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A FOND FAREWELL TO THE WHITE POTATOES
A fond farewell to the white potatoes, pleasant it was to be in their company; generous and cheerful, laughing at us from the head of the table. They were ‘the nurse that kept us amused at meals, daytime and night-time.’
Peatsaí O’Callanáin,
Craughwell, East Galway
That last, most hopeful autumn before blight and Famine changed all Irish propositions, Duffy, the manager and publisher of the Nation, tended his tubercular, pregnant young wife, Emily, and received a note too that Davis was ill. I have had an attack of some sort of cholera,’ wrote Davis, ‘and perhaps have a slight scarlatina.’ The invalid was in love—he had met a young woman named Annie Hutton, the daughter of a Dublin Presbyterian couple. Courting Annie, Davis had the disadvantage that nearly all her loyalist clan were appalled by his furiously nationalist poems. A considerable number of these ballads and lyrics are still sung in Ireland and in Irish communities throughout the world, but they were not likely to appeal to the Huttons.
‘The West’s Asleep,’ for example, had celebrated the Mayo uprising of 1798 and raised the proposition so favoured by young Tom Meagher that if the lost battles were remembered, they would accumulate in the end into a won independence.
But—hark! Some voice like thunder spake:
‘The West’s awake, the West’s: awake’—
Sing Oh! hurra! Let England quake,
We’ll watch till death for Erin’s sake!
Now Davis lay at his mother’s house at Baggot Street. MacNevin, a lawyer and a member of Young Ireland, ill himself at the time, wrote to Davis wishing him speedy recovery and reproving him for being so unpatriotically stricken with ‘English cholera.’ All the jokes turned sour when, within a week, at dawn on the 16 September 1845, the 30-year old Davis died. As he expired, the air over Ireland was filling with the spores of a mould which would work a ferocious change. Old and Young Ireland, with Annie Hutton and Davis’s desolated family, followed his corpse to the family burial plot in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Harold’s Cross. In the same few weeks, Gavan Duffy’s pregnant young wife Emily, perished in giving birth to a second Duffy son. But in Duffy’s Autobiography, written decades later, it was the death of Davis which carried the emotional, the national weight.
After Davis’s death, Mitchel was offered the editorship of the Nation, and accepted. Thomas Carlyle, who had recently visited Dublin and met Mitchel, described him as ‘a fine elastic-spirited young fellow with superior natural talent.’ Full of zeal, Mitchel departed each morning from his wife Jenny, his mother, his small children and his ‘frugally elegant small house and table’ at 8 Ontario Terrace near Charlemont Bridge, for the Nation offices. There he wrote a series of articles on railways, including advice on the way Repeal wardens should deal with the spread of railroads throughout Ireland. Should they be used to move troops, it was easy, said Mitchel, to break down an embankment or lift a mile or two of rail. Rails and sleepers could be used for making pikes and barricades. ‘But sooth, ’tis a dream,’ he wrote, as if that would save him. ‘No enemy will put us to realise these things. Yet all understand what a railway may and what it may not do.’
A disgruntled O’Connell himself called into the Nation offices and protested to Mitchel and Duffy about the first railway article. He was outraged that his Repeal wardens should be called on to destroy property. Amongst themselves, the Young Irelanders were cynical about the complaints, attributing them to the fact that the Liberator had invested some Repeal rent and become the first shareholder in the Dublin and Cashel Railway. At the end of November 1845, Duffy, as publisher, was arrested for allowing the publication of the railway articles, taken to College Green police station, and charged with sedition.
Esther Larkin, sitting at some neighbour’s fire and hearing the articles of Mitchel read aloud by a hedge-school teacher or pupil, may have looked at her sons and felt a pulse of fear and excitement. But a curse she knew nothing of already lay over these cabins and the companionable potato patches beyond the doors; the fury of God was already moving on the late summer breeze.
