Irish Potato Famine (1845–1849)
Encyclopedia
In Ireland
, the Great Famine was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration between 1845 and 1852. It is also known, mostly outside Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine. In the Irish language
it is called an Gorta Mór (ənˠ ˈɡɔɾˠtˠə ˈmˠoːɾˠ, meaning "the Great Hunger") or an Drochshaol (ənˠ ˈdˠɾɔxˌhiːlˠ, meaning "the bad times").
During the famine approximately 1 million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%. The proximate cause of famine
was a potato
disease commonly known as potato blight. Although blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland where one-third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food was exacerbated by a host of political, social and economic factors which remain the subject of historical debate.
The famine was a watershed in the history of Ireland
. Its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political and cultural landscape. For both the native Irish
and those in the resulting diaspora
, the famine entered folk memory
and became a rallying point for various nationalist movements
as Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
. Modern historians regard it as a dividing line in the Irish historical narrative, referring to the preceding period of Irish history as "pre-Famine".
, as part of the United Kingdom
. Executive power
lay in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland
and Chief Secretary for Ireland
, both of whom were appointed by the British government. Ireland sent 105 members of parliament
to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, and Irish
representative peer
s elected 28 of their own number to sit for life in the House of Lords
. Between 1832 and 1859, 70% of Irish representatives were landowners or the sons of landowners.
In the 40 years that followed the union, successive British governments grappled with the problems of governing a country which had, as Benjamin Disraeli put it in 1844, "a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church
, and in addition the weakest executive in the world." One historian calculated that between 1801 and 1845, there had been 114 commissions and 61 special committees inquiring into the state of Ireland and that "without exception their findings prophesied disaster; Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standard of living unbelievably low." This was a contrast to Britain, which was beginning to enjoy the modern prosperity of the Victorian and Industrial
ages. Laws against education of Irish Catholic
s and possession of land had made such a progress impossible until the penal laws were repealed 50 years before the Famine, but the economic recovery was slow because the landlord families still kept their land.
from owning land, from leasing land; from voting, from holding political office; from living in a corporate town or within 5 mi (8 km) of a corporate town, from obtaining education, from entering a profession, and from doing many other things that are necessary in order to succeed and prosper in life. The laws had largely been reformed by 1793, and in 1829, Irish Catholics could again sit in parliament following the Act of Emancipation
.
Catholics made up 80% of the population, the bulk of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity despite Catholic emancipation
in 1829. At the top of the "social pyramid" was the "ascendancy class
", the English and Anglo-Irish
families who owned most of the land, and who had more or less limitless power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast: the Earl of Lucan
owned over 60000 acre (242.8 km²). Many of these landlords lived in England and were called "absentee landlords". The rent revenue was sent to England, collected from "impoverished tenants" paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export.
In 1843, the British Government considered that the land question in Ireland was the root cause
of disaffection in the country. They set up a Royal Commission
, chaired by the Earl of Devon
, to inquire into the laws with regard to the occupation of land in Ireland. Daniel O'Connell
described this commission as perfectly one-sided, being made up of landlords and no tenants. Devon in February 1845 reported that "It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [Irish labourer and his family] habitually and silently endure . . . in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water . . . their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather... a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury . . . and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property." The Commissioners concluded that they could not "forbear expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain."
The Commission stated that the principal cause was the bad relations between the landlord and tenant. There was no hereditary loyalty, feudal tie or paternalism as existed in England. Ireland was a conquered country, with the Earl of Clare
speaking of the landlords saying "confiscation is their common title." According to the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith
, the landlords regarded the land as a source of income from which to extract as much money as possible. With the Irish "brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation" according to the Earl of Clare, Ireland was seen as a hostile place in which to live, and as a consequence absentee landlords were common, with some visiting their property once or twice in a lifetime, or never. The rents from Ireland were then spent in England, it being estimated that in 1842 £6,000,000 was remitted out of Ireland.
According to Woodham-Smith, the ability of the middlemen was measured by the amount of money they could contrive to extract. Described by the Commission as "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country," they were invariably described as "land sharks" and "bloodsuckers."
The middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents, which they then sublet as they saw fit. They split the holding into smaller and smaller parcels to increase the amounts of rents they could then obtain, a system called conacre
. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were very high), or if the landlord decided to raise sheep instead of grain crops
. The cottier
paid his rent by working for the landlord.
Any improvements made on the holdings by the tenants became the property of the landlords when the lease expired or was terminated, which acted as a disincentive to improvements. The tenants had no security of tenure on the land; being tenants "at will" they could be turned out whenever the landlord chose. This class of tenant made up the majority of tenant farmer
s in Ireland, the exception being in Ulster
where there existed a practice known as "tenant right", under which tenants were compensated for any improvements made to their holdings. The commission according to Woodham-Smith stated that "the superior prosperity and tranquility of Ulster, compared with the rest of Ireland, were due to tenant right."
Landlords in Ireland used their powers without remorse, and the people lived in dread of them. In these circumstances, Woodham-Smith writes "industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe."
s (1-5 acre
s) in size, while 40% were of 2-6 hectares (5-15 acres). Holdings were so small that no other crop than potatoes would suffice to feed a family, nor could ranching be a possibility due to the limited land. The British government reported, shortly before the famine, that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support their families, after paying their rent, except by earnings of seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland. Following the famine, reforms were implemented making it illegal to further divide land holdings.
The 1841 census showed a population of just over eight million. Two-thirds of those depended on agriculture for their survival, but they rarely received a working wage. They had to work for their landlords in return for the patch of land they needed in order to grow enough food for their own families. This was the system which forced Ireland and its peasantry into monoculture
, as only the potato could be grown in sufficient quantity. The rights to a plot of land in Ireland could mean the difference between life and death in the early 19th century.
was introduced to Ireland as a garden crop of the gentry. By the late 17th century, it had become widespread as a supplementary rather than a principal food, as the main diet still revolved around butter, milk, and grain products. In the first two decades of the 18th century, however, it became a base food of the poor, especially in winter. The expansion of the economy between 1760 and 1815 saw the potato make inroads in the diet of the people and become a staple food
all the year round for farmers.
The potato's spread was essential to the development of the cottier system, delivering an extremely cheap workforce, but at the cost of lower living standards. For the labourer, it was essentially a potato wage that shaped the expanding agrarian economy.
The expansion of tillage led to an inevitable expansion of the potato acreage and an expansion of peasant farmers. By 1841, there were over half a million peasant farmers, with 1.75 million dependants. The principal beneficiary of this system was the English consumer.
The potato was also used extensively as a fodder crop for livestock immediately prior to the famine. Approximately 33% of production, amounting to 5000000 ST (4,535,923.7 t), was normally used in this way.
[1] The 1848 figures are based on extrapolation from incomplete returns.
, commonly known as blight, there were only two main potato plant diseases. One was called 'dry rot' or 'taint' and the other was a virus, known popularly as 'curl'. Phytophthora infestans is an oomycete (not a fungus).
In 1851, the Census of Ireland Commissioners recorded 24 failures of the potato crop going back to 1728, of varying severity. In 1739, the crop was "entirely destroyed", and again in 1740. In 1770, the crop largely failed again. In 1800, there was another "general" failure, and in 1807, 50% of the crop was lost. In 1821 and 1822, the potato crop failed completely in Munster
and Connaught
, and 1830 and 1831 were years of failure in Mayo
, Donegal
and Galway
. In 1832, 1833, 1834 and 1836, a large number of districts suffered serious loss, and in 1835, the potato failed in Ulster
. 1836 and 1837 brought "extensive" failures throughout Ireland and again in 1839 failure was universal throughout the country; both 1841 and 1844 potato crop failure was widespread. According to Woodham-Smith, "the unreliability of the potato crop was an accepted fact in Ireland.
How and when the blight Phytophthora infestans
arrived in Europe is still uncertain; according to P.M.A Bourke, however, it almost certainly was not present prior to 1842, and probably arrived in 1844. At least one of the sources of the infection suggests it may have originated in the northern Andes region of South America
, Peru in particular. It was then conveyed to Europe on ships carrying guano
, which was in great demand as a fertiliser on European and British farms.
In 1844, Irish newspapers carried reports concerning a disease which for two years had attacked the potato crops in America. According to James Donnelly, a likely source was the eastern United States, where in 1843 and 1844 blight largely destroyed the potato crops. He suggests that ships from Baltimore, Philadelphia or New York could have brought diseased potatoes to European ports. W.C. Paddock suggests that it was transported on potatoes being carried to feed passengers on clipper ships sailing from America to Ireland.
Once it was introduced, it spread rapidly. By late summer and early autumn of 1845, it had spread throughout the greater part of northern and central Europe
. Belgium, Holland, northern France and southern England by mid-August had all been stricken.
On August 16, the Gardeners' Chronicle and Horticultural Gazette printed a report which described 'a blight of unusual character' in the Isle of Wight
. A week later, on 23 August, it reported that 'A fearful malady has broken out among the potato crop... In Belgium the fields are said to be completely desolated. There is hardly a sound sample in Covent Garden market
... As for cure for this distemper, there is none...' These reports were extensively covered in Irish newspapers. On 13 September the Gardeners' Chronicle made 'a dramatic announcement': 'We stop the Press with very great regret to announce that the potato Murrain has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland.' The British Government were nevertheless optimistic through the next few weeks.
Crop loss in 1845 has been estimated at anywhere from one third to as high as one half of cultivated acreage. The Mansion House Committee in Dublin, to which hundreds of letters were directed from all over Ireland, claimed on November 19, 1845 to have ascertained beyond the shadow of doubt that 'considerably more than one-third of the entire of the potato crop ... has been already destroyed'.
In 1846, three quarters of the harvest was lost to blight. By December, a third of a million destitute people were employed in public works. According to Cormac Ó Gráda the first attack of potato blight caused considerable hardship in rural Ireland, from the autumn of 1846, when the first deaths from starvation were recorded. Seed potatoes were scarce in 1847, little had been sown, so despite average yields, hunger continued. 1848 yields would be only two thirds of normal. As over 3 million Irish people were totally dependent on potatoes for food, hunger and famine were inevitable.
of Belfast
met and made similar suggestions, but neither body asked for charity, according to Mitchel. "They demanded that, if Ireland was indeed an Integral part of the realm, the common exchequer of both islands should be used—not to give alms, but to provide employment on public works of general utility." It was Mitchel's opinion that "if Yorkshire and Lancashire had sustained a like calamity in England, there is no doubt such measures as these would have been taken, promptly and liberally."
A deputation from the citizens of Dublin, including the Duke of Leinster
, the Lord Mayor, Lord Cloncurry
, and Daniel O'Connell, went to the current Lord Lieutenant of Ireland
, and offered suggestions, such as opening the ports to foreign corn for a time, stopping distillation from grain, or providing public works; that this was extremely urgent, as millions of people would shortly be without food. Lord Heytesbury told them they "were premature", and told them not to be alarmed, that learned men (Playfair and Lindley) had been sent from England to enquire into all those matters; and that the Inspectors of Constabulary and Stipendiary Magistrates were charged with making constant reports from their districts; and there was no "immediate pressure on the market". Of these reports from Lord Heytesbury, Peel in a letter to Sir James Graham was to say that he found the accounts "very alarming", though he reminded him that there was, according to Woodham-Smith "always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news".
On December 8, 1845, Daniel O'Connell
, in the Repeal Association
, proposed the following remedies to the pending disaster. One of the first things he suggested was the introduction of "Tenant-Right
" as practised in Ulster, giving the landlord a fair rent for his land, but giving the tenant compensation for any money he might have laid out on the land in permanent improvements.
O'Connell then pointed out the means used by the Belgian legislature during the same season: shutting their ports against the export of provisions, but opening them to imports. He suggested that if Ireland had a domestic Parliament the ports would be thrown open and the abundant crops raised in Ireland would be kept for the people of Ireland. O'Connell maintained that only an Irish parliament
would provide for the people both food and employment, saying that a repeal of the Act of Union
was a necessity and Ireland's only hope.
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John Mitchel
, one of the leading political writers of Young Ireland
, as early as 1844, in The Nation
raised the issue of the "Potato Disease" in Ireland noting how powerful an agent hunger had been in certain revolutions. On February 14, 1846, he put forward his views on "the wretched way in which the famine was being trifled with", and asked, had not the Government even yet any conception that there might be soon "millions of human beings in Ireland having nothing to eat."
On February 28, writing on the Coercion Bill which was then going through the House of Lords, he noted that this was the only kind of legislation that was sure to meet with no obstruction in the British House of Commons. His view was that however the government may differ about feeding the Irish people, "they agree most cordially in the policy of taxing, prosecuting and ruining them." (As it happened, the bill was subsequently defeated, and Peel's government fell.)
In an article on "English Rule" on March 7, Mitchel wrote that the Irish People were "expecting famine day by day" and they attributed it collectively, not to "the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England." He continued in the same article to write that the people "believe that the season as they roll are but ministers of England's rapacity; that their starving children cannot sit down to their scanty meal but they see the harpy claw of England in their dish." The people, Mitchel wrote, watched as their "food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth," all the while watching "heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England."
Mitchel later wrote one of the first widely circulated tracts on the famine, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) in 1861. It established the widespread view that the treatment of the famine by the British was a deliberate murder of the Irish, and contained the famous phrase: Mitchel was charged with sedition
because of his writings, but this charge was dropped and he was convicted by a packed jury under the newly enacted Treason Felony
Act and sentenced to 14 years transportation to Bermuda
.
The Nation
according to Charles Gavan Duffy
, insisted that the one remedy was that which the rest of Europe had adopted, which even the parliaments of the Pale
had adopted in periods of distress, which was to retain in the country the food raised by her people till the people were fed.
Ireland at this time was, according to the Act of Union of 1801, an integral part of the British imperial homeland, "the richest empire on the globe," and was "the most fertile portion of that empire," in addition; Ireland was sheltered by both "... Habeas Corpus
and trial by jury ...". And yet Ireland's elected representatives seemed powerless to act on the country's behalf as Members of the British Parliament
. Commenting on this at the time John Mitchel wrote: "That an island which is said to be an integral part of the richest empire on the globe ... should in five years lose two and a half millions of its people (more than one fourth) by hunger, and fever the consequence of hunger, and flight beyond sea to escape from hunger ..."
The period of the potato blight in Ireland from 1845 to 1851 was full of political confrontation. The mass movement for Repeal
of the Act of Union had failed in its objectives by the time its founder Daniel O'Connell
died in 1847. A more radical Young Ireland
group seceded from the Repeal movement and attempted an armed rebellion in the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848
. It was unsuccessful.
Sir Robert Peel
purchased £100,000 worth of maize
and cornmeal
secretly from America. Baring Brothers & Co
initially acted as purchasing agents for the Prime Minister. The government hoped that they would not "stifle private enterprise" and that their actions would not act as a disincentive to local relief efforts. Due to weather conditions, the first shipment did not arrive in Ireland until the beginning of February 1846.
