Ireland

by Joseph Coohill

  THE SOUP

  In January 1847, many Irish peers, members of parliament and landlords met in Dublin and appealed to the government for direct aid to ease mass mortality. Russell and his government finally realized that their policies were not working. They ended the public works projects and extended direct relief in late January. ‘The pressing matter at present,’ Russell said, ‘is to keep the people alive.’ This was a major change in the basic thinking of statesmen at the time, and did not find universal agreement in government circles. Although there were disagreements in the cabinet and the treasury, the government set up soup kitchens throughout the spring and summer of 1847. Compared with the public works projects, the soup kitchens were more successful. During the summer of 1847, three million people per day were being fed at a cost of two pence per person. The total cost of the soup kitchens in 1847 was around

  £1,700,000, a fraction of what the public works had cost. The soup kitchens had done more with less, but they were a mixed success. In some areas, they began too late, and in most places demand outstripped supply. The food quality was low and the quantities were small. The number of deaths fell during the summer of 1847, but historians have debated whether this was due to the soup or the effect of a mild summer. The soup kitchens, however, were always intended to be temporary, and were shut down (amid much protest) in September 1847, just as they appeared to be having a beneficial effect. Parliament had put pressure on the government to put the burden for Irish relief back on local landlords and taxpayers.

  The soup kitchens have also been remembered in Famine folklore as the places where relief from starvation and death were given at the cost of religious conversion. A few private soup kitchens were guilty of demanding or convincing people to convert to Protestantism before giving them any food. Although the number of soup kitchens where this occurred was actually very small, word soon spread that ‘taking the soup’ meant a necessary rejection of the Catholic faith, and ‘souperism’ has had a hold in the popular Irish historical mind ever since. Catholics who did convert at these few places were called ‘jumpers’, which remained a family insult for their descendants well into the twentieth century. Like so much else about the Famine, however, souperism mythology has been difficult to displace. Government soup kitchens were banned from conversion or requiring religious pledges, and the Quakers (who had perhaps the largest number of private food depots) never employed the practice. Further, the image of souperism has unfairly tainted the relief work done by many Church of Ireland and Presbyterian clergy, who often worked in conjunction with the local Catholic priest to bring relief to their parishes. But perhaps the greatest shame of souperism is that the rumour of it may have prevented many people from travelling to the soup kitchens in search of relief. We will never know how many died of starvation for fear of losing their faith.

  HUNGER, DISEASE AND EMIGRATION

  As the terrible winter of early 1847 continued, various illnesses related to hunger and poverty began to spread. By the spring of 1847, people were not only starving to death, but hunger left them open to diseases that their bodies simply could not fight. Compared to the numbers dying from disease, relatively few people died of starvation. Hunger lowered the body’s natural resistance, and many otherwise non-fatal diseases became fatal. Since most of these conditions had a weakening and wasting effect on the body, sufferers could not work and many could not travel to relief stations. They simply declined and died, in their cottages or by the side of the road. Even Ireland’s relatively good network of hospitals and medical facilities could not handle the massive need for medical care. Temporary fever hospitals were set up and staff were recruited, but it was all inadequate, and there were no known cures for famine fever or dysentery, two of the most common diseases.

  It was these conditions which drove many of the desperate to emigrate, and 1847 saw the first real wave of Famine emigrants. Emigration as a solution soon began to move down the economic scale to the poorest levels. This shows the desperation to leave, since this class found it very difficult to find money for the passage. Most of those who left in early 1847 went to Liverpool or Glasgow. In many cases, British ports were the place to catch trans-Atlantic ships to North America. But demand to leave the country was so great that direct sailings from Irish ports soon began. More than 100,000 people sailed for Canada in the spring of 1847, and roughly twenty percent died before they got there. Many of these deaths were caused by passage on ill-fitted or unseaworthy ‘coffin ships’. By the time that direct sailings from Irish ports began, the government ship inspection system was overwhelmed, and many ships slipped out without being examined. Passengers with Famine-related diseases were often allowed on board, and overcrowding and lack of food and medical care compounded the problem.

