ftp.pasteur.org/FAQ//ftp-pasteur-org-FAQ.zip/FAQ/cultures/irish-faq/part06

Internet Message Format | 1999-11-08 | 16.1 KB

From: [e-mail] (Irish FAQ Maintainer)
Sender: [e-mail] (Christian Murphy)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.irish,soc.answers,news.answers
Subject: Irish FAQ: The Famine [6/10]
Summary: an gorta m≤r
Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!howland.erols.net!blackbush.xlink.net!news.csl-gmbh.net!news.space.net!news.muc.de!salmon.muc.de!irish-faq
Followup-To: soc.culture.irish
Date: Mon, 08 Nov 1999 02:10:02 GMT
Expires: Sun, 21 Nov 1999 02:10:02 GMT
Message-ID: <cultures/irish-faq/[e-mail]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Approved: [e-mail]
References: <cultures/irish-faq/[e-mail]> <cultures/irish-faq/[e-mail]> <cultures/irish-faq/[e-mail]> <cultures/irish-faq/[e-mail]> <cultures/irish-faq/[e-mail]> <cultures/irish-faq/[e-mail]>
Lines: 364
Xref: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu soc.culture.irish:308253 soc.answers:12711 news.answers:170629

Archive-name: cultures/irish-faq/part06
Last-modified: 7 Oct 99
Posting-Frequency: monthly
URL: http://www.enteract.com/~cpm/irish-faq/

Part six of ten.


Frequently Asked Questions on soc.culture.irish with answers.
Send corrections, suggestions, additions, and other feedback
to <[e-mail]>

The Famine

1) Why is it important?
2) Why is it controversial?
3) What happened?
4) Why did so many people die?
5) Was the Famine genocide?
6) Any references?
7) Where can I find other points of view?


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: 1) Why is it important?

    More Irish died in the Famine of 1845 to 1849 than in any war
    before or since.  The best estimates (based on census data
    from 1841 and 1851, as well as other figures) are that around
    one million people died, or one out of every nine inhabitants.
    About one and a half million emigrated in the decade after 1845
    (the peak was in 1851, when a quarter of a million people left
    the island).  The population continued to decline in Ireland
    through emigration until well into the second half of this century
    (it nearly halved between 1840 and 1910).  Many say that the
    west of the country never recovered.

    The Famine hit one of the richest kingdoms of western Europe in
    a time of peace.  There have been food shortages since and even
    starvation, but western Europe has not seen a large scale famine
    since.


------------------------------

Subject: 2) Why is it controversial?

    Most of the controversy is over the question of blame.    Those who
    look for a simple answer usually settle on one of two targets:
    the British government of the time or the Irish themselves.
    The government is accused of genocide and even of instigating an
    "Irish holocaust".  The Irish are accused of marrying too early
    and having too many children, making a Malthusian catastrophe
    inevitable.

    However the Famine is too complicated to allow a simple
    apportionment of blame.  There were a number of social and
    political forces at work, not to mention the seed of the calamity,
    the potato blight that robbed people of their food.


------------------------------

Subject: 3) What happened?

    The potato crop failed two years in a row, 1845 and 1846.
    There was a partial harvest in 1847 but there were failures again
    in 1848 and 1849.  The cause of the failures was potato blight
    (phytophthora infestans) a fungus that attacked potatoes, making
    them rotten and inedible.

    There was hardship after the blight struck in 1845 but the true
    famine did not come until the following year.  More potatoes
    than ever were planted that spring because people did not expect
    the blight to strike again.  It did.  During the winter of 1846
    the worst started to happen.  People died of starvation in their
    houses (or what passed for houses), in the fields, on the roads.
    Dysentery and typhus became epidemic.  Each took their toll,
    especially among the very young and the old.  Cholera hit in
    1849 and killed many of the survivors.    More people died of
    disease than of starvation.

    The hardest hit were the landless labourers who rented small plots
    of land to feed themselves and their families.    When their own
    crops failed, they had to buy food with money they did not have.
    The price of a hundredweight (112 lb or 50 kg) of potatoes in
    Dublin more than doubled in eight months (from around 16d in
    September 1845 to 3 shillings in April 1846, rising to more than
    6 shillings by October).  Wages did not keep pace.  Some landlords
    treated their tenants well, but most did not.  Evictions were not
    uncommon and tenants who were evicted were left without means to
    support themselves.

    The poor did not just accept their fate.  There were food riots
    and an upsurge in activity among secret societies.  These were
    dealt with as a threat to law and order by the usual method,
    repression with violence if necessary.    There was an epidemic
    in crime as people stole to survive.

