The Quakers Again

A happy family, we’re told, eats together.  The dinner table is the fulcrum of the family where life is talked out under the benign eye of the loving matriarch. Dad provides some jokes.  It’s not really how I remember meal times growing up. We did eat together, it was important to the family and it was often a laugh, but meals didn’t really take the form of a pleasant middle-class dinner party.  Instead dinner started with a frantic scramble for food, followed by a grim silence as the days takings were consumed.  The atmosphere was more Gulag than Come Dine with Me, talk and laughter followed after dinner was eaten, which in the case of me and my brothers never took more than ninety seconds.  My father approved of this gluttony and insists to this day that it’s a genetic imprint of the Famine.  Irish people, he reckons, were so traumatized by the 1845-49 famine that they consume food in a desperately functional manner.  It’s an interesting hypothesis; although I think in our case eating habits may have been more influenced by our father’s prodigious, Wellesian voracity than some folk memory.  I wouldn’t dismiss the argument altogether though; a person has a right to suppose that the Famine is the single defining event in Irish History.  As with most of our story, it becomes subsumed by the bitterness in our relations with the British, and the Liberal government of the time demonstrated a spectacular disregard for the Irish peasantry.  The second episode of my Quaker documentary, Waterford’s Friends, features a choice quote from Sir Charles Trevelyan to the effect that the Irish deserved what they got.  To be fair, and to fudge the matter as I usually like to, the previous Conservative government of Robert Peel did take what action it could to relieve the situation.  Peel may have been attracted to the Free Market but he was enough of an old school Tory paternalist to believe that when poor people are starving the government may have some responsibility to help.  John Russell’s Whigs in an act of blinkered idealism – which ought not to be lost on us today – wanted the market to decide who lived and who died.  Also to be fair, many of the starving peasants were hunted from their holdings not by absentee landlords but good catholic Irish nationalist farmers from whom they sub-let and from whom they got little in the way of compassion.  However, politics and recrimination aside, the desperate fact of the famine, an event so terrible it could, according to my Dad, genetically program the behavior of subsequent generations of Irish people in their eating habits is what fascinates me.  Our main cemetery in Waterford, Saint Otterans, is located where it is because that is where the refugees from the land died in their hundreds.  The country boreens festooned with the dead and the dying.  The desperate journeys to America where success awaited some, penury the others.  The Waterford Quakers were one of the first (although as they are quick to point out, not the only) groups to organize relief.  Their religion had little time for economic theory, economic practice was more their line; nor were they too interested in questioning the motives of God.  God may have had His reasons, but their job was simple, to help.  What I love about that help was that it often took the form of loans, those they helped paid them back, and the money was reinvested somewhere else.  The Quakers were not interesting in feeling good about themselves, they wanted to get things done.  There was no religious caveat to the help; Quakers don’t seek converts, reasoning that a person must find their own way to God, without nudges.  It seems to me that the Quaker belief in God is so profound that they are much more comfortable in allowing that God discretion in His own decisions, a refreshing contrast to the zealots around the world today who are determined to do God’s will themselves in case, I don’t know, He forgets.  I’m not into conversion myself, I suppose an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Catholic is much the same as an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Quaker, or an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Muslim or an agnostic/atheist/I don’t know Mormon.  But I’ve developed a profound respect for the Quakers of Waterford, as much for their practicality as anything else.  The second episode of Waterford’s Friends is broadcast tomorrow at 11am.