The maize corn was then re-sold for a penny a pound. The corn when it arrived had not been ground and was inedible, and this task involved a long and complicated process if it was to be done correctly and it was unlikely to be carried out locally. In addition, before the cornmeal could be consumed, it had to be 'very much' cooked again, or eating it could result in severe bowel complaints. Because of maize's yellow colour, and the fact that it had to be ground twice, it became known in Ireland as 'Peel's brimstone'. In 1846, Peel then moved to repeal the Corn Laws
, tariff
s on grain which kept the price of bread artificially high. The famine situation worsened during 1846 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in that year did little to help the starving Irish; the measure split the Conservative Party, leading to the fall of Peel's ministry. In March, Peel set up a programme of public works in Ireland but was forced to resign as Prime Minister on 29 June." This fall came on June 25, when he was defeated in the House of Commons on a motion that the Irish Coercion Bill be read a second time. According to Michael Doheny
, the majority against him was 73, and it was made of the "Whig party, the extreme Conservatives, the ultra-Radicals and Irish Repealers." Ten days after, Lord John Russell assumed the seals of office.
The measures undertaken by Peel's successor, Lord John Russell
, proved comparatively "inadequate" as the crisis deepened. Russell's ministry introduced public works projects, which by December 1846 employed some half million Irish and proved impossible to administer. Sir Charles Trevelyan
, who was in charge of the administration of Government relief to the victims of the Irish Famine, limited the Government's actual relief because he thought "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson". For his policy, he was commemorated in the song The Fields of Athenry
. The Public Works were "strictly ordered" to be unproductive—that is, they would create no fund to repay their own expenses. Many hundreds of thousands of "feeble and starving men" according to John Mitchel, were kept digging holes, and breaking up roads, which was doing no service.
The new Lord John Russell Whig administration, influenced by their laissez-faire
belief that the market would provide the food needed but at the same time ignoring the food exports to England, then halted government food and relief works, leaving many hundreds of thousands of people without any work, money or food. In January, the government abandoned these projects and turned to a mixture of "indoor" and "outdoor" direct relief; the former administered in workhouse
s through the Poor Law
, the latter through soup kitchen
s. The costs of the Poor Law fell primarily on the local landlords, who in turn attempted to reduce their liability by evicting their tenants. This was then facilitated through the "Cheap Ejectment Acts." The poor law amendment act was passed in June 1847. According to James Donnelly in Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine, it embodied the principle popular in Britain that Irish property must support Irish poverty. The landed proprietors in Ireland were held in Britain to have created the conditions that led to the famine. It was asserted however, that the British parliament since the Act of Union of 1800 was partly to blame. This point was raised in the Illustrated London News
on 13 February 13, 1847, "There was no laws it would not pass at their request, and no abuse it would not defend for them." On the 24 March the Times reported that Britain had permitted in Ireland "a mass of poverty, disaffection, and degradation without a parallel in the world. It allowed proprietors to suck the very life-blood of that wretched race."
The "Gregory clause" of the Poor Law prohibited anyone who held at least ¼ of an acre from receiving relief. This in practice meant that if a farmer, having sold all his produce to pay rent, duties, rates and taxes, should be reduced, as many thousands of them were, to applying for public outdoor relief, he would not get it until he had first delivered up all his land to the landlord. Of this Law Mitchel was to write: "it is the able-bodied
idler only who is to be fed — if he attempted to till but one rood of ground, he dies." This simple method of ejectment was called "passing paupers through the workhouse" — a man went in, a pauper came out. These factors combined to drive thousands of people off the land: 90,000 in 1849, and 104,000 in 1850.
Cecil Woodham-Smith
, an authority on the Irish Famine, wrote in The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845–1849 that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland as "the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation." Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout most of the five-year famine.
Christine Kinealy writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham actually increased during the famine. The food was shipped under guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland. However, the poor had no money to buy food and the government then did not ban exports.
The following poem written by Miss Jane Francesca Elgee, a well known and popular author, was carried in The Nation:
Mitchel wrote in his The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), on the same subject, that no one from Ireland ever asked for charity during this period, and that it was England who sought charity on Ireland's behalf, and, having received it, was also responsible for administering it. He suggested that it has been carefully inculcated by the British Press, "that the moment Ireland fell into distress, she became an abject beggar at England's gate, and that she even craved alms from all mankind." He affirmed that in Ireland no one ever asked alms or favours of any kind from England or any other nation, but that it was England herself that begged for Ireland. He suggested that it was England that "sent 'round the hat over all the globe, asking a penny for the love of God to relieve the poor Irish," and constituting herself the agent of all that charity, took all the profit of it.
Large sums of money were donated by charities; Calcutta is credited with making the first donation of £14,000. The money was raised by Irish soldiers serving there and Irish people employed by the East India Company
. Pope Pius IX
sent funds and Queen Victoria donated £2,000.
Quaker and Irish politician Alfred Webb
later wrote:
In addition to the religious, non-religious organisations came to the assistance of famine victims. The British Relief Association was one such group. Founded in 1847, the Association raised money throughout England, America and Australia; their funding drive benefited by a "Queen's Letter", a letter from Queen Victoria appealing for money to relieve the distress in Ireland. With this initial letter the Association raised £171,533. A second, somewhat less successful "Queen's Letter" was issued in late 1847. In total, the British Relief Association raised approximately £200,000 (c. US$1,000,000 at the time).
Private initiatives such as The Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends (Quakers) attempted to fill the gap caused by the end of government relief and eventually the government reinstated the relief works, although bureaucracy slowed the release of food supplies.
Sultan Abdülmecid
declared his intention to send £10,000 to Irish farmers but Queen Victoria requested that the Sultan send only £1,000, because she herself had sent only £2,000. The Sultan sent the £1,000 sterling but also secretly sent three ships full of food. The English courts
tried to block the ships, but the food arrived at Drogheda
harbour and was left there by Ottoman sailors.
Choctaw
s collected $710 (although many articles say the original amount was $170 after a misprint in Angie Debo
's The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic) and sent it to help starving Irish men, women and children. "It had been just 16 years since the Choctaw people had experienced the Trail of Tears
, and they had faced starvation... It was an amazing gesture." according to Judy Allen, editor of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma's newspaper, Bishinik, based at the Oklahoma Choctaw tribal headquarters in Durant, Oklahoma
. To mark the 150th anniversary, eight Irish people retraced the Trail of Tears, and the donation was publicly commemorated by President Mary Robinson
.
Donnelly considered this to be an underestimate, and if the figures were to include the number pressured into "voluntary" surrenders during the whole period (1846–1854) the figure would almost certainly exceed half a million persons. While Helen Litton says there were also thousands of "voluntary" surrenders, she notes also that there was "precious little voluntary about them." In some cases, tenants were persuaded to accept a small sum of money to leave their homes, "cheated into believing the workhouse would take them in."
West Clare was one of the worst areas for evictions, where landlords turned thousands of families out and demolished their derisory cabins. Captain Kennedy in April 1848 estimated that 1,000 houses, with an average of six people to each, had been levelled since November. The Mahon family, Strokestown House alone in 1847 evicted 3,000 people, and according to John Gibney were still able to dine on lobster soup.
After Clare, the worst area for evictions was County Mayo, accounting for 10% of all evictions between 1849 and 1854. The Earl of Lucan, who owned over 60000 acre (242.8 km²) was among the worst evicting landlords. He was quoted as saying 'he would not breed paupers to pay priests'. Having turned out in the parish of Ballinrobe over 2,000 tenants alone, the cleared land he then used as grazing farms. In 1848, the Marquis of Sligo owed £1,650 to Westport Union; he was also an evicting landlord, though he claimed to be selective, saying he was only getting rid of the idle and dishonest. Altogether, he cleared about 25% of his tenants.
According to Litton, evictions might have taken place earlier but for fear of the secret societies. However they were now greatly weakened by the Famine. Revenge still occasionally took place, with seven landlords being shot, six fatally, during the autumn and winter of 1847. Ten other occupiers of land, though without tenants, were also murdered, she says.
Lord Clarendon, alarmed that this might mean rebellion, asked for special powers. Lord John Russell was not sympathetic to this appeal. Lord Clarendon believed that the landlords themselves were mostly responsible for the tragedy in the first place, saying "It is quite true that landlords in England would not like to be shot like hares and partridges...but neither does any landlord in England turn out fifty persons at once and burn their houses over their heads, giving them no provision for the future." The Crime and Outrage Act was passed in December 1847 as a compromise and additional troops were sent to Ireland.
Under the notorious Gregory clause, described by Donnelly as a "vicious amendment to the Irish poor law, named after William H. Gregory, M.P. and commonly known as the quarter-acre clause, provided that no tenant holding more than a quarter-acre of land would be eligible for public assistance either in or outside the workhouse. This clause had been a successful Tory amendment to the Whig poor-relief bill which became law in early June 1847, where its potential as an estate-clearing device was widely recognised in parliament, though not in advance. At first the poor law commissioners and inspectors viewed the clause as an valuable instrument for a more cost-effective administration of public relief, but the drawbacks soon became apparent, even from an administrative perspective. They would soon view them as little more than murderous from a humanitarian perspective
. According to Donnelly it became obvious that the quarter-acre clause was "indirectly a death-dealing instrument."
While the famine was responsible for a significant increase in emigration from Ireland, of anywhere from 45% to nearly 85% depending on the year and the county, it was not the sole cause. Nor was it even the era when mass emigration from Ireland commenced. That can be traced to the middle of the 18th century, when some 250,000 people left Ireland to settle in the New World
alone, over a period of some 50 years. From the defeat of Napoleon to the beginning of the famine, a period of 30 years, "at least 1,000,000 and possibly 1,500,000 emigrated". However, during the worst of the famine, emigration reached somewhere around 250,000 in one year alone, with far more emigrants coming from western Ireland than any other part.
Families did not migrate en masse but younger members of families did. So much so that emigration almost became a rite of passage
, as evidenced by the data that show that, unlike similar emigration throughout world history, women emigrated just as often, just as early, and in the same numbers as men. The emigrant started a new life in a new land, sent remittances "[reaching] £1,404,000 by 1851" back to his/her family in Ireland which, in turn, allowed another member of the family to emigrate.
Emigration during the famine years of 1845-1850 was to England, Scotland, the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Many of those fleeing to the Americas used the well-established McCorkell Line
.
Of the 100,000 Irish that sailed to Canada in 1847, an estimated one out of five died from disease and malnutrition, including over 5,000 at Grosse Isle. Mortality rates of 30% aboard the coffin ship
s were common.
By 1854, between 1.5 and 2 million Irish left their country due to evictions, starvation, and harsh living conditions. In America, most Irish became city-dwellers: with little money, many had to settle in the cities that the ships they came on landed in. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston
, Massachusetts
; New York City
; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
; and Baltimore, Maryland. In addition, Irish populations became prevalent in some American mining communities.
The 1851 census reported that more than half the inhabitants of Toronto, Ontario
were Irish, and in 1847 alone, 38,000 famine Irish flooded a city with fewer than 20,000 citizens. Other Canadian cities such as Saint John, New Brunswick
; Quebec City
and Montreal, Quebec
; Ottawa, Kingston and Hamilton, Ontario
also received large numbers of Famine Irish since Canada, as part of the British Empire
, could not close its ports to Irish ships (unlike the U.S.), and they could get passage cheaply (or free in the case of tenant evictions) in returning empty lumber holds. However fearing nationalist insurgencies the British government placed harsh restrictions on Irish immigration to Canada after 1847 resulting in larger influxes to the U.S. The largest Famine grave site outside of Ireland is at Grosse-Île, Quebec, an island in the St. Lawrence River
used to quarantine ships near Quebec City. In 1851, about a quarter of Liverpool's population was Irish-born.
The famine marked the beginning of the steep depopulation of Ireland in the 19th century. Population had increased by 13–14% in the first three decades of the 19th century. Between 1831 and 1841, population grew by 5%. Application of Thomas Malthus
's idea of population expanding geometrically while resources increase arithmetically was popular during the famines of 1817 and 1822. However by the 1830s, a decade before the famine, they were seen as overly simplistic and Ireland's problems were seen "less as an excess of population than as a lack of capital investment." The population of Ireland was increasing no faster than that of England, which suffered no equivalent catastrophe.
In 1847, William Smith O'Brien
, the leader of the Young Ireland
party, became one of the founding members of the Irish Confederation
to campaign for a Repeal of the Act of Union
, and called for the export of grain to be stopped and the ports closed. The following year he organised the resistance of landless farmers in County Tipperary
against the landowners and their agents.
accounts have helped medical historians identify both the ailments and effects of famine, and have been used to evaluate and explain in greater detail features of the famine. In Mayo, English Quaker William Bennett wrote of
Revd Dr. Traill Hall, a Church of Ireland rector in Schull, described
Marasmic children also left a permanent image on Quaker Joseph Crosfield who in 1846 witnessed a
William Forster
wrote in Carrick-on-Shannon
that
One possible estimate has been reached by comparing the expected population with the eventual numbers in the 1850s -see Irish population analysis
. Earlier predictions expected that by 1851 Ireland would have a population of 8-9 million. A census taken in 1841 revealed a population of slightly over 8 million. A census immediately after the famine in 1851 counted 6,552,385, a drop of almost 1.5 million in 10 years. Modern historian R.J. Foster estimates that 'at least 775,000 died, mostly through disease, including cholera
in the latter stages of the holocaust'. He further notes that 'a recent sophisticated computation estimates excess deaths from 1846 to 1851 as between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000...; after a careful critique of this, other statisticians arrive at a figure of 1,000,000.' In addition, in excess of 1 million Irish emigrated to Great Britain
, U.S., Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, while millions emigrated over following decades.
Detailed statistics of the population of Ireland since 1841 are available at Irish population analysis
.
Perhaps the best-known estimates of deaths at a county level are those by Joel Mokyr
. The range of Mokyr's mortality figures goes from 1.1 million to 1.5 million Famine deaths in Ireland between 1846 and 1851. Mokyr produced two sets of data which contained an upper-bound and lower-bound estimate, which showed not much difference in regional patterns. Because of such anomalies, Cormac Ó Gráda
revisited the work of S. H. Cousens. Cousens' estimates of mortality relied heavily on retrospective information contained in the 1851 census. The death tables, contained in the 1851 census have been rightly criticised, as under-estimating the true extent of mortality, Cousens' mortality of 800,000 is now regarded as much too low. There were a number of reasons for this, because the information was gathered from the surviving householders and others and having to look back over the previous 10 years, it underestimates the true extent of disease and mortality. Death and emigration had also cleared away entire families, leaving few or no survivors to answer the questions on the census.
Another area of uncertainty lies in the descriptions of disease given by tenants as to the cause of their relatives' deaths.
Though Wilde's work has been rightly criticised as under-estimating the true extent of mortality, it does provide a framework for the medical history of the Great Famine.
