The Great Irish Famine {Starvation}: a Crime of Free Market Economics

This very informative article really hits home. My grandmother Brigit Granahan's family home in County Mayo was "owned" by one of the English landlords held responsible for thousands of deaths during the Irish "Starvation." Let's not call it a "famine" anymore. JKG

Writing in the Nation newspaper in the early summer of 1847, John Mitchel described a journey through Connaught. He and his companions arrived at a village where they had been hospitably received two years earlier:
But why do we not see the smoke curling from those lowly chimneys? And surely we ought by this time to scent the well-known aroma of the turf-fires. But what . . . what reeking breath of hell is this oppressing the air, heavier and more loathsome than the smell of death rising from the fresh carnage of a battlefield. Oh misery! had we forgotten that this was the Famine Year? And we are here in the midst of those thousand Golgothas that border our island with a ring of death from Cork Harbour all round to Lough Foyle. There is no need of inquiries here--no need of words; the history of this little society is plain before us. Yet we go forward, though with sick hearts and swimming eyes, to examine the Place of Skulls nearer.

There is a horrible silence; grass grows before the doors; we fear to look into any door, though they are all open or off the hinges; for we fear to see yellow chapless skeletons grinning there . . . We walk amidst the houses of the dead and out at the other side of the cluster, and there is not one where we dare to enter. We stop before the threshold of our host of two years ago, put our head, with eyes shut, inside the door-jamb, and say with shaking voice, "God save all here!" the strong man and the fair, dark-eyed woman and the little ones, with their liquid Gaelic accents that melted into music for us two years ago; they shrunk and withered together until their voices dwindled to rueful gibbering, and they hardly knew one another's faces . . .

We know the whole story. This experience turned Mitchel, already a militant nationalist into a social revolutionary. Previously, he had advocated that the Protestant landlords had to be won over to the nationalist movement and given a position of leadership within it that reflected their social position, now he called for these same landlords to be swept away in a revolutionary war that would hopefully deal a death-blow to the "thrice-accursed" British Empire. Mitchel was to become one of the inspirations of modern Irish republicanism.(1

Potato blight (the fungus phytophthora infestans) first appeared in Ireland in 1845, destroying some 40 percent of the crop. It caused considerable hardship but, as yet, few fatalities. The following year the blight ruined the whole crop. The result was the terrible famine of the winter of 1846-47 that was to continue into the early 1850s. This was Western Europe's worst modern peacetime catastrophe with a million people dying of starvation, disease, and exposure and another million fleeing their homeland as refugees, seeking safety in England and the United States. The hardest hit were inevitably the rural poor, the landless laborers, cottiers, and small farmers: the number of landless laborers was to fall by over a quarter and of small farmers by nearly half in the course of the Famine.

Why did these people die or seek safety in flight?Britain after all was the richest country in Europe, "the workshop of the world," and the ruler of a great Empire. For a variety of reasons the Whig government of the day failed to take adequate measures to keep the Irish alive. Certainly Lord John Russell's government implemented measures of famine relief, but this was only done with the greatest reluctance, in the meanest way possible, and invariably proved too little too late. The scale of the suffering forced the government to introduce emergency measures including a program of public works and the establishment of soup kitchens. As Mitchel points out, for many this only meant that instead of dying in December, they died in March.

Throughout these years the British government remained steadfastly committed to the belief that any interference with market forces should be kept to a minimum, that the rights of property had to be upheld no matter what, and that the costs of relief should as far as possible be borne by Ireland lest the country should remain dependent on British handouts. "What brought them, in great measure at least, to their present state of helplessness?" Sir Charles Wood, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote to Russell. He answered himself: "Their habit of depending on Government. What are we trying to do now? To force them upon their own resources."(2) The British took advantage of the catastrophe to implement a hidden agenda in Ireland. According to Christine Kinealy, it provided the opportunity for an experiment in social engineering: "population control . . . the elimination of small holdings, and the sale of large but bankrupt estates."(3) The exercise was to cost the lives of more Irish men, women, and children than any other episode in Irish history.

