by Frank Gannon
My mom: That was nice.
My dad: But why didn’t they have potatoes?
When I had my own place I had dinner with my mom and dad. My dad looked around the table.
“What are you doing for potatoes?” he asked.
I thought, Nothing! Potatoes aren’t doing anything for me! But I chickened out.
So, when I got the chance, I cut off the potato flow. No more potatoes. Never. Ever.
Once in a while people would ask me about it. I didn’t know what to say, so I developed a stock response, a standard reply: In the late sixties, I remember seeing Johnny Cash say that he was going to wear black clothing until we got out of Vietnam. That sounded good to me. So, for a while, I said, “I am not going to eat potatoes until we get out of this senseless ‘police action’ in Vietnam.”
We left, but Cash kept wearing black. I kept not eating potatoes. Then, when I read a little about Irish history, I thought I knew what to say.
“I will eat no potatoes because of the major tragedy that England caused involving Ireland in the nineteenth century,” or something like that.
Then, when I got a little older, and read a little more about the horror of the famine, I felt really stupid that I ever said that. How could I trivialize something like that? So I stopped saying that.
But I still don’t eat potatoes. I just don’t like them and, at least in this lifetime, I never will. Potatoes in general are a pretty trivial subject. You’ve never seen “Potatoes” as a category on Jeopardy. You don’t see many divorce cases where potatoes were involved. But in Ireland “potato” is a loaded word. “Potato” is to Irish people something like what “watermelon” is to black people. The mere mention of the word “potato” evokes in the Irish mind a complex hierarchy of emotions. At their simplest, “potatoes” are a meal. But the word “potato” also evokes something truly horrible and frightening, and it’s something that will never go completely away from the Irish consciousness.
If you spend any time in Ireland you will inevitably hear about England’s cruelty during the potato famine: That is a given. It doesn’t matter if you stay in Dublin or roam around the countryside: Stay in Ireland for a few days and someone will mention it in your presence. Since the potato famine was 155 years ago, you would think it would become a seldom-mentioned subject, something for history class, something like (except for the PBS Ken Burns week) the American Civil War. If my stay there is typical, this is emphatically not the case in Ireland. In Ireland, the potato famine might have happened last year. Outside the universities, it’s not usually discussed in any depth, but it’s mentioned a lot.
I didn’t keep any stats on it, but I literally could not get through a whole day in Ireland without having someone allude, in some fashion, to the famine. The first person I met when I got to Ireland, an old woman, had the following conversation with me while we waited for our luggage at the airport.
Woman: Are you visiting?
Me: Yes, from America.
Woman: First time?
Me: Yes, first time. My parents were Irish. They left when they were young and went to America.
Woman: A lot of Irish people had to leave. The famine.
Me: Yes, they told me about it. They left a long time after that, though.
Woman: Did they tell you about how cruel the English were? During the famine?
Me: Yes, they did.
Woman: They were awfully cruel.
Me: Yes.
* * *
It seems that Irish people aren’t interested in talking in depth about the potato famine, especially to a Yank, but they do want you to “bear it in mind” while you are in Ireland.
The famine changed everything about Ireland, and the changes are still here today. Before the famine people in Ireland married young. After the famine they married late. Some said that the famine underlined the need for birth control, and Catholic Ireland took the only “nonsinful” course it had available and delayed marrying. It’s more accurate to say that the famine was so devastating, people were not eager to share the horror of this world with children.
Before the famine, Irish was widely spoken all over Ireland. After the famine, English became the dominant language it continues to be in Ireland. The reasons for this are complex. They are dealt with in the definitive work on the potato famine, The Great Hunger. The book talks about what happened in a very thoughtful, controlled manner, but it is impossible to read the book without a deep sense of horror. It is, in its way, as disturbing as the Holocaust, or Stalin’s mass murders in Russia.
A large part of that horror is the chilling realization that the whole thing wasn’t an unavoidable natural disaster. If everything in Ireland’s economy and food source weren’t linked to the fate of that particular tuber, and England hadn’t acted the way it acted, the potato famine might just be a footnote in the agricultural records of the era.
The agricultural reasons are simple enough. The famine was caused by the failure, in three seasons out of four, of the crop that basically fed most of Ireland, the potato crop. A fungal disease, Phytophthora infestans, often called potato blight, was the cause. No one knows for certain how the blight happened, but a lot of historians think that some fertilizer imported from South America might have caused it.
In another country, it wouldn’t have been that bad. But in a country where the potato was, for many people, the basis of the diet, it was an unimaginable disaster. Many Irish people of the era literally ate nothing but potatoes from cradle to grave. The famine completely eliminated everything there was to eat. Mass starvation was the result.
The blight actually began in Belgium, but Ireland was the place where it had catastrophic effects. It began in the fall of 1845. Ireland was at the time a particularly big problem for England. Seven centuries ago it had “conquered” its neighbor to the west. But it wasn’t really conquered—“hearts and minds”—and the newspapers of the era reflect that. But England certainly wasn’t looking for another Cromwell-style crushing. It was just collectively sick and tired of the ages-old “Irish Problem.” By 1845 England would have liked to just forget about Ireland and its problems. It certainly tried.