The diseases that badly affected the population fell into two categories, famine-induced diseases and diseases of nutritional deficiency
. Of the nutritional deficiency diseases the most commonly experienced were starvation and marasmus
, as well as condition called at the time dropsy. Dropsy (Edema
) was a popular name given for the symptoms of several diseases, one of which, kwashiorkor
, is associated with starvation. The greatest mortality, however, was not from nutritional deficiency diseases, but from famine-induced ailments. The malnourished are very vulnerable to infections; therefore, they were more severe when they occurred. Measles, diarrheal diseases
, tuberculosis, most respiratory infections, whooping cough
, many intestinal parasites and cholera were all strongly conditioned by nutritional status. Potentially lethal diseases, such as smallpox and influenza, were so virulent that their spread was independent of nutrition.
A significant cause spreading disease during the Famine was "social dislocation." The best example of this phenomenon was fever, which exacted the greatest toll of death. In the popular mind, as well as among much medical opinion, fever and famine are closely related. This view was not wholly mistaken, but the most critical connection was the congregating of the hungry at soup kitchens, food depots, overcrowded work houses where conditions were ideal for spreading infectious disease
s such as typhus, typhoid and relapsing fever
. As to the diarrheal diseases, their presence was the result of poor hygiene, bad sanitation and dietary changes. The concluding attack on a population incapacitated by famine was delivered by Asiatic cholera
. Cholera had visited Ireland, briefly in the 1830s. But in the following decade it spread uncontrollably across Asia, through Europe, and into Britain and finally reached Ireland in 1849.
On the 1851 census, both Cormac Ó Gráda & Joel Mokyr would also describe it as a famous but flawed source. They would contend that the combination of institutional and individuals figures gives "an incomplete and biased count" of fatalities during the famine. Ó Gráda referencing the work of W. A. MacArthur, writes, specialists have long known the Irish death tables left a lot to be desired in terms of accuracy. As a result, Ó Gráda says to take the Tables of Death at face value would be a grave mistake, as they seriously undercount the number of deaths both before and during the famine.
In 1851, the census commissioners collected information on the number who died in each family since 1841, the cause, season and year of death. Its disputed findings were as follows: 21,770 total deaths from starvation in the previous decade, and 400,720 deaths from disease. Listed diseases were fever, dysentery, cholera, smallpox and influenza; the first two being the main killers (222,021 and 93,232). The commissioners acknowledged that their figures were incomplete and that the true number of deaths was probably higher: "The greater the amount of destitution of mortality...the less will be the amount of recorded deaths derived through any household form; - for not only were whole families swept away by disease...but whole villages were effaced from off the land." A later historian has this to say: "In 1851, the Census Commissioners attempted to produce a table of mortality for each year since 1841... The statistics provided were flawed and probably under-estimated the level of mortality..."
Other, perhaps less reliable and likely underestimates are that the event led to the deaths of approximately 1 million people through starvation and disease; a further million are thought to have emigrated as a result of the famine. Some scholars estimate that the population of Ireland was reduced by 20-25%. All of this occurred while taxes, rents, and food exports were being collected and sent to British landlords, in an amount surpassing £6 million.
, the island of Ireland's population had fallen to 4.4 million, about the same as the population in 1800 and 2000 and only a half of its peak population.
's late government, wrote to Peel that, in his opinion, "the real extent and magnitude of the Irish difficulty are underestimated by the Government, and cannot be met by measures within the strict rule of economical science."
This criticism was not confined to outside critics. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon
, wrote a letter to Russell on April 26, 1849, urging that the government propose additional relief measures: "I do not think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination." Also in 1849 the Chief Poor Law Commissioner, Edward Twisleton, resigned in protest over the Rate-in-Aid Act, which provided additional funds for the Poor Law through a 6p in the pound levy on all rateable properties in Ireland. Twisleton testified that "comparatively trifling sums were required for Britain to spare itself the deep disgrace of permitting its miserable fellow subjects to die of starvation." According to Peter Gray
, in his book The Irish Famine, the government spent £7,000,000 for relief in Ireland between 1845 and 1850, "representing less than half of one percent of the British gross national product
over five years. Contemporaries noted the sharp contrast with the 20 million pounds compensation given to West Indian
slave-owners in the 1830s."
Other critics maintained that even after the government recognised the scope of the crisis, it failed to take sufficient steps to address it. John Mitchel, one of the leaders of the Young Ireland Movement, wrote the following in 1860: "I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a 'dispensation of Providence;' and ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe; yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine."
Still other critics saw reflected in the government's response the government's attitude to the so-called "Irish Question". Nassau Senior, an economics professor at Oxford University, wrote that the Famine "would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good." It is not clear from this quote, however, whether Nassau Senior was speaking from a Malthusian context. In 1848, Denis Shine Lawlor suggested that Russell was a student of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser
, who had calculated "how far English colonisation and English policy might be most effectively carried out by Irish starvation." Charles Trevelyan
, the civil servant with most direct responsibility for the government's handling of the famine, described it in 1848 as "a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence", which laid bare "the deep and inveterate root of social evil"; the Famine, he affirmed, was "the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected. God grant that the generation to which this opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part..."
Several writers single out the decision of the government to permit the continued export of food from Ireland as suggestive of the policy-makers' attitudes. Leon Uris
suggested that "there was ample food within Ireland", while all the Irish-bred cattle were being shipped off to England. The following exchange appeared in Act IV of George Bernard Shaw
's play Man and Superman
:
Critics of British imperialism point to the structure of empire as a contributing factor. J. A. Froude wrote that "England governed Ireland for what she deemed her own interest, making her calculations on the gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving moral obligations aside, as if right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the Universe." Dennis Clark, an Irish-American
historian, claimed that the famine was "the culmination of generations of neglect, misrule and repression. It was an epic of English colonial cruelty and inadequacy. For the landless cabin dwellers it meant emigration or extinction..."
In 1996, Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
, wrote a report commissioned by the New York-based Irish Famine/Genocide Committee, which concluded that the British government deliberately pursued a race and ethnicity-based policy aimed at destroying the group commonly known as the Irish people and that the policy of mass starvation amounted to genocide per the Hague convention of 1948. On the strength of Boyle's report, the U.S. state of New Jersey
included the famine in the "Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum" at the secondary
tier.
Historian Peter Duffy
writes that "The government's crime, which deserves to blacken its name forever ..." was rooted "in the effort to regenerate Ireland" through "landlord-engineered replacement of tillage plots with grazing lands" that "took precedence over the obligation to provide food ... for its starving citizens. It is little wonder that the policy looked to many people like genocide."
Several commentators have argued that the searing effect of the famine in Irish cultural memory has effects similar to that of genocide, while maintaining that one did not occur. Robert Kee
suggests that the Famine is seen as "comparable" in its force on "popular national consciousness to that of the 'final solution' on the Jews," and that it is not "infrequently" thought that the Famine was something very like "a form of genocide engineered by the English against the Irish people." This point was echoed by James Donnelly, a historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
, who wrote in his work Landlord and Tenant in Nineteenth-century Ireland, "I would draw the following broad conclusion: at a fairly early stage of the Great Famine the government's abject failure to stop or even slow down the clearances (evictions) contributed in a major way to enshrining the idea of English state-sponsored genocide in Irish popular mind. Or perhaps one should say in the Irish mind, for this was a notion that appealed to many educated and discriminating men and women, and not only to the revolutionary minority...And it is also my contention that while genocide was not in fact committed, what happened during and as a result of the clearances had the look of genocide to a great many Irish..."
Historian Cormac Ó Gráda
disagreed that the famine was genocide: first, that "genocide includes murderous intent and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of the day sought the extermination of the Irish"; second, that most people in Whitehall
"hoped for better times in Ireland" and third, that the claim of genocide overlooks "the enormous challenges facing relief efforts, both central, local, public and private". Ó Gráda thinks that a case of neglect is easier to sustain than that of genocide. However, people in charge like chief of the Government relief Charles Trevelyan contradict a "neglect" but rather hazarded the consequenses from the colonial perspective that the Famine was a "mechanism for reducing surplus population" and a "judgement of God".
Views of the Irish as racially inferior, and for this reason significantly responsible for their circumstances, gained purchase in Great Britain during and immediately after the famine, especially through influential publications such as The Medical Times and The Times
.
Irish columnist John Waters
has described the famine as "an act of genocide, driven by racism
and justified by ideology".
ised in many locations throughout Ireland, especially in those regions that suffered the greatest losses, and also in cities overseas with large populations descended from Irish immigrants. These include, at Custom House Quays, Dublin, the thin sculptural figures, by artist Rowan Gillespie
, who stand as if walking towards the emigration ships on the Dublin Quayside. There is also a large memorial at the Murrisk Millennium Peace Park at the foot of Croagh Patrick in County Mayo. Among the memorials in the U.S. is the Irish Hunger Memorial
near a section of the Manhattan waterfront in New York City
, where many fleeing Irish arrived. An annual Great Famine walk, the brainchild of the Irish author/humanitarian, Don Mullan
, from Doolough to Louisburgh, Co. Mayo, was inaugurated in 1988 and has been led by such notable personalities as Archbishop Desmond Tutu
of South Africa and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma
. The walk, organised by AFrI Action From Ireland, takes place on the first or second Saturday of May and links the memory of the Great Hunger with a contemporary Human Rights issue. Commemorating the Doolough Tragedy, the walk was covered by the three major US television networks: ABC, NBC and CBS, during its first three years.
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
, the Great Famine was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration between 1845 and 1852. It is also known, mostly outside Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine. In the Irish language
Irish language
Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
it is called an Gorta Mór (ənˠ ˈɡɔɾˠtˠə ˈmˠoːɾˠ, meaning "the Great Hunger") or an Drochshaol (ənˠ ˈdˠɾɔxˌhiːlˠ, meaning "the bad times").
During the famine approximately 1 million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland, causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%. The proximate cause of famine
Famine
A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including crop failure, overpopulation, or government policies. This phenomenon is usually accompanied or followed by regional malnutrition, starvation, epidemic, and increased mortality. Every continent in the world has...
was a potato
Potato
The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family . The word potato may refer to the plant itself as well as the edible tuber. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species...
disease commonly known as potato blight. Although blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland where one-third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food was exacerbated by a host of political, social and economic factors which remain the subject of historical debate.
The famine was a watershed in the history of Ireland
History of Ireland
The first known settlement in Ireland began around 8000 BC, when hunter-gatherers arrived from continental Europe, probably via a land bridge. Few archaeological traces remain of this group, but their descendants and later Neolithic arrivals, particularly from the Iberian Peninsula, were...
. Its effects permanently changed the island's demographic, political and cultural landscape. For both the native Irish
Irish people
The Irish people are an ethnic group who originate in Ireland, an island in northwestern Europe. Ireland has been populated for around 9,000 years , with the Irish people's earliest ancestors recorded having legends of being descended from groups such as the Nemedians, Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha...
and those in the resulting diaspora
Irish diaspora
thumb|Night Train with Reaper by London Irish artist [[Brian Whelan]] from the book Myth of Return, 2007The Irish diaspora consists of Irish emigrants and their descendants in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, Mexico, South Africa,...
, the famine entered folk memory
Folk memory
Folk memories is a term sometimes used to describe stories, folklore or myths about past events that have passed orally from generation to generation. The events described by the memories may date back hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of years and often have a local significance...
and became a rallying point for various nationalist movements
Irish nationalism
Irish nationalism manifests itself in political and social movements and in sentiment inspired by a love for Irish culture, language and history, and as a sense of pride in Ireland and in the Irish people...
as Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was the formal name of the United Kingdom during the period when what is now the Republic of Ireland formed a part of it....
. Modern historians regard it as a dividing line in the Irish historical narrative, referring to the preceding period of Irish history as "pre-Famine".
Causes and contributing factors
Starting in 1801, Ireland had been directly governed, under the Act of UnionAct of Union 1800
The Acts of Union 1800 describe two complementary Acts, namely:* the Union with Ireland Act 1800 , an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, and...
, as part of the United Kingdom
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was the formal name of the United Kingdom during the period when what is now the Republic of Ireland formed a part of it....
. Executive power
Executive (government)
Executive branch of Government is the part of government that has sole authority and responsibility for the daily administration of the state bureaucracy. The division of power into separate branches of government is central to the idea of the separation of powers.In many countries, the term...
lay in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland
Lord Lieutenant of Ireland
The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was the British King's representative and head of the Irish executive during the Lordship of Ireland , the Kingdom of Ireland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland...
and Chief Secretary for Ireland
Chief Secretary for Ireland
The Chief Secretary for Ireland was a key political office in the British administration in Ireland. Nominally subordinate to the Lord Lieutenant, from the late 18th century until the end of British rule he was effectively the government minister with responsibility for governing Ireland; usually...
, both of whom were appointed by the British government. Ireland sent 105 members of parliament
Member of Parliament
A Member of Parliament is a representative of the voters to a :parliament. In many countries with bicameral parliaments, the term applies specifically to members of the lower house, as upper houses often have a different title, such as senate, and thus also have different titles for its members,...
to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, and Irish
Peerage of Ireland
The Peerage of Ireland is the term used for those titles of nobility created by the English and later British monarchs of Ireland in their capacity as Lord or King of Ireland. The creation of such titles came to an end in the 19th century. The ranks of the Irish peerage are Duke, Marquess, Earl,...
representative peer
Representative peer
In the United Kingdom, representative peers were those peers elected by the members of the Peerage of Scotland and the Peerage of Ireland to sit in the British House of Lords...
s elected 28 of their own number to sit for life in the House of Lords
House of Lords
The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster....
. Between 1832 and 1859, 70% of Irish representatives were landowners or the sons of landowners.
In the 40 years that followed the union, successive British governments grappled with the problems of governing a country which had, as Benjamin Disraeli put it in 1844, "a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church
Church of Ireland
The Church of Ireland is an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. The church operates in all parts of Ireland and is the second largest religious body on the island after the Roman Catholic Church...
, and in addition the weakest executive in the world." One historian calculated that between 1801 and 1845, there had been 114 commissions and 61 special committees inquiring into the state of Ireland and that "without exception their findings prophesied disaster; Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standard of living unbelievably low." This was a contrast to Britain, which was beginning to enjoy the modern prosperity of the Victorian and Industrial
Industrial Age
Industrial Age may refer to:*Industrialisation*The Industrial Revolution...
ages. Laws against education of Irish Catholic
Irish Catholic
Irish Catholic is a term used to describe people who are both Roman Catholic and Irish .Note: the term is not used to describe a variant of Catholicism. More particularly, it is not a separate creed or sect in the sense that "Anglo-Catholic", "Old Catholic", "Eastern Orthodox Catholic" might be...
s and possession of land had made such a progress impossible until the penal laws were repealed 50 years before the Famine, but the economic recovery was slow because the landlord families still kept their land.
