobody wanted to talk. Everybody had an egg for breakfast in honor of the occasion. Mrs.
Feeney, after the usual habit, tried to give her egg first to Michael, then to Mary, and as each refused it, she ate a little
herself and gave the remainder to little Thomas who had the singing in his chest. Then the breakfast was cleared away.
The father went to put the creels on the mare so as to take the luggage into Kilmurrage. Michael and Mary got the lug­
gage ready and began to get dressed. The mother and the other children tidied up the house. People from the village
began to come into the kitchen, as was customary, in order to accompany the immigrants from their home to
Kilmurrage.
At last everything was ready. Mrs. Feeney had exhausted all excuses for moving about, engaged on trivial tasks.
She had to go into the big bedroom where Mary was putting on her new hat. The mother sat on a chair by the window;
her face contorting on account of the flood of tears she was keeping back. Michael moved about the room uneasily, his
two hands knotting a big red handkerchief behind his back. Mary twisted about in front of the mirror that hung over the
black wooden mantelpiece. She was spending a long time with the hat. It was the first one she had ever worn, but it fit­
ted her beautifully, and it was in excellent taste. It was given to her by the schoolmistress, who was very fond of her,
and she herself had taken it in a little. She had an instinct for beauty in dress and deportment.
But the mother, looking at how well her daughter wore the cheap navy blue costume and the white frilled blouse,
and the little round black hat with a fat, fluffy, glossy curl covering each ear, and the black silk stockings with blue
clocks in them, and the little black shoes that had laces of three colors in them, got suddenly enraged with...She did-
n’t know with what she got enraged. But for the moment she hated her daughter’s beauty, and she remembered all the
anguish of giving birth to her and nursing her and toiling for her, for no other purpose than to lose her now and let her
go away, maybe to be ravished wantonly because of her beauty and her love of gaiety. A cloud of mad jealousy and
hatred against this impersonal beauty that she saw in her daughter almost suffocated the mother, and stretched out her
hands in front of her unconsciously and then just as suddenly her anger vanished like a puff of smoke, and she burst
into wild tears, wailing: “My children, oh, my children, far over the sea you will be carried from me, your mother.”
And she began to rock herself and she threw her apron over her head.
Immediately the cabin was full of the sound of bitter wailing. A dismal cry rose from the women gathered in the
kitchen. “Far over the sea they will be carried,” began woman after woman, and they all rocked themselves and hid
their heads in their aprons. Michael’s mongrel dog began to howl on the hearth. Little Thomas sat down on the hearth
beside the dog and, putting his arms around him, he began to cry, although he didn’t know exactly why he was crying,
but he felt melancholy on account of the dog howling and so many people being about.
In the bedroom the son and daughter, on their knees, clung to their mother, who held their heads between her hands
and rained kisses on both heads ravenously. After the first wave of tears she had stopped weeping. The tears still ran
down her cheeks, but her eyes gleamed and they were dry. There was a fierce look in them as she searched all over the
heads of her two children with them, with her brows contracted, searching with a fierce terror-stricken expression, as
if by the intensity of her state she hoped to keep a living photograph of them before her mind. With her quivering lips
she made a queer sound like “im-m-m-m” and she kept kissing. Her right hand clutched at Mary’s left shoulder and
with her left she fondled the back of Michael’s neck. The two children were sobbing freely. They must have stayed
that way a quarter of an hour.

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 Then the father came into the room, dressed in his best clothes He wore a new frieze waistcoat, with a gray and
black front and white back. He held his soft black felt hat in one hand and in the other hand he had a bottle of holy
water. He coughed and said in a weak gentle voice that was strange to him, as he touched his son: “Come now, it is
time.”
Mary and Michael got to their feet. The father sprinkled them with holy water and they crossed themselves. Then,
without looking at their mother, who lay in the chair with her hands clasped on her lap, looking at the ground in a silent
tearless stupor, they left the room. Each hurriedly kissed little Thomas, who was not going to Kilmurrage, and then,
hand in hand, they left the house. As Michael was going out the door he picked a piece of loose whitewash from the
wall and put it in his pocket. The people filed after them, down the yard and on to the road, like a funeral procession.
The mother was left in the house with little Thomas and two old peasant women from the village. Nobody spoke in
the cabin for a long time.
Then the mother rose and came into the kitchen. She looked at the two women, at her little son at the hearth, as if
she was looking for something she had lost. Then she threw her hands into the air and ran out into the yard.
“Come back,” she screamed; “come back to me.”
She looked wildly down the road with dilated nostrils, her bosom heaving. But there was nobody in sight. Nobody
replied. There was a crooked stretch of limestone road, surrounded by gray crags that were scorched by the sun. It was
something in her head that was singing.
The two old women led her back into the kitchen. “There is nothing that time will not cure,” said one. “Yes. Time
and patience,” said the other.

Source: Liam O’Flaherty, The Collected Stories I. Ed., A. A. Kelly. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, pp. 151-160.
Used with the permission of the estate of Liam O‘Flaherty.

759
 Emigration Traditions

After charting three different emigrant family traditions, (Irish-American wake, emigration rituals of an interviewed
immigrant, and personal experiences), complete the diagram below, showing similarities, differences, and shared emi­
gration traditions.

