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Neo-liberalism, non-interference and laissez-faire in the Great Irish Famine
In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith argued that markets are governed by an ‘invisible hand’ and thus should be subject to minimal government interference, to allow said free markets to facilitate sustained economic growth. Letting the free market be king, queen and government is all very well and good when all things are equal, but when things are not equal, as in Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine, Smith’s subsequent army of fans would become criminally negligent. His line of thinking started a thread that would eventually take on the ideological shape of laissez-faire in the nineteenth century, evolving into neo-liberalism in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Smith started that trend of a world where every action of every person is a competitive market transaction, and each action has a domino effect across an increasingly complex web of global activity. Today, it’s called neo-liberalism; you could describe neo-liberalism as laissez-faire on speed.
Whichever name you prefer then – old style laissez-faire or the more modern neo-liberalism, both permutations have been responsible for encouraging minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs, the Republican party’s fear of big government in the United States being one example, Brexit supporters being another. I’ll always remember one of my history teachers in school describing laissez-faire as the lazy solution for a government – just sit back and let markets do what markets do, even if it means letting the house fall down around you. From nineteenth century Ireland’s perspective then, the flawed reasoning of the well fed, well dressed, well off supporters of lazy laissez faire was at its most egregious when they saw it as a way of counteracting the system of (in their arrogant opinion) ‘easy existence’ in Ireland. And of course, devious people will always jump on words and terminology to strengthen their case. For example, upright public opinion was only too happy to equate ‘lazy beds’ with lazy people. Lazy bed was a most unfortunate description for a method of growing potatoes that needed little intervention. And wasn’t it interesting that the lazy laissez faire system of governing championed no intervention, even in the face of mass starvation.
Sixty-nine years after the publication of The Wealth of Nations, Ireland was a colony in the shadow of the more powerful coloniser, threatening that superior neighbour, in its own twisted interpretation, with an influx of degenerates who would have a deleterious impact on the moral fibre of the English labouring classes; it would seem that those tenders of lazy beds were too close for comfort. In the intervening years, up to this very day, waves of refugee crises across the globe have evoked similar responses from so-called concerned citizens. Who’d have guessed that Ireland was part of, as Dr Declan Kiberd reminds us in the 2017 documentary, Ireland’s Great Hunger, the most successful political and social entity in the world at that time. While Ireland descended into a living hell, Prince Albert indulged his hobby and Crystal Palace was being constructed in readiness for the Great Exhibition in London.
But being part of the largest and richest empire in the world did not cut the mustard if you were Irish. When famine struck in 1845, Ireland was the poor neighbour who just did not have the resources to stand up against such a battering. You could say that we did not have the ‘comfort blanket’ that other European countries, also struck by the potato blight, had. But how did Ireland reach that point?
In 1800, the population of Ireland was five million. In 1821 it was six and a half million, and by 1841 it had risen to over eight million. Just how did this phenomenal population rise occur? The eighteenth century was relatively peaceful, notwithstanding the Penal Laws. Granted, it did end in disaster with the 1798 Rebellion and the Act of Union. A largely peaceful eighteenth century then, meant that people were not being killed and crops were not being destroyed. More importantly though, Irish people were, for the first time, assured of a regular and dependable source of food, by changing over to a potato diet. This was a perfectly balanced diet when supplemented with milk and fish. Furthermore, a very large crop of potatoes could be grown on a very small patch of ground unlike grain, which needed a lot more acreage.
In a 1995 History Ireland magazine article Beyond Revisionism: reassessing the Great Irish Famine, Professor Christine Kinealy paints an Ireland that did not look ready for such a tragic fall. The land of Ireland was feeding its inhabitants as well as its neighbours, albeit in different ways. 1995 marked the 150th anniversary of the first appearance of potato blight in Ireland. Kinealy says:
By the 1840s, apart from growing sufficient potatoes to feed over five million people, and large numbers of farm animals and fowl, Ireland was also growing large quantities of grain, and by the 1840s was exporting sufficient grain to Britain to feed approximately two million people.