Laws that restricted the rights of the Irish
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish Catholics had been prohibited by the penal lawsPenal Laws (Ireland)
The term Penal Laws in Ireland were a series of laws imposed under English and later British rule that sought to discriminate against Roman Catholics and Protestant dissenters in favour of members of the established Church of Ireland....
from owning land, from leasing land; from voting, from holding political office; from living in a corporate town or within 5 mi (8 km) of a corporate town, from obtaining education, from entering a profession, and from doing many other things that are necessary in order to succeed and prosper in life. The laws had largely been reformed by 1793, and in 1829, Irish Catholics could again sit in parliament following the Act of Emancipation
Catholic Emancipation
Catholic emancipation or Catholic relief was a process in Great Britain and Ireland in the late 18th century and early 19th century which involved reducing and removing many of the restrictions on Roman Catholics which had been introduced by the Act of Uniformity, the Test Acts and the penal laws...
.
Landlords and tenants
During the 18th century, a new system for managing the landlord's property was introduced in the form of the "middleman system". Rent collection was left in the hands of the landlords' agents, or middlemen. This assured the (usually Protestant) landlord of a regular income, and relieved them of any responsibility; the tenants however were then subject to exploitation through these middlemen.Catholics made up 80% of the population, the bulk of whom lived in conditions of poverty and insecurity despite Catholic emancipation
Catholic Emancipation
Catholic emancipation or Catholic relief was a process in Great Britain and Ireland in the late 18th century and early 19th century which involved reducing and removing many of the restrictions on Roman Catholics which had been introduced by the Act of Uniformity, the Test Acts and the penal laws...
in 1829. At the top of the "social pyramid" was the "ascendancy class
Protestant Ascendancy
The Protestant Ascendancy, usually known in Ireland simply as the Ascendancy, is a phrase used when referring to the political, economic, and social domination of Ireland by a minority of great landowners, Protestant clergy, and professionals, all members of the Established Church during the 17th...
", the English and Anglo-Irish
Anglo-Irish
Anglo-Irish was a term used primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries to identify a privileged social class in Ireland, whose members were the descendants and successors of the Protestant Ascendancy, mostly belonging to the Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until...
families who owned most of the land, and who had more or less limitless power over their tenants. Some of their estates were vast: the Earl of Lucan
Earl of Lucan
Earl of Lucan was a title in the Peerage of Ireland which has been possessed by two related Irish families in creations of 1691 and 1795. The current holder is presumed to be Richard Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, who vanished in 1974....
owned over 60000 acre (242.8 km²). Many of these landlords lived in England and were called "absentee landlords". The rent revenue was sent to England, collected from "impoverished tenants" paid minimal wages to raise crops and livestock for export.
In 1843, the British Government considered that the land question in Ireland was the root cause
Root cause
A root cause is rarely an initiating cause of a causal chain which leads to an outcome or effect of interest. Commonly, root cause is misused to describe the depth in the causal chain where an intervention could reasonably be implemented to change performance and prevent an undesirable outcome.In...
of disaffection in the country. They set up a Royal Commission
Royal Commission
In Commonwealth realms and other monarchies a Royal Commission is a major ad-hoc formal public inquiry into a defined issue. They have been held in various countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Saudi Arabia...
, chaired by the Earl of Devon
Earl of Devon
The title of Earl of Devon was created several times in the Peerage of England, and was possessed first by the de Redvers family, and later by the Courtenays...
, to inquire into the laws with regard to the occupation of land in Ireland. Daniel O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell Daniel O'Connell Daniel O'Connell (6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847; often referred to as The Liberator, or The Emancipator, was an Irish political leader in the first half of the 19th century...
described this commission as perfectly one-sided, being made up of landlords and no tenants. Devon in February 1845 reported that "It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they [Irish labourer and his family] habitually and silently endure . . . in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water . . . their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather... a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury . . . and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property." The Commissioners concluded that they could not "forbear expressing our strong sense of the patient endurance which the labouring classes have exhibited under sufferings greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to sustain."
The Commission stated that the principal cause was the bad relations between the landlord and tenant. There was no hereditary loyalty, feudal tie or paternalism as existed in England. Ireland was a conquered country, with the Earl of Clare
Earl of Clare
Earl of Clare was a title of English nobility created three times: once each in the peerages of England, Great Britain, and Ireland. The title derives from Clare, Suffolk, where a prominent Anglo-Norman family was seated since the Norman Conquest, and from which their English surname sprang from...
speaking of the landlords saying "confiscation is their common title." According to the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith
Cecil Woodham-Smith
Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith was a British historian and biographer. She wrote four popular history books, each dealing with a different aspect of the Victorian era.-Early life:...
, the landlords regarded the land as a source of income from which to extract as much money as possible. With the Irish "brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation" according to the Earl of Clare, Ireland was seen as a hostile place in which to live, and as a consequence absentee landlords were common, with some visiting their property once or twice in a lifetime, or never. The rents from Ireland were then spent in England, it being estimated that in 1842 £6,000,000 was remitted out of Ireland.
According to Woodham-Smith, the ability of the middlemen was measured by the amount of money they could contrive to extract. Described by the Commission as "the most oppressive species of tyrant that ever lent assistance to the destruction of a country," they were invariably described as "land sharks" and "bloodsuckers."
The middlemen leased large tracts of land from the landlords on long leases with fixed rents, which they then sublet as they saw fit. They split the holding into smaller and smaller parcels to increase the amounts of rents they could then obtain, a system called conacre
Conacre
Conacre , in Ireland, is a system of letting land, formerly in small patches or strips, and usually for tillage ....
. Tenants could be evicted for reasons such as non-payment of rents (which were very high), or if the landlord decided to raise sheep instead of grain crops
Cereal
Cereals are grasses cultivated for the edible components of their grain , composed of the endosperm, germ, and bran...
. The cottier
Cotter (farmer)
See also Canadian band The Cottars.Cotter, cottier or cottar is the Scots term for a peasant farmer formerly in the Scottish highlands. Cotters occupied cottages and cultivated small plots of land...
paid his rent by working for the landlord.
Any improvements made on the holdings by the tenants became the property of the landlords when the lease expired or was terminated, which acted as a disincentive to improvements. The tenants had no security of tenure on the land; being tenants "at will" they could be turned out whenever the landlord chose. This class of tenant made up the majority of tenant farmer
Tenant farmer
A tenant farmer is one who resides on and farms land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management; while tenant farmers contribute their labor along with at times varying...
s in Ireland, the exception being in Ulster
Ulster
Ulster is one of the four provinces of Ireland, located in the north of the island. In ancient Ireland, it was one of the fifths ruled by a "king of over-kings" . Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the ancient kingdoms were shired into a number of counties for administrative and judicial...
where there existed a practice known as "tenant right", under which tenants were compensated for any improvements made to their holdings. The commission according to Woodham-Smith stated that "the superior prosperity and tranquility of Ulster, compared with the rest of Ireland, were due to tenant right."
Landlords in Ireland used their powers without remorse, and the people lived in dread of them. In these circumstances, Woodham-Smith writes "industry and enterprise were extinguished and a peasantry created which was one of the most destitute in Europe."
Tenants, subdivisions, and bankruptcy
In 1845, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4-2 hectareHectare
The hectare is a metric unit of area defined as 10,000 square metres , and primarily used in the measurement of land. In 1795, when the metric system was introduced, the are was defined as being 100 square metres and the hectare was thus 100 ares or 1/100 km2...
s (1-5 acre
Acre
The acre is a unit of area in a number of different systems, including the imperial and U.S. customary systems. The most commonly used acres today are the international acre and, in the United States, the survey acre. The most common use of the acre is to measure tracts of land.The acre is related...
s) in size, while 40% were of 2-6 hectares (5-15 acres). Holdings were so small that no other crop than potatoes would suffice to feed a family, nor could ranching be a possibility due to the limited land. The British government reported, shortly before the famine, that poverty was so widespread that one-third of all Irish small holdings could not support their families, after paying their rent, except by earnings of seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland. Following the famine, reforms were implemented making it illegal to further divide land holdings.
The 1841 census showed a population of just over eight million. Two-thirds of those depended on agriculture for their survival, but they rarely received a working wage. They had to work for their landlords in return for the patch of land they needed in order to grow enough food for their own families. This was the system which forced Ireland and its peasantry into monoculture
Monoculture
Monoculture is the agricultural practice of producing or growing one single crop over a wide area. It is also known as a way of farming practice of growing large stands of a single species. It is widely used in modern industrial agriculture and its implementation has allowed for large harvests from...
, as only the potato could be grown in sufficient quantity. The rights to a plot of land in Ireland could mean the difference between life and death in the early 19th century.
Potato dependency
The potatoPotato
The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family . The word potato may refer to the plant itself as well as the edible tuber. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species...
was introduced to Ireland as a garden crop of the gentry. By the late 17th century, it had become widespread as a supplementary rather than a principal food, as the main diet still revolved around butter, milk, and grain products. In the first two decades of the 18th century, however, it became a base food of the poor, especially in winter. The expansion of the economy between 1760 and 1815 saw the potato make inroads in the diet of the people and become a staple food
Staple food
A staple food is one that is eaten regularly and in such quantities that it constitutes a dominant portion of a diet, and that supplies a high proportion of energy and nutrient needs. Most people live on a diet based on one or more staples...
all the year round for farmers.
The potato's spread was essential to the development of the cottier system, delivering an extremely cheap workforce, but at the cost of lower living standards. For the labourer, it was essentially a potato wage that shaped the expanding agrarian economy.
The expansion of tillage led to an inevitable expansion of the potato acreage and an expansion of peasant farmers. By 1841, there were over half a million peasant farmers, with 1.75 million dependants. The principal beneficiary of this system was the English consumer.
The potato was also used extensively as a fodder crop for livestock immediately prior to the famine. Approximately 33% of production, amounting to 5000000 ST (4,535,923.7 t), was normally used in this way.
| Year | Estimated potato produce (in thousands of tons) |
|---|---|
| 1844 | 14,862 |
| 1845 | 10,063 |
| 1846 | 2,999 |
| 1847 | 2,046 |
| 1848 | 3,077[1] |
| 1849 | 4,024 |
| 1855 | 6,287 |
| 1856 | 4,419 |
| 1859 | 4,321 |
[1] The 1848 figures are based on extrapolation from incomplete returns.
Blight in Ireland
Prior to the arrival in Ireland of the disease Phytophthora infestansPhytophthora infestans
Phytophthora infestans is an oomycete that causes the serious potato disease known as late blight or potato blight. . Late blight was a major culprit in the 1840s European, the 1845 Irish and 1846 Highland potato famines...
, commonly known as blight, there were only two main potato plant diseases. One was called 'dry rot' or 'taint' and the other was a virus, known popularly as 'curl'. Phytophthora infestans is an oomycete (not a fungus).
Munster
Munster is one of the Provinces of Ireland situated in the south of Ireland. In Ancient Ireland, it was one of the fifths ruled by a "king of over-kings" . Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the ancient kingdoms were shired into a number of counties for administrative and judicial purposes...
and Connaught
Connacht
Connacht , formerly anglicised as Connaught, is one of the Provinces of Ireland situated in the west of Ireland. In Ancient Ireland, it was one of the fifths ruled by a "king of over-kings" . Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the ancient kingdoms were shired into a number of counties for...
, and 1830 and 1831 were years of failure in Mayo
County Mayo
County Mayo is a county in Ireland. It is located in the West Region and is also part of the province of Connacht. It is named after the village of Mayo, which is now generally known as Mayo Abbey. Mayo County Council is the local authority for the county. The population of the county is 130,552...
, Donegal
County Donegal
County Donegal is a county in Ireland. It is part of the Border Region and is also located in the province of Ulster. It is named after the town of Donegal. Donegal County Council is the local authority for the county...
and Galway
County Galway
County Galway is a county in Ireland. It is located in the West Region and is also part of the province of Connacht. It is named after the city of Galway. Galway County Council is the local authority for the county. There are several strongly Irish-speaking areas in the west of the county...
. In 1832, 1833, 1834 and 1836, a large number of districts suffered serious loss, and in 1835, the potato failed in Ulster
Ulster
Ulster is one of the four provinces of Ireland, located in the north of the island. In ancient Ireland, it was one of the fifths ruled by a "king of over-kings" . Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the ancient kingdoms were shired into a number of counties for administrative and judicial...
. 1836 and 1837 brought "extensive" failures throughout Ireland and again in 1839 failure was universal throughout the country; both 1841 and 1844 potato crop failure was widespread. According to Woodham-Smith, "the unreliability of the potato crop was an accepted fact in Ireland.
How and when the blight Phytophthora infestans
Phytophthora infestans
Phytophthora infestans is an oomycete that causes the serious potato disease known as late blight or potato blight. . Late blight was a major culprit in the 1840s European, the 1845 Irish and 1846 Highland potato famines...
arrived in Europe is still uncertain; according to P.M.A Bourke, however, it almost certainly was not present prior to 1842, and probably arrived in 1844. At least one of the sources of the infection suggests it may have originated in the northern Andes region of South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
, Peru in particular. It was then conveyed to Europe on ships carrying guano
Guano
Guano is the excrement of seabirds, cave dwelling bats, and seals. Guano manure is an effective fertilizer due to its high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen and also its lack of odor. It was an important source of nitrates for gunpowder...
, which was in great demand as a fertiliser on European and British farms.
In 1844, Irish newspapers carried reports concerning a disease which for two years had attacked the potato crops in America. According to James Donnelly, a likely source was the eastern United States, where in 1843 and 1844 blight largely destroyed the potato crops. He suggests that ships from Baltimore, Philadelphia or New York could have brought diseased potatoes to European ports. W.C. Paddock suggests that it was transported on potatoes being carried to feed passengers on clipper ships sailing from America to Ireland.
Once it was introduced, it spread rapidly. By late summer and early autumn of 1845, it had spread throughout the greater part of northern and central Europe
Central Europe
Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...
. Belgium, Holland, northern France and southern England by mid-August had all been stricken.
On August 16, the Gardeners' Chronicle and Horticultural Gazette printed a report which described 'a blight of unusual character' in the Isle of Wight
Isle of Wight
The Isle of Wight is a county and the largest island of England, located in the English Channel, on average about 2–4 miles off the south coast of the county of Hampshire, separated from the mainland by a strait called the Solent...
. A week later, on 23 August, it reported that 'A fearful malady has broken out among the potato crop... In Belgium the fields are said to be completely desolated. There is hardly a sound sample in Covent Garden market
Covent Garden
Covent Garden is a district in London on the eastern fringes of the West End, between St. Martin's Lane and Drury Lane. It is associated with the former fruit and vegetable market in the central square, now a popular shopping and tourist site, and the Royal Opera House, which is also known as...
... As for cure for this distemper, there is none...' These reports were extensively covered in Irish newspapers. On 13 September the Gardeners' Chronicle made 'a dramatic announcement': 'We stop the Press with very great regret to announce that the potato Murrain has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland.' The British Government were nevertheless optimistic through the next few weeks.
