This magnificent book was given to me as a
2012 Christmas gift by my wife, Finola, and daughter, Mary Elizabeth. I only managed to find the time to read it a
year later, over the Christmas holiday of 2013.
Because of the topic it covers,
and the scale of its ambition, it has to be seen as one of the most important books
published in Ireland so far this century.
The famine of 1846 to 1850 set
the course of Irish history to this day, and had a dramatic long term impact on
the political history of Britain, as well as on the demographics of the United
States.
A blight on the potato crop was the proximate
cause of the failure of the potato harvest, and thus of the Irish famine. Potato blight was first detected in the area
around New York in the United States in 1843.
It came to Europe in June 1845,
in a consignment of seed potatoes sent to Belgium, which must not have been adequately
examined before shipment. In subsequent months, it spread all over Northern
Europe, and to Britain. The first Irish case was identified in the Botanic
Gardens in Dublin in August 1845.
Thanks to the availability of the
potato, which produced more human nourishment per acre than any other crop,
Ireland’s population had grown rapidly, from 5 million in 1800, to 7 million in
1821, and to 8.7 million in 1846.
Ireland had become dependent on
the potato for food, to a degree that was not the case in other European
countries, which also suffered from the blight at the same time. For example, in
Cork alone, there was a larger area of land sown with potatoes, than the entire
area of land under any form of tillage on the whole island of Ireland today.
The reasons for Ireland’s development
of an over dependence on this one crop, over the previous century, might
usefully be further explored in a future edition of this book.
It is probably pointless to ask why
so few Irish people in 1845 assumed the potato crop would never fail, just as it is pointless to ask why so many
Irish people, and their bankers, assumed, in 2005, that house prices would
never fall. Humans are by nature
optimistic, and tend to assume that present conditions, whatever they may be,
will continue indefinitely. This applied to Irish landlords, who were running
up debts, on the assumption that the potato generated prosperity was
invulnerable, just as much as it applied to their tenants, who subdivided their
holdings among their children, on the same basis .
In a mere 20 years, from 1820 to
1840, the population had increased by over 50% in parts of North Kerry, west
Clare, west Galway, and Sligo.
Interestingly , the highest
absolute densities of persons per 100 acres, were not to be found in those
counties, but in a broad belt of land stretching
from south of Belfast, across Armagh,
Monaghan and Cavan into Longford and Roscommon. Those areas had over 50 people
per acre, whereas the density of population per acre was below 10 in some areas
of Meath, Kildare, Wicklow, Kerry, Mayo and Galway.
In Meath and Kildare, the system
of agriculture required fewer people. Meath land had instead to provide feed
for 100,000 cattle in pre famine Ireland. In the other four counties, the soil
fertility was well below the national average.
200
hundred years before, the distribution of the population had been very
different. In 1660, the highest concentration of people per acre in Ireland was
to be found in Meath, Dublin, East Cork, East Antrim and South East Wexford,
where the population density was then 5 times that in the western counties.
In a sense, over two centuries,
the Irish population had, willingly or otherwise, shifted from living on land
which could feed it in a variety of different ways, to live on land which could
feed it in only one way, by potato production.
Meanwhile large areas of the best
land were shifted from meeting local food needs, to export production of
livestock and grain products for the British market. 74% of Irish exports went
to Britain by 1774, whereas only 38% had done so in 1683.
In 1841, Armagh was the county
which had the highest density of people per square mile of arable land, over
1000 people per acre, as against only 187 people per square mile in Kildare and
201 in Meath. In contrast, Armagh’s population density in 1660 had been below
the national average.
Armagh would have had the linen
industry to supplement its food production. This may explain why it could
support such a high population in 1841, and also why it survived the famine
better than his high population density might suggest. But the same cannot be
said of Cavan, and Longford, which also had very high densities.
Some nationalist writers see the
Irish famine as something connived at by the British Government, in the hope
that it would clear Ireland of its surplus population, and thus make land
available for higher value crops and livestock of which would be saleable to
industrial populations of Britain.
While the British Treasury did
spend money on famine relief, about £9.5 million in fact, it tried to shift the
main burden on to Irish ratepayers (mostly landlords, many of whom were already
bankrupt, before the famine started and their rents dried up). Furthermore, the
£9.5million spent of relief, was less than the £10 million the Treasury spent
on maintaining its military establishment in Ireland.
Clearly, the assumed mutual solidarity on
which the Act Union between Ireland and
Britain had been enacted in 1800, did not exist when it came to spending
sufficient amounts of British taxpayers money to save Irish lives. In a sense
the Famine doomed the Union.
While there was a view in some
quarters in London that Ireland was overpopulated, and Malthus had argued that
the world as a whole was going to face a crisis of over population, I doubt if
there was ever a deliberate plan or conspiracy to allow famine to reduce the
Irish population. It was more that policy makers in London believed that Governments
should be reluctant to interfere with natural economic processes.
The prevailing economic ideology
in London in 1846 was of support for the free market. The view was that the
market should be allowed to find its own level, scarcity would lead to higher
prices, higher prices would call forth more production, and thus the scarcity
would solve itself. One should not interfere with the market by providing free
food because that would give people dependent on government, and by keeping
prices artificially low would deter new private sector solutions.
That would have been the thinking
of Charles Trevelyan, the London based Treasury official most directly
concerned with the Governments response to the Irish Famine. It is a line of
thought that has many echoes in current economic thinking. Indeed it is a
policy that might even have worked in England, where there was a well developed
market in food, and an infrastructure for getting food to where it was needed.
