The Famine also had a strong effect on religion. With its overtones of moral punishment and curse from God, the Famine helped accelerate the ‘devotional revolution’ that had been slowly taking place in previous decades. This was especially true of the Catholic religion, which became increasingly formal in the mid-nineteenth century. Cardinal Cullen, an authoritarian and reforming leader, helped revitalize the Catholic Church in the post-Famine decades. Protestant churches also saw increases in attendance and devotional worship. But some Catholics and Protestants saw the Famine as largely a Catholic problem. That is, many Catholics thought they were the victims of British Protestant indifference and souperism because they were Catholics, and many Protestants felt that providence had spared them from hunger and disease precisely because they were not Catholic. So sectarian distrust began to solidify, especially in Belfast and other parts of the north-east, where many Protestants and Catholics had fled to avoid starvation and disease.
INTERPRETATIONS
As stated at the beginning of this chapter, interpretations of the Famine have been under contention almost since it ended in 1852. Folk memories have preserved vivid images of the Famine. Some, such as those of food being taken out of the country, universally callous landlords and the uncaring British, are half-truths. Others, such as stories of brutal evictions, are true. These stories are still told in Ireland, and in countries where descendants of Irish immigrants have made their homes, so they are very important in their own right. They are also important because they provide the basis for popular ideas about the Famine and its importance for Irish history. Some of these folk memories were, no doubt, fed by the first major interpretation of the Famine, which dates from the decades immediately following it. In 1848, Charles Gavan Duffy, the Young Ireland nationalist (see chapter three), wrote that the Famine all around him was ‘a fearful murder committed on the mass of the people’. Later, in 1860, the Irish nationalist John Mitchel (see chapter five), wrote The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), in which he argued that the Famine was murder on a huge scale, and that the British government used the natural disaster of the potato blight to get rid of a troublesome population. ‘A million and a half men, women, and children’, he wrote, ‘were carefully, prudently, and peacefully slain by the English government. They died of hunger in the midst of abundance, which their own hands created.’ To Mitchel and those who agreed with him, the government’s reaction to the Famine was the inevitable outcome of centuries of mis-rule and disregard for the Irish as equals. This interpretation, sometimes called the ‘nationalist’ or ‘Mitchelite’ interpretation, had a great impact on the Irish consciousness. Generations of nationalists after Mitchel, including Arthur Griffith (see chapters six and seven) used it as part of the justification of their cause. Since much of the popular literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was politically motivated, this is the only interpretation that many Irish people heard.
In the middle of the twentieth century, however, there was a reaction against the Mitchelite interpretation. The overblown and over-dramatic language of many nationalists sat uneasily with Irish professional historians, and many of them began to do the first scholarly research into the subject of the Famine. Since there was no evidence of a conscious attempt by the British government to implement a policy of genocide during the Famine, this revisionist interpretation tried to provide cool historical detachment from the Mitchelite interpretation. This was partly a natural reaction against so strong a traditional way of thinking. But it was also an attempt by Irish historians of the mid-twentieth century to cast off the nationalist tint that had coloured previous Famine interpretations. Such interpretations were not considered scholarly. The revisionist interpretation attempted to go beyond ‘the political commentator, the ballad singer and the unknown maker of folk-tales’ to research a more historically accurate picture of the Famine. In this, they argued that nationalism was a poor schoolmaster for history, and that the British governors of the time were simply acting as men of their time, and should not be held up to anachronistic blame. The two main revisionist historians were R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams, who edited a collection of essays entitled The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845–52, published in 1956. The contributors to this volume questioned long-standing assumptions about the Famine, including the number of deaths, and concentrated on revising the assessment of the responsibility of landlords and the British government. In the introduction (ghost-written by Kevin Nowlan), revisionist ideas about British responsibility for the Famine were made clear.
If man, the prisoner of time, acts in conformity with the conventions of society into which he is born, it is difficult to judge him with an irrevocable harshness. So it is with the men of the Famine era. Human limitations and timidity dominate the story of the Great Famine, but of great and deliberately imposed evil in high positions of responsibility there is little evidence.
It was this interpretative tradition, which held sway until the late 1970s and early 1980s, that dismissed Cecil Woodham-Smith’s popular history The Great Hunger (1962) as ‘a great novel’. F.S.L. Lyons, the major figure in academic Irish history of the post-war generation, argued thatWoodham-Smith’s book was naive and that it pandered to the nationalist ideas of government responsibility without taking the contemporary context into account. According to the revisionists, then, the British government was caught in the grip of the politics and ideology of its time, and could not have acted in any other way than it did. It was, rather, the larger system which was at fault, and the words of the great Irish socialist James Connolly sum up the revisionist ideas about government responsibility neatly – ‘No man who accepts capitalist society and the laws thereof can logically find fault with the statesmen of England for their acts in that awful period.’