IRISH YOUR FAMILY

OR INTERVIEWED IMMIGRANT

SHARED

What is similar about the way people leave their homes to settle in a new place? What differences do you notice? Write
a summary discussing similarities and differences.

760
 Dance as Communication
BACKGROUND

T
his activity refers to the dancing in the Going Into Exile handout in The American Wake activity. The
dance component of this activity might be put into the context of the recent phenomenal growth of
interest in Irish traditional dance. In 1968, Irish musicologist and dance historian Breandan
Breathnach wrote about the decline of interest in Irish dancing. “Traditional dancing has almost wholly
disappeared from the social life of the community. It is now cultivated only in schools of dancing whose
activities are chiefly directed at training youths and children for competition.”
Riverdance, the recent show that has depicted Irish dance with a dramatic flair, has certainly changed things;
however, it is only part of the story. There has been a revival of interest in traditional dance in Ireland, and
dance has returned to its place in Irish social life. In America, National Heritage Fellow New Yorker Donny
Golden’s dancing and teaching and the work of other dancers and teachers have stimulated an interest in
Irish dancing. He recently gave an introduction to Irish national dancing made possible by support from the
Booklyn Academy of Music to student participants in the Great Irish Famine project. These days, in
addition to the Irish dancing schools that cater to children and adolescents, there are adult classes,
workshops, and gatherings for set dancing and group or céilí dancing held regularly around the country. The
National Council for the Traditional Arts has been sponsoring an annual national Irish Festival of music and
dance since 1976.
In this activity, students will learn to perform two kinds of Irish dance types: solo (the hornpipe) and a céilí
[kay-lee] or group dance (The Walls of Limerick). Teachers can also refer to the activty Dance in Ireland: The
Walls of Limerick.

RESOURCES
HANDOUTS
Walls of Limerick
Going Into Exile
Thousands are Sailing
ADDITIONAL READING
Breathnach, Breandan. “Irish Dancing,” in Victor Meally et. al., eds. Encyclopedia of Ireland. Dublin:
Hodges and Figgis, 1968. pp. 398-399.
Friel, Brian. Philadelphia, Here I Come! New York: Farrar and Strauss, 1965.
Lynd, Robert. Home Life in Ireland. London: Mills and Boon, 1909, pp.17-120.
MacBride, Oistín. “Stepping out for Ireland,” Irish-America. (January-February, 1995), 20-22.
O’Flaherty, Tom. Aranmen All.. Dublin: At the Sign of Three Candles, 1934.
Tannen, Deborah. You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, New York: Ballatine
Books, 1990.
Westley, Kevin B. Westley School of Irish Dancing: Céilí. Country Set and 2 Hand Dance Instruction Book.
New York: The Westley School of Irish Dance, 1992.
CLASSROOM MATERIALS
Space for dancing!
Irish music for dancing

761
STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Students will be able to:
Develop aesthetic appreciation of Irish dance.
Learn at least one traditional Irish dance.
Plan and execute an American wake.
Explain how dance and other nonverbal actions can be effective sources of communication.
Identify the components of an American wake and design and implement a wake.

STANDARDS
ELA 2: Students will read, write, listen, and speak for literary response and expression.
SS 2: Students will use a variety of intellectual skills to demonstrate their understanding of major ideas,
eras, themes, developments, and turning points in world history and examine the broad sweep of history
from a variety of perspectives.
Arts 1: Students will actively engage in the processes that constitute creation and performance in the arts
(dance, music, theatre, and visual arts) and participate in various roles in the arts. (Dance and Music)
Arts 4: Students will develop an understanding of the personal and cultural forces that shape artistic
communication and how the arts in turn shape the diverse cultures of past and present society. (Dance and
Music)

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
Know the social and economic characteristics, such as customs, traditions, child-rearing practices, ways of
making a living, education and socialization practices, gender roles, foods, and religious and spiritual beliefs
that distinguish different cultures and civilizations.
Explain the dynamics of cultural change and how interactions between and among cultures has affected
various cultural groups throughout the world.
View historic events through the eyes of those who were there, as shown in their art, writings, music and
artifacts.
Dance a range of forms from free improvisation to structured choreography.
Sing and/or play, alone and in combination with other voice or instrument parts, a varied repertoire of folk,
art, and contemporary songs, from notation, with a good tone, pitch, duration, and loudness.
Identify some of the major dance artists from diverse cultures.
Identify the cultural contexts of a performance or recording and perform (with movement, where culturally
appropriate) a varied repertoire of folk, art, and contemporary selections from the basic cultures that
represent the peoples of the world.

DIMENSIONS OF LEARNING
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS
. analytical thinking
. evaluate and connect evidence
. reflective thinking
. participate in interpersonal and group activities
. work with others to solve problems
. conceptualize and observe
. reflect upon content/form opinions
762
 MULTI-DISCIPLINARY APPROACHES
Arts
MULTIPLE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS
Visit a dance studio or Irish Dance concert.

