The Irish Famine

The Great Famine or the Great Hunger (Irish: An Gorta Mór or An Drochshaol), known more commonly outside of Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine, is the name given to the famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1849. The Famine was due to the appearance of "the Blight" (also known as phytophthora)- the potato fungus that almost instantly destroyed the primary food source for the majority of the island's population. The immediate after-effects of The Famine continued until 1851. Much is unrecorded, and various estimates suggest that between 500,000 and more than one million people died in the three years from 1846 to 1849 as a result of hunger or disease. Some two million refugees are attributed to the Great Hunger (estimates vary), and much the same number of people emigrated to Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia

The immediate effect on Ireland was devastating, and its long-term effects proved immense, permanently changing Irish culture and tradition. The Irish Potato Famine was the culmination of a social, biological, political and economic catastrophe.
The Famine was the product of a number of complex problems which affected nineteenth-century Ireland. One of the most central was the nature of landholdings. From the Norman invasion in 1169 Irish ownership of the land of the island had been in decline. However, the assimilation of the Hiberno-Normans into Irish society rendered this land transfer of less importance by the end of the sixteenth century. Then, under Mary and Elizabeth, plantations of the country were undertaken. These plantations - in Laois, Offaly and Antrim respectively - did not survive. Landholding was, however, fundamentally altered by the Plantation of Ulster and the consequences of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.
A practice of consolidation of lands into large estates was widespread in Europe, but, in Ireland, it was complicated by the discriminatory laws applied to all faiths, in particular against Presbyterians and Roman Catholics, but not the Church of Ireland as the state church of the British Crown in Ireland. By the time of The Great Hunger these discriminatory laws had been repealed, but not before irrepairably biasing large land-ownership to non-native, and often non-resident, landlords.
The local practice known as 'subdivision', whereby lands and property, instead of being inherited by the first-born son (primogeniture) was divided equally among male heirs. In its nineteenth-century landholding form, it meant that, over each generation, the size of a tenant farm was reduced, as it was split between all living sons, though by the 1840s, subdivision was increasingly only found among the poorest people on the smallest farms.
In 1845, for example, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4 to 2 hectares (one to five acres) in size, while 40% were of 2 to 6 hectares (five to fifteen acres). This included marshland and bogland that could not be used for food production. As a result, holdings were so small that the only crop that could be grown in sufficient quantities, and which provided sufficient nourishment to feed a family, was potatoes. A British Government report carried out shortly before the Great Hunger noted that the scale of the poverty was such that one third of all small holdings in Ireland were presumed to be unable to support their families, after paying their rent, other than through the earnings of seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland.
As a result, the Irish landholding system in the 1840s was already in serious trouble. Many of the big estates, as a result of earlier agricultural crises, were heavily mortgaged and in financial difficulty. (10% were eventually bankrupted by the Great Hunger). Below that level were mass tenancies, lacking long-term leases, rent control and security of tenure, many of them through subdivision so small that the tenants were struggling to survive in good years, and almost wholly dependent on potatoes because they alone could be grown in sufficient quantity and nutritional value on the land left to native ownership, while many tons of cattle and other foodstuffs from estates were exported by absentee British landlords to foreign markets. Furthermore, any desire of tenants to increase the productivity of their land was actively discouraged by the threat that any increase in land value would lead to a disproportionately high increase in rent, possibly leading to their eviction.
At the time, the relief of the poor in Ireland was based on the Poor Law legislation. These schemes were paid for through the Poor Law Union, which was funded by rates (local taxes) paid by landlords, on the basis of an estate's tenant numbers. The system of letting small farms to subsistance farmers was unprofitable, and the Irish Government used the rating system to encourage consolidation of holdings which would be more profitable and, in theory, provide employment for those who were no longer able to farm.
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, Queen Victoria donated the equivalent of €70,000 in 2007's money, while she was reciving far more in civil list money off the state, showing what a greedy so and so she was, and it is said she asked a other person not to give so much money as it may may make her look bad, which she was. While the Choctaw Indians famously sent $710 and grain, an act of generosity still remembered to this day, and publicly commemorated by President Mary Robinson in the 1990s.
Decline in population 1841-51 (%)
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
The initial British government policy towards the famine was, in the view of historians such as F.S.L. Lyons, "very delayed and slow". Professor Joe Lee contends: "There was nothing unique (by the standards of pre-industrial subsistence crisis) about the [Irish] famine. The death rate had been frequently equalled in earlier European famines, including, possibly, in Ireland itself during the famine of 1740-41" . This 1740-1741 famine is commonly referred to as The Forgotten Famine. Commonly, the government would encourage land owners to evict their tenants.
