Michael Higgins’ visitation of this material is a way of treading through shards of rescinded memory rather than storytelling for historiographical purposes. In a discussion at the Joinery on 20 January the story’s author, Michael Harding said that the famine had a massively damaging effect on Irish cultural memory, and on the Irish public’s relationship with dignity and sexuality in ordinary life. In his research, Harding discovered an archive of documentation about a poorhouse in Lisnaskea, Fermanagh, which recorded basic facts about that town’s workhouse; details about the kind of materials that made up the women’s frocks, what kind of laces they put into their shoes and the size and geography of the hospital shed for people with fever. A separate meaning floated to the surface after he had finished writing. To Harding, the piece represented a way of saying that nineteenth-century Ireland’s walled-off mansions helped wealthy landowners to ignore the famine while i was happening. And, that in the following century, the same plantations helped their new inhabitants to systematically forget the shame of having grown up in poverty. Consequently, Harding felt that those houses had rotted away at the Irish psyche, and are still “eating the anima” from us.
Harding went on to say that many of the rural workhouses that characterised both Ireland’s famine, and the face of Irish-speaking society during the nineteenth century had been allowed to fall into disrepair. He recalled that when Frank Stapleton shot his film in Bawnboy during 1995, the crew worked to return the town’s workhouse to a resemblance of its condition during the famine. They suggested that the local community could preserve the building as a museum, or at least as a site of remembrance. It wasn’t preserved. In the months following, ivy covered over the building and swallowed up its memory again. For the most part, the Irish public’s regard for the famine has developed through a staid schoolbook presentation of its historical occurrence and its relationship to nationalism. That distance curtails its impact as a massive, multifaceted humanitarian disaster – as a case study in malice. The Poorhouse Revisited, and the recollections of Michael Harding on 20 January gave a better characterisation of the utter bloody cruelty of the workhouse, and the silenced, gradual violence that it instigated. After all, what kind of place needs a full-time gravedigger?
This question drags out a long thread from the Selected Stories programme. Only the worst kind of sanctuary could fully occupy a man with getting rid of people. And although the job certainly did exist in Ireland’s workhouses during the 1850s, the gravedigger’s presence in these stories plays a larger part than is instantly apparent. Between the ministrations of this old man, we can see the difference between two kinds of reality.
<<BACK / CONTINUE>>