LEARNING EXPERIENCES
1. Discuss the handout Going Into Exile, focusing on the role of dance at the American wake. Suggested
follow-up activities are:
Students can look at some videotaped segments from Riverdance, decide which dancers’ performances
they like best and explain what criteria they used to make their decisions.
Discuss how non-verbal communication such as dance affects interpersonal relationships: How can
feelings be expressed through dance? Why would people dance joyfully when they are really sad? How
do established dance steps carry on cultural tradition?
Students (using the handout Walls of Limerick) can learn the steps to the dance.
As the culminating activity for their reading of Going Into Exile, students can plan an Irish wake for a
brother and sister emigrating from rural Ireland. There can be music; students can sing “Thousands are
Sailing” and other emigration songs. There can be solo and group dancing. Refreshments of tea and soda
bread, butter and homemade jam can be served. Students may wish to invite guests to their American
wake.
2. In Home Life in Ireland, the sociologist Robert Lynd described dance at an Irish wake:
It is a strange mixture of dancing and sudden lamentation which continues all through the
night. It is not without significance that so funeral a name should be given to emigration
ceremonies, for the Irish emigrant is not the personification of national adventure but
something that has the appearance of national doom.
Think of a community where most of the young people will be leaving. What does that mean for
families? Why the “sudden lamentation” and “appearance of national doom”?
3. Liam O’Flaherty’s brother Tom wrote his own autobiography called Aranmen All (1934). He describes
his last dance with his father at his American wake. They danced a hornpipe, a lively dance like a tap
dance done by one person. (Think of the men in the Irish Riverdance company.) Tom and Liam’s father
was a man famous for his dancing on the island:
We danced the first step together. Then we danced every second step until we danced twenty-
four separate steps. There wasn’t a word spoken while we were on the floor. I don’t think either
of us ever danced better. When we finished, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
What happened between father and son as they danced? What does Tom’s dance with his father say to
his father? What does it say to those watching? Why wasn’t there a “dry eye in the house?”
4. In Going into Exile, we see Michael and his father longing to speak about how they feel to each other.
What prevents them? Later in the story, Michael cries when he says good-bye to his mother. What is the
difference between the way Michael relates to his father and the way he relates to his mother? Students
will use quotes from the text to support their answers.
Why can’t Michael express his emotions to his father? How do fathers and sons communicate? Do you
notice a difference between the way girls communicate or relate to their fathers and the way that boys
communicate and relate to their fathers? If there are differences, what are those differences? Are the
differences gender differences? Are they cultural differences? Are there differences between the way
boys and girls of this generation behave and the way their parents and/or grandparents behaved toward
their fathers? What factors contribute to the differences?

763
ASSESSMENT OPTION
How do we use nonverbal ways to communicate? Look at nonverbal behavior and write an essay that
describes how non-verbal behavior helps us “speak” in ways we can’t put into words. Write about when you
received a very clear non-verbal message.
Brian Friel’s play Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) offers another examination of the relationship between
a young Irishman and his father. On the night before Gar O’Donnell leaves for Philadelphia, Gar yearns for
his father to remember a day of great happiness, a day spent fishing together. Discuss how nonverbal
messages can be sent through body language, dance, music, and eye contact.

TEACHER REFLECTION
It is not always easy to get students to dance, but once they begin to follow the steps in the handout Walls of
Limerick, they will discover that learning can be confusing but fun. Invite a dance teacher or experienced Irish
Dance instructor to visit and demonstrate. (Never force anyone to dance in front of the group)!

ADDITIONAL LEARNING EXPERIENCES

For younger students:
Discuss body language and the messages sent, such as:
standing close
glaring at someone
turning your back
putting your arm around someone
looking down when someone is speaking to you
Then discuss how dance can be expressive. Ask students to dance with joy, anger, confusion, fright, disgust,
and sadness.

764
 Walls or Limerick
This Is a pr<>grtl.'lh-e king dance dcxie i:tl ttd lin:>t. One ccupe facing. anorllcr RQ11nd 'lbe House or llousc
coupie "'1111 the gent 011 lllt lady·s kft lWI• side. RI~ foot ditccl!y in ftoot Face your pantt«. b dy gi\>c:i: crQl;-\l!Cl h.111CI$ (;Mims <l\>wn) ;ifil.I ~cnt give$
of lht.kl\ foot with your wdghl <ll'I )'OUr Id\ foot. Ho1ding inside bands. the uncrossed b.ai)!Js (1J11.l n1.~ u11) wilh •he r.lbow. lx:nt $llatpl)' upward. Gent PJIS
danct. sttrl! u follows: the 1,1o'Cig.bt on lhc. Rigll( lllCll (R) while 1:16) ~11$ •be 1,1-o tight on the Left (CIC(
#or (L). Giving only 1he r,et1i"s i~n>etion. tlte lady mG\'¢.S in lhc opposi1c
l.!!!!!'!!: Ste Bars dirocli«I Mid uu::s the: QPt>05itl'. foot . Rourd lhc !louse i$ done :is fuU.:i~ ~
Tum f<>rv.•ard(L)·~R)':•( L) I
A}All Advance & Rel.ire • twicle 8 Tum Ncl:\lo'lfd(R) !( l.}<1(R}

A.~ yuu hnn iu 1:!01:k;wise lllOtivll, )'«J shr.iuld ;ihu 1111,1v1: llllll: 1io;1i;U1\111 :1rooml
81) Udici Si<ks.tqi (7';) 10 the l.en di~:llly 2
IJIC llt l Ill :en :mll-CSC)UWl 5¢ <llT('(UOll.

