The Great Irish Famine E-Book

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Thomas Davis Lectures
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 493

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

This is the most wide-ranging series of essays ever published on the Great Irish Famine, and will prove of lasting interest to the general reader. Leading historians, economists and geographers – from Ireland, Britain and the United States – have assembled the most up-to-date research from a wide spectrum of disciplines including medicine, folklore and literature, to give the fullest account yet of the background and consequences of the Famine. Contributors include Dr Kevin Whelan, Professor Mary Daly, Professor James Donnelly and Professor Cormac Ó Gráda. The Great Irish Famine was the first major series of essays on the Famine published in Ireland for almost fifty years.

Leseprobe

The Great Irish Famine

Edited byCathal Póirtéir

The Thomas Davis Lecture SeriesGeneral Editor: Michael Littleton

Published in association withRadio Telefís Éireann

Acknowledgement

The editor and publisher would like to thank Carcanet Press Ltd and W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., for permission to reproduce excerpts from Outside History: Selected Poems 1980–1990 by Eavan Boland, Copyright © 1990 by Eavan Boland

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the publisher in writing.

Contents

Title PageAcknowledgementThe ContributorsIntroductionby Cathal PóirtéirPre and Post-Famine Landscape Change by Kevin WhelanThe Great Famine and Irish Politics by S. J. ConnollyThe Other Great Irish Famine by David DicksonFood and Famineby E. Margaret CrawfordFamine, Fever and the Bloody Flux by Laurence M. GearyIdeology and the famine by Peter GrayThe Role of the Poor Law During the Famine by Christine kinealyThe Operations of Famine Relief, 1845–47 by Mary E. DalyThe Stigma of Souperism by Irene WhelanMass Eviction and the Great Famine by James S. Donnelly, JrFlight from Famineby David FitzpatrickThe Famine in the Skibbereen Union  (1845–51) by Patrick Hickey, c.c.The Persistence of Famine in Ireland by Tim P. O’NeillFolk Memory and the Famine by Cathal PóirtéirIrish Famine in Literature by Margaret KelleherThe Great Famine and Today’s Famines by Cormac Ó GrádaCopyright

5

The Contributors

Cathal Póirtéir is a graduate of University College Dublin. He is a Senior Radio Producer in RTÉ where he works on current affairs and features programmes. His forthcoming publications on the Famine include Famine Echoes (Gill and Macmillan), a radio folk history of the Famine, Gnéithe denGhorta (Coiscéim), a series of lectures for Raidio na Gaeltachta; and Glórtha ón Ghorta (Coiscéim), the Irish language folklore of the famine.

Kevin Whelan is the Bicentennial Research Fellow at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. He has written extensively on eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Ireland, empha­sising the interplay between environment, economy, society and culture. He has recently co-edited The United Irishmen:Radicalism, Rebellion and Revolution (Lilliput Press, 1993). His collected essays will be published by Field Day in con­junction with Notre Dame Press.

S. J. Connolly is Reader in History at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. He has written Priests and People in Pre-FamineIreland 1780–1845 (Dublin, 1982), Religion and Society inNineteenth-Century Ireland (Dundalk, 1985), and Religion, Lawand Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992). He is currently editing the Oxford Companionto Irish History.

David Dickson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern History, and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. Recent publications include The United Irishmen: Radicalism,Republicanism, Rebellion (co-edited with Kevin Whelan and Dáire Keogh).

E. Margaret Crawford is a Senior Research Officer at Queen’s University Belfast. She edited Famine – the IrishExperience,900–1900 and has written numerous articles on medical and dietary aspects of the Great Famine.

6Larry Geary is a history graduate of UCC. He has worked in Irish, British and Australian universities, and is currently a Wellcome Research Fellow in the History of Medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, where he is writing a history of medical charities and the poor law medical service in Ireland.

Christine Kinealy is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin. She is a Fellow of the University of Liverpool and lectures in Irish and British history. Her re-assessment of the famine, This Great Calamity. The IrishFamine 1845–52 was published by Gill and Macmillan in November 1994.

Peter Gray was born in Belfast in 1965 and educated there and at Cambridge University. He completed his doctoral thesis, on the politics of land during the Great Famine, in 1992. He is currently a British Academy post-doctoral fellow at Downing College, Cambridge.

Mary E. Daly is Associate Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin and co-editor of the journal Irish Economic and Social History. Her publications include TheFamine in Ireland (Dublin, 1986) and Industrial Developmentand IrishNational Identity 1922–39 (Dublin, 1992). She is cur­rently finishing a history of the Department of the Envi­ronment.

Irene Whelan was educated at University College Galway and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from which she holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. She received the Newcombe Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for her doctoral work on Irish evangelicalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and she is currently employed as an assistant professor of history at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.

JamesS.Donnelly, Jr, is the author of Landlord and Tenant inNineteenth-Century Ireland (1973), The Land of the People ofNineteenth-Century Cork (1975), and the new chapters on the Great Famine in Volume V, Part I, of A New History of Ireland7(1989). With Samuel Clark, he is the co-editor of IrishPeasants (1983). He is currently writing a book on Knock Shrine and the cult of Mary in modern Irish Catholicism. A past Presi­dent of the American Conference for Irish Studies, he is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

David Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin. His Book Oceans of Consolation:Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia was published in 1995.

Patrick Hickey, C.C, is curate in the parish of Drimoleague/Drinagh, Co. Cork. He is a graduate of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Salamanca and University College Cork. His thesis was ‘A Study of four peninsular parishes in west Cork, 1796–1855’, M.A., UCC, (1980). He has contributed to P. Flanagan and C.G. Buttimer, Cork, History and Society, (Dublin), 1993.

Tim P. O’Neill is a lecturer in Modern Irish History in University College Dublin. The author of many articles on nineteenth-century poverty and public health, he was born in County Offaly and is married with four children.