Many European countries were a lot worse off than Ireland, so what went wrong? Remember that most of the landed aristocracy in Ireland were very concerned about their image in comparison to their peers in England. Most of them wanted to live a life of equal opulence and to this end all they cared about was having enough money to maintain a lifestyle that matched the grandeur of their fellow landed gentry across the Irish Sea. In the main, these landlords did not concern themselves with expenditure on farm improvements, or philanthropic measures that would benefit their Irish tenants. Another category of landlord described by Tim Pat Coogan in The Famine Plot were the ‘chinless wonders’ who were completely ineffectual and cowered behind their high walls. So, most Irish landlords were living beyond their means (Charlie Haughey would not have approved, would he?) and incapable of running their estates.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries then, great strides were being made in the Agricultural Revolution in England, while Ireland’s farmlands and tenants languished in a kind of disgraceful time warp. These shortcomings might eventually have been noticed and addressed if it wasn’t for the distraction of the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815). Indeed, Professor Roy Foster would regard 1815 and not 1846 as being a watershed in nineteenth century Irish history, changing as it did, our agri-economics and rural landscape. As war dragged on the price of grain rose and more and more Irish pasture land was commandeered for growing grain to feed the soldiers. Interestingly, this shift from pastoral to tillage farming created a demand for more labour. This situation could have been exploited by tenant farmers and labourers, but the population was increasing so rapidly that available land was becoming more and more scarce. In The Course of Irish History E.R.R. Green paints a rural idyll:
Wartime emphasis on tillage completed the triumph of the potato. It enabled the farmer to produce grain purely as a cash crop and incidentally to offer a higher rent. Nor did he need money to pay labourers; they were satisfied with a patch of ground on which to grow potatoes. Those who were fortunate enough to possess sizeable leaseholds set up as landlords themselves by creating under-tenancies. Fathers subdivided their holdings to provide for sons. Landless men reclaimed the mountain and the bog and colonised them.
Not quite an idyll perhaps, but more of a pragmatic management of the prevailing economic climate by anybody who could – possibly just like those who could buy multiple properties and rent them out in late twentieth and early twenty-first century Ireland.
And yet the signs were there. By the 1830’s milk and fish consumption was becoming very rare among the very poor. To compound this deterioration in diet, poorer quality but higher yielding ‘cup’ and ‘lumper’ potatoes were replacing less prolific but higher quality ‘apple’ and ‘minion’ potatoes. Unlike grain, the potato could not be stored for lengthy periods, meaning the poor had no store cupboard for emergencies, especially because they could not afford to buy grain for their own consumption. A potential failure of the potato crop was by this stage a ticking time bomb, and one for which, because of its potential enormity, nobody in Ireland or England was prepared for. Ireland had already experienced a catastrophic potato famine in 1740-41 and fourteen partial or complete potato famines between 1816 and 1842. The new fungal disease – phytophthora infestans – that struck in the autumn of 1845 – would prove to be the most catastrophic of all. E. R. R. Green treats the onset of famine as a complete surprise. “The disaster when it came was more sudden and complete than anyone could have imagined,” he says. To put it bluntly, the population of Ireland was vast and impoverished and the only thing keeping it alive was the potato. The famous social reformer, abolitionist, anti-slavery orator and writer, Frederick Douglas, who had himself escaped slavery in Maryland was horrified by the scenes of poverty he witnessed on arrival in Cork in 1845. “I see much here to remind me of my former condition,” he wrote. On this trip Douglas would meet Daniel O’Connell, who strongly opposed slavery, and they jointly delivered speeches at an anti-slavery rally.
In September of 1845 blight was first spotted in Wexford and Waterford and it spread rapidly over half the country. The government soon realised that more food was needed from somewhere to make up the shortfall. British Prime Minister, Robert Peel had two options. The first was to stop exports. But the landlords of Leinster, many of whom cultivated grain, and often sold to the large markets in Britain, would not countenance this. The other solution was to import more food. But how would this be done? A key Tory policy was the Corn Laws, which protected local farmers by banning cheap foreign, imports of food. Despite incurring the wrath of his party and losing the next general election as a result, Peel made the decision to repeal the Corn Laws. In November 1845, £105,000 worth of maize was imported from the United States and £46,000 worth was imported from Britain; enough to feed one million people for one month although not many people were yet starving in 1845. While many have interpreted this as an altruistic move by Peel, Christine Kinealy, in her excellent book about the Irish Famine, This Great Calamity, believes otherwise:
Peel’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws, therefore, was not prompted by a ‘famine’. Was it rather the response of an opportunist and pragmatic politician who, for a number of years, had been moving closer to a policy of free trade in corn and not, as had frequently been implied, an act of political suicide largely motivated by a desire to alleviate the situation in Ireland?
Incredibly, food continued to be exported from Ireland throughout the Famine, mainly for fear of violent reactions from the farmer classes. Our school history books told us that nobody would have died from starvation if the government had prevented these exports; but from 1847 Ireland was importing five times as much grain as she was exporting, so, would that exported grain if kept at home and added to the imported grain have saved lives? Maybe only some sophisticated statistical formula can answer that. Relief works were set up to provide employment, as it was proposed to sell food rather than give it away. At their peak, schemes to build roads, harbours and piers gave work to about 140,000 people.