In the case of the 1846-49 Irish Famine, the response of Tory government head Sir Robert Peel was to purchase some foreign maize for delivery to Ireland, and to repeal the Corn Laws, which prohibited imports of the much cheaper foreign grain to Ireland. The Irish called the maize imported by the government 'Peel's brimstone' - and the nickname was only partly because of the yellow colour of the maize. The repeal of the Corn Laws was enacted over a three-year period from 1846 to 1849 and came too late to help the starving Irish, and was politically unpopular, resulting in the end of Sir Robert's ministry. Succeeding him was a Whig ministry under Lord John Russell, later Earl Russell. Lord John's ministry focused on providing support through "public works" projects. Such projects mainly consisted of the government employing Irish peasantry on wasteful projects, such as filling in valleys and flattening hills, so the government could justify the cash payments. Such projects proved counterproductive, as starving labourers expended the energy gained from low rations on the heavy labour. Furthermore, the paid labour prevented the Irish peasants from returning to their farmlands to grow another harvest and prolonged the famine. Eventually, a soup-kitchen network, which fed three million people, replaced the public works projects.
In the autumn of 1847, the soup-kitchens were shut down and responsibility for famine relief was transferred to the Poor Laws unions. The Irish Poor Laws were even harsher on the poor than their English counterparts; those paupers with over a quarter-acre of land were expected to abandon it before entering a workhouse - something many of the poor would not do. Furthermore, Ireland had too few workhouses. Many of the workhouses that existed were closed due to financial problems; authorities in London refused to give large amounts of aid to bankrupt Poor Laws unions. As a result, disaster became inevitable.
No one knows for certain how many people died in the Famine. State registration of births, marriages or deaths had not yet begun, while records kept by the Roman Catholic Church are incomplete. Many of the Church of Ireland's records (which included records of local Catholics due to the collection of Tithes (10% of income) from Catholics to finance the Church of Ireland) were destroyed by irregular IRA troops in 1922.
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 to 9 million. This calculation is based on numbers contained in the ten year census results compiled since 1821. (However, a recent re-examination of those returns raise questions as to their accuracy; the 1841 Census, for example, incorrectly classed farm children as labourers, affecting later calculations on how many adults capable of childbearing existed to produce children between 1841 and 1851). In 1851 the actual population was 6.6 million. Making straightforward calculations is complicated by a secondary effect of famine, a key side-effect of malnutrition, namely plummeting fertility and sexual activity rates. The scale of that effect on population numbers was not fully recognized until studies done during African famines in the twentieth century. As a result, corrections based on inaccuracies in census returns and on the previous unrealized decline in births due to malnourishment have led to an overall reduction in the presumed death numbers. Modern historians and statisticians estimate that between 500,000 and 2,000,000 died. Some historians suggest the death toll was in the region of 700,000 to 800,000.[One website claims a figure of over five million - no serious historian endorses a figure of even half this size. In addition, in excess of one million Irish emigrated to the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, while more than one million emigrated over following decades; by 1911, a combination of emigration and an abnormally high number of unmarried men and women in the population, had reduced the population of Ireland to 4.4 million.

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Potato blights continued in Ireland, especially in 1872 and 1879-1880. These killed few people, partly because they were less severe, but mainly for a complex range of reasons. But, on the other hand, the population in Ireland soon shrunk from over 8 million to about 6 million. This was due to deaths from, at that time, incurable diseases like typhus. However, part of the loss was because many Irish immigrated to America and other countries. The growth in the numbers of railways made the importation of foodstuffs easier; in 1834, Ireland had 9.7 km (6 miles) of railway tracks; by 1912, the total was 5 480 km (3,403 miles). The banning of subdivision, coupled with emigration, had increased the average farm holding, enabling tenant farms to diversify in terms of produce grown. The increasing wealth in urban areas meant alternative sources of food, grain, potatoes and seed were available in towns and villages. The 1870s agricultural economy thus was more efficient and less dependent on potatoes, as well as having access to new farm machinery and product control that had not existed thirty years earlier.
