Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Maelnuneb (talk | contribs) at 21:40, 1 November 2006 (Typo fixing Typos: the the → the, using AWB). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Great Famine or the Great Hunger (Irish: An Gorta Mór or An Drochshaol), known more commonly outside of Ireland as the Irish Potato Famine, is the name given to the famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1849. The Famine was due to the appearance of "the Blight" – the potato fungus that almost instantly destroyed the primary food source for the majority population. 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 five years from 1846 to 1849 as a result of hunger or disease. 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).

The immediate effect on Ireland was devastating, and its long-term effects proved immense, permanently changing Irish culture and tradition. The Irish Potato Famine was the culmination of a social, biological, political and economic catastrophe, caused by both Irish and British factors.

The potato's benefits also led to a dangerous inflexibility in the Irish food system. The majority of food energy was being provided from a single crop. That alone is not unusual, and is still the case today for many subsistence farmers around the world. British penal laws, specifically the Popery Act, forbade Irish Catholics to pass the family landholdings on to a single son. As a result of this law, the practice of subdividing plots among the male children of a family, though diminishing, was still widely practised in the poorer areas of the country. The use of the potato and subdivision produced two interlinked side-effects; with increased food energy the number of surviving male heirs was quickly increasing, while with the prospect of inheriting a landholding, heirs married young and produced large families — hence increasing subdivision into smaller estates for their own heirs.

Irish landholdings

The Famine was the product of a number of complex problems which affected nineteenth-century Ireland. One of the most central was the nature of landholdings. From the Norman invasion in 1169 Irish ownership of the land of the island had been in decline. However, the assimilation of the Hiberno-Normans into Irish society rendered this land transfer of less importance by the end of the sixteenth century. Then, under Mary and Elizabeth, plantations of the country were undertaken. These plantations — in Laois, Offaly and Antrim respectively — did not survive. Landholding was, however, fundamentally altered by the Plantation of Ulster and the consequences of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.

A practice of consolidation of lands into large estates was widespread in Europe, but, in Ireland, it was complicated by the discriminatory laws applied to all faiths other than the Established Church of Ireland, in particular against Presbyterians and Roman Catholics.. However, by the time of the potato famine these discriminatory laws had been repealed.

The local practice known as 'subdivision', whereby lands and property, instead of being inherited by the first-born son (primogeniture) was divided equally among male heirs. In its nineteenth-century landholding form, it meant that, over each generation, the size of a tenant farm was reduced, as it was split between all living sons, though by the 1840s, 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 2 to 6 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.

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. (10% were eventually bankrupted by the Great Hunger). 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 wholly 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, possibly leading to their eviction.

Evictions

At the time, the relief of the poor in Ireland was based on the Poor Law legislation. These schemes were paid for through the Poor Law Union, which was funded by rates (local taxes) paid by landlords, on the basis of an estate's tenant numbers. The system of letting small farms to subsistance farmers was unprofitable, and the Irish Government used the rating system to encourage consolidation of holdings which would be more profitable and, in theory, provide employment for those who were no longer able to farm.

Large sums of money were donated by charities; Calcutta is credited with making the first donation of £14,000. The money was raised by Irish soldiers serving there and Irish people employed by the East India Company. Pope Pius IX sent funds, Queen Victoria donated the equivalent of €70,000 in today's money, while the Choctaw Indians famously sent $710 and grain, an act of generosity still remembered to this day, and publicly commemorated by President Mary Robinson in the 1990s.

Detailed statistics into the population of Ireland since 1841 are available at Irish Population Analysis.

Response of United Kingdom Government

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it.

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

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 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. Lord Russell's ministry focused on providing support through public works and soup kitchens. Unfortunately, in the autumn of 1847, these relief programs 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.

During the winter of 1845–1846 Peel's government spent £100,000 on American maize which was sold to the destitute. The Irish called the maize 'Peel's brimstone' — and the nickname was only partly because of the yellow colour of the maize. Eventually the government also initiated relief schemes such as canal-building and road building to provide employment. The workers were paid at the end of the week and often men had died of starvation before their wages arrived. Even worse, many of the schemes were of little use: men filled in valleys and flattened hills just so the government could justify the cash payments.

Death tolls

No one knows for certain how many people died in the Famine. State registration of births, marriages or deaths had not yet begun, while records kept by the Roman Catholic Church are incomplete. Many of the Church of Ireland's records (which included records of local Catholics due to the collection of Tithes (10% of income) from Catholics to finance the Church of Ireland) were destroyed by irregular IRA troops in 1922.

