52x52: Press a Button

52 random acts of kindness that each take under 52 seconds. One action each week, over a year takes less than an hour of your life

In recent posts I mentioned the Irish Famine over a 150 years ago. People all over the world are still hungry today. The Hunger Site gives us the opportunity to help without spending a penny by just pressing a button. And you can do it every day if you want and every day you will help to give someone something to eat.  Press the yellow button. 

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Hawthorn, Superstition and Death

I remember giving my mother a bunch of hawthorn flowers and being warned to take them out of the house as they were bad luck. I remember taking them out and planting them uselessly in the ground taking it as true because my mother told me. 

This was an Irish superstition, it seems since the middle ages. Hawthorn could adorn the outdoors but to bring it into the house would signify death.

The book Under the Hawthorn Tree by Marita Conlon-McKenna, certainly has much to say about death as a book about children trying to escape the workhouse at the time of the Irish Famine. People were dying all round them and their baby sister was buried where they used to play, under the hawthorn tree.

The origin of the link with death associated with the hawthorn, it seems began when it was said that the flowers smelled like the plague. In later years, according to Trees for Life,  botanists discovered that the hawthorn flower has the chemical trimethylamine which is also a chemical made by decaying flesh. This was a smell people were used to when copses were kept in the house for days before burial and makes sense of the link made between hawthorn and death.

So although I like the blossom of the hawthorn, it won't be adorning the rooms of my house. Not because of any superstition or bad luck, but because I just don't happen to like the smell of rotting flesh, even from a flower.

Leaving Home: For Hundreds of Years

Reading 'Star of the Sea' by Joseph O'Connor, reccommended to me by my Father, I was struck by the many and varied ways we see the lives of those fleeing from famine and destitution to America in the 1840s. On the 26 day voyage, we read letters, headlines and announcements, hear stories of the past in Ireland and see the lives conflict on board the Star of the Sea. 

It is not hard to see where the migrant culture of Ireland has come from. It is not hard to see why the population of Ireland is only 4.8 million today compared to that of the city of London's which is 8.6 million.  It is not hard to see why, by the time Ireland achieved independence in 1921, that Ireland's population had dropped to only half what it was in the 1840s and why it's still less than it was before the famine over a hundred and fifty years ago.

It is said that there are more Irish abroad than in Ireland. Global Irish has some sources saying that the diaspora total number is 70 million. 

According to The Washington Post, the census of 2013, had 34.5 million Americans who listed their heritage as Irish. The headline read:

The Irish-American Population is Seven times larger than in Ireland 

Yet in the Irish Times, John Grenham says 'Nobody ever left Ireland to go to America.' And I understand what he meant. I never left Ireland to go to Italy. I left for a job, opportunity, experience and a new life. But mostly I left because of the people, the Irish and Italian links, like when I left for London,  just like Grenham mentions in his article. People left Ireland to go to jobs or opportunities with family and friends and they were all in America.