IRL-CORK-L Archives

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Subject: RE:Newspaper Article full transcript
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2001 17:17:53 EDT

TITLE: When despair drove starving to our shore
Newport's flourishing Irish community is recalling its tragic origins , the
Irish potato famine and the huge exodus of people fleeing starvation more
than 150 years ago.
Generations of families from Ireland settled here in Newport. We have a
thriving Irish club and a Gaelic football league, numerous Irish bars and
noisy celebrations on St. Patrick's Day bearing testimony to them.
The terrible famines in Ireland of 1846 and 1847 caused over two million
Irish to flee.
In Britain they entered by Liverpool, Glasgow and the South Wales ports.
Cheap deck passages could be obtained for a few shillings and exports of coal
from Cardiff to Cork meant that free passages could be had to provide ballast.
Conditions on board ship were dreadful and the scenes at the riverbank in
Newport must have been horrific.
At best a throng of emaciated, ragged men, women and children would stagger
from the holds, half dead, to make theigh way through the town to the
workhouse.
Others, forced to jump ship or swim ashore in their desperation to reach
Newport, crawled through the thick mud of the River Usk.
The Monmouthshire Merlin records that in 1847 the Mayor of Newport detained
a vessel belonging to a Skibbereen grain merchant because it had been used to
land poor, destitute Irishmen. Over 60 of these men from Skibbereen and
Clonakilty died on landing due to fever and starvation.
In 1849 , some 200 persons, many sick, were thrown ashore from an Irish
collier some way downstream to find their own way to the town. The next day
,only some sixty crawled from the mudbanks to the streets.
Soon after, William Sutton, the master of the Mary, a Cork schooner, was
fined the considerable sum of 50 pounds for dumping Irish on the riverside.
In August 1849 the packet Abaelino left Newport for Boston, Massachusetts,
where the large Irish colony was steadily growing. It is likely that some of
those early Irish/Newport set sail again in search of a better life.
To the good of Newport , many decided to settle here. The grim conditions of
19th century South Wales were a haven compared with the famine they had fled.
In some streets the Murphys, Cashmans, Coades and Ryans outstripped English
names - and even the Welsh. End.

I hope this article is of interest, particularly be interested if anyone has
information on the Abaelino.
Regards
Richard Ryan. Researching Evans( Cork) also McCarthy and Halloran (
Clonakilty)

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