Ciarán Ó Murchadha in his book The Great Famine: Ireland’s Agony, wryly observes that ‘Robert Peel’s reputation in Ireland was saved by the misdeeds of his successors,’ those successors being a Whig government under Lord John Russell; not good for Ireland because the Whigs supported laissez faire, believing that government interference with economic laws was futile. The Whigs would continue the damage the Tories had started. This change of government (and thinking) suited permanent head of the treasury and laissez faire aficionado, Charles Trevelyan, dubbed the “Victorian Cromwell” who had been in charge of relief measures after the first potato crop failure in 1845. With an ineffectual Prime Minister - Lord John Russell and an ineffectual Chancellor of the Exchequer - Sir Charles Wood, Trevelyan pulled all the necessary strings in cabinet when it came to managing the famine. Now, under the Whigs, it was agreed that if the potato crop failed a second time the government would not buy food for distribution but would leave the supply of food exclusively to private enterprise. The second failure came in 1846, and this time it was a complete failure. Relief was to be limited to public works paid for entirely by local rates – previously half the cost had been met by the government. The real purpose of this move was to force the Irish landlords to bear the cost, but the whole burden fell on the Irish board of works.
Not all work schemes were noble, and many could accurately be described as roads to nowhere being built by people too weak to work. Eavan Boland’s poem, The Famine Road captures the arrogance of the supporters of relief work and the pointlessness of it for the people. But true to the doctrine a laissez faire these ‘roads of hunger’ are explained by Tim Pat Coogan in his book The Famine Plot:
These roads could be taken as a metaphor for the entire famine relief approach. The roads led nowhere except to bogs or rocky plateaus constructed not with a view to developing infrastructure but to avoid interfering with private enterprise.
It is worth noting that Indian corn was not unfamiliar to the Irish as many of us were led to believe in school when we were taught about "Peel's brimestone". It had been imported in considerable quantities over the previous fifty years as a stop-gap food in times of famine. By the time of the second potato crop failure in 1846 it was badly needed. The Illustrated London News of April 4th, 1846 reported on the government sale of Indian corn at Cork:
On Saturday last, the Government Sales of Indian Corn and Meal commenced in Cork. Immediately on the depôts being opened, the crowds of poor persons who gathered round them were so turbulently inclined as to require the immediate interference of the police, who remained there throughout the day. Among the poor, who were of the humblest description, and needing charitable relief, the sales were but scanty. The occasion had become of necessity; for potatoes have risen to 11d. market price for 14lbs.; and, some of the leading commercial men in Cork have made a calculation, which shows that the Government can afford to sell the Indian Corn at a much cheaper rate.
The private enterprise approach taken by Trevelyan and the Whigs could not work then and would not work now. Think about the famines in more recent history - Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan over the last thirty years, or Yemen today. Think about the natural disasters in Haiti and the Philippines, not to mention the more recent manmade one in Beirut or the Ebola outbreak in Liberia and surrounding countries. Or more pressingly, consider the Covid-19 world in which we all now exist. If food, shelter, medical relief and mass vaccination development and delivery were left to private enterprise and not to the United Nations and NGOs like MSF, Goal, Concern and Oxfam, the outcomes would be even more catastrophic. The State of Food Insecurity and Nutrition in the World 2017, released by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Program (WFP), and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, reports that the five regions with the highest number of hungry people as a proportion of population are:
Indeed, food insecurity is now emerging as an increasing problem for concern in the developed world. Think about some modern political movements around the world that push for the protection of private enterprise above the general well-being of the population or the role of the public service. There have been enough reincarnations of Trevelyans since 1846 that, if given free rein, would let the life cycle of this kind of food poverty and social injustice play out naturally – a kind of economic ‘herd immunity’ if you will.
The next winter, Black ’47, would be the harshest and longest in living memory. With no food left, people started to panic. Hungry mobs frantically searched for food and queued up to do relief work. Numbers employed in relief work jumped from 30,000 in September 1846 to 500,000 in December 1846. This approach was not working; the board of works was spending approximately £30,000 a day and its employees now numbered over 11,500. It was decided to abandon public works and give direct relief instead. An act was passed to provide for the establishment of soup kitchens for the free distribution of soup. Alexis Soyer, famous chef in the London Reform Club, set up a model kitchen that made soup to the recipe that he devised for the London poor. This excerpt from a Cork Examiner report on February 26, 1847 tells us:
The soup has been served to several of the best judges of the noble art of gastronomy at the Reform Club, not as soup for the poor, but as a soup furnished for the day in the carte. The members who partook of it declared it excellent. Among these may be mentioned Lord Titchfield and Mr. O’Connell. M. Soyer can supply the whole poor of Ireland, at one meal for each person, once a day. He has informed the executive that a bellyfull of his soup, once a day, together with a biscuit, will be more than sufficient to sustain the strength of a strong and healthy man.
