Ireland

by Joseph Coohill

  O’Connell’s great contribution to the development of modern Ireland was that he called into being, and organized for political action, the force of mass opinion; he taught the Roman Catholic majority to regard itself as the Irish nation; and all succeeding nationalist leaders … have had to build upon the foundations that he laid … [Despite his failings] … he remains a man of transcendent genius, which he devoted to the service of his native land: no other single person has left such an unmistakable mark on the history of Ireland.

  This emphasis on creating a sense of strong national identity mainly for Catholics raises the question of O’Connell’s attitudes towards other religions. Here there is less scholarly work available. Maurice O’Connell argued that O’Connell’s speeches and private correspondence indicate that he was one of the first European statesmen to argue for both freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. In this sense, O’Connell shares his ideology with other European liberal Catholics of the period, and he often expressed such opinions concerning the state of religions in France, Spain and Italy. Oliver MacDonagh’s two-volume biography of O’Connell appeared in 1988 and 1989, and attempted to remove many of the myths and misunderstandings of O’Connell’s complex career and personality, as well as provide an analysis of why he has been unfavourably compared to that other great nationalist at the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Stewart Parnell (see chapter six).

  FOUR

  The Famine, 1845–52

  Few episodes in modern Irish history have become as important as the Great Famine. A mysterious potato blight attacked the country in 1845, and a general food shortage led to massive loss of life and equally massive emigration to other countries over the next seven years. Not only was the Famine a calamitous and deadly event in its own right, it has come to be seen as a defining point in Irish history. It has raised questions about the over-population of the country in the early nineteenth century, the ways in which Ireland was governed and treated within the United Kingdom and the increased emigration to North America and the antipodes. It established bitterness and deep resentment towards Britain, which has also had long-standing consequences. Any event of this significance attracts controversy, and the Famine has certainly seen its share. Folk tales, political rhetoric and novels have all kept the history of the Famine alive, but they have also been responsible for the continuation of many of its myths and misunderstandings. This is somewhat ironic because the Famine is one of the best recorded events in modern world history. Extensive government reports, written eyewitness accounts and the records of voluntary organizations provide us with a very clear picture of what happened during the Famine. What is not so clear is why it happened, and whether anything more could have been done to prevent the death and emigration. It is generally agreed that roughly one million people perished as a result of starvation and disease, and that a further million or so emigrated in desperation to find a better life. Everything else about the Famine is subject to differing interpretations, and historians have been arguing about it for decades.

  PRECONDITIONS

  There were several preconditions which limited the potential and flexibility of the Irish economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Compared with Britain, Ireland did not possess large stores of mineral resources, such as coal. Nor was it at the centre of international trading routes. And the climate and history of landownership in the country lent itself to a type of agriculture that provided limited employment. During the eighteenth century, many landowners preferred to rent their land to middlemen tenants on long-term leases. These middlemen then sublet their farms to smaller farmers, and the land continued to be sub-divided among sons. Further, from the 1750s, there had been a shift from pastoral farming (where a farmer had a relatively diverse system of farming with a few types of crops and livestock of various kinds), to tillage (or arable) farming (which meant concentrating on one type of crop, usually the potato). There had been a rising demand for grain in Britain (owing to a growing population fuelled by the Industrial Revolution), and tillage farming seemed best suited to meeting that demand. The British wars against Napoleon increased this demand further, and the Irish agricultural economy was temporarily and artificially buoyed by the wars. So, although there is some disagreement amongst historians about the efficiency of pre-Famine agriculture in Ireland, it was certainly true that the country was heavily dependent on agriculture by the early nineteenth century.

  This overwhelmingly agricultural economy led to three important preconditions which made the Famine worse when it came: overpopulation, poverty and dependence on the potato as the main crop and food source. Population, boosted by the labour-intensive tillage farming system, continued to grow rapidly in the early nineteenth century. Compared with other European countries, Ireland’s population grew dramatically between 1750 and 1845. In 1800, there were 5 million people in Ireland, in 1821 6.5 million, and by 1841 over 8 million, which was around 700 people per square mile. There were significant regional variations, however, as western and southern counties (where the effects of the Famine would be more dire) saw more growth than the north and east. Overall, the rate of population growth had started to slow down after 1821, but it still left Ireland overcrowded. This overpopulation caused severe unemployment, and emigration to Britain and North America started. For many of those left in Ireland, the 1820s and 1830s were bleak decades, and many travellers to the country commented on the worsening conditions of the Irish poor. There were bad harvests in 1816–17 and 1821–22, and famine conditions hit some areas. But these famines were highly localized and short-lived, and did not cause people to think there was the possibility of a widespread famine. After 1815, many of the landlords who had leased their land through middlemen took back possession, and the smaller tenants were placed on yearly, and less secure, leases. In the non-agricultural parts of the economy, the 1820s and 1830s were also times of struggle. Irish manufacturing and business suffered during this period. The Irish linen and cotton trades collapsed under the pressure of competition from Britain. The mechanization of the linen industry put many cottage labourers out of work, and they often turned to small plots of land and grew potatoes in order to survive. By 1845, the living standards for the Irish poor (estimated at half the population) had declined significantly, and there is little doubt that the potato blight that arrived in that year would have had less of an impact if the economy had been more flexible, and if the poor had had a greater margin of economic security.