Of particular importance was the wholesale reorganisation of the agricultural sector, which had begun after the famine with the Encumbered Estates Act and which in the period (1870s-1900s) saw the nature of Irish landholding changed completely, with small owned farms replacing mass estates and multiple tenants. Many of the large estates in the 1840s were debt-ridden and heavily mortgaged. In contrast, estates in the 1870s, many of them under new Irish middle class owners thanks to the Encumbered Estates Act, were on a better economic footing, and so capable of reducing rents and providing locally organized relief, as was the Roman Catholic Church, which was better organised and funded than it had been in 1847-49.
If subdivision produced earlier marriage and larger families, its abolition produced the opposite effect; the 'inheriting' child would wait until they found the 'right' partner, preferably one with a large dowry to bring to the farm. Other children, no longer with the possibility of inheriting a farm (or part of it at least) had no economic attraction and no financial resources to consider an early marriage.
As a result, later mini-famines made only minimal effect and are generally forgotten, except by historians. However, even though by the 1880s Ireland went through an economic boom unprecedented until the Celtic Tiger era, emigration, often of children who no longer could inherit a share in the land and who as a result chose to go abroad for economic advantage and to avoid poverty, continued. By the 1911 census, 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.
The same mould (Phytophthora infestans) was responsible for the 1847-51 and later famines. When people speak of "the Irish famine", or "an Gorta Mór", they nearly always mean the one of the 1840s, even though a similar Great Famine did in fact hit in the early 18th century. The fact that only four types of potato were brought from the Americas was a fundamental cause of the famine, as the lack of genetic diversity made it possible for a single fungus-relative to have much more devastating consequences than it might otherwise have had.
As a result of the famine, many Irish families were forced to emigrate from the country. By 1854, between 1.5 and 2 million Irish left their country. Due to the harsh living conditions In the United States, 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, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In addition, Irish populations were prevalent among American mining communities. The 1851 census reported that about one third of the inhabitants of Toronto, Canada, were Irish, and in the same year, about a quarter of Liverpool's population was Irish-born. The Famine is often seen as an initiator in the steep depopulation of Ireland in the 19th century; however, it is likely that real population began to fall in 1841 with the Famine accelerating any population changes already occurring. Some may argue the Famine was necessary to restore population equilibrium to Ireland given that population increased by 13-14% in the first three decades of the 19th century (using Thomas Malthus's idea of population expanding geometrically, resources increasing arithmetically) nonetheless there is a tendency among Irish historians to dispute this. Statistics show that between 1831 and 1841 population grew by only 5% so this gives more value to those who argue that population was already falling by 1844.
The mass exodus in the years following the famine must be seen in the context of overpopulation, industrial stagnation, land shortages, declining agricultural employment and inadequate diet. These factors were already combining to choke off population growth by the 1830s. It would be wrong, therefore, to attribute all the population loss during the famine, to the famine.
The suggestion that the Famine "amounted to genocide" by the British against the Irish is a divisive issue. Few Irish historians accept outright such a definition, as "genocide" implies a deliberate policy of extermination. Many agree that the British policies during the Famine, particularly those applied under Lord John Russell, were misguided, ill-informed, and disastrous. Anglo-Irish poet Jonathan Swift had satirized the plight of the Irish in relation to English economic domination over a century before the famine in his pamphlet A Modest Proposal (1729). Professor Joe Lee called what happened a holocaust[citation needed] (although Holodomor may be a more accurate description). Others, however, note that over three million people were fed through soup kitchens (though much of it through non-governmental aid), and that factors such as poor communication, primitive retail distribution networks and inefficiencies of local government had exacerbated the situation. Essentially most though say capitalism, was to blame.
The "debate" is largely a moral one, attempting to ascertain whether within the policies of the British Empire lay a nationalist, forgetful, or simply inconsiderate mentality that, despite its power, made it impotent to handle a humanitarian crisis in its own backyard, or whether a large reduction in Ireland's population was looked on as a favourable outcome by a large segment of the British body politic, who then decided to let nature take its course. Some Irish, British and US historians (F.S.L. Lyons, John A. Murphy, Joe Lee, Roy Foster, and James S. Donnelly, Jr.), as well as historians Cecil Woodham-Smith, Peter Gray, Ruth Dudley Edwards and many others have long dismissed claims of a deliberate policy of extermination. This dismissal usually does not preclude any assessment of British Imperial rule as ill-mannered or unresponsive toward certain of its subjects.
