Great Famine (Ireland)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Great Famine struck Ireland between 1845 and 1852, a stretch of mass starvation and disease that Irish speakers of the time called an Drochshaol, the bad life, or more loosely, the hard times. On the eve of it, roughly 8.5 million people lived on the island. By 1901 that number had fallen to 4.4 million. The worst single year had a name of its own. People called it Black '47.

  A disease of potatoes set the catastrophe in motion. Yet the scale of the dying owed less to the blight than to the human decisions made around it. Why did roughly a million people starve on an island that exported food the whole time? Why did over a million more board ships and leave? And why, more than a century and a half later, does the wound still shape relations between Ireland and Britain? The answers run through landlords and tenants, through grain trade ledgers, through eviction notices, and through the holds of ships bound for North America.

• 2. A Wage Paid In Potatoes

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  Walter Raleigh is often credited with bringing the potato to Ireland, planting it at Myrtle Grove in Youghal, County Cork, some time soon after 1586. Others credit Anthony Southwell or Francis Drake with introducing it to County Cork. For a long time the crop was only a supplement. The main Irish diet rested on butter, milk, and grain.

  By 1800 the potato had become a staple for one in three Irish people, especially in winter. It grew quickly in a small space, which made it ideal for feeding families on shrinking plots. A disproportionate share of what was grown was a single variety, the Irish Lumper, leaving little genetic variation and a population of plants exposed to the same disease.

  For the labourer, the source describes a potato wage, a system in which the poorest were paid in the crop itself. Cottiers paid rent by working for the landlord. Spalpeens, itinerant labourers, paid for short leases through temporary day work. Catholics made up 80 percent of the population, and most lived in poverty and insecurity.

  The potato also fed animals. Roughly 33 percent of production, around 5 million short tons, was typically used as fodder for livestock just before the famine. That dependence reached its limit as holdings kept being divided. By 1845-24 percent of all Irish tenant farms were between 0.4 and 2 hectares, and 40 percent between 2 and 6 hectares, so small that no crop but the potato could feed a family on them.

• 3. Landlords And Middlemen

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  In 1800 the 1st Earl of Clare said of Irish landlords that confiscation is their common title. Many of them lived in England and functioned as absentee landlords, sending the rental revenue back across the Irish Sea. An estimated 6 million pounds was remitted out of Ireland in 1842 alone. The historian Cecil Woodham-Smith wrote that landlords treated the land as a source of income to be drained as fully as possible.

  The middleman system, introduced in the 18th century, made the squeeze tighter. Middlemen leased large tracts on long, fixed-rent leases, then sublet to tenants and pocketed the difference. They split holdings into smaller and smaller parcels to raise more rent. Tenants could be evicted for non-payment, or because a landlord chose to raise sheep instead of grain.

  In 1843 the British government recognised that land management was the root cause of disaffection in Ireland. The Prime Minister set up a Royal Commission chaired by the Earl of Devon. Daniel O'Connell called it perfectly one-sided, since it was made up of landlords with no tenant representation. In February 1845 Devon reported that in many districts the only food was the potato, the only drink water, and that a bed or a blanket was a rare luxury.

  Witnesses before the commission called landlords land sharks and bloodsuckers. Because any improvement a tenant made became the landlord's property when a lease ended, tenants had little reason to improve anything. Most had no security of tenure at all. The exception was Ulster, where a practice called tenant right compensated tenants for their improvements, and which the commission linked to that province's relative prosperity and calm.

• 4. The Murrain Declares Itself

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  On the 16th of August 1845, The Gardeners' Chronicle and Horticultural Gazette reported a blight of unusual character on the Isle of Wight. A week later, on the 23rd, it described a fearful malady among the potato crop, with Belgian fields said to be completely desolated and no cure to be had. By mid-August the disease had already reached Belgium, the Netherlands, northern France, and southern England.

  The pathogen was Phytophthora infestans, an oomycete related to brown algae rather than a fungus. Its origin has been traced to the Toluca Valley in Mexico, and the 1845 to 1846 outbreak was caused by a strain known as HERB-1. One theory holds it crossed the Atlantic on potatoes carried to feed passengers on clipper ships from America, where blight had wrecked crops in 1843 and 1844.

  On the 13th of September The Gardeners' Chronicle stopped the press to announce that the potato murrain had unequivocally declared itself in Ireland. Even so, Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel wrote to Sir James Graham that there was always a tendency to exaggeration in Irish news. Only when the crop came up in October did the scale become clear.

  The damage compounded year on year. The 1845 loss has been estimated at a third to a half of cultivated acreage. In 1846 three-quarters of the harvest was lost. Seed potatoes were scarce in 1847, so few were sown, and hunger continued despite average yields. With over three million people totally dependent on the crop, the failures meant famine.

• 5. Food Leaving The Ports

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  Nicolas McEvoy, parish priest of Kells, wrote in October 1845 that he had watched fifty dray loads of meal move from a single milling establishment toward Drogheda, bound to feed the foreigner, leaving starvation and death behind. Large quantities of food were exported from Ireland throughout the crisis, and London's refusal to bar those exports became an immediate and lasting source of controversy.

  The grain trade figures tell the story in numbers. In 1846 Ireland exported 1,826 thousand quarters and imported 987. The next year exports fell to 970 while imports rose to 4,519, with maize imports of 3,287. Woodham-Smith noted that at the height of the famine four times as much wheat was imported into Ireland as was exported.