2)
.3Cf0$$ lhc set
Turn into the: other lady's pllee (l's) 2
l) °""'
.
Sidtsr.ep (7's) to lhe Right <bgonally
across the set
2 Rtpc;1;1 IJ1csc: "1:p~ 1hroe tim<'-S (6 b.lts} ~uJ (i\11.1 w;uu1~ yvu :d 1o11uld ctll! 1111
Ix.cl: wlicn: )'(.lit s.ta nt;:(l This ~cp can ~h11 he du11c w11h 1111: r.i:m inr1int
•dlh hil; Rif.hl (OOI
4) ~into tbe other gem' ; p)a(.e 0 '$) 2
Siddep oc Slipside (7's & 3" ) 10 the
Cl} All Sid«lcp (7'; 8' 3';) aw.1y fl(lm
)'OU:f J)llrtae:1
hQldlng ~IC pcrso11·.'I rl~I la nd iJJ ywr ' Lett & Ho1ne
>bnd with the Ri~ foot (R) dil'Cldly in rftnlt of lhe U:f1 foot (L). Your
2)
. rig:bt baM
Sidcs.ttp O's & l 's) Home 4
\'eight iJ on tbc Len rooi.
The SW«1tp b Jotit u folk>ws:

0) All Roond lbc Hwi;c: & f;aa: new c:wp1e 8 Sidtsttp or Slipside to lhe Left
11ie 7's
Repeat A t.h:roogh D until the: niud c Mops >,,) BMg the Righi fooc dinltl1y behind 1tc ldl root.
Sta.i'.ld with the Right fOOI ( R) directly in ftQnl ()( the Ltfl fooc (L). Your Moving 10 the left.~ R·L-R-L-R·L-R t.:ounting
wcigtlt bM the Left foot. The AdvanccnOO Re1in: i~ dllnC as follows: 1-2-J-+5-~7. DariQg !IDs moYt;melll the Right f1xll is
• lwa.ys bd:Liod the Left foot
A.) Jn ooe qu.ick motion. brio.& the. Right foot lxicl: (1ry «> The 3's
"bck your·bacl:s.ide~) and fo1ward. llu:n. "'' ilh lhe Right RI) lo ooe quic:k rootioa. bring the Len f111l dife<:tly
foot directly in front of the Left foot, dmi.:e R·l .-R behind the~ fOQll and &ll« l ..R•L coonling 1·2·3
W.:Sll(ing 1·2-3 l) In one quick motion. brin1 the Right b'lt directly
behind 1bc I.en foot R cbnt.'e R·L-R tciuntitlg 2·2·3
D) In c::me qui.ck. motlon, bring the Left bot bac.k (try 11> o.wg Ult U ll IOQI directly bdxiJld 1beR.if;ht fOQC , 2
'l:icl: your b:11:k$16e") arxl forwud. Thoo. wlth I.be. Ut\ t.io.,ing to 1J1e right. dance J...R-J...R-L-R-L ooooring
foot Wn:o;,.-tly in rruna <.tf the R.igh( foct, .da.noe L-R·L 1·2·:3·4·5·6·7. During Ibis momnentthe Left foot is
oountln& 2·2·3 alway$ bcliind the Right fooc ·
<.~) Wilh d'oe Left root dire«ly in from d tl1e Rigf1t foot, The 3's
<.l.'.I'"'• R. L R ~nt~ 3 2 l
' I) l.o ont t11llclt IIKl(ion. briQg lhe Right iool dir«tly
0) lo ODC quklc motioo, brios_ the Lef: root
di.reedy behind bchi.nd lhe Left fooc uid d&ncc. R·L·RC'Otltltiug 1·2·3
the Ri.gh1 foot and dance L-R·LOOJOling 4-Z.) !) In one quick motion, bril'lg lhe. L.cfl foot dittelly
1.it:hind the Right foot a.od d3.oct ~R· L eotu1(i.11g l ·2·3
Rcpe.11 A lhrougb 0 CO'WltiD.g S.2·J, 6-2-:. 1 -2·3 a.nd 8-Z.J. 4
·•.!£: AJ\\·ays dance il'I ff()ll( whm )'QI.I Silk$'p 10 the Left and behind ""ben
•u Sidesttp 10 lhc Right.

765
Source: Kevin B. Westley. Westley School of Irish Dancing: Ceile, Country nd 2 Hand Dance Instruction Book.
New York: The Westley School of Irish Dance, 1992.
Permission pending.

