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

Agree. Embarrassing comment.

I have Catholic Irish, Protestant Irish, Protestant Scottish and English Anglican ancestry. So I'm equally baffled.

The role of Scottish Protestants in Ireland shouldn't be underestimated.

Also, if you go to the visitor centre at Culloden, you can see how many Scots fought Scots.

"It's not as simple as big bad English starving the Irish"

Why the mocking tone "big bad" regarding the idea that it was the English starving the Irish, when that's very much what it was?

As I pointed out, the 'bad idea' of monocrops which you seem to be trying now to attribute to no one if you are not blaming the Irish for living off potatoes, was also the fault of the British. Ireland was producing lots of food that wasn't potatoes. It wasn't a country entirely devoted to raising potatoes. It was a country forced to live off potatoes because the rest of the food the country produced was taken off it.

No, the British government. This demonisation of England over Wales/Scotland is unhelpful.

Monocropping isn’t a good idea. But what’s important to remember here is that Irish tenant farmers were effectively forced into it. No other crop could provide that amount of calories or nutrients (supplemented by a cow and maybe a pig) on the size plots available especially given that the tenancy laws and the landlords effectively discouraged tenants from making any improvements on the land. It’s worth noting that the Protestants in Ulster were subject to better tenancy laws, and also suffered less.

This is why it all goes back to policy. Those tenants were perfectly capable of growing other crops, and did. But they were not able to benefit from them.

Well put, as always @RedToothBrush.

Life was, to a greater or lesser degree, shit for 99.9% of the population who were too focused on staying alive themselves to worry about people in the next county never mind country.

The poster I replied to earlier said.

I see this mentality creeping into Scotland and it’s so destructive. Trying to make highland clearances a thing and that Scotland is owed something as victims.

I can honestly say I've yet to see anyone in Scotland claim they're owed compensation for the Highland Clearances so not sure what circles that poster is moving in. (An ever decreasing one, probably).

because 'blame the English' is such a massive over-simplification.

Blame the ruling classes of both countries and their profiteering capitalism (although there were rich Irish profiteering too don't forget). But 'The English' as if every woman and man tenant farming in England wasn't also being exploited is just thought-terminating jingoism.

Perhaps we should bring in the corn laws, and the Napoleonic war - which certainly would have fed into the UK government's trade policies?

Brilliant post!

And this is why your posts are so ridiculous. The ‘ring class’ of Ireland in the 19thc was English. And overwhelmingly absentee.

There is a reason why inheritance was spread across all male heirs; this was due to The Popery Act (Penal laws) implemented via British rule and designed to suppress Catholicism in Ireland. So again, the deck was stacked against the poor Irish farmers. These were not circumstances of their own making. They were forced, by law, to break up farms and monocrop for their meagre survival even before the blight hit.

It was a British thing. Even the Irish were complicit.

Do you mean there's a fear of going without food etc passed down in the collective sub conscious? I find that all fascinating, there definitely has to be remnants of such an awful time left lingering somewhere..

The Scots are doing a great job of retconning themselves into victims, when many Scottish people were instrumental in the Empire -both good and bad. Particularly in Ireland, given the very strong links between Scotland and the northern parts of Ireland; the idea that it was all English Baddies is both incorrect, nairve, and dare I say it, anti-English.

I agree there is a tendency to seek victimhood status, and align with the “right think” causes in Ireland’s chattering classes, almost as a way of saying “see, we’re not like those nasty English people, we’re much better!” And Ireland is perfectly capable of brutality and misery without any outside help, English or otherwise; you just have to look at the Tuam and laundry scandals for evidence of that.

We’ll never move on if we are constantly defining ourselves by our relationships to the English. I see Irish people get upset by how little they perceive English people know about Ireland’s history. But the Empire was huge, and the British impact on world history is enormous, with the Irish story only playing a small part. Arguably the history of the Empire in India and Pakistan is more relevant to England today, given the large amounts of immigration and geopolitical activity in that area; there’s only a finite amount of time in school history curriculum and we shouldn’t be shocked that Irish history only makes up a tiny part of it in England.

For the avoidance of doubt, none of the above is intended to downplay any of the horrific events in the Famine.

Why only the female line? The production of eggs in the grandmother's womb? Or have I barked up wrong tree? 😄

Also one of the reasons there was a potato monoculture was because it was the best crop for the conditions in Ireland - you could support more people on the same amount of land growing spuds than other crops.

