Fourteen years ago, Canadian authors were producing 27 per cent of English-language books sold in Canada. Today we account for 13 per cent. That is not a misprint: Canadians who write books in English produce only 13 per cent of all books purchased in Canada. Don't take my word for it. Check out this story from the Globe and Mail, which compares extensive surveys from 2005 and 2018. Am I the only one who finds that drop alarming? More than 50 per cent! Globe writer Kate Taylor identifies causes and suggests that the federal government should get involved and I'm on board with that. But surely it's time for individuals who care about what's happening to get active. I'm thinking that writers, publishers, booksellers and serious readers should launch a campaign to follow the Irish model. OK, it's not just Irish. The Scots and the Aussies are also out front on this. But above we see an image of an independent bookseller in Kilkenny, Ireland.
To the right, we discover a wall of books near the front of the shop. Note one thing: these are all Irish books: Irish interest, Irish history, Irish biography, Irish literature and poetry, Irish travel. Why, it's whole separate section with a national focus. If in Canada our booksellers were encouraged to emulate that approach, we could support them in developing a section called, oh, I don't know: Canadiana? Yup. It's high time for us to go Back to the Future. 

In 1324, Alice Le Kyteler -- original owner of this Kilkenny inn -- was accused with various accomplices of witchcraft. Beauteous and clever, the daughter of a Norman banker, Alice had survived four husbands and amassed no small fortune. All this excited the jealousy of powerful contemporaries. Alice was tried, found guilty, and condemned to be whipped through the streets and then burnt alive at the stake. She escaped this fate through the intervention of "certain of the nobilitie" who conveyed her to England, where she disappeared. Her maid, Petronella, enjoyed no such happy flight. Condemned as one of the accomplices, she suffered the horrific fate intended originally for her mistress. Medieval times. That Alice's house had been a place of "merrymaking and good cheer" is the only charge that has stood the test of time. Kyteler's Inn has reverted to its old ways, as you can read on a sign within. It offers those of "the most jaded of appetites" music, home-made food, and a selection of quality wines and beers. True, those who work at the inn have frequently reported ghostly goings-on. Paranormal investigators have felt a presence, and not long ago, four women-friends from Wexford accidentally captured photos of a black shadow heading up the stairs behind them. Was it Alice? Petronella? In Kilkenny, that mystery awaits resolution.

It's not that far to Tipperary -- not if you start in Kilkenny. That's what we did. The statue to the left commemorates John and Patrick Saul, two boys abandoned by their parents at the docks in Dublin. The butcher and his wife boarded a ship for Australia after first telling their sons, ages 15 and 13, they had a better chance of surviving if they turned back and made for home in Clonmel, County Tipperary. The year was 1842. The boys, increasingly hungry as they travelled, called in at the newly built workhouse in Kilkenny. Their story surfaced in 2005, when developers began turning the prison-like workhouse into the splendiferous MacDonough Junction Shopping Centre. The statue is one of the highlights of the Kilkenny Famine Experience -- a 50-minute audio-visual tour that takes visitors through the story of the Great Hunger as it unfolded in this location. The big surprise came when excavators came upon the forgotten graves of more than 970 people who died here -- among them 545 children -- mostly between 1845 and 1851. Rations were spartan but few died of starvation. Disease got them first, either typhus, typhoid, diptheria, smallpox, tuberculosis or cholera. Bullying, amputations, riots, death-dealing stampedes, this place had them all. As the potato famine wore on and workhouse conditions worsened, the Saul brothers set out for home. But Tipperary! Sheena and I drove half an hour west into that county, sometimes along one-lane roads with a ridge of grass down the middle. We went not to Clonmel but to the Famine Warhouse, site of an incident known as the Battle of Widow MacCormack's Cabbage Patch. By 1848, not
surprisingly, the never-ending famine -- the deaths, the coffin ships -- sparked a reaction.  Several of the leaders of the rebels, known collectively as Young Ireland, trapped a group of policemen in this house near Ballingarry. The police took the widow's children hostage and held on until reinforcements arrived.  Before long, most rebel leaders were rounded up, jailed, and transported to penal colonies in Australia. Anybody still with me?

Here we have the Dunbrody Famine Ship in New Ross, County Wexford -- one of the finest memorials of the Great Hunger in all Ireland. I've posted about visiting the EPIC emigration museum, the exhibition at St. Stephen's Green, and the Jeannie Johnston. Since then the biggest surprise has been the Famine Exhibition in the agricultural museum at Johnstown Castle:  who could have guessed that it would be so detailed and, indeed, superb? Even against all that, this replica of the Dunbrody is an exceptional site. The original ship was built in Quebec in 1845, the first year of the Irish famine. It was one of eight vessels owned by W.S. Graves that plied between New Ross and both Quebec City and Manhattan. Relatively large -- 176 feet long and 28 feet wide -- the three-masted barque carried an average of 200 people per voyage across the Atlantic, and on one occasion, during 1847, a total of 313. The ship had two cabins for first-class passengers, but the vast majority were confined below decks for most of the six or seven week voyage. There they slept in 40 bunk beds roughly six feet square, with four to eight people per bunk. Brutal. The dozen crew who manned the ship enjoyed better food and conditions -- after all, they constituted the ship's engine. But they would not be paid until they arrived back in Ireland, because otherwise, whoosh, they might disappear on landing. An excellent tour guide named Mark laid all this out as we set sail in 1849. He introduced two women actors -- one sailing first-class,  the other travelling with us in steerage (see photo below) -- who told their own stories, incidentally
highlighting the class structure of the era. During the famine years (1845-1852), 1.5 million Irish emigrated on ships like the Dunbrody, while another 1.5 million died at home. During the following decade, another 2 million left Ireland. As a result, Canadians who claim Irish heritage today total just under 5 million . . . while in the U.S., the total is a staggering 35 million.

The terrible parallels hit you like a bucket of cold water in the face -- at least if you have been immersed for a while in Scotland's Highland Clearances. Check out the image to the right. Looks like it could be from a Scottish Clearance in Sutherland or Glengarry, or perhaps Lewis, Uist or Barra. In fact, it's from County Clare in Ireland -- Mathia Magrath's house "after destruction by the Battering Ram." I know this because today we checked out the Irish Famine Exhibition at St. Stephen's Green Shopping Centre in Dublin. The exhibition, which runs until Oct. 15, brought the famine experience front and centre for me. Between 1845 and 1851, approximately one million Irish people died of starvation or disease and a couple of million emigrated, many of them to Canada. Many of those were forcibly evicted by landlords spouting the free-market doctrine of laissez faire. The end result: an Irish diaspora that has produced a globe-scattering of something like 70 million people of Irish descent. The decades immediately after the famine brought mostly silence about that trauma. More recently, scholars and others have turned increasingly to the Great Hunger, as it is also called. Today in Dublin, you can see famine monuments in St. Stephen's Green and on the north bank of the Liffey. You can visit the marvellous EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum. And you can spend an hour poking around on the Jeannie Johnston, a replica famine ship. If you have time for only one stop, the exhibition at St. Stephen's Green includes a 15-minute film that summarizes the saga. Millions displaced, not hundreds of thousands. Terrible to contemplate. Preparing to leave Dublin, all I can think about is how the Irish famine changed the world.