Margaret Kelleher lectures in English in Mater Dei Institute of Education, Dublin. She has written a number of articles on Irish and Bengali Famine literature; her comparative study of representations of women in Famine literature, The Femini­zationof Famine, is forthcoming.

Cormac Ó Gráda teaches economics and economic history at University College Dublin. His latest books are Ireland: ANew Economic History 1780–1939 (Oxford University Press, 1994) and An Drochsaol:BéaloideasagusAmhráin (Coiscéim, 1994). 8

9

Introduction

CathalPóirtéir

This Thomas Davis Lecture Series is to mark the arrival of the potato blight in Ireland in 1845 and the Great Famine which followed.

One hundred and fifty years ago, in the late summer of 1845, the fungus phytopthorainfestans struck Ireland for the first time causing potato blight. Repeated failures of the potato crop led to the deaths of one million people in the next five years and two million more fled the country in the ten years following the first blight. It was a watershed in Irish history and the last major European famine.

The nutritious potato had been the mainstay of the agricultural labourers and cottier class and dominated the diets of at least one-third of the population. When the blight hit the first year it was a disaster for those who depended on it. When the blight returned in the following years it meant death for many of those who were already living pre­cariously at subsistence level, and emigration for those who had the resources to flee disease, death and poverty.

The British government was faced with a disaster on a massive scale. Although famines had occurred many times in Ireland, the unforeseen nature of the potato blight and its duration posed a huge challenge to the administration in Ireland and its political masters in London.

When the previously unknown fungus struck in 1845 the view of the government and those influential on its policies was to be important to the way in which it dealt with the famine in the neighbouring island. The social, economic and religious doctrines of the age all had their role to play in the way the government reacted to the catastrophe.

Many of the changes brought about or hastened by famine deaths and emigration were consistent with what 10many theorists saw as being beneficial for the economic development of Ireland in the long term. The pattern of development which had seen the move to dependency on the potato for cottiers and landless Irish labourers changed. Many of the reforms led to more short-term hardship and evictions and emigration increased as land reforms and social change gathered pace. The radical reforms that might have lessened the impact of the blight, had they occurred be­fore the 1840s, were now on the agenda of both government and tenant-right agitator alike. The landlord was no longer propped up by a social order based largely on the poor and potato dependent labourer. After the Famine three million of the labourers, cottiers, and small holders were literally dead or gone.

With the benefit of hindsight and the perspective of a developed twentieth century country much of the dogma which dictated government policy and the implementation of relief schemes appear hard-hearted, to say the least. To gain an understanding of the circumstances which led to the Great Famine and the attempts made to deal with it, we must take into account the many and varied elements which helped to create the Ireland of the period and the thinking of that time, both in Ireland and Britain. In attempting to do this we should look at the history of famine in Ireland prior to the Great Famine and the way in which Irish agriculture evolved in the period leading up to it. Today we have many difficulties in trying to imagine and understand much of what happened during that period: a huge population dependent on the potato, an unknown disease striking at the heart of its diet, unprecedented levels of death and the great speed of emigration. We find many of the theories of the political economists of the time uncaring, the administration of relief far from adequate and the mass evictions and emigration hard to accept. Many of our difficulties in relating to these and other facets of the Great Famine are because of our perspective at the tail end of the twentieth century. Many of our judgements are made with the benefit of hindsight and we must remember that the cause of the blight was unknown at the time it first struck, that medical science was 11not as developed as it is today and that to find explanations for much of what happened we must take a broad view of the circumstances prevailing at the time.

In trying to achieve a balanced overview of the Great Famine we have called on contributors from many dis­ciplines and they deal with the subject from a variety of viewpoints. Each contributor brings his or her own expertise to bear on a specific strand of the history of the Famine. The historians, economists, geographers and others in this series of lectures are actively involved in research, must of which challenges, updates or complements other work on the Great Famine published over the last century and a half. Their contributions vary in the sources they call on, the facts they present and the way in which they interpret them. While their analysis and conclusions may differ in emphasis or in substance, it is hoped that such a wide-ranging examination of the Famine and the context in which these essays place it, will be of value to the general reader in trying to get a fuller and clearer picture of what happened and why it happened.

Dr Kevin Whelan examines the massive changes in the Irish agricultural community in the periods before and after the Famine. He highlights the role of the potato in the evolution of the cottier system and the way in which it de­formed the class structure of a rapidly expanding popu­lation. The economic development which the potato aided saw a huge movement of population from east to west with new communities growing up in previously little populated areas. Among the changes outlined are the onslaught on the rundale and clachan systems and consequent changes in cultural moulds including the devastation of the Irish language communities. Dr Whelan also outlines some of the changes in Irish landlordism and landscape policy, en­couraged and welcomed by the United Kingdom govern­ment.

Dr Seán J. Connolly provides an overview of Irish politics during the period. He highlights the dislocation between the six-year holocaust of crop failure, disease and death and the political movements for Repeal, the Young Irelanders and the Tenant League. He also analyses the 12structure of the political system which was largely the preserve of wealthy landowners and their sons and how it failed to produce an adequate response to the disaster of famine.

Dr David Dickson reminds us of Ireland’s other Great Famine of 1740–1741 which has often been overshadowed by the Famine of the 1840s. He compares and contrasts the duration, severity and geographical spread of the famines and also reflects on the reasons for the two disasters and the types of society in which they happened.

Dr E. Margaret Crawford takes a detailed look at the diet of the famine period and how the unique dependence of at least one-third of the people on the potato had developed from the beginning of the eighteenth century when the two main sources of food had been pastoral products and grain. She also examined the role and nutritional value of other food sources, including relief foods, during the Famine and the way in which nutritional deficiency diseases increased in the absence of the potato.

Dr Laurence M. Geary turns his attention to the other diseases which claimed so many lives during this and other famines. Although fever had no respect for social classes, it tended to begin among the poor and spread upwards, the contagiousness striking both towns and country areas. Typhus fever, relapsing fever, typhoid, dysentery, diarrhoea and smallpox are examined along with their relationship to famine and the social conditions associated with it. The links between poverty, malnutrition and disease are analysed and the dangers of badly chosen or badly cooked food highlighted.