Yes, because sperm is constantly made, whilst eggs are made when you’re in your mother’s womb.

As an aside, I think one of the reasons for the increase in allergies and what have you is because of epigenetic changes that happened to our parents, when smoking etc was much more prevalent. You can see similar effects in the Dutch famine cohort, which looked at Dutch people in the WW2 famine.

It's all so fascinating, thank you

Really good and interesting post @DeafLeppard

It was a British parliament, but the majority of the seats were in england. Im not sure that Wales, Irish and Scottish seats added up to as a percent of seats back then.

Food was shipped to Glasgow from ireland, because some of my ancestors moved to glasgow from the Highlands as they were also experiencing blight and food was available in glasgow. The relief efforts in that area where better as I understand but they still had more than one child that died of malnutrition.

180-200 years ago sounds so long, but its just a couple of conversations. I spoke to my granny, who spoke to her great uncle (who left ireland in the famine -different side of the family) and suddenly we have spanned that time frame. Just two conversations. He was about 80 when she was born and she was about 60 when I was and I am about 50 now.

‘Retconning themselves into victims’ Jesus wept! Just because some Scots did well out of the empire doesn’t negate the impacts of the clearances and the Highland potato famine on others. It’s estimated that around a third of the population of the Highlands emigrated over the course of 20 years in the early 19th century. People visit the beautiful empty spaces of the highlands now and assume it was always like that but it really wasn’t. If anyone is interested James Hunter’s books are a good place to start.

Also, I thought it was generally understood now that Culloden was not English v Scots rather Catholic v Protestant?

Honestly what are you talking about. Where have you got this “understanding”?

Prior to the famine, average family sizes in England and Ireland were the same. In the decades after the famine, Irish families were, on average, larger. The predominant reason for this was to counteract the effects of the famine itself and the mass emigration that continued for the next hundred years. Catholicism had very little to do with it and your assumption that it did is both historically inaccurate and based on lazy stereotyping.

I normally wouldn’t care but your original post was stated with such authority when clearly you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.

A factor that gets overlooked is that by law catholics had to split their land between all of their sons, resulting in smaller and smaller plots, and as time went on people settled on less arable land up the sides of mountains. An acre of potatoes could feed a family which is why peasants grew them.

Protestants could benefit from primogeniture, ensuring that their land holding was sustainable across generations. There were professional careers open to younger sons that were blocked to catholics.

The penal laws, as they were called, were a foreshadowing of Hitler’s Nuremberg laws targeting Jews. One example was that if a catholic owned a horse and a Protestant wanted to buy it, the catholic was obliged by law to sell it. Poverty, on the scale that existed in the mid 19th century in Ireland had been purposely engineered.

Then the poor were blamed for being poor and there are records of parliamentary debates that make for uncomfortable reading.

One point that has always fascinated me about the Irish character, is that these were also issues across Britain. Arguably the Scottish famine of that period was longer and more sustained. There were periods where bread was unaffordable to the poor because of the insistence (by the rich) on a free market (to make them richer). I’ve never fully uunderstood why there isn’t a stronger sense of historical injustice in the English working class. For the Scots, religion seems to have been a major factor. Scottish emigrants of the time seemed to carry a sense of shame, and a belief that God was punishing them for shortcomings. Whereas the Irish carried a burning sense of human injustice.

It is a massive underestimation of the Irish interest in Gaza to think it’s some sort of woke, virtue signalling, seeking of victim status. There has been deep, and long standing interest in Palestine. People still dig deep for famine support - one of the highest profile charity agencies in Ireland is called Gorta (translated Famine). In many families you don’t have many generations back to the famine because after the 1840s people married later, so the average generation was about 40 years rather than 20/25. My grandfather’s grandfather endured the 1870s famine - that’s not long enough for the family stories to fade.

Also agree that it’s not ancient history for most people in Ireland.

My mother’s father was born in 1920 when his father was 50 (born 1870). His father (so my mother’s great-grandfather) was born to a man who had lost his entire family in the famine and then remarried later in life. It was something that wasn’t spoken about in the family as it was too painful. Bizarrely there is/was a sense of shame about it, because to admit that you had relatives who died was to admit to poverty.

Do you know what the English landlords (who were the ruling class of Ireland) did to the starving families during the famine? They kicked them off their land and destroyed their houses.

They actually invested in heavy equipment to demolish the miserable houses, to ensure those families had nowhere to live. The average life expectancy of the evicted dropped to months.