When a delegation from Ireland visited Russell to beg for more relief for the starving poor, this humane and liberal gentleman read to them from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Such measures would only make things worse, he argued.(4) Once again, according to John Mitchel, it was not the failure of the potato crop that killed the Irish, but Political Economy. Altogether, the British government spent some 7 million [pounds] on famine relief. This contrasts sharply with the 20 million [pounds ]spent compensating the slave owners when slavery was abolished in 1833 (the slaves, of course, received no compensation for their enslavement). This money was disbursed to uphold the rights of property and went to the deserving rich (the Gladstone family for example received over 80,000[pounds] for their 2,000 slaves) rather than to the undeserving poor and the Irish poor at that. Soon after the Famine, the British government was able without too much difficulty to find 70[pounds] million to wage the Crimean War.(5)

Without any doubt one of the reasons for the inadequacy of relief measures was British prejudice against the "feckless" Irish, prejudice that the government deliberately fostered and encouraged.(6) Considerable sums of money were donated for famine relief by individuals, communities, and organizations throughout the world. The Choctaw Indians sent money from the United States, the Quakers and the Catholic Church raised large amounts. Most embarrassing for the British government was the Sultan of Turkey's decision to donate 10,000 [pounds]. This rather overshadowed Queen Victoria's donation of 1,000[pounds]. The British ambassador persuaded the Sultan to reduce his donation to 1,000[pounds] and Victoria increased hers to 2,000[pounds]. Honor was satisfied.(7)

Compounding the hunger and disease was the way that the Famine became the occasion for dramatic land clearances, for a concerted landlord offensive against the poor. The larger Catholic farmers joined in this assault and in fact emerged as important beneficiaries of the famine years. Exactly how many people were evicted during these grim years is unknown because the authorities only began keeping records in 1849. Nevertheless the figure certainly exceeds half a million people, an astonishing figure by any standard. This is one of the most terrible acts of class war in British history even without the accompanying hunger. How does the standard history, Modem Ireland by Roy Foster, the eminent Professor of Irish History at Oxford, deal with it? The whole Famine receives pretty minimalist treatment, but the clearances only merit one sentence,just one sentence, in 596 pages of text!(8)

In December 1849 the correspondent for the London Illustrated News reported from Moveen, a village in the Kilrush Poor Law district:

There is nothing but devastation . . . the ruthless destroyer, as if he delighted in seeing the monuments of his skill, has left the walls of the houses standing, while he has unroofed them and taken away all shelter from the people. They look like the tombs of a departed race, rather than the recent abodes of a yet living people, and I felt actually relieved at seeing one or two half-clad specters gliding about,as evidence that I was not in the land of the dead . . . The once frolicsome people--even the saucy beggars--have disappeared and given place to wan and haggard objects, who are so resigned to their doom, that they no longer expect relief. One beholds only shrunken frames scarcely covered with flesh--crawling skeletons, who appear to have risen from their graves. . .The report goes on to emphasize "the vast extent of the evictions at the present time."(9)

The spectacle of troops, police, and bailiffs evicting starving, sick men, women, and children, levelling their homes and leaving them to live in holes in the ground or die by the roadside even appalled some members of the British Government. Prime Minister Russell himself on one occasion complained that "the murders of poor cottier tenants are too horrible to bear" (my emphasis) and that "we ought to put down this lynch-law of a landlord.(10)

Bear it he did, however. The majority of the cabinet insisted that the rights of property had to be upheld and indeed Lord Palmerston, himself an Irish landlord, argued that what Ireland required was "a long and systematic ejection of smallholders and of squatting tenants."(11) Even more extreme were the sentiments the Viceroy, Lord Clarendon gave voice to in August 1848: "I would sweep Connacht clean and turn upon it new men and English money just as one would to Australia or any freshly discovered Colony." This, the forcible removal of some two million people, was the only solution he could see to "the Irish Problem."(12)

Palmerston himself was as good as his word and actually evicted many of his tenants, offering them free passage to Canada. A recent biographer describes how in the summer and autumn of 1847 nine ships arrived at Quebec and St. John carrying a total of two thousand of Palmerston's tenants from Sligo. The Canadians were shocked at the conditions of the immigrants who arrived in a state of complete destitution . . . though Palmerston had announced that every family would be paid between 2 [pounds] and 5 [pounds] on arrival at Quebec, no representative was there to meet them, or provided them with any assistance, and they were left to be in the snow, barefoot and in rags, during their first Canadian winter.