  THE EXTENSION OF THE POOR LAW

  The potato crop did not fail in the summer of 1847. This led some people, notably Trevelyan and other government officials, to declare that the Famine was ending. There were other reasons to think this. There were reports of a good grain harvest in Ireland, and grain imports from America were beginning to stem the tide of starvation. The harvest reports were greatly exaggerated, however. The good grain harvests were largely limited to the north and east, and the rest of the country, which relied on a potato economy, saw no easing of conditions. But in London the belief that the worst was over won the day. In June, the government passed the Poor Law Extension Act, which put the burden of paying for Famine relief on local Irish taxes, in an attempt to get the landlords to pay for what the government thought was ultimately their responsibility. This ‘extension’ of the Poor Law meant that paupers could get ‘outdoor relief’, that is, relief without working for it ‘inside’ the workhouses. It was difficult, however, to convince a sceptical parliament that these poor deserved outdoor relief. The government was forced, therefore, to agree to include a ‘quarter acre clause’ in the bill, which said that any tenant who held more than a quarter acre of land was ineligible for relief. This meant that many of the working poor could not get relief, and many quarter-acre owners willingly gave up their holdings in order to qualify for help. This Poor Law affected many landlords as well. The depressed economy had whittled away their financial reserves, and they found themselves staring at bankruptcy. Evictions of those who could not pay rents rose, which threw even more people on to poverty relief. By the winter of 1847, the Poor Law Guardians (the committee who set and collected the taxes that funded the workhouses and the outdoor relief) found it almost impossible to do their jobs. The taxes were often ignored or proved difficult to collect, and the amount of money they raised was insufficient to ease the problems of unemployment and suffering. So the Poor Law system was not working well. The workhouses had been generally overcrowded by October 1846, and the strain of ‘Black 47’ was almost unbearable for them. Poor Law officials in the regions and in Dublin begged the London government to do more. Lord Clarendon, the new governor of Ireland, pleaded with the government not to ‘allow above a certain number’ to starve. In response, Trevelyan at the treasury decided that much of the west of Ireland deserved more relief funding, but even that proved to be inadequate.

  Although ‘Black 47’ has often been characterized as the height of the Famine, 1848 was just as bad, perhaps worse. The potato blight returned in full force in that year. The official estimated loss was half the crop, but again it was worse in the west of the country. The 1848 blight showed how overwhelmed the Poor Law system and its workhouses were. Over three-quarters of a million people were on outdoor relief by July 1849. Even more people tried to cram into the workhouses but were turned away. By this time, it was not just the poor tenants who were clamouring for relief; it was also the small farmers who collapsed under the crop failure and, ironically, the burden of the Poor Law taxes. The death toll in the workhouses rose; roughly 2,500 people were dying each week. This was only partly due to conditions in the workhouses themselves, and mainly due to diseases outside. By the time many of these people got to the do
or of the workhouse, they were already dying. By 1848, it was also clear that some of the Boards of Guardians who ran the workhouses were corrupt. Government rules for running workhouses were ignored. Some Irish merchants acted as Poor Law Guardians so they could get the relatively lucrative government contracts for food and provisions, and they often did not deliver on those contracts. The government was too overwhelmed with other relief work to prosecute them. Another tragedy of 1848 was that private charity had reached its financial limit. The Quakers, amongst the most generous of private relief organizations, were stretched to the limit. The winter of 1848–9, therefore, proved to be a particularly terrible one in terms of deaths from starvation and disease.

  NEW RELIEF POLICIES

  In early 1849, Russell tried other avenues of relief. He first introduced the ‘rate in aid’ plan, in which the relatively more prosperous north and east of Ireland would pay higher taxes to support the ravaged west and south. This was not well received in the north and east, and many landlords refused to pay the extra taxes. The government then tried another tack, aimed at correcting what they saw as one of the underlying problems leading to the Famine. This was a ‘free trade in land’ policy. The idea was to open up landownership to the general market, making it more likely that the middle and lower middle classes (from England as well as Ireland) would be able to buy land, and break the dependency on large landlords for both land and employment. But the plan did not have the desired effect. Most of the land sold simply changed hands between the existing landowning class. These two efforts at solving underlying problems showed that the government had hardened in its laissez-faire policy towards direct food aid. Perhaps the only positive thing to happen in 1849 was that Queen Victoria visited Ireland, in order to solidify the perception that the Famine was coming to an end, and to try to help the free trade in land policy. The Queen visited Dublin, Cork, Belfast and some of the Kildare countryside. She was enthusiastically received by huge crowds wherever she went, but she only saw a limited amount of the country, and none of the ravaged west. In some important ways, the Queen’s visit gave a psychological boost to many Irish people, but the marking of the end of the Famine was, sadly, two or three years too soon.

  In 1850, Russell persuaded the treasury to give £300,000 pounds for Irish relief, and to rearrange Irish Famine debts so that they would be easier to repay. But the terrible cycle of blight, starvation and disease continued. The workhouses were increasingly besieged, and voluntary efforts had completely collapsed. The Quakers, out of money, had given up their work in June 1849, believing that ‘the Government alone could raise the funds and carry out the measures necessary . . . to save the lives of the people.’ This, of course, meant that the under-funded and over-worked government relief systems were burdened even further. But little direct aid was forthcoming from London, and 1850 and 1851 saw many of the same scenes as 1847 and 1848. The potato crop was healthy in 1852, however, and the beginning of the end was in sight. The harvests of that year were not affected by the blight, although the high potato yields of pre-Famine years were not reached. Slowly, Irish agriculture and the economy began to rebuild themselves, and the pressure on poor relief eased (although emigration continued at a high rate, no doubt due to fears of a return of the blight or the hopelessness of a ravaged economy).

