Patterns in land ownership made Irish farmers dependent on the potato. Most farmers had to rent from landlords (who were usually English) who demanded cash payments. The farmers had to use most of their time and land to produce cash crops to cover the rent, and consequently they only had small amounts of time or land left to grow their own food. Given these constraints, the potato was the only crop that could provide sufficient nutrition to feed the growing Irish families.
And grow they did; between 1700 and 1800 the population doubled from somewhere around 2.5 million people to about 5 million people.
By the early 1840s, the population stood at 8.2 million; ironically, it was densest in the poorest areas. The potato helped make this possible, but population growth also made people more dependent on the potato. Fathers would split up their land between their sons, making families depend on smaller and smaller plots of land. The system worked, but only as long as the potatoes were plentiful.
So there the Irish were, planting their potatoes every spring, digging them up every fall, and eating rather well, all things considered. But in the autumn of 1845, all that changed.
In October of that year, farmers walked out to their fields to harvest their crops. They plunged their shovels into the ground and then shrieked in horror — the potatoes were black and rotten, completely useless. The crop they had counted on for generations had finally failed them.
No one knew what to do. Experts offered advice, suggesting that the fungus killing the potatoes was attracted to moisture. Farmers tried to dig dry pits, but the spores traveled through the air and soaked into the ground after rain, which has always been plentiful in Ireland. It took only one infected plant to spread the blight over acres of potatoes. There was no escape.
The west and southwest of Ireland bore the brunt of the famine. Those areas, including Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon, Galway, Clare, and Cork, were the poorest regions of the island, and the most dependent on subsistence farming. Not coincidentally, these were also the areas that Catholic Irish had been sent to during the Protestant plantation. Poor laborers were hardest hit, followed by the smallest farmers.
The worst part of the potato blight was that it didn’t go away. After the 1845 crops failed, people counted on the potatoes of 1846 to pull them through, but those potatoes rotted away, too. For some reason the crop of 1847 survived, but not enough fields of potatoes had been planted to produce enough food for everyone who needed it. And in 1848 the blight reappeared with a vengeance.
70 { Life During the Famine
The poor Irish who had lost their potatoes faced terrifying difficulties. They called the time an Gorta Mór, which means “the Great Hunger,” or an Droch Shaol, “the Bad Times.”
The poorest farmers, already living at a subsistence level, were the first to feel the effects. Within a few months of the bad harvest, the people in the hardest-hit areas were already dying of starvation. Travelers reported seeing skeletal people with their mouths stained green; they had tried to ward off hunger by eating grass. In some places in western Ireland, piles of corpses filled the ditches.
The first thing the stricken farmers did was try to eat their diseased potatoes. This made them terribly sick with stomach cramps, diarrhea, and intestinal bleeding. Some very old and very young people died from this disease.
There was some food to be found on the land, and the Irish were very resourceful at scrounging it. They trapped birds and stole eggs from nests, gathered shellfish from the shores, and caught fish. Coastal people ate seaweed. They would take blood from cattle and fry it. They ate rats, worms, nettles, and chickweed. When the opportunity presented itself, they stole food from wagons and barges. But none of it helped much.
The malnourished Irish were very vulnerable to diseases. In fact, more people died from illness than from actual starvation.
Typhus appeared in the winter of 1846. The Irish called it the black fever because it made victims’ faces swollen and dark. It was incredibly contagious, spread by lice, which were everywhere. Many people lived in one-room cottages, humans and animals all huddled together, and there was no way to avoid lice jumping from person to person. The typhus bacteria also traveled in louse feces, which formed an invisible dust in the air. Anyone who touched an infected person, or even an infected person’s clothes, could become the disease’s next victim. Typhus was the supreme killer of the famine; in the winter of 1847, thousands of people died of it every week.
Another fever appeared at the same time, the relapsing fever called yellow fever because its victims became jaundiced. This fever also came from lice. A victim would suffer from a high fever for several days, seem to recover, and then relapse a week later. Many people died from this fever as well.
Scurvy became a problem. This disease comes from a deficiency of vitamin C, and it causes the victim’s connective tissue to break down. The Irish called scurvy black leg, because it made the blood vessels under the skin burst, giving a victim’s limbs a black appearance. The cure for scurvy is fresh food — meat, vegetables, or fruit — none of which was available to the poor in Ireland.
There were other diseases, too. Some Irish children fell victim to an odd disease that made hair grow on their faces while it fell out of their heads. Some observers commented that the children looked like monkeys. Cholera was always a problem in unsanitary, crowded conditions; it broke out in workhouses throughout the famine years.
When people died, the living were left with the problem of what to do with the bodies. There were not enough coffins to hold the dead, even if the poor had money to pay for them. Stories abounded of entire families dying, or of mothers losing all their children and carrying the bodies to the cemetery on their backs, one by one. Visitors reported seeing dead bodies stacked in ditches and dogs devouring corpses in the fields; to their horror, they also observed people killing and eating those same dogs.
