Famine

Between 1845 and 1849 Ireland lost at least a third of it's population as a result of a prolonged blight on the potato crop and subsequent humanitarian inaction by it's English overlords. Even today there are fewer people in Ireland than there were 1845.

The famine defines this country like no other single event. Cooler heads these days acknowledge 'genocide' is not exactly an accurrate term for what happened to the Catholic Poor but that acknowledgement comes only because 'genocide' requires some active involvement by people in power. In Ireland the landlords and the moneyed Brits simply ignored the crisis and prospered.

The Great Famine or the Great Hunger (Irish: An Gorta Mór or An Drochshaol) is the name given to the famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1849. The Famine was due to the appearance of "the (potato) Blight" (also known as phytophthora)– the oomycete that almost instantly destroyed the primary food source for the majority of the island's population. [citation needed]The immediate after-effects of The Famine continued until 1851. Much is unrecorded, and various estimates suggest that between 500,000 and more than one million people died in the three years from 1846 to 1849 as a result of hunger or disease.[citation needed] Some two million refugees are attributed to the Great Hunger (estimates vary), and much the same number of people emigrated to Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia (see the Irish Diaspora).

A notable difference between the Famine and other humanitarian crises was that it occurred within the imperial homeland, [citation needed]at a time well into the modern prosperity of the Victorian and Industrial age. With respect to geography, the famine would appear to belie many of the typical circumstances in which imperialist dismissal of native plight often occurred. With respect to era, the famine came at a crossroads of old world and modern world.[citation needed]
The immediate effect on Ireland was devastating, and its long-term effects proved immense, permanently changing Irish culture and tradition. Though human suffering during the famine was never photographed, the event immediately and profoundly altered the course of generations of Irish and Irish diaspora.

In the 16th century plantations of the country were undertaken under Mary I and Elizabeth I. The plantations in Laois, Offaly and Antrim did not survive, but the plantation of Ulster fundamentally established an English Protestant presence. In 1649 Oliver Cromwell's forces defeated the Confederate and Royalist coalition in Ireland and occupied the country, bringing to an end the Irish Confederate Wars. He passed a very harsh series of Penal laws against Roman Catholics and confiscated almost all of their land. The Parliamentarian reconquest of Ireland was extremely brutal, and Cromwell is still a hated figure in Ireland.

A practice of consolidation of lands into large estates was widespread in Europe, but in Ireland it was exacerbated by the discriminatory laws applied to Presbyterians and Roman Catholics, favoring the Anglicans of the Church of Ireland, a state religion under the British Crown. By the time of The Great Hunger these discriminatory laws had been repealed, but not before irreparably biasing large land-ownership to Protestant, English, and often non-resident, landlords.

English control of the lasted until the establishment of Irish independence — the Irish Free State, the Irish War of Independence and the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

The local practice known as "subdivision", whereby lands and property were divided equally among male heirs (instead of being inherited by the first-born son) meant that over each generation the size of a tenant farm was reduced, as it was split between all living sons. By the 1840s, however subdivision was increasingly only found among the poorest people on the smallest farms.

In 1845, for example, 24% of all Irish tenant farms were of 0.4 to 2 hectares (one to five acres) in size, while 40% were of two to six hectares (five to fifteen acres). This included marshland and bogland that could not be used for food production. As a result, holdings were so small that the only crop that could be grown in sufficient quantities, and which provided sufficient nourishment to feed a family, was potatoes. A British Government report carried out shortly before the Great Hunger noted that the scale of the poverty was such that one third of all small holdings in Ireland were presumed to be unable to support their families, after paying their rent, other than through the earnings of seasonal migrant labour in England and Scotland.[1]

As a result, the Irish landholding system in the 1840s was already in serious trouble. Many of the big estates, as a result of earlier agricultural crises, were heavily mortgaged and in financial difficulty. Ten percent were eventually bankrupted by the Great Hunger.[citation needed] Below that level were mass tenancies, lacking long-term leases, rent control and security of tenure, many of them through subdivision so small that the tenants were struggling to survive in good years, and almost fully dependent on potatoes because they alone could be grown in sufficient quantity and nutritional value on the land left to native ownership, while many tons of cattle and other foodstuffs from estates were exported by absentee British landlords to foreign markets. Furthermore, any desire of tenants to increase the productivity of their land was actively discouraged by the threat that any increase in land value would lead to a disproportionately high increase in rent.

Another incriminating aspect, central to the issue of starvation, is food production and distribution. Records show the productivity of Irish lands under English rule exported vast amounts of food produced in Ireland to England. When Ireland experienced an earlier famine of 1782-83, ports were closed in order to keep home grown food for domestic consumption. Food prices were immediately reduced within Ireland. The merchants lobbied against such efforts, but their protests were over-ridden. It was recognized that the interests of the merchants and the distressed people were irreconcilable, and moreover the English system of controls were not as entrenched as they would later be. In the Great Famine, English landowners presided over the continued production of crops for sale in England while peasant Irish starved.

During the first nine months of "Black '47" the export of grain-derived alcohol from Ireland to England included the following: 874,170 gallons of porter, 278,658 gallons of Guinness, and 183,392 gallons of whiskey. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas,beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues,animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding nine gallons. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins were shipped to Liverpool. That works out to be 822,681 gallons of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of "famine". Kinealy's research ostsensibly proves beyond a reasonable doubt that there was sufficient food in Ireland to prevent mass starvation.

The initial British government policy towards the famine was, in the view of historians such as F.S.L. Lyons, "very delayed and slow"[4]. Professor Joe Lee contends: "There was nothing unique (by the standards of pre-industrial subsistence crisis) about the [Irish] famine. The death rate had been frequently equalled in earlier European famines, including, possibly, in Ireland itself during the famine of 1740–41"[5]. This 1740–1741 famine is commonly referred to as The Forgotten Famine. Commonly, the government would encourage land owners to evict their tenants.

In the case of the 1846–49 Irish Famine, the response of Tory government head Sir Robert Peel was to purchase some foreign maize for delivery to Ireland, and to repeal the Corn Laws, which prohibited imports of the much cheaper foreign grain to Ireland. The Irish called the maize imported by the government 'Peel's brimstone' — and the nickname was only partly because of the yellow colour of the maize. The repeal of the Corn Laws was enacted over a three-year period from 1846 to 1849 and came too late to help the starving Irish, and was politically unpopular, resulting in the end of Sir Robert's ministry. Succeeding him was a Whig ministry under Lord John Russell, later Earl Russell. Lord John's ministry focused on providing support through "public works" projects. Such projects mainly consisted of the government employing Irish peasantry on wasteful projects, such as filling in valleys and flattening hills, so the government could justify the cash payments. Such projects proved counterproductive, as starving labourers expended the energy gained from low rations on the heavy labour. Furthermore, the paid labour prevented the Irish peasants from returning to their farmlands to grow another harvest and prolonged the famine. Eventually, a soup-kitchen network, which fed three million people, replaced the public works projects.

In the autumn of 1847, the soup-kitchens were shut down and responsibility for famine relief was transferred to the Poor Laws unions. The Irish Poor Laws were even harsher on the poor than their English counterparts; those paupers with over a quarter-acre of land were expected to abandon it before entering a workhouse — something many of the poor would not do. Furthermore, Ireland had too few workhouses. Many of the workhouses that existed were closed due to financial problems; authorities in London refused to give large amounts of aid to bankrupt Poor Laws unions. As a result, disaster became inevitable.