But of course, this was all spin and optics. The soup was no replacement for the potato and it would not sustain anyone doing physical labour on public works. By February 1847 the situation had reached its worst. The country was covered in snow and there was a typhus epidemic. People living on raw turnips, raw seaweed, or half-cooked Indian meal succumbed to the fatal bacillary dysentery. Those surviving only on Indian meal lacked vitamin C and contracted scurvy. Hunger oedema (commonly known as famine dropsy) resulted from starvation. People suffering from malnutrition hadn’t a hope of surviving the harsh weather on public works or avoiding infection in soup kitchens or workhouses. Starving people made their way to towns and public works, and more wanted to get out of Ireland altogether. But emigration by sea was limited to spring and summer. Of course, for Trevelyan and his free trade buddies, mass emigration was an ideal solution. It would get rid of small holdings, create larger farms that would practice ‘big farming’ and provide cheap food to England.
The Whig government, who wanted Irish property to pay for Irish poverty, blamed the Irish landlords for the famine and it was determined to make them finance any relief through rates. While some of the more humane landlords paid for their tenants to emigrate, the unfortunate tenants of absentee landlords had nowhere to turn. The burden of tax would become too onerous, even on good landlords, and evictions ensued. Fewer tenants meant bigger farms with bigger fields where cattle could graze. This shift from tillage to livestock was exactly what the Whigs wanted – a source of meat for English industrial workers.
The first significant wave of emigration took place in July and August of 1846 – after the first complete potato crop failure. The first to leave were the poor cottiers and they were soon followed by the small farmers. The notorious ‘coffin ships’ – run by profiteers - old, overcrowded and in disrepair, sailed from the smaller Irish ports. In one week of January 1847 over 130,000 Irish people arrived in Liverpool and had to be given poor relief. By June 1847, 300,000 destitute Irish people had landed in Liverpool. The cheapest way to get to the United States from Liverpool was to sail to Canada, and about 100,000 did this. At least one fifth of them perished from privation and disease on this harsh and indirect route. On hearing this, it is impossible not to think about the current migrant crisis in the world and how so many refugees fleeing from war, famine and persecution are paying exorbitant amounts swindlers and scammers to take to the high seas in overcrowded unseaworthy boats.
How the Whig government did not implicate themselves in the unfolding tragedy was beyond belief. Rather than pony up the readies, many landlords responded by evicting pauper tenants, adding homelessness to hunger. The poor law extension act decreed that relief should not be given outside the workhouse walls; but only to inmates, meaning that the starving and destitute trying to cling on to their last shreds of pride, had some hard and heart-breaking decisions to make. The act placed an intolerable burden on the already overcrowded workhouses. The Gregory Clause compounded the cold economics; if you had one quarter of an acre you could not get relief in the workhouse. The blight returned with full virulence in 1848. More and more people flocked to workhouses and their remains are chilling reminders of local histories all over Ireland. By 1849 the number of people being maintained in workhouses rose to a staggering 932,000. Another Eavan Boland poem, Quarantine, captures the hoplessness of people already more dead than alive, crawling towards that last resort, the workhouse.
The consequences of the famine
First and foremost, we must understand that the famine was a natural disaster like a tsunami or a hurricane or the current locust plague in East Africa. Nobody can be held responsible for the potato blight. But the conditions in Ireland that led people to wholly depend on the potato can be laid at the door of several parties.
In 1845 the population of Ireland was estimated at eight and a half million; in 1851 the population of Ireland was six and a half million. One million perished and one million emigrated. But the most amazing figure to come out of this tragedy relates to agricultural output. Production increased rather than decreased, and the area under cultivation expanded by over one million acres. As the population fell the number of farm holdings fell. Now only fifteen per cent of farms were five acres or less while twenty-six per cent of farms were now over thirty acres, and this change would form the basis of modern Irish agriculture – the family farm of mixed tillage and livestock production with the stock providing the income.
Ireland would no longer be a patchwork quilt of tiny plots – caused by continual subdivision among married children. Henceforth, the family farm was king – intact and undivided. One person inherited the farm while other family members emigrated; mainly to the United States or joined religious orders. National resentment against England’s handling of the famine would take generations to heal. The misery of the famine would be overtaken by hostility between landlord and tenant and this would result in the great land wars of the 1870’s. In June 1997, British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, officially apologised for England’s role in the famine 150 years after the disaster. He blamed ‘those who governed in London.’
N is for neo-liberalism; n is for non-interference. But there was interference when it suited them; when the political interests of John Bull were being threatened. Between 1845 and 1852 the self-belief and arrogance of a British administration that motored through the laissez faire approach resulted in Europe’s greatest nineteenth century population disaster; a legacy their successors can only shudder at.
