Editor’s note: This is the final article in a five-part series entitled “Writer’s Notebook: Ireland.”
Day Five
The Famine Cemetery, Dingle
“Ghosts”
I walked up to the famine cemetery today, taking a turn off Upper Main Street near the center of the town where a large, prehistoric boulder thought to be left behind from retreating glaciers, sits. It’s referred to by locals as the Holy Stone. It’s a gradual incline up a road called Chapel Lane, though the last Chapel to stand along the road was back in the 18th century. The area is called Fearran Flaherty, which includes the original Famine workhouse which later became the area’s hospital. It’s a large three-story pale-yellow building that has been unused since 2010. The potato plight of the 1840s, caused millions of Irish to perish. The workhouses were established by the British government to house and feed the impoverished. According to the monk, whole families died on their way to the workhouse in Dingle and many more died shortly after arriving. So many died, in such a short time, that bodies were buried in mass graves at the top of the hill. More recently, the graveyard, long neglected, has been periodically cared for and in the far corner there is memorial area with two original, large iron soup pots used to feed the residents of the workhouse. There was a grant that was allocated to transform the old workhouse/hospital building into a cultural center, with rooms for artists and other events, but the pandemic put a hold on those plans.
There are some dark clouds over the mountains in the distance, but I’m drawn to this particular area today. Near the start of the walk, there is a farmyard with hens and goats, but then nothing but open fields closed in by stone walls line my route. It’s a long walk up, giving me time to think about the people who were lost and those, like my maternal grandfather’s ancestors, who were fortunate enough to escape the misery by taking the difficult journey to America. While my novel has been inspired by experiences of my father’s family, I feel particularly connected to my maternal Irish roots whenever I am in this part of the world. My mother’s father was Irish and, as far as I know, from one of the southern counties. I’m not sure, because they emigrated so many generations ago, exactly where they were from, but the connection I feel to this particular area of Ireland makes me think that it couldn’t have been far from here. I suppose nothing on the small island of Ireland is ever far from anywhere else.
The Gormans arrived on the far shores of America before the Civil War, so at least one of my Gorman ancestors fought for the Union. That much I know from a family gravestone in a Brooklyn cemetery. By the time my grandfather and his brother were growing up in the streets around Greenpoint, the family had most likely acclimated to an American way of life, although the Irish still filled mostly public service jobs.
The first names of Thomas and John, intermingled in various forms, had been handed down through the generations until my grandfather, Thomas John Gorman, inherited one version. He became a lieutenant in the New York Fire Department and his brother became a New York City Policeman. They were respectively, in colloquial New York terms, “New York’s bravest” and “New York’s Finest.” My grandfather died when I was very young, so I remember my great-uncle even more clearly. He had been in Vaudeville before the Police force, and I have happy memories of spending summer nights on a Southampton, New York beach listening to him sing and play his ukulele. This was before the “Hamptons,” as the far end of Long Island is known, became so popular. We would build a fire in a ditch on a remote stretch of the beach (no longer allowed) and listen to the crashing Atlantic waves and the music until late into the night.
What a different life the Gorman brothers would have had, if any of their family had even survived the famine. I wonder if they would have been farmers, businessmen, musicians, or if their interests still would have gravitated towards service. Would they have preferred a rural life to that of the city? My mother would certainly not have met my father, whose family emigrated from Belfast at the beginning of the 20th century, in the face of anti-Catholic discrimination. I wouldn’t be walking this path today if the Gormans, in the 19th century, and the McStockers in the 20th century, had not been fearless enough to pick up and move across the Atlantic with little more than a dream. The community of the Irish diaspora in Brooklyn brought them together, as it did for so many.
The cemetery is a solemn place with an extraordinary view. I like to think the position, high above Dingle with the mountains behind them and the sea below, provides some comfort to those who had so little to comfort them against the ravages of starvation. The hillside is uneven, with random mounds and ditches scattered throughout the stone-wall enclosed area. The only markers are rocks, standing upright, in various shapes and sizes to the indicate what are mostly mass graves. I stop and pray for the souls beneath them. It is an instinctive act, much like Brigid remembering the words of a hymn her mother loved, despite not singing it or hearing it for decades; it is in the first chapter of my novel, as her mother lay dying. Much of my novel centers around the question of subliminal family traditions that are bred into us, shape us, connect us. For Brigid, these are complex influences that shape her beliefs and actions.
I make a note: “Brigid walked up the path that took her to the neglected famine graveyard, overlooking the mouth of the harbor. This is where the thousands of those who perished in this area during the famine, lay unidentified, in unmarked graves among the scattered stones. They had, simply, disappeared; whole families, ancestral lines. They died in the large, long, pale yellow building visible below. The workhouse. Mostly there had been no one to give them a proper burial or to even know they had perished. The “disappeared.”
In the novel, Brigid is responsible for the death of a woman who becomes one of those known, in Northern Ireland, as “the disappeared.” Their deaths remain unsolved, the circumstances of them under suspicion as being tied to sectarian violence. The connection between those whose graves Brigid visits in this cemetery and the Belfast woman who never had a proper burial is an intentional plot point of the novel.
Like these souls who lie beneath the crooked rocks, some tilted far over, others jutting out from random mounds or sunken trenches, Brigid is a ghost to me. She appears on blank pages and in dreams; but she is elusive, letting me into her world and thoughts slowly over the past years. Her hold on me, despite her gossamer-like nature, is strong, reaching across decades and place. She pulls me in, telling me her story in bursts and then backing away into her ghostly silence. That is the writing life with Brigid.
The storm has arrived on the hillside, and I make my way back into town in a biting rain. There is a saying I remember from my childhood, perhaps it is an old Irish one, ‘peaceful the dead the rain falls on’ and, today, I hope it is true.
Day One: Writer’s Notebook: Ireland.
Day Two: Writer’s Notebook: ‘Journey to Gobnait’s Holy Well’.
Day Three: Writer’s Notebook: ‘The Green Road’.
Day Four: Writer’s Notebook: ‘Inspiration in Dunquin’.
Marie Hulme is a local writer who resides in Weston and teaches at Sacred Heart University. She earned her B.A. in English from Smith College, an M.A. in British and American Literature from NYU, an M.A. in Teaching from SHU and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. Prof. Hulme has received national awards for her creative writing in fiction and non-fiction, and previous to her life as an academic, she worked as a journalist for ABC News in London.