Dr Peter Gray unravels the complex issue of how ideology motivated and influenced British government policy. He links government thinking to public opinion and sites it within the intellectual context of Britain at the time. The role of classical economic orthodoxy and variants of it are examined along with Providentialism and the Christian political economics of the period. The political context for the world view of government is explained and it is demon­strated how this resulted in a dogmatism based on false 13premises which contributed to the deaths of thousands in the famine conditions of Ireland in the 1840s.

The pivotal role of the Poor Law in Ireland is examined by Dr Christine Kinealy. The origins of the system are reviewed along with its transformation into the main method of relief during the Great Famine. The differences between the Irish Poor Law and the English Poor Law are highlighted as are the modifications to it which were carried out in response to the Famine. One of the most important decisions was to make the Poor Law responsible for the provision of all relief after August 1847 and the transfer of the financial burden from central to local resources. Other changes included allowing outdoor relief and the introduction of the controversial Quarter Acre or Gregory Clause with the subsequent rise in evictions. The view of the Poor Law as a tool to transform the Irish economy is shown to have taken priority over the immediate needs of the distressed poor. Our attention is also drawn to the experience on the ground where the realities of distress led to official policy being ignored by many in their response to the suffering community around them.

Professor Mary Daly focuses on the operations of Famine relief between 1845–47 when a series of special government programmes were put in place to deal with the crisis. She recalls that neither famine nor government relief schemes were new and points to the inadequacy of government efforts to relieve hunger after 1847 when the government wrongly declared the Famine over. How it dealt with the operations of famine relief in the first three years, while inadequate, was nevertheless a major effort in dealing with an unprecedented disaster, despite the fact that they regarded Irish society as a whole, and the landlord class in particular, as being to blame for rampant population growth, sub-division of holdings and dependence on the potato which they regarded as a morally inferior food. When those views combined with a laissez faire economics reading of the famine as the will of God, and a way to remedy many of Ireland’s social ills was an appealing choice for the British government of the time. It is argued that if blame is to be 14attached that it should have a much wider catchment and include landlords, land agents, farmers, clergy and Irish politicians.

Dr Irene Whelan puts the stigma of souperism in context with a detailed look at the wider context of Protestant evangelism in Britain and Ireland before and during the Famine period and how it became linked with the distribution of relief in certain places.

Professor James S. Donnolly, Jr examines the mass evictions of the Famine period and contends that what happened during and as a result of the clearances had the look of genocide to a great many Irish contemporaries as well as to nationalist propagandists after the Great Famine. While he maintains that genocide was not in fact committed, he challenges the revisionist historiography of the Famine, in which Mitchel and other nationalist propagandists are dismissed as the creators of a baseless myth of genocide.

Dr David Fitzpatrick reminds us that getting out of famine-stricken Ireland was a matter of life or death for many of those who emigrated and that the unprecedented scale of emigration, two million in ten years, undermined the gradations and hierarchies of Irish society. The contradictory evidence about the social class of the emigrants is reviewed along with the reasons for the redirection of most of the emigration from Britain to the United States. The Famine exodus resulted in a startling redistribution of the surviving Irish population and continuing depopulation played a major part in the evolving social structures in Ireland and left an ambiguous legacy in the memory of expatriate survivors, caught between resentment at their exile and the eagerness with which so many of them grasped the chance of a new and better life.

Many of the main elements in the discussions on the operations of relief schemes, how the Poor Law worked, attitudes of officialdom and clergy on the ground are discussed in Patrick Hickey’s paper on the Great Famine in the Skibbereen Union. This focus on one particular geo­graphical area allows us the opportunity to examine to what extent many of the general observations made about the 15extent of the disaster and the attempts to alleviate it can be upheld, or otherwise, in a detailed local study. Perhaps it is appropriate that an area which attracted so much outside attention during the Famine, should be the area to be included in a detailed local study one hundred and fifty years later.

Dr Tim P. O’Neill examines the persistence of famine in Ireland after the Great Famine and shows that starvation still threatened in the west of Ireland into the twentieth century, even after the foundation of the Irish Free State. The sensitivity of both British and Irish governments to the word ‘famine’ is demonstrated. He maintains that if famine is defined as an extreme scarcity of food in a district, then there were many minor famines in late nineteenth century Ireland but if widespread death from starvation is the defining factor that there were few, if any, famines in Ireland after the Great Famine. We are left in no doubt about the recurring food shortages and extreme hardship in many remote areas in the west, with the loss of crops between 1859 and 1864 being the most serious minor famine after the 1840s. It is pointed out that fewer deaths occurred because relief agencies were more sensitive to the threat of death, there was less eviction, and cheap alternative food and credit in new shops were available. The better-known minor famine of 1879–80 is also examined along with the contemporary interest in it, the role of private charities and government thinking and policy of the time.

The lectures by Cathal Póirtéir and Dr Margaret Kelleher investigate the way in which famine has been dealt with in memory and imagination. Cathal Póirtéir examines the folklore of the Famine and the possibilities of using the oral tradition as an additional historical source and as a means of understanding the impact of the Famine on the minds of the generations who came directly afterwards. Many of the images available in the folk tradition play their role in the literature of the Famine which Margaret Kelleher examines in detail. The difficulties of finding the language to describe the horrors of famine are discussed along with a review of the poetry and prose of the Famine period and later 16interpretations of the disaster in Irish Literature. The combinations of fact and fiction, the individual perspectives of the writers and the critical and public reactions to their various works are drawn together in this essay.

