The Irish Potato Famine

[MsAmerica]

This would have been better in a history forum, but failing that, I'll try Politics. Interesting article - a book review, really.

What Made the Irish Famine So Deadly
The Great Hunger was a modern event, shaped by the belief that the poor are the authors of their own misery and that the market must be obeyed at all costs.
By Fintan O’Toole

There have been, in absolute terms, many deadlier famines, but as Amartya Sen, the eminent Indian scholar of the subject, concluded, in “no other famine in the world [was] the proportion of people killed . . . as large as in the Irish famines in the 1840s.” The pathogen that caused it was a fungus-like water mold called Phytophthora infestans. Its effect on the potato gives “Rot,” a vigorous and engaging new study of the Irish famine by the historian Padraic X. Scanlan, its title. The blight began to infect the crop across much of western and northern Europe in the summer of 1845. In the Netherlands, about sixty thousand people died in the consequent famine—a terrible loss, but a fraction of the mortality rate in Ireland. It is, oddly, easier to form a mental picture of what it might have been like to witness the Dutch tragedy than to truly convey the magnitude of the suffering in Ireland...

Even before the potato blight, there was a degree of hunger among the Irish rural underclass that seemed like an ugly remnant of a receding past. In 1837, two years after Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of “Democracy in America,” his lifelong collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, went to Ireland, a country the two men had previously visited together. The book de Beaumont produced in 1839, “L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse,” was a grim companion piece to his friend’s largely optimistic vision of the future that was taking shape on the far side of the Atlantic. De Beaumont, a grandson by marriage of the Marquis de Lafayette, understood that, while the United States his ancestor had helped to create was a vigorous outgrowth of the British political traditions he and de Tocqueville so admired, Ireland was their poisoned fruit. America, he wrote, was “the land where destitution is the exception,” Ireland “the country where misery is the common rule.”

The problem was not that the land was barren: Scanlan records that, “in 1846, 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs.” But almost none of this food was available for consumption by the people who produced it. It was intended primarily for export to the burgeoning industrial cities of England. Thus, even Irish farmers who held ten or more acres and who would therefore have been regarded as well off, ate meat only at Christmas. “If an Irish family slaughtered their own pig, they would sell even the intestines and other offal,” Scanlan writes. He quotes the testimony of a farmer to a parliamentary commission, in 1836, that “he knew other leaseholders who had not eaten even an egg in six months. ‘We sell them now,’ he explained.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/17/rot-padraic-x-scanlan-book-review

I just googled and from this quote from Cormac Ó Grada so I’m confused by what you say -
”Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population.”

I think many of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy found themselves looked down on by the rest if the British and considered British in Ireland and Irish in Britain but yes, the Anglo-Irish landlords were largely not helpful or sympathetic towards the poor and starving Irish.

Yes, I wondered if, even if they did consider themselves “British”, whether the rest of the Peerage did so.

Well Arthur Wellesley - later Duke of Wellington- was an Anglo-Irish peer so I imagine it depended on what they contributed to British society. I imagine if he had lost at Waterloo he would now be known as the Irish failure!

ETA I'm aware that this was before the time of the famine.

There is significant dispute about whether there was enough food or not - records weren't always wonderful either. It's a distraction. Food was exported from a country where people were starving to death. Full stop. Even if it wasn't enough to replace the blighted potato crops, giving that food to starving people would have greatly reduced the numbers dying, even if it didn't stop everyone from dying.

Just wanted to say thank you for this thread very interesting and insightful. Am listening to a few of the pod casts linked up thread. Wish you had been taught this at school.

Ok - thanks for the explanation.
I think “micro aggressions” are often unintentional and need to be pointed out in non aggressive ways.
Unlike slavery and the Holocaust, the Irish Famine is not covered on the English curriculum ( 🤨) so this is a good opportunity for people to learn - hopefully in non confrontational ways. . I think it’s better to explain why certain terminology is preferred ( as some posters have done ) rather than go on the attack . ( I’m not blaming you for going on the attack- it’s often the default position on here )

In the podcast they describe it as "the great Irish famine" they also explain why this nomenclature is preferred.

If you read the book, there’s a whole section where he takes apart the notion that this was not a famine because of food scarcity driven by export. He does say that temporary embargoes on food export would have saved lives, but it would not have solved the issue in the long term.

Well yeah, saving lives would obviously have been a stupid idea. As would, ermm, importing food? It is still a distraction. People died who did not need to. People were driven from their homes when there were alternatives. There didn't have to be one option; nor would anyone say that all lives could have been saved.

The death toll in the whole of the rest of Europe was estimated at 100,000. In Ireland it was 1 million.

Everyone recognises that this was a brutal period and that poverty and hunger were widespead (as, sadly, they still are - who would have thought we'd need food banks in Western Europe?). But the fact is that the actions and inactions of the British rulers definitely made it far worse than it needed to be, and there were clear benefits to them in allowing that. Or so they thought.

I was doing a bit of googling thanks to this thread and found a link to a free publication by a Christine Kinealy. It's called This Great Calamity The Irish Famine. I think she is a professor that is an expert in the field. I haven't read it yet but thought some in here maybe interested.

Well said. Only the rich lived well in the 1800s. Everyone else was fodder who struggled constantly. My ancestors worked in the dyehouses and mills in the North. No work meant no food and no roof over your head.

Apparently there was a “famine”on the west coast of Ireland in the winter of 1924-1925
It was a period of severe food shortages and hardship, often regarded as the “forgotten famine”. This crisis was particularly acute in areas like Connemara west Mumster and stemmed from a combination of factors including crop failures - particularly potatoes and the failure of other local industries including fishing.
The fledgling Irish state downplayed the seriousness of it for public relations reasons but eventually had to take steps which did lead to some relief efforts.
Newspapers reported deaths from starvation and starvation related illnesses 🥲
Fortunately the harvest of 1925 was better.

