Remembering Kilcasheen

Co Clare and the Frost Famine of 1740-41

Arctic Ireland: The Extraordinary Story of the Great Frost and Forgotten Famine of 1740-41 (Belfast, 1998).

Wed 17th July 2024

The Frost Famine of 1740-41 remains a shadowy episode in Irish history, despite being more costly of human life than any other event between the Cromwellian reconquest and the Great Famine of the 1840s.

It remains shadowy because unlike the Great Famine it is not well documented and the oral memory of its impact was lost over time.

The Famine was triggered by a series of weather anomalies that affected most of northern Europe, but the human impact of the strange weather was greatest in Ireland, with Munster and the south Midlands particularly hard hit.

There are several great monuments associated with the crisis still surviving in the Dublin region (on Killiney Hill and at Castletown), the result of privately sponsored relief works, but there does not seem to be a single monument or marker of the event in Munster, the epicentre of the crisis.

The small burial ground near here at Kilcasheen could be an exception to this, where we have unambiguous documentary evidence that it became an emergency burial pit in 1740-41. We will consider whether therefore

west Clare was particularly badly affected by the famine, and if so, why? But whether or not it was, the grave-yard at Kilcasheen can tell a far wider story.

speaker

Professor David Dickson

date

Wed 17th July 2024

time

8:00 PM

location

Cultúrlann Sweeney,
O’Connell St.,
Kilkee V15 P960

admission

Free

About the speaker

Professor David Dickson

David Dickson is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin and has written very widely on the social and economic history of the Irish regions between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Major books include Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster 1630-1830 (Cork, 2005); Dublin: The Making of a Capital (London & Cambridge, MA, 2014); and The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation (New Haven & London, 2021).

He has published a short history of the Frost Famine – Arctic Ireland: The Extraordinary Story of the Great Frost and Forgotten Famine of 1740-41 (Belfast, 1998).