While this interpretation undoubtedly provided a necessary corrective for the unrealistic expectations of how the government could have reacted during this period, it has been criticized for presenting a sanitized version of events, and one that focuses too much on the administrative side of the story. Critics claim that it avoided using non-governmental sources, and that it all but ignored the real suffering of the Famine. Such critics may be grouped together into a ‘post-revisionist’ school of thought (although their ideas about the Famine differ at various points). This school draws on the massive amount of Famine research done in recent decades on economic history, anthropology and historical demographics. It criticizes the Mitchelite nationalist account for being ahistorical, but understands the reasons why it was so. It also criticizes the revisionist interpretation for inadequately addressing the depths of starvation and sickness. One of the most important historians of this new tradition is Cormac Ó Gráda. His study of the Famine over a number of years has led him to conclude that ‘food availability was a problem; nobody wanted the extirpation [destruction] of the Irish as a race’.
In her recent books, This Great Calamity (1994) and The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion (2001), Christine Kinealy agrees generally with the post-revisionist interpretation. She has done a close analysis of the government relief structures, particularly the workings of the Poor Law, and has come to the conclusion that much more could have been done to relieve suffering, if the political will had existed. One of her strongest arguments is that the fact that over three million people were fed by the government in 1847 shows that similar levels of relief could have been reached in the other Famine years. Clearly the structure was there, but the ideology was not. Most modern historians would agree with this. Kinealy takes her analysis further, however, to argue that the government, by placing the burden of relief on the localities, had a hidden agenda, that of attempting to use government resources for longer-term economic reform in Ireland. Government policy was, she argues, ‘inadequate in terms of humanitarian criteria, and increasingly after 1847, systematically and deliberately so’. Again, she stops well short of untenable claims of genocide, but condemns the British gov
ernment quite strongly for its inadequate relief of hunger and disease.
Perhaps the most interesting and challenging of recent interpretations of the Famine has arisen from the work of Peter Gray on the ideology of providentialism. As we have seen, many people in England and Ireland saw the Famine as the work of God, and thought that interference with such providence was immediately dangerous and ultimately disastrous. Gray has shown how this thinking operated in Ireland during the Famine. He argues that the strict laissez-faire ideas of Trevelyan at the treasury department were far more widely shared than has been previously argued. Before Gray, many historians (and certainly many popular commentators) saw Sir Robert Peel as more humane and pragmatic in his reaction to the Famine than the dogmatic Lord John Russell. Gray has argued, however, that Peel faced a much milder Famine in late 1845 and early 1846 than Russell did later, and that it was easier to convince parliament to grant direct food aid in such a circumstance. Once the Famine became total devastation, it would have been unlikely that Peel would have continued direct aid because he was nearly as much in the grip of providentialism as were the stricter laissez-faire men of Russell’s government. Gray also argues that providentialist thinking was so widespread in parliament that a mild course of relief was the only one Peel or Russell could have followed for any length of time. Again, we return to the question of ideology and the degree to which it controlled the actions of those in the government. While Gray obviously does not agree with the genocide interpretation he does hold these strong religious beliefs to account for Famine suffering.
Cormac Ó Gráda has argued that one of the few positive things to come out of the Famine was that it helped destroy ideas of providentialism and government non-interference in the economy, so that subsequent British governments responded to crop failures and other social crises in far more humane ways. The diversity and sophistication of recent scholarship on the Famine has been shown in his Black ’47 and Beyond (1999). This book examines not only questions of economics, demographics and responsibility, but also the importance of the Famine in Irish memory. Using the underexplored material at the Irish Folklore Commission, Ó Gráda shows the extent to which memories lasted well into the twentieth century and how they affected Irish social and political thought.
Memory and commemoration have been the dominant themes in interpretations of the Famine since the mid-1990s. The observations of 150th anniversary of the outbreak, by governments in Ireland, Britain, and the United States, attracted massive amounts of public commentary. Memory has also become the dominant theme in new scholarly work on the Famine. That has taken many forms, from close textual examinations of oral histories and folklore, to the use of Famine memory as a way to analyze how memory and history relate to each other in larger socio-psychological contexts. Niall Ó Coisáin’s essay ‘Famine memory and the popular representation of scarcity’ (in Ian McBride, History and Memory in Modern Ireland, 2001) goes further than representations of scarcity. It shows the nature of Famine memory in three important aspects: local memory, which is made up of ‘relatively atomized detail’, even at the family and personal level; popular memory, which stresses causes and blame; and global memory, which places the Famine in the larger contexts of Irish and British history (and is usually tied up with memories and oral histories of land war evictions and other injustices). Ó Coisáin further globalizes Famine memory by comparing it with disaster memory studies from other countries and cultures. It is thought-provoking and essential reading for students of the Famine.
