Myxomatosis

My previous post sort of linked the Titanic and Ballyhaunis. The Titanic got me thinking about Father Browne and I went to his site to check out some of his photographs.

He seems to have had a great grá for the old steam trains, a sign of a powerful intellect and great aesthetic judgement.

The above photo brought me up short. It is typical of a view I had many times when I was young and on my way from Dublin to Ballyhaunis. It is listed as being "the new diesel in 1953". These cars were unusual in that you could go right up to the front of the passenger section and, through the glass panel, get the same view as the driver.

This was very exciting for a young lad; apart from the view, you could watch the driver driving and effectively learn how to drive the train yourself. The view itself was marvellous. Much of the country was single track; this meant that sections were controlled by the staff system which added another interesting element to the journey.

But the view was not all plain sailing. The rabbits were all dying of myxomatosis and the view of them dragging themselves along, including onto the track to be mowed down by the train, was disgusting.

Rabbit meat which, like today's chicken, had been freely available and reasonably priced, just vanished off the butchers' shelves. Prior to the spread of myxomatosis the rabbits lived a better and more healthy life than the poor battery chickens of today. In all, a sad, sad story.

If you're interested, you can read about the demise of the Ballyhaunis signal box here. Gone the way of the rabbits it is, never to come back.

On a slightly brighter note regarding the chickens, I roasted a free range chicken the other day and you could actually pull the wishbone. Must have been very free range. Up to now, and unlike in the distant past (when I was young), the wishbones, and all the other bones, even in purportedly free range chickens, were coming apart in the oven. Doesn't bear thinking about.

An American Wake

It's amazing, when you start following up your family history, how many world events which you might have learned about in your school history suddenly become personal.

The First World War is a typical one of these. Almost everybody in Ireland who starts out tracing their family history, from rabid Republicans to West Brits, will find some relation somewhere who went to war. Some families will come up with a clatter of them. WWI had an insatiable hunger for cannon fodder.

Another event, whose 100th anniversary is coming up, is the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. You can see the impact of this event on a sample local community, the Mayo village of Lahardane, on that community's commemorative website.


These were times of large families and high emigration, much of it to America (USA and Canada). Emigrants tended to cluster. That is to say, those from a particular parish would emigrate together as a group. When tragedy occurred it then had a disproportionate effect on certain communities. A good example in the case of the Titanic was the village of Lahardane in the parish of Addergoole, from where a group of 14 went on the Titanic; only 3 survived.

While none of those who left might ever have come back anyway, hence the "American Wake", the emigrant was never completely lost to the local community. There were always letters from America, which would be passed around all those mentioned in them. There were food and clothes parcels, which kept many a family going in times of hardship. And, of course, the remittances: money sent home when the emigrants got established in their new country. In Ireland's case there was even a special line in the national accounts for emigrants' remittances, and it was a significant line even in macro economic terms.


When it came to crossing the Atlantic, my family was more fortunate than some of those in Addergoole. My aunt Jane sailed from Cobh in 1908 on the White Star Line's then flagship the Baltic. At the time, this was the largest ship afloat, just as the Titanic was to be 4 years later.

Unlike the Titanic, the Baltic made it, and was one of the ships which radioed the Titanic an ice warning on the day the latter sank.

Jane was accompanied by a group from Ballyhaunis, her home town, and not a thousand miles from Lahardane. She settled in New York and had family, some of whom did come back to Ireland and visit. She was one of the lucky ones.