Crop loss in 1845 has been estimated at anywhere from one third to as high as one half of cultivated acreage. The Mansion House Committee in Dublin, to which hundreds of letters were directed from all over Ireland, claimed on November 19, 1845 to have ascertained beyond the shadow of doubt that 'considerably more than one-third of the entire of the potato crop ... has been already destroyed'.
In 1846, three quarters of the harvest was lost to blight. By December, a third of a million destitute people were employed in public works. According to Cormac Ó Gráda the first attack of potato blight caused considerable hardship in rural Ireland, from the autumn of 1846, when the first deaths from starvation were recorded. Seed potatoes were scarce in 1847, little had been sown, so despite average yields, hunger continued. 1848 yields would be only two thirds of normal. As over 3 million Irish people were totally dependent on potatoes for food, hunger and famine were inevitable.
Reaction in Ireland
The Corporation of Dublin sent a memorial to the Queen, "praying her" to call Parliament together early (Parliament was at this time prorogued), and to recommend the requisition of some public money for public works, especially railways in Ireland. The Town CouncilTown council
A town council is a democratically elected form of government for small municipalities or civil parishes. A council may serve as both the representative and executive branch....
of Belfast
Belfast
Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...
met and made similar suggestions, but neither body asked for charity, according to Mitchel. "They demanded that, if Ireland was indeed an Integral part of the realm, the common exchequer of both islands should be used—not to give alms, but to provide employment on public works of general utility." It was Mitchel's opinion that "if Yorkshire and Lancashire had sustained a like calamity in England, there is no doubt such measures as these would have been taken, promptly and liberally."
A deputation from the citizens of Dublin, including the Duke of Leinster
Augustus FitzGerald, 3rd Duke of Leinster
Augustus Frederick FitzGerald, 3rd Duke of Leinster, etc., PC, PC was an Irish peer and freemason, styled Marquess of Kildare from birth until 1804. He was born and died in Carton....
, the Lord Mayor, Lord Cloncurry
Valentine Lawless, 2nd Baron Cloncurry
Valentine Brown Lawless, 2nd Baron Cloncurry , was an Irish politician and landowner. He lived in Lyons, under Lyons Hill Ardclough County Kildare.-Birth:...
, and Daniel O'Connell, went to the current Lord Lieutenant of Ireland
William à Court, 1st Baron Heytesbury
William à Court, 1st Baron Heytesbury GCB PC , known as Sir William à Court, Bt, from 1817 to 1828, was a British diplomat and Conservative politician.-Background and education:...
, and offered suggestions, such as opening the ports to foreign corn for a time, stopping distillation from grain, or providing public works; that this was extremely urgent, as millions of people would shortly be without food. Lord Heytesbury told them they "were premature", and told them not to be alarmed, that learned men (Playfair and Lindley) had been sent from England to enquire into all those matters; and that the Inspectors of Constabulary and Stipendiary Magistrates were charged with making constant reports from their districts; and there was no "immediate pressure on the market". Of these reports from Lord Heytesbury, Peel in a letter to Sir James Graham was to say that he found the accounts "very alarming", though he reminded him that there was, according to Woodham-Smith "always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news".
On December 8, 1845, Daniel O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell Daniel O'Connell Daniel O'Connell (6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847; often referred to as The Liberator, or The Emancipator, was an Irish political leader in the first half of the 19th century...
, in the Repeal Association
Repeal Association
The Repeal Association was an Irish mass membership political movement set up by Daniel O'Connell to campaign for a repeal of the Act of Union of 1800 between Great Britain and Ireland....
, proposed the following remedies to the pending disaster. One of the first things he suggested was the introduction of "Tenant-Right
Tenant-right
Tenant-right is a term in the common law system expressing the right to compensation which a tenant has, either by custom or by law, against his landlord for improvements at the termination of his tenancy....
" as practised in Ulster, giving the landlord a fair rent for his land, but giving the tenant compensation for any money he might have laid out on the land in permanent improvements.
O'Connell then pointed out the means used by the Belgian legislature during the same season: shutting their ports against the export of provisions, but opening them to imports. He suggested that if Ireland had a domestic Parliament the ports would be thrown open and the abundant crops raised in Ireland would be kept for the people of Ireland. O'Connell maintained that only an Irish parliament
Parliament of Ireland
The Parliament of Ireland was a legislature that existed in Dublin from 1297 until 1800. In its early mediaeval period during the Lordship of Ireland it consisted of either two or three chambers: the House of Commons, elected by a very restricted suffrage, the House of Lords in which the lords...
would provide for the people both food and employment, saying that a repeal of the Act of Union
Act of Union 1800
The Acts of Union 1800 describe two complementary Acts, namely:* the Union with Ireland Act 1800 , an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, and...
was a necessity and Ireland's only hope.
John Mitchel
John Mitchel was an Irish nationalist activist, solicitor and political journalist. Born in Camnish, near Dungiven, County Londonderry, Ireland he became a leading member of both Young Ireland and the Irish Confederation...
, one of the leading political writers of Young Ireland
Young Ireland
Young Ireland was a political, cultural and social movement of the mid-19th century. It led changes in Irish nationalism, including an abortive rebellion known as the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848. Many of the latter's leaders were tried for sedition and sentenced to penal transportation to...
, as early as 1844, in The Nation
The Nation (Irish newspaper)
The Nation was an Irish nationalist weekly newspaper, published in the 19th century. The Nation was printed first at 12 Trinity Street, Dublin, on 15 October 1842, until 6 January 1844...
raised the issue of the "Potato Disease" in Ireland noting how powerful an agent hunger had been in certain revolutions. On February 14, 1846, he put forward his views on "the wretched way in which the famine was being trifled with", and asked, had not the Government even yet any conception that there might be soon "millions of human beings in Ireland having nothing to eat."
On February 28, writing on the Coercion Bill which was then going through the House of Lords, he noted that this was the only kind of legislation that was sure to meet with no obstruction in the British House of Commons. His view was that however the government may differ about feeding the Irish people, "they agree most cordially in the policy of taxing, prosecuting and ruining them." (As it happened, the bill was subsequently defeated, and Peel's government fell.)
In an article on "English Rule" on March 7, Mitchel wrote that the Irish People were "expecting famine day by day" and they attributed it collectively, not to "the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England." He continued in the same article to write that the people "believe that the season as they roll are but ministers of England's rapacity; that their starving children cannot sit down to their scanty meal but they see the harpy claw of England in their dish." The people, Mitchel wrote, watched as their "food melting in rottenness off the face of the earth," all the while watching "heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for England."
Mitchel later wrote one of the first widely circulated tracts on the famine, The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) in 1861. It established the widespread view that the treatment of the famine by the British was a deliberate murder of the Irish, and contained the famous phrase: Mitchel was charged with sedition
Sedition
In law, sedition is overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent to lawful authority. Sedition may include any...
because of his writings, but this charge was dropped and he was convicted by a packed jury under the newly enacted Treason Felony
Treason Felony Act 1848
The Treason Felony Act 1848 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The Act is still in force. It is a law which protects HM the Queen and the Crown....
Act and sentenced to 14 years transportation to Bermuda
Bermuda
Bermuda is a British overseas territory in the North Atlantic Ocean. Located off the east coast of the United States, its nearest landmass is Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, about to the west-northwest. It is about south of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and northeast of Miami, Florida...
.
The Nation
The Nation (Irish newspaper)
The Nation was an Irish nationalist weekly newspaper, published in the 19th century. The Nation was printed first at 12 Trinity Street, Dublin, on 15 October 1842, until 6 January 1844...
according to Charles Gavan Duffy
Charles Gavan Duffy
Additional Reading*, Allen & Unwin, 1973.*John Mitchel, A Cause Too Many, Aidan Hegarty, Camlane Press.*Thomas Davis, The Thinker and Teacher, Arthur Griffith, M.H. Gill & Son 1922....
, insisted that the one remedy was that which the rest of Europe had adopted, which even the parliaments of the Pale
The Pale
The Pale or the English Pale , was the part of Ireland that was directly under the control of the English government in the late Middle Ages. It had reduced by the late 15th century to an area along the east coast stretching from Dalkey, south of Dublin, to the garrison town of Dundalk...
had adopted in periods of distress, which was to retain in the country the food raised by her people till the people were fed.
Ireland at this time was, according to the Act of Union of 1801, an integral part of the British imperial homeland, "the richest empire on the globe," and was "the most fertile portion of that empire," in addition; Ireland was sheltered by both "... Habeas Corpus
Habeas corpus
is a writ, or legal action, through which a prisoner can be released from unlawful detention. The remedy can be sought by the prisoner or by another person coming to his aid. Habeas corpus originated in the English legal system, but it is now available in many nations...
and trial by jury ...". And yet Ireland's elected representatives seemed powerless to act on the country's behalf as Members of the British Parliament
Parliament of the United Kingdom
The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body in the United Kingdom, British Crown dependencies and British overseas territories, located in London...
. Commenting on this at the time John Mitchel wrote: "That an island which is said to be an integral part of the richest empire on the globe ... should in five years lose two and a half millions of its people (more than one fourth) by hunger, and fever the consequence of hunger, and flight beyond sea to escape from hunger ..."
The period of the potato blight in Ireland from 1845 to 1851 was full of political confrontation. The mass movement for Repeal
Repeal Association
The Repeal Association was an Irish mass membership political movement set up by Daniel O'Connell to campaign for a repeal of the Act of Union of 1800 between Great Britain and Ireland....
of the Act of Union had failed in its objectives by the time its founder Daniel O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell
Daniel O'Connell Daniel O'Connell Daniel O'Connell (6 August 1775 – 15 May 1847; often referred to as The Liberator, or The Emancipator, was an Irish political leader in the first half of the 19th century...
died in 1847. A more radical Young Ireland
Young Ireland
Young Ireland was a political, cultural and social movement of the mid-19th century. It led changes in Irish nationalism, including an abortive rebellion known as the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848. Many of the latter's leaders were tried for sedition and sentenced to penal transportation to...
group seceded from the Repeal movement and attempted an armed rebellion in the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848
Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848
The Young Irelander Rebellion was a failed Irish nationalist uprising led by the Young Ireland movement. It took place on 29 July 1848 in the village of Ballingarry, County Tipperary. After being chased by a force of Young Irelanders and their supporters, an Irish Constabulary unit raided a house...
. It was unsuccessful.
Government response
F.S.L. Lyons characterised the initial response of the British government to the early less severe phase of the famine as "prompt and relatively successful." Confronted by widespread crop failure in the autumn of 1845, Prime MinisterPrime Minister of the United Kingdom
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the Head of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom. The Prime Minister and Cabinet are collectively accountable for their policies and actions to the Sovereign, to Parliament, to their political party and...
Sir Robert Peel
Robert Peel
Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet was a British Conservative statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 December 1834 to 8 April 1835, and again from 30 August 1841 to 29 June 1846...
purchased £100,000 worth of maize
Maize
Maize known in many English-speaking countries as corn or mielie/mealie, is a grain domesticated by indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica in prehistoric times. The leafy stalk produces ears which contain seeds called kernels. Though technically a grain, maize kernels are used in cooking as a vegetable...
and cornmeal
Cornmeal
Cornmeal is flour ground from dried maize or American corn. It is a common staple food, and is ground to fine, medium, and coarse consistencies. In the United States, the finely ground cornmeal is also referred to as cornflour. However, the word cornflour denotes cornstarch in recipes from the...
secretly from America. Baring Brothers & Co
Barings Bank
Barings Bank was the oldest merchant bank in London until its collapse in 1995 after one of the bank's employees, Nick Leeson, lost £827 million due to speculative investing, primarily in futures contracts, at the bank's Singapore office.-History:-1762–1890:Barings Bank was founded in 1762 as the...
initially acted as purchasing agents for the Prime Minister. The government hoped that they would not "stifle private enterprise" and that their actions would not act as a disincentive to local relief efforts. Due to weather conditions, the first shipment did not arrive in Ireland until the beginning of February 1846.
The maize corn was then re-sold for a penny a pound. The corn when it arrived had not been ground and was inedible, and this task involved a long and complicated process if it was to be done correctly and it was unlikely to be carried out locally. In addition, before the cornmeal could be consumed, it had to be 'very much' cooked again, or eating it could result in severe bowel complaints. Because of maize's yellow colour, and the fact that it had to be ground twice, it became known in Ireland as 'Peel's brimstone'. In 1846, Peel then moved to repeal the Corn Laws
Corn Laws
The Corn Laws were trade barriers designed to protect cereal producers in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland against competition from less expensive foreign imports between 1815 and 1846. The barriers were introduced by the Importation Act 1815 and repealed by the Importation Act 1846...
, tariff
Tariff
A tariff may be either tax on imports or exports , or a list or schedule of prices for such things as rail service, bus routes, and electrical usage ....
s on grain which kept the price of bread artificially high. The famine situation worsened during 1846 and the repeal of the Corn Laws in that year did little to help the starving Irish; the measure split the Conservative Party, leading to the fall of Peel's ministry. In March, Peel set up a programme of public works in Ireland but was forced to resign as Prime Minister on 29 June." This fall came on June 25, when he was defeated in the House of Commons on a motion that the Irish Coercion Bill be read a second time. According to Michael Doheny
Michael Doheny
Michael Doheny was an Irish writer and member of the Young Ireland movement.-Early life:The third son of Michael Doheny, of Brookhill, he was born at Brookhill, near Fethard, Co. Tipperary, and married a Miss O'Dwyer of that county...
, the majority against him was 73, and it was made of the "Whig party, the extreme Conservatives, the ultra-Radicals and Irish Repealers." Ten days after, Lord John Russell assumed the seals of office.
The measures undertaken by Peel's successor, Lord John Russell
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, KG, GCMG, PC , known as Lord John Russell before 1861, was an English Whig and Liberal politician who served twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century....
, proved comparatively "inadequate" as the crisis deepened. Russell's ministry introduced public works projects, which by December 1846 employed some half million Irish and proved impossible to administer. Sir Charles Trevelyan
Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet
Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, 1st Baronet, KCB was a British civil servant and colonial administrator. As a young man, he worked with the colonial government in Calcutta, India; in the late 1850s and 1860s he served there in senior-level appointments...
, who was in charge of the administration of Government relief to the victims of the Irish Famine, limited the Government's actual relief because he thought "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson". For his policy, he was commemorated in the song The Fields of Athenry
The Fields of Athenry
"The Fields of Athenry" is an Irish folk ballad set during the Great Irish Famine about a fictional man named Michael from near Athenry in County Galway who has been sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay, Australia, for stealing food for his starving family...
. The Public Works were "strictly ordered" to be unproductive—that is, they would create no fund to repay their own expenses. Many hundreds of thousands of "feeble and starving men" according to John Mitchel, were kept digging holes, and breaking up roads, which was doing no service.
