Famine Memorial - Dublin
The Great Famine
The Great Famine or ‘Great Hunger’ of 1845–9 is the most important event in modern Irish history. It was the worst catastrophe in modern European history before the twentieth century. If one judges famine by the percentage of the population that dies of it and its effects, it was the worst famine in modern times. It was caused, in the first place, by the failure of the potato on which about one third of the population depended for survival. The potato was attacked by the fungus Phytophthora infestans, previously unknown, which came to Europe from North America.
This caused a crisis that the Government failed, in general, to cope with. The near complete failure of the potato crop made disaster on an unprecedented scale inevitable unless other food could be provided. As Cormac Ó Gráda writes:
The Irish famine relief effort was constrained less by poverty than by ideology and public opinion. Too much was expected of the Irish themselves, including Irish landlords. Too much was blamed on their dishonesty and laziness. Too much time was lost on public works as the main vehicle of relief. By the time food was reaching the starving through the soup kitchens, they were already vulnerable to infectious diseases, against which the medical science of the day was virtually helpless. Too much was made of the antisocial behavior inevitable in such crisis conditions. Too many people in high places believed that this was a time when, as the Times put it, “something like harshness is the greatest humanity”. … Most important, public spending on relief went nowhere near the cost of plugging the gap left by the failure of the potato. … a shortfall of about £50 million in money. … exchequer spending on famine relief between 1846 and 1852 totaled less than £10 million. [Cormac Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and beyond: the Great Irish Famine in history, economy, and memory (Princeton NJ 1998) 82–3]
The Government’s reaction to the crisis was slow. Food continued to be exported from Ireland and arrangements for the importation of other foods were not effective. Rev. Dr McEvoy, parish priest of Kells, wrote in October 1845:
On my most minute personal inspection of the potato crop in this most fertile potato-growing locale is founded my inexpressibly painful conviction that one family in twenty of the people will not have a single potato left on Christmas day next. Many are the fields I have examined and testimony the most solemn can I tender, that in the great bulk of those fields all the potatoes sizable enough to be sent to table are irreparably damaged, while for the remaining comparatively sounder fields very little hopes are entertained in consequence of the daily rapid development of the deplorable disease. With starvation at our doors, grimly staring us, vessels laden with our sole hopes of existence, our provisions, are hourly wafted from our every port. From one milling establishment I have last night seen not less than fifty dray loads of meal moving on to Drogheda, thence to go to feed the foreigner, leaving starvation and death the sure and certain fate of the toil and sweat that raised this food. For their respective inhabitants England, Holland, Scotland, Germany, are taking early the necessary precautions—getting provisions from every possible part of the globe; and I ask are Irishmen alone unworthy the sympathies of a paternal gentry or a paternal Government? Let Irishmen themselves take heed before the provisions are gone. Let those, too, who have sheep, and oxen, and haggards. Self-preservation is the first law of nature. The right of the starving to try and sustain existence is a right far and away paramount to every right that property confers. … [The Nation, 25 October 1845; repr. in P. S. O’Hegarty, A history of Ireland under the Union (London 1952) 293]
Others nearer the administration made a like complaint. The Mansion House Committee, of which the Duke of Leinster and Lord Cloncurry were chairmen, addressed a Resolution to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Heytesbury, in November 1845:
We have ascertained beyond any shadow of doubt, that considerably more than one-third of the entire potato crop in Ireland has already been destroyed by the potato disease; and that such disease has not, by an means, ceased its ravages, but, on the contrary, is daily extending more and more; and that no reasonable conjecture can be formed with respect to the limits of its effects, short of destruction of the entire remaining potato crop. … that our information on the subject is positive and precise and is derived from persons living in all the counties of Ireland, from persons of all political opinions and from clergymen of all religious persuasions. We are thus unfortunately able to proclaim to all the inhabitants of the British Empire, and in the presence of an all-seeing Providence, that in Ireland famine of a most hideous description must be immediate and pressing, and that pestilence of the most frightening kind is certain and not remote, unless immediately prevented. … That we arraign in the strongest terms, consistent with personal respect to ourselves, the culpable conduct of the present administration, as well in refusing to take any efficacious measure for alleviating the present calamity with all its approaching hideous and necessary consequences; as also for the positive and unequivocal crime of keeping the ports closed against the importation of foreign provisions, thus either abdicating their duty to the people or their sovereign, whose servants they are, or involving themselves in the enormous guilt of aggravating starvation and famine, by unnaturally keeping up the price of provisions, and doing this for the benefit of a selfish class who derive at the present awful crisis pecuniary advantages to themselves by the maintenance of the oppressive Corn Laws. … that the people of Ireland, in their bitter hour of misfortune, have the strongest right to impeach the criminality of the ministers of the Crown, inasmuch as it has pleased a merciful Providence to favour Ireland in the present season with a most abundant crop of oats. Yet, while the harbours are closed against the importation of foreign food, they are left open for the exportation of Irish grain, an exportation which has already amounted in the present season to a quantity nearly adequate to feed the entire people of Ireland, and to avert the now certain famine; thus inflicting upon the Irish people the abject misery of having their own provisions carried away to feed others, while they themselves are left contemptuously to starve. … Signed John L. Arabin, Lord Mayor of Dublin [John O’Rourke, A history of the Great Irish Famine (3rd ed. Dublin 1902), 65–7; repr. in Colm Tóibín & Diarmaid Ferriter, The Irish famine: a documentary (New York 2002) 47–8]
The statistics of modern scholars support these observations. In 1845 the excess of exported over imported grain was 485,000 tons; and in 1846 it was 87,000 tons. In 1847, however, Ireland became a net importer of grain, 763,000 tons; and in 1848, 125,000 tons.
WEB SITES
www.umbc.edu/history/CHE/InstPg/RitFamine/irish-famine-li...
ist.uwaterloo.ca/~marj/genealogy/thevoyage.htm
www.thegreathunger.org/html/main/indexa.htm
www.qub.ac.uk/en/imperial/ireland/famine.htm
aad.archives.gov/aad/index.jsp
www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1695potato.html
vassun.vassar.edu/~sttaylor/FAMINE
vassun.vassar.edu/~sttaylor/FAMINE/Related.html
etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH38/Lengel.html
www.umbc.edu/history/CHE/InstPg/RitFamine/Irish-Famine-fo...
www.bbc.co.uk/history/state/nations/famine_01.shtml
www.ucc.ie/famine/Ireland's Famine/irefam.htm
www.soton.ac.uk/~pg2/Fammems.html
Donnchadh Ó Corráin
23 January 2006