Thought for the Week: Mullinbouys
Ian Kirk-Smith reflects on being of service in his final 'Thought for the Week' as editor
On 11 November 2004, a room in Dublin Castle hosted the most significant state ceremony of the year. The stage was crowded with men. There were only half a dozen women, one a Quaker and another, centre stage, a Catholic brought up in Ardoyne in North Belfast during the troubles, then an IRA stronghold where a helicopter hovered overhead twenty-four hours a day, a place I knew well from cleaning blocked drains and manholes with my father’s small firm in the 1970s.
On a Saturday afternoon, nine years later, at Ireland Yearly Meeting in Cork, some Friends went on a guided tour of Cobh, where the Titanic docked before leaving for America. The tour guide, a local historian, was thanked at the end and offered some money. He refused it, saying he would not take money from Quakers because of what they had done in the Irish famine of the 1840s.
I recently met an old film-making colleague who said that my ‘disappearance’ to ‘some strange God job in London’ in 2010 had bewildered him, especially when he learnt I had only a few hundred pounds to pay for ‘editorial content’ for fifty-one issues of the magazine compared with the generous budgets I enjoyed at the BBC for my documentaries. He was surprised to learn of the depth of my loneliness at times and that I had only seen my wife, my best friend, for a week or so each month for eight years. He said: ‘Why make such a personal sacrifice?’
I tried to offer an explanation. I am a Quaker. My Methodist family had a small farm in Mullinbouys in South Donegal and survived the Irish famine. A relative, William Kirk, still farms the land. Many poorer Catholics along the coast died – but many lived because they had ‘soup’ boiled in massive ‘famine pots’. These were an early Quaker initiative. I went to London, I said, to ‘remember British Friends of long ago’ who provided the huge cauldrons, set up ‘soup kitchens’ and gave unstinting financial help to Irish people and Irish Friends. It was a gesture of gratitude for what they had done, especially for people in South Donegal. They followed an Inner Light.
This answer seemed to go in one of his ears and rapidly out the other. His bemused response was that I had always been ‘passionate, enigmatic and different from the rest of us’. Well, it has been wonderful each day to share a sense of common purpose with a few fine people, the finest, committed to a worthwhile enterprise, and to offer some service to British Quakers, and inspiring to encounter the loyalty of subscribers.
We do not, for good and ill, forget the past in Ireland. The compassion of British Friends during the famine is etched indelibly into the Irish psyche and, indeed, my soul. My wife was on stage, representing 2,000 Quakers on an island of six-and-a-half million, at the re-inauguration of Mary McAleese as president of Ireland, because of this past. I watched the ceremony in a pub in Hillsborough where you could get RTE – my first venture after a heart attack. I was so proud that day of my wife, of Mary McAleese, and of being a Friend. I feel very privileged to have been the only Irish editor of the Friend in 175 years and to have followed the Inner Light which, for me, is the Light of Christ.
The Inner Light is eternal. Wait on it. Trust it. Roll up your sleeves and get on with the work that has to be done. I write this on the Holyhead-Dublin ferry, my last trip as editor, and Ireland has just come into view to starboard. The boat is shipshape.
Time now, I fear, to do the washing up properly.
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Famine pots
Quakers brought about 300 ‘famine pots’ into Ireland during the Irish famine of 1846-1852. Many were made at the iron foundry owned by the Quaker Darby family at Coalbrookdale. In the first consignment, in early 1847, the largest number, ten, went to Killybegs, a few miles along the coast of South Donegal from Mullinbouys. oatmeal, salt and pepper, water, vegetables, nettles and herbs were boiled in them. Quakers later hired ships to bring medicine, food and supplies. They contributed to saving possibly hundreds of thousands of lives. In a Famine Exhibition at Cavan Museum it said: ‘Quakers are fondly remembered because they did not require a conversion from Catholicism before offering help.’
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