County Clare Emigration: Leaving the West of Ireland

Every Irish county lost people in the nineteenth century, but the leaving from Clare had a particular character, and you can still read it in the stones of the west of the county: roofless gables and tumbled walls where houses were not abandoned but deliberately pulled down. County Clare emigration history is inseparable from eviction. More than almost anywhere else in Ireland, Clare’s people did not simply decide to go. Thousands of them were put out, and for those families the road to the emigrant ship began on the morning the landlord’s crowbar crew came up the boreen.

That deserves to be told plainly, because it is the part of the story that official memory was most inclined to soften, and because one man made sure it could never be denied.

The Kilrush clearances

In the Famine years the poorest corner of Clare was governed, for Poor Law purposes, from Kilrush, and the Kilrush union became the most notorious eviction ground in Ireland. Captain Arthur Kennedy, the government’s own Poor Law inspector, arrived there in November 1847 and served until September 1850, and he refused to let what he saw pass unrecorded. By the time he took up the post, some six thousand notices to quit had already been issued across the union. In the eight months that followed, around nine hundred houses, holding roughly four thousand people, were levelled, and the destruction carried on after that without pause.

Kennedy counted, named and reported. His accounts went to the Poor Law Commissioners in Dublin and on to London, many of them printed in a parliamentary blue book in 1849, and in 1850 a select committee of the House of Commons sat to examine the Kilrush union. Its investigation bore him out, confirming around 2,700 recorded evictions in the union, the clearance of at least twelve thousand people, and the levelling of some two thousand homes. One union, in one county.

All the while the hunger was doing its own clearing. Clare’s population fell from roughly 286,000 in 1841 to about 212,000 in 1851, and the county’s historians reckon more than fifty thousand of its people died between 1845 and 1850. For a family standing beside the ruin of their cabin, the choices had narrowed to three: the workhouse, the grave, or the ship.

Where County Clare emigration history led

For most, the ship meant North America. Clare’s emigrants poured into the ports of the eastern United States and Canada through the Famine decade and long afterwards, and Clare became one of the western counties that Boston in particular drew on most heavily, alongside Cork, Kerry and Galway. The pattern was the familiar chain. One member of a family got out, found work, and sent the passage money home for the next, so that a single foothold in Massachusetts or New York slowly hauled a whole townland across the water. It is the same worn chain you can follow in the road Galway’s emigrants made to Boston, one county up the coast.

Once landed, they took the work that was going, the men into labouring, the docks and later the railways, the women overwhelmingly into domestic service, and out of those wages came the folded dollars that kept the people at home alive. In the worst-cleared parishes of west Clare, the American money was not a luxury. It paid the rent that kept the next family off the roadside, and in time it paid the next passage out.

Some of the leaving was organised, and paid for, by the very Poor Law machinery that had presided over the clearances. In the years after the worst of the Famine, unions shipped parties of their workhouse poor across the Atlantic, and the recorded parties from Clare were among the largest anywhere in Ireland: 389 people sent from the Kilrush union to Quebec, and another 376 from Ennistymon.

And some of it was children. Under the Earl Grey scheme, which between 1848 and 1850 took just over four thousand young women orphaned by the Famine out of Irish workhouses to the Australian colonies, more than a hundred Clare girls were chosen from four of the county’s workhouses. Eighty-one of them, aged between fifteen and eighteen, from the Ennis, Scarriff and Ennistymon houses, sailed together on the Thomas Arbuthnot. Another thirty left the Kilrush workhouse for Melbourne on the Pemberton in 1849. Every name on those lists was a teenager who had already buried her family, sent to the far side of the world for a life in domestic service, and few ever saw Clare again.

Australia kept its pull afterwards. Assisted passages made it a realistic destination for rural families with nothing, and in the 1860s, with America at war with itself, the flow tilted further that way for a time. But across the century as a whole, the far greater number of Clare’s emigrants went west across the Atlantic, not south.

The leaving that would not stop

Clare’s emigration neither began nor ended with Black ‘47. The county had already known famine and flight in 1822, after the ruined harvest of the year before, and people had been going in numbers ever since. What the Great Famine and the clearances did was turn a current into a flood, and the flood never fully receded. Clare’s population went on falling for more than a century, decade after decade, until by the mid-1960s around 73,500 people lived in a county that had held some 286,000 before the Famine. Roughly a quarter remained. Three of every four, with all their descendants, were somewhere else, and mostly in America.

Finding a Clare family in the records

There is a bitter paradox in all of this for anyone tracing their people: the same machinery that put Clare’s families out also wrote them down. Kennedy’s reports and the evidence gathered by the 1850 select committee preserve names, townlands and dates for thousands of evicted families. The workhouse admission registers and union minute books do the same for those who passed through the houses at Kilrush, Ennis, Ennistymon and Scarriff, and the Earl Grey embarkation lists carry the orphan girls’ names to the far end of their voyages. Passenger records at Boston, New York and Quebec sometimes close the circle.

If you know a surname and a rough townland, start there and work outward through the parish registers and the civil records, and let the union papers fill in the hardest decade. The Clare Heritage and Genealogy Centre has spent decades gathering exactly these threads for exactly this purpose, and the famine-era parliamentary papers, Kennedy’s evidence among them, are increasingly available to read online.

What none of those records can give you is what it felt like: the last night in the townland, the bundle carried to the boat, the first envelope home with money in it. For that you need the other kind of document, the kind almost no evicted family had the chance to leave behind. The series this journal belongs to follows one family through those same hungry years, and a mother writing through them from the west of Ireland opens the story in 1847. If your own people were among the Clare thousands, you can choose Clare for its own edition, a family and a century of letters from home set in Clare and posted from Ireland. Editions are written county by county, Mayo first, in the order founding readers ask.