FAMINE IN IRELAND

The proximate cause of the Great Irish Famine (1846–1852) was the fungus Phythophtera infestans (potato blight), which reached Ireland in the fall of 1845. It destroyed about one-third of that year's crop and nearly all of the crop of 1846. After a season's remission it also ruined the harvest of 1848. These repeated shortfalls made the Irish famine more protracted than most. Partial failures of the potato crop were nothing new in Ireland before 1845, but damage on the scale wrought by the blight was utterly unprecedented. However, the famine would not have been so lethal if the population had been less dependent on the potato. Poverty had reduced one-third of the population to almost exclusive dependence on the potato for food. That, coupled with an inadequate response from the authorities, made the consequences of repeated failures devastating.

The Government's Response

The debate about relief measures in the press and in Parliament in the 1840s has a modern resonance. At first the government opted for reliance on the provision of employment through public works schemes. At their height in the spring of 1847 the public works employed 700,000 people, or one-twelfth of the entire population. These measures did not contain the famine, partly because they did not target some of the most needy, partly because the average wage was too low, and partly because they entailed exposing malnourished people (mostly men) to the elements during the worst months of the year. At their peak in early July 1847 the publicly financed soup kitchens that succeeded the public works program reached 3 million people daily. Mortality seemed to fall while they operated, though doubts remain about the effect of a diet of meal-based gruel on weakened stomachs.

The drop in food prices during the summer of 1847 prompted the authorities to treat the famine as a manageable local problem. The main burden of relieving the poor was placed on the workhouses established under the Irish poor law of 1838. Most of the workhouses were ill equipped to meet the demands placed on them, and about one-quarter of all famine mortalities occurred in them. Local histories highlight mismanagement and the impossible burden placed on local taxpayers, and the high overall proportion of workhouse deaths caused by contagious disease is an indictment of this form of relief. The very high mortality in some workhouses in 1850 and even 1851 provides evidence of the long-lasting character of the famine in some western areas. The aggregate sum spent on relief (about £9 million) was too small to make a significant dent in mortality.

Traditional accounts of the famine pit the more humane policies of Sir Robert Peel's Tories against the dogmatic stance of Sir John Russell's Whig administration, which took office in July 1846. That contrast is oversimplified. Although Peel was more familiar with Ireland's problems than were Whig ideologues such as Charles Wood, the crisis confronting him in 1845–1846 was mild compared to what was to follow. Moreover, Peel broadly supported the Whig line in opposition.

At the height of the crisis the policy adopted by the Whigs was influenced by Malthusian providentialism, the conviction that the potato blight was a divinely ordained remedy for Irish overpopulation. The fear that too much kindness would entail a Malthusian lesson not learned also conditioned both the nature and the extent of intervention.

The Effects of the Famine

The Irish famine killed about one million people, making it a major famine by world-historical standards. The death toll is approximate, since in the absence of civil registration excess mortality cannot be calculated directly. This estimate does not include averted births or allow for famine-related deaths in Britain and farther afield. Mortality was regionally very uneven. No part of Ireland escaped entirely, but the toll ranged from one-quarter of the population of some western counties to negligible fractions in Down and Wexford on the east coast. The timing of mortality varied too, even in some of the worst hit areas. In western Cork the worst was over by late 1847, but the effects of the famine raged in Clare until 1850 or even 1851. Infectious diseases rather than literal starvation were responsible for the largest proportion of the mortality. As in most famines, the elderly and the young were the most likely to die, but women proved marginally more resilient than men.

Like all famines, the Irish famine produced a hierarchy of suffering. The rural poor, landless or nearly landless, were the most likely to perish. Farmers faced an effective land endowment reduced by the potato blight and increased labor costs, forcing them to reduce their concentration on tillage. Landlords' rental income plummeted by as much as a third. Many medical practitioners and clergymen died of infectious diseases. Pawnbrokers found their pledges being unredeemed as the crisis worsened. Least affected were those firms and their workforces that relied on foreign markets for raw materials and sales. It is difficult to identify any significant class of "winners": except perhaps those grain merchants who grasped the opportunities offered by the trade in Indian meal when prices were still rising in the autumn of 1846 and in early 1847, lawyers who benefited from the deregulation of land transfers, and pastorally oriented farmers.

The Great Irish Famine was not just a watershed in Irish history but also a major event in global history, with far-reaching and enduring economic and political consequences. In Ireland it brought the era of famines to a brutal end. Serious failures of the potato crop in the early 1860s and late 1870s brought privation but no significant excess mortality. The famine also resulted in a higher living standard for survivors. Higher emigration was another byproduct as the huge outflow of the crisis years generated its own "friends and neighbors" dynamic. Only in a few remote and tiny pockets in the west did population fill the vacuum left by the "Great Hunger," and then only very briefly. Whether by reducing the domestic market the famine led to the decline of certain industries remains to be established. Finally, although the introduction of new potato varieties offered some protection against Phythophtera infestans thereafter, no reliable defense would be found against it until the 1890s.

See also: Trans-Atlantic Migration.

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——. 2001. "Famine, Trauma, and Memory." Béaloideas 69: 121–143.

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Cormac Ó GrÁda