When someone came down with typhus, relatives and neighbors feared that they would contract the disease, too. Sometimes all healthy members of a family would leave a sick person alone in a house, hoping to escape the contagion. They hadn’t abandoned the sufferer; they would push food in through the windows on the end of a long pole. When there was no longer a response from inside the house, they would pull the house down on top of the victim and burn the whole thing.
Most of the victims of the famine did not own the land they lived on. Instead, they rented houses and farmland from large landholders. When the potato crops failed, they could no longer pay their rent. Some landlords were understanding; many actually helped their tenants, handing out food and concocting jobs that would allow them to earn wages.
But other landlords were less accommodating. Scores of poor Irish were evicted from their homes. This wasn’t all due to cruelty and greed; many landlords themselves faced bankruptcy and starvation as their rents stopped coming in. Some landlords decided that grazing sheep or cattle would be a better use of the land, and the peasants and their potato plots had to give way for the livestock.
The result was that many poor Irish found themselves not only starving, but homeless as well. Some of them moved into workhouses, but many dug holes in hillsides or made huts out of peat and lived in them as best they could. Others simply wandered the roads until they dropped dead.
71 { Help! Responses to the Famine
One of the things that made the Irish famine especially bad was a lack of help for the starving. The British government was reluctant to help too much, partly out of fear that the poor would depend on aid and not try to help themselves. The mid-nineteenth century was the heyday of laissezfaire economics, which taught that the free market would solve all problems and that the government should never intervene. Unfortunately, that approach led to tragedy for the Irish population.
Politicians quickly got word that the Irish peasantry had nothing to eat. Many English were not particularly impressed with the Irish plight.
A number of them thought that the famine was a punishment for Ireland’s sin of ove
rpopulation. According to population theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, Ireland had far too many people for its land to support, and the best solution was to get rid of most of them. The famine would take care of that.
The truth was, the factors that contributed to the Irish famine were far more complex than mere overpopulation. There was plenty of food in Ireland. The island grew and exported more than 1 billion pounds of grain every year. Many Irish actually sold this food willingly so they would have the money to pay rent. Ireland also was not allowed to import rice or corn from the British colonies. This was the effect of the Corn Laws (the British call wheat “corn”; they call corn “maize”), which set artificially high prices for British grain and locked out cheaper imports until the entire British crop was sold. This was a problem for the Irish, who had no money.
Prime Minister Robert Peel initially took pity on the starving Irish, and, unbeknownst to his own government, ordered Indian corn from the Americas to be delivered to the island. This corn was only a last resort for the sufferers; it was difficult to grind and cook, not nearly as filling as potatoes, and it lacked vitamin C. It ran out quickly, too, and was not replaced.
Peel resigned in 1846, and for the next four years the man he appointed to oversee famine relief, Charles Edward Trevelyan, handled matters. Trevelyan didn’t have a very high opinion of the Irish, and in fact only visited Ireland once; he thought distance helped him maintain objectivity. He was a firm believer in laissez faire and thought donated food actually exacerbated the problem by relieving the Irish of the obligation to feed themselves. Unfortunately, in some places, no one had either food or money, so feeding themselves was completely impossible. Irish crops continued to be exported, which led to great resentment on the part of the Irish people.
When people got truly desperate, there was a place that they could go: the workhouse. These houses had been established in the early 1840s to provide relief to the poorest people. Opponents of workhouses feared that the Irish would abuse the system, using the workhouse if they weren’t truly desperate. But supporters countered that they could solve this problem by making workhouses so unpleasant that only people with no alternative would enter them.
Unpleasant they were. Anyone who owned land had to give it up before entering a workhouse, which forced many families to choose between staying on their farms and starving or giving up their land for a chance to eat. People who entered a workhouse were segregated by sex, which meant dividing up families. They were forced to live there, essentially sentencing themselves to prison. They had to give up their own clothes and wear pauper’s uniforms, which marked them as destitute. They had to work at menial jobs to earn their keep — men broke up rocks, women knitted, and children either had lessons or learned to do various industrial tasks. Families only got together on Sundays.
The Irish people did everything they could to avoid the workhouse. They found the splitting up of families especially hard to bear. The unpleasant regimen did succeed in keeping people away from public charity in the early 1840s and even into 1846, before the second bad potato crop.
But after the second nonexistent potato harvest in the autumn of 1846, people were more willing to surrender their dignity in the hopes of not starving. Poorhouse food was bad and often inadequate, but at least it was food. By mid-October, most workhouses in the worst-hit areas were full and turning away inmates.
Crowding did nothing to improve the workhouse atmosphere. The stench became overpowering as hundreds of unhealthy people contributed their bodily products to the building. Typhus, cholera, and other diseases thrived in this environment, and many people died.