766
 Going Into Exile

Patrick Feeney’s cabin was crowded with people. In the large kitchen men, women, and children lined the walls,
three deep in places, sitting on forms, chairs, stools, and on one another’s knees. On the cement floor three couples
were dancing a jig and raising a quantity of dust, which was, however, soon sucked up the chimney by the huge turf
fire that blazed on the hearth. The only clear space in the kitchen was the corner to the left of the fireplace, where Pat
Mullaney sat on a yellow chair with his right ankle resting on his left knee, a spotted red handkerchief on his head that
reeked with perspiration, and his red face contorting as he played a tattered old accordion. One door was shut and the
tins hanging on it gleamed in the firelight. The opposite door was open and over the heads of the small boys that crowd­
ed in it and outside it, peering in at the dancing couples in the kitchen, a starry June sky was visible and, beneath the
sky, shadowy gray crags and misty, whitish fields lay motionless, still and somber. There was a deep, calm silence out­
side the cabin and within the cabin, in spite of the music and dancing in the kitchen and the singing in the little room
to the left, where Patrick Feeney’s eldest son Michael sat on the bed with three other young men, there was a haunt­
ing melancholy in the air.
The people were dancing, laughing and singing with a certain forced and boisterous gaiety that failed to hide from
them the real cause of their being there, dancing, singing and laughing. For the dance was on account of Patrick
Feeney’s two children, Mary and Michael, who were going to the United States on the following morning.
Feeney himself, a black-bearded, red-faced, middle-aged peasant, with white ivory buttons on his blue frieze shirt
and his hands stuck in his leather waist belt, wandered restlessly about the kitchen, urging the people to sing and dance,
while his mind was in agony all the time, thinking that on the following day he would lose his two eldest children,
never to see them again perhaps. He kept talking to everybody about amusing things, shouted at the dancers and
behaved in a boisterous and abandoned manner. But every now and then he had to leave the kitchen, under the pre­
tense of going to the pigsty to look at a young pig that was supposed to be ill. He would stand, however, upright against
his gable and look gloomily at some star or other, while his mind struggled with vague and peculiar ideas that wan­
dered about in it. He could make nothing at all of his thoughts, but a lump always came up his throat, and he shivered,
although the night was warm.
Then he would sigh and say with a contraction of his neck: “Oh, it’s a queer world this and no doubt about it. So
it is.” Then he would go back to the cabin again and begin to urge on the dance, laughing, shouting and stamping on
the floor.
Towards dawn, when the floor was crowded with couples, arranged in fours, stamping on the floor and going to
and fro, dancing the “Walls of Limerick,” Feeney was going out to the gable when his son Michael followed him out.
The two of them walked side by side about the yard over the gray sea pebbles that had been strewn there the previous
day. They walked in silence and yawned without need, pretending to be taking the air. But each of them was very excit­
ed. Michael was taller than his father and not so thickly built, but the shabby blue serge suit that he had bought for
going to America was too narrow for his broad shoulders and the coat was too wide around the waist. He moved clum­
sily in it and his hands appeared altogether too bony and big and red, and he didn’t know what to do with them. During
his twenty-one years of life he had never worn anything other than the homespun clothes of Inverara, and the shop-
made clothes appeared as strange to him and as uncomfortable as a dress suit worn by a man working in a sewer. His
face was flushed a bright red and his blue eyes shone with excitement. Now and again he wiped the perspiration from
his forehead with the lining of his gray tweed cap.
At last Patrick Feeney reached his usual position at the gable end. He halted, balanced himself on his heels with
his hands in his waist belt, coughed and said, “It’s going to be a warm day.” The son came up beside him, folded his
arms and leaned his right shoulder against the gable.
“It was kind of Uncle Ned to lend the money for the dance, father,” he said. “I’d hate to think that we’d have to
go without something or other, just the same as everybody else has. I’ll send you that money, the very first money I
earn, father...even before I pay Aunt Mary for my passage money. I should have all that money paid off in four months,
and then I’ll have some more money to send you by Christmas.”
And Michael felt very strong and manly recounting what he was going to do when he got to Boston, Massachusetts.
He told himself that with his great strength he would earn a great deal of money. Conscious of his youth and his strength
and lusting for adventurous life, for the moment he forgot the ache in his heart that the thought of leaving his father
inspired in him.
767
 The father was silent for some time. He was looking at the sky with his lower lip hanging, thinking of nothing. At
last he sighed as a memory struck him. “What is it?” said the son. “Don’t weaken, for God’s sake. You will only make
it hard for me.” “Fooh!” said the father suddenly with pretended gruffness. “Who is weakening? I’m afraid that your
new clothes make you impudent.” Then he was silent for a moment and continued in a low voice: “I was thinking of
that potato field you sowed alone last spring the time I had the influenza. I never set eyes on the man that could do it
better. It’s a cruel world that takes you away from the land that God made you for.”
“Oh, what are you talking about, father?“ said Michael irritably. “Sure what did anybody ever get out of the land
but poverty and hard work and potatoes and salt?”
“Ah yes,” said father with a sigh, “but it’s your own, the land, and over there’—he waved his hand at the western
sky—‘you’ll be giving your sweat to some other man’s land, or what’s equal to it.”
“Indeed,” muttered Michael, looking at the ground with a melancholy expression in his eyes, “it’s poor encour­
agement you are giving me.”
They stood in silence fully five minutes. Each hungered to embrace the other, to cry, to beat the air, to scream with
excess sorrow. But they stood silent and somber, like nature about them, hugging their woe. Then they went back to
the cabin. Michael went into the little room to the left of the kitchen, to the three young men who fished in the same
curragh with him and were his bosom friends. The father walked into the large bedroom to the right of the kitchen.
The large bedroom was crowded with people. A large table was laid for tea in the center of the room and about a
dozen young men were sitting at it, drinking tea and eating buttered raisin cake. Mrs. Feeney was bustling about the
table, serving the food and urging them to eat. She was assisted by her two younger daughters and by another woman,
a relative of her own. Her eldest daughter Mary, who was going to the United States that day, was sitting on the edge
of the bed with several other young women. The bed was a large four poster bed with a deal canopy over it, painted
red, and the young women were huddled together on it. So that there must have been about a dozen of them there. They
were Mary Feeney’s particular friends, and they stayed with her in that uncomfortable position just to show how much
they like her. It was a custom.
Mary herself sat on the edge of the bed with her legs dangling. She was a pretty, dark-haired girl of nineteen, with
dimpled, plump, red cheeks and ruminative brown eyes that seemed to cause little wrinkles to come and go in her little
low forehead. Her nose was soft and small and rounded. Her mouth was small and her lips were red and open. Beneath
her white blouse that was frilled at the neck and her navy blue skirt that outlined her limbs as she sat on the edge of the
bed, her body was plump, soft, well-molded and in some manner exuded a feeling of freshness and innocence. So that
