The Mourning After

Gloomily the delegates trooped down the green and yellow carpet of Dublin's Leinster House and into the dimly lit Dail Chamber. "Like mourners," cracked a newsman, "heavy with the wake's hangover, for the funeral of Kathleen ni Houlihan." Throughout the war stubborn, belligerently neutral Eire had feasted while the rest of the world fought. But last week the feast was over and the grim specter of famine lowered over Eire. Newspaper headlines were black with pessimism, as Eire's editors recalled the great Famine of 1847, when a blight had turned Ireland's young potato plants to withered stalks, leaving a million Irish dead of starvation, and sending a million-odd more to the green fields of America.* In that grim year, reported the official Census of Ireland, "starving people lived on the carcasses of diseased cattle, dogs and dead horses." Was this year, Irishmen asked one another, to be another "Black '47"?

The Government had no answer and few plans. "We're not responsible for sun-spots," snapped mystic mathematician Premier Eamon de Valera at his critics. And while Dev doodled oversize hieroglyphics, at his side nervous, lanky Agriculture Minister Patrick Smith could only assure the Dail that "with the help of God" the weather would mend. "I have faith in the mercy of God," piously echoed an Opposition frontbencher. Like the Government, the Opposition had no further ideas.

Already Eire's farmers were six weeks behind in their plowing. Only a tenth of the usual winter wheat crop had been planted, and there were no potatoes and little spring wheat yet in the ground.

Since January, blizzard after blizzard had struck Eire, until three-quarters of the land was covered with a two-foot layer of granite-hard ice. There is a tradition that on March 17 Saint Patrick turns "the stone warm side up" to make the soft, drying west wind blow over Ireland. Two days before the Saint's day, a thaw came, but with it a ten-hour fall of rain and sleet. Ireland's rivers boiled in swollen anger, flooding the lush valleys in Meath, Carlow, Athlone, Cork and Wexford. In Kilkenny town the floods were the worst in living memory.*

While "cot-fishing crews" (four men with two flat-bottomed boats known as currachs or cots) rescued householders from upper-story windows, watchers on the hills knelt in the downpour and recited the Rosary. Confessionals and prayer-stools floated out of church doors. On the Galtee slopes above Tipperary, sheep, terrified by the mountain torrents, fled to the valley, leaving their lambs to perish. It had never happened before.

"Everybody who has a bit of ground in which he can sow wheat must do it," clarioned Dev. But Eire's farmers knew that, with all the good intentions in the world, they could do nothing until the rains stopped and the drying winds began to blow. "We didn't need Patrick Smith to tell us we depended on God," they said.

By week's end the winds were beginning to blow. Between showers the sun shone fitfully and there was a moon for night plowing. As Eire's farmers drove their spades deep into the soggy earth, Eire's priests prayed for the fine weather to hold. "A grand campaign of prayer and work will save us," said Patrick Collier, Bishop of Ossory.

* In the century following the famine, Ireland's population dropped from 11,000,000 to less than 2,500,000. * Similar floods in Britain (TIME, March 31) had cost British farmers at 1east $80 million in lost crops, the National Farmers' Union estimated last week.

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