The first account of the onset of a potato blight had come to the government at Westminster from the fields of England. There had been a slightly earlier rumour from Belgium of a blight which turned the potato flower and stalk black and which caused the tuber itself to putrefy. Sir Robert Peel did not at first believe the report from across the Irish Sea. ‘There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable,’ he wrote on 13 October 1845. But the Royal Irish Constabulary reports of 15 October told the administration unambiguously that everywhere in Ireland potatoes were rotting. Esther and her adolescent sons were party to this horror. Someone in Lismany, as elsewhere, ‘went out to the garden,’ to quote one tale of the onset of blight, ‘for potatoes for a meal. He stuck his spade in the pit, and the spade was swallowed. The potatoes turned mud inside. He shrieked and shrieked. The whole town came out.’ This blight may have reached Europe by way of produce in the holds of ships from America. In return it would generate a vast emigration to North America and elsewhere, altering for ever the character of the new world.
After the initial shock, the sense of being orphaned by the Deity, the peasantry received advice from experts of the day about how to dig a potato pit secure from contamination by moisture. One man, a Church of Ireland minister, the Reverend M. J. Berkley, correctly diagnosed the mould on the plants as a ‘vampire’ fungus. Forty years later it would be identified as Phytophthora infestans, treatable by spraying with copper compounds, and so reduced to an agricultural nuisance; but for now, it was a momentous force, a savage visitation.
Esther’s sons dutifully dug dry pits to save the crop, but the fungus spores were carried by wind and washed into soil by soft rain. Everyone was amazed that the potato itself, safe in the earth, could have been so heavily attacked. But fungus spores borne on the air and burrowing into soil attacked the meat of the potato as well as the plant, and leaf and fruit alike fermented, blackened and rotted.
In November 1845 O’Connell, in receipt of awful intelligence from Repeal branches all over the country, went with a delegation to visit Lord Lieutenant Heytesbury in Dublin Castle. O’Connell pleaded for a suspension of the export of the annual approximately 1,600,000,000 pounds weight of Irish grain and provisions, and a prohibition on distilling and brewing from grain. He also urged Heytesbury that the ports be opened to the free import of rice and Indian corn from British colonies. For Irish ports were not open now, but subject to the special provisions of the Corn Laws, laws designed to peg the price of local grain at the highest possible level and to keep out other, cheaper grain until the entire British crop had been sold at that artificially pegged price. The Liberator also asked that paid labour be provided on public works for those whose staple food had rotted before their eyes. If these things were not done, said O’Connell, millions would have nothing to eat throughout the winter except decomposed potatoes, seedling eyes cut out of the diseased tubers, and family pigs. The Liberator wrote to Smith O’Brien of ‘the frightful certainty of an approaching famine; and you know pestilence always follows famine, the prospect is really frightful.’
Sir Robert Peel considered what was to his party the unutterable: the repeal of the Corn Laws. The champions of the Corn Laws argued that if foreign grain was admitted freely into Britain and Ireland, the price would collapse, and millions of labourers whose livelihood was dependent upon the growing of grain would go without work. But the Corn Laws worked as a spur to ill-paid employment of peasants on next year’s harvest only if the peasant had not starved to death before then. Peasants were starving in Ireland, and in parts of the Highlands of Scotland. Prime Minister Peel’s motives in amending or repealing all Corn Laws were humanitarian but also profoundly conservative. The fact was that these laws had pushed the price of food beyond the reach even of English labourers. For the end result of such bad l
aws, he argued, one had only to look at the French Revolution.
It is remarked in every Famine history that the lives of millions of Irish peasants were in the hands of men on both sides of Parliament who believed in market forces, in what was called political economy. Most members and most bureaucrats were influenced also by the theory of Benthamite utilitarianism, which took its name from the late political reformer Jeremy Bentham. His principle that legislation was unjustified except where it answered a clear need to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number gave a license for inaction. And legislated pain could be admitted ‘so far as it promises to exclude some greater evil.’ In the name of greater possible evils, Ireland’s pain was to be sanctioned.