Berni Dwan 2018
Neo-liberalism, non-interference and laissez-faire in the Great Irish Famine
In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith argued that markets are governed by an ‘invisible hand’ and thus should be subject to minimal government interference, to allow said free markets to facilitate sustained economic growth. Letting the free market be king, queen and government is all very well and good when all things are equal, but when things are not equal, as in Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine, Smith’s subsequent army of fans would become criminally negligent. His line of thinking started a thread that would eventually take on the ideological shape of laissez-faire in the nineteenth century, evolving into neo-liberalism in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Smith started that trend of a world where every action of every person is a competitive market transaction, and each action has a domino effect across an increasingly complex web of global activity. Today, it’s called neo-liberalism; you could describe neo-liberalism as laissez-faire on speed.
Whichever name you prefer then – old style laissez-faire or the more modern neo-liberalism, both permutations have been responsible for encouraging minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs, the Republican party’s fear of big government in the United States being one example, Brexit supporters being another. I’ll always remember one of my history teachers in school describing laissez-faire as the lazy solution for a government – just sit back and let markets do what markets do, even if it means letting the house fall down around you. From nineteenth century Ireland’s perspective then, the flawed reasoning of the well fed, well dressed, well off supporters of lazy laissez faire was at its most egregious when they saw it as a way of counteracting the system of (in their arrogant opinion) ‘easy existence’ in Ireland. And of course, devious people will always jump on words and terminology to strengthen their case. For example, upright public opinion was only too happy to equate ‘lazy beds’ with lazy people. Lazy bed was a most unfortunate description for a method of growing potatoes that needed little intervention. And wasn’t it interesting that the lazy laissez faire system of governing championed no intervention, even in the face of mass starvation.
Sixty-nine years after the publication of The Wealth of Nations, Ireland was a colony in the shadow of the more powerful coloniser, threatening that superior neighbour, in its own twisted interpretation, with an influx of degenerates who would have a deleterious impact on the moral fibre of the English labouring classes; it would seem that those tenders of lazy beds were too close for comfort. In the intervening years, up to this very day, waves of refugee crises across the globe have evoked similar responses from so-called concerned citizens. Who’d have guessed that Ireland was part of, as Dr Declan Kiberd reminds us in the 2017 documentary, Ireland’s Great Hunger, the most successful political and social entity in the world at that time. While Ireland descended into a living hell, Prince Albert indulged his hobby and Crystal Palace was being constructed in readiness for the Great Exhibition in London.
But being part of the largest and richest empire in the world did not cut the mustard if you were Irish. When famine struck in 1845, Ireland was the poor neighbour who just did not have the resources to stand up against such a battering. You could say that we did not have the ‘comfort blanket’ that other European countries, also struck by the potato blight, had. But how did Ireland reach that point?
In 1800, the population of Ireland was five million. In 1821 it was six and a half million, and by 1841 it had risen to over eight million. Just how did this phenomenal population rise occur? The eighteenth century was relatively peaceful, notwithstanding the Penal Laws. Granted, it did end in disaster with the 1798 Rebellion and the Act of Union. A largely peaceful eighteenth century then, meant that people were not being killed and crops were not being destroyed. More importantly though, Irish people were, for the first time, assured of a regular and dependable source of food, by changing over to a potato diet. This was a perfectly balanced diet when supplemented with milk and fish. Furthermore, a very large crop of potatoes could be grown on a very small patch of ground unlike grain, which needed a lot more acreage.
In a 1995 History Ireland magazine article Beyond Revisionism: reassessing the Great Irish Famine, Professor Christine Kinealy paints an Ireland that did not look ready for such a tragic fall. The land of Ireland was feeding its inhabitants as well as its neighbours, albeit in different ways. 1995 marked the 150th anniversary of the first appearance of potato blight in Ireland. Kinealy says:
By the 1840s, apart from growing sufficient potatoes to feed over five million people, and large numbers of farm animals and fowl, Ireland was also growing large quantities of grain, and by the 1840s was exporting sufficient grain to Britain to feed approximately two million people.