    The prime minister, Peel, had ú100 000 worth of Indian corn
    imported from America for food relief in November 1845.  This
    was food not unfamiliar to the Irish, but it was unpopular.
    A programme of public works was started in March 1846 to
    employ the neediest.  The works were to be paid for locally.
    The harbour at Dun Laoghaire (then Kingstown) is a good example
    of the type of scheme that was approved: it did not benefit any
    particular private interest but was supposed to be of social
    value.    Unfortunately most of the schemes were of little value to
    anyone and, although three quarters of a million were employed
    on them by March 1847, they were paid a wage (about 12d a day)
    too low to feed a family.

    A traditional policy of Peel's party, the Tories, was support for
    the Corn Laws, which restricted imports of grain.  The failure
    of the potato crop in Ireland helped convince Peel that this
    protectionist policy was wrong.  He moved to have them repealed.
    In this he was successful.  The Laws were repealed in June 1846
    but Peel lost power immediately afterwards, having alienated
    a large portion of his own party.  The next prime minister was
    Russell, leading a Whig minority government.

    In March 1847 the government abandoned public works and started
    a new scheme.  Soup kitchens were opened, paid for by charity,
    local rates and government aid.  By July three million people were
    being fed a day.  It was probably the most successful (in terms
    of lives saved) that was tried, but it was abandoned in September.

    Instead, the Irish Poor Law System was supposed to cater for
    the destitute.    This System had been established in 1838 as an
    extension of the English system in Ireland.  The harsh conditions
    in Poor Law houses were supposed to encourage self-reliance,
    thrift and hard work.  200 000 were housed in July 1849 and
    "outdoor relief" was given to a further 800 000.  The system had
    been built to house 100 000 and before the famine it rarely
    housed more than 40 000.  As a solution to the plight of the
    famine-stricken, it was not only woefully inadequate; it was
    horrific.  The infamous "Gregory clause" denied even this much
    relief to anyone who owned more than a quarter of an acre of land.

    The blight struck again in 1850, but not to the same extent.
    Hundreds of thousands of smallholdings had disappeared with the
    people who lived on them.  Many of the marginal plots that had
    been in use were never cultivated again.


------------------------------

Subject: 4) Why did so many people die?

    Ireland was uniquely vulnerable to a failure of the potato crop
    in the 1840s.  Potatoes had been imported to Ireland in the late
    sixteenth century (they were brought to Europe from the Spanish
    empire in America).  By the nineteenth century, varieties adapted
    to the Irish climate were developed and they became a staple,
    particularly for the poor, who often lived off little else.

    An adult male would eat 12 to 14 pounds (5 to 6 kg) a day.
    If the amount seems large, it must be remembered that growing
    potatoes was back-breaking work.  Fields were dug with a spade;
    planting and fertilisation were done by hand.  An acre (about
    0.4 hectare) could support four people, about twice as many
    as the equivalent area of grain.  With a supplement of milk or
    buttermilk a diet like this did not lack any essential nutrients.

    The population of Ireland was growing at around 1.6% a year in the
    early nineteenth century (a rate that would cause it to double
    every 44 years).  This was one of the highest rates in Europe.
    The rate fell drastically in the fifteen years before the Famine
    to something like 0.6%.  Population growth was highest in the
    West, where small plots of intensively cultivated potatoes were
    the most common.  The population of Ireland reached its peak
    just before the Famine.

    Although the Irish poor may have been relatively healthy (there
    was a notable lack of scurvy), they were still appallingly
    poor.  It was common for labourers to hunger in the late summer
    before harvest.  In 1841 there were more than a million of them.
    Housing and clothing were poor: mud huts and rags were the norm
    for the majority.  Men lived to an average around 37 years of age,
    (actually not a short lifespan by European standards of the time).
    But most importantly, the Irish economy was ailing since the
    end of the Napoleonic wars and the poor were getting poorer.

    The Industrial Revolution never reached Ireland in the nineteenth
    century (with the exception of eastern parts of Ulster).
    Irish cottage industries could not compete against the new
    mills of England.  There was little opportunity for employment
    outside of agriculture and agriculture did not pay well.

    The potato blight was misunderstood or not understood at all.
    People could see that it thrived in damp weather, but the
    scientific committee of inquiry set up by Peel considered it a
    type of wet rot.  A fungicide for blight was not discovered until
    1882, when it was found that spraying a solution of "bluestone"
    (copper sulphate) prevented the disease from taking hold.  At
    the time of the famine there was nothing a farmer could do.

    Medical science could do no better.  There was no cure for
    the common relapsing fevers, never mind typhus and cholera,
    especially when these struck people already weak from hunger.

    It would have taken massive government intervention to feed
    everyone during the famine, probably more than any government
    of the time was capable of.  As it happened, the efforts of
    the government were wholly inadequate, even by the standards
    of the time.  The Treasury spent ú8 million, mostly in the form
    of loans that were never repaid.  This amounts to around two to
    three percent of government spending during the period, or 0.3%
    of GNP.  It was easy for critics at the time to find more money
    spent on other things, including ú20 million to "compensate"
    slave owners in the West Indies when their slaves were freed.


