In 1845, there were 8.2 million people living in Ireland. 40% were tenant farmers who relied on the only crop that produced enough to feed their families on their small holdings, the non-native potato. In the summer of that year, one third to one half the potato crop was struck by a fungus, Phytophthora Infestans, which makes the potato inedible.
The following year, 1846, almost the entire crop failed. The crop in 1847 survived but was only a quarter of its usual size, and there was almost total failure in 1848 and 1849.
During these five years, over a million, possibly 1.5 million, people in Ireland starved to death or died of famine-related diseases, including typhus and cholera. Another million emigrated to the United States and to Canada.
How did this happen? And what part could economic theory have played in it?
In 1849 about 500 starving people were forced to walk 15 miles in winter through Doo Lough Pass, County Mayo, in order to verify they really needed aid and weren't welfare cheats. Over 100 died en route and were later buried where they fell. They didn't get their aid.
Most of the Irish peasants were Catholic, unlike their landlords. These were English and Anglo Irish people, many of whom had not grown up on and rarely visited their estates. Those estates produced wheat, oats, barley, cattle, sheep and pigs, like most European countries. For their own subsistence, though, most of the peasants grew just the one crop, potatoes, which would feed them and allow them to make rent.
As of 1840, there were 300,000 farmers with five acre plots, some of them informally subdivided further, and one million laborers with an acre or less.
The landlords who had gotten their vast estates via confiscation during one or another punitive English incursion didn't know the tenants from whose ancestors their lands had been taken. The estates were managed by agents. Some landlords also rented out swaths of their estate to middlemen, who in turn rented small holdings to tenants. The agents and middlemen had virtually unlimited power; except in Ulster, tenants could be evicted for any or for no reason.
Ireland (all one entity, back then) was a wholly owned subsidiary of England. There were elected Irish representatives in the House of Commons, but there was no self government. Queen Victoria was on the throne. When the Famine struck, the country was at peace. It was ostensibly an organic part of the British Isles, the superpower of superpowers, with no shortage of food elsewhere. There were no administrative obstacles to relief except in a few remote areas, and the empire bred superb administrators. There were only two obstacles to solving the crisis, but they were enormous: the devotion of the English ruling class to laissez fare capitalism and the contempt of the English ruling class for the Irish.
The Conservative government in place in 1845 and 1846, headed by Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, did make some efforts when the Famine began. On his own, Peel imported 100,000 pounds of corn from the United States without even telling his cabinet. Unfortunately, the Irish mills weren't equipped to handle it, so they had to be reengineered, and then Pell insisted on selling it (though at below market price), rather than distributing it, because direct distribution would have affected commerce and violated the gospel of the marketplace, and this was a population that relied primarily on barter and therefore didn’t have cash, but it was an effort at least. Peel’s government’s primary goal at the time was to repeal the Corn Laws, protective tariffs, and allow food to be imported freely, not that this meant a lot to the starving Irish, whose problem was the means to buy food. He did manage to repeal the Corm Laws, but his government fell, and was replaced in June 1846 by the Whig (Liberal) government of Lord John Russell, even more deeply imbued with the idea of the divine right of the marketplace. At that point primary responsibility for addressing the Famine fell to Sir Charles Trevelyan as Treasury Undersecretary to Ireland.
Relief should be made so unattractive as to furnish no motive to ask for it, except in the absence of every other means of subsistence. Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis, p. 187
Trevelyan closed the food depots that had distributed Pell’s corn, and turned back a second shipload of corn en route. This was in order to keep the Irish from becoming “habitually dependent” on the British government.
By September [1846], starvation struck in the west and southwest where the people had been entirely dependent on the potato. British Coastguard Inspector-General, Sir James Dombrain, upon encountering starving paupers, ordered his subordinates to give free food handouts. For his efforts, Dombrain was publicly rebuked by Trevelyan. The proper procedure, he was informed, would have been to encourage the Irish to form a local relief committee so that Irish funds could have been raised to provide the food.
Sound familar?
An Irish artist was asked to tour the countryside and describe what he saw for the Illustrated London News:
We next reached Skibbereen... We first proceeded to Bridgetown...and there I saw the dying, the living, and the dead, lying indiscriminately upon the same floor, without anything between them and the cold earth, save a few miserable rags upon them. To point to any particular house as a proof of this would be a waste of time, as all were in the same state; and, not a single house out of 500 could boast of being free from death and fever, though several could be pointed out with the dead lying close to the living for the space of three or four, even six days, without any effort being made to remove the bodies to a last resting place.
Trevelyan and his colleagues deprecated the sharecropping customs of the Irish, and blamed these on both the peasants, who were starving, and the landlords, who weren’t. How much better, the British thought, if the peasants were to throw off their connection to the land and become happy wage earners on the great estates. That this had not happened (well, there were landless laborers on the great estates, but most were not wage earners, so they were starving too) seemed to them to be due to the innate inferiority of the Irish people.
The British established soup kitchens from March to September 1847. These fed three million people in July 1847. But they closed them, again out of fear that they would make the Irish too dependent and/or damage commerce. Charitable organizations like the Quakers tried to fill the gap, but of course they could not. The government also provided short lived public works programs, which did not pay enough to allow the workers to buy food, especially because the invisible hand of the marketplace was speculating on food prices like mad. Furthermore, people employed in the public work projects were paid depending upon how much they produced, which penalized the elderly, the sick, and -- oh, yes -- the starving.