Professor Cormac Ó Gráda centres his thoughts on the Great Famine and today’s famines and suggests that the generous response of the Irish public to Third World famines may not be directly linked to the history or memory of famine in Ireland, as is often claimed. Rather he links the giving of aid to the Third World to the Irish tradition of overseas missionary activity and raises the possibility that Irish people have distanced themselves from what happened in Ireland in the 1840s while responding to similar disasters elsewhere. The similarities and differences between the circumstances of the Great Famine and modern famines in other countries are also examined. The philosophical contexts, the proportions of the disasters, the infrastructures and levels of general poverty in the regions are compared and contrasted with the Irish experience in the 1840s. We are left in no doubt that ideology and attitudes to relief and poverty can still exacerbate food shortages and that class prejudice has played its part in dictating how some administrations viewed and dealt with famine up to the present day.

I hope that this series of Thomas Davis Lectures will help towards a better understanding of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s and place it in a context which will make its interpretation and analysis a continuing matter of interest for researchers and the general reader alike.

Finally I would like to thank all the contributors for their willingness to take part in the project and for their forbearance and courtesy in my dealings with them. I hope they will feel that their work has been treated with due care and attention despite the sometimes harsh deadlines dictated by broadcasters and publishers. Gabhaim buíochas ar leith le Cormac Ó Gráda a spreag agus a chomhairligh mé go minic ón uair a rith sé liom an chéad uair go mba chóir dom tabhairt faoin tionscnamh seo. Bhí sé fial lena shaineolas agus lena chuid ama, mar is dual dó. My particular thanks to 17Michael Littleton of RTÉ, the General Editor of the Thomas Davis Lectures, and Mary Feehan of Mercier Press for their encouragement and willingness to share their experience with me.

Cathal Póirtéir18

19

Pre and Post-Famine Landscape Change

KevinWhelan

It is not a simple task to endeavour to recover in any meaningful way the buried experience of the Famine, or to imaginatively reappropriate the consciousness or culture of pre-Famine Ireland, on the eve of its extinction. It is difficult to grasp at an individual level the implications of a tragedy which wiped out one million people in half a decade, as if the modern population of Dublin was to be obliterated be­fore the end of the 1990s. It is also difficult to empathise with the scale of the poverty. In seemingly prosperous Kilkenny in 1835, a German visitor noted with fascinated disgust how a local mother had picked up gooseberry skins which a fel­low traveller had spat out of the stagecoach, carefully plac­ing them in the mouth of her child. In Limerick city in 1844, a labourer named John Cherry told a local doctor that ‘the people are so poor that they are ready to eat one another’.

To understand the build-up to the Famine, it is necessary to begin with the inevitable potato. While the potato began its Irish career as a garden crop of the gentry, it quickly jumped the garden wall and was given the freedom of the fields. By the late seventeenth century, it had become a wide­spread field crop especially in Munster, although it was a supplementary rather than a principal food source (the main diet still revolved around butter, milk and grain products). But in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, it be­came a base food of the Munster poor, especially in winter.

The relatively rapid expansion of the economy between 1760 and 1815 saw the potato pushing out of Munster, forc­ing the oatmeal-eating zone to retract towards the north-west, and beginning to make inroads into the more varied diet zone of south Leinster. By 1800, it had become a staple 20food all the year round for the cottier and small farm class, and there was an accelerating tendency towards monocul­ture. In the difficult year of 1822, distress was concentrated west of a line from Sligo to Cork: the oatmeal zone, for example, in Donegal, was not affected in any serious way.

The potato’s spread was also pivotal to the evolution of the cottier system, which delivered an extremely cheap and very disciplined workforce to the farmer, but at the cost of depressed living standards (essentially a potato wage) for the labourer. Thus the potato figured prominently in the paradox of a rapidly expanding agrarian economy, co-existing with decreasing living standards for a proliferating social base. The potato facilitated economic expansion while deforming the class structure. In a pre-mechanised produc­tion system, Irish tillage expanded its output by expanding its labour force – achieved by the proliferation of cottiers, who were essentially paid a minimum ‘potato wage’. This was a barrier to innovation (in that low-cost labour made capital-intensive methods undesirable) and a way of disci­plining a captive labour force by limiting its independence. It also favoured the farmer in that the high manure residue from the previous year’s potato crop made for increased tillage yields (as did the prevalent spade as opposed to horse cultivation techniques). Therefore, expansion of tillage led to an inexorable expansion of the potato acreage, and a con­comitant expansion of the cottier class. By 1841, there were over half a million cottiers, with one and three-quarter of a million dependents. The principal beneficiary of this system was the English consumer. The Corn Laws saw the percent­age of British corn imports rise from 16% in the 1790s to 80% by the 1830s. This cheap food was made available by the rapid expansion of Irish imports, based on the cottier system and the potato.

The potato had a number of advantages which made it an attractive proposition in Irish circumstances. It was well adapted to a wet, sunless climate and to sour acidic soils, especially when it had a long growing season in a temperate climate: the potato’s principal enemy was frost more than rain. Unlike grain, the potato required no processing to make 21it edible; this meant that its producers retained direct control over their means of subsistence;

Grá mo chrói na preataí

Nach n-iarann áth nó muileann

Ach á mbaint ins a’ gharraí

Agus á bhfágáil ar a teinidh.

The potatoes are the love of my heart

They don’t require a kiln or mill

Only to be dug in the field

And left on the fire.

In agricultural terms the potato remained disease-free in the Irish context. It also did everything the much vaunted turnip did; it was a root crop which replaced fallow, a winter crop for livestock, and a valuable reclaiming agent in previously untilled ground. It facilitated the development of the spail­pín system, which regularly supplied harvest migrants from poorer to richer areas: the differential harvest time (2–3 weeks) between east and west, and between upland and lowland, allowed seasonal migrants to save the crops in rich­er areas, and then return to harvest their own crop.

The potato was nutritious: with milk added, it formed a balanced diet, containing adequate amounts of protein, car­bohydrates and minerals. Its high energy value and low fat content made it a healthy food source. It also remained palat­able even as part of an extremely monotonous diet. Those who relied totally on potatoes were consuming a stone a day – about fifty to eighty potatoes; over a fifty year career of eating potatoes, this meant consuming a million potatoes.

