Although poverty and the emigration it spawned were to continue to be part of Irish life until the 1980s the Great Famine itself probably ended in 1849. However, pockets of starvation, fever and death could be found in remoter parts for many years afterwards. Indeed the Editor’s mother (now 89) remembers – can’t ever forget – seeing the bodies of two old people who had died of cold and hunger lying in a ditch in Muskerry, County Cork, when she was about 10. “Everyone had to look after their own”, she recalls in an attempt to come to terms with something that still gnaws in her memory.
As we now (1 March – St. David’s Day) go to press we reflect on a Study Day at
Tabernacl Caerdydd (the Welsh Baptists’ place of worship in The Hayes, Cardiff, since 1825) on
Saturday, 27 February during which speakers from various charities were joined by Derry-born Don Mullan
and about 40 participants in considering ‘Ireland’s Great Famine and Famine in
Today’s World’. History can be relevant to our own time and it has been our constant
concern since our first meeting in February, 1995, to remind ourselves that we, the Irish people, have
walked down a death-dealing Famine Road. Today, 150 years on, an
Independent Ireland has become known as ‘The
We also look forward to St.Patrick’s Day, Wednesday 17 March, not just for all of the
usual good reasons (the feastday of our nation’s Welsh-born patron – possibly the
world’s best known and most popular saint – is now second only to Christmas as a
worldwide festival) but because at 11.00 a.m. on that day The Wales National Great Famine Memorial will be unveiled jointly by John Owen Jones MP, Minister of State at
the Welsh Office and Conor O’Riordan, the Consul General of Ireland in Wales, during a public
ceremony in the Catholic plot of Cardiff’s Cathays Cemetery attended by dignitaries from both
Ireland and Wales.
Perhaps at this point a word of apology is due to our patient subscribers and other readers for
the long delay in publishing this edition, due to be published in September last! We can only plead that
we are a voluntary organisation of no more than six active members all of whom are beset by
life’s usual package deal of sickness, toil and trouble, not to mention problems with our computer
and its associated team of technologically challenged wrinklies! That said, we are now looking forward to
producing two further editions before we all become millennarians!
Please note:
A transcript of a tape recording of the recollections of Ben 'Blow' Whelan, born in Ireland over
100 years ago, who spent all his working life in Wales.
Transcription © : The Wales Famine Forum.
*********************
2. Wales, Ireland and Lloyd George
© Dr.John Davies, author of Hanes Cymru (History of Wales) – the first book
in Welsh published by Penguin – delivered this paper in Welsh on Wednesday 6 August 1988 at
the
National Eisteddfod in Bridgend. One of a series of four lectures about Irish-Welsh links arranged by the
Wales Famine Forum it is an updated version of his article in English published in Planet 67, February /
March, 1988 under the same title.
*********************
3. Murder and Transportation : Cardiff 1848
© John O’Sullivan, a freelance journalist and author, living in Cardiff, who descibes the
turmoil that followed the killing of a Welshman by an Irishman in a brawl.
********************* Twentieth century
Immigration and the growth of the Roman Catholic Church in Wales.
© Dr. Trystan Hughes is Head, School of Theology and Religious Studies, Trinity College,
Carmarthen .
*********************
5. Nora
© John O’Sullivan, a Catholic freelance journalist based in Cardiff, who tells of Nora
O'Connor of Cardiff whose father was killed in action during the Great War. Her mother died later when a
ferry travelling to Wales from Ireland was torpedoed on October 11, 1918.
*********************
This is an extended essay on relations between Ireland, Wales, Britain and North America with
particular emphasis on Northern Ireland. The author, © Billy Mathias, is a former North Londoner resident
in Roath, Cardiff. A Q. & A. quiz based upon this essay appeared in the Church in Wales parish magazine
in Cardiff, Roath News, in November (the Questions) and December 1998 (the Answers), as a
celebration of an historic year in Ireland. With an added note for the British PM in the Dublin Parliament in
November, the two pieces noted six Irish ‘first evers.’
*********************
7. The Belfast Agreement - further Reflections
This article on the state of the Northern Ireland peace process is by Sam H. Boyd, Cwmbran,
Wales who was born in Belfast in 1919 into a working class Presbyterian family.
*********************
© Hilary M. Rowley. A shortened version of this article has been published previously in
Ireland’s Own and in the anthology Voices from Wales published last year by
the Bridgend Writers’ Circle of which the author is a member. Bridgend (pop. about 35,000) is
about 20 miles west of Cardiff.
*********************
9. Those Blue Remembered Hills
This is a trip 70 years down memory lane to Belfast's famous Cave Hill by regular contributor ©
Sam H. Boyd, Cwmbran, Gwent, South Wales, who was born in Belfast in
1919.
*********************
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1. An Irish Life in Wales