Leaders on both sides of the House were men too who were fatally impressed by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, the population theorist. Malthus had written a considerable amount on Ireland, which he never visited. In 1817, he had stated to one correspondent: ‘the land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than anywhere else; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.’ A doctrine which favoured rationalisation of Irish population by some ‘dreadful resource of nature’ was fashionable with leading Tories and Whigs. An Irish catastrophe was considered scientifically inevitable and, though few could bring themselves to say it until the disaster was well advanced, even desirable. Whatever alliances O’Connell made in the House of Commons, he could not talk his English allies out of their Malthus.
So the Famine, whatever its other causes, would be seen as a visitation upon the Irish themselves, a corrective to their over-breeding, and their over-dependence on the potato. If Esther Larkin and her Irish brethren were to perish, that reality was governed by great and immutable factors beyond the scope of government.
These sincerely held principles are seen in the writing of the four-square young bureaucrat Charles Trevelyan, elevated from dealing with such questions as the Parramatta Female Factory at the Home Secretary’s office and now Assistant Secretary to the Treasury in Whitehall. Trevelyan was a high-minded and decent member of the Clapham Sect, a group of progressive Evangelical Anglicans, and was married to the sister of the historian Macaulay. Some twentieth-century Irish historians complain that Cecil Woodham-Smith had in her 1962 classic The Great Hunger demonised urbane Trevelyan; had made him a by-word for administrative callousness. But, a fair reading of Trevelyan’s own tract on the Famine, published in 1848 and prematurely declaring the Famine ended, shows that he went to some trouble to demonise himself. The Irish smallholder, wrote Trevelyan,
lives in a state of isolation, the type of which is to be sought for in the islands of the south seas rather than in the great civil community of the ancient world. A fortnight for planting, a week or ten days for digging, and another fortnight for turf cutting, suffice for his subsistence, when, during the rest of the year, he is at leisure to follow his own inclinations without even the safeguard of those intellectual tastes and legitimate objects of ambition which only imperfectly obviate the evils of leisure in the highest ranks of society.
And though, said Trevelyan, it was argued ‘in Ireland that the calamity was an Imperial one … the disease was strictly local, and the cure was to be obtained only by the application of local remedies.’
A virtually widowed Irish peasant like Esther Larkin would have laughed at the concept that her life that autumn and winter of 1845 was a South Seas idyll translated to East Galway. As for her supposed vices, one of which would be declared to be early marriage, she had not—in terms of Europe—married recklessly young. Studies of Western European records, says a modern historian, show that Irish women married on average at 26.3 years, as against a Continental average of 25.7 years for females. And though Hugh and Esther had two infants by the time Hugh was twenty-four years, such a family as theirs would not now be considered either abnormally fertile or appallingly young.
Before the final collapse of his government, Peel had ordered the purchase of £100,000-worth of corn, to be sent to Ireland and warehoused in British army commissary stores throughout the poorer regions. It was to be sold off to the hungry only when the price of meal rose to an ‘unreasonable’ level. The Indian corn which was to save, in extremity, Esther and all her sister Irish women, was the same which in the southern United States produced the food called hominy. It was corn so hard to crack that it had to be chopped in steel mills, and there were no such mills in Ireland. A circular was issued to the local relief committees suggesting that corn could be sold unground as long as it was subsequently cooked. But it was very difficult to cook and, if improperly done, caused severe and even fatal bowel disorders.
