19th Century Irish History Articles - The Potato Famine by Dr. Samuel Couch

Articles: 19th Century Ireland
III. The Famine or The Great Hunger

by Dr. Sam Couch, Ph. D.
Owner, Rising Road Tours

When Grattan in his famous speech against the Act of Union described Ireland as "in her tomb, helpless and motionless," he was speaking in rhetorical terms. It was an apt description of the country at the time of the Liberator's death. Starvation, disease and emigration had reduced the "nine million" of the Mallow defiance to six and a half. By the 1861 census, the figure was 5.76 million and the downward tendency would continue into the 1980s. A fungal infection partially destroyed the potato crop in 1845 and totally in 1846. A large portion of the rural population relied on the potato with milk for a well-balanced high-energy diet with a nice proportion of carbohydrates, proteins and minerals. Those who subsisted on it exclusively were estimated to eat a million potatoes in a life of 50 years. Peel knew Ireland well. He had been MP for Cashel and chief secretary from 1812 to 1816. In 1846, he authorized the purchase of (English Pounds)100,000 of maize for distribution to prevent food prices from rising and provided (English Pounds)365,000 to subsidize the work of local committees. The potato crop was the only one that was affected. Wheat and corn harvests were as good as ever and though imports of corn were greater than exports, it was clear that it was actually being exported from a country where a third of the population was starving and in danger of death.

The Tory government fell in June 1846 and Lord John Russell became leader of a minority Whig administration. He was firmly non-interventionist and a follower of laissez faire economics. He regarded it as not only wrong but futile for governments to interfere with economic laws. "Relief works," largely pointless schemes such as building walls or roads that led nowhere were to be financed by local taxation. Sir Charles Trevelyan, Assistant Secretary to the Treasure and Charles Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, were chief villains in Ireland policies at this time. Trevelyan believed in Malthus's theories concerning the impossibility of raising the standards of a depressed class because any attempt to ease suffering would be off set by a constituent rise in the population of that class. He saw the Irish hunger as God's way of solving the problem. "The great evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people." These words described a people who allowed food trains to pass unhindered to the ports for shipment. Fenian leaders responded "The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine."

This is the time of coffins with sliding bottoms, roads filled with hungry people barely able to walk, mass graves, and visions of the hungry being forced to eat grass. With these images etched into the common memory, it is easy to see how the famine years seem to be with the Irish still. Figures like 932,000 people maintained in the workhouse in 1849, 1,000,000 emigrants bound for Canada (the most economical route to the States) in 1847, and 3,000,000 people a day being fed in government soup kitchens that same year and 104,000 tenants evicted in 1850.

Not all the country was stricken equally. East Ulster and Leinster were affected least because of their mixed husbandry. They did suffer from epidemics of typhus, relapsing fever and cholera which appeared in the later stages of the famine. The Society of Friends emerge as the heroes of the period, providing relief and in spite of appalling conditions getting it to the places of greatest need. Other evangelicals set up proselytizing experiments. Offers of food were made in exchange for conversion. This bread and sermons tactic led to charges of "souperism," the practice of conversion to Protestantism in exchange for food (soup.) The charges of soup-taking that were leveled at certain families for at least a hundred years were never disavowed and often perpetuated by pastors.

Since transportation was so poor, it was difficult for inhabitants of one part of a county to have information about places even a twenty miles away. The Church capitalized on the shock of Biblical catastrophe and looked at the famine as a punishment for sin. The effect was to create a docile laity for a clergy that were entering upon their period of greatest power an influence. The sense of unworthiness, of the extreme difficulty of the ordinary mortal's ever being able to merit grace, made reception of the sacraments a rare event, and even children were regarded as sinners.

Most of the demographic changes in post-Famine Ireland started before the 1840s. Emigration was well established though destinations usually were to the east - to Scotland, to northern England and to southern Wales. In the late 1840s America became the chimerical Promised Land. The curve of early marriages that was so characteristic of the poorer rural population for a century before had flattened out by the 1830s. By 1850 the days of reckless subdivision of properties ended. Farms were larger and tended to mix tillage and livestock. The holding had to be preserved and younger sons and daughters were obliged to find alternative sources of living. (The quarter of a million that emigrated annually from 1847 were the eugenic cream of the country, the source of the burgeoning population before the catastrophe.) Heirs who didn't have to worry about land bided their time and rarely married before thirty. Marriages were materialist and a young woman had to be in possession of a fortune before she was considered marriageable.

The Famine permanently seared the psyche of those affected, notably the million who survived by fleeing. They carried a hatred of England as the colonizer guilty of deliberate genocide. By 1870 the émigré numbers reached a million. They carried memories of the coffin ships. By 1900 four million Irish had crossed the Atlantic. After a few years of initial privations and denigration they became a significant factor in East Coast and mid-west local and national politics. From 1850 onward America was to be the source of money and succor for all native nationalist movements in Ireland.

If "England" was execrated for its apparent attempted genocide, an equally imprecise class of "landlords" was only a little lower down on the hate register. From 1849 until 1854 police records show that 250,000 people were formally and permanently evicted from their holdings. Often it was Catholic farmers who treated the needy worst of all, bringing cases against wretches who stole turnips and disapproving of the magistrates' clemency. This is the class that objected to any suggestions of banning grain exports. Many landlords bankrupted themselves in their attempts to care for their needy tenants; others, who gained the lasting reputation for their class, ignored the plight of their dependents and made sure of their rents. Death, emigration and eviction carried out the "clearances." The restoration of tilled lands to grass for livestock required clearance and in many cases rents were raised not for income but for "legal" eviction. The congested districts of the south and west were now empty and the pattern of life in rural Ireland was fundamentally changed. (The rocky settlements along the coasts from Malin Head to Kinsale continued to be overpopulated, their denizens subsisting on restored potatoes, sea produce - pollack for the table, lobster and kelp for sale - and seasonal migrant labor. These become the concern of Balfour's Congested Districts Board, universally knows as the CDB that was set up in 1890.)

This series of articles is based on lectures given by Dr. Samuel Couch to Irish Studies courses at Georgia Southern University and Young Harris College between 1997 and 2004. Documented sources come from Couch's research and studies in American universities and with scholars in Ireland. The articles are in no way intended to be comprehensive.

Background materials come from, but are not limited to, readings in the following books:

Duffy, Sean, ed., Atlas of Irish History. Gill & Macmillan: Dublin. 1997.
Joyce, P.W., Outlines of the History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1905. M.H. Gill & Son: Dublin. 1909.
Killeen, Richard, A Short History of Ireland. Gill & Macmillan: Dublin. 1994.
Smyth, Daragh, A Guide to Irish Mythology. 2nd ed. Irish Academic Press: Dublin. 1996.

Any lack of attribution to primary sources is unintentional and the sole responsibility of Dr. Couch.

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Articles: 19th Century Ireland III. The Famine or The Great Hunger

Articles: 19th Century Ireland
III. The Famine or The Great Hunger