Not everyone could fit into the workhouses, and many people refused to even consider the possibility. The government provided an alternative for them: working for pay on public projects. Local relief committees made lists of people who needed help, and then one member of each needy family was allowed to work for pay.
This was a nice idea, but ineffective in practice. The projects in question involved hard physical labor — digging ditches, breaking and moving rocks to build roads — and the workers were already malnourished. The winter of 1846 to 1847 was especially harsh, and the workers had no adequate clothes. Many of them fell sick and dropped dead on the job. In fact, 1847 was such a bad year that it became known as Black ’47.
The wages for public works would have been generous in the days of plentiful potatoes, but during the famine food prices went through the roof. A week’s wages were barely adequate to buy half a week’s sustenance for a family of any size, and many Irish families were large. Families were desperate to keep someone on the works to collect money, though, so they would often deprive nonworkers of food to keep up the strength of the wage-earner. Children would go hungry so their father could eat.
In many cases, the person going out to work was also the person who would have planted the next year’s potato crop at home. Without that labor, the next year’s harvest suffered.
At the start of the famine, the government insisted that charity was best done by private institutions. The Quakers in particular rose to the occasion, opening soup kitchens to feed paupers. Some landlords helped their tenants, providing food, clothes, or housing. Irish peasants helped one another when they could; many stories from the famine years tell of housewives who gave away their last cabbage in the garden or last drop of milk from the cow, only to have their supplies miraculously renewed the next morning. These are nice stories, but unfortunately usually not true.
In 1847, the government stopped the public-works programs and announced that from now on, private aid would be the solution. The British still feared that too much aid to the Irish would prevent them from ever going back to work. The British decided that Irish landlords must be responsible for the famine, so it would be their job to fix it. Local governments were supposed to organize charitable soup kitchens paid for by taxes collected by local relief committees.
But as the famine years progressed, Ireland had less and less food and money. Landlords went bankrupt as their tenants failed to pay rents, and property taxes went up, ironically, to provide money to feed the starving. In an effort to lower their property values and thus their taxes, some of them evicted the peasants still living on their land and tore down their huts. Britain sent more and more soldiers to Ireland to enforce evictions and see that taxes were collected. This combination of military might and no food made the Irish even more resentful of the occupying British government. Though there was more food available now, no one had the money to buy it.
Matters were made even worse by a financial crisis in Britain in 1847. Wheat prices plummeted, railroad stocks fell, and many businesses went bankrupt. The British had less money to help the Irish, even if they had wanted to.
The winter of 1848 to 1849 was a nightmare for the Irish. They had gambled on the potato crop, spending every cent they had to buy seed potatoes that they planted in the spring; after all, the blight hadn’t attacked the 1847 crop, so they had reason to hope that it was gone. But they were terribly wrong; the blight was still around and it devastated potatoes all over the island. Landlords kept evicting peasants, and the British government kept raising Ireland’s taxes in the vain hope that this would help the island pull itself up by its bootstraps. The poorest people shrank down to human skeletons before dying. Some turned to crime as an alternative to starvation — in prison or on a ship heading to Australia there would at least be something to eat. Wealthier people gave up on Ireland and left for other countries.
72 { Results of the Famine
Ireland was a different place after the famine. The population was drastically reduced — an island of 8.2 million people in 1841 was reduced to 6 million in 1851. At least 1 million of those people had died. The rest fled the country, hoping for a new life in another land.
After the famine, there were fewer tiny landholdings, farms of 5 or fewer acres. By 1851, many more farms consisted of 30 acres or more. Fathers stopped dividing their acreage among all their
sons and instead passed the entire farm to just one of them. This made it easier for a farmer to support his own family but caused problems for the children who didn’t inherit. It also forced inheriting sons to wait longer to come into property, which delayed marriages. Farmers used more of their land to grow livestock; not surprisingly, they didn’t grow nearly as many potatoes as they had before.
Many Irish left their beloved homeland during the famine years, hoping to find something better in the United States, England, Canada, or Australia. Emigration posed its own risks. Many emigrants died en route to their destinations. Others found that their new homes were little better than the barren farms they’d left behind. Nevertheless, many Irish emigrants quickly grew roots in fresh soil and flourished. For better or for worse, the Irish were now permanently planted around the world.
Daniel O’Connell had worked hard on behalf of the starving Irishmen, petitioning Parliament to put a stop to grain exports and to provide public work for people in need. He continued his support of nonviolent means of dealing with the Crown, but at the same time, a group called Young Ireland appeared. This was a group of younger men who were more interested in gaining Irish independence than in improving the existing system. After O’Connell died in 1847, the Young Irelanders were ready to use violence to fight for an Irish republic.
The Myths, Legends, and Lore of Ireland Page 12