FIVE
Fenianism and the Land, 1848–81
The Famine did much more than depopulate the country through death and emigration. Its severity raised important underlying issues about the structure of the Irish economy. The most important of these issues were land use and landownership. Land has always been a central theme in Irish history. Native Irish chieftains fought each other (as well as invaders) over the question of land, and the various settlement plans of English governors were centred on the land. But ‘the land’ became more than an agricultural and economic question. In the second half of the nineteenth century it became a political issue as well, and became more closely tied to the national question (that is, who should rule in Ireland). Perhaps more importantly, it was presented as being tied to the national question and Irish nationalism. And for the first time, tenants formed organized political movements for land reform. The politics of this period are represented by a division between constitutional and parliamentary attempts at reform (much like O’Connell’s largely peaceful means) and revolutionary attempts at forcing change (much like the Young Ireland rebellion, but more organized and effective). This chapter will deal mainly with the revolutionaries, and the next chapter will discuss the more moderate agitators. The important thing to note, however, is that these two groups joined forces after 1879, under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–91) and Michael Davitt (1846–1906). This merging was seen as a ‘new departure’ in Irish nationalism.
One of the most significant aspects of Irish history from the Famine to the end of the twentieth century was the changing relationships between landlords, farmers and labourers. Some of these changes were the result of population devastation from Famine deaths and emigration, and other changes were the result of political and social movements and government legislation. In the first place, the numbers making up each of the three groups changed during this period. Most significantly, the number of agricultural labourers declined by nearly fifteen percent. There was a gradual change from tillage to more pastoral farming (which in most cases meant fewer potatoes and more livestock), and this reduced the need for labourers. The number of farmers increased by roughly the same amount as the number of labourers decreased. This may be part of the reason that agitation over the land issue centred on the rights of farmers, and that the reforms eventually reached were mainly aimed at the rents they paid and the security they received, as we shall see in this chapter. In fact, this caused bitterness between farmers and labourers, which sometimes sparked into violence.
Although Irish labourers’ wages slowly increased during this period, they still lagged behind those in Britain and most of Europe. Labourers and their families, therefore, did not see much improvement in their living conditions. Farmers, on the other hand, did see some increase in their material comforts. Generally speaking (and accepting that there were significant regional variations), the size of farms increased, and nearly a third of all farmers held land over thirty acres in size. Furthermore, prices for agricultural goods rose over this period, but they did so in a very chaotic way. There was not a gradual increase in prices; farmers could not predict which way prices could go, and they had to react to market changes quickly.
Landlords who had survived the Famine without going bankrupt generally found that they could increase their holdings dramatically by purchasing land that other landlords had been forced to vacate. But running and managing estates became more and more expensive, and many landlords found that their incomes did not allow them to live in a manner comparable with their English counterparts. Even though landlords were in a reasonably safe position, and tenant farmers seemed to be benefiting from increased farm size and rising prices, there was a great deal of tension between the two classes. This may not be immediately obvious because most of the statistics about growth of tenant landholdings and rising prices conceal a very important aspect of Irish agricultural life. It was true that, as a result of increased numbers of farmers with more land, agricultural production increased by over twelve percent between the mid-1850s and the mid-1870s (which would seem to benefit farmers). Further, rents increased by over fifteen percent (which would seem to benefit landlords). But the fluctuations in prices from year to year and other factors meant that farmers’ incomes did not keep up with either production or rents (increasing at roughly seven and a half percent over this period). Farmers, therefore, were producing more but earning less, in relative terms. Tensions between the agricultural class
es were still acute, and a temporary downturn in the economy could result in serious rural unrest.
The immediate post-Famine period also saw a decline in nationalist fervour. Preoccupation with earning a living and a sort of resigned depression set in after O’Connell’s failed Repeal bid and Young Ireland’s brief rebellion. This kept nationalist feeling low. There was, however, a deeper divide between those who supported the Union (largely Protestant) and those who opposed it (largely Catholic). The Catholic majority of the population were disappointed by the Union. They thought it had not delivered on its promises of a better life for all the people in Ireland. Supporters thought that it had improved things in Ireland and that it must be maintained. These supporters were largely Protestant landowners and the Protestant communities in Ulster.
THE THREE FS AND THE TENANT LEAGUE
During the period 1800–50, Ulster underwent an industrial revolution, which the rest of the country did not do to any great extent. Belfast in particular was in the early stages of becoming a linen, shipbuilding and engineering centre. Also in Ulster, tenants lived under what was called ‘Ulster Custom’, or ‘tenant right’. This meant that tenants had a right to what was eventually called the ‘Three Fs’ – fair rent, fixity of tenure and freedom to sell interest in a holding. The Three Fs were to become the demands of organized tenants elsewhere in the country. The earliest tenant organizations were founded during the Famine, but they stayed local and did not last very long. The first group that provided some sort of permanence, as well as an organizational model for the rest of the country, was the Tenant Protection Society of Callan in County Kilkenny, founded in October 1849. It was the growth of these local organizations that led Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy and others to propose a national network of tenant associations. A conference of local organizations was held in August 1850, which resulted in the formation of the Irish Tenant League.
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