On one of the nine ships, the Lord Ashburton that arrived on October 30, 107 of Palmerson's tenants had died of fever on the voyage and of the 477 who had survived, 174 were almost naked. They had to be provided with clothing before they could disembark. The Canadian Legislative Council protested to London that Palmerston had dispatched these unfortunate people "without regard to humanity or even to common decency" in conditions that were as bad as the slave trade.(13) Palmerston's Irish brutalities were to be no hindrance to his later political career; he was to go on to be Prime Minister for over eight years between 1855 and 1865, making himself a byword for British chauvinism and armed aggression.

John Mitchel and the Famine
Looking back on the Famine in 1854, John Mitchel wrote that while now "I can set down these things calmly . . . to see them might have driven a wise man mad." He went on about how families, when all was eaten and no hope left, took their last look at the Sun, built up their cottage doors, that none might see them die nor hear their groans, and were found weeks afterwards skeletons on their hearth; how the law was vindicated all this while . .. and many examples made; how starving wretches were transported for stealing vegetables by night . . . and how every one of these years, '46, '47 and '48 Ireland was exporting to England, food to the value of fifteen million pounds sterling.He accused the British government of deliberately starving the Irish people, of making use of the potato blight to "thin out these multitudinous Celts."

While the potato crop might have failed, there was still more than enough grain, cereals, and livestock in the country to have fed double the population, but it was exported to England. He wrote of how "insane mothers began to eat their young children who died of famine before them; and still fleets of ships were sailing with every tide, carrying Irish cattle and corn to England." This was what "free trade did for Ireland in those days."(14)

In fact, Mitchel's indictment of the British government was wrong in one respect. There was a real food deficit in Ireland. Nevertheless, it is still incredible that while people were dying in the thousands from hunger, wagon convoys guarded by troops carried food out of the country. If the government had banned these exports it would not have fed all the starving but would have saved another hundred, perhaps two hundred thousand people. But while Mitchel's indictment may have been wrong, there can be no doubt that a terrible crime was committed. It was this that drove Mitchel and others to revolt.

1848 in Ireland

The February Revolution in Paris in 1848 gave rise to revolutionary hopes in Ireland as well as the rest of Europe. Even in the midst of the Famine, the prospect of liberation seemed to offer itself as thrones and governments fell throughout Europe and people in arms took to the streets. Indeed, if it had not been for the devastation caused by the Famine one can confidently predict that there would have been a serious, perhaps irresistible revolutionary outbreak in Ireland. The Repeal movement, a popular mass movement, that under the moderate leadership of Daniel O'Connell, had backed away from confrontation with the British in 1843, would have been radicalized by the events of spring1848. Instead the movement was broken by hunger, disease, eviction, and despair.

Nevertheless John Mitchel and others did try to raise the standard of revolt. In his United Irishman newspaper, Mitchel preached defiance and urged preparations for an uprising in alliance with the Chartists in Britain, deliberately courting arrest in the hope of precipitating a clash between the British and the Irish Confederation, a breakaway from O'Connell's Repeal movement. He nearly succeeded. Mitchel was arrested in early May, tried before a packed jury, sentenced to fourteen years transportation, and rushed in chains out of the country. He had hoped that a rescue attempt would provoke a rising in Dublin where thousands of artisans were certainly ready for the attempt. Instead the moderates in the Confederate leadership prevailed and the rescue never took place.