  Each of these preconditions, overpopulation, poverty and dependence on the potato, made the Irish situation more vulnerable. Perhaps the most tragic was the reliance on the potato, because it provided an essential and nutritious diet for the poor, yet dependence on it kept them poor. The rising Irish population became dependent on the potato because it could be tilled easily, it yielded more crop per acre than any grain, it was a good subsistence food and could provide the nutritional value of grain at one-third the cost. The Irish ate more potatoes than any other people in the world. Adult males ate over six kilos per day, women and children over ten years old ate nearly five kilos, and young children ate over two. Potatoes were also used as a cash crop, and labourers were sometimes paid in land to grow their own crop. The problem with the potato was that it was perishable and could not be stored like grain. This meant that if anything happened to the crop in any one year, there would be a general food shortage. So, had there been any other crop or livestock crisis in the 1840s, the reliance of the poor on the potato would probably have seen them through. With cruel efficiency, however, nature struck at the very foundation of Irish agriculture.

  THE BLIGHT

  The summer of 1845 was wet. Ordinarily, farmers would have been concerned that the excessive damp would damage the potato crop. Early reports, however, seemed to indicate a promising harvest for the year. In August a potato disease, called a ‘blight,’ arrived in the south of England. It had first been seen on the east coast of the United States in the s
ummer of 1843, and had made its way to Europe by 1845. By September it was in Ireland. Although it was not identified until much later, the blight was a fungus called phytophthora infestans, which lived in mild and damp conditions and spread by spores. It attacked potato plants through the leaves and the stalk, working its way down to the potato itself and rotting it. Although local reports of the first Irish potato harvest in September were optimistic, the blight was found to have destroyed many crops in counties Wexford and Waterford in the south-east. Even this was little cause for alarm, as the blight seemed localized, and there had been potato crop failures in the past that did not affect the whole country.

  The late harvest in mid-October was found to be diseased in many places, however. This late harvest was traditionally the main harvest of the year, and the loss of much of the crop caused considerable alarm. The east was hit very badly, and as the months went by, the blight moved west. One-third of the late harvest was lost by mid-November, and even stored potatoes were found to be affected. This was the worst crop failure in over a hundred years, and the very real possibility of famine loomed. In November 1845, the British Prime Minister, the Conservative Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), immediately established a scientific commission to determine what the blight was and what was needed to counteract it. This commission thought the blight was a disease of the potato plant itself, and disregarded the hypothesis of a specialist who said that it was a fungus (the cure for which was not discovered until the 1880s). Many months were spent in ultimately fruitless examination of the blight.

  At the same time as he established the commission, Peel bought £100,000 worth of maize from the United States. He did this partly to stave off hunger, but also to stabilize food prices in Ireland. But it was never Peel’s plan for the government to feed all the people directly. This was not generally thought to be the proper role of the state in the nineteenth century. Instead, Peel set up a relief commission to deal with hunger and unemployment. Local voluntary efforts were given funding (sometimes as much as two-thirds of their expenditure). Relief works were also set up to ease unemployment. Peel also wanted a system whereby Irish landowners took responsibility for relief. Nearly 650 local committees were founded, with local landowners in control, to distribute cheap food to the poor.

  In early 1846, Peel began a public works project to provide temporary work for the poor and unemployed so that they would be able to buy food. A second goal of the works was to make permanent improvements to the country. These relief efforts, combined with the ability of the country to survive one season’s blight, meant that very few people died of hunger or disease in the winter of December 1845 to February 1846. And the spring and early summer of 1846 looked promising, so much so that many farmers felt confident enough to plant potato seeds again. But other troubling signs of famine continued. The corn meal from the United States was less palatable than potatoes, and needed to be cooked for a long time. Hungry people were unwilling to wait, and often ate the grain partially cooked, which caused serious digestive problems. In June 1846, Peel decided to repeal the corn laws, a series of acts which protected British agriculture from an influx of cheap grain from abroad. Irish MPs in the House of Commons had asked that Peel halt grain exports from Ireland, but he refused, thinking that such a ban on exports would ruin the economy and make conditions in Ireland much worse. It was better, he argued, to allow free trade in grain between Britain, Ireland and other countries. This would provide cheaper grain for both the British and Irish poor. The repeal of the corn laws, however, angered many members of the Conservative party who thought the laws protected the British (and Irish) farmer. This split the party, and Peel’s government fell in June 1846.