------------------------------

Subject: 5) Was the Famine genocide?

    No.  "Genocide" is defined in the Shorter Oxford as " the
    (attempted) deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic
    or national group".

    British policy was anything but deliberate and systematic.
    The government did not prevent extra food from being imported
    (indeed the repeal of the Corn Laws had the opposite effect).
    The government did not force exports to continue: Irish farmers
    chose to export their produce.  Of course, armed guards were
    used to protect such private property.

    Imports to Ireland rose and exports fell dramatically as a
    result of a famine (see the table below, from ╙ Grßda's book).

    -------------------------------------------------------

    Grain exports and imports 1844-48 (in thousands of tons)

            Exports    Imports    Net Export
            ------- ------- ----------
        1844    424    30    +394
        1845    513    28    +485
        1846    284    197    +87
        1847    146    889    -743
        1848    314    439    -125

    -------------------------------------------------------


    Quakers and other charitable societies were not prevented
    from feeding the poor.    On the contrary, private charities
    were expected to provide most of the relief, as they had in
    1822 and 1831, when subsistence crises had threatened to turn
    into famine.  One of the charities, the "British Association",
    raised over ú450 000 in Britain, including ú2000 from Queen
    Victoria, not the five pounds of legend.  (Around one sixth
    of the money raised was used to relieve famine in Scotland.)

    (There is real doubt whether enough food was produced in
    Ireland during the Famine to feed everyone [even assuming
    perfect distribution].    A rough calculation shows that three
    million extra acres of grain would have been needed to make
    up the shortfall of potatoes.  Theoretically, there was enough
    acreage of grain to feed everyone if shared equally, but this
    assumes, for example, that none of the grain would be needed
    to feed the animals that would transport it.)

    However, there is no doubt that the governments of the day
    bear much of the blame for the number of deaths.  There were
    ideological reasons for refusing to intervene, but these had
    little to do with anti-Irish animus (though that certainly
    existed, as a look at some of the Punch cartoons at the time
    proves) and much to with laissez-faire carried to its logical
    extreme.

    The Whigs were strong believers in free trade and small
    government.  Adam Smith, the greatest economist of the last
    century had written "the free exercise [of trade] is not only
    the best palliative of the inconveniences of a dearth, but the
    best preventative of that calamity".  In a mixture of fatalism
    and complacency, they trusted the free market to supply food to
    the needy, or at least the most efficient distribution of what
    food was available.  Notoriously, Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary
    to the Treasury and most responsible for British relief policy,
    believed that the Famine was ordained by God as a Malthusian
    measure to control population growth.

    Russell's government can be justly accused of callousness,
    miserliness, negligence, ignorance, slowness, fickleness,
    complacency and fatalism.  Unlike genocide, this does not amount
    to murder.


------------------------------

Subject: 6) Any references?

    This part of the FAQ is mostly based on two books.  The
    first is a slim volume, a fairly impartial summary of recent
    work on the subject.  It's very strong on the economics but
    does not neglect the social and political aspects.

Title:        The Great Irish Famine
Author:        Cormac ╙ Grßda
Publisher:    MacMillan
ISBN:        0-333-39883-1

    The second is Roy Foster's book Modern Ireland (see part 6 of
    the FAQ for publishing details) which contains a chapter on
    the Famine.

    Another book (recommended by Patrick Denny <[e-mail]>
    in this newsgroup) with a more contemporary slant is

Title:        The Great Irish Famine
Author:        Canon John O'Rourke
Publisher:    (Abridged reprint) Veritas Publications
ISBN:        1 85390 130 X   (Hardback 1 85390 049 4)


    Cecil Woodham-Smith's book remains one of the most comprehensive
    accounts available, though later research casts doubt on some
    of her conclusions.

Title:        The Great Hunger
Author:        Cecil Woodham-Smith
Publisher:    Penguin
ISBN:        0 14 014515 X




------------------------------

Subject: 7) Where can I find other points of view?

There are various pages on the web which contend that the Famine was
genocide.

Chris Fogarty has a comprehensive web site at
http://www.irishholocaust.org/

Whitewolf has some material from Chris Fogarty on his site at
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/7652/index.html#holocaust

Nancy Monaghan has a web site with a similar theme at
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/6705/hunger.html

An organisation called the Irish Famine/Genocide Committee
has a web site at http://www.ifgc.org/ .

Gareth Davis has written a paper about the causes of the Famine and the
lessons that can be drawn from it.  A draft is available at
 http://members.tripod.com/~gdavis2/fam.txt

Richard Lough has some statistical research and commentary at
http://dnausers.d-n-a.net/dnetnLDQ/famine/index.htm

Various links (including some primary sources) relating to the Famine can
be found at
 http://avery.med.virginia.edu/~eas5e/Irish/biblio.html

------------------------------

End of Irish FAQ part 6
***********************