Only at the end of july when habeas corpus was suspended and the prospect of mass arrests loomed was the Confederate leadership finally coerced into revolt. The result was a complete fiasco. The Confederate leader, William Smith O'Brien was a most reluctant and half-hearted revolutionary. He had really only paid lip-service to the notion to counter Mitchel's influence and was only now forced into action by the British. Those thousands of farmers and laborers who rallied to the rebel cause found themselves ordered not to trespass on private property, forbidden to requisition food supplies, and banned from cutting down trees for barricades without first getting the landowners' permission. This was not the way to conduct a revolutionary war. Demoralization quickly set in and the rebel army began to melt away.

After a clash with police at Ballingary the movement collapsed, the rank and file dispersed, and their leaders went on the run, some fled the country, others were captured. Was this failure inevitable? Certainly hunger and disease bad devastated the countryside leaving much of the population broken both in health and spirit and in the grip of despair. Nevertheless, there is enough evidence to suggest that with more determined leadership a more serious effort could have been made.(15) Certainly the British were seriously alarmed will-i Lord Clarendon complaining that "in the event of an outbreak only the Protestants could be relied upon." Indeed there is evidence that in 1848 the British government secretly armed the Orangemen in the north in case of a general uprising.

The failure of the British government to feed the starving Irish and its involvement in mass evictions in the 1840s is without doubt the most terrible indictment that can be laid against British Imperialism inthe nineteenth century. The Opium Wars, the incredibly brutal suppression of the great Indian Revolt of 1857, the conquest of Egypt and the Sudan, the invasion of Tibet--all of these crimes are eclipsed by the horrors of the Famine. Here we see hundreds of thousands of people dying or forced to flee for their lives so that Political Economy could prevail. It was a crime that should never be forgotten.
(1.) John Mitchel, Jail Journal (Dublin: Gill, 1913), pp. 426-427. Mitchel's radicalism was to be corroded after he arrived in the United States where he emerged as a staunch supporter of black slavery.This reactionary racist stance ate away at his radical commitment until all that remained was his support for an Irish Republic. There is no modern biography of John Mitchel but see my "John Mitchel and Irish Nationalism," Literature and History 6, v. 2 (Autumn 1980). (2.) G.P. Gooch ed., The Later Correspondence of Lord John Russell 1840-18 78 (London: I. Longmans, Green and Co., 1925), p. 161. (3.) Christine Kinealy, The Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1994), p. 353. See also Frederick W. Powell, The Politics of Irish Social Policy (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), pp. 96-101. (4.) Donald Kerr, A Nation of Beggars? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 37. (5.) Cormac O Grada, Ireland: A New Economic History 1780-1939 (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1994), p. 191. (6.) For more on anti-Irish racism in Britain, see Hazel Waters, "The great Famine and the Rise of anti-Irish racism," I?ace and Class 37, v. 1 (July-September, 1995). (7.) Kerr, A Nation of Beggars, p. 56. (8.) R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 374. He writes "of the terrible clearances of the late 1840s and early 1850s . .. of the 90,000 evictions apparently recorded from 1847 to 1900, 50,000 took place between 1847 and 1850." And that is all the fate of the poor get in the standard history! See instead James S. Donnelly Jr., "Mass Eviction and the Great Famine: The Clearances Revisited" in Cathal Poirteir, The Great Irish Famine (Cork: Mercier Press, 1995). Donnelly insists on a figure of over a half million people evicted for the years 1846-1854. (9.) John Killeen ed., The Famine Decade: Contemporary Accounts: 1841-1851 (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1995), pp. 232-233. (10.) Donnelly, "Mass Eviction and the Great Famine," p. 163. (11.) Ibid., p. 164. (12.) Kerr, A Nation of Beggars, p. 333. (13.) Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), pp. 322-323. (14). Mitchel, John, Jail Journal xxxix; id., The History of Ireland (Glasgow 1869), pp. 214-215. (15.) On 1848 in Ireland see my Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1994)
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John Newsinger is lecturer in History at Bath College of Higher Education in England. This article commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc