Mutton Island and Celia Griffin Park

Salt Hill, west of Galway, is a nice place for a stroll on the waterfront and through Irish history. The walk from Galway city center, along the River Corrib to South Park, is an escape from the hurly-burly and vitality of the destination town to a sedate and meditative contemplation of sea, skies, or the concerns and things that occupy us. For me that means two dozen university students in their third and final week of a study abroad program with all the attendant problems thereto: fatigue, nagging illnesses, and looming expectations of returning home – a happy event for some, a cause for despair for others. Managing schedules, expectations, and anxieties are wearing. That is not a reflection upon the students who have been great this year, but instead the realities of the job.

Most people think of Ireland as a single island, politically divided. Extending about half a mile into the bay, a causeway to Mutton Island provides an example of the many small islands that dot the coast of the country. With a tantalizing lighthouse, Mutton Island is home to a sewage and water treatment plant today. A gate at the end of causeway prevents visitors to the island but has excellent views of the bay and Salt Hill.

Mutton Island in the distance

A little farther west is Celia Griffin Park. When a park is named after a local person, often it is done so for a person who has been a resident for a long time. A park being named after someone is likely an acknowledgement of some good service rendered to the community. In the case of Celia Griffin, this is not the case. She was only six years old, and a resident of Galway for about six weeks, when she succumbed to hunger and famine in 1847. According to an inquest published in a local newspaper, Celia and her family made their way from Corrandulla, a small village some 17 kilometers away, looking for relief. Although she was taken to a convent, provided food and care, she was too weak to recover, becoming one of the many victims of the famine. If it had not been for the park’s name, she would have likely become yet another unknown victim of the famine travesty. The park is named and dedicated to Celia and all the children who died during the events that killed perhaps a million people and precipitated the emigration of many more.

The Griffin family had been residents on the estate of Thomas Barnwall Martin, a member of an important merchant family and British member of parliament representing Galway. He would die about six weeks after Celia, contracting typhus after trying to assist tenants. His only daughter and heir, the novelist Mary Letita Martin, would preside over the loss of the family fortune, as she tried to help as many tenants are she could. She and her husband, facing destitution, would emigrate to the United States in 1850, where she died ten days after arriving because of complications from a premature. Mary and her baby, who did not survive, were collateral casualties of the famine as well.

The park overlooks Galway Bay and a monument for those who left Ireland during the famine on the so-called Coffin Ships. Many passengers attempting to escape the famine, sick with disease like cholera and typhus, crowded on ships destined for North America. The ships had delivered goods and food to Europe and took on passengers for the return trip as “human ballast.” As a deckhand on one such ship, Herman Melville noted in 1849 that passengers were “stowed away like bales of cotton and packed like slaves in a ship. . . We had not been at sea one week when to hold your head down the hatchway was like holding it down a cesspool.” Upwards of a third of passengers on the coffin ships would die during the voyage. The monument notes that for those escaping from the Port of Galway the light from the Mutton Island Lighthouse would have been the last light from their homeland. At the other end of the journey, migrants’ difficulties did not end. On Grose-Ile, on the Saint Lawrence River near Quebec City, a Canadian national historical site honors the migrants as well.

The Coffin Ship Memorial on an appropriately overcast day

Like many photographs I have taken in Ireland, it looks to be gray and cold – but today it is gray and mild.  As I approached Mutton Light Memorial, camera in hand, an older man with a closely cropped gray beard, a black jacket zipped to the neck, looked me in the eye. He tilted his head, lifting his chin, in a form of approval, raised his right hand with his index finger raised, and pointed at me as we passed.  I nodded in appreciation, but we did not speak a word. Since I encountered him, I have occasionally contemplated whether we were having the same thoughts, or he was just enjoying the relatively mild weather.