A Short History of Ireland, 1500-2000 by John Gibney

Author:John Gibney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

Famine

There had been periods of dearth due to poor potato harvests in the 1820s and 1830s. But the failure of the 1840s was on a different scale. The collapse in the potato crop was catastrophic. In 1845, 2.4 million acres were devoted to growing potatoes in Ireland; by 1847, thanks to the ravages of the blight, that number had collapsed to 284,000 acres. In 1845 perhaps a third to a fourth of the crop failed, prompting emergency relief measures by the Tory government of Sir Robert Peel, who, to circumvent the protectionist Corn Laws that restricted cereal imports to the United Kingdom, ordered the surreptitious purchase of maize in North America and the opening of food depots along the west coast of Ireland. But the partial failure of 1845 was followed by a complete failure in 1846, as the spores of the fungus were washed into the ground in the course of a wet winter, to reemerge the following year. This major crop failure saw the first reports of fatalities, and relief works began; the 130 workhouses established under the Poor Law of 1838 were under pressure by the end of the year. The workhouse system was infused with a moralistic purpose: the strictly regimented rules to be found within their walls were intended to deter all but the most genuinely destitute. But these, and such public institutions as existed (such as dispensaries), were never designed to cope with a crisis of the kind they now faced.

Unrest manifested itself from an early stage. A particular source of anger was the continued export of cash crops in the early years of the famine, which prompted food riots in coastal towns and cities; by the end of the crisis, the British garrison in Ireland had nearly doubled in size, from 15,000 troops in 1843 to 29,500 in 1849. Strikingly, more money was spent on security throughout the period of the famine, £14 million, than on famine relief: £9.5 million. Yet even as official coercion was readily deployed, government relief measures did have an impact: by the end of 1847, seven hundred thousand people were employed on public works, with soup kitchens feeding huge numbers between January and October 1847. But in 1847 the burden of relief was shifted onto the Irish Poor Law under the new Whig-Liberal government of Sir John Russell. Irish resources were to pay for what was deemed to be an Irish problem, despite the fact that Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom, and public works were to justify the administration of relief. There were limits to official charity, and despite the obvious effectiveness of the soup kitchens, they were phased out. Senior treasury officials such as Charles Trevelyan articulated a myopic vision that the famine was the unavoidable consequence of various Irish social evils, which needed urgently to be reformed; in this reading, the famine was a symptom rather than a cause, and offered an opportunity for remoulding Irish society. The view of the British government

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