One possible estimate has been reached by comparing the expected population with the eventual numbers in the 1850s (see Irish Population Analysis). Earlier predictions expected that by 1851, Ireland would have a population of 8 to 9 million. This calculation is based on numbers contained in the ten year census results compiled since 1821. (However, a recent re-examination of those returns raise questions as to their accuracy; the 1841 Census, for example, incorrectly classed farm children as labourers, affecting later calculations on how many adults capable of childbearing existed to produce children between 1841 and 1851). In 1851 the actual population was 6.6 million. Making straightforward calculations is complicated by a secondary effect of famine, a key side-effect of malnutrition, namely plummeting fertility and sexual activity rates. The scale of that effect on population numbers was not fully recognized until studies done during African famines in the twentieth century. As a result, corrections based on inaccuracies in census returns and on the previous unrealized decline in births due to malnourishment have led to an overall reduction in the presumed death numbers. Modern historians and statisticians estimate that between 500,000 and 1,500,000 died. Some historians suggest the death toll was in the region of 700,000 to 800,000. One website claims a figure of over five million - no serious historian endorses a figure of even half this size. In addition, in excess of one million Irish emigrated to the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, while more than one million emigrated over following decades; by 1911, a combination of emigration and an abnormally high number of unmarried men and women in the population, had reduced the population of Ireland to 4.4 million.

The aftermath

Potato blights continued in Ireland, especially in 1872 and 1879–1880. These killed few people, partly because they were less severe, but mainly for a complex range of reasons. The growth in the numbers of railways made the importation of foodstuffs easier; in 1834, Ireland had 9.7 km (6 miles) of railway tracks; by 1912, the total was 5 480 km (3,403 miles). The banning of subdivision, 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. The 1870s agricultural economy thus was more efficient and less dependent on potatoes, as well as having access to new farm machinery and product control that had not existed thirty years earlier.

Of particular importance was the wholesale reorganisation of the agricultural sector, which had begun after the famine with the Encumbered 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 mortgaged. In contrast, estates in the 1870s, many of them under new Irish middle class owners thanks to the Encumbered Estates Act, were on a better economic footing, and so capable of reducing rents and providing locally organized relief, as was the Roman Catholic Church, which was better organised and funded than it had been in 1847–49.

If subdivision produced earlier marriage and larger families, its abolition produced the opposite effect; the 'inheriting' child would wait until they found the 'right' partner, preferably one with a large dowry to bring to the farm. Other children, no longer with the possibility of inheriting a farm (or part of it at least) had no economic attraction and no financial resources to consider an early marriage.

As a result, later mini-famines made only minimal effect and are generally forgotten, except by historians. However, even though by the 1880s Ireland went through an economic boom unprecedented until the Celtic Tiger era, 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 1911 census, the island of Ireland's population had fallen to 4.4 million, about the same as the population in 1800 and 2000 and only a half of its peak population.

The same mould (Phytophthora infestan3r2qs) was responsible for the 1847–51 and later famines. When people speak of "the Irish famine", or "an Gorta Mór", they nearly always mean the one of the 1840s, even though a similar Great Famine did in fact hit in the early 18th century. The fact that only four types of potato were brought from the Americas was a fundamental cause of the famine, as the lack of genetic diversity made it possible for a single fungus-relative to have much more devastating consequences than it might otherwise have had.

Emigration

As a result of the famine, many Irish families were forced to emigrate from the country. By 1854, between 1.5 and 2 million Irish left their country. In the United States, most Irish became city-dwellers. With little money, many had to settle in the cities that the ships they came on landed in. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The 1851 census reported that about one third of the inhabitants of Toronto, Canada, were Irish. The Famine is often seen as an initiator in the steep depopulation of Ireland in the 19th century; however, it is likely that real population began to fall in 1841 with the Famine accelerating any population changes already occurring. Some may argue the Famine was necessary to restore population equilibrium to Ireland given that population increased by 13–14% in the first three decades of the 19th century (using Thomas Malthus's idea of population expanding geometrically, resources increasing arithmetically) nonetheless there is a tendency among Irish historians to dispute this. Statistics show that between 1831 and 1841 population grew by only 5% so this gives more value to those who argue that population was already falling by 1844.

The mass exodus in the years following the famine must be seen in the context of overpopulation, industrial stagnation, land shortages, declining agricultural employment and inadequate diet. These factors were already combining to choke off population growth by the 1830s. It would be wrong, therefore, to attribute all the population loss during the famine, to the famine.

