ATLAS OF THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE

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

             

             

PORTUGAL AND IRELAND.....EXITING BAILOUTS, BUT DIFFERENT CHALLENGES

Ireland and Portugal are two Atlantic nations. Both look west, rather than east.

In the fifteenth century, and long thereafter, Portuguese navigators invented, and promoted, globalisation.  Portugal had trading posts in Arabia, India, China, and Indonesia as well as a large Empire in Africa and South America.

Since the nineteenth century, Irish people, as emigrants, have been residents of every continent. 

During my time in the United States, as EU Ambassador, I became aware of the huge Portuguese influence in that country, in places like Rhode Island, and Newark, New Jersey, both  of which also happen to be  among the most Irish places in North America.

I am in Portugal this week taking part in discussions on the lessons Portugal might learn from Ireland’s recent exit from reliance on EU/IMF loans.

Both countries have had to use such loans to bridge the gap between Government spending and revenue, because they could not borrow enough elsewhere. Like any bank manager of a client who is spending more than his income, the EU/IMF has imposed conditions which are difficult.  In that sense, EU/IMF has taken the blame for decisions that would have had to be taken anyway.

As a proportion of national income, Ireland’s  projected budget deficit is slightly larger than Portugal’s   (4.9% as against 4.5%).

Ireland’s debt/GDP ratio is  about the same as Portugal’s now (around 125%), but the IMF predicts that Ireland’s  position will improve a bit sooner, getting down to “only”  100% by 2020, while Portugal’s will still be at 110% then. 

Portugal has a big amount of its debt which it must repay, or roll over and refinance, in 2014, whereas Ireland does not have a similar immediate challenge.

The big difference is the relative income of the people. The average per capita income in Portugal is about 10,000 euros, whereas the average in Ireland is almost 25,000 per head.......more than twice as much.

Some adults in Portugal have nothing at all to live on, and have to rely on family networks. Welfare, of some kind, covers almost everyone who needs it in Ireland, and basic welfare rates in Ireland have been preserved from cuts, notwithstanding the big fall in the revenues from which they must be met.

Whereas 10% of Irish adults receive Lone Parents allowance or some other form of social assistance from the state, only 4% of Portuguese do. Incidentally, the figure is only 4% in the UK too, and most UK welfare benefits are paid at much lower rates than in Ireland. 

Average wage rates in Portugal only 75% of the level in Greece, 66% of the level in Spain, and considerably below average wage rates Ireland.

One of the reasons Ireland has regained the confidence of lenders is the performance of its exports. Exports are the equivalent of 100% of Ireland’s GDP, whereas Portuguese exports come to only 45%. But Portuguese exports are rising faster than Irish exports. They are catching up.

In the 1999 to 2007 period, Ireland’s exports grew at the third fastest rate in the Euro zone (after Germany and Luxembourg), and Portugal was then seventh in that race.

But in the 2007 to 2013 period, Portugal jumped to second place after Spain, and ahead of Germany! Ireland, notwithstanding its high absolute level of exports, fell back into sixth place in terms of the rate of growth of exports. 

Ireland’s slowing rate of  export growth may be related to some of the pharmaceuticals it exports going off patent.

Portugal is a leading player in nano technology, but some say its strong exports are partly due to the diversion to exports of goods that would previously been sold in the, now depressed, home market .

Portugal has a well developed infrastructure, it has twice as great an area of motorway per 1000 people as the EU average, and has to spend 1.3% of its GDP on road maintenance, as against 0.9% in Ireland.

Portugal’s economy grew very slowly since the early 1990s, and it continued to spend a little more than it was earning, gradually getting itself into the position it is in today. In contrast, Ireland’s economy grew exceptionally quickly from 1995 to 2002, and then, in the short space of three years, developed a huge credit bubble, which burst in 2008.

Ireland’s problems were dramatic, Portugal’s were chronic.

Both Ireland and Portugal suffer from remoteness from the centre of Europe. Portugal is cut off by its bigger, richer, neighbour, Spain. Ireland has Britain, and the sea, between it and the continent. 

