Ireland

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Ireland

• The Potato Famine

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PART 1

• The Great Hunger (Irish An Gorta Mór or An
  Drochshaol, litt The Bad life) reduced the
  population of Ireland by 20 to 25 percent between
  1845 and 1852.1 It is a highly contentious
  topic of history and known by various names, such
  as The Great Famine in Ireland itself and The
  Irish Potato Famine internationally. The
  proximate cause2 of the famine was a pathogenic
  water mould, , the disease it causes is commonly
  known as late blight of potato. Though P.
  infestans ravaged potato crops throughout Europe
  during the 1840s, its human cost in Ireland was
  exacerbated by a host of political, social,
  economic, and climatological factors which remain
  the subjects of heated historical debate.
• The famine was a watershed in the history of
  Ireland. Its effects extended well beyond its
  immediate demographic impact and permanently
  changed the island's political and cultural
  landscape. For both the native Irish and those in
  the resulting , the famine entered folk memory
  and became a rallying point for various
  nationalist movements. Virtually all modern
  historians of Ireland regard it as a dividing
  line in the Irish historical narrative, referring
  to the preceding period of Irish history as
  "pre-Famine

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PART 2

• The period of the potato blight in Ireland from
  184551 was full of political confrontation.4
  The mass movement for Repeal of the Act of Union
  had failed in its objectives by the time its
  founder Daniel O'Connell died in 1847.citation
  needed A more radical Young Ireland group
  seceded from the Repeal movement and attempted an
  armed rebellion in the Young Irelander Rebellion
  of 1848. It was unsuccessful

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PART 3

• Ireland remained a net exporter of food even
  during the blight. The immediate effect on
  Ireland was devastating, and its long-term
  effects proved immense, changing Irish culture
  and tradition for generations.10 The population
  of Ireland continued to fall for 70 years,
  stabilizing at half the level prior to the
  famine. This long-term decline ended in the west
  of the country only in 2006, over 160 years after
  the famine struck.11

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PART 4

• Records show Irish lands exported food, even
  during the worst years of the Famine. When
  Ireland experienced a famine in 1782-83, ports
  were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland
  to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly
  dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export
  ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their
  protests that export ban did not happen in the
  1840s.19
• Starving Irish family during the potato famine
• Cecil Woodham-Smith, an authority on the Irish
  Famine, wrote in The Great Hunger Ireland
  1845-1849 that,
• ...no issue has provoked so much anger or so
  embittered relations between the two countries
  (England and Ireland) as the indisputable fact
  that huge quantities of food were exported from
  Ireland to England throughout the period when the
  people of Ireland were dying of starvation.
• Ireland remained a net exporter of food
  throughout most of the five-year famine.
• Christine Kinealy, a University of Liverpool
  fellow and author of two texts on the famine,
  Irish Famine This Great Calamity and A
  Death-Dealing Famine, writes that Irish exports
  of calves, livestock (except pigs), bacon and ham
  actually increased during the famine. The food
  was shipped under guard from the most
  famine-stricken parts of Ireland. However, the
  poor had no money to buy food and the government
  then did not ban exports.
• Irish meteorologist Austin Bourke, in The use of
  the potato crop in pre-famine Ireland disputes
  some of Woodham-Smith's calculations, and notes
  that during December 1846 imports almost doubled.
  He opines that
• it is beyond question that the deficiency
  arising from the loss of the potato crop in 1846
  could not have been met by the simple expedient
  of prohibiting the export of grain from Ireland.
• The Quakers are the only Protestant religious
  group commonly recognised to have come to the aid
  of the Irish during the Great Faminecitation
  needed, but they often required Catholics to
  convert to Protestantism.

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PART 5

• No one knows how many people died during the
  period of the Famine, although more died from
  diseases than from starvation.22 State
  registration of births, marriages or deaths had
  not yet begun, while records kept by the Roman
  Catholic Church are incomplete.23 Eye witness
  accounts have helped medical historians to
  identify both the ailments and effects of famine,
  and have helped to evaluate and explain in
  greater detail features of the famine. Quaker,
  William Bennett in Mayo wrote of
• three children huddled together, lying there
  because they were too weak to rise, pale and
  ghastly, their little limbs ... perfectly
  emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently
  in the last stages of actual starvation.
  24Revd Dr Traill Hall, a Church of Ireland
  rector in Schull, described
• the aged, who, with the young are almost
  without exception swollen and ripening for the
  grave.25Marasmic children also left a
  permanent image on Quaker Joseph Crosfield who in
  1846 witnessed a 26
• heartrending scene of poor wretches in the
  last stages of famine imploring to be received
  into the workhouse...Some of the children were
  worn to skeletons, their features sharpened with
  hunger, and their limbs wasted almost to the
  boneWilliam Forster wrote in Carrick-on-Shannon
  that
• the children exhibit the effects of famine in a
  remarkable degree, their faces looking wan and
  haggard with hunger, and seeming like old men and
  women. 27One 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 eight to nine million. A census
  taken in 1841 revealed a population of slightly
  over 8 million.13 A census immediately after
  the famine in 1851 counted 6,552,385, a drop of
  almost 1,500,000 in ten years. 28 Modern
  historian R.J. Foster estimates that 'at least
  775,000 died, mostly through disease, including
  cholera in the latter stages of the holocaust'.
  He further notes that 'a recent sophisticated
  computation estimates excess deaths from 1846 to
  1851 as between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000... after
  a careful critique of this, other statisticians
  arrive at a figure of 1,000,000.' 2930 In
  addition, in excess of one million Irish
  emigrated to Great Britain, United States,
  Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, while more than
  one million emigrated over following decades

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PART 6

• As early as 1844, John Mitchel, one of the
  leading political writers of Young Ireland,
  raised the issue of the "Potato Disease" in The
  Nation he noted how powerful an agent hunger had
  been in certain revolutions.55 Mitchel again in
  The Nation on 14 February 1846, put forward his
  views on "the wretched way in which the famine
  was being trifled with, and asked, had not the
  Government even yet any conception that there
  might be soon "millions of human beings in
  Ireland having nothing to eat." 56 On 28
  February, writing on the Coercion Bill which was
  then going through the House of Lords, he writes,
• This is the only kind of legislation for Ireland
  that is sure to meet with no obstruction in that
  House. However they may differ about feeding the
  Irish people, they agree most cordially in the
  policy of taxing, prosecuting and ruining them.
  57In an article on "English Rule" on 7 March,
  Mitchel wrote
• The Irish People are expecting famine day by
  day... and they ascribe it unanimously, not so
  much to the rule of heaven as to the greedy and
  cruel policy of England. Be that right or wrong,
  that is their feeling. They believe that the
  season as they roll are but ministers of
  Englands rapacity that their starving children
  cannot sit down to their scanty meal but they see
  the harpy claw of England in their dish. They
  behold their own wretched food melting in
  rottenness off the face of the earth, and they
  see heavy-laden ships, freighted with the yellow
  corn their own hands have sown and reaped,
  spreading all sail for England they see it and
  with every grain of that corn goes a heavy curse.
  Again the people believeno matter whether truly
  or falselythat if they should escape the hunger
  and the fever their lives are not safe from
  judges and juries. They do not look upon the law
  of the land as a terror to evil-doers, and a
  praise to those who do well they scowl on it as
  an engine of foreign rule, ill-omened harbinger
  of doom." 58Mitchel because of his writings
  was charged with sedition, but this charge was
  dropped, and he was convicted under a new law
  purposefully enacted of Treason Felony Act and
  sentenced to 14 years transportation.

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