The Fearful System of Ejectment

A dog waits in anticipation of a bone. It’s an ominous depiction offered by artist Dymphna Headen. The scene is centred around a person who perished, their body lying at the gate of the Bawnboy Workhouse. One of so many deaths in the 1840s in Ireland.

With her new exhibition ‘Ejectment’ in the Townhall Arts Centre Gallery, local painter and historian Dymphna Headen approaches the Great Famine from an uncommon perspective: Ejection, or ejectment as it was called then.

“At least 250,000 people were evicted from their homes during that time”, says Dymphna. A fact not well known.

In her opinion, the existence of the 130 workhouses in Ireland have been generally overlooked in the context of the Great Famine. Yet she sees a massive correlation between the starvation and emigration of Irish people in the late 1840s and the appearance of these workhouses after the imposition of the ‘Poor Law Tax’ in 1843. The tax was imposed on all occupiers of land to pay for the Poorhouses. If tenants couldn’t pay, they were evicted by their landlords, thus contributing to the already dire situation of hunger and homelessness. “It was the tax for the workhouse that caused the famine, not the potato.”

While researching the archives of famine museums in Australia, England and the USA, Dymphna stumbled over a significant portrayal of the time by an illustrator named Landell.

“The fearful system of wholesale ejectment, of which we daily hear, and which we daily behold, is a mockery of the eternal laws of God – a flagrant outrage on the principles of nature. Whole districts are cleared,” reads the caption below the picture published in the ‘Illustrated London News’, on December 16, 1848.

‘The Ejectment’ thus became the inspiration for Dymphna’s centerpiece: A ragged clothed woman clinging onto the rein of a horse. The looming master undisturbed by her pleas to spare the family from eviction and the dilapidation of their home in the background. Straw is thrown from the thatched roof and strewn across the painting.

“A homage to Anselm Kiefer,” says Dymphna, referencing the conceptual artist known for his symbolic imagery and materials. The straw here foreshadows the fate of evicted “paupers” sleeping on straw-stuffed coffee bean bags in the workhouses. If they found a place to stay at all.

Her paintings show the different aspects of living conditions in the workhouses: the famine pot, the concrete bed in the isolation punishment cell, a seven seated latrine, the list of 61 orphaned teenage girls from Cavan who were transported to Australia, the lych gate with the hungry dog.

The local historian who moved from Dublin to Bawnboy in the 1990s took an interest in the graffiti covered, derelict workhouse and its past.

Her artpieces were painted over the years in which she has been closely associated with the efforts of the community of Bawnboy to preserve the workhouse. She hopes the exhibition will raise awareness of the importance of the workhouses in Irish history and may inspire the community to preserve the one in Bawnboy.

‘Ejectment’ runs in the Townhall Arts Centre Gallery until July 10.