Behold a Pale Horse: Horrors and Heritages of Famine

Abstract

Behold a Pale Horse: Horrors and Heritages of Famine1 Cormac Ó Gráda (bio) In late January 1849, a woman in her sixties was bludgeoned to death in her own home in Rooskagh, not far from Athlone in the Irish midlands.2 Margaret Kelly, née Doran, was by all accounts an unpleasant woman. She was ‘known to be “snug”, miserly, and, as all misers are, avaricious’. It was not the land that made her ‘snug’; she and her husband, who were childless and who seemingly did not get along, held a modest four acres from an absentee clergyman-middleman, enough to graze two cows. She made her money from what was known in ‘indigenous parlance’ as gombeening, charging eight shillings a year for every twenty shillings she lent, ‘and that on solid security’. Margaret’s murderers were her husband’s brother and his sixteen-year-old son, Pat and Michael Kelly. Pat, who was destitute, had often sought her help, which she had refused, against her husband’s wishes. After Pat had lost his home and ‘the workhouse stared him in the face … he was heard say that he would murder her (the deceased) rather than suffer more want’. The Kellys’ servant girl, related to Margaret but seemingly intimate with her husband, and also a moneylender, was out with the cows when she saw young Michael Kelly watching from a hillock near the house in the pouring rain. Suspecting that he was stealing cabbage, she returned home, only to discover a lifeless and battered Margaret stretched on the floor. Pat and Michael absconded as soon as they realised that they were under suspicion, leaving no traces, but in possession of £12 belonging to Margaret and £30 belonging to the servant girl; ‘and it is to be supposed that with the sum of money they have thus murderously acquired, they are now on their way to America’3. The story of Margaret Kelly, murdered in broad daylight, has both a local and a universal resonance for students of famine. Historians of the Irish Famine will note the timing of this tragedy – nearly a year and a half after the Famine had been declared over in London.4 They will also note how the perpetrators had used emigration, which they could not have afforded [End Page 134] otherwise, as an escape route from the law and from famine. This is a reminder too that the Irish economy at the time of the Famine, though backward, was monetised: the murdered woman was a moneylender. In those years, there were both those who lent money exclusively, like Margaret Kelly, and those, like Darby Skinadre, William Carleton’s fictional ‘miser’ in The Black Prophet, who sold oats and oatmeal on credit. Like Kelly and Skinadre, gombeenmen were unloved, even though their rapacity may have saved some lives in a way that disciples of Adam Smith would have approved of. They were no help, however, to those ‘walking skeletons’ on the public works in Mayo in August 1846, just as famine was beginning to bite, who had not been paid for three weeks, and on whom ‘the gombeen people had stopped their supplies’5. Scholars of famines more generally will see the story of Margaret Kelly as another illustration of what Breandán Mac Suibhne, following Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, has characterised as the Grey Zone inhabited by those who live through or succumb to famines. For Levi, the Grey Zone is the moral space inhabited by victims and persecutors. One must not forget, naturally, who or what forced them into that space. Given the risks involved, in order for her business to survive Margaret Kelly may have been forced (perhaps this is being charitable) to charge high interest rates and to reject the business of those who had no prospect of repaying. But, surely, she could have made an exception for her own brother-in-law? Unfortunately, tales of intra-familial tension and the sundering of family ties are not uncommon during famines. Fast forward to the Leningrad blockade of the Second World War. From an analysis of a large number of diaries kept in the city during the blockade – an unrivalled and unique...