Customer Reviews

Ballykilcline Rising: From Famine Ireland to Immigrant America

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This was an excellent book. Very absorbing. I read it in a few days and was curled up on the sofa with the book so much that my husband finally said, "What ARE you reading? You never put it down."

I've read many books about the Great Famine and about Irish immigration to America. I liked the fact that Mary Lee Dunn's book followed a specific group of Irish evictees not only to the shores of America but through their lives in their places of immigration, particularly Rutland, Vermont.

It is a good companion book to "The End of Hidden Ireland" by Robert Scally. Dunn's research and observations offer alternatives to some of Scally's views, opening up the floor for discussion and further exploration of the immigrant experience.

I think it really is a significant contribution to an historical area that has gained in interest since the opening of the Famine Museum.

It's difficult if not impossible to write about the past without imposing our present day culture and values on the narrative. Mary Lee Dunn does a fine job in taking us back to mid-nineteenth century Ireland, to the small townland of Ballykilcline in County Roscommon in the undeveloped mid-west of Ireland at the time of the terrible Irish potato famine when landlords were ridding themselves of tenants by paying their emigration costs for America or England. The Ballykilcline landlords had obtained their lease rights from the Crown years before for their service to the Crown in the infamous Irish Parliamentary bribery which resulted in the Act of Union placing Ireland under the British Crown. That lease had expired in 1834 and the tenants, showing more nerve than most other Irish tenants, had seized the opportunity to cease paying their rents - the "rising" of the book's title. Their struggle continued to the famine time, when exhausted, they gave in to English law which was the rent-based, military enforced fist of the English colonial system which had been imposed on Ireland by Britsh conquest and land piracy - the basis of Irish landlordism and "Titles", not ended until modern times.

Ms. Dunn, unlike Robert Scally, whose book on Ballykilcline she relies upon for detailed information (although her own independent research is superb and voluminous)shows sympathy and understanding for the Irish tenants of Ballykilcline and the surrounding area. Although limited in education they were not as ill-informed as Scally thought, as she makes clear. They also showed almost total solidarity in their resistance. Ms. Dunn has a better grasp of the Irish context of the story than does Scally who relies mostly on the English records.

More importantly, whereas Scally left them at the dockside of their boarding of the emigrant ship for America Ms. Dunn follows them across the Atlantic, mainly to the quarry industry towns around Rutland, Vermont where she does a remarkable research job in tracing individual families as the made ther way in the Yankee New England world. A brilliant work of historian's skill.

If I had any criticism of the book it would be that more could have been said about the effects of the famine on the townland people in Ireland, but I know that research on that subject is difficult as the Irish of the time and even later tried their best to forget it themselves, even largely giving up their language.

Would that the famine emigrants from all parts of Ireland had such excellent recorders as Mary Lee Dunn! What a story they have to tell!