Irish Famine

I

Introduction

Irish Famine, sometimes called the Great Famine, catastrophic famine that swept Ireland from 1845 to 1851. It followed the destruction of the potato crop by a hitherto unknown type of blight, Phytophthora infestans, from America in 1845, and the response of the British government to the resulting crisis.

II

Social and Economic Background to the Famine

The potato was the main food of about 4 million people in Ireland of a total population of about 8.5 million. Reliance on the potato derived from a combination of the structure of landholding and economic and demographic circumstances. The entire land was owned by about 10,000 landlords, mainly the descendants of English conquerors, living on the rent of about 600,000 farmers. The base of the rural social pyramid was occupied by a peasantry comprising more than 1 million cottiers and labourers, whose numbers had been rising rapidly for about a century, originally induced by a growing demand for labour due to rising grain exports at good prices until 1815, and subsequently continuing, if somewhat more slowly, in less propitious market circumstances.

The labourers were usually paid, not in money, but in small patches of land, called conacre, on which they grew their potatoes, and whose rent they paid mainly through their labour. A highly nutritious food, which could grow on poor land, and feed four times as many people as corn on the same acreage, the potato normally sufficed to cover needs. But when it failed, the labourers not only lost their food, but had little money to buy substitutes in the market, particularly as their main source of cash income, pigs and poultry, also depended mainly on the potato.

III

The Spread of the Famine

About one third of the potato crop failed in autumn 1845. In the worst hit areas, famine struck in early 1846. But excess mortality remained generally low, for human consumption normally accounted for only about one half of the potato crop, with about one third going to animal consumption and one sixth to seed. The 80-90 per cent failure of the 1846 crop, however, brought widespread famine. The yield of 1847 was high, but only about one sixth the normal area had been sown, as famished people had consumed the seed potatoes. Herculean efforts were made to import seed to plant in 1848, but blight returned to destroy more than half of the crop. Partial failure in 1849 and 1850 kept famine lingering at local levels into 1851. This was the first time the potato had failed for so long a period over so wide an area.

The number of famine victims has been bitterly contested on ideological grounds. Those anxious to blame the British government sometimes cite up to 2 million dead, while those anxious to exonerate the government often embrace estimates as low as 300,000. The historiography of the Famine provides a rich laboratory for students of the manner in which ideologically driven commentators strive mightily to find the answers they want, ranging from genocide on the one hand to virtual famine denial on the other.

Although all estimates must forever remain provisional because of uncertainty about the exact population at the outset, there is currently a research consensus that at least 1 million died from disease and starvation between 1845 and 1851, with about another 1.5 million emigrating between 1845 and 1855 due to famine-related causes, the very poorest to Britain, the somewhat better off to Canada and, above all, to the United States.

IV

Official Response to the Famine

The most controversial question concerning the famine is whether so many need have died. The official response fell into four phases. In 1845 Sir Robert Peel, the prime minister, ordered Indian meal from America to be distributed in the worst affected areas. When the Whigs under Lord John Russell came into office in July 1846, the thinking of Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, and of Charles Wood, his minister, triumphed. To avert what they saw as the threat to character contained in the dependency culture allegedly fostered by food handouts, they determined that any relief must be earned through work. But applicants could not be employed in any activity that would interfere with the market. Therefore they must be engaged on ”unproductive” works, often aimless road making. At its peak in early 1847, over 700,000 were employed in this manner. To discourage slackers, wages were paid at piece rates, set deliberately low in order not to interfere with the market. As food prices rose sharply, the rates fell far below what was necessary to buy enough food for a family, and probably at least 250,000 died that winter and spring at a time when large amounts of food continued to be exported.

Trevelyan, now the main overseer of famine relief, was soon having second thoughts. He fell back reluctantly, until the next harvest, on Peel’s solution, the free distribution of food, from May to August 1847. At the peak in July over 3 million people were surviving on free food from the government soup kitchens.

But Trevelyan, still fearing the debilitating impact of charity on character, and the dominant faction in the Cabinet, led by Wood and Earl Grey, the Colonial Secretary, closed the soup kitchens in the autumn, seizing on the news of a good potato yield to declare the famine over, ignoring the frantic warnings of Clarendon, the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin—Trevelyan made only one flying visit to Dublin during the entire famine—that the potato supply would last a mere six weeks. The Cabinet, it seemed to many, had already decided that Irish property must henceforth pay for Irish poverty.

This did not amount to a consciously genocidal course, although it has been suggested that genocidal impulses can be detected in some British responses. The official British mind, however, convinced that Ireland was grossly overpopulated, appears to have deemed the Famine somewhat in the light of a divine solution to the otherwise insoluble population problem, because it would allow for the social reorganization of Ireland along English lines, with an English type system of responsible landlords, market-oriented farmers, and a labouring class paid in money instead of land, which by transforming Ireland into a replica of rural England would allow it more efficiently to supply food to England’s own burgeoning population. The Famine could thus be said to have presented itself as an effective context for an exercise in social engineering.

The most effective weapon against the cottiers and smallholders was the “quarter-acre clause” of 1847, under which nobody could procure public relief if they held more than a quarter acre of land. The starving poor therefore had to surrender their land or face death. The contempt in some official quarters for the Catholic Celtic peasantry, on economic, social, religious, and racial grounds, was complemented by disdain, if not on religious and racial, then on economic grounds, for Irish landlords, many of them absentee, deemed to be largely parasitic, battening on rents they had done little to deserve. They were now to be obliged, through heavy taxation in the form of rates, to support the starving. They were also to be encouraged to abdicate, in favour of allegedly progressive new landlords from England and Scotland, through the Encumbered Estates Acts of 1848 and 1849, designed to facilitate the sale of indebted estates.

But if some nurtured the vision of an anglicized Ireland arising from the calamity, it was only half realized. Few new landlords came from Britain, and these “Saxon saviours” were not given the expected grateful welcome by the Celtic Irish population, to quote the racial vocabulary in widespread official and popular use at the time.

Some deaths were unavoidable in the winter of 1846, before an administrative relief system could be fully put in place. But the most striking feature of the Famine was that having apparently solved the crisis in the summer of 1847, the government decided, in effect, to let it start again. This is often explained in terms of the dominance of the doctrine of laissez-faire. There were indeed many vigorous advocates of non-intervention. But there were also many voices, not least of private relief workers like the Quakers, raised in favour of more active intervention. There was no consensus on laissez-faire in English public discourse. Far from being prisoners of laissez-faire dogma, it could be argued that the government consciously chose a policy of non-intervention as the one designed most effectively to achieve a transformation in the social structure of Ireland.