The problem with this thinking
was that it had little applicability to the conditions of Ireland in the 1840’s. In large parts of
Ireland, there was no market economy through which food could be sold. In the
worst hit areas, a cashless barter economy existed, whereby tenants bartered
their labour on a land owner’s farm, in return for the use of a given area of
his land for potato production for their own use. As long as potato yields stayed high, both
landlord and tenant had an incentive to keep subdividing holdings among young
adult members of the tenant’s family, thereby providing more labour for the
landlord, and keeping extended families near home. But once the potato failed,
the tenant had nothing to eat, and no money to buy anything.
The most eloquent critic of the
Government’s policy, quoted in this book, is actually a member of the
establishment and the senior British official in Ireland, the Lord Lieutenant
himself, the fourth Earl of Clarendon, who wrote to his Prime Minister, Lord
John Russell , in 1849,seeking more funds from Parliament for Famine Relief,
saying
“ I don’t think there is another legislature in Europe that would
disregard the suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland and coldly persist
in a policy of extermination”
If there was a conspiracy
to use the famine to reduce the population, he was certainly not part of it. It
was not so much a case of conspiracy, as of people being misled by abstract
principles and prejudices, that could be seen by those on the ground not to work
in Ireland of the 1840s. It is noteworthy that landlords, who actually lived
locally in Ireland, were much more supportive of relief efforts, than those who
owned Irish land but did not live locally.
The Famine reduced the population of
Ireland dramatically, and in three ways, through starvation, disease and
emigration. Famine related diseases spread to people who themselves may have
had adequate nourishment. Many staff of work houses, and clergy of all
denominations, died of famine generated diseases.
The maps used in this book show
that the pattern of loss of life through
across different areas of the country did
not follow some simple formula, like land quality or population density.
Donegal, with poorer land and
higher population density, had a lower rate of “excess mortality” during the
famine years than Meath had. The Aran islands, off the Galway coast, had an
increase in population in the famine years, while thousands starved on the
mainland and on other offshore islands, like Clare island in Mayo.
The county that had the biggest
overall population loss, from a combination of ,eviction and emigration, was Roscommon, which lost 31%
of its population in ten years. But in terms of death by famine alone, the
biggest losses were in Galway and Clare.
Many in those latter counties
were simply too poor to meet the cost of emigrating. In Connacht for every 3
people who died, 2 emigrated. In Leinster, in contrast, more than two people
emigrated, for every one person who died.
It was not solely the Catholic
Irish who died or emigrated. The Presbyterian parish of Kilwaughter, near Larne
in County Antrim, lost 36% of its population in the famine years, a higher rate
of loss even than Roscommon, but in a smaller area.
In the county I know best, Meath,
the population decline was most marked in the North West of the county, in the Kells,
Oldcastle and Moynalty areas. There was a general decline across the middle of
the county, with some exceptions like Donaghmore and Duleek, which saw their
population increase over the Famine decade, for reasons I cannot explain.
Villages, like Bohermeen, Kilberry, Syddan and
Ardcath, that existed before the famine, were no long there after it.
All that remained in those places, until recently, was the lonely church, that
used to be the centre of a village.
One response to the failure of
the potato crop was the eviction of tenants who could no longer pay their
rents. This was probably more likely where the rent was paid in cash rather
than in labour services. Thus, two fifths of all the evictions in Ireland in
the famine years were in Munster, as against a quarter of the total in
Connacht, a fifth in Leinster, and only one tenth of the total in Ulster.
These evictions, in the midst of
starvation, were facilitated by the means test system,that was used to decide
who could get famine relief supplies. Once one still had a sizeable holding, one
did not qualify for relief.
The evictions had a poisonous
effect on relations between tenant and landlord, and contributed to the
bitterness of the “Land War” later in the nineteenth century. They also
influence Irish attitudes to the legitimacy house repossessions for unpaid
debts, to this very day.
Tipperary was the county which
had the highest rate of evictions, and the highest rate of agrarian protests in
these years. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is the county in which the War of
Independence started in 1919.
Could a potato famine ever
happen again somewhere in the world?
Are there lessons to be learned today about
the risk of relying for subsistence on one crop?
John Feehan, a biology lecturer
in University College Dublin, argues in one of the essays in the book, that the
potato is likely to play a growing role in the world’s diet, as we struggle to
find affordable food, for a population that could rise by an extra two billion
by 2050.
China is now the world’s biggest
potato producer in the world, and India produces twice as many potatoes as the
USA. A virulent strain of potato blight was identified in Mexico in 1992, which
overpowers the blight resistant genes in the potato plant, and is able to
withstand conventional fungicides. Feehan concludes that” a twenty first
century version of the Great Famine is a real possibility”.
By its combination of maps and text,
this book enables one to understand the Famine in ways a simple narrative
history could never achieve.
A reader, who is familiar with a
particular country and its land, can compare the famine experience of the
locality with it looks like today. It would be interesting of an interactive
web version of the book could be published, which would enable readers to drill
down further into particular parts of the map to access the underlying local
data on which they are based.
Edited by John Crowley, William J Smyth and
Mike Murphy
Published by Cork University Press
This book review first appeared in the "Dublin Review of Books", www.drb.ie
1 comment:
For Centuries the Catholic Church forbid folks from intake meat on Fridays and then ate after a famine?, instead they Greek deity one thing else. currently that the Pope modified the foundations a number of decades past one should marvel if so it's honest to all or any the folks that antecedently visited hell for intake meat thereon day.I mean there they're stuck in hell for one thing that's not against the foundations, says very little|the small|the tiny|the insufficient|the limited|the miscroscopic} stooping over guy within the funny "B-Movie" kind Wardrobe and cruises around during a silly little Pope Mobile. even so, currently that the foundations have modified, I propose we have a tendency to organize a multi-lateral Coalition of the best nations on Earth with the best military and type a rescue mission. we have a tendency to should bring these poor soles back from Hell.
Post a Comment