the great silence in Irish history

This morning I watched a video from the Irish History Podcast that talked about what is referred to as the Great Silence, a period during which historians did not write much about the Great Hunger. It lasted for about a hundred years after the famine ended. The Irish president, in 2014 or 2016, referred to this period as the Great Silence. His interpretation was that people were so traumatized they didn't want to talk about it. Another version of the same interpretation is that people were ashamed or embarrassed by it, and apparently that might have had something to do with it because they had to do some pretty extreme things to survive.

In reality, ordinary people were talking about it all the time. It was just that academic books were not being written, and government officials and other people in power weren't talking about it. Cecil Woodham-Smith published The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849, which became a bestseller and was even serialized in newspapers. Folklore researchers around that time discovered that stories of the famine were very common in Irish folklore, and even songs had been written about it. The Fields of Athenry is a famous song about the famine that is still popular today and is sung at soccer matches, similar to the way we play the national anthem.

The historian in the video made a good point that there are still villages and isolated huts all over Ireland that were abandoned during the famine, and it would be very hard to ignore these very obvious signs of it. My own opinion, which he didn't mention but makes sense to me, is that newer generations would naturally want to know why they have family in America, Canada, Australia, or elsewhere. That question would be impossible to answer without mentioning the famine if that was the reason their ancestors emigrated, as so many did.

So, in reality, it was just that official and academic books weren't being written. There was a huge revisionist movement at the time, where people were reluctant to write anything that was overly critical of the British government. According to the historian Mary Daly, she was reluctant to write about the famine because she didn't want to produce a work that might, in some way, support the IRA, and she believed other historians felt the same.

Ironically, some of the next books to become popular with the public were written by English historians, including Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 and Terry Eagleton's Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture.

Summer Solstice in Ireland

What I Learned Today: The Summer Solstice in Ireland

Contrary to what they seem to be saying over at Irish Pagan School, apparently the summer solstice was kind of a big deal way back into ancient times. It wasn't just because they were celebrating the longest day. It was also because this was about the time that last year's harvest was starting to run out.

The really poor people lived almost entirely on potatoes for most of the year, but about this time the potatoes were starting to run out and the new ones weren't ready yet. In order to fill the gap, they grew cabbage, which has a much shorter growing season. They actually had to eat so much of it that their skin in the summertime had sort of a greenish-yellow color.

People think of the Great Famine in the 1840s because everybody knows about it and it was so huge and catastrophic, but there were also a bunch of other famines that happened earlier than that. They were just shorter and less widespread.

Eventually, the summer solstice festival was Christianized and changed to St. John's Day or St. John's Eve on June 23rd because, of course, they had to change everything, but not too much. People believed that if you didn't burn a bonfire on St. John's Eve, your crops would be unlucky that year. St. John's Eve was also a big festival day going back as early as the 1300s.

Another sad thing that happened during the solstice festival, and later on St. John's Eve, was that farmhands would be hired out. Kids as young as twelve or thirteen were often hired out as labor. How they were treated pretty much depended on wherever they landed. Some families were good to them and treated them like another one of the kids. Other families treated them worse than their work animals.

It wasn't just that people were hoping the kids would earn wages to send back home. It was also a way to send them away for the summer and get them fed somewhere else because these families didn't have enough resources. Sending the children out to work temporarily reduced the number of mouths to feed until the next harvest.