she seemed to have been born to be fondled and admired in luxurious surroundings instead of having been born a peas­
ant’s daughter, who had to go to the United States that day to work as a servant or maybe in a factory.
And as she sat on the edge of the bed crushing her little handkerchief between her palms, she kept thinking fever­
ishly of the United States, at one moment with fear and loathing, at the next with desire and longing. Unlike her broth­
er she did not think of the work she was going to do or the money that she was going to earn. Other things troubled
her, things of which she was half ashamed, half afraid, thoughts of love and of foreign men and of clothes and of hous­
es where there were more than three rooms and where people ate meat every day.
She was fond of life, and several young men among the local gentry had admired her in Inverara. But...
She happened to look up and she caught her father’s eyes as he stood silently by the window with his hands stuck
in his waist belt. His eyes rested on hers for a moment and then he dropped them without smiling, and with his lips com­
pressed he walked down to the kitchen. She shuddered slightly. She was a little afraid of her father, although she knew
that he loved her very much and he was very kind to her. But the winter before he had whipped her with a dried willow
rod, when he caught her one evening behind Tim Hernon’s cabin after nightfall, with Tim Hernon’s son Bartly’s arms
around her waist and he kissing her. Ever since, she always shivered slightly when her father touched her or spoke to
her. “Oho!” said an old peasant who sat at the table with a saucer full of tea in his hand and his gray flannel shirt open
at his thick hairy, wrinkled neck. “Oho! indeed, but it’s a disgrace to the island of Inverara to let such a beautiful woman
as your daughter go away, Mrs. Feeney. If I was a young man, I’ll be flayed alive if I’d let her go.”
There was a laugh and some of the women on the bed, said: “Bad cess to you, Patsy Coyne, if you haven’t too
much impudence, it’s a caution.” But the laugh soon died. The young men sitting at the table felt embarrassed and kept
looking at one another sheepishly, as if each tried to find out if the others were in love with Mary Feeney.
“Oh, well, God is good,” said Mrs. Feeney, as she wiped her lips with the tip of her bright, clean, check apron.
“What will be must be, and sure there is hope from the sea, but there is no hope from the grave. It is sad and the poor
768
have to suffer, but...” Mrs. Feeney stopped suddenly, aware that all these platitudes meant nothing whatsoever. Like
her husband she was unable to think intelligibly about her two children going away. Whenever the reality of their going
away, maybe for ever, three thousand miles into a vast unknown world, came before her mind, it seemed that a thin
bar of some hard metal thrust itself forward from her brain and rested behind the wall of her forehead. So that almost
immediately she became stupidly conscious of the pain caused by the imaginary bar of metal and she forgot the dread
prospect of her children going away. But her mind grappled with the things about her busily and efficiently, with the
preparation of food, with the entertaining of her guests, with the numerous little things that have to be done in a house
where there is a party and which only a woman can do properly. These little things, in a manner, saved her, for the
moment at least, from bursting into tears whenever she looked at her daughter and whenever she thought of her son,
whom she loved most of all her children, because perhaps she nearly died giving birth to him and he had been very
delicate until he was twelve years old. So she laughed down in her breast a funny laugh she had that made her heave,
where her check apron rose out from the waistband in a deep curve. “A person begins to talk,” she said with a shrug
of her shoulders sideways, “and then a person says foolish things.”
“That’s true,” said the old peasant, noisily pouring more tea from his cup to his saucer.
But Mary knew by her mother laughing that way that she was very near being hysterical. She always laughed that
way before she had one of her fits of hysterics. And Mary’s heart stopped beating suddenly and then began again at an
awful rate as her eyes became acutely conscious of her mother’s body, the rotund, short body with the wonderful; mass
of fair hair, growing grey at the temples and the fair face with the soft liquid eyes, that grew hard and piercing for a
moment as they looked at a thing and then grew soft and liquid again, and the thin-lipped small mouth with the beau­
tiful white teeth and the deep perpendicular grooves in the upper lip and the tremor that always came in the corner of
the mouth, with love, when she looked at her children. Mary became acutely conscious of all these little points, as well
as of the little black spot that was on her left breast below the nipple and the swelling that came now and again in her
legs and caused her to have hysterics and would one day cause her death. And she was stricken with horror at the
thought of leaving her mother and at the selfishness of her thoughts. She had never been prone to thinking of anything
important but now, somehow for a moment she had a glimpse of her mother’s life that made her shiver and hate her­
self as a cruel, heartless, lazy, selfish wretch. Her mother’s life loomed up before her eyes, a life of continual misery
and suffering, hard work, birth pangs, sickness and again hard work and hunger and anxiety. It loomed up and then it
fled again, a little mist came before her eyes and she jumped down from the bed, with the jaunty twirl of her head that
was her habit when she set her body in motion.
“Sit down for a while, mother,” she whispered toying with the black ivory buttons on her mother’s brown bodice.
“I’ll look after the table.” “No, no” murmured the mother with a shake of her whole body, “I’m not a bit tired. Sit down,
my treasure. You have a long way to travel today.” And Mary sighed and went back to the bed again. At last some­
body said: “So it is, and may God be praised.” The change from the starry night to the gray, sharp dawn was hard to
notice until it had arrived. People looked out and saw the morning light sneaking over the crags silently, along the
ground, pushing the mist banks upwards. The stars were growing dim. A long way off invisible sparrows were chirp­
ing in their ivied perch in some distant hill or other. Another day had arrived and even as the people looked at it,
yawned and began to search for their hats, caps and shawls preparing to go home, the day grew and spread its light and
made things move and give voice. Cocks crew, blackbirds caroled, a dog let loose from a cabin by an early riser chased
madly after an imaginary robber, barking as if his tail were on fire. The people said good-bye and began to stream forth
from Feeney’s cabin. They were going to their homes to see to the morning’s work before going to Kilmurrage to see
the immigrants off on the steamer to the mainland. Soon the cabin was empty except for family.
All the family gathered into the kitchen and stood about for some minutes talking sleepily of the dance and of the
people who had been present. Mrs. Feeney tried to persuade everybody to go to bed, but everybody refused. It was four
o’clock and Michael and Mary would have to set out for Kilmurrage at nine. So tea was made and they all sat about
for an hour drinking it and eating raisin cake and talking. They talked of the dance and of the people who had been
present.
There were eight of them there, the father and mother and six children. The youngest child was Thomas, a thin
boy of twelve, whose lungs made a singing sound every time he breathed. The next was Bridget, a girl of fourteen,
with dancing eyes and a habit of shaking her short golden curls every now and then for no apparent reason. Then there
were the twins, Julia and Margaret, quiet, rather stupid, flat-faced girls of sixteen. Both their upper front teeth pro­
truded slightly and they were both great workers and very obedient to their mother. They were all sitting at the table,
having just finished a third large pot of tea, when suddenly the mother hastily gulped down the remainder of the tea in