There was food exported and food imported. There was a lot of aid sent, mostly from Britain, but it wasn't distributed. Where it was distributed it wasn't eaten, as it wasn't recognised, and no information about preparation disseminated with it. It was mostly Indian maize. The most effective aid was the british soup kitchens. When the brits switched from funding soup kitchens to funding work houses, this was less effective.

OK, you have changed my mind. I have read the posts that have been put up this afternoon, and I will not call it the potato famine anymore. I will call it the great irish famine. I will change my school scheme of work to this - not that I have taught it this year or next year, but when I next do teach it

Thank you.

Please disabuse yourself of the ideology that soup kitchens we're a form of aid. There was no aid from Britain.

The Temporary Relief Fund (1847) AKA The Soup Kitchen Act,was introduced 2 years into the famine/ an gorta mór. It was a temporary solution which the British Government closed in September 1847. The government expected the Irish Poor Law to take over. The soul kitchens didn't reach rural communities, the scale of starvation meant even we'll run kitchens couldn't meet demand. Devastatingly, people were too weak and sick to travel to these kitchens.
After closing the kitchens, the British shifted responsibility to the Poor Unions which were funded through taxation of local landowners (see evictions unworked /underworked farms) meant local landowners couldn't afford to feed its local populations.

There was a lot of british aid, but it was ineffective, that is the point. There was also aid from other countries, also not distributed, and not effective.

A couple of excerpts from the book I mentioned earlier This
Great Calamity THE I RISH FAMINE
1845-52 Christine Kinealy

'The policies of the government increasingly specified criteria that disallowed external assistance until distress was considerable and evident. The leitmotif of
relief provided by the central government throughout the course of the Famine was that assistance would be provided only when it—or, in fact, its agent, the Treasury—
was satisfied that local resources were exhausted, or that if aid was not provided, the distressed people would die. By implementing a policy which insisted that local resources must be exhausted before an external agency would intervene, and pursuing this policy vigorously despite local advice to the contrary, the government made
suffering an unavoidable consequence of the various relief systems which it introduced. The suffering was exacerbated by the frequent delays in the provision of
relief even after it had been granted and by the small quantity of relief provided, which was also of low nutritional value. By treating the Famine as, in essence, a
local problem requiring a local response, the government was, in fact, penalising those areas which had the fewest resources to meet the distress.
The government response to the Famine was cautious, measured and frequently parsimonious, both with regard to immediate need and in relation to the long-term
welfare of that portion of the population whose livelihood had been wiped out by successive years of potato blight. Nor could the government pretend ignorance of the
nature and extent of human tragedy that unfolded in Ireland following the appearance
of blight. The Irish Executive and the Poor Law Commissioners sent regular, detailed reports of conditions within the localities and increasingly requested that even more
extensive relief be provided. In addition, Trevelyan employed his own independent sources of information on local conditions, by-passing the existing official sources of
the Lord Lieutenant. This information revealed the extent of deprivation caused by the Famine. It also showed the regional variations arising from the loss of the potato crop; and it exposed the inability of some areas to compensate for such losses from their own internal resources. There was no shortage of detailed and up-to-date information. What was crucial was the way in which the government used this information.'

And this ....
' A government enquiry in 1851 stated that the level of suffering was
unacceptable and queried whether a similar level would have been allowed in England. If the loss of population is taken as the ultimate measure of suffering, how could any government justify the outcome of its policies in a country that had lost between 20 and 25 per cent of its population? Ireland may have been a part of the United Kingdom, but its place within it was hardly that of an equal partner or even
that of a young sibling: in the words of Trevelyan, Ireland was a ‘prodigal son’ who had to be forcibly brought under parental control. If, as some people stated, the Famine was a punishment from God, the punitive relief measures did nothing to
diminish this belief.'

The Temporary Relief Fund was not aid.
It was introduced too late and only after widespread international condemnation of the mismanagement of the British.
It was withdrawn too early and lack of follow up meant millions remained starving.
So please don't gaslight us into believing the British government provided

The sultan of Turkey was going to send £10000 relief but was dissuaded as it would look bad for the British queen who only donated £2000. He sent £1000 and several ships full of food in the end.

Also, much of the aid consisted of relief works where the recipients were paid for building roads/walls/etc. This meant that the worst affected, who were not physically capable of that work, received nothing.

Well the Irish were poorer than English peasants and they experienced this man made catastrophe where they starved to death while food, livestock and dairy was exported out of Ireland while its own population starved.

Nobody is asking for reparations. An apology has already been made by the British government and we’d just like to remember it, and not have it minimised. It leaves its mark on our population levels, on our culture and it’s an important part of Irish history.

Well fair play to you for changing your mind. I never realised it was actually taught in schools in the UK as “the potato famine” so every day is a school day for all of us.

I am not gaslighting you - I have no skin in this game, I am totally impartial. What I don't get is why so many people's whole identity seems to be tied up in anti British propaganda.

Aid was sent, aid rotted in warehouses, or disappeared, or was distributed without information about how to use it.

That is what happened. It isn't even controversial, it is just an account of what happened. Aid was sent.

How much and from whom and on what conditions, is debated, for example, there are accounts of aid being offered on condition of attending a non catholic church, and although it can't be proven that NO BODY put this condition on aid, it has been shown that mostly this condition did exist, and the evidence that it existed anywhere is unreliable. Other disputes centre on how much Queen victoria personally donated, and whether some of the aid from turkey was or was not turned down, and why......

But there is no dispute that aid was sent, and that the distribution was almost totally ineffective.

The question is, why does that fact appear to threaten your whole identity today in 2025?