Mullingar part of YouTube Famine documentary

Mullingar features in a new documentary published on YouTube retracing the 165km National Famine Way.

‘The Journey’ by Dubliner George Fitzgerald, tells of how a group of tenants from Strokestown were forcibly marched from Roscommon to Dublin in 1847, at the height of the Great Famine.

Their route took them to Athlone, and on to Mullingar, from where they walked alongside the Royal Canal to Dublin.

The path commemorates the suffering of those who were evicted, starved, and displaced. It was a journey of survival, in which hundreds of tenants were marched eastward toward emigration, never to return.

Beginning in Athlone, the documentary explores the Famine-era workhouses in Athlone and Roscommon and as the documentary follows the route through Mullingar and onward to Dublin, it contrasts Ireland’s natural beauty with its grim past.

By the time the journey reaches Dublin, viewers are reminded that in 1847, the capital was infamous for having some of the worst slums in Europe, an unrecognisable city to the impoverished rural Irish arriving there.

George Fitzgerald, writer-director of The Journey, was a founder member of the 90s pop/funk band, the D11 Runners, said to inspire The Commitments, who played venues like the Stables and The Horizon in Mullingar.