In the early days of the famine, things really didn’t go that badly. The governments of Ireland and England set up soup kitchens, but the scope of the problem was not immediately evident. In England, the general feeling was that the “invisible hand” of the marketplace was not something that should be tampered with. Economic nature should be allowed to take its course.
A lot of the writings of the era reminded me of certain oped pieces from the Reagan years in America. The government doesn’t need to get involved in an economic matter. The markets have a way of regulating themselves, and so forth. This has always been a convenient way of avoiding the problem of poverty. It probably always will be.
Ireland wasn’t that easy to forget in those days but the English tried. They mostly attempted to publicly rationalize what they were doing. Charles Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge was expressing a widely held English opinion when he suggested that conditions should be left to run free and therefore “decrease the surplus population.” Malthusian solutions were not considered completely out of the question
It is startling to come across the fact that since 1845, the world’s population has increased many times, while Ireland’s population has fallen by half. In the 1800s Ireland was the most densely populated nation in Europe. In 1845 a produce boat from America arrived, and everything changed.
In Ireland, the famine also revealed the unfortunate consequences of the traditional Irish religious faith. This line of reasoning went: All things happen because of God’s great master plan. So “His will be done,” even if it means a lot of children starve slowly to death. You can find this awful idea almost applauded in some of the Irish newspapers of the era. In England, of course, some ministers saw the blight as God’s rightful punishment for the ungodly papists on their isle of the damned.
As the famine wore on, cond
itions produced more and more horrors for the rural Irish. The population had gotten used to a lot of potato-supplied Vitamin C. Scurvy reached epidemic status. As starving people crowded into food kitchens and public shelters, typhus became a huge problem. Typhus in its later stages produces delirium, and many of the infected Irish died truly horrifying deaths. “Many died screaming,” reads a period report.
Nobody knows how many did die. The best estimates are over a million. In a country as small as Ireland in 1845, the famine was one of the great disasters of the modern world. One-fifth of the country died between 1845 and 1851.
The part of this that has really burned its way into the Irish mind is, however, not the magnitude of the deaths, however staggering. The part indelibly stamped on the Irish psyche is the utter ruthlessness of the landlords, as they evicted thousands and thousands of diseased and dying people who were not able to pay the rent on property for the land their families once “owned.” And, of course, during the height of the famine, the final unthinkable horror, England exported grain from “food rich” Ireland. This fact, more than anything else, tortures the Irish psyche: “Let’s get that train car of oats out of here; don’t mind the dying people.”
Many English landlords lived comfortable lives back in England, supported by the income-generating produce raised in Ireland. A lot of English landowners actually saw the famine as a good opportunity to evict their Irish tenants, tear down their little homes, and use the land for larger, more efficient farms. In the year 1850, an estimated 104,000 tenants were evicted.
Today there are revisionist historians who seek to point out that England could not really have done much more than it did. They try to explain the famine as an inevitability caused by a rapidly growing population and a rapidly failing economy. In Ireland, these arguments are not welcomed. The image of starving people being evicted from their own little homes and forced to live, without food, outdoors in an Irish winter is not something that easily fades from the mind. There were mass graves all over Ireland.
English government proclamations of the era are hideously cruel. A man named Charles Edward Trevelyan was put in charge of “Irish Famine Relief.” He had this to say, ex officio: “Ireland must be left to the operation of natural causes.”
Trevelyan also expressed his concern for the treacherous starving Irish: “If the Irish once find out there are any circumstances in which they can get free government grants, we shall have a system of mendicancy such as the world never knew.” The sly Irishman will stoop to dying to get a free lunch, according to the justly despised Trevelyan.
The idea that this was all Ireland’s fault was a popular one among the English. It appealed to their natural prejudice against the Irish, and it took England off the hook, morally speaking. The only way out for the Irish was to leave their beloved country. Staying at home meant certain death, but leaving wasn’t much better. The Irish were packed into “coffin ships” bound for America. With little food and rampant disease, a great number died en route and were buried at sea. At least a million people died this way.
Many people say that it is pointless to blame England. After all, American ships brought the plague, and England did try to help. Still, for the Irish, particularly the Irish kid just discovering this in history class, there are too many mental images: English landlords evicting dying people; guarded train cars filled with food, winding through a land of starving women and children dying in slow, horrifying ways, reusable coffins with sliding bottoms opening to dump dead bodies; mass graves and coffin ships and drawings of a dying baby on a dead mother’s lap. Too much.
When you look at Irish history, you have to wonder how the Irish-English hostility has lasted so long and is, even today, a given. After all, England treated Scotland and Wales pretty badly, yet, over time, those ancient wounds seemed almost healed. Why did England pick out Ireland for such singularly unspeakable treatment?
It may come down to one word: religion. Ireland is alone among northern European countries in its fervent Catholicism. The Reformation might as well never have happened as far as Ireland is concerned.
