​In the fourteen years since the Roscius delivered Mary Austin to America, County Monaghan experienced destitution on par with the West of Ireland and Skibbereen. Fighting and the decline of the linen industry dominated these changes, and Monaghan was still recalling its painful past until the latter part of the twentieth century.

In 1801, the Act of Union placed Ireland firmly under the control of British Rule. This resulted from the 1798 Rebellion, which fueled anti-loyalist sentiments among Catholics and Protestants who had taken, or were alleged to have taken, the United Irishman oath. Although the significant battles took place in the northern counties, the south also saw its share of fighting. Monaghan, however, was close enough to the epicenters of northern battles that sufficient support was garnered to create groups of fighters. Four men in the Monaghan Militia, who adamantly denied they were United Irishmen, left a lasting impression due to an orchestrated scene at their executions. According to historian Guy Beiner, “they were marched in front of their regiment to the tune of the ‘Dead March in Saul,’ forced to kneel in front of their coffins and shot by a firing squad.” Monaghan’s geographical location to the six counties of Ulster would mean that forgetting the Rebellion of 1798 was impossible. 

The land in Monaghan had been sublet and divided repeatedly because of the growth of the linen industry during the Industrial Revolution. The more tenants on the land, the more rent a landlord could garnish—and so, Monaghan became densely populated. As per historian Patrick Duffy, “The resources of the land clearly had become too fragmented, farms had become minuscule, there were too many people with limited or no access to land, and fewer and fewer of these had access to non-farm incomes.” 

However, as machines replaced human work, the heavily populated areas that were once spinning and weaving their way to economic security in cottage industry style became unemployed and financially unstable. Tenants could not pay rent, and absentee landlords, not witnessing the circumstances firsthand, did not understand the situation but demanded rent payments. 

When Mary Austin emigrated from Monaghan in 1841, the county's population was 200,422, and the main industry source was linen spinning. 185,000 people were living in rural areas. The “linen industry’s spinning and weaving crafts were in rapid retreat,” as per Duffy. The migration from Ulster began decades before the Irish Famine. Mary Austin, a cap maker in the female needle trades in New York City in 1855, is an example of that earlier migration. Mary left when things were bad but were about to get worse. In Duffy's words, “County Monaghan’s experience of the Great Famine reflected very much its peripheral situation in south Ulster.” Monaghan borders Fermanagh, Armagh, and Tyrone, all in Northern Ireland and under British rule.

On August 24th, 1846, County Inspector James J. Sanderson reported his observations from his travels in County Monaghan to the Relief Commission, stating that the blight had ravaged the entire county’s crop. According to his eyewitness report to relief commissioners, Carrikmacross, Castleblayney, Clones, and Glasslough districts were severely affected, with “fields perfectly withered and black and vegetation has to all appearance ceased.” Later that year, in December, The Northern Standard newspaper criticized the government for its laissez-faire policy of non-interference in the market. “Clones and the western districts of the county were suffering while we see droves of bullocks... winding their weary way to some port to be shipped to Liverpool. This week the dead-cart of the workhouse most impertinently intercepted a drove of those bloated natives in a narrow street of our town and the dead-cart stopped, that the living luxuries walking into the maw of England might pass on.” This critique is highly unusual because the newspaper was traditionally strongly unionist. 

Poorer people in rural areas still relied on potatoes as their staple diet. The extent of suffering and starvation accelerated once that crop failed, and no seed was left to replant, compounded by the decline of the linen industry and the ignorance of absentee landlords. “When excluding the towns,” says historian Michelle McGoff McCann, “Monaghan experienced the third heaviest rural decline in Ireland at almost 30 percent between 1841 and 1851.”

A statement dated May 1st, 1847, showing workhouse accommodation in Ireland, shows that Monaghan's workhouse, built to house 900 inmates, added space for 300. By 1848, according to Duffy, Clones workhouse had, “2,600 inmates, and another 4,000 people were obtaining outdoor relief.” 

As the crow flies, less than eighteen miles away from Clones, in the parish of Clontibret, on March 11th, 1847, Cecelia McPhillips arrived at her neighbor’s house. Cecelia had begged all that day and gathered what food she could to feed her four hungry children, now standing on Jane Forsythe’s doorstep. It was not an unusual tradition to allow a neighbor in to cook food. The family was brought inside and fed. The following day, one of the children, Pat, fell ill. The two women lay him on a bed of straw beside the fire, and within an hour of remaining unresponsive, Pat was dead. On March 13th, Cecelia McPhillips carried her son’s body to Saint Coleman’s Church of Ireland graveyard.