The seventeenth century witnessed the transformation of the lazy bed from being a receptacle for oats to being one for the potato. The lazy bed could be minutely adjusted to soil type, altitude, slope conditions and rockiness: (this explains the great variety of Irish spade types). Its flexibility allowed steep, irregular or inaccessible slopes to be cultivated areas which could never have been brought under the plough. As Samuel Hayes explained in 1797, writing about mountainous areas in County Wicklow: ‘Potatoes certainly may be culti­vated in ground too moory, stony or too much covered with brush and furze to afford wheat in the first instance. In such ground, the potato must be produced in the common ridge 22or furrow, or lazy-bed way. The crop is often very consider­able in such circumstances, with a sufficient quantity of good dung and in some soils with lime or ashes, but the labour is very great.’

The lazy bed was environmentally efficient, a brilliantly ingenious method of absorbing both an unrestricted labour supply, and nutrient sources like manure, sand, seaweed and peat. Spade cultivation of this type absorbed about five times as much labour as ploughing, twenty times as much as stock-rearing; in that sense, it was a massive soak for surplus or under-employed labour. But it was efficient. Spade culti­vation of potatoes tripled the yield over ploughing, and in the 1840s, Irish yields were twice those of France. Therefore the lazy bed system was a safety-valve in a high-pressure demographic regime.

Population expanded rapidly in those favoured parts of the west of Ireland where potato cultivation could be added to access to hills (for rough grazing), to bogs (for turf) and to the seaside for seaweed, sand and the cnuasach trá (shore-food). Given these amenities, families had access to cheap food, fuel and housing (which could be easily constructed using only local materials – stones for walls, clay for floors, ‘wreck’ timber for rafters, oats or bent grass for thatch). Such areas were a poor man’s paradise in the late eighteenth cen­tury. With little material expectations before the consumer revolution, there were remarkably few formal barriers to early marriage and family formation. In the absence of the old elite, there was little influence exerted by the new land­lord class in social norms; similarly, the institutional church and formal education were weak in the newly settled areas. Alongside the lack of negative influences, there were also positive inducements to marriage (in the form of cheap food, fuel and housing) and the ready availability of land (albeit poor or marginal). This can be contrasted to the population picture in the environmentally favoured big farm areas of Leinster and Munster, where social and economic constraints depressed the demography.

An Irish proverb succinctly expressed the dominant west of Ireland attitude: ‘Dá mbeadh prátaí is móin againn, 23bheadh ár saol ar ár dtóin againn’. An outsider caught the same sentiments in Letters from the IrishHighlands of Conne­mara in 1824:

If they have turf and potatoes enough, they reckon themselves provided for; if a few herring, a little oatmeal and above all the milk of a cow be added, they are rich, they can enjoy them­selves and dance with a light heart after the day’s work is over.

Alongside the potato and the lazy bed cultivation system, a third principal determinant of the west of Ireland settlement pattern was the rundale and clachan system. A clachan (or baile or ‘village’) was a nucleated group of farmhouses, where land-holding was organised communally, frequently on a townland basis and often with considerable ties of kin­ship between the families involved. Although the misleading English word ‘village’ was often used to describe the baile, these clusters of farmhouses were not classic villages, in that they lacked any service functions – church, pub, school or shop. While the houses might have adjacent individual veg­etable gardens (garraí), they were surrounded, on the best available patch of land, by a permanently cultivated infield – a large open field, without enclosures, with a multiplicity of ‘strips’ separated by sods or stones, in which oats or potatoes were grown. Each family used a variety of strips, periodi­cally redistributed, to ensure a fair division of all types of soil – deep, shallow, sandy, boggy, dry. Outside the infield, and generally separated from it by a sturdy wall, was the outfield – poorer, more marginal, hilly or boggy ground which was used for common pasture and turbary. An occa­sional reclamation might be made in the outfield for the pur­pose of growing potatoes (especially when the population grew). The grazing was organised communally using the old Gaelic qualitative measure (the ‘collop’ or ‘sum’) to define the amount of stock each family was allowed to have on the pasturage (so as not to overstock it). Occasionally, if the out­field spread into high mountain pastures, cattle might be moved there in the summer, attended by young boys or girls who lived in summer huts. This was called the buaile and was especially important for butter-making.

24This type of settlement became practically universal on the poorer lands of the west of Ireland in the pre-Famine period. They were an ingenious adaptation to the environ­mental conditions of the west of Ireland, where tiny patches of glacial drift were frequently embedded in extensive areas of bog or mountain. Collective use of the infield maximised utilisation of the limited amount of arable land provided by those drift pockets. Because it was permanently cultivated, the infield’s fertility had to be maintained by drawing on the non-arable outfield for resources – manure, sods, peat and especially seaweed.

Economic development, underpinned by the potato, rundale and clachan, and the lazy bed, engineered a massive shift in population density from east to west, from good land to poor land, and from port hinterlands and river valleys to bog and hill fringes. The density of the population in the mid-nineteenth century had been completely transformed since the mid-seventeenth century. Massive potato-aided re­clamation, intensive sub-division of rundale shares and ex­pansion into previously unsettled areas were all part of the surging demographic profile of Ireland in the post-potato period. Between 1600 and 1845, Ireland’s population surged from one million to eight and a half million, with four mil­lion additional people being added between 1780 and 1845.

The new areas of settlement were concentrated along the ragged Atlantic fringe, and on bog and hill edges. Rundale villages, powered by the potato, acted as a mobile pioneer­ing fringe; the spade and the spud conquered the contours. On the mid-seventeenth century Down Survey maps, settle­ment limits were at c. 500 feet; by 1840, they had climbed to 800 feet – an important consideration in a country of frag­mented uplands like Ireland.

