Kerry Girls by Kay Moloney Caball Read Free Book Online Page B

bore the brunt of the disapproval of the courts and newspaper.
    The author’s kinswomen Catherine Mullowney [ sic ] is another mystery woman. She was the daughter of William Mallowney [ sic ] and Honora Doherty and was baptised in Killarney on 6 April 1830. Her parents had married in the parish church in Killarney on 1 October 1826 and she had brothers and sisters. How or why did she end up in Listowel Workhouse, recording on arrival that her father was ‘living in Listowel’ and her native place as Millstreet, Cork? She also stated that she had two cousins, James and Denis Mullowney, living in Sydney.
Kenmare
    The Kenmare girls had the highest number of what we would regard as real orphans. Only Catherine Sullivan’s parents were both alive. Both parents of twenty-two of the Kenmare girls were dead, while Jessie Foley and Margaret Murphy’s mothers were ‘living at Kenmare’. Kenmare also had the highest number of those who could not read or write. Only Jessie Foley, Frances Reardon and Ellen Lovett were literate.
    We can take it that the majority of these Kerry girls came from homes where parents had either died or deserted, or the parents had not married. There is no doubt from what we know of conditions in their localities that starvation and fever had decimated their communities; they either entered the workhouse with their families, some of whom would still have survived there, or they were abandoned by one or other parent in the hope that they would get food and shelter that the parent was unable to supply. Their lives for the previous four years would have been a constant search for food and shelter. They would have wandered through their local townlands, eventually making it to their nearest workhouse, shoeless and usually dressed in rags. We have the testimony of the Quakers and William Forster in particular, who after his tour of Ireland in 1847 issued an appeal to the women of England to make, prepare and collect clothes to send to the Central Relief Committee for distribution among the destitute in Ireland. ‘Many more of those visited [by the Quakers] were widows with young children. In most cases the families had no food, no beds, no fire, little furniture and hunger was so far advanced that many nursing mothers had ceased to lactate. Shortage of clothing was also seen as a problem, as the heads of the families were unable to seek work when they did not have adequate clothing’. 14
    There is no doubt that the inmates of the workhouses and in particular these young girls were there only because it was a last resort for food and shelter and that they were deserving of the opportunity to get out and start a new life on the other side of the world. Whether they were equipped to take on the tasks that awaited them there is another question, though their background, with its deprivations and challenges, would have prepared them for the pioneering spirit which would require ‘plenty of honest perspiration and unglamorous toil, a quality of silent heroism and the capacity to endure heartbreak’ 15 that Sid Ingram said of later Irish emigrants to Australia.
    Margaret O’Sullivan (Cooper)
    Margaret O’Sullivan left Kenmare Workhouse on 6 December 1849 initially travelling to Plymouth and then to Sydney. She travelled on the John Knox , arriving on 29 April 1850.
    We know from the note on the Kenmare Board of Guardians Minutes that Margaret was from Kenmare East Division. When she arrived in Sydney, her arrival papers tell us that she was aged 20, her parent were ‘Connor & Mary, both dead’. She could not read or write and had ‘no relatives in the colony’.
    Kilgarvan is a village in south-east County Kerry near the Cork boundary. It is mountainous country with little fertile land. Sullivan is by far the most common name in that part of Kerry. In Griffith’s Valuation of 1852, there were eighty-seven families of Sullivan or O’Sullivan in Kilgarvan parish. Many of these Sullivans are descendants of the