  The export pattern was tangled up with how relief was funded. Workhouse provision under the Poor Law had to be paid by rates on local property owners. In the worst-hit areas tenants could not pay rent, so landlords could not pay rates, and only by selling food, some of which would be exported, could the rents, rates, and workhouses be funded at all.

  The historian James Donnelly judged the picture of Irish people starving as food was exported to be the most powerful image in the nationalist account of the famine. It was the writer John Mitchel who gave that image its sharpest line, one that became famous: The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.

• 6. Two Governments, Two Policies

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  When Ireland faced food shortages in 1782 to 1783, ports were closed to food exports to keep local food at home, and prices promptly dropped. Merchants who lobbied against the ban were overruled. That precedent made London's later choices all the more pointed.

  Sir Robert Peel's Tory government drew early praise. The historian F. S. L. Lyons called its first response prompt and relatively successful. In November 1845 Peel secretly bought 100,000 pounds worth of maize and cornmeal from America, using Baring Brothers as agents. Irish mills were not equipped to grind it, and the yellow meal, hard to cook and unpopular, became known as Peel's brimstone. In March 1846 Peel set up public works, and he moved to repeal the Corn Laws, a fight that split his party and ended his ministry.

  The Whig leader Lord John Russell took over in June 1846 and leaned on laissez-faire doctrine, assuming the market would supply the food. His government refused to interfere with food moving to England and halted the previous relief works. Charles Trevelyan, who ran government relief, wrote privately to Edward Twisleton that if small farmers go, and landlords sell to investors, the country might reach a satisfactory settlement.

  In January 1847 the government admitted the policy had failed and turned to direct relief, indoor aid through workhouses and outdoor aid through soup kitchens. The Poor Relief (Ireland) Act of June 1847 embodied a principle popular in Britain, that Irish property must support Irish poverty, shifting the cost onto local landlords. Peter Gray calculated that London spent about 7 million pounds on relief between 1845 and 1850, less than half of one percent of British gross national product, against the 20 million pounds given to West Indian slave-owners in the 1830s.

• 7. Cleared From The Land

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  Bishop of Meath Thomas Nulty recalled in 1847 seeing seven hundred people driven from their homes in a single day, the wailing of women and the screams of children wringing tears from all who saw it. He wrote that landlords for miles around warned their tenants against giving even a single night's shelter, and that within little more than three years nearly a fourth of those evicted lay in their graves.

  The Gregory clause turned poverty into homelessness by design. Named after William H. Gregory, MP, it barred anyone holding more than a quarter acre from receiving relief. Farmers had to surrender all their land to a landlord to qualify, and Donnelly called the quarter-acre rule indirectly a death-dealing instrument. Landlords, liable for the rates of tenants paying 4 pounds or less in rent, cleared poorer tenants to cut their bills.

  The police only began counting in 1849, and recorded almost 250,000 people officially evicted between 1849 and 1854. Donnelly thought the true figure, including voluntary surrenders from 1846 onward, would exceed half a million. West Clare was among the worst, where Captain Kennedy in April 1848 estimated a thousand houses levelled since November. The Mahon family of Strokestown House evicted 3,000 people in 1847 and still dined on lobster soup.

  After Clare came County Mayo, with 10 percent of all evictions between 1849 and 1854. George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan, who owned over 60,000 acres, said he would not breed paupers to pay priests, and turned out more than 2,000 tenants in Ballinrobe to make grazing farms. Revenge came too. Seven landlords were shot, six fatally, during the autumn and winter of 1847, among them Major Denis Mahon of West Roscommon, killed that year after forcing thousands into eviction.

• 8. Coffin Ships And The Long Aftermath

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  At least a million people are thought to have emigrated because of the famine, with about a million long-distance emigrants between 1846 and 1851, mostly to North America. The 1851 census gives 967,952. Emigrants sent remittances home, reaching 1,404,000 pounds by 1851, money that allowed another family member to leave. Unlike most migrations in world history, women left just as often, just as early, and in the same numbers as men.

  The crossings were lethal. Overcrowded, badly provisioned vessels known as coffin ships sailed from small unregulated harbours in the west in defiance of British safety rules. Of the more than 100,000 Irish who sailed to Canada in 1847, an estimated one in five died of disease and malnutrition, including over 5,000 at Grosse Isle in the Saint Lawrence River. That same year 38,000 Irish flooded Toronto, a city of fewer than 20,000 people. Liverpool drew so many that at least a quarter of its population was Irish-born by 1851, earning it the nickname Ireland's second capital.

  Charity came from far afield. A group of Choctaw raised 170 dollars in 1847, just 16 years after their own Trail of Tears. Queen Victoria donated 2,000 pounds. The British Relief Association, founded on the 1st of January 1847 by Lionel de Rothschild, Abel Smith, and others, raised roughly 390,000 pounds. On the 25th of March 1847 Pope Pius IX issued the encyclical Praedecessores nostros, calling the whole Catholic world to give.

  More people died of disease than of starvation. The 1851 census recorded 21,770 deaths from starvation and 400,720 from disease, with fever and dysentery the main killers, though historians agree the tables undercounted, and the most widely accepted estimate is one million dead. The folk memory ran deep yet quiet. The linguist Erick Falc'her-Poyroux found surprisingly few songs survived, inferring the subject was avoided for decades because it brought back too many sorrowful memories. When the blight returned in 1879, Michael Davitt's Land League, led by a man born during the Great Famine and evicted with his family at age four, boycotted notorious landlords and blocked evictions, and the next famine's severity was limited.