Despite their economic and political marginalisation, there were by the beginning of the nineteenth century more Gaelic speakers in Ireland than at any time in its history. The rapid spread of potato cultivation in the eighteenth century led to a population explosion. In the 50 years before 1841 Ireland’s population more than doubled, from around four million to 8.2 million. The potato’s high nutritional content and ability to thrive even in wet infertile soils made it an ideal staple crop for poor peasant farmers. A family could be supported on the produce of tiny plots. Visitors noticed how healthy and well nourished even the poorest Irish peasant families appeared despite otherwise living in conditions of extreme material poverty. These impressions are confirmed by British military records of the period, which show that Irish recruits to the army were on average taller than their more urbanised English counterparts, who lived in unhealthy slums and whose food was often adulterated by profiteering merchants. While landowners ensured that the best land continued to be devoted to grain production and stock rearing, most of it destined for export to Britain, they were happy to encourage peasant farmers to take out tenancies on more and more marginal land. Lazy beds (artificial raised ridges of soil used for cultivation in Ireland since the Neolithic) spread onto the edges of bogs and up mountainsides. Maintaining the lazy beds was labour intensive, but this was not a problem with a rapidly growing population and the yield, by area, was three times higher than that of ploughed land.
Ireland developed a bizarre population distribution whereby it was the less fertile areas, especially in the west in Connacht and Munster, which were the most densely populated ones.
A long agricultural depression followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Declining prices forced poor tenants further into dependence on the potato as they needed to sell all of their more valuable cash crops such as oats to pay their rents. Cattle were simply beyond the means of most of the peasantry and milk, butter and cheese vanished from their diet. The decline of stock rearing contributed to an increasing reliance on a single strain of potato, the Lumper, which flourished in poor soils and needed little manuring but was watery and nutritionally inferior. One observer noted that the ‘Lumper is not indeed human food at all. Mix them with any other kind of potato and lay them before a pig, and she will not eat one of them until all the good kind are devoured.’ By the 1830s over 3,000,000 people, one third of Ireland’s population, relied on potatoes for 90 per cent of their calorie intake. The growing dependence on the potato was watched with concern by the government, which saw quite clearly that failure of the crop would lead to famine - potatoes can be stored for about nine months at most, so farmers were unable to build up stocks in the good years against years of shortages.
In June 1845 potato blight broke out in Belgium where it is thought to have been introduced in a cargo of fertiliser from South America. The disease quickly spread across Europe: it reached Ireland in September of that year. The disease - a fungal infection that rots tubers in the ground - took Europe by surprise. Perhaps it ought not to have done, as it had been raging in North America since 1843. Potatoes were an important crop for peasant farmers in many areas of Europe and the blight brought hunger to thousands in the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland and Scotland but nowhere was the dependence as absolute as it was in Ireland. Initial assessments suggested that 80 per cent of the Irish crop would be lost in 1845. When the loss turned out to be only half that, most people thought that the worst was already over. When the crop failed again the next year, hunger turned to starvation for millions. Exactly how many people died in the six years before the potato crop recovered is not known; most estimates are in the range of 500,000 to one million with the higher figure being perhaps the more likely. Mortality was highest in those areas dominated by clachans (nucleated groups of farmhouses where landholding was organised communally): contagious diseases spread more quickly through their densely packed inhabitants, already weakened by starvation. In some areas of Connacht and Munster an estimated 25 per cent of the population died during the famine.
It might be thought that the government of the United Kingdom, then the world’s wealthiest country, could have intervened to mitigate the effects of the potato blight, but it was wedded to the ideologies of Malthusianism and laissez-faire C2ipitaism. The British government believed that overpopulation was the root cause of Ireland’s problems so the outbreak of potato blight and the resulting famine was seen as a necessary, even a welcome.
Plate 36 Starving Irish peasants clamour at the gates of a workhouse Source: Getty Images/Hulton Archive
Corrective which would in due course lead to a more prosperous, economically modern country as soon as the population had fallen to a level deemed to be in balance with the available resources. Food aid and a ban on food exports were also opposed on free trade grounds, as it was feared that these would undermine prices and put Irish farmers unaffected by the blight out of business, so reducing the country’s food production even more. Apologists for the British government argue that it lacked the resources and expertise to have provided effective famine relief, even had it wanted to, but the sad fact is that it had both. On the one occasion that the government did intervene on a large scale, in the summer of 1847, it set up a system of soup kitchens that fed over three million people daily. Though the nutritional quality of the meals was often poor, the rate of mortality was considerably reduced. Had even this parsimonious system been set up in 1846 and maintained until potato crops recovered in 1852, most of the mortality of the famine could surely have been prevented, as it was in Scotland. Amazingly, in 1846 Ireland was even denied grain imports until Scotland had been supplied. Mass starvation was unacceptable in Britain but it was in Ireland. Although Ireland had been a part of the United Kingdom since 1801, the British government still regarded it as a colony, not an equal partner entitled to a share of the national wealth in time of need. Even though Ireland contained over a quarter of the United Kingdom’s population, government spending on famine relief never exceeded a derisory 0.3 per cent of the gross national product. No wonder, then, that the memory of the famine brought a new and lasting bitterness to Anglo-Irish relations. However, that was for the future: the immediate reaction of its victims was to interpret the famine in religious terms. There had been such good harvests in the preceding years that large quantities of surplus potatoes had simply been dumped and left to rot. The blight w’as God’s punishment on a wasteful people.
World History