The first to seek recourse to the yellow cornmeal which the Irish called ‘Peel’s brimstone,’ min déirce, beggar’s meal, Indian buck, were the people of the extreme west and south-west, where food was soon exhausted and where there existed few stores and chandleries. In the wool-breeding areas of East Galway, Esther Larkin and her fellow peasants were used to buying foodstuffs in the summer if they had the cash. The large, well-planned town of Ballinasloe lay only a little to the north of Esther. The Galway Mercury at first reported failures in other areas but said that there was no ‘ground of apprehension in this neighbourhood.’ The potatoes which were sold at the Ballinasloe market, and which normally fetched 2½ pence to 3 pence per stone (14 pounds), were fetching 4½ pence per stone, so that there was as elsewhere a momentary surge of prosperity. Even on 11 October 1845 the Galway Mercury was still sanguine. Within a fortnight, however, widespread reports of the appearance of the blight in some local potato crops led the Mercury to recommend that not all grain should be exported from Ireland to England. There was now a panic. People crowded into town from the countryside, and vendors of bread raised the price by reducing the size of the loaf. By 8 November 1845 the Mercury’s headline read: THE THREATENED FAMINE. No further hopeful editorials appeared.
The time had begun to which the Irish applied the name an Gorta Mór—the Great Hunger, or simply an droch-Shaol—the Bad Life, the Bad Times. Esther and her neighbours had at first tried to eat diseased potatoes, by grating, boiling and squeezing them in a cloth, and making them into boxty or potato cakes. The result was stomach cramps and diarrhoea, or dysentery with bleeding from the anus, sicknesses from which her robust sons recovered but which carried away a first toll of the aged and infants. In mid-February 1846, the survey of the destitute population of five townlands in the barony of Longford near Lismany, found that 211 persons in the district were ‘absolutely starving.’ They were correctly seen as the apex of a pyramid of hunger in the area, and reduced in some cases to the skeletal condition where the body feeds necrotically on its own substance, they had only a poor chance of survival. The government was advised by local officials ‘to distribute Indian meal at reasonable prices as the most immediate form of relief.’ But by the spring, distress in the barony of Longford was ‘alarmingly great and uneasing.’ It was accompanied by calls from landlords for a new Coercion Bill to be passed, suspending Habeas Corpus and allowing for summary punishment, since rural outrages had increased in East Galway with the coming of this most extreme want since 1822. The proposed new bill would make it possible for magistrates to have men arrested on suspicion, and label the bearing of any kind of arms a transportable offence. Esther nagged her sons Patrick and Hugh to remain indoors at night and abstain from Ribbon oaths, threatening notices and secret meetings of disgruntled men. According to a Lismany source on this matter, at least one of the boys did have Ribbon tendencies.
But a visitor to Ballinasloe after this terrible winter saw a people on the road leading into the town who still seemed to possess their souls. ‘The poor labourers were going to their work, smoking or singing, their tattered garments but an apology for clothing. As I passed the wretched cabins, now and then the happy voice of some child singing a merry song greeted my ear.’ For Esther, of course, diet was neither as reliable nor as v
aried as that of Mary Shields in the Monaro a world away. In modern terms, one would need to visit a distressed area of East Africa to see a woman who possessed as lean, as agelessly hollowed a countenance, and as chancy a hold on life as Esther had in the late winter of 1845–6. But she still held normal hope of finding labour in the spring and of an unblighted potato crop at the end of the summer, and it was on other roads than hers, and in other baronies of Galway, that travellers would already have commonly seen full-blown and terminal malnutrition, and an accumulation of corpses in ditches and by hedges.
In increasing numbers, the peasants found Repeal irrelevant to this visitation, or could no longer afford to support it. Outside Mass, O’Connell’s Repeal wardens were rebuffed, and Repeal rent collapsed. The minds of Esther and her neighbours ran confusedly for explanations of what had befallen them. One Famine song asked whether the disaster was God’s punishment for ‘the shame of a Queen who counted the nation’s people,’ a reference to the supposed un-Godly arrogance of the census of 1841. Strictly political explanations seemed remote. The Repeal rent published in the Nation on 24 January was a mere £367. There was residual faith, however, and on 14 March the Nation printed a poignant letter from the priest at St Mary’s, Clonmel, Tipperary. ‘With famine staring us in the face, the enclosed £10 from the parish of St Mary’s Clonmel, is rather a substantial proof of our devotion to the cause of nationality. The money would afford a temporary relief, but self-legislation would confer lasting prosperity.’
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 16