Walkers jam the pavement, trying to keep to the left. Like many roads in rural Ireland, this one through the Doolough Valley is narrow.
“I can’t wait to spread out,” I whisper to my niece, Shannon. She smiles back. We both enjoy a good walk but are used to setting our own pace. I push toward the edge of the crowd, reminding myself that today’s route is 12 miles long, so there will be plenty of time to find my own rhythm and stride.
The sun beats down. It is unusually warm for spring in County Mayo, which is as far west as you can go in Ireland without falling into the sea. County Mayo is named from the Irish mhaigh eo, meaning “plain of the yew trees,” and its uplands rise in stark ridges; the lowlands unfold into expanses of heath broken by whitewashed houses and grazing sheep.
We don hats and apply sunscreen, grateful for the shade of rhododendrons and moss-covered oaks as we set out. After the first quarter mile, the trees give way to open stretches of land. Mountains surround us; an overlay of grasses makes the ridges appear velvet. A lake shimmers alongside the road. Blooming gorse adds bits of yellow to the landscape. The views are so stunning, I have to remind myself that the Doolough Valley may look like the Ireland of dreams, but we are here because it also represents a kind of nightmare.
“Walking is a desperate act,” Joe Murray said to the hundreds of us walkers before the annual Afri Famine Walk began. We had gathered to hear from an impressive array of speakers, and judging by the tears and nodding heads in the crowd, each speaker’s words and music had hit home. But Joe’s in particular struck a chord with me. The words of the former coordinator of Action From Ireland—known as Afri, which has organized the walk since 1988—were simple and softly spoken. “Think about those who walked in desperation in the past,” he said. “And those who continue to walk in desperation today.”
This 12-mile walk is a choice for me, my sister and my niece; all of us have traveled many miles to be here today. But walking is also what people do when they have nothing left to lose.
I think of the neighborhoods I grew up in, places where people take buses when they’re lucky enough to scrape together fare but otherwise rely on their feet. I think of unhoused people shuffling along city streets; refugees crossing borders; the Choctaw, Cherokee and other Native American people walking hundreds of miles on the Trail of Tears after being cleared from their land. And when the potato failed and families were evicted or forced to abandon their homes in search of food, the Irish took to walking too.
An Gorta Mór
Many Americans know about the 19th-century famine that turned Ireland inside out. Whether we learned about it in school or from family stories, we understand the failure of the potato crop as a catastrophic event that shaped not only Ireland but America itself, as the Irish were forced to flee their homes in droves. More than 38 million Americans claim Irish ancestry; over half are Irish Catholics whose families emigrated as a result of the famine. Known as An Gorta Mór (the “Great Hunger”) in Irish, the famine is often discussed in terms of Ireland’s overreliance on the potato as a food source and the misfortune of the blight that decimated its crops starting in 1845. We tend to speak less about England’s negligent response or the tons of food grown in Ireland that was exported to Britain even as Irish families starved. We do not always know or remember that Ireland was already reeling from centuries of foreign occupation before the first potato ever went black.
The failure of the potato crop was simply the last straw and brought Irish suffering to a fever pitch. In the seven years of the famine (1845-52), one million people died and more than two million (or a quarter of Ireland’s population) emigrated to Canada, England, Australia—but most of all, to the United States. This trend continued for 50 years, so that, by 1901, Ireland’s population had been halved. No county was left untouched, though the situation was particularly dire in the south and west, where 90 percent of the population relied on the potato to feed themselves. Things were so bad in Mayo, people took to adding “God help us” whenever the name of their home county was invoked. Where do you come from? someone might ask, and the answer was never simply Ballina, Westport or Swinford, but Mayo, God help us.
It is no coincidence that this annual Famine Walk, which retraces the steps of those who walked in desperation and hunger during the height of the famine, takes place in Mayo’s Doolough Valley.
The Doolough Tragedy
It was the weekend before Easter 1849 when the poor of western Mayo gathered in Louisburgh.
Because palms were not widely available, the feast day was called Domhnach an Iúir, or Yew Sunday, in Ireland, and people broke sprigs from yews to have them blessed at Mass. Church is where those in Louisburgh would have been on a Sunday morning in ordinary times, but in March of that year, nothing was normal in Ireland.