  Ireland was not free of the potato blight, however. It returned in 1860, 1879, 1890 and 1897, but for much shorter periods each time. These blights did not create famines like that of 1845–52, although there was a good deal of food shortage and some starvation. By the later Victorian period, attitudes to the relief of suffering had changed considerably, strict laissez-faire policies had been seen to be failures, and the Famine had forced people to realize that dependency on the potato was potentially dangerous. These other blights were less devastating and government responses were more humane. Finally, a cure for the blight of phytophthora infestans, using a treatment of copper sulphate, was discovered in 1882. Tragically, a similar treatment using copper was found to have worked to some extent in south Wales in 1846, but it failed to attract the notice of the government commission looking into the problem. It is not clear how well this copper treatment would have worked during the Irish Famine of 1845–52, or whether it could have been applied quickly enough to prevent massive crop losses, but it may be seen as symbolic of the larger tragedy of the Famine, and of the inadequate measures taken to relieve it.

  EFFECTS

  Like most major historical events, the effects of the Famine are disputed, and it is clear from this section and the ‘Interpretations’ section that they will be discussed and debated for a long time. The most immediate effect, of course, was the number of people who died. Economic historians use the phrase ‘excessive mortality’ to describe the number of deaths in a given situation that are above the natural death rate at the time. In this sense, the Famine and its attendant diseases killed roughly a million people. The worst affected counties were Mayo and Sligo, in the far west, with 50,000–60,000 deaths per year during the Famine. The rest of the western counties (Galway, Roscommon and Leitrim) lost 40,000–50,000 per year. Cork and Clare in the south-west lost 30,000–40,000 per year. The north and the east suffered less. Dublin lost under 10,000 per year, as did many other eastern counties. Other counties, particularly those in the north-east, lost between 10,000 and 30,000 per year.

  Agriculture and the agricultural economy were heavily affected by the Famine. Although some historians have pointed out that many agricultural changes and much modernization was taking place before 1845, it is clear that the Famine changed the way people thought about Irish agriculture. The post-Famine Irish family farm mixed tillage and livestock, with an emphasis on the livestock for cash income. Land was no longer subdivided amongst sons. There was less need for a large family to run these farms, so the pattern of early marriage ended. But perhaps most significantly, the Famine placed the possibility of emigration permanently in the Irish rural mind. Younger sons often left the country rather than trying their hand at other Irish industries. This strengthened the image of Ireland as a land of no opportunity. But the new agriculture did not reach all areas, particularly the poorer regions in the west. There, poor farmers returned to their small holdings, and a heavy reliance on the potato. Large landowners and farmers with more land were the least affected by the Famine. As a result of evictions, clearances and depopulation, many were able to consolidate and even enlarge their holdings. They were also able to use government reforms for agricultural modernization.

  The political effects of the Famine were also significant. Resentment against the English deepened and spread, although no effective political force or movement was able to use this resentment to agitate for meaningful change. The resentment was directed first at the landlords, which flared up in the agricultural aggression of later decades (see chapter five). It also provided strong folk memories, which were used by Fenian radicals to demand independence in the 1860s. And, of course, those forced to emigrate to North America and Australia brought with them a bitterness that was eventually turned into political action and, more importantly, political fund-raising, as the Famine immigrants in those countries gradually rose in economic and political prominence. Again, this was to have major effects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Back in Ireland, however, the Famine’s impact on the structure of Irish politics was less inflamed, but potentially more devastating. Localism and local issues, rather than ideas of repealing the Union, came to dominate Irish politics from the end of the Famine until well into the late 1860s. Some of the most troubling effects of the Famine were psychological. These, of course, are difficult to measure, but show themselves in post-Famine literature, political speeches and folk customs. In the late nineteenth century, songs and ballads bemoaned the coming of the blight. Some of these songs gave the impression that Ireland was a permanently tragic country, while others were clearly more political, blaming landlords and the British government for the deaths and emigration. S
ome historians have noted that market fairs and traditional gatherings went into a period of decline in the immediate post-Famine decades, and those that were held were far more sober and orderly affairs than they had been in the past.

  The Famine has also been seen as causing the decline of the Irish language. Not only had the Famine hit predominantly Irish-speaking areas (and therefore many Irish speakers died or emigrated to English-speaking countries), it also seemed to symbolize that Ireland was a backward country. Many people thought that the Famine was the result of backward agricultural practices and fatalist Irish thinking. The gradual loss of Irish seemed to reinforce this. Like most historical trends, however, the decline in Irish speaking is more complicated than this. The Famine did kill or send away a disproportionately large number of Irish speakers. In 1845, there were over three million Irish speakers in Ireland and about half a million elsewhere (mainly in Britain). By 1851, the total number of Irish speakers had fallen to below two million. But Irish speaking had been declining rapidly before the Famine, and fewer and fewer young people were learning it as their mother tongue in the 1830s and early 1840s. This was partly the effect of the Act of Union of 1800, which meant that ties with Britain were even closer than they had been before. It was also because there had not been a conscious effort to keep the language alive. Daniel O’Connell and other nationalist leaders had not linked the Irish language with demands for Irish sovereignty, and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century (when the language was nearly dead) that a new generation of nationalists tried to revive it (see chapter seven).