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her cup, dropped the cup with a clatter to her saucer and sobbed once through her nose.
“Now mother,” said Michael sternly, “what’s the good of this work?”
“No, you are right, my pulse,” she replied quietly. “Only I was just thinking how nice it is to sit here surrounded
by all my children, all my little birds in my nest, and then two of them going to fly away made me sad.” And she
laughed, pretending to treat it as a foolish joke.
“Oh, that be damned for a story,” said the father, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, “there’s work to be done. You
Julia, go and get the horse. Margaret, you milk the cow and see that you give enough milk to the calf this morning.”
And he ordered everybody about as if it were an ordinary day of work.
But Michael and Mary had nothing to do and they sat about miserably conscious that they had cut adrift from the
routine of their home life. They no longer had any place in it. In a few hours they would be homeless wanderers. Now
that they were cut adrift from it, the poverty and sordidness of their home life appeared to them under the aspect of com­
fort and plenty.
So the morning passed until breakfast time at seven o’clock. The morning’s work was finished and the family was
gathered together again. The meal passed in a dead silence. Drowsy after the sleepless night and conscious that the part­
ing would come in a few hours, nobody wanted to talk. Everybody had an egg for breakfast in honor of the occasion. Mrs.
Feeney, after the usual habit, tried to give her egg first to Michael, then to Mary, and as each refused it, she ate a little
herself and gave the remainder to little Thomas who had the singing in his chest. Then the breakfast was cleared away.
The father went to put the creels on the mare so as to take the luggage into Kilmurrage. Michael and Mary got the lug­
gage ready and began to get dressed. The mother and the other children tidied up the house. People from the village
began to come into the kitchen, as was customary, in order to accompany the immigrants from their home to
Kilmurrage.
At last everything was ready. Mrs. Feeney had exhausted all excuses for moving about, engaged on trivial tasks.
She had to go into the big bedroom where Mary was putting on her new hat. The mother sat on a chair by the window;
her face contorting on account of the flood of tears she was keeping back. Michael moved about the room uneasily, his
two hands knotting a big red handkerchief behind his back. Mary twisted about in front of the mirror that hung over the
black wooden mantelpiece. She was spending a long time with the hat. It was the first one she had ever worn, but it fit­
ted her beautifully, and it was in excellent taste. It was given to her by the schoolmistress, who was very fond of her,
and she herself had taken it in a little. She had an instinct for beauty in dress and deportment.
But the mother, looking at how well her daughter wore the cheap navy blue costume and the white frilled blouse,
and the little round black hat with a fat, fluffy, glossy curl covering each ear, and the black silk stockings with blue
clocks in them, and the little black shoes that had laces of three colors in them, got suddenly enraged with...She did-
n’t know with what she got enraged. But for the moment she hated her daughter’s beauty, and she remembered all the
anguish of giving birth to her and nursing her and toiling for her, for no other purpose than to lose her now and let her
go away, maybe to be ravished wantonly because of her beauty and her love of gaiety. A cloud of mad jealousy and
hatred against this impersonal beauty that she saw in her daughter almost suffocated the mother, and stretched out her
hands in front of her unconsciously and then just as suddenly her anger vanished like a puff of smoke, and she burst
into wild tears, wailing: “My children, oh, my children, far over the sea you will be carried from me, your mother.”
And she began to rock herself and she threw her apron over her head.
Immediately the cabin was full of the sound of bitter wailing. A dismal cry rose from the women gathered in the
kitchen. “Far over the sea they will be carried,” began woman after woman, and they all rocked themselves and hid
their heads in their aprons. Michael’s mongrel dog began to howl on the hearth. Little Thomas sat down on the hearth
beside the dog and, putting his arms around him, he began to cry, although he didn’t know exactly why he was crying,
but he felt melancholy on account of the dog howling and so many people being about.
In the bedroom the son and daughter, on their knees, clung to their mother, who held their heads between her hands
and rained kisses on both heads ravenously. After the first wave of tears she had stopped weeping. The tears still ran
down her cheeks, but her eyes gleamed and they were dry. There was a fierce look in them as she searched all over the
heads of her two children with them, with her brows contracted, searching with a fierce terror-stricken expression, as
if by the intensity of her state she hoped to keep a living photograph of them before her mind. With her quivering lips
she made a queer sound like “im-m-m-m” and she kept kissing. Her right hand clutched at Mary’s left shoulder and
with her left she fondled the back of Michael’s neck. The two children were sobbing freely. They must have stayed
that way a quarter of an hour.