Suggestions of genocide

The suggestion that the Famine "amounted to genocide" by the British against the Irish is a divisive issue. Few Irish historians accept outright such a definition, as "genocide" implies a deliberate policy of extermination. Many agree that the British policies during the Famine, particularly those applied under Lord John Russell, were misguided, ill-informed, and disastrous. Anglo-Irish poet Jonathan Swift had satirized the plight of the Irish in relation to English economic domination almost a century before the famine in his pamphlet A Modest Proposal (1729). Professor Joe Lee called what happened a holocaust (although Holodomor may be a more accurate description). Others, however, note that over three million people were fed through soup kitchens (though much of it through non-governmental aid), and that factors such as poor communication, primitive retail distribution networks and the inefficiencies of local government had exacerbated the situation.

The "debate" is largely a moral one, attempting to ascertain whether within the policies of the British Empire lay a racist, forgetful, or simply inconsiderate mentality that, despite its power, made it impotent to handle a humanitarian crisis in its own backyard, or whether a large reduction in Ireland's population was looked on as a favourable outcome by a large segment of the British body politic, who then decided to let nature take its course. Some Irish, British and US historians (F.S.L. Lyons, John A. Murphy, Joe Lee, Roy Foster, and James S. Donnelly, Jr.), as well as historians Cecil Woodham-Smith, Peter Gray, Ruth Dudley Edwards and many others have long dismissed claims of a deliberate policy of extermination. This dismissal usually does not preclude any assessment of British Imperial rule as ill-mannered or unresponsive toward certain of its subjects.

The notable difference between the Famine and other humanitarian crises was that it occurred within the imperial homeland, at a time well into the modern prosperity of the Victorian and Industrial age. Even today, such crises tend to be far away from centres of power such that the subjects of empire, almost by definition, are of distant cultures, languages and religious beliefs. Within the imperial culture, the reportage of a crisis among its subjects more often uses dismissive and dehumanizing terms, and treats otherwise urgent matters with little relevancy or interest. With respect to geography, the famine would appear to belie many of the typical circumstances in which colonialist dismissal of native plight often occurred. With respect to era, the famine came at a crossroads of old world and modern world. Though human suffering during the famine was never photographed, the event immediately and profoundly altered the course of generations of Irish and Irish diaspora — for whom history has a rich and prosperous record.

Memorials to the famine

The Great Famine is still remembered in many locations throughout Ireland, especially in those regions which suffered the greatest losses, and also in cities overseas with large populations descended from Irish immigrants.

In Ireland

• Strokestown Park Famine Museum, Ireland
• Dublin City Quays, Ireland. Painfully thin sculptural figures stand as if walking towards the emigration ships on the Dublin Quayside.
• Murrisk, County Mayo, Ireland. This sculpture of a famine ship, near the foot of Croagh Patrick, depicts the refugees it carries as dead souls hanging from the sides.
• Doolough, County Mayo. A memorial commemorates famine victims who walked from Louisburgh along the mountain road to Delphi Lodge to seek relief from the Poor Board who were meeting there. Returning after their request was refused, many of them died at this point.

In the United Kingdom

• Liverpool, England. A memorial is in the grounds of St Luke's Church on Leece Street, itself a memorial to the victims of the Blitz. It recalls that from 1849–1852 1,241,410 Irish immigrants arrived in the city and that from Liverpool they dispersed to locations around the world. Many died despite the help they received within the city, some 7000 in the city perish within one year. The sculpture is dedicated to the memory of all famine emigrants and their suffering. There is also a plaque on the gates to Clarence Dock. Unveiled in 2000 The plaque inscription reads in Gaelic and English: "Through these gates passed most of the 1,300,000 Irish migrants who fled from the Great Famine and 'took the ship' to Liverpool in the years 1845–52" The Maritime Museum, Albert Dock, Liverpool has an exhibition regarding the Irish Migration, showing models of ships, documentation and other facts on Liverpool's history.

• Cardiff, Wales. A magnificent Celtic Cross made of Irish Limestone on a base of Welsh stone stands in the city's Cathays Cemetery. The cross was unveiled in 1999 as the high point in the work of the Wales Famine Forum, remembering the 150th Anniversary of the famine. The memorial is dedicated to every person of Irish origin, without distinction on grounds of class, politics, allegiance or religious belief, who has died in Wales. The Potatoes were also taken over.

