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The Great Famine struck Ireland between 1847 and 1849 (though its after-affects continued until 1851). Well in excess of half a million Irish people died, while in its long-term impact, millions emigrated.

The Potato in Ireland

The potato contains considerable food energy, and yet is very easy to cultivate. Typical farming practice of the era seeded a field once after being hoed, and future year's crops were "seeded" by simply leaving some of the potatoes unharvested in the ground. Weeding was minimal, and irrigation unnessesary.

For all of these reasons the potato had become Ireland's major food crop after being introduced sometime around 1650. Even small plots could provide enough calories for a family, and other lands were used for cash crops like flax. The abundance of food and cash led to a rise in population in Ireland, and predictions from the early 19th century called for a population of 8 to 9 million by 1851.

The potato's benefits also led to a dangerous inflexibility in the Irish food system. The majority of calories were being provided from a single crop. That alone is not unusual, and is still the case today for many farmers around the world. However the traditional Irish practice of the day was to sub-divide plots among the male children of a family, and with increased calories the number of surviving mail heirs was quickly increasing.

By 1840 holdings were so small that the only crop that could be grown in sufficient quantities to feed a family was potatoes. 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 2 to 6 hectares (five to fifteen acres). This included marshland and bogland that could not be used for food production.

Furthermore, the structure of land ownership complicated matters. Few lower class Irish owned their land, but were in fact tenants of massive estates, often created during the various plantations or after the various wars (Elizabethan, Cromwell, Glorious Revolution, etc). Tenants had few rights, which made holding a tenancy a precarious experience. Furthermore, many of the great estates themselves were heavily morgaged, and in debt. As a result, most of the Irish rural economy was teetering on the brink of economic collapse in any case, with an urgent need for fundamental land reform.

The Blight

Although the origins are still unclear, in 1845 a potato blight struck across Europe, turning potatoes into a black, soggy, and inedible mess. The vast majority of the Irish 1847 crop was ruined. Food stores and emergency supplies made up for some of this setback, but the blight appeared again in 1849, and there were no reserve capacity remaining. The result was widespread famine, though it affected different parts of the island to different degrees.

While no-one knows how many died (state registration of deaths had not begun yet), historians estimate that a minimum of 500,000 men, women and children died. The number may be considerably more than that, but no-one can be certain, though recent historical studies have suggested small numbers than used to be presumed.

Another measure is possible by comparing the expected population with the eventual numbers in the 1850s. Earlier predictions called for 8 to 9 million, but in 1851 the actual population was 6.5 million. In addition to the outright deaths, the side-effects of malnutrition, namely a plummeting in fertility rates and rates of sexual activity, had a toll as well. In addition, estimates suggest that up to 1 million Irish emegrated to the United States as a result of the famine.

The initial British government response towards the early famine was, in the view of historians, adequate. Unfortunately, with tragic consequences, the Tory government of Sir Robert Peel was replaced (with the help of Irish MPs under Daniel O'Connell) by a Whig ministry under Lord John Russell (whose family, ironically had Irish links through estates they owned in County Meath). Russell, like many leaders of the time, believed in a laissez faire economic policy of non-intervention in the economy. So whereas Peel had imported Indian Maize to feed the starving, Russell instead focused on providing support through public works and the provision of work-houses. Unfortunately a disastrous Gregory Clause was introduced, which limited aid to those who owned less than one acre of land. This forced poverty-striken starving tenants either to give up their homes and land, and so become destitute after the famine, or hold on to them and risk starvation. However it followed the economic theory of time that was intended to discourage the 'undeserving poor' from using the welfare system while they still had means (however theoretical in the absence of a harvest) of providing for themselves.

As a result, a disastrous application of the laissez faire economic theory and ignorance in London of the scale of the problem turned a disaster into a catastrophe. Large sums of money were donated by charities; Pope Pius IX sent funds, Queen Victoria personally gave the modern day equivalent of €70,000 (not the mythical £5 claimed!), while some native americans famously sent money and grain (an act of kindness still remembered to this day). Nevertheless such charitable donations could not solve the scale of the problem. However the claim sometimes made that the British were guilty of 'genocide' in their 'deliberate' inaction during the Famine is widely rubbished by historians as 'propagandistic nonsense'; Britain and other major states similarly mishandled other famines, including famines in Scotland though ignorance, incompetence and what were in retrospect flawed economic theories at the time.

Critics have observed how during this time, Irish and Anglo-Irish landowners exported corn (and other crops) which could have saved the lives of many Irish people. However, had they not done so, a major economic crisis could have resulted, with would have bankrupted the entire agricultural sector and through loss of foreign currency devestated the urban and industrial economies. For example, it could have forced far more estates to evict their tenants, these estates only being able to survive themselves and in many cases lower rents or provide local relief due to the income coming in from grain exports, Most historians have concluded that not to continue the export could have plunged the entire Irish economy into economic meltdown, forcing mass emigration on a scale even worse than that experienced from all the island, including those parts to that point not heavily hit by the early stages of the famine, notably in east and north east of the island. It was the classic 'no win' situation faced by many economies hit by famine.

Side Effects in Ireland

Potato blights continued in Ireland, especially in 1872 and 1879-1880. These killed few people, partly because they were less severe, partly because Irish-Americans and Britain contributed to relief efforts. More directly however, it was due to a complex range of reasons. The growth in the numbers of railways made the importation of foodstuffs easier. The banning of sub-division, coupled with emigration, had increased the average farm holding, enabling tenant farms to diversify in terms of produce grown. The increasing wealth in urban areas meant alternative sources of food, grain, potatoes and seed were available in towns and villages. Furthermore, the 1847-49 peak of the famine also wiped out one entire class, the 'cottiers' or farm labourers, leading to a restructuring of the agricultural economy, which by the 1870s was more efficient, as well as having access to new farm machinery and product control that had not existed thirty years earlier.

Crucially, the economic policy of laissez faire that had been fashionable in the 1840s was no longer so fashionable in the 1870s. As a result, state intervention was quicker, more effective, and more directed than had been the case in the 1840s. Of particular importance was the wholescale re-organisation of the agricultural sector, which had begun after the famine with the Emcumbered Estates Act and which in the period (1870s-1900s) saw the nature of Irish landholding changed completely, with small owned farms replacing mass estates and multiple tenants. Many of the large estates in the 1840s were debt ridden and heavily morgaged. As a result, policies of wholescale evictions of tenants who could no longer pay the full rent took place, increasingly the scale of the poverty and famine. (Though a number of estates themselves went backrupt attempting to feed their starving tenants, or were bankrupt in the immediate aftermath.) In contrast, estates in the 1870s were on a better economic footing, and so capable of reducing rents and providing locally organised relief, as was the Roman Catholic Church, which was better organised and funded than it had been in 1847-49.

Different sexual habits and a different demographic profile also helped curb the danger of mass starvation in the 1870s, as against the 1840s. The 1850s had seen as resurgence in Roman Catholicism under the ultramontane Cardinal Archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, resulting in less sexual activity outside marriage, which was commonplace before the 1850s, hence the near doubling of the population over a couple of generations prior to the 1840s. As a result of fewer non-marital children and a rise in the marriage age, fertility rates had dropped. The abandonment of subdivision meant that only one sibling and his children was reliant on food from the farm, while his siblings went to other careers (often in urban centres) where food was freely available. In addition, emigration had led to the mass exodus of young people of marital or child-rearing age, leaving many spinster women and bachelor men, unmarried and without children, in the country. Together, all these factors produced a drop in the number of dependent children and a rise in single individuals who were able to feed themselves on their farmsted.

As a result, later mini-famines made only minimal impact and are generally forgotten, except by historians. However, even though by the 1880s Ireland went through an economic boom unprecedented until the Celtic Tiger (1995-2002), emigration, often of children who no longer could inherit a share in the land and who as a result chose to go abroad for economic advantage and to avoid poverty, continued. By the 1890s, the Irish population had fallen to around 4 million, about the same as the population in 1800 and 2000 and only a half of its peak population.

The same mould (Phytophthora infestans) was responsible for the 1847-51 and later famines. When people speak of "The Irish potato famine", or "an Gortha Mor", (pronounced, 'on gore-ta more') they nearly always mean the one of the 1840s, even though a similar Great Famine in fact hit in the early eighteenth century.

The fact that only four types of potato were brought from America was at the root of the famine. In fact the lack of genetic diversity in the food made it possible for a single fungus-relative to have those devastating consequences.

Additional Reading

• Cormac O'Grada, An Economic History of Ireland
• Robert Kee, Ireland: A History (ISBN 0349106789)
• F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (ISBN 0006860052)

A number of localised studies on the impact of the Famine has been published in recent years. Information on these may be got from major bookstores.

See Also Misplaced Pages entries on: History of Ireland, Republic of Ireland, Ireland, Daniel O'Connell.

External links

• For more on the pathogen see http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/mar2001.html
• Republic of Ireland website