Andrew Dwyer: Why Did You Leave Ireland?

 

Why Did Andrew Dwyer Leave Ireland?

I wondered if it was because of the famine. I have to admit that I got a bit side tracked learning about the Famines in Ireland, it makes for interesting reading. Reading about the potato famine really brings it home to me how lucky we are to live where and when we do. I’ve learned that the Famine was not a single event, and it is sobering to read the statistics. 1845/49 - The Great Irish Famine lays waste to the Irish landscape, one out of every nine inhabitants die

This from: http://sites.rootsweb.com/~irlkik/famine.htm.

Since its introduction to Europe in the late 16^th century growing potatoes spread. In Ireland the potato slowly took the place of other staple crops like oats and barley and even green vegetables to become, by the 1840’s, the chief food crop.  By 1845 more than half the population of Ireland was largely dependent of the potato for food and as a crop to sell.

It was particularly cold and wet during the growing season in !816 giving rise to the first significant crop failure This deterioration continued into 1817 causing near famine conditions. Conditions that were worsened by an outbreak of typhus. An Irish diarist Amhlaoibh Ó Suilleabháin, noted of 1817 that

	… we had seventeen weeks of continuous rain which rotted the ripe corn and that already cut on the ground, and left the rest un-ripened. I myself saw oats, still unripe, being cut on the first day of the new year in 1818, the year of the plague when thousands of people died, as a result of eating rotten half-ripe food. ... And the potatoes were wet, tasteless, and without nourishment."

 More crop failures in the 1820s and 1830s were documented by diarist Amhlaoibh Ó Suilleabháin, as in this sad entry from July 26 1830

 The initial success of the potato as an easy crop to grow meant that farmers and their families were more well fed and successful which in turn led to a rapid population increase country wide. Iin 1838 Ireland as whole had a population of about 8 million, and the population of Kilkenny was about 200,000. Poverty was widespread and it was estimated that up to half the population was illiterate. That same year in July the very unpopular Poor Law Act came int law, opposed by both sides of the parliamentary denomination divide (Catholics and protestants)

In simple terms the Poor Law Act was an attempt to compel those who were destitute to earn their ‘relief’ by working at a workhouse, becoming over the next few years the primary means of supporting pauper families across the whole of Ireland. he Kilkenny workhouse was in operation by 1842

 

The Kilkenny Workhouse

https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/features/the-kilkenny-workhouse-mass-burials-an-archaeology-of-the-great-irish-famine.

While I have no idea if Andrew and his  family were inmates of a workhouse the very idea of them may have been enough to leave Ireland and seek a better life in England.

The fact that the first time that Andrew shows up in a public document is his marriage to Susanna in 1854 leads me to conclude that he was likely an adult when he came to England. As Susanna’s parents were also Irish I did wonder if Andrew was in Bristol before London, but sometime between the birth of Susanna’s sister Julia Croker in 1846 in Bristol and the 1851 census Susanna and her family went from Bristol to London’s West Ham., which is where Susanna married Andrew Therefore, I think it is reasonable to conclude that Andrew and Susanna Croker met in London.

So, I still do not know if the famine was the cause of him leaving.