Great Potato Famine in Ireland

This series has three easy 5-minute installments. This first installment: What Went Wrong.

Introduction
This is the stories of one of the greatest tragedies (on a per capita basis) in human history.

From the fact that its immediate cause was the almost complete failure of the potato crop, due to the rot, the great Irish famine is known as the “potato famine.” The crop that suffered so was that of 1845, and the famine began in the following year and reached its climax in 1847. It is estimated that by this calamity two hundred thousand persons perished. Many compensating features in connection with this appalling distress have been pointed out. Some writers friendly toward Ireland have declared that the famine proved one of the greatest blessings to the country; that it hastened free trade, better drainage of the island, and the passage of the Land Improvement Act; that it relieved the overcrowded labor market, led to more scientific farming, and in other ways produced changes that have been of lasting benefit. But though all this be true, the misfortune itself gave to modern history one of its most harrowing chapters.

The population of Ireland in 1845 is supposed to have been nearly nine millions. The manufactures were small, and the people depended on the potato crop, and had no other resource in time of scarcity. For several years the potato yield had been abundant, the country was comparatively prosperous, and the temperance movement led by Father Mathew promised a happier future. A great harvest was expected in 1845, but almost at a single stroke this expectation was blasted; for although the crop was large the greater part of it was destroyed in the ground, and the potatoes that were gathered “rotted in pit and storehouse.” The farmers taxed all their means and energies to secure even a larger crop in 1846, but the blight of that year was even more fatal than the last. To pinching want was added discouragement, and the people sat in the shadow of a frightful catastrophe. In vain the British Government was called upon to give relief through Parliament, until, in the autumn of 1846, parliamentary authority was obtained to grant baronial loans. But these and every local endeavor to mitigate the suffering failed and the destructive work of the famine continued, the number of victims increasing, to the end of that fatal year. The horrors of 1846 were more than equaled by those of the year that followed, and the woeful picture presented by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, the distinguished Irish patriot, statesman, and historian, is but too amply justified by the accepted records of the time.

This selection is from Four Years of Irish History by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy published in 1883. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Sir Charles Gavan Duffy (1816-1903) was an Irish writer and editor of The Nation magazine. Emigrating to Australia, he became Australia’s Prime Minister.

Time: 1847

The condition of Ireland at the opening of the year 1847 is one of the most painful chapters in the annals of mankind. An industrious and hospitable race were in the pangs of a devouring famine. Deaths of individuals, of husband and wife, of entire families, were becoming common. The potato-blight had spread from the Atlantic to the Caspian; but there was more suffering in one parish of Mayo than in all the rest of Europe. From Connaught, where distress was greatest, came batches of inquests with the horrible verdict “died of starvation.” In some instances, the victims were buried “wrapped in a coarse coverlet,” a coffin being too costly a luxury. The living awaited death with a listlessness that was at once tragic and revolting. Women with dead children in their arms were seen begging for a coffin to bury them.

Béranger has touched a thousand hearts by the picture of Pauvre Jacques, who, when the tax-gatherer came in the King’s name, was discovered dead on his miserable pallet. But at Skibbereen, in the fruitful County Cork whose seaports were thronged with vessels laden with corn, cattle, and butter for England, the rate collector told a more tragic tale. Some houses he found deserted; the owners had been carried to their graves. In one cabin there was no other occupant than three corpses; in a once prosperous home a woman and her children had lain dead and unburied for a week; in the fields a man was discovered so fearfully mangled by dogs that identification was impossible. The relief committee of the Society of Friends described the state of the town in language which it was hard to read with dry eyes. The people were dying of the unaccustomed food which mocked their prayer for daily bread and were carried to the graveyard in a coffin from which the benevolent strangers who had come to their relief had to drop them, like dead dogs, that there might be a covering for the next corpse in its turn.

This place is one mass of famine, disease, and death. The poor creatures, hitherto trying to exist on one meal a day, are now sinking under fever and bowel complaints, unable to come for their soup, which is not fit for them. Rice is what their whole cry is for, but we cannot manage this well, nor can we get the food carried to the houses, from dread of infection. I have got a coffin constructed with movable sides, to convey the bodies to the churchyard, in calico bags prepared, in which the remains are wrapped up. I have just sent it to bring the remains of a poor creature to the grave, who having been turned out of the only shelter she had, a miserable hut, perished the night before last in a quarry.”

The people saw the harvest they had reared carried away to another country without an effort, for the most part, to retain it. The sole food of the distressed class was Indian-meal, which had paid freight and storage in England, and had been obtained in exchange for English manufactures. Under a recent law a peasant who accepted public relief forfeited his holding, and thousands were ejected under this cruel provision. But landowners were not content with one process alone; they closed on the people with ejectments, turned them out on the roads, and plucked down their rooftrees. In more than one county rents falling due in November for land that no longer yielded food to the cultivator, were enforced in January. In the southwest the peasantry had made some frantic efforts to clutch their harvest and to retaliate for their sufferings in blind vengeance, but the law carried a sharp sword. Eight counties, or parts of counties, were proclaimed, and a special commission, after a brief sitting in Clare and Limerick, left eleven peasants for the gallows. Chief Justice Blackburn took occasion to note that “The state of things in 1847 was exactly that described by an act passed in 1776.” The disease was permanent, so were the symptoms. One well-head of Irish discontent was English prejudice, which refuses to listen to any complaint till it threatens to become dangerous.

It was a fearful time for men who loved their country, not only with deep affection, but with a wise and forecasting interest. A revolution of the worst type was in progress. Not the present alone, but the future, was being laid waste. The marvelous reform accomplished by Father Mathew, the self-reliance which had grown up in the era of monster meetings, and the moral teachings of Davis and his friends were being fast swallowed up by this calamity. The youth and manhood of the middle classes were scrambling for pauper places from the Board of Works, and the peasants were being transformed into mendicants by process of law. These calamities, related of a distant and savage tribe, would move a generous heart; but seeing them befall our own people, the children of the same mother, and foreseeing all the black, unfathomable misery they foreshadowed, it was hard to preserve the sober rule of reason.

The gentry, who were responsible in the first place for the protection of the people from whom they drew their income, insisted that the calamity was an imperial one and ought to be borne out of the exchequer of the empire. It was an equitable claim. If there was no irresistible title of brotherhood, at lowest the stronger nation had snatched away from the weaker the power of helping itself, and still drew away during this terrible era half a million pounds every month in the shape of absentee rents. The demand was put aside contemptuously. The claim of the Nationalists to reënter on the management of their own affairs, since it was plain England could not manage them successfully, was treated as sedition. We were proffered, instead of our own resources, which were ample —

Alms from scornful hands, to hands in chains,
Bitterer to taste than death.”

All the nations of the earth were appealed to and they gave generously but the result was far from being proportionate to the need. During the year 1846 the contributions fell short of two thousand pounds a week. And it was not forgotten that after the great fire of London, when the citizens were in deep distress, the Irish contributed twenty thousand fat cattle for their relief, which at their present value would amount to a sum greater than England and Europe sent to the aid of Ireland in 1846.

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