The new Lord John Russell Whig administration, influenced by their laissez-faire
Laissez-faire
In economics, laissez-faire describes an environment in which transactions between private parties are free from state intervention, including restrictive regulations, taxes, tariffs and enforced monopolies....
belief that the market would provide the food needed but at the same time ignoring the food exports to England, then halted government food and relief works, leaving many hundreds of thousands of people without any work, money or food. In January, the government abandoned these projects and turned to a mixture of "indoor" and "outdoor" direct relief; the former administered in workhouse
Workhouse
In England and Wales a workhouse, colloquially known as a spike, was a place where those unable to support themselves were offered accommodation and employment...
s through the Poor Law
Irish Poor Laws
The Irish Poor Laws were a series of Acts of Parliament intended to address social instability due to widespread and persistent poverty in Ireland. While some legislation had been introduced by the pre-Union Parliament of Ireland prior to the Act of Union, the most radical and comprehensive...
, the latter through soup kitchen
Soup kitchen
A soup kitchen, a bread line, or a meal center is a place where food is offered to the hungry for free or at a reasonably low price. Frequently located in lower-income neighborhoods, they are often staffed by volunteer organizations, such as church groups or community groups...
s. The costs of the Poor Law fell primarily on the local landlords, who in turn attempted to reduce their liability by evicting their tenants. This was then facilitated through the "Cheap Ejectment Acts." The poor law amendment act was passed in June 1847. According to James Donnelly in Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Famine, it embodied the principle popular in Britain that Irish property must support Irish poverty. The landed proprietors in Ireland were held in Britain to have created the conditions that led to the famine. It was asserted however, that the British parliament since the Act of Union of 1800 was partly to blame. This point was raised in the Illustrated London News
Illustrated London News
The Illustrated London News was the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper; the first issue appeared on Saturday 14 May 1842. It was published weekly until 1971 and then increasingly less frequently until publication ceased in 2003.-History:...
on 13 February 13, 1847, "There was no laws it would not pass at their request, and no abuse it would not defend for them." On the 24 March the Times reported that Britain had permitted in Ireland "a mass of poverty, disaffection, and degradation without a parallel in the world. It allowed proprietors to suck the very life-blood of that wretched race."
The "Gregory clause" of the Poor Law prohibited anyone who held at least ¼ of an acre from receiving relief. This in practice meant that if a farmer, having sold all his produce to pay rent, duties, rates and taxes, should be reduced, as many thousands of them were, to applying for public outdoor relief, he would not get it until he had first delivered up all his land to the landlord. Of this Law Mitchel was to write: "it is the able-bodied
Able-bodied
Able-bodied refers, in law, to an individual's physical or mental capacity for gainful employment or military service, and it is in this sense that the term is also used regarding eligibility for payment of child support or alimony....
idler only who is to be fed — if he attempted to till but one rood of ground, he dies." This simple method of ejectment was called "passing paupers through the workhouse" — a man went in, a pauper came out. These factors combined to drive thousands of people off the land: 90,000 in 1849, and 104,000 in 1850.
Food exports to England
Records show Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine. When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–1783, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests. No such export ban happened in the 1840s.Cecil Woodham-Smith
Cecil Woodham-Smith
Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith was a British historian and biographer. She wrote four popular history books, each dealing with a different aspect of the Victorian era.-Early life:...
, an authority on the Irish Famine, wrote in The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845–1849 that no issue has provoked so much anger and embittered relations between England and Ireland as "the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation." Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout most of the five-year famine.
Christine Kinealy writes that Irish exports of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham actually increased during the famine. The food was shipped under guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland. However, the poor had no money to buy food and the government then did not ban exports.
The following poem written by Miss Jane Francesca Elgee, a well known and popular author, was carried in The Nation:
Charity
William Smith O'Brien, speaking on the subject of charity in a speech to the Repeal Association, February 1845, applauded the fact that the universal sentiment on the subject of charity was that they would accept no English charity. He expressed the view that the resources of this country were still abundantly adequate to maintain the population and that until those resources had been utterly exhausted, he hoped that there was no one in "Ireland who will so degrade himself as to ask the aid of a subscription from England".Mitchel wrote in his The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), on the same subject, that no one from Ireland ever asked for charity during this period, and that it was England who sought charity on Ireland's behalf, and, having received it, was also responsible for administering it. He suggested that it has been carefully inculcated by the British Press, "that the moment Ireland fell into distress, she became an abject beggar at England's gate, and that she even craved alms from all mankind." He affirmed that in Ireland no one ever asked alms or favours of any kind from England or any other nation, but that it was England herself that begged for Ireland. He suggested that it was England that "sent 'round the hat over all the globe, asking a penny for the love of God to relieve the poor Irish," and constituting herself the agent of all that charity, took all the profit of it.
Large sums of money were donated by charities; Calcutta is credited with making the first donation of £14,000. The money was raised by Irish soldiers serving there and Irish people employed by the East India Company
British East India Company
The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...
. Pope Pius IX
Pope Pius IX
Blessed Pope Pius IX , born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, was the longest-reigning elected Pope in the history of the Catholic Church, serving from 16 June 1846 until his death, a period of nearly 32 years. During his pontificate, he convened the First Vatican Council in 1869, which decreed papal...
sent funds and Queen Victoria donated £2,000.
Quaker and Irish politician Alfred Webb
Alfred Webb
He was first elected to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom on 24 February 1890, when he won a by-election for the West Waterford constituency. He was again returned for West Waterford in the 1892 general election, this time as an anti-Parnellite MP....
later wrote:
In addition to the religious, non-religious organisations came to the assistance of famine victims. The British Relief Association was one such group. Founded in 1847, the Association raised money throughout England, America and Australia; their funding drive benefited by a "Queen's Letter", a letter from Queen Victoria appealing for money to relieve the distress in Ireland. With this initial letter the Association raised £171,533. A second, somewhat less successful "Queen's Letter" was issued in late 1847. In total, the British Relief Association raised approximately £200,000 (c. US$1,000,000 at the time).
Private initiatives such as The Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends (Quakers) attempted to fill the gap caused by the end of government relief and eventually the government reinstated the relief works, although bureaucracy slowed the release of food supplies.
Ottoman aid
In 1845, OttomanOttoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
Sultan Abdülmecid
Abdülmecid I
Sultan Abdülmecid I, Abdul Mejid I, Abd-ul-Mejid I or Abd Al-Majid I Ghazi was the 31st Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and succeeded his father Mahmud II on July 2, 1839. His reign was notable for the rise of nationalist movements within the empire's territories...
declared his intention to send £10,000 to Irish farmers but Queen Victoria requested that the Sultan send only £1,000, because she herself had sent only £2,000. The Sultan sent the £1,000 sterling but also secretly sent three ships full of food. The English courts
Courts of England and Wales
Her Majesty's Courts of Justice of England and Wales are the civil and criminal courts responsible for the administration of justice in England and Wales; they apply the law of England and Wales and are established under Acts of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.The United Kingdom does not have...
tried to block the ships, but the food arrived at Drogheda
Drogheda
Drogheda is an industrial and port town in County Louth on the east coast of Ireland, 56 km north of Dublin. It is the last bridging point on the River Boyne before it enters the Irish Sea....
harbour and was left there by Ottoman sailors.
From Native Americans
In 1847, midway through the Great Irish Famine (1845–1849), a group of Native AmericanNative Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
Choctaw
Choctaw
The Choctaw are a Native American people originally from the Southeastern United States...
s collected $710 (although many articles say the original amount was $170 after a misprint in Angie Debo
Angie Debo
Angie Elbertha Debo was an American historian who wrote 13 books and hundreds of articles about Native American and Oklahoma history...
's The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic) and sent it to help starving Irish men, women and children. "It had been just 16 years since the Choctaw people had experienced the Trail of Tears
Trail of Tears
The Trail of Tears is a name given to the forced relocation and movement of Native American nations from southeastern parts of the United States following the Indian Removal Act of 1830...
, and they had faced starvation... It was an amazing gesture." according to Judy Allen, editor of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma's newspaper, Bishinik, based at the Oklahoma Choctaw tribal headquarters in Durant, Oklahoma
Durant, Oklahoma
Durant is a city in Bryan County, Oklahoma, United States. The population was 15,877 at the 2010 census. Durant is the principal city of the Durant Micropolitan Statistical Area, which had a population of 42,416 in 2010...
. To mark the 150th anniversary, eight Irish people retraced the Trail of Tears, and the donation was publicly commemorated by President Mary Robinson
Mary Robinson
Mary Therese Winifred Robinson served as the seventh, and first female, President of Ireland from 1990 to 1997, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, from 1997 to 2002. She first rose to prominence as an academic, barrister, campaigner and member of the Irish Senate...
.
Eviction
Landlords were responsible for paying the rates of every tenant who paid less than £4 in yearly rent. Landlords whose land was crowded with poorer tenants were now faced with large bills. They began clearing the poor tenants from their small plots, and letting the land in larger plots for over £4 which then reduced their debts. In 1846, there had been some clearances, but the great mass of evictions came in 1847. According to James S. Donnelly Jr, it is impossible to be sure how many people were evicted during the years of the famine and its immediate aftermath. It was only in 1849 that the police began to keep a count, and they recorded a total of almost 250,000 persons as officially evicted between 1849 and 1854.Donnelly considered this to be an underestimate, and if the figures were to include the number pressured into "voluntary" surrenders during the whole period (1846–1854) the figure would almost certainly exceed half a million persons. While Helen Litton says there were also thousands of "voluntary" surrenders, she notes also that there was "precious little voluntary about them." In some cases, tenants were persuaded to accept a small sum of money to leave their homes, "cheated into believing the workhouse would take them in."
West Clare was one of the worst areas for evictions, where landlords turned thousands of families out and demolished their derisory cabins. Captain Kennedy in April 1848 estimated that 1,000 houses, with an average of six people to each, had been levelled since November. The Mahon family, Strokestown House alone in 1847 evicted 3,000 people, and according to John Gibney were still able to dine on lobster soup.
After Clare, the worst area for evictions was County Mayo, accounting for 10% of all evictions between 1849 and 1854. The Earl of Lucan, who owned over 60000 acre (242.8 km²) was among the worst evicting landlords. He was quoted as saying 'he would not breed paupers to pay priests'. Having turned out in the parish of Ballinrobe over 2,000 tenants alone, the cleared land he then used as grazing farms. In 1848, the Marquis of Sligo owed £1,650 to Westport Union; he was also an evicting landlord, though he claimed to be selective, saying he was only getting rid of the idle and dishonest. Altogether, he cleared about 25% of his tenants.
According to Litton, evictions might have taken place earlier but for fear of the secret societies. However they were now greatly weakened by the Famine. Revenge still occasionally took place, with seven landlords being shot, six fatally, during the autumn and winter of 1847. Ten other occupiers of land, though without tenants, were also murdered, she says.
Lord Clarendon, alarmed that this might mean rebellion, asked for special powers. Lord John Russell was not sympathetic to this appeal. Lord Clarendon believed that the landlords themselves were mostly responsible for the tragedy in the first place, saying "It is quite true that landlords in England would not like to be shot like hares and partridges...but neither does any landlord in England turn out fifty persons at once and burn their houses over their heads, giving them no provision for the future." The Crime and Outrage Act was passed in December 1847 as a compromise and additional troops were sent to Ireland.
Under the notorious Gregory clause, described by Donnelly as a "vicious amendment to the Irish poor law, named after William H. Gregory, M.P. and commonly known as the quarter-acre clause, provided that no tenant holding more than a quarter-acre of land would be eligible for public assistance either in or outside the workhouse. This clause had been a successful Tory amendment to the Whig poor-relief bill which became law in early June 1847, where its potential as an estate-clearing device was widely recognised in parliament, though not in advance. At first the poor law commissioners and inspectors viewed the clause as an valuable instrument for a more cost-effective administration of public relief, but the drawbacks soon became apparent, even from an administrative perspective. They would soon view them as little more than murderous from a humanitarian perspective
Humanistic psychology
Humanistic psychology is a psychological perspective which rose to prominence in the mid-20th century, drawing on the work of early pioneers like Carl Rogers and the philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology...
. According to Donnelly it became obvious that the quarter-acre clause was "indirectly a death-dealing instrument."
Emigration
New World
The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...
alone, over a period of some 50 years. From the defeat of Napoleon to the beginning of the famine, a period of 30 years, "at least 1,000,000 and possibly 1,500,000 emigrated". However, during the worst of the famine, emigration reached somewhere around 250,000 in one year alone, with far more emigrants coming from western Ireland than any other part.
Families did not migrate en masse but younger members of families did. So much so that emigration almost became a rite of passage
Rite of passage
A rite of passage is a ritual event that marks a person's progress from one status to another. It is a universal phenomenon which can show anthropologists what social hierarchies, values and beliefs are important in specific cultures....
, as evidenced by the data that show that, unlike similar emigration throughout world history, women emigrated just as often, just as early, and in the same numbers as men. The emigrant started a new life in a new land, sent remittances "[reaching] £1,404,000 by 1851" back to his/her family in Ireland which, in turn, allowed another member of the family to emigrate.
Emigration during the famine years of 1845-1850 was to England, Scotland, the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Many of those fleeing to the Americas used the well-established McCorkell Line
McCorkell Line
The McCorkell Line was operated by Wm. McCorkell & Co. Ltd. from 1778, principally carrying passengers from Ireland, Scotland and England to the Americas...
.
Of the 100,000 Irish that sailed to Canada in 1847, an estimated one out of five died from disease and malnutrition, including over 5,000 at Grosse Isle. Mortality rates of 30% aboard the coffin ship
Coffin ship
Coffin ship is the name given to any boat that has been overinsured and is therefore worth more to its owners sunk than afloat. These were hazardous places to work in the days before effective maritime safety regulation. They were generally eliminated in the 1870s with the success of reforms...
s were common.
By 1854, between 1.5 and 2 million Irish left their country due to evictions, starvation, and harsh living conditions. In America, most Irish became city-dwellers: with little money, many had to settle in the cities that the ships they came on landed in. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
; New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Philadelphia County, with which it is coterminous. The city is located in the Northeastern United States along the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is the fifth-most-populous city in the United States,...
; and Baltimore, Maryland. In addition, Irish populations became prevalent in some American mining communities.
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
were Irish, and in 1847 alone, 38,000 famine Irish flooded a city with fewer than 20,000 citizens. Other Canadian cities such as Saint John, New Brunswick
Saint John, New Brunswick
City of Saint John , or commonly Saint John, is the largest city in the province of New Brunswick, and the first incorporated city in Canada. The city is situated along the north shore of the Bay of Fundy at the mouth of the Saint John River. In 2006 the city proper had a population of 74,043...
; Quebec City
Quebec City
Quebec , also Québec, Quebec City or Québec City is the capital of the Canadian province of Quebec and is located within the Capitale-Nationale region. It is the second most populous city in Quebec after Montreal, which is about to the southwest...
and Montreal, Quebec
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
; Ottawa, Kingston and Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton is a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Conceived by George Hamilton when he purchased the Durand farm shortly after the War of 1812, Hamilton has become the centre of a densely populated and industrialized region at the west end of Lake Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe...
also received large numbers of Famine Irish since Canada, as part of the British Empire
British Empire
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. At its height, it was the...