During an earlier famine in 1700s, exports of food from Ireland had been suspended, but because it would have violated the laissez faire doctrine of the Victorian era to restrict exports, the government would not consider it now, even though experts advised them to. Trevelyan wrote:
The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. …The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people,
So the British allowed the wealthy landowners to export food from Ireland throughout the Famine. Not potatoes, but the cash crops -- wheat and other crops as well as meat. Even had food not been exported, there might not have been enough to go around in 1846. But after that, with more food being imported to Ireland, there was enough food that no one needed to starve, had food produced in Ireland been used to feed the Irish.
In 1847, 4000 boatloads of wheat, oats, barley, almost a million gallons of butter, peas, and beans were shipped from Ireland to Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London. People tried sometimes to take possession of shipments. But the British were less laissez faire about self-help measures than about commerce, and sent in ample troops to protect shipments.
After two years, Trevelyan wrote in 1847:
It is my opinion that too much has been done for the people [of Ireland]. Under such treatment the people have grown worse instead of better, and we must now try what independent exertion, and the operation of natural causes, can do.... I shall rest after two years of such continuous hard work in public service, as I have never had in my life."
Then, having vacationed in France, he added: "[The] problem of Irish overpopulation being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure had been supplied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence."
Between 1845 and 1850, about half a million tenants were
forcibly evicted from their holdings by middleman or the landlord's bailiffs, with soldiers available to put down resistance. The tenant's cottage would then be burned and levelled. Over 200,000 small holdings were obliterated during this time. Evictions increased as the famine dragged on, because the landlords, facing reduced income and more taxes (imposed to address the Famine, because Ireland had to buy its own way out of it) turned to raising more cattle and sheep.
Karl Marx said “1,023,694 Irishmen have been replaced with about one million cattle, pigs and sheep. What has become of them? The emigration list answers.”
The British government defended the right of the landowners to evict tenants under any circumstances.
When there was widespread criticism in the newspaper over the evictions, Lord Broughman made a speech on March 23rd, 1846 in the House of Lords. He said:
"Undoubtedly it is the landlord's right to do as he pleases, and if he abstained he conferred a favor and was doing an act of kindness. If, on the other hand, he choose to stand on his right, the tenants must be taught by the strong arm of the law that they had no power to oppose or resist...property would be valueless and capital would no longer be invested in cultivation of the land if it were not acknowledged that it was the landlord's undoubted and most sacred right to deal with his property as he wished."
Even when tenants were evicted in the dead of winter and died of exposure, the British Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, "rejected the notion that house-destroying landlords were open to any criminal proceedings on the part of the government."
British Parliament passed a law reducing the notice given to people before they were evicted to 48 hours. The law also made it a misdemeanor to demolish a dwelling while the tenants were inside. As a grand gesture of goodwill, the law prohibited evictions on Christmas day and Good Friday.
Dennis Clark, author of
Erin's Heirs and The Irish in Philadelphia, wrote that the British government's insistence on "the absolute rights of landlords" to evict farmers and their families so they could raise cattle and sheep, was "a process as close to 'ethnic cleansing' as any Balkan war ever enacted."
The million people who emigrated faced another hell. Many of the "coffin ships" that carried them were operated by unscrupulous shipowners and were rife with illness and starvation, with mortality rates as high as 30%. The eerie National Famine Monument at Murrisk, County Mayo is a coffin ship rigged with skeletons:
Of course, then as with disasters now, there were private individuals, including some landlords, and organizations like the Quakers that did their best to help. Irish Americans raised and sent at least $300,000. And as you'd expect, Queen Victoria herself chipped in. She gave 2000 pounds – very generous of her, as her private fortune at her death was estimated to be $100 million, in 1901 dollars. She even visited Ireland in 1849, under very tight security. It was a non-State visit, so Dublin Castle footed the bill. One banquet alone cost 5000 pounds. On that visit, her only public reference to the Famine was, “I gladly share with you the hope that the heavy visitation, with which Providence has recently visited large numbers of my people in this country, is passing away.” Providence, what a bastard.
The British historian Charles Kingsley, who accompanied the Queen on her visit, wrote to his wife:
I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that 100 miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault. I believe that there are not only many more of them than of old [!], but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much.
This story is so horrible, and has so many grim echoes today, that I have to add two stories of great generosity.
In 1847, a group of Choctaw Indians in Oklahoma, only 16 years after they themselves endured the Trail of Tears, collected and sent $170 for famine relief. In 1995, Mary Robinson, then President of Ireland, visited the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma to thank them. She was made an honorary member of the Choctaw tribe.
And the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Khaleefah Abdul-Majid, decided to send 10,000 pounds for famine relief. I can hardly believe this, but the British Ambassador asked if he would be so kind as to reduce the amount so as not to embarrass Queen Victoria, because she was only giving 2000 pounds. The Sultan acquiesced, and sent the upper limit of 1000 pounds. But the story has it that he then secretly sent three ships loaded with food to Ireland. hey were not admitted to the the port of Dublin, so they proceeded to Drogheda, County Mayo, where the famine was especially severe, and were left for the people there to unload. Whether he did or didn’t is a hotly contested question, but Mary Robinson believes it, and the people of Drogheda have told the story since the Famine, and there's some new evidence to support it, and they’re making a movie about it with Sean Bean and Colin Farrell, and that’s good enough for me.
And speaking of the visual arts, in January, a British television station has commissioned a sitcom, to be called "Hungry," about the Famine. I know I can't wait.