Many European countries were a lot worse off than Ireland, so what went wrong? Remember that most of the landed aristocracy in Ireland were very concerned about their image in comparison to their peers in England. Most of them wanted to live a life of equal opulence and to this end all they cared about was having enough money to maintain a lifestyle that matched the grandeur of their fellow landed gentry across the Irish Sea. In the main, these landlords did not concern themselves with expenditure on farm improvements, or philanthropic measures that would benefit their Irish tenants. Another category of landlord described by Tim Pat Coogan in The Famine Plot were the ‘chinless wonders’ who were completely ineffectual and cowered behind their high walls. So, most Irish landlords were living beyond their means (Charlie Haughey would not have approved, would he?) and incapable of running their estates.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries then, great strides were being made in the Agricultural Revolution in England, while Ireland’s farmlands and tenants languished in a kind of disgraceful time warp. These shortcomings might eventually have been noticed and addressed if it wasn’t for the distraction of the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815). Indeed, Professor Roy Foster would regard 1815 and not 1846 as being a watershed in nineteenth century Irish history, changing as it did, our agri-economics and rural landscape. As war dragged on the price of grain rose and more and more Irish pasture land was commandeered for growing grain to feed the soldiers. Interestingly, this shift from pastoral to tillage farming created a demand for more labour. This situation could have been exploited by tenant farmers and labourers, but the population was increasing so rapidly that available land was becoming more and more scarce. In The Course of Irish History E.R.R. Green paints a rural idyll:
Wartime emphasis on tillage completed the triumph of the potato. It enabled the farmer to produce grain purely as a cash crop and incidentally to offer a higher rent. Nor did he need money to pay labourers; they were satisfied with a patch of ground on which to grow potatoes. Those who were fortunate enough to possess sizeable leaseholds set up as landlords themselves by creating under-tenancies. Fathers subdivided their holdings to provide for sons. Landless men reclaimed the mountain and the bog and colonised them.
Not quite an idyll perhaps, but more of a pragmatic management of the prevailing economic climate by anybody who could – possibly just like those who could buy multiple properties and rent them out in late twentieth and early twenty-first century Ireland.
And yet the signs were there. By the 1830’s milk and fish consumption was becoming very rare among the very poor. To compound this deterioration in diet, poorer quality but higher yielding ‘cup’ and ‘lumper’ potatoes were replacing less prolific but higher quality ‘apple’ and ‘minion’ potatoes. Unlike grain, the potato could not be stored for lengthy periods, meaning the poor had no store cupboard for emergencies, especially because they could not afford to buy grain for their own consumption. A potential failure of the potato crop was by this stage a ticking time bomb, and one for which, because of its potential enormity, nobody in Ireland or England was prepared for. Ireland had already experienced a catastrophic potato famine in 1740-41 and fourteen partial or complete potato famines between 1816 and 1842. The new fungal disease – phytophthora infestans – that struck in the autumn of 1845 – would prove to be the most catastrophic of all. E. R. R. Green treats the onset of famine as a complete surprise. “The disaster when it came was more sudden and complete than anyone could have imagined,” he says. To put it bluntly, the population of Ireland was vast and impoverished and the only thing keeping it alive was the potato. The famous social reformer, abolitionist, anti-slavery orator and writer, Frederick Douglas, who had himself escaped slavery in Maryland was horrified by the scenes of poverty he witnessed on arrival in Cork in 1845. “I see much here to remind me of my former condition,” he wrote. On this trip Douglas would meet Daniel O’Connell, who strongly opposed slavery, and they jointly delivered speeches at an anti-slavery rally.
In September of 1845 blight was first spotted in Wexford and Waterford and it spread rapidly over half the country. The government soon realised that more food was needed from somewhere to make up the shortfall. British Prime Minister, Robert Peel had two options. The first was to stop exports. But the landlords of Leinster, many of whom cultivated grain, and often sold to the large markets in Britain, would not countenance this. The other solution was to import more food. But how would this be done? A key Tory policy was the Corn Laws, which protected local farmers by banning cheap foreign, imports of food. Despite incurring the wrath of his party and losing the next general election as a result, Peel made the decision to repeal the Corn Laws. In November 1845, £105,000 worth of maize was imported from the United States and £46,000 worth was imported from Britain; enough to feed one million people for one month although not many people were yet starving in 1845. While many have interpreted this as an altruistic move by Peel, Christine Kinealy, in her excellent book about the Irish Famine, This Great Calamity, believes otherwise:
Peel’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws, therefore, was not prompted by a ‘famine’. Was it rather the response of an opportunist and pragmatic politician who, for a number of years, had been moving closer to a policy of free trade in corn and not, as had frequently been implied, an act of political suicide largely motivated by a desire to alleviate the situation in Ireland?
Incredibly, food continued to be exported from Ireland throughout the Famine, mainly for fear of violent reactions from the farmer classes. Our school history books told us that nobody would have died from starvation if the government had prevented these exports; but from 1847 Ireland was importing five times as much grain as she was exporting, so, would that exported grain if kept at home and added to the imported grain have saved lives? Maybe only some sophisticated statistical formula can answer that. Relief works were set up to provide employment, as it was proposed to sell food rather than give it away. At their peak, schemes to build roads, harbours and piers gave work to about 140,000 people.