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 Then the father came into the room, dressed in his best clothes He wore a new frieze waistcoat, with a gray and
black front and white back. He held his soft black felt hat in one hand and in the other hand he had a bottle of holy
water. He coughed and said in a weak gentle voice that was strange to him, as he touched his son: “Come now, it is
time.”
Mary and Michael got to their feet. The father sprinkled them with holy water and they crossed themselves. Then,
without looking at their mother, who lay in the chair with her hands clasped on her lap, looking at the ground in a silent
tearless stupor, they left the room. Each hurriedly kissed little Thomas, who was not going to Kilmurrage, and then,
hand in hand, they left the house. As Michael was going out the door he picked a piece of loose whitewash from the
wall and put it in his pocket. The people filed after them, down the yard and on to the road, like a funeral procession.
The mother was left in the house with little Thomas and two old peasant women from the village. Nobody spoke in
the cabin for a long time.
Then the mother rose and came into the kitchen. She looked at the two women, at her little son at the hearth, as if
she was looking for something she had lost. Then she threw her hands into the air and ran out into the yard.
“Come back,” she screamed; “come back to me.”
She looked wildly down the road with dilated nostrils, her bosom heaving. But there was nobody in sight. Nobody
replied. There was a crooked stretch of limestone road, surrounded by gray crags that were scorched by the sun. It was
something in her head that was singing.
The two old women led her back into the kitchen. “There is nothing that time will not cure,” said one. “Yes. Time
and patience,” said the other.

Source: Liam O’Flaherty. The Collected Stories I. Ed., A. A. Kelly. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, pp. 151-160.
Used with the permission of the estate of Liam O‘Flaherty.

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 Thousands Are Sailing
You brave Irish heroes, wherever you be,
I pray stand a moment and listen to me
Your sons and your daughters are going away,
And thousands are sailing to Amerikay.

Refrain:
So good luck to those people, and safe may they land.
They are leaving their country for a far distant strand.
They are leaving old Ireland, no longer to stay.
And thousands are sailing to Amerikay.

The night before leaving, they are bidding good-by,

And early next morning, their hearts dip a sigh.
They do kiss their mothers and then they will say,
“Farewell, dear old father. We must now go away.”

Their friends and relations and neighbors also,

When the trunks are all packed up, all ready to go.
Oh, the tears from their eyes, they fall down like the rain
And the horses are prancing going off for the train.

Refrain
When that you reach the station, you will hear their last cry,
With handkerchief’s waving and bidding good-by.
Their hearts will be breaking on leaving this shore.
“Farewell, dear old Ireland. Will we ne’er see you more?”

Oh, I pity the mother that rears up the child

And likewise the father who labors and toils.
To try to support them he will work night and day,
And when they are reared up, they will go away.

Refrain.

Source: Traditional song arranged by Planxty, Words and Music album. Permission pending.

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