Two final observations are appropriate here. The west of Ireland was a zone of settlement discontinuity, not of con­tinuity. It was not an archaic but a very modern society, whose very existence was underpinned by a relatively novel development – the extensive infiltration of the ecological interloper – the potato. One might also wonder if the potato ultimately destroyed the pre seventeenth-century balance 25between tillage and pasture in these environmentally frail areas. Traditionally, land use had been regulated not by per­manent possession of a precise piece of land but by abstract rights – the cuibhreadh or share, which was determined by a balance between kinship affiliations, lease obligations and environmental constraints. These were dictated by the quali­tative estimation of the carrying capacity for livestock, which then allowed for the precise quantification of grazing rights (sums and collops). These in turn defined tillage rights in the infield, on the basis that manure was the key to the sustain­ability of the system. The balance of pasture and tillage was determined traditionally – i.e., by that blend of necessity and experience which embodied the legacy of accumulated en­vironmental experience. The equilibrium of land use prior to the potato emphasised pastoralism at the expense of tillage. In the west of Ireland, the spread of the potato deranged the traditional balance between tillage and pasture.

These issues came into increasingly sharp focus in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, when a sharp depression hit the area. Agricultural prices halved, the fickle herring de­serted the west coast (where they had been abundant be­tween 1780 and 1810), the linen industry was dislocated by the advent of factory-spinning and weaving – a succession of hammer blows, accentuated by a series of wet summers and bad harvests. By 1822 the region was facing a Famine situ­ation, with a ‘bitter harvest of misery and disappointment’.

The problem faced by these communities was that their prospects were essentially limited. While a minimum exis­tence was underwritten by the potato, their room to manoeu­vre was limited as expectations increased. Called forth by a unique conjuncture of forces, they were trapped in restricted circumstances once those conditions altered. The shrinking pre-Famine economy was squeezed by a relentless demo­graphic regime. Its trauma lay ahead, but with too limited time for readjustments. With the improved position of pas­toralism on the lowland areas, the declining demand for agricultural labour, and more attentive landlord surveillance of sub-division, there were few places left to go but to the high mountain or wet bog.

26The combination of a distressed proto-industrial sector and a volatile agricultural situation gave rise to a great shifting under-class in Irish society in the immediate pre-Famine years. In Ballina in 1835, a commentator noted: ‘If you were going among them for twenty years you would not know their faces, they come and go so fast.’ Their existential marginality was mirrored in their settlement marginality. This period witnessed the explosive expansion of cabin shanties on the edge of towns, bogside squatter colonies like the Erris ‘troglodytes’ or the wretched settlers oozing into the wet deserts of the Bog of Allen, voracious assaults on commonages, or on the limits of cultivation which were pushing up over 1,000 feet.

The cumulative impact of these changes strengthened dangerous tendencies within the society. Firstly, in the pre-Famine period, the more solvent tenants tended to emigrate, thereby simplifying and weakening the social structure. Secondly the prolonged depression drained existing capital resources and damaged resilience in the face of crisis years. Thirdly, the weakening of other cash inputs forced tenants to sell all their oats production, and dragged them increasingly towards dependence on the potato and indeed into depen­dence on the inferior lumper variety, which was initially cal­led the ‘Connaught lumper’. The ecological knife-edge was thereby constantly sharpening, pushing those communities ever closer to the potato precipice. Between 1810 and 1845, there was a decline of potato varieties in favour of the lumper – a high bulk variety which could tolerate poorer soils, and above all else required little manure. The resulting dense monoculture was also more susceptible to disease. Once oats became a cash crop and left the diet, the depen­dence on the potato was dangerously deepening, especially as the emaciated economy was squeezed by an inexorable demographic regime.

The post-Napoleonic collapse impacted perniciously on the cottier class, who now found themselves under relentless pressure. Farmers no longer had the same demand for labour, as the terms of agricultural trade swung more to­wards pastoral rather than tillage production. The sharp de­cline 27in agricultural prices also depressed already minimal wages, in effect pushing it towards a pure potato wage. The labourer’s position, economically redundant, socially mar­ginal, was even further eroded by his lack of any legal foot­hold on his conacre ground. Farmers could peremptorily re­fuse to renew the verbal contract for conacre ground, or evict and distrain, without any legal restraint. For those close to the poor, it was these mini-landlords (‘tiarnaí beaga’) rather than the landlord class per se who were the worst enemies of the agricultural labourer. In 1844, Fr Michael Fitzgerald, the parish priest of Ballingarry in County Limerick, described how a gentleman farmer had cleared his land of cottiers, in the interest of efficiency. ‘There are now beautiful fields and pastures there, but these beautiful fields are the sepulchres of the poor.’ He also accused the big farmer of lacking a social conscience:

If he possessed honest feelings, he ought to be ashamed of his Durhams and his South Downs and his interminable fields of corn, tilled by miserable serfs (more miserable than the fellahs of Egypt or the blacks of Cuba), and occupy the place from which numan happiness and human enjoyment were rooted out and exterminated.

But the potato, as well as being a lifesaver was also a hard taskmaster. Asenath Nicholson described a scene near Roundstone, County Galway, in 1845:

The poor peasants, men, women and children were gathering seaweed, loading their horses, asses and backs with it, to manure their wretched little patches of potatoes sown among the rocks. ‘Three hundred and sixty-two days a year we have the potato,’ said a young man to me bitterly, ‘the blackguard of a Raleigh who brought them here entailed a curse upon the labourer that has broke his heart. Because the landlord sees that we can live and work hard on them, he grinds us down in our ways and he despises us because we are ignorant and ragged.’

In these circumstances, a failure of the crop would cause dis­aster; repeated failures would simply decimate the popu­lation. The unprecedented attack of Phytopthora infestans de­stroyed one-third of the crop in 1845; the combined impact of 28blight and the failure to sow the crop led to the yield being lower by three-quarters in 1846 and 1847 and one-third in 1848. Massive mortality and emigration ensued: one million died and two million emigrated in the next two decades, cru­elly paralleling the three million ‘potato people’ who were totally dependent on the now fickle tuber in the immediate pre-Famine period. These deaths were disproportionately concentrated in the areas of new settlement dominated by rundale and clachan, and by the lumper potato. In the dense huddles of poor quality housing, disease had a field day. From a sample of 7,000 people who died in West Cork in 1847, we know that 44% died of fever, 34% of starvation and 22% of dysentery. The clachan settlements were decimated. At Liscananaun, in the parish of Turloughmore in County Galway, the swollen clachan had 114 houses and 688 people in 1841: by 1851, this had been shrunk to 46 houses and 257 people – only one-third of its pre-Famine size. A similar devastation emerges from close study of clachans right across the west of Ireland in the Famine period.

The response of the United Kingdom government to this devastating crisis was dominated by its perception of the potato as literally the root of all Irish evil. There was a pre­valent ideological antipathy to the potato as a ‘lazy root’, grown in ‘lazy’ beds by a ‘lazy’ people. The potato itself was an inferior food in a civilisational sense, which pinned the Irish poor to the bottom of the cultural ladder, accentuating the negatives associated with their race (‘Celtic’) and religion (Popery). The potato, in this point of view, was ‘the crop which fosters, from the earliest childhood, habits of indo­lence, improvidence and waste’. ‘No other crop produces such an abundance of food on the same extent of ground, re­quires so little skill and labour either to rear it or prepare it for food, and leaves so large a portion of the labourer’s time unoccupied.’

One response to the Famine then was to see it as an opportunity to replace the backward, degenerate potato as a food-source by a ‘higher form’, like grain, which would forcibly elevate the feckless Irish up the ladder of civilis­ation. By linking food, race and religion (the Potato, Paddy 29and Popery) in a stadial view of civilisation, the Famine could then be interpreted benevolently as an accelerator ef­fect conducive to a policy of agrarian anglicisation. Simul­taneously, by linking Celtic inferiority and the obstinate Popery of the Irish poor, it could interpret the Famine as ultimately being caused by moral not biological failings.

These viewpoints, shared by senior politicians, key ad­ministrators and influential journalists, encouraged an ex­treme reluctance to intervene in Ireland; the British estab­lishment could and did argue that in doing so, it was simply acting in accordance with God’s plan. In a society increas­ingly soaked in evangelicalism, this argument was decisive in carrying the dominant strand of British public opinion with it in its view that Ireland should be let starve for its own good. That viewpoint hardened even more in the aftermath of the 1848 Young Ireland rebellion, interpreted as a sneaky stab in the back of the empire. Wood, the minister in charge of the purse strings at the height of the Famine, was sanguine: ‘Except through a purgatory of misery and starvation, I cannot see how Ireland is to emerge into a state of anything approaching to quiet or prosperity.’ Trevelyan agreed: ‘Even in the most afflicting dispensations of provi­dence, there was ground for consolation and often even occa­sion for congratulation.’ Framed within these perspectives, the paradox of the Irish Famine, commented on by Glad­stone in 1847, became more explicable: ‘It is the greatest hor­ror of modern times that in the richest ages of the world and in the richest country of that age, the people should be dying of Famine by hundreds.’

The Famine victims themselves interpreted the disaster in social, not in religious or moral terms:

Is ní h-é Dia cheap riamh an obair seo

daoine bochta do chur le fuacht is le fán.

or

Mo thrua mór uaisle a bhfuil móran coda acu

gan tabhairt sásaimh san obair seo le Rí na ngrás

Ach ag feall ar bhochta Dé nár bhfuair riamh aon saibhreas

Ach ag síor obair dóibh ó aois go bás.

30Similarly the Irish poor lamented the passing of the potato;

Ba iad ár gcaraid iad ó am ár gcliabháin

Ach is é mo dhiobháil iad imeacht uainn

Ba mhaith an chuidheacht iad is an t-údar rince

Bhíodh spóirt is siamsa againn in aice leo.

or

Ba mhaith liom an práta, dob fháil is dob fhairsing é

Chun é a roinnt ar bhochtaibh Dé.

But the emigrant Irish, coming in contact with an American society undergoing the consumer revolution, had little hes­itation in rapidly embracing its values. A Kerry woman who settled in Philadelphia in the post Famine period noted of her adopted land:

Bíonn mairtfheol aorach ar phlátaí china

bíonn gin Cubánach ‘s caoir-fheoil aird

‘s nach ró-bhreá an phrae sin ‘s é fháil gan aon locht

ná a bheith in Éirinn ar lumper bhán’.

There’s the best of beef there on china plates

mighty mutton and Cuban gin

And isn’t that much better grub than to

be stuck in Ireland on the lumper spud.

The assault on the potato as a food source was accompanied by an onslaught on the rundale and clachan system, in the belief that only individual farms would encourage initiative and self-reliance. The clachans needed to be dispersed to break the cultural moulds which sustained mutual aid (comhar na gcomharsan) and thereby fostered a debilitating dependency. The privatisation and linearisation of landscape spread a logical lattice of ladder farms over the west of Ireland, obliterating the earlier informal networks of the rundale system. As early as 1845, some landlords had begun to implement this new landscape policy, including George Hill at Gweedore and Lord Leitrim at Milford, both in Done­gal. A contemporary description catches the new system being implemented on the Leitrim estate:

The country is being divided into long straight farms, by long straight fences, running up to the mountains, the object being 31to give each farmer a pretty equal division of good and bad land, and to oblige him to reside on his farm. Formerly the land was divided by rundale, as it is called; a dozen people possessed alternate furrows in the same field, something sim­ilar to the ridge and furrow system in England on an extended scale. The system was necessarily attended with every evil, and improvement precluded. The agent is endeavouring to eradi­cate it by the means before-mentioned, and has given each tenant three years to build his house and his outside fences. These long straight fences are partly made, partly lock-spitted and in many places not laid out, and as the measure has met with great opposition it is difficult to say when they are likely to be completed.