Because Ireland was, since Patrick, always decidedly pro-Catholic, the country has been on the “wrong side” in virtually every English brouhaha throughout modern history. Ireland was in the stands rooting for the Catholic Spanish Armada in 1588 when the English navy wiped it out. (In England, rowdies still yell “1588” at soccer matches.) Ireland was behind Napoleon at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It’s hard to picture Ireland getting behind the eccentric French leader, but to a country in which religion is as important as it has always been in Ireland, that’s the way it was. The Catholic side was always the Irish side, no matter who, or how horrible, the Catholic.
So every “God-save-the-queen” moment for England was a big defeat for Ireland. All of the big heroes in English history—especially Queen Elizabeth—are in the Irish Hall of Evil.
And the absolute bottom of the bottomless pit of Irish misery happened in the 1840s, and it wrote its ugly story on the world’s conscience. And the world blamed England. Travelers from Germany and France who happened to visit Ireland during this era strained themselves trying to describe the depths of human suffering they found there. The German J. G. Kohl, a veteran of observing misery, wrote that no form of life could seem pitiful after witnessing Ireland in the 1840s. All the misery he had seen before did not prepare him for the nightmare that rural Ireland had become in the 1840s. The worst suffering the well-traveled Kohl had ever witnessed was in Ireland. Kohl wrote: “Now I have seen Ireland, it seems to me that the poorest among the Letts, the Esthonians and the Finlander, lead a life of comparative comfort.”
Frederick Douglass, of all people, was also a memorable witness to the potato famine. Douglass came to Ireland seeking a safe place. He had recently published his autobiography and, since he had mentioned his “owners” in the book, he no longer felt safe in America. Legally speaking, Douglass was a runaway. During the years of the potato famine, he could be legally “recaptured.” He came to Ireland seeking asylum.
The choice of Ireland was, on the surface, odd. In the American South, a lot of the slave owners had Irish ancestors, and Douglass had actually written about the way Irish people had oppressed his people in America. Irish immigrants in America had organized African-Americans to control jobs in coal mines, railways, and shipyards. But he had also written that the Irish workers had encouraged him to escape from his life as a slave.
When Douglass first landed in famine Ireland, he was hesitant to draw any conclusions. Soon, however, after weeks of travel through the West of Ireland, he recognized that Ireland had a “terrible indictment to bring against England.”
This whole Irish-English thing will probably never really end. Too much cruelty. Too much suffering. Nevertheless, in 1997, an amazing thing happened: England said it was sorry. Tony Blair officially “apologized.”
“Sorry, chaps,” he might have said, “bad show, that.”
Around the same time, Emperor Akihito “apologized” for Japanese atrocities in World War II, and President Clinton “apologized” to African-Americans for that faux pas called slavery.
I’m sure everybody feels better now.
TEN
Catholics at Large
If you cruise along Ireland’s northwestern shore, you have to fight the impulse to stop and take pictures. It is just beautiful. You circle Donegal Bay and stop at the little towns with strange names like Ballyshannon and Killybegs and you are having a grand time.
All is well in your Irish world as you drive along in your little wind-up car. You listen to a “real” Irish station that plays authentic Celtic music played on authentic Celtic instruments by authentic Celts.
We started to feel authentic. I was wearing one of those funny hats that authentic Irish people wear. I had worn it for days and it no longer even made me feel like an idiot. Or “eee-jit,” to say it the way authentic Irish people like me say it. I had a sweater on that was q
uite Celtic in general appearance. Its label said L.L. Bean, but nobody had to know that. I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror. Yes, that’s an Irishman there. You’re lookin’ at a fine broth of a man there.
I looked over at Paulette. I was now calling her Bridget. She was a fine broth of a Colleen. I think you might describe her complexion as “ruddy.” She too was pretty tweedy. She was after looking pretty damn Irish even though her dad was born in France and her mom is from Saint Louis and her mom’s mom was German. But Old Bridget, she was after being a fine slip of a lass. Old Bridget had a white sweater on and that’s what her kind of Colleens wear.
On the radio they were havin’ a “session” (that’s what we call it). The bodhran was bodhraning and the fiddler was working overtime and you could almost hear them perspiring with the way they were playin’ the reel. Everything was grand. It was brilliant.
I looked ahead and realized something that made me have a thought or two that was perhaps a bit too authentic. If we kept this up, if we kept driving where we were driving, we were going to be where things, I hear, are not that grand. We were going to be after driving into Northern Ireland. That was not in our nonplan. Before we left we stuck a note on the refrigerator: “No explosions.”
I knew less about Northern Ireland than I knew about southern Ireland. All I know is what I saw on the television. What I saw on the television said, “No!” I’m sure that the northern part of Ireland is very interesting, but we knew that, for us on this trip at least, it wasn’t going to happen.
We took the first right we could and headed for Monaghan. As we drove along, we decided that we were going to continue south by southwest. Drogheda sounded good. That was where Cromwell had done his damned work. But Cromwell was, at least, dead.