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| The Great Famine |
“[The famine is an] effective mechanism for reducing surplus population [as well as] the judgement of God… 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.”
Charles Trevelyan, letter to Lord Monteagle of Brandon
Trevelyan's repugnant words, typical of English upper-class thinking of the time, illustrates just how much religion played in the response to the Irish Potato Famine, just as it had played a major part in setting the conditions for it to happen in the first place. Although the anti-Catholic Penal Laws begun by Cromwell and later extended, had been repealed, the repeal was too recent to have altered the distribution of land which was still heavily tilted in favour of Protestants, who were the main landlords, especially in the south and west of the island, and Catholics owned little or none of it.
I explain this in detail in my popular book A History of Ireland: How Religion Poisoned Everything:
Famine.
One event that perhaps stands out more than any other in the long tale of the Irish Gaelic suffering and humiliation, was the Great Famine of 1845-9. It has had a lasting influence on Irish Catholic psychology. Its impact has been likened to that of the Holocaust on the Jews. It is seen, rightly or wrongly, as a form of genocide perpetrated by the English on the Irish. The important thing, as with the 1642 massacre of Protestants at Porterdown Bridge, is not what actually happened, but what is believed to have happened.
Why the poor Irish peasantry had become so dependent on the potato as sometimes the only food is complex.
Most of Ireland was remote and poorly served by roads. Most Catholic families lived miserably poor lives subsisting on land for which they paid an extortionately high rent. Few of them owned any land at all. The only way they could feed themselves was to pay the rent in order to keep enough land on which to grow food. Any cereal crops they grew just about paid the rent and so they concentrated their efforts into growing the only plant that could provide enough on the small patch they had left. The potato was the only plant that could provide anything like enough, so it became the staple, and for many families, the only food.
Coupled with this was a huge population increase in common with the rest of Europe, almost doubling from four and a half million in 1800 to eight million by 1841. Population pressure resulted in more and more people living on smaller and smaller patches of land and concentrating more and more on the potato. The poorest had to hire out their labour, not for wages but for a small plot of land. With hindsight, disaster was inevitable should the potato crop fail.
In fact, it did not need hindsight. The government was aware of the consequences, there having been a famine with thousands dead in 1817.
In 1845, it happened. On 20 August 1845, the Freeman’s Journal reported:
DISEASE IN THE POTATO CROP We regret to have to state that we have had communications from more than one well-informed correspondent announcing the fact of what is called ‘cholera’ in potatoes in Ireland, especially in the North. In one instance the party has been digging potatoes – the finest he had ever seen – from a particular field, and a particular ridge of that field up to Monday last; and on digging in the same field on Tuesday he found the tubers all blasted, and unfit for the use of man or beast.
Potato blight had struck.
By the middle of October, there were extensive reports of potato crop failures and they were most widespread in the west. By February 1846, three quarters of the potato crop had been lost, there were outbreaks of typhus in Cork and Kilkenny and, by March, it had been recorded in twenty-five of the thirty-two counties.
The story of the potato famine is a story of a third religion; the religion of supply and demand economics. Almost unshakeable economic beliefs were held by the political classes of the day including a belief that the law of supply and demand was God-given and inviolate. Interference with market forces would endanger the flow of trade and would bring economic ruin. Foremost amongst the disciples of this creed was a Treasury civil servant by the name of Charles Trevelyan, Permanent Head of the Treasury. He was considered the best person to go to Ireland to manage the situation and the solution, naturally, was to be rigorously enforced supply and demand economics. At the height of the famine, Trevelyan wrote to Lord Monteagle of Brandon:
“[The famine is an] effective mechanism for reducing surplus population [as well as] the judgement of God… 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.”
You can read more about how religion pervades Irish History and has rarely been a force for good, rather it has usually been a forces for the sort of division, distrust, violence and barbarism that now characterises parts of the Middle East, and formerly, the post-Yugoslavian Balkans.
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