, could not close its ports to Irish ships (unlike the U.S.), and they could get passage cheaply (or free in the case of tenant evictions) in returning empty lumber holds. However fearing nationalist insurgencies the British government placed harsh restrictions on Irish immigration to Canada after 1847 resulting in larger influxes to the U.S. The largest Famine grave site outside of Ireland is at Grosse-Île, Quebec, an island in the St. Lawrence River
Saint Lawrence River
The Saint Lawrence is a large river flowing approximately from southwest to northeast in the middle latitudes of North America, connecting the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. It is the primary drainage conveyor of the Great Lakes Basin...
used to quarantine ships near Quebec City. In 1851, about a quarter of Liverpool's population was Irish-born.
The famine marked the beginning of the steep depopulation of Ireland in the 19th century. Population had increased by 13–14% in the first three decades of the 19th century. Between 1831 and 1841, population grew by 5%. Application of Thomas Malthus
Thomas Malthus
The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus FRS was an English scholar, influential in political economy and demography. Malthus popularized the economic theory of rent....
's idea of population expanding geometrically while resources increase arithmetically was popular during the famines of 1817 and 1822. However by the 1830s, a decade before the famine, they were seen as overly simplistic and Ireland's problems were seen "less as an excess of population than as a lack of capital investment." The population of Ireland was increasing no faster than that of England, which suffered no equivalent catastrophe.
1848 rebellion
William Smith O'Brien
William Smith O'Brien was an Irish Nationalist and Member of Parliament and leader of the Young Ireland movement. He was convicted of sedition for his part in the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, but his sentence of death was commuted to deportation to Van Diemen's Land. In 1854, he was...
, the leader of the Young Ireland
Young Ireland
Young Ireland was a political, cultural and social movement of the mid-19th century. It led changes in Irish nationalism, including an abortive rebellion known as the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848. Many of the latter's leaders were tried for sedition and sentenced to penal transportation to...
party, became one of the founding members of the Irish Confederation
Irish Confederation
The Irish Confederation was an Irish nationalist independence movement, established on 13 January 1847 by members of the Young Ireland movement who had seceded from Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association. Historian T. W...
to campaign for a Repeal of the Act of Union
Act of Union 1800
The Acts of Union 1800 describe two complementary Acts, namely:* the Union with Ireland Act 1800 , an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain, and...
, and called for the export of grain to be stopped and the ports closed. The following year he organised the resistance of landless farmers in County Tipperary
County Tipperary
County Tipperary is a county of Ireland. It is located in the province of Munster and is named after the town of Tipperary. The area of the county does not have a single local authority; local government is split between two authorities. In North Tipperary, part of the Mid-West Region, local...
against the landowners and their agents.
Death toll
It is not known exactly how many people died during the period of the Famine, although it is believed more died from diseases than from starvation. State registration of births, marriages or deaths had not yet begun, and records kept by the Roman Catholic Church are incomplete. EyewitnessWitness
A witness is someone who has firsthand knowledge about an event, or in the criminal justice systems usually a crime, through his or her senses and can help certify important considerations about the crime or event. A witness who has seen the event first hand is known as an eyewitness...
accounts have helped medical historians identify both the ailments and effects of famine, and have been used to evaluate and explain in greater detail features of the famine. In Mayo, English Quaker William Bennett wrote of
Revd Dr. Traill Hall, a Church of Ireland rector in Schull, described
Marasmic children also left a permanent image on Quaker Joseph Crosfield who in 1846 witnessed a
William Forster
William Forster (philanthropist)
William Forster was a preacher, Quaker elder and a fervent abolitionist. He was an early member of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1839...
wrote in Carrick-on-Shannon
Carrick-on-Shannon
Carrick-on-Shannon is the county town of County Leitrim in Ireland. It is also the smallest main county town in the country . It is situated on a strategic crossing point of the River Shannon and is the largest town in the county. The population of the town was 3,163 in 2006. It is in the barony...
that
One possible estimate has been reached by comparing the expected population with the eventual numbers in the 1850s -see Irish population analysis
Irish Population Analysis
The population of Ireland in 2008 was approximately 6.1 million comprising 4.35 million in the Republic of Ireland with another 1.75 million in Northern Ireland. Although this is a significant growth over recent years, it is lower than historical figures....
. Earlier predictions expected that by 1851 Ireland would have a population of 8-9 million. A census taken in 1841 revealed a population of slightly over 8 million. A census immediately after the famine in 1851 counted 6,552,385, a drop of almost 1.5 million in 10 years. Modern historian R.J. Foster estimates that 'at least 775,000 died, mostly through disease, including cholera
Cholera
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The main symptoms are profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. Transmission occurs primarily by drinking or eating water or food that has been contaminated by the diarrhea of an infected person or the feces...
in the latter stages of the holocaust'. He further notes that 'a recent sophisticated computation estimates excess deaths from 1846 to 1851 as between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000...; after a careful critique of this, other statisticians arrive at a figure of 1,000,000.' In addition, in excess of 1 million Irish emigrated to Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
, U.S., Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, while millions emigrated over following decades.
| Leinster | Munster | Ulster | Connaught | Ireland |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15.3 | 22.5 | 15.7 | 28.8 | 20 |
| Table from Joe Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society (Gill History of Ireland Series No.10) p. 2 | ||||
Detailed statistics of the population of Ireland since 1841 are available at Irish population analysis
Irish Population Analysis
The population of Ireland in 2008 was approximately 6.1 million comprising 4.35 million in the Republic of Ireland with another 1.75 million in Northern Ireland. Although this is a significant growth over recent years, it is lower than historical figures....
.
Perhaps the best-known estimates of deaths at a county level are those by Joel Mokyr
Joel Mokyr
Joel Mokyr is an American economic historian. He is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University....
. The range of Mokyr's mortality figures goes from 1.1 million to 1.5 million Famine deaths in Ireland between 1846 and 1851. Mokyr produced two sets of data which contained an upper-bound and lower-bound estimate, which showed not much difference in regional patterns. Because of such anomalies, Cormac Ó Gráda
Cormac Ó Gráda
Cormac Ó Gráda is an Irish economist, a professor of economics at University College Dublin, and a prolific author of books and academic papers....
revisited the work of S. H. Cousens. Cousens' estimates of mortality relied heavily on retrospective information contained in the 1851 census. The death tables, contained in the 1851 census have been rightly criticised, as under-estimating the true extent of mortality, Cousens' mortality of 800,000 is now regarded as much too low. There were a number of reasons for this, because the information was gathered from the surviving householders and others and having to look back over the previous 10 years, it underestimates the true extent of disease and mortality. Death and emigration had also cleared away entire families, leaving few or no survivors to answer the questions on the census.
Another area of uncertainty lies in the descriptions of disease given by tenants as to the cause of their relatives' deaths.
Though Wilde's work has been rightly criticised as under-estimating the true extent of mortality, it does provide a framework for the medical history of the Great Famine.
The diseases that badly affected the population fell into two categories, famine-induced diseases and diseases of nutritional deficiency
Illnesses related to poor nutrition
Nutritional diseases are diseases in humans that are directly or indirectly caused by a lack of essential nutrients in the diet. Nutritional diseases are commonly associated with chronic malnutrition. Additionally, conditions such as obesity from overeating can also cause, or contribute to, serious...
. Of the nutritional deficiency diseases the most commonly experienced were starvation and marasmus
Marasmus
Marasmus is a form of severe protein-energy malnutrition characterized by energy deficiency.A child with marasmus looks emaciated. Body weight may be reduced to less than 80% of the average weight that corresponds to the height . Marasmus occurrence increases prior to age 1, whereas kwashiorkor...
, as well as condition called at the time dropsy. Dropsy (Edema
Edema
Edema or oedema ; both words from the Greek , oídēma "swelling"), formerly known as dropsy or hydropsy, is an abnormal accumulation of fluid beneath the skin or in one or more cavities of the body that produces swelling...
) was a popular name given for the symptoms of several diseases, one of which, kwashiorkor
Kwashiorkor
Kwashiorkor is an acute form of childhood protein-energy malnutrition characterized by edema, irritability, anorexia, ulcerating dermatoses, and an enlarged liver with fatty infiltrates. The presence of edema caused by poor nutrition defines kwashiorkor...
, is associated with starvation. The greatest mortality, however, was not from nutritional deficiency diseases, but from famine-induced ailments. The malnourished are very vulnerable to infections; therefore, they were more severe when they occurred. Measles, diarrheal diseases
Diarrhea
Diarrhea , also spelled diarrhoea, is the condition of having three or more loose or liquid bowel movements per day. It is a common cause of death in developing countries and the second most common cause of infant deaths worldwide. The loss of fluids through diarrhea can cause dehydration and...
, tuberculosis, most respiratory infections, whooping cough
Pertussis
Pertussis, also known as whooping cough , is a highly contagious bacterial disease caused by Bordetella pertussis. Symptoms are initially mild, and then develop into severe coughing fits, which produce the namesake high-pitched "whoop" sound in infected babies and children when they inhale air...
, many intestinal parasites and cholera were all strongly conditioned by nutritional status. Potentially lethal diseases, such as smallpox and influenza, were so virulent that their spread was independent of nutrition.
A significant cause spreading disease during the Famine was "social dislocation." The best example of this phenomenon was fever, which exacted the greatest toll of death. In the popular mind, as well as among much medical opinion, fever and famine are closely related. This view was not wholly mistaken, but the most critical connection was the congregating of the hungry at soup kitchens, food depots, overcrowded work houses where conditions were ideal for spreading infectious disease
Infectious disease
Infectious diseases, also known as communicable diseases, contagious diseases or transmissible diseases comprise clinically evident illness resulting from the infection, presence and growth of pathogenic biological agents in an individual host organism...
s such as typhus, typhoid and relapsing fever
Relapsing fever
Relapsing fever is an infection caused by certain bacteria in the genus Borrelia. It is a vector-borne disease that is transmitted through the bites of lice or soft-bodied ticks.-Louse-borne relapsing fever:...
. As to the diarrheal diseases, their presence was the result of poor hygiene, bad sanitation and dietary changes. The concluding attack on a population incapacitated by famine was delivered by Asiatic cholera
Cholera
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The main symptoms are profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. Transmission occurs primarily by drinking or eating water or food that has been contaminated by the diarrhea of an infected person or the feces...
. Cholera had visited Ireland, briefly in the 1830s. But in the following decade it spread uncontrollably across Asia, through Europe, and into Britain and finally reached Ireland in 1849.
On the 1851 census, both Cormac Ó Gráda & Joel Mokyr would also describe it as a famous but flawed source. They would contend that the combination of institutional and individuals figures gives "an incomplete and biased count" of fatalities during the famine. Ó Gráda referencing the work of W. A. MacArthur, writes, specialists have long known the Irish death tables left a lot to be desired in terms of accuracy. As a result, Ó Gráda says to take the Tables of Death at face value would be a grave mistake, as they seriously undercount the number of deaths both before and during the famine.
In 1851, the census commissioners collected information on the number who died in each family since 1841, the cause, season and year of death. Its disputed findings were as follows: 21,770 total deaths from starvation in the previous decade, and 400,720 deaths from disease. Listed diseases were fever, dysentery, cholera, smallpox and influenza; the first two being the main killers (222,021 and 93,232). The commissioners acknowledged that their figures were incomplete and that the true number of deaths was probably higher: "The greater the amount of destitution of mortality...the less will be the amount of recorded deaths derived through any household form; - for not only were whole families swept away by disease...but whole villages were effaced from off the land." A later historian has this to say: "In 1851, the Census Commissioners attempted to produce a table of mortality for each year since 1841... The statistics provided were flawed and probably under-estimated the level of mortality..."
Other, perhaps less reliable and likely underestimates are that the event led to the deaths of approximately 1 million people through starvation and disease; a further million are thought to have emigrated as a result of the famine. Some scholars estimate that the population of Ireland was reduced by 20-25%. All of this occurred while taxes, rents, and food exports were being collected and sent to British landlords, in an amount surpassing £6 million.
Aftermath
The potato remained Ireland's staple crop after the famine; at the end of the 19th century, the Irish per capita consumption of four pounds a day was the highest in the world. Later famines made only minimal effect and are generally forgotten, except by historians. By the 1911 censusCensus in the United Kingdom
Coincident full censuses have taken place in the different jurisdictions of the United Kingdom every ten years since 1801, with the exceptions of 1941 and in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State in 1921; simultaneous censuses were taken in the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, with...
, the island of Ireland's population had fallen to 4.4 million, about the same as the population in 1800 and 2000 and only a half of its peak population.
Contemporary
Contemporary opinion was sharply critical of the Russell government's response to and management of the crisis. From the start, there were accusations that the government failed to grasp the magnitude of the disaster. Sir James Graham, who had served as Home Secretary in Sir Robert PeelRobert Peel
Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet was a British Conservative statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 December 1834 to 8 April 1835, and again from 30 August 1841 to 29 June 1846...
's late government, wrote to Peel that, in his opinion, "the real extent and magnitude of the Irish difficulty are underestimated by the Government, and cannot be met by measures within the strict rule of economical science."
This criticism was not confined to outside critics. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon
George Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon
George William Frederick Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon KG, GCB, PC , was an English diplomat and statesman.-Background and education:...
, wrote a letter to Russell on April 26, 1849, urging that the government propose additional relief measures: "I do not think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination." Also in 1849 the Chief Poor Law Commissioner, Edward Twisleton, resigned in protest over the Rate-in-Aid Act, which provided additional funds for the Poor Law through a 6p in the pound levy on all rateable properties in Ireland. Twisleton testified that "comparatively trifling sums were required for Britain to spare itself the deep disgrace of permitting its miserable fellow subjects to die of starvation." According to Peter Gray
Peter Gray (historian)
Peter Gray is Professor of Modern Irish History at Queen's University Belfast. He specializes in the history of British-Irish relations in the 19th century, particularly the Great Irish Famine.-External links:...
, in his book The Irish Famine, the government spent £7,000,000 for relief in Ireland between 1845 and 1850, "representing less than half of one percent of the British gross national product
Measures of national income and output
A variety of measures of national income and output are used in economics to estimate total economic activity in a country or region, including gross domestic product , gross national product , and net national income . All are specially concerned with counting the total amount of goods and...
over five years. Contemporaries noted the sharp contrast with the 20 million pounds compensation given to West Indian
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
slave-owners in the 1830s."
Other critics maintained that even after the government recognised the scope of the crisis, it failed to take sufficient steps to address it. John Mitchel, one of the leaders of the Young Ireland Movement, wrote the following in 1860: "I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a 'dispensation of Providence;' and ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe; yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine."
Still other critics saw reflected in the government's response the government's attitude to the so-called "Irish Question". Nassau Senior, an economics professor at Oxford University, wrote that the Famine "would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good." It is not clear from this quote, however, whether Nassau Senior was speaking from a Malthusian context. In 1848, Denis Shine Lawlor suggested that Russell was a student of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English...
