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'Rohan, Clare'. Winifred was born, apparently in 1833, at Clunes in County Clare. Neither
Clunes nor Rath nor Rohan exist in Clare today in a modern map of Ireland. More than likely
both hamlets waned and disappeared in the terrible years between 1845 and 1851, when the
potato crop failed in successive years, resulting in widespread famine and disease. Tens of
thousands of the Irish poor, the peasantry, died.
Two years before the start of the famine, in 1843, an early Sunday morning in a coastal village in
the south-west of County Cork was described by Thackeray. The village was called
Skibbereen, and must have been similar in many ways to Clunes and Rath.
'The people came flocking into the place by hundreds, and you saw their blue cloaks dotting the
road and the bare open plains beyond. The men came with shoes and stockings today, the
women all bare-legged, and many of them might be seen washing their feet in the stream before
they went up to the chapel. The street seemed to be lined on either side with blue cloaks,
squatting along the doorways as is their wont. Among these, numberless cows were walking to
and fro, and pails of milk passing, and here and there a hound or two went stalking about... The
chapel-yard was filled with men and women: a couple of shabby old beadles were at the gate,
with copper shovels to collect money; and inside the chapel four or five hundred people were
on their knees'.
Within five years, most of these people that Thackeray observed that Sunday morning would be
dead.
In 1846, a magistrate from Cork, Nicholas Cummins, visited Skibbereen, and wrote about 'the
appalling state of misery' that the potato famine had wrought. He was there in mid December.
"I provided myself with as much bread as five men could carry, and on reaching the spot I was
surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted. I entered some of the hovels to
ascertain the cause... In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead,
were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged
horsecloth... I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive -they were
in a fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man... In a few minutes I was
surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe,
either from famine or from fever. Their demonic yells are still ringing in my ears... My clothes
were nearly torn off in my endeavour to escape... My neckcloth was seized from behind by a
grip which compelled me to turn, and I found myself grasped by a women with an infant just
born in her arms...'
Frank Murphy, in his book, The Bog Irish, says: 'One person in ten, or more than 800,000,
died of hunger, or more commonly, of typhus, cholera, or another attendant disease. In the
space of seven years... more than a million
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and a half people emigrated. Thousands of bog Irish, many of them Irish-speaking, were to be
found in the second half of the 19th century sweating in the textile mills of northern England, or
navvying in New South Wales, or serving in the Indian Army, or building the railways of North
America. It is perhaps the supreme irony of their nation's history that... these Irish played a vital
part in building the British Empire, and in helping to make the language of their ancestral foe so
widely spoken'.
Somehow the teenage Patrick Casey of County Clare and Winifred McCormack, his wife-to-
be, survived. It seems that both his parents (Michael Casey, labourer, and Mary Casey, nee
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