At eight o’clock, Benjamin Beatty, the schoolmaster of Clontibret parish, was passing by the church and saw “a woman with a spade trying to bury a child.” When he asked her why she was burying him without a coffin, Cecelia told him she “could not secure one” according to Beatty. After including the archdeacon, Fr. Russell, in the circumstances of Cecelia's predicament and her son’s death, Beatty was given the money to provide a coffin for young Pat and told to buy Cecelia breakfast. Fr. Russell then sent word to the police to come and investigate the youngster’s death. An inquest was carried out by the local coroner, Charles Waddell, and concluded on March 15th that Patrick McPhillips had “no marks of external violence. On one foot was an ulcerated sore, the result of walking great distances with his mother in search of food.” Patrick’s body was “emaciated.” The Doctor who examined his body, Stanley Christian, concluded that the cause of death was a result of “exposure to cold and want of proper nourishing food.”

Another famous native of County Monaghan was Charles Gavan Duffy. Born in 1815 in Monaghan town and raised by the local parish priest, due to the premature deaths of his parents, Duffy became involved in editing newspapers and is historically remembered as the editor of The Nation. Later in his career, Duffy would become the Prime Minister of Victoria in Australia. As a writer and editor, Duffy and his Young Ireland compatriots wrote extensively on the land question and parliamentary opposition in the years leading up to the failed Young Ireland Rebellion of July 1848. The shadow of the failed 1878 rebellion was still being cast across Monaghan and remembered among its natives. 

By 1851, the population of County Monaghan had fallen to 141,000. Patrick Duffy states, “the decline in house numbers is probably the most dramatic of the sweeping nature of the changes across the countryside.” The University College of Cork project, The Great Irish Famine Online shows the population of Clones in the Barony of Dartree in 1841 at 2,877. By 1851, it had decreased to 2,319. Mary Austin was one of those 558 people who left or died in the decade after 1841. 

People left before the famine due to reduced employment in the linen industry; when the potato crop failed in 1845 and again in the following years, the population of Monaghan felt double the pain—high unemployment and requests to pay rent led to destitution or emigration. The walking distance to the ports of Dundalk or Newry may have counteracted County Monaghan's mortality rate during the years of the Irish famine. Many Monaghan natives had already traveled those routes to England and Scotland as migrant laborers. 

A non-catholic from Ulster was given a numerical identifier of 1 in the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank records. When asked by the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank clerk on May 12th 1855, Mary Austin, depositor number 230, was given the numerical identifier of 0.5. Her mother, Mary Bragau, was living in New York, and her father, William McElroy, was deceased. Mary Austin had one daughter, who was also a Mary. She lists her husband as James. Is James Austin, depositor number 229, her husband? He was born in 1827 in Glasgow and emigrated to New York in 1853. Is that score of 0.5 significant of one of her parents being of the protestant faith or that she converted? Like all things related to the Irish Famine, we may never know. However, the few details she supplied to the EISB clerk on that Saturday in May 1855 are rich details about County Monaghan’s history before and after the famine. Details that are still significant in the memory of many County Monaghan natives to this day.

Sources:
1.    The Irish Coroner: Death, Murder and Politics in Co. Monaghan 1846 – 78 by Michelle McGoff McCann
2.    An Atlas of Irish History by Ruth Dudely Edwards
3.    Irish Rebellions 1798 -1921 by Helen Litton
4.    Atlas of Irish History by Sean Duffy
5.    Atlas of the Great Irish Famine editited by Crowley, Smyth and Murphy (essay by Patrick Duffy titled Mapping the Famine in County Monaghan)
6.    The Famine in Ulster edited by C. Kinealy and T Parkhill (essay by Patrick Duffy titled The Famine in County Monaghan)
7.    Forgetful Remembrance by Guy Beiner
8.    The Workhouses of Ireland by John O’Connor
9.    Insight Guides: Ireland
10.  Tyler Anbinder, Cormac Ó Gráda, and Simone Wegge, "Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database, 1850-1858," version 3.0, September 13,           2019, accessed via https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/work/0k225b85w
11.  The Great Irish Famine Online by University College Cork