Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849)

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 a famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1849. The Famine was at least fifty years in the making, due to the disastrous interaction of British economic policy, destructive farming methods, and the unfortunate appearance of "the Blight" —the potato fungus that almost instantly destroyed the primary food source for the majority population. The immediate after-effects of The Famine continued until 1851. The number of deaths is unrecorded, and various estimates suggest totals between 500,000 and more than one million in the five years from 1846. 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 (see the Irish Diaspora).

Ireland and Great Britain

The Act of Union 1800 stipulated that Ireland would have in the United Kingdom one-fifth the representation of Great Britain, that is 100 members in the House of Commons. The trouble was not the lack of Irish representation in the British parliament but that the London parliament was not in tune with the needs of Ireland, given that the vast majority of its MPs and government ministers had never set foot in Ireland and showed little interest in it or its problems. The union of the churches of England and Ireland also cemented British rule, strengthening the pre-eminent position in Ireland of the Anglicans by securing the continuation of the British Test Act, which virtually excluded Presbyterians and Roman Catholics from Parliament and from membership of municipal corporations.

Related Topics:
Act of Union 1800 - United Kingdom - House of Commons - British parliament - England - Ireland - Anglican - Test Act - Presbyterian - Roman Catholic

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Part of the agreement that led to the Union Act stipulated that the Penal Laws were to be repealed and Catholic Emancipation granted. King George III, however, blocked emancipation, arguing that to grant it would break his coronation oath to defend the Anglican Church. A campaign under lawyer and politician Daniel O'Connell led to the conceding of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, so allowing Catholics to sit in parliament. O'Connell then mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the “Repeal” of the Act of Union.

Related Topics:
Penal Laws - Catholic Emancipation - King George III - Daniel O'Connell

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Not until 1828-29 did the repeal of the Test Act and the concession of Catholic Emancipation provide political equality for most purposes, including free trade between the British Isles and that Irish merchandise would be admitted to British colonies on the same terms as British merchandise.

Related Topics:
1828 - 29

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The effect of laissez-faire economics

Political equality and laissez-faire were mixed blessings though. These advantages were not enough to offset the full effect of Britain's Industrial Revolution. The time of the Potato Famine coincided with the era of Pax Britannica between the Congress of Vienna (after the defeat of Napoleon) and the Franco-Prussian War. Britain then reaped the benefits of being the world's sole modern, industrial nation. Following the defeat of Napoleon, Britain was the "workshop of the world", meaning that its finished goods were produced so efficiently and cheaply that they could usually undersell comparable, locally manufactured goods in other markets.

Related Topics:
Laissez-faire - Pax Britannica - Congress of Vienna - Franco-Prussian War - Napoleon

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Within half a century agricultural produce dropped in value and estate rentals declined while the rural population increased substantially. When harvests of potato, the staple food of rural Ireland, were devastated through the onset of blight in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands died of starvation or fever in the Great Famine that ensued, and hundreds of thousands more fled abroad. British food relief can be summarized as too little, too late; some blame the economic policy of laissez-faire, which argued against state intervention to keep Irish grain in Ireland to feed the people there because doing so would "interfere with the sacred laws of Free Trade", while others look towards government inefficiencies and lack of transportation. In any case, it is an inarguable fact that right through the Famine England imported tons of Irish grain and livestock - more than enough to feed every starving person in Ireland. Food depots at ports were guarded by British Army regiments and local militias.

Related Topics:
Blight - Free Trade - British Army

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While no one knows how many died (state registration of deaths, even if was possible given the vast numbers dying, did not exist, while the major religion, the Catholic Church, only just freed from the official restrictions placed on it by the Penal Laws, was poor at keeping records), but estimates suggest anything from 500,000 to in excess of one million people died of hunger and related diseases, with another million forced to emigrate immediately to avoid starvation. Millions more followed over the following decades. The famine was a monumental turning point in Irish history and effectively spelled the death of Irish as the national language. Before the famine almost no one outside "The Pale" spoke English, after the famine the survivors were forced to learn it. One entire class, the cottiers, or farm laborers, was wiped out.

Related Topics:
Catholic Church - Penal Laws - Irish - Pale - Cottier

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Traditional methods of supplementing the diet, such as game hunting and fishing often resulted in imprisonment and deportation ("transportation") to other parts of the British colonies (notably Australia and Van Diemen's Land), because the land and the wildlife thereon belonged to the landlords. Excessive rents often led to evictions and compounded the problems, with many Irish families left homeless.

Related Topics:
Australia - Van Diemen's Land

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The Famine also led to the profound alteration of the balance of power in Parliament, as the landowners lost out to the industrialists with the repeal of the Corn Laws —repealed due to popular outcry at the plight of the Irish. This led to a great split in the Tory party with those who sided with Peel in supporting repeal becoming known as Peelites, numbering among them almost every Tory of ministerial experience (Gladstone, Lord Aberdeen, among others). They eventually combined with the Whigs and Radicals to form the modern Liberal party in the 1860s. Disraeli, along with Lord Stanley, fashioned the modern Conservative party from the remnants of the Tory party.

Related Topics:
Corn Laws - Tory - Peel - Peelites - Gladstone - Lord Aberdeen - Whigs - Liberal - Disraeli - Conservative

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Suggestions of genocide

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. All are agreed that the British policies during the Famine, particularly those applied under Lord John Russell, were misguided, ill-informed and disastrous. Irish poet Jonathan Swift had satirized the plight of the Irish in relation to English economic domination almost a century prior to the famine in his masterpiece "A Modest Proposal"(1729). Professor Joe Lee called what happened a holocaust. (See Democide).

Related Topics:
Genocide - Lord John Russell - Holocaust - Democide

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The "debate" is largely a moral one, attempting to ascertain whether within the policies of the British Empire lay a racist, 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.

Related Topics:
F.S.L. Lyons - John A. Murphy - Joe Lee - Roy Foster - James S. Donnelly, Jr. - Cecil Woodham-Smith - Peter Gray - Ruth Dudley Edwards - British Imperial - Subjects

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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 centers 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 record.

Related Topics:
Humanitarian crises - Victorian - Industrial - Centers of power - Cultures - Languages - Religious beliefs - Dehumanizing - Photographed

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