Why is Ireland relatively better off at the moment?

Portugal has an older population. As a result, Ireland spends half as much, as a proportion of its GDP, on pensions, as Portugal does. On the plus side, life expectancy ha dramatically improved in Portugal in recent times, by 8and a half years since 1980.

During the 1970,s, when Ireland, already an EU member, was laying the foundation for the Celtic Tiger, by investing in technological education, and promoting foreign investment, Portugal was in the midst of a revolution.

The conservative regime of Antonio Salazar was replaced by a junta of left wing officers, who promoted a constitution, which conferred all sorts of rights on people, without creating commensurate resources, or responsibilities, to meet the cost of these rights. That constitution continues, to this day, to inhibit the elected Government in reducing expenditure to the level of the revenue it  feels it can raise without doing damage to the fabric of the economy.

The revolution also meant the abandonment of a costly colonial war, and the return to Portugal of 600,000 descendants of former colonists, equivalent to 6% of the home population, all of whom had to be housed, fed and retrained for a new life.  I believe this diversion of resources, delayed Portugal’s modernisation at a crucial moment, and the country has never really caught up since.

The OECD has said that

“human capital is the Achilles heel of the Portuguese economy”

Only 60% of Portuguese 25 to 34 year olds completed higher second level education, whereas 100% have done so in Korea, 90% in Ireland, and 75% in Italy.  Too many Portuguese students have to repeat grades, rather than get remedial help in time. 

Many of the qualifications of young Portuguese are not “work relevant” according to the OECD. This is why Portugal has been forced to compete for low wage work with countries in Eastern Europe, rather than move up the value chain to higher skill jobs, as Ireland has done. But this is not something that can be remedied quickly. Ireland did not derive the full benefit from the educational changes, made in the   1960s and 1970s, until the 1990s.

Quicker gains can be made through reforms in the labour market. 

 Wage rates and employment rules are set centrally in Portugal, whereas Ireland allows more freedom to negotiate at the level of the firm.

“Last in, first out” is a legal requirement in Portugal, regardless of the needs of the firm.

The constitutional court has tended to protect the privileges of permanent and public sector workers, and this makes it difficult for Portugal to shift people and resources from the non traded protected sector of its economy to the export sector.

Like Ireland, Portugal has a problem of hard core long term unemployment. One in five children in Ireland grow up in a home where no one is working. This is building up a huge financial and psychological burden for the future. Ireland and Portugal could usefully compare notes on how to solve this problem.

Revenue collection is an area where Portugal could usefully learn from Ireland. Self Assessment (which I promoted as Finance Minister) and intelligent use of computerisation and the internet have enabled Ireland to reduce the cost of tax collection for taxpayer and Government alike.

Getting Government itself to function in a cohesive fashion is a problem everywhere.

Different Ministries tend to develop their own empires, with their own mindsets. Communication, let alone coordination, between them are often difficult. In my own time in Government, I found this to be a huge problem, and I found interdepartmental committees to be ineffective. Direct intervention by the Prime Minister (Taoiseach) was often the only way to move things along. The Cabinet Secretariat of the current Irish Government has been recommended to Portugal as a good example of how to tackle this problem.

Another area in which Portugal may benefit from studying what has been done in Ireland is the reform of the Courts system. Delays and unpredictability in Court decisions can be a major deterrent to foreign investment and a big cost for domestic businesses that are trying to grow. Court reform, initiated during my time as Taoiseach in the 1990s, has introduced computerisation, active case management and a specialised Commercial Court, all of which have been a big help. 

As in Ireland, the current Portuguese Government has been implementing a restructuring programme that was drawn up, and agreed with EU/IMF, by its predecessor.  This means that, in crude political terms, both Governments could blame both the EU/IMF, and its predecessor, for what it has to do.

Of course, to do so, would actually mislead people to some extent, because the real driver of restructuring is not the EU, the IMF, or the previous Government.....but the lack of money, the gap between spending and revenue, which is there anyway. It would be there no matter who was in power, and no matter who one was borrowing from.