The British system of famine relief was predicated on the belief that the Irish character was not only lacking but to blame for the crisis. A scheme of local workhouses and outdoor work projects was preferred over charity, which was viewed as a last resort. The rules for its receipt were unyielding. To be certain the poor were worthy of relief, for instance, they were required to submit to regular inspection. Neither grain nor admission to the workhouse would be given without an officer checking to be sure those seeking it were truly in need. As Captain J. M. Primrose, one of the local inspectors, wrote in a report for the Westport Poor Law Union the month before:
No application for relief has been granted by the Vice-Guardians, without a most careful scrutiny into the circumstances of each case : as a proof, I may adduce that during the last six weeks the number of applicants amounted to 11,430, of whom 6362 were either rejected or did not appear… [Feb. 7, 1849]
It is unclear how many gathered for inspection in Louisburgh the last week of March, but nearly 1,000 adults had been inspected the week before—along with 1,500 children who also required examination. No record exists, because Captain Primrose and a fellow inspector, Colonel Francis Hogrove, left without seeing those in need. Instead, the men rode on to Delphi Lodge, a hunting lodge 12 miles south. The hungry were, without warning, told to report instead to Delphi Lodge the following morning. Malnourished to begin with, many did not have coats or shoes and had already walked miles to attend inspection in Louisburgh.
They set out at night. It was an unusually cold March. Winds blew in from the Atlantic. Rain became sleet as temperatures dipped below freezing. When those who survived the trek arrived, they were told the officers were lunching and could not be disturbed. No one knows if the inspectors eventually saw the hundreds gathered outside the lodge. All that’s certain is that they were turned away without water or food.
Their bodies were husks, so underweight and broken by hunger that some say many were swept into the lake by the wind. When they trudged barefoot and freezing the day before, they had hope at least. Once they were turned away, whatever hope propelled them the day before was gone.
Katherine Dillon was found with her two children by the side of the road. The bodies of Catherine Grady, Mary McHale and James Flynn were discovered later on. Some say dozens died of starvation and exposure, others report hundreds. Beyond local stories collected by James Berry 60 years later in The Mayo News, much of what is known comes from a series of letters published in The Mayo Constitution in the spring of 1849. An anonymous writer condemned the treatment of those forced to walk to and from Delphi and rebuked the soldiers who turned a blind eye.
What is most shocking is how ordinary Irish misery was by then. In the fourth year of the famine, workhouses were so crowded, the starving were regularly turned away. Fever sheds were packed, as were paupers’ graveyards and ships crossing the Atlantic, which James Joyce would later call the “bowl of bitter tears.” Children slept in hedges and alleyways; men and women roamed the countryside in search of food. So all-encompassing was Irish suffering that, terrible as the incident at Doolough was, it was not well known at the time. Without that anonymous letter writer, the story might have been lost for good.
Hills of Ghosts
“What made you want to walk?” I ask the woman who has come up beside us.
Maura Walsh from Galway says she has been wanting to do the walk for years. “With the day being so sunny,” she says. “I decided this was the year.”
“What about you,” she asks. “What brings you all this way?”
I wonder how to explain the past few years of trying to reconstruct my rather broken family tree. We never knew our extended family growing up, and while we never considered ourselves anything other than an American hodgepodge, a DNA test a few years ago showed my mother had more Irish ancestry than anything else. In piecing together our heritage, I have discovered immigrants named Croake and Cass, Horan and Bahan, Murphy and McNeela. Some came from Tipperary and Offaly, Dublin or Cork, but most came from the hard-hit areas of Mayo, Galway and Donegal.
Because passage was cheaper to Canada, they sailed to Ontario before crossing the border for jobs mining iron in the Adirondacks, cleaning houses in Glens Falls or laboring on the Erie Canal near Rochester.
“I’m here to learn more about my Irish ancestors and the famine,” I tell Maura, knowing how much I sound like an American stereotype. “I’ll bet you’ve heard that a thousand times.”
“Yes,” Maura hesitates. “But it’s important to hear again. We Irish are not great at facing the pain of the past. Maybe that’s why we drink so much.”
Others have shared similar thoughts today. Walkers have talked about the importance of remembering the past but also the necessity of allowing themselves to face the ache of that old wound. Hundreds have come from Canada, England, the United States—but mostly, from all over Ireland—as a way to do that.
Here my sister Stephanie chimes in, telling how we relied on food baskets and donations from our local church as kids. Though we were often the recipients of help, our mother insisted we stand for others besides. For years, she walked the annual Crop Walk for hunger in Rochester, N.Y.
“Our mother died a year and half ago,” Stephanie says. “We’re walking in memory of her, too.”
