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

^But people don’t seem to have the same personal feelings of outrage and trauma that they do over the starvation.

No, because they have feelings of patriotic pride and a sense of being the good guys? Like I also mentioned, the plucky Brits standing alone against the Nazis.

so would there be ‘outrage’ if I turned up at a rembersncecceremony and said get over it? Or if a German person did so? When I see the parades and solemnity that surrounds remembrance ceremonies in UK it makes me think someone somewhere is ‘worked up about it’ and has acknowledged their feelings of trauma and created a whole series of events to continue to acknowledge it.

True, it’s harder to feel patriotic pride over people who were starved to death. That engenders feelings of hurt and sorrow gather than pride, and also a desire to at least acknowledge the sufferings of people going through the same today.

I think people have been ‘worked up’ by two things on the thread.

Firstly, the implication that the famine was purely a natural disaster.

Secondly, the denial that it’s still a valid subject of discussion, and the related accusations that people are seeking victimhood (and more) when they post.

When WW2 is discussed in the UK nobody needs to get upset for those sorts of reasons.

You are mistaking the upset caused by the factors mentioned above for something it isn’t. And we are going around in circles.

And we are going around in circles

I think that is the aim.

All the posts here every november would contradict that assertion. So many people who take it personally and get really offended and upset at people not wearing poppies or not observing the silence. Note: I am not talking about people disrupting the silence - that would be rude - but rather not observing it.

I think the Irish feel strongly about this because as others have said, it’s a fundamental part of Irish history and seen as significant and important to the majority of those educated in Ireland. Ireland’s rulers in Westminster directly contributed to a million deaths but those living in the UK today are not educated about it and most appear to have very little awareness of it. A function of Ireland being a small country and this tragedy being seen as less significant in terms of the entire history of the British empire, but this inequality in public awareness/recognition of the severity of the event is in my opinion why the Irish feel so strongly about it.

Edit to last post - I should exclude Northern Ireland from ‘the UK’ in my last comment as I assume those in NI are educated about the Irish famine.

Yes, but I think most people put those posts in the “internet weirdo” category. FWIW I find all of the WW1 and 2 remembrance stuff a bit jingoistic at best, and it makes me very uncomfortable.

It seems to be a very large number is Internet weirdos.

Do you add the media getting in a froth over so and so, who is not British, not wearing a poppy, to the category "Internet weirdo"? Or what about the fact the television stations seem to insist on everyone wearing a poppy for November if they are to go on air? Or all the coverage given to remembrance day events?

It’s interesting that it’s quite a modern thing to remember the famine. Apparently in the 1940’s (the 100 year anniversary)it was still seen as an embarrassment.

It’s only since the 1990’s (the 150 anniversary) that all this research and large scale compiling of experiences started to be done and they has memorials and museums.

So it is particularly odd that people think we should just forget about it now. It’s only been quite recently that it was fully recognised as a significant chapter in Irish history.

They do in older years. But I don’t think everyone in NI covers the famine the way they do in Ireland, like from a young age in primary school. But I didn’t go to school in the north although I have lived there.

Poor Catholics and poor Protestants were impacted from the famine so it is very much a shared history,

Define media - if you mean the right wing press such as GB news and Daily Mail then I don’t really pay much attention to them, nor consider them to be a reasonable barometer of anything much tbh.

This is mentioned by several modern day Irish historians- there was very little scholarship around the Famine until relatively recently.

Many moons ago in NI we covered the famine briefly in early secondary, as part of general Irish history. We did a year or so that started with Wolf Tone, went through the Famine and finished around the Ulster Covenant.

Given the number of papers they sell/viewers they have, they are obviously reflective of a large number of people's views.

You also get editorials in the so called better quality papers pontificating. There are soccer clubs that incorporate them in to their kit, with the likes of James McClean getting dog's abuse for not wearing one. Pretty much every single presenter and guest on TV wears them because of the high numbers of complaints and abuse they get if they don't. The BBC provide them on site in order to avoid complaints from the public.

That doesn't sound like one or two "Outraged from Tunbridge Wells".

And was it called the Potato famine? Just out of interest.

The BBC repeatedly states that presenters wearing poppies is a matter of personal choice.

I’m fairly sure it was, but can’t recall exactly.

Out of interest, I had a look through Trinity College Dublin’s library catalogue for items about the “potato famine” (as opposed to the Great Hunger) and there are numerous academic articles and books that use the term, right up to the current date.

But sure that is a meaningless thing to say. We don’t know what context it is used in or who used the term. Find me a potato famine etched into a memorial plate. Or The Potato famine museum.

Did I say it wasn't? I said the BBC provide them onsite because of all the complaints if people aren't wearing them.

While yes, it is personal choice, the choice is wear one or be subject to abuse and complaints from the public.

Did I say it wasn't? I said the BBC provide them onsite because of all the complaints if people aren't wearing them.

While yes, it is personal choice, the choice is wear one or be subject to abuse and complaints from the public.

Well, the titles of the articles give you a very good clue as to what the context is!

Edit: I was using the search as a way to try and understand if/when/how the useage of the term “potato famine” had changed over the years.

And how many were written by Irish academics? I had a quick look at the library website of the university I work at. Yes, there are articles and books. My cursory glance did not show Irish authors.

The amount of ignorance on this thread is astounding.

The Irish have moved on, and prospered at that. Far more than the UK.

What the Irish are justifiably angry about is that history is whitewashed from British history in UK schools. The genocide that took place in Ireland inflicted by the British is taught as the "Great Hunger" in UK schools.

The heinous murders and executions by firing squad by British troops is not taught in British history. 16 men were murdered in Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin by court ordered firing squad for simply defending Ireland from British occupation and invasion.

Most British people who do the tour of Kilmainham Gaol Museum in Dublin come away mortified at learning history that they knew nothing about. They soon learn that their history curriculum were lies and that it is engineered from a right wing teaching philosophy.

The "Empire" as you were all taught was actually sickening invasions of other countries in an attempt to impose British law and legislation onto lands that never belonged to Britain in the first instance.

The late queen's visit to Dublin in 2011 was the closest thing Ireland got to apology, where she laid a wreath in rememberance of those who sacrificed their lives and were instrumental in winning the War Of Independence against Britain, which is another fact that Britain whitewashed i.e. they wouldn't dare teach their children that Britain lost a war.

No Irish person is living in the past. However, no British Head Of State ever stood trial for the atrocities they caused in Ireland