Post Famine Donegal
Taken from Donegal History & Society (Editors: William Nolan, Liam Ronayne and Mairead Dunlevy)

The wife of a prominent landlord in south Donegal suggested that the only remedy for the endemic poverty of Donegal in the late nineteenth century was for the people:

"to rely on their own industry and efforts, instead of becoming public beggars, or beseeching the government to help them - in other words requesting the government to hand over to them the result of other people's labours. If a healthier tone would be infused, and the people roused from their old indolent ways, Donegal's great curses - misrepresentations, begging, and laziness - would vanish, and we should hear no more pitiable appeals. Doling out meal, abusing landlords, and blaming Government can never be the cure for the evils from which these congested districts suffer. At present there is neither industry nor the desire for improvement. When seasons do not fail the people can exist, and are happy, and do not care for settled work. They have their warm cabins, and all the winter the men lounge about doing nothing. To get the people away from the crowded districts and into more profitable field of labour, if possible at home, if not, abroad, is the only cure for Donegal. Thousands of girls could find employment in the factories of Belfast and vicinity, but as long as meal can be had for the asking, the people will not exert themselves."

The statement is all the more remarkable because it referred to subjects of the crown in an Ulster county in terms redolent of the pateralism, racism and ethnocentrism normally reserved for subordinate communities in colonial Africa and India. Many of the poor 'vanished' from Donegal not only to Belfast but also to England, Scotland, and North America with hardly enough English to write their names. Thus nationalists make political capital out of the fact that from the late nineteenth century onwards Donegal became an 'emigrant nursery' which exported surplus labourers to the core areas of world capitalism in order to make room for 'graziers and their bullocks' in rural Catholic Ireland.

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