, who had calculated "how far English colonisation and English policy might be most effectively carried out by Irish starvation." Charles Trevelyan
Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet
Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, 1st Baronet, KCB was a British civil servant and colonial administrator. As a young man, he worked with the colonial government in Calcutta, India; in the late 1850s and 1860s he served there in senior-level appointments...
, the civil servant with most direct responsibility for the government's handling of the famine, described it in 1848 as "a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence", which laid bare "the deep and inveterate root of social evil"; the Famine, he affirmed, was "the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected. God grant that the generation to which this opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part..."
Historical
Christine Kinealy expresses the consensus of historians when she states that "the major tragedy of the Irish Famine of 1845–52 marked a watershed in modern Irish history. Its occurrence, however, was neither inevitable nor unavoidable." The underlying factors which combined to cause the famine were aggravated by an inadequate government response. As Kinealy notes,"...[T]he government had to do something to help alleviate the suffering, the particular nature of the actual response, especially following 1846, suggests a more covert agenda and motivation. As the Famine progressed, it became apparent that the government was using its information not merely to help it formulate its relief policies, but also as an opportunity to facilitate various long-desired changes within Ireland. These included population controlPopulation controlHuman population control is the practice of artificially altering the rate of growth of a human population.Historically, human population control has been implemented by limiting the population's birth rate, usually by government mandate, and has been undertaken as a response to factors including...
and the consolidation of property through various means, including emigration... Despite the overwhelming evidence of prolonged distress caused by successive years of potato blight, the underlying philosophy of the relief efforts was that they should be kept to a minimalist level; in fact they actually decreased as the Famine progressed."
Several writers single out the decision of the government to permit the continued export of food from Ireland as suggestive of the policy-makers' attitudes. Leon Uris
Leon Uris
Leon Marcus Uris was an American novelist, known for his historical fiction and the deep research that went into his novels. His two bestselling books were Exodus, published in 1958, and Trinity, in 1976.-Life:...
suggested that "there was ample food within Ireland", while all the Irish-bred cattle were being shipped off to England. The following exchange appeared in Act IV of George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
's play Man and Superman
Man and Superman
Man and Superman is a four-act drama, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903. The series was written in response to calls for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juan theme. Man and Superman opened at The Royal Court Theatre in London on 23 May 1905, but with the omission of the 3rd Act...
:
- MALONE. He will get over it all right enough. Men thrive better on disappointments in love than on disappointments in money. I daresay you think that sordid; but I know what I'm talking about. My father died of starvation in Ireland in the black 47, Maybe you've heard of it.
- VIOLET. The Famine?
- MALONE. [with smouldering passion] No, the starvation. When a country is full of food, and exporting it, there can be no famine. My father was starved dead; and I was starved out to America in my mother's arms. English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland. Well, you can keep Ireland. I and my like are coming back to buy England; and we'll buy the best of it. I want no middle class properties and no middle class women for Hector. That's straightforward isn't it, like yourself?
Critics of British imperialism point to the structure of empire as a contributing factor. J. A. Froude wrote that "England governed Ireland for what she deemed her own interest, making her calculations on the gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving moral obligations aside, as if right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the Universe." Dennis Clark, an Irish-American
Irish American
Irish Americans are citizens of the United States who can trace their ancestry to Ireland. A total of 36,278,332 Americans—estimated at 11.9% of the total population—reported Irish ancestry in the 2008 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau...
historian, claimed that the famine was "the culmination of generations of neglect, misrule and repression. It was an epic of English colonial cruelty and inadequacy. For the landless cabin dwellers it meant emigration or extinction..."
Suggestions of genocide
The famine is still a controversial event in Irish history. Debate and discussion on the British government's response to the failure of the potato crop in Ireland and the subsequent large-scale starvation, and whether or not this constituted genocide, remains a historically and politically-charged issue.In 1996, Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
, wrote a report commissioned by the New York-based Irish Famine/Genocide Committee, which concluded that the British government deliberately pursued a race and ethnicity-based policy aimed at destroying the group commonly known as the Irish people and that the policy of mass starvation amounted to genocide per the Hague convention of 1948. On the strength of Boyle's report, the U.S. state of New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
included the famine in the "Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum" at the secondary
Secondary education in the United States
In most jurisdictions, secondary education in the United States refers to the last six or seven years of statutory formal education. Secondary education is generally split between junior high school or middle school, usually beginning with sixth or seventh grade , and high school, beginning with...
tier.
Historian Peter Duffy
Peter Duffy
Peter Duffy QC was a British barrister. Educated at Wimbledon College, London, he read law at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge where he received a first class degree. He went on to Queen Mary College, London, where he taught from 1979 to 1989. He was called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn in 1978...
writes that "The government's crime, which deserves to blacken its name forever ..." was rooted "in the effort to regenerate Ireland" through "landlord-engineered replacement of tillage plots with grazing lands" that "took precedence over the obligation to provide food ... for its starving citizens. It is little wonder that the policy looked to many people like genocide."
Several commentators have argued that the searing effect of the famine in Irish cultural memory has effects similar to that of genocide, while maintaining that one did not occur. Robert Kee
Robert Kee
Robert Kee CBE is a British broadcaster, journalist and writer, known for his historical works on World War II and Ireland....
suggests that the Famine is seen as "comparable" in its force on "popular national consciousness to that of the 'final solution' on the Jews," and that it is not "infrequently" thought that the Famine was something very like "a form of genocide engineered by the English against the Irish people." This point was echoed by James Donnelly, a historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
, who wrote in his work Landlord and Tenant in Nineteenth-century Ireland, "I would draw the following broad conclusion: at a fairly early stage of the Great Famine the government's abject failure to stop or even slow down the clearances (evictions) contributed in a major way to enshrining the idea of English state-sponsored genocide in Irish popular mind. Or perhaps one should say in the Irish mind, for this was a notion that appealed to many educated and discriminating men and women, and not only to the revolutionary minority...And it is also my contention that while genocide was not in fact committed, what happened during and as a result of the clearances had the look of genocide to a great many Irish..."
Historian Cormac Ó Gráda
Cormac Ó Gráda
Cormac Ó Gráda is an Irish economist, a professor of economics at University College Dublin, and a prolific author of books and academic papers....
disagreed that the famine was genocide: first, that "genocide includes murderous intent and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of the day sought the extermination of the Irish"; second, that most people in Whitehall
Whitehall
Whitehall is a road in Westminster, in London, England. It is the main artery running north from Parliament Square, towards Charing Cross at the southern end of Trafalgar Square...
"hoped for better times in Ireland" and third, that the claim of genocide overlooks "the enormous challenges facing relief efforts, both central, local, public and private". Ó Gráda thinks that a case of neglect is easier to sustain than that of genocide. However, people in charge like chief of the Government relief Charles Trevelyan contradict a "neglect" but rather hazarded the consequenses from the colonial perspective that the Famine was a "mechanism for reducing surplus population" and a "judgement of God".
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
.
Irish columnist John Waters
John Waters (columnist)
John Waters is a columnist with The Irish Times and a former editor of Magill magazine. His career began in 1981 with the Irish political-music magazine Hot Press. He went on to write for the Sunday Tribune and later edited In Dublin magazine and Magill...
has described the famine as "an act of genocide, driven by racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
and justified by ideology".
Memorials
The Great Famine is memorialMemorial
A memorial is an object which serves as a focus for memory of something, usually a person or an event. Popular forms of memorials include landmark objects or art objects such as sculptures, statues or fountains, and even entire parks....
ised in many locations throughout Ireland, especially in those regions that suffered the greatest losses, and also in cities overseas with large populations descended from Irish immigrants. These include, at Custom House Quays, Dublin, the thin sculptural figures, by artist Rowan Gillespie
Rowan Gillespie
Rowan Fergus Meredith Gillespie is an Irish bronze casting sculptor of international renown. Born in Dublin to Irish parents, Gillespie spent his formative years in Cyprus...
, who stand as if walking towards the emigration ships on the Dublin Quayside. There is also a large memorial at the Murrisk Millennium Peace Park at the foot of Croagh Patrick in County Mayo. Among the memorials in the U.S. is the Irish Hunger Memorial
Irish Hunger Memorial
The Irish Hunger Memorial, designed collaboratively by artist Brian Tolle, landscape architect Gail Wittwer-Laird, and 1100 Architect, is located on a one-half acre site at the corner of Vesey Street and North End Avenue in the Battery Park City neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, and is...
near a section of the Manhattan waterfront in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, where many fleeing Irish arrived. An annual Great Famine walk, the brainchild of the Irish author/humanitarian, Don Mullan
Don Mullan
Don Mullan is an Irish bestselling author/humanitarian and media producer. His book Eyewitness Bloody Sunday is officially recognised as a primary catalyst for a new Bloody Sunday Inquiry which became the longest running and most expensive in British Legal History...
, from Doolough to Louisburgh, Co. Mayo, was inaugurated in 1988 and has been led by such notable personalities as Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Desmond Tutu
Desmond Mpilo Tutu is a South African activist and retired Anglican bishop who rose to worldwide fame during the 1980s as an opponent of apartheid...
of South Africa and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma
Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma
The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is a semi-autonomous Native American homeland comprising twelve tribal districts. The Choctaw Nation maintains a special relationship with both the United States and Oklahoma governments...
. The walk, organised by AFrI Action From Ireland, takes place on the first or second Saturday of May and links the memory of the Great Hunger with a contemporary Human Rights issue. Commemorating the Doolough Tragedy, the walk was covered by the three major US television networks: ABC, NBC and CBS, during its first three years.
See also
- European Potato Failure (the wider agrarian crisis in Europe at the same time)
- Famine in IndiaFamine in IndiaFamine has been a recurrent feature of life in the Indian sub-continental countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and reached its numerically deadliest peak in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Historical and legendary evidence names some 90 famines in 2,500 years of history. There...
- Greener Grass: The Famine YearsGreener Grass: The Famine YearsGreener Grass, published in 2009, is the second novel of Canadian author Caroline Pignat. The story revolves around a 14-year-old girl, Kit Byrne, living during the Great Famine of 1847 in Ireland. The Byrne family faces imminent eviction when their landlord, Lord Fraser, wants to repossess their...
(2009 novel) - Highland Potato Famine (agrarian crisis in Scotland at the same time)
- HolodomorHolodomorThe Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933. During the famine, which is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine" and "famine-genocide in Ukraine", millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of...
, a 1930s famine in UkraineUkrainian SSRThe Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic or in short, the Ukrainian SSR was a sovereign Soviet Socialist state and one of the fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union lasting from its inception in 1922 to the breakup in 1991...
, the causes of which are also the subject of debate - List of famines
- List of natural disasters in the British Isles
Further reading
- Mary E. Daly, The Famine in Ireland
- R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams (eds.), The Great Famine: Studies in Irish history 1845-52
- Peter GrayPeter Gray (historian)Peter Gray is Professor of Modern Irish History at Queen's University Belfast. He specializes in the history of British-Irish relations in the 19th century, particularly the Great Irish Famine.-External links:...
, The Irish Famine - Joseph O'ConnorJoseph O'ConnorJoseph Victor O'Connor is an Irish novelist. He is known for his 2002 historical novel Star of the Sea. Before success as an author he was a journalist with the Sunday Tribune newspaper and Esquire magazine...
, Star of the Sea - Cormac Ó GrádaCormac Ó GrádaCormac Ó Gráda is an Irish economist, a professor of economics at University College Dublin, and a prolific author of books and academic papers....
, An Economic History of Ireland - Robert KeeRobert KeeRobert Kee CBE is a British broadcaster, journalist and writer, known for his historical works on World War II and Ireland....
, Ireland: A History (ISBN 0-349-10678-9) - Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845 - 1852, history.ac.uk
- John MitchelJohn MitchelJohn Mitchel was an Irish nationalist activist, solicitor and political journalist. Born in Camnish, near Dungiven, County Londonderry, Ireland he became a leading member of both Young Ireland and the Irish Confederation...
, The Last Conquest of Ireland (1861) (University College Dublin Press reprint, 2005 paperback) ISBN I-904558-36-4 - Marita Conlon-McKennaMarita Conlon-McKennaMarita Conlon-McKenna is an Irish children's novels author. She was born in Dublin in 1956 and brought up in Goatstown.She is the author of the Children of the Famine Trilogy which was inspired by the Great Irish Famine....
, Under the Hawthorn Tree - Canon John O'Rourke, The Great Irish Famine (ISBN 1-85390-049-4 Hardback) (ISBN 1-85390-130-X Paperback) Veritas Publications 1989. First published in 1874.
- Liam O'FlahertyLiam O'FlahertyLiam O'Flaherty was a significant Irish novelist and short story writer and a major figure in the Irish literary renaissance, born August 28, 1896, died September 7, 1984.-Biography:...
, Famine - Colm TóibínColm TóibínColm Tóibín is a multi-award-winning Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic, and, most recently, poet.Tóibín is Leonard Milberg Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University in New Jersey and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the...
and Diarmaid Ferriter, The Irish FamineThe Irish Famine (book)The Irish Famine is a book co-authored by Diarmaid Ferriter and Colm Tóibín in 2001. The book is two volumes, the first of which was written and originally published by Tóibín in 1999...
, ISBN 9781861972491 (first edition, hardback) - Kevin BakerKevin BakerKevin Baker is an American novelist and journalist. He was born in Englewood, New Jersey and grew up in New Jersey and Rockport, Massachusetts....
, Paradise Alley - Several books by Young Irelanders make reference to the Great Irish Famine
External links
- New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education 1996
- The History of the Irish Famine by Rev. John O'Rourke
- Irish National Archives information on the Famine
- Quinnipiac University's An Gorta Mor site - includes etexts
- Ireland's Great Famine (Cormac Ó Gráda) from EH.Net Encyclopedia of Economic History
- Irishholocaust.org
- American.edu, History
- Ireland: The hunger years 1845-1851
- Kids History Website about the Famine
- Cork Multitext Project article on the Famine, by Donnchadh Ó Corráin
- For more on the pathogen see bobit.botany.wisc.edu
- Karp, Ivan. Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. books.google.com
- Seamus P. Metress, Richard A. Rajner. The Great Starvation: An Irish Holocaust. books.google.com
- Books.google.com
- Irish Repay Choctaw Famine Gift:March Traces Trail of Tears in Trek for Somalian Relief
- President of Ireland Mary Robinson Addresses the Choctaw People
- Views of the Famine
- Sligoheritage.com, Famine on the Gore-Booth and Palmerston estates in Sligo, IrelandSligoSligo is the county town of County Sligo in Ireland. The town is a borough and has a charter and a town mayor. It is sometimes referred to as a city, and sometimes as a town, and is the second largest urban area in Connacht...
- The Famine in Doon co.Limerick
- What Caused the Irish Potato Famine?
- Genome of Irish potato famine pathogen decoded, physorg.com]