Ciarán Ó Murchadha in his book The Great Famine: Ireland’s Agony, wryly observes that ‘Robert Peel’s reputation in Ireland was saved by the misdeeds of his successors,’ those successors being a Whig government under Lord John Russell; not good for Ireland because the Whigs supported laissez faire, believing that government interference with economic laws was futile. The Whigs would continue the damage the Tories had started. This change of government (and thinking) suited permanent head of the treasury and laissez faire aficionado, Charles Trevelyan, dubbed the “Victorian Cromwell” who had been in charge of relief measures after the first potato crop failure in 1845. With an ineffectual Prime Minister - Lord John Russell and an ineffectual Chancellor of the Exchequer - Sir Charles Wood, Trevelyan pulled all the necessary strings in cabinet when it came to managing the famine. Now, under the Whigs, it was agreed that if the potato crop failed a second time the government would not buy food for distribution but would leave the supply of food exclusively to private enterprise. The second failure came in 1846, and this time it was a complete failure. Relief was to be limited to public works paid for entirely by local rates – previously half the cost had been met by the government. The real purpose of this move was to force the Irish landlords to bear the cost, but the whole burden fell on the Irish board of works.
Not all work schemes were noble, and many could accurately be described as roads to nowhere being built by people too weak to work. Eavan Boland’s poem, The Famine Road captures the arrogance of the supporters of relief work and the pointlessness of it for the people. But true to the doctrine a laissez faire these ‘roads of hunger’ are explained by Tim Pat Coogan in his book The Famine Plot:
These roads could be taken as a metaphor for the entire famine relief approach. The roads led nowhere except to bogs or rocky plateaus constructed not with a view to developing infrastructure but to avoid interfering with private enterprise.
It is worth noting that Indian corn was not unfamiliar to the Irish as many of us were led to believe in school when we were taught about "Peel's brimestone". It had been imported in considerable quantities over the previous fifty years as a stop-gap food in times of famine. By the time of the second potato crop failure in 1846 it was badly needed. The Illustrated London News of April 4th, 1846 reported on the government sale of Indian corn at Cork:
On Saturday last, the Government Sales of Indian Corn and Meal commenced in Cork. Immediately on the depôts being opened, the crowds of poor persons who gathered round them were so turbulently inclined as to require the immediate interference of the police, who remained there throughout the day. Among the poor, who were of the humblest description, and needing charitable relief, the sales were but scanty. The occasion had become of necessity; for potatoes have risen to 11d. market price for 14lbs.; and, some of the leading commercial men in Cork have made a calculation, which shows that the Government can afford to sell the Indian Corn at a much cheaper rate.
The private enterprise approach taken by Trevelyan and the Whigs could not work then and would not work now. Think about the famines in more recent history - Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan over the last thirty years, or Yemen today. Think about the natural disasters in Haiti and the Philippines, not to mention the more recent manmade one in Beirut or the Ebola outbreak in Liberia and surrounding countries. Or more pressingly, consider the Covid-19 world in which we all now exist. If food, shelter, medical relief and mass vaccination development and delivery were left to private enterprise and not to the United Nations and NGOs like MSF, Goal, Concern and Oxfam, the outcomes would be even more catastrophic. The State of Food Insecurity and Nutrition in the World 2017, released by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Program (WFP), and the International Fund for Agricultural Development, reports that the five regions with the highest number of hungry people as a proportion of population are:
- Sub-Saharan Africa: 22.7 percent
- Caribbean: 17.7 percent
- Southern Asia: 14.4 percent
- Southeastern Asia: 11.5 percent
- Western Asia: 10.6 percent
Indeed, food insecurity is now emerging as an increasing problem for concern in the developed world. Think about some modern political movements around the world that push for the protection of private enterprise above the general well-being of the population or the role of the public service. There have been enough reincarnations of Trevelyans since 1846 that, if given free rein, would let the life cycle of this kind of food poverty and social injustice play out naturally – a kind of economic ‘herd immunity’ if you will.
The next winter, Black ’47, would be the harshest and longest in living memory. With no food left, people started to panic. Hungry mobs frantically searched for food and queued up to do relief work. Numbers employed in relief work jumped from 30,000 in September 1846 to 500,000 in December 1846. This approach was not working; the board of works was spending approximately £30,000 a day and its employees now numbered over 11,500. It was decided to abandon public works and give direct relief instead. An act was passed to provide for the establishment of soup kitchens for the free distribution of soup. Alexis Soyer, famous chef in the London Reform Club, set up a model kitchen that made soup to the recipe that he devised for the London poor. This excerpt from a Cork Examiner report on February 26, 1847 tells us:
The soup has been served to several of the best judges of the noble art of gastronomy at the Reform Club, not as soup for the poor, but as a soup furnished for the day in the carte. The members who partook of it declared it excellent. Among these may be mentioned Lord Titchfield and Mr. O’Connell. M. Soyer can supply the whole poor of Ireland, at one meal for each person, once a day. He has informed the executive that a bellyfull of his soup, once a day, together with a biscuit, will be more than sufficient to sustain the strength of a strong and healthy man.