The sun beats down, the sky is blue for miles. The Mweelrea Mountains rise to the west; to the east are the Sheeffry Hills, Cnoic Shíofra in Irish, meaning “Hills of the Wraith.” The range is aptly named. No matter the reasons we speak aloud, ghosts have brought us here today.
A Famine Repressed
As we push north, the drama of lakes and ridges is replaced by pastureland and boggy fields.
Croagh Patrick comes into view, the holy mountain where St. Patrick is said to have prayed for 40 nights and days. It is a perennial site of pilgrimage.
Abandoned cottages and the furrows of potato beds from the time of the famine still shape the landscape. Just as the earth still bears the mark of history after 175 years, so do the descendants of those who died or emigrated. The Irish are not the only ones who have not fully reckoned with the famine. Americans of Irish ancestry seem more comfortable with a romanticized ideal of an Irish homeland than with the horrors of forced migration that are our bedrock.
Some aches run so deep they are difficult to speak aloud. Unfortunately, silence does not banish the pain but sends it underground, where it is transmitted without words. Perhaps worst of all, our unacknowledged sorrow blunts our ability to see ourselves in those who hunger today. Which is why the Irish-American activist and writer Tom Hayden believed we have a moral and spiritual need to remember, writing “a famine repressed breeds an insipid hunger of its own.”
“We are the ancestors of the future,” Katie Martin, Afri’s newest coordinator, said when I met with her last summer. Founded in 1975 by Father Sean McFerren, a priest of the Salesians of Don Bosco, Afri has moved from a charity model to one of action, solidarity and justice.
Credit: Shannon Heywood
Each year the organization invites artists and activists from communities affected by famine, human rights abuses or genocide to lead the walk. Past leaders have included Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Gary White Deer of the Choctaw Tribe, who, recognizing something of themselves in the Irish, had donated money to help victims of the famine in 1847. This year’s leaders are the screenwriter Paul Laverty, the seed keeper Dr. Clare O’Grady Walshe, the Palestinian photojournalist Eman Mohammed and the Irish-Libyan musician Farah Elle.
“The actions we take today become our legacy,” Katie Martin said. “Will we care for those in need or look the other way?”
The Real Blight
We walk on. Croagh Patrick is close enough that we can see the chapel on its summit. Maura chats with my sister. My niece and I study the columbine and marsh orchids along the roadside.
“How much longer?” I ask.
“An hour,” Shannon says.
After five hours of walking, we feel the effects of the heat. Volunteers pass on bicycles and cars to check in. “Almost there,” they say, offering encouragement and bottled water. I can’t help but think how such care would have changed everything for the hundreds on this path in 1849 and how it still might change the lives of others today.
While poverty is not new to me, it has been largely relegated to the past. Like many, I struggle with how best to respond to the overwhelming need today. Even if we could somehow untangle the politics and agree on an approach to ensure that every person is fed and housed, there is another hunger, deeper still. How else to explain why even those of us with plenty seem famished for something we can’t quite name?
Up ahead, a trio of walkers has stopped. They cup their ears and lean toward the hedge. A bird calls as we approach. “A cuckoo!” I say. We stop walking and go quiet, smiling while listening to the bird’s distinctive song.
This is why I’m here, I realize. Not the cuckoo necessarily, but the simple act of stopping to share the ordinary miracle of its song—and the example of those checking in to help anyone with a blister or too much sun. They seem like such simple things, yet how often do I stop and check in? I’d told myself I’d traveled to the Doolough Valley to face the hunger of the past, but hadn’t I really come to better understand how to face the hungers of today?
An Gorta Mór was willful blindness at best, genocide at worst. Irish crops began to rot in 1845, but the failure to recognize God in the faces of the suffering was the real blight—one that remains with us today. Whether in Mayo or Belfast, Ukraine or Russia, Gaza or Israel, El Paso or Rochester, N.Y., we must do our best to help those who suffer—for their sake, but also for ours.
I think back to how I began this walk, lingering along the edges, searching for my own pocket of space. There is nothing wrong with solitude, but the greatest hunger we have is for one another. What good is walking for the victims of historical famine if I cut myself off from people on the same path today? We can rally for change and donate with the best of intentions—both of which are essential—but we cannot heal from the devastating divisions of the past until we step out of our comfort zones and accompany others on the road today.
“If we have no peace,” St. Teresa of Kolkata said. “It is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”
We belong to one another. Is anything more radical or hopeful than that?
This article appears in March 2026.
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