In North America

• In Boston, Massachusetts, a bronze statue located at the corner of Washington and School Streets on the Freedom Trail depicts a starving woman, looking up to the heavens as if to ask "Why?", while her children cling to her. A second sculpture shows the figures hopeful as they land in Boston. See .
• Buffalo, New York has a stone memorial on its waterfront.
• Cambridge, Massachusetts has a memorial to the famine on its Common.
• Chicago, Illinois
• Cleveland, Ohio A 12 foot high stone celtic cross, located on the east bank of the Cuyahoga River.
• Grosse-Île, Quebec, Canada
• Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, 12-foot limestone cross donated by the government of Ireland in 1997
• Keansburg, NJ has a Hunger Memorial in Friendship Park on Main Street.
• Kingston, Ontario, Canada, has three monuments. Celtic cross at An Gorta Mor Park on the waterfront. Another is located at Skeleton (McBurney) Park (formerly Kingston Upper Cemetery). Angel of Resurrection monument, first dedicated in 1894 at St. Mary's cemetery.
• Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the "Boulder Stone" in Pointe-Saint-Charles
• New York, New York has the Irish Hunger Memorial which looks like a sloping hillside with low stone walls and a roofless cabin on one side and a polished wall with lit (or white) lines on the other three sides. The memorial is in Battery Park City, a short walk west from the World Trade Center site. See . Another memorial exists in V.E. Macy Park in Ardsley, New York about 32 km north of Manhattan.
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Phoenix, Arizona has a famine memorial in the form of a dolmen at the Irish Cultural Center.
• Toronto, Ontario Under Construction – opening June 2007. Four bronze statues arriving at the Toronto wharves, at Ireland Park on Bathurst Quay, modeled after the Dublin Departure Memorial. List of names of those who died of thyphus in the Toronto fever sheds shortly after their arrival. Current memorial plaque at Metro Hall.
• Irish Hills Michigan — The Ancient Order of Hibernian's An Gorta Mor Memorial is located on the grounds of St. Joseph's Shrine in the Irish Hills district of Lenawee County, Michigan. There are 32 black stones as the platform, one for each county. The grounds are surrounded with a stone wall. The Lintel is a step from Penrose Quay in Cork Harbor. The project was the result of several years of fundraising by the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Lenewee County. It was dedicated in 2004 by AOH Divisional President, Patrick Maguire, and many political and Irish figures from around the state of Michigan.

In Australia

• Sydney, Australia. The Australian Monument to the Great Irish Famine is located in the courtyard wall of the Hyde Park Barracks, Macquarie Street Sydney. It symbolises the experiences of young Irishwomen fleeing the Great Irish Famine of 1845–48.

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items.

See also

• Irish potato famine (legacy) (continuation of this article)
• Highland Potato Famine (1846 - 1857) (agrarian crisis in Scotland at the same time)
• List of natural disasters in the United Kingdom
• "Fields of Athenry," a popular song about the famine

Footnotes

1. Robert Kee, The Laurel and the Ivy: The Story of Charles Stewart Parnell and Irish Nationalism p.15.
2. FSL Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine p.42.
3. Lee, op.cit p.1.
4. Joe Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society p.1. Cormac Ó Grada suggests the higher number of one million.
5. http://www.catholicapologetics.net/Ireland's%20Holocaust.htm

Additional reading

• Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea
• Cormac Ó Gráda, An Economic History of Ireland
• Robert Kee, Ireland: A History (ISBN 0349106789)
• John Mitchel, The Last Conquest of Ireland (1861) (out of print)
• Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, 1845-49 (Penguin, 1991 edition)
• Marita Conlon-McKenna, Under the Hawthorn Tree
• Thomas Gallagher, Paddy's Lament, Ireland 1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred
• Canon John O'Rourke, The Great Irish Famine (ISBN 1853900494 Hardback) (ISBN 185390130X Paperback) Veritas Publications 1989. First published in 1874.

External links

• Irish National Archives information on the Famine
• Quinnipiac University's An Gorta Mor site - includes etexts
• Ireland's Great Famine (Cormac Ó Gráda) from EH.Net Encyclopedia of Economic History
• Irish Holocaust (appears quite biased)
• History
• Newspaper Reports on the Famine
• Ireland: The hunger years 1845-1851
• Local History Website on the Famine
• Kids History Website about the Famine
• Cork Multitext Project article on the Famine, by Donnchadh Ó Corráin
• For more on the pathogen see http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/mar2001.html

Template:Link FA

• History of Ireland 1801-1922
• Famines
• 1840s
• Land reform in Ireland
• Famines in Ireland
• Potatoes
• Economic disasters
• Irish American history
• Irish diaspora