But of course, this was all spin and optics. The soup was no replacement for the potato and it would not sustain anyone doing physical labour on public works. By February 1847 the situation had reached its worst. The country was covered in snow and there was a typhus epidemic. People living on raw turnips, raw seaweed, or half-cooked Indian meal succumbed to the fatal bacillary dysentery. Those surviving only on Indian meal lacked vitamin C and contracted scurvy. Hunger oedema (commonly known as famine dropsy) resulted from starvation. People suffering from malnutrition hadn’t a hope of surviving the harsh weather on public works or avoiding infection in soup kitchens or workhouses. Starving people made their way to towns and public works, and more wanted to get out of Ireland altogether. But emigration by sea was limited to spring and summer. Of course, for Trevelyan and his free trade buddies, mass emigration was an ideal solution. It would get rid of small holdings, create larger farms that would practice ‘big farming’ and provide cheap food to England.
The Whig government, who wanted Irish property to pay for Irish poverty, blamed the Irish landlords for the famine and it was determined to make them finance any relief through rates. While some of the more humane landlords paid for their tenants to emigrate, the unfortunate tenants of absentee landlords had nowhere to turn. The burden of tax would become too onerous, even on good landlords, and evictions ensued. Fewer tenants meant bigger farms with bigger fields where cattle could graze. This shift from tillage to livestock was exactly what the Whigs wanted – a source of meat for English industrial workers.
The first significant wave of emigration took place in July and August of 1846 – after the first complete potato crop failure. The first to leave were the poor cottiers and they were soon followed by the small farmers. The notorious ‘coffin ships’ – run by profiteers - old, overcrowded and in disrepair, sailed from the smaller Irish ports. In one week of January 1847 over 130,000 Irish people arrived in Liverpool and had to be given poor relief. By June 1847, 300,000 destitute Irish people had landed in Liverpool. The cheapest way to get to the United States from Liverpool was to sail to Canada, and about 100,000 did this. At least one fifth of them perished from privation and disease on this harsh and indirect route. On hearing this, it is impossible not to think about the current migrant crisis in the world and how so many refugees fleeing from war, famine and persecution are paying exorbitant amounts swindlers and scammers to take to the high seas in overcrowded unseaworthy boats.
How the Whig government did not implicate themselves in the unfolding tragedy was beyond belief. Rather than pony up the readies, many landlords responded by evicting pauper tenants, adding homelessness to hunger. The poor law extension act decreed that relief should not be given outside the workhouse walls; but only to inmates, meaning that the starving and destitute trying to cling on to their last shreds of pride, had some hard and heart-breaking decisions to make. The act placed an intolerable burden on the already overcrowded workhouses. The Gregory Clause compounded the cold economics; if you had one quarter of an acre you could not get relief in the workhouse. The blight returned with full virulence in 1848. More and more people flocked to workhouses and their remains are chilling reminders of local histories all over Ireland. By 1849 the number of people being maintained in workhouses rose to a staggering 932,000. Another Eavan Boland poem, Quarantine, captures the hoplessness of people already more dead than alive, crawling towards that last resort, the workhouse.
The consequences of the famine
First and foremost, we must understand that the famine was a natural disaster like a tsunami or a hurricane or the current locust plague in East Africa. Nobody can be held responsible for the potato blight. But the conditions in Ireland that led people to wholly depend on the potato can be laid at the door of several parties.
In 1845 the population of Ireland was estimated at eight and a half million; in 1851 the population of Ireland was six and a half million. One million perished and one million emigrated. But the most amazing figure to come out of this tragedy relates to agricultural output. Production increased rather than decreased, and the area under cultivation expanded by over one million acres. As the population fell the number of farm holdings fell. Now only fifteen per cent of farms were five acres or less while twenty-six per cent of farms were now over thirty acres, and this change would form the basis of modern Irish agriculture – the family farm of mixed tillage and livestock production with the stock providing the income.
Ireland would no longer be a patchwork quilt of tiny plots – caused by continual subdivision among married children. Henceforth, the family farm was king – intact and undivided. One person inherited the farm while other family members emigrated; mainly to the United States or joined religious orders. National resentment against England’s handling of the famine would take generations to heal. The misery of the famine would be overtaken by hostility between landlord and tenant and this would result in the great land wars of the 1870’s. In June 1997, British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, officially apologised for England’s role in the famine 150 years after the disaster. He blamed ‘those who governed in London.’
N is for neo-liberalism; n is for non-interference. But there was interference when it suited them; when the political interests of John Bull were being threatened. Between 1845 and 1852 the self-belief and arrogance of a British administration that motored through the laissez faire approach resulted in Europe’s greatest nineteenth century population disaster; a legacy their successors can only shudder at.
Berni Dwan 2018
