Poem by Shirley O’Shea a writer from Carrick-on-Suir and a Teacher of English and German at St. Declan’s Community College, Kilmacthomas since 1999. She is an active participant of Poetry Plus in Brewery Lane Theatre. Her poem ‘With Grace and with Gratitude’ about Dr. Mary Strangman was published for SETU Blue Plaque unveiling at Carriganore House in Waterford in 2023. This poem and another ‘PJ 07’, was shortlisted for the Sean Dunne Literary award in June 2024.
Seven Years Transportation
(Taken women)
I wonder what they saw as they looked back over the stern of the Isabella or Sea Queen?
The ships conveying them eleven thousand miles away from home.
The convict girls, taken from Waterford city and county.
Offenders, mothers, mistresses, daughters,
Thievers and givers of food, cloaks and blankets,
Swapping petticoats and shawls for a life behind bars and a colony.
Culprits adjudged and condemned to Spike Island or Grangegorman,
Vagabond girls, subjected to earn their own living in felony,
Serving time till their freedom papers and tickets of leave.
Risk takers. Lawbreakers. No pardons or pleas.
Mary Moon. Deported 1834
The widow Mary stole a kerchief, and her child was taken from her.
A convict dressmaker traded in Van Dieman’s Island in Tasmania.
Hard labour or toil, nor her crude tongue could tame her,
The mischievous vixen escaped times over, as a deep poverty mania
Drove her forth in her anger and grief.
Better than the penalty of death but no less,
Not worth the mantilla, or the price she paid too steep.
In waters deep.
Ellen Lennehan. Deported 1842
Like Mary, Ellen had an eye for the style and fancied a petticoat,
That cost her more than the penny she would have paid for it,
And a shawl to go with it, pretty slippers, ten more months, was made pay
With no conditional or absolute pardon.
The shoes she required for her night on the town,
and she did not drown on her journey from Kingstown or Queenstown,
to Hobart female penitentiary,
and a life of continued brutality.
Margaret Daly. Deported 1847
This girl was one and twenty years, illiterate and abandoned,
stole a cloak and so exiled on the boat from Grangegorman,
Her convict trade to be made toil and scrub as a housemaid.
A freckled girl, with a gap in her smile, all the while,
Her 7 children did not survive or were orphaned.
7, the number unlucky for Margaret of Dungarvan.
Her Hemiplegic body paralysed by the loss and the grief.
37 the number of years in her life.
Bridget Crotty. Deported 1849
The Lismore girl stole three geese from Pat Walsh of Portlaw,
Made an outlaw of her and her friend Judith
Sent first to Grangegorman workhouse to await her passage,
Yet a quiet girl like Bridget understood the message
and good behaviour cut short her servitude, with her modest attitude,
and the flesh of the geese never made it to her belly
from Ballyduff to the rough seas,
going under to the hell of a retributive colony.
Judith Farrell. Deported 1849
Of Lismore and a friend of Ms Crotty, the geese stealer
She sailed down to hard labour without favour from healing
herself from the dysentery on the boat of transportation,
Frequented disorderly houses and stations
Where she took up with a fellow, a drunken braggard boaster,
Her black tale of woe ends with her rape and her murder.
No absence permitted or sanctitude or saviour,
She couldn’t escape from his fervour and venture.
Bridget Brien. Deported 1852
Ms Brien stole a hen at the height of the famine
To sustain starving children, 7 years transportation.
Transformed to a penal servant girl, dark haired and blue eyed
Her boy John Brien, age 4 by her side
was taken into the orphanage on arrival, the pain of survival.
Bereft Bridget heartbroken, caught drunk and absconding
One of 9000 women, repentant remanding.
The women of Waterford and Van Diemen’s landing.
What did they see when the glanced back over the stern?
They saw Ireland, to where they would never to return.
Ireland