  Lord John Russell (1792–1878), leader of the Liberals, formed a government, and was initially reluctant to follow Peel’s course. When Russell came into office, he faced several Famine problems. The first was the expectations that had been raised by Peel’s reaction in 1845–46. The second was that the general European food supply situation in 1846 was much worse than it had been the year before. Further, and perhaps most significantly, Russell and the Liberals were more attached to the policy of laissez-faire in terms of government involvement in the economy. Laissez-faire (literally, ‘let do’) generally meant that government interference in the economy was not only unwise, but unnatural, and would possibly make food shortages much worse. Rather than plan for another potato failure in the harvest of 1846, the new government thought that the better course was to end the direct purchase of food, and to reform basic elements of the Irish economy (which they thought was backward and unnatural) so that the country would be able to survive food shortages. These reforms could be brought about by more locally based relief and public works projects (which Russell hoped would set the Irish economy on a modern footing). Strong laissez-faire men in the government, particularly Sir Charles Wood (1800–85) in the cabinet and the civil servant Sir Charles Trevelyan (1807–86) at the treasury department, thought that the problem in Ireland was not overpopulation but underdevelopment. They thought that Ireland possessed the necessary resources to become economically stable, though not to become an economic power. What was needed was the will and entrepreneurship to make the best of the country’s resources. Relief was to be limited to public projects, but they were to be paid for out of local taxes. Russell’s government wanted to place the responsibility for relieving Irish distress on Irish landlords, whom they blamed for creating the conditions that made the Famine possible. ‘Irish property must support Irish poverty’, was how Trevelyan put it. This policy of local relief and reform might well have worked had the only real problem been a slow recovery from the 1845 blight without any further shortages. The assumption that this was the case was shown when the government closed the public works in August so that workers could attend to the harvest.

  THE COMING OF FAMINE

  The harvest of 1846 was black. The failure of the potato crop was complete. Farmers dug up fields of rotten potatoes, and the true disaster of the Famine had begun. Starvation began in earnest and people flooded into the local relief works. The number employed in the relief works went from 30,000 in September 1846, when they re-opened, to nearly 500,000 in December. But the public relief works did little to solve either the problem of employment or hunger. Workers were paid below market rates, and increasingly pointless ‘make work’ projects were begun. By the end of 1846, it was clear that the works were failing. Even some of those employed were falling over from hunger and dying next to their work. The harsh winter of December 1846 to February 1847 was no help, and food supplies became dangerously low. The government realized that the mounting death toll had to be met with new policies. They centralized the administration of the relief works (although they were still largely paid for from local taxation), and by March 1847, roughly 750,000 people were employed (still at wages below subsistence levels). During 1846, some grain was held back from export and overall export levels dropped dramatically. The amount exported was still large, equivalent to nearly 1 million tons of potatoes, but that was less than ten percent of what was destroyed by the fungus. A total prohibition on exports, therefore, would have saved a small proportion of people, but would not have stopped massive starvation and death in the winter of 1846–47.

  ‘Black 47’, as that year has come to be known in Famine folklore, was the worst year yet in terms of mortality and emigration. By now, the news of the condition of Ireland had spread to many parts of the world, and voluntary relief funds came from Britain, the United States and Australia, and from Irish soldiers serving in the British Army. Scotland was suffering from its own famine (which turned out to be limited in comparison with Ireland’s). Most of the voluntary relief came from Britain, with the Quakers taking an early lead. They visited Ireland, wrote reports on the Famine and its effects, and set up their own local relief committees distributing food. The British Association for the Relief of Extreme Distress in Ireland and Scotland raised nearly £500,000, with Queen Victoria m
aking an early and example-setting personal donation of £2,000. Relief committees in the United States sent over $500,000, and Irish immigrants there sent money to family members to encourage emigration. 1846–7 was also a bleak period for Britain, which led to an unwillingness, perhaps even an inability, from the government to increase Irish Famine relief. Bad harvests in Britain in 1846 led to a huge trade deficit and a drain on gold reserves in the Bank of England. Credit was nearly impossible to obtain, and some industries, such as cotton, suffered severely. Although short, this financial crisis was one of the worst in modern times, and had come at a particularly bad time for the relief of Irish distress.