It is often argued that there existed an over-reliance on the growing of potatoes as a food source in Ireland; to the detriment of a diversified food base. However Ireland was not unique in this respect. The fairly sudden shift towards potato cultivation in the early years of the French Revolution allowed a nation that had traditionally hovered on the brink of starvation in times of stability and peace to expand its population during a decades-long period of constant political upheaval and warfare. The uncertainly of food supply during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, combined with the tendency of above-ground crops to be destroyed by soldiers, encouraged France's allies and enemies to embrace the tuber as well; by the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the potato had become a staple food in the diets of most Europeans. The blight was present all across Europe. However it was only in Ireland that its consequnces were so drastic. While the potato constituted a very important component of the Irish diet it was not the only source of nutrition available in the Irish countryside. It is the continued, and even increased, exportation of those alternate foodstuffs during the famine years that supports the thesis the famine was result of colonial disregard by British authorities.
In Ireland Before and After the Famine, author Cormac O'Grada documents that in 1845, a famine year in Ireland, 3,251,907 quarters (8 bushels = 1 quarter)) of corn were exported from Ireland to Britain. That same year, 257,257 sheep were exported to Britain. In 1846, another famine year, 480,827 swine, and 186,483 oxen were exported to Britain.
Cecil Woodham-Smith, considered the preeminent authority on the Irish Famine, wrote in The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-1849 that, "...no issue has provoked so much anger or so embittered relations between the two countries (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." According to John Mitchel, quoted by Woodham-Smith, "Ireland was actually producing sufficient food, wool and flax, to feed and clothe not nine but eighteen millions of people," yet a ship sailing into an Irish port during the famine years with a cargo of grain was "sure to meet six ships sailing out with a similar cargo."
One of the most remarkable facts about the famine period is that there was an average monthly export of food from Ireland worth 100,000 Pound Sterling. Almost throughout the five-year famine, Ireland remained a net exporter of food.
Dr. Christine Kinealy, a fellow at the University of Liverpool and the author of two scholarly texts on the Irish Famine: This Great Calamity and A Death-Dealing Famine, says that 9,992 calves were exported from Ireland to England during "Black '47", an increase of thirty-three per cent from the previous year. In the twelve months following the second failure of the potato crop, 4,000 horses and ponies were exported. The export of livestock to Britain (with the exception of pigs) increased during the "famine". The export of bacon and ham increased. In total, over three million live animals were exported from Ireland between 1846-50, more than the number of people who emigrated during the famine years.
Dr. Kinealy's most recent work is documented in the spring, 1998 issue of "History Ireland". She states that almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases. The food was shipped under guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland: Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee and Westport.
During the first nine months of "Black '47" the export of grain-derived alcohol from Ireland to England included the following: 874,170 gallons of porter, 278,658 gallons of Guinness, and 183,392 gallons of whiskey.
A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas,beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues,animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue and seed.
The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding nine gallons. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins were shipped to Liverpool. That works out to be 822,681 gallons of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of "famine".
If the other three months of exports were at all comparable, then we can safely assume that a million gallons of butter left Ireland while 400,000 Irish people starved to death!
It would appear that Dr. Kinealy's research proves beyond a reasonable doubt that there was sufficient food in Ireland to prevent mass starvation however Austin Bourke in examining the evidence comes to a different conclusion. In his work 'The use of the potato crop in pre-famine Ireland' he determines that Woodham-Smith's calculations are wrong and also notes that during the last month of 1846 imports almost doubled.
Finally he notes, that "it is beyond question that the deficiency arising from the loss of the potato crop in 1846 could not have been met by the simple expedient of prohibiting the export of grain from Ireland."
When Ireland experienced an earlier famine in 1782-83, ports were closed in order to keep home grown food for domestic consumption. Food prices were immediately reduced within Ireland. The merchants lobbied against such efforts, but their protests were over-ridden. Everyone recognized that the interests of the merchants and the distressed people were irreconcilable
The notable difference between the Famine and other humanitarian crises was that it occurred within the imperial homeland, at a time well into the modern prosperity of the Victorian and Industrial age. Even today, such crises tend to be far away from centres of power such that the subjects of empire, almost by definition, are of distant cultures, languages and religious beliefs. Within the imperial culture, the reportage of a crisis among its subjects more often uses dismissive and dehumanizing terms, and treats otherwise urgent matters with little relevancy or interest. With respect to geography, the famine would appear to belie many of the typical circumstances in which colonialist dismissal of native plight often occurred. With respect to era, the famine came at a crossroads of old world and modern world. Though human suffering during the famine was never photographed, the event immediately and profoundly altered the course of generations of Irish and Irish diaspora - for whom history has a rich and prosperous record.

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