FOR anyone who has visited the west of Ireland, particularly around its remaining Gaeltacht areas, the sight of the so-called ‘famine cottages’ – empty shells that were once home to a generation of poor wretches who abandoned them or died of starvation during An Drochshaol or An Górta Mór (1845-1851) – are all too familiar.

The decimation through disease of the main food source of the Irish peasantry, the potato crop, and the human destruction that followed, is now rightly discussed in the context of the economic logic and market imperatives of a system that drove millions to their doom. While the crumbling ruins from the most tragic period in Ireland’s history remain as a harrowing reminder of devastation, the names of those who died or fled are largely forgotten. However, in Belfast where no such relics exist, the name of one of the period’s youngest victims has been immortalised.

At the time in question Belfast, unlike most other parts of the country, was already experiencing the effects of the industrial revolution, making it Ireland’s most prosperous city. As a beacon of industry, it drew people from all over the island as they searched for opportunities around the city’s docks, linen mills and markets.

A massive population boom marked the arrival of the 1840s, with Ireland’s inhabitants numbering 8.5 million when the first potato crop failed in 1845.

The Great Hunger saw at least one million people perish and a further one million emigrate on ‘coffin ships’ – so named due to the high mortality rate on board. Astoundingly, the country’s population has never recovered in the proceeding years (with a current population of just 6.5 million).

Despite its growing commerce and prosperity, Belfast was not immune to the devastation as starving and disease-ridden people flocked to the city in search of relief. In 1847, or ‘Black 47’ as it often referred to, typhus fever swept the city. In his celebrated text, Labour in Irish History, the Marxist revolutionary and historian, James Connolly, explained that the fever, which “always follows on the heels of hunger” had “struck down as many as perished directly of famine”. Around 250,000 died of fever, and 21,770 of starvation in Ireland that year.

Local historian Dr Éamon Phoenix attributes the spread of typhus in Belfast to the arrival from Connacht of the emigrant ship, the Swatara, in March of 1847. Approximately 2,000 of the fever’s victims are buried in a mass grave at the appropriately named Plaguey Hill at Friar’s Bush Graveyard in South Belfast. Again, Connolly explains that as the fever spread “it became impossible in many districts to get sufficient labourers with strength enough to dig separate graves for the dying.”

The dire poverty experienced by the famished and fever afflicted also meant that they simply could not afford burial. Indeed, cemeteries in other parts of the city have their allocated ‘poor ground’ where hundreds or, as the case might be, thousands of people are buried.

In North Belfast’s Clifton Street Cemetery, the poor grave had already been in use for a decade by 1847. However, with the ravages of the hunger spreading rapidly, the victims of An Górta Mór, including a young infant named Mary McSweeney, joined the wretched poor of previous years in the pit. While there are few records of Mary’s existence, the story of her tragic demise was uncovered by North Belfast historian Joe Baker, who maintains she was the first child to die of starvation in Belfast during the man-made ‘famine’.
The official burial register for June 7, 1847 lists the interment by the Belfast Board of Health of an infant named May Sweeney, who is said to have died of fever. However, a newspaper report from the Northern Whig, which was uncovered by Joe Baker, states that a two- or three-year-old “poor child named McSweeney” had died in its mothers arms at May’s Bridge. The newspaper also reported, “that the want of proper nourishment hastened, if it did not cause, the death of the child”.

Writing for Rushlight Magazine a number of years ago, Joe shed some further light on the tale, revealing that May Sweeney or Mary McSweeney were one and the same person. He maintains that officials, employing an early form of PR, were reluctant to admit that she, and others, had died of starvation in Belfast. McSweeney, became the more Anglican Sweeney, whereas Mary became May – perhaps after the place where she passed.

Regardless of whether Mary McSweeney died of starvation or hunger-induced fever, the barbarity of her death remains the same. Economic injustice robbed her of a chance at life, while a socially alienated and indifferent bureaucracy almost robbed her of part of her identity.
But now, a brand new building that sits adjacent to Clifton Street Cemetery bears her name: The McSweeney Centre is owned by the Ashton Community Trust, a charity set up to tackle severe levels of social and economic inequality. It is at the heart of a social enterprise that helps some of the most disadvantaged communities in Belfast –  a fitting tribute to victim of economic violence.