My own sense is that voters understand this. Voters probably understand quite well that restructuring will continue, long after the EU/ IMF troika have gone, in both countries. 

This will certainly be the case until the Debt/ GDP ratio is down to 60%, a figure both countries have agreed to in the Fiscal Compact Treaty. Getting the ratio down to 60%, as we have decided to do in Ireland’s case by referendum, will mean running budget surpluses for  many years, perhaps in the face of pressure to spend more or tax less.

Continued restructuring is necessary for the simple reason that, if you want to borrow new money, you must repay old debts, and you must get your debts down to a manageable level.

An issue under discussion now is whether Portugal should aim, like Ireland did, to make an exit from the EU/IMF bailout without the support of a precautionary credit line. Such a credit line could be drawn upon if one gets into subsequent funding difficulties.

Bond markets are notoriously fickle, and delays in finalising robust arrangements for the EU, along with worries about excessive credit in China, and about what the stress tests of Europe’s banks may reveal, add to the uncertainty. A precautionary credit line would involve a measure of continuing EU supervision, but such supervision would probably be no greater than will apply anyway under the new EU “six pack” and “two pack” rules.

Obviously, if a country wishes not to have a precautionary credit line, it must, of its own accord, build up bigger cash reserves. These will be in the form of money borrowed ahead of time and kept in reserve.  The state would be paying a higher rate of interest on that borrows money than it would be receiving when it parks it on deposit.

Dealing with this issue, before Ireland eventually decided after much thought not to seek a precautionary credit line, Colm Keena of the Irish Times newspaper wrote

“Take, for instance, the much vaunted 25 billion euros in cash that the Government says it has in the bank, as an assurance to bond markets. The money is not ours. It’s borrowed, probably at an average rate of 4%. If it’s earning interest, it’s probably at 0.5%. So it’s costing us 875 million euros a year” he concluded.

That’s real money that could have been used for other things, like reducing the cost of employing people.

But the confidence generating effect of dispensing with a precautionary credit line may, in Ireland’s case, have obviated these costs.  Certainly there has been a big boost to political and psychological confidence in the country. 

I realise Portugal has built up substantial reserves already, which are costing it money in net interest payments.  This is a carefully balanced decision, involving predictions about future movements in global bond markets, and not an easy or simple task.

When it comes to European affairs, I believe German, Dutch and Finnish public opinion needs to understand that an approach of doing as little as possible, and only at the last minute, carries extra costs. For example, a facility to issue Eurobonds, if agreed in principle could give a big boost to confidence. Increasing the size of ESM funds to a market intimidating size would increase the likelihood that they might not ever have to be used in practice.

Turning back to Portugal, what is the best way to build a truly sustainable economy? 

I would suggest three themes.

Portugal should aim to make itself the best place in the world to set up a new business. Thanks to the internet, a small business can become a global player much earlier in its life than was possible 10 years ago. Portugal should make it  easy to set up a new business, easy to enter a new profession and easy to comply with regulations.

Successful new business is not always about a new technological breakthrough, but about making new connections between existing technologies, or people, that have not been combined before. The global Portuguese community, many of them recent emigrants, can form a network that can bring business ideas and investments home to Portugal. Connect Ireland is a model you could look at.

Finally, it is easier to build on existing strengths, than it is to start something completely new. 

Existing Portuguese businesses should aim to become innovation communities, forming new partnerships and synergies in fields where existing expertise can be more widely applied.

TRIBUTE BY JOHN BRUTON, FORMER TAOISEACH, TO THE LATE TED NEALON

I am really sorry to hear of Ted Nealon’s death. In addition to his service as a Minister and Deputy, he was a talented press spokesman for Gael.

Acting as spokesman for a party, especially when it is in opposition, is one of the most stressful and thankless jobs in politics. In this and every other capacity, he was both good humoured and incisive, both generous and honest.

He will be missed, especially in his native Sligo, which he loved so much