Those new attitudes can be contrasted to the cohesive cultur­al moulds of the baile system of settlement, whose values were succinctly expressed in the proverb Is arscátha chéileamhaireann na daoine. Hely Dutton described such villages in Galway in 1808, concluding that they led ‘to such strong attachments, generally strengthened by intermarriages, that though they may have some bickering with each other, they will, right or wrong, keep their companions’. In this intimate face-to-face world, communication skills were highly valued, and a rich oral culture was encouraged – the non-material performing arts, like singing, dancing and storytelling emerged as the prized art forms, creating a satisfying inter­pretation of the culture. All this life was intricately inter­woven with the cohesive quality of rundale life, with its communal, customary and contextual modes of organisa­tion. The vivacity and gaiety of the society, as well as its hospitality, was constantly commented on by pre-Famine visitors.

These changes also entailed a massive dislocation of the culture itself, symbolised by the rapid erosion of the Irish language in the reorganised areas. This change is neatly caught in a vignette by William Wilde in a visit to Lough Inagh in Connemara, where he saw the tally-stick in opera­tion [a stick around the children’s neck which was notched if they were caught speaking Irish]. Wilde asked the father:

if he did not love the Irish language – indeed the man scarcely spoke any other; ‘I do,’ said he, his eyes kindling with enthu­siasm; ‘sure it is the talk of the ould country, and the ould 32times, the language of my rather and all that’s gone before me – the speech of these mountains, and lakes, and these glens, where I was bred and born; but you know,’ he continued, ‘the children must have larnin’, and as they tache no Irish in the National School, we must have recourse to this to instigate them to talk English’.

A certain amount of iron entered the Irish soul in the Famine holocaust Malachi Horan, a small farmer at the Dublin end of the Wicklow mountains near Tallaght, commented that the Famine’s main effect had not been to create poverty – ‘they were used to that’ – but that it made the people ‘so sad in themselves … and that it made many a one hard too’. Edith Martin (the Galway half of the Somerville and Ross partnership) expressed similar sentiments: ‘The Famine yielded like the ice of the northern seas; it ran like melted snow into the veins of Ireland for many years afterwards’. At the end of the century John Millington Synge commented on the omnipresent Famine shadow that still fell across the Wicklow Glens, and the three shadowy countries ‘that were never altogether absent in the old people’s minds – America, the workhouse and the madhouse’. The widespread dis­location lent credence to James Fintan Lalor’s claim that the Famine represented ‘a deeper social disorganisation than the French Revolution – greater waste of life, wider loss of prop­erty – more of the horror with none of the hopes’.

This assault on rundale and clachan was also accompa­nied by an assault on Irish landlordism itself; the British establishment welcomed the bankruptcy of Irish landlords, whom they saw as equally feckless as the Irish peasantry. If they were replaced by a new breed of hard-headed English and Scottish owners, occupying newly cleared estates for large-scale cattle or sheep ranching, so much the better. TheTimes noted (somewhat prematurely): ‘In a few years a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as a Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan’. But the Encumbered Estates Act was designed to facilitate the easy transfer of land from Irish to English and Scottish landowners who would transform the society, culture, politics and economics of Ireland.

As landlords set their faces against rundale and clachan, 33and against the partnership leases which underpinned it, and as the Encumbered Estates machinery created a new landlord group with ambitious agrarian plans in mind for the west of Ireland, the large scale grazier tenant became a preferred option. By the end of the century, it was estimated that of 190,000 acres in Connemara, 60,000 (one-third) were held by 90 graziers. Across Connaught as a whole, the graziers leased the level limestone lowlands, while the run­dale farmers were tolerated only on the bog and mountain fringes. In Roscommon, for example, the celebrated plains of Boyle were dominated by the bullock and virtually devoid of people, while the bog-pocked south of the county was strewn with clachans. The glaring environmental and social asymmetries were to be a powerful stimulus to the Land League, and later to the anti-grazier United Irish League. A Connemara priest, Rev. James Kelly, attacked the grazier system as a parasitic attack on the very core of Irish society itself.

It is lying like a nightmare over the land and over the people and they are anxious to get that off their dreams and off their waking and working moments; and although by some noble and interested lords, the graziers are called the backbone of the country, [they] must be regarded as an invertebrate class … They are actually like tuberculosis on the constitution: they are spreading out on the vitals of the people.

The incompatible existence cheek-by-jowl of the contrasting systems of rundale and grazier farming was the obvious landscape expression of an economic, social and political di­chotomy which the Famine had lain bare. That dichotomy dramatically symbolises the contrasting responses to the Famine, while forcing consideration of a colonial context which we have too often ignored in our recent analyses of nineteenth-century Irish life.

34

The Great Famine and Irish Politics

S. J. Connolly

The period 1845–52 wasnot one short of political in­cident, confrontation and even drama. It began with the final phases of the movement for repeal of the Act of Union, the secession from that movement of the Young Ireland party, and the armed insurrection by the Young Irelanders in 1848; later came the emergence, from 1849, of a new movement for the defence of Irish farmers, the Tenant League, and the election in 1852 of what appeared at the time to be a strong new party for the defence of Irish interests in the United Kingdom parliament. Yet there remains a striking disassoci­ation between all of these developments and the background against which they unfolded: a six-year holocaust of crop failure and disease, in which something like one million people died of fever and starvation, another million fled the country, and perhaps the same overall total again survived for long periods on the very edge of starvation. The splits, re­groupings and new departures, the intense debate over points of administrative or legal detail, the passionate conflicts on issues of abstract principle: all seem equally set apart, as if by a wall of glass, from the unprecedented dis­aster unfolding in the Irish countryside.

One main reason for this disassociation lay in the struc­ture of the political system. Since the beginning of 1801 Ire­land had been governed, under the Act of Union, as part of the United Kingdom. Executive power lay in the hands of a lord lieutenant and chief secretary, both of whom were ap­pointed by, and responsible to, the British cabinet. Within the United Kingdom parliament Ireland was represented by 105 M.P.s out of a total of 656, as well as by representative Irish peers sitting in the House of Lords. These Irish M.P.s 35