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 talk of reparations and who to blame is entirely beside the point. This isn’t about inducing guilt. All that is required in 2025 is a commitment to eradicate poverty and injustice.

If we could stop making billionaires richer and do something about the children that are going hungry today. But you don’t have to spend very long on MN to see the same mindset of blaming poverty on the poor.

Yes, my great-grandparents lived through the Famine. My maternal grandfather was an older father to my mother (his first wife and children all died in the 1918-20 flu epidemic), so my mother was brought up by someone who was himself brought up by people who’d watched not only their parents and siblings die of starvation and disease, but most of their community. (They were in a particularly badly-affected part of west Cork.) Generationally, it’s not long ago at all.

Our family graves on that side are in a graveyard that, like many of the others around, has a ground level about 12 feet above the surrounding ground level because of all the mass burials from the Famine period.

How about the Scottish landowners during the Highland Clearances?

As an aside, I think it’s really interesting watching how different societies respond to enormous traumas such as this. I’d love to look at different responses to the Irish Famine, the communities devastated by WW1 and th Holocaust, the Chinese Great Famine, the Laos and Vietnam wars - all massive traumatic events in recent times where societies have different responses.

I have an Irish Protestant branch who married an early Irish Republican branch. I'm not sure the marriage was approved of - they left for Scotland. That branch eventually married the Scottish Highlanders.

I also have a second Irish branch. Some of whom really suffered during the famine but also there's another branch who ended up owning more land after the famine than before. I have Irish lineage I can trace back to resistance against the English around Wexford in the 1600s.

I think it's worth remembering that even in England during the 1840s the infant mortality rate in English cities was 40%. This wasn't much better than pre Agricultural Revolution. A LOT of people died. Death was normal in a way we can't comprehend.

Even in Ireland during the famine, starvation was NOT the main primary cause of death. It was actually disease. But the disease killed more because malnutrition meant fewer survived if they got sick and because the famine had forced so many people into overcrowded poor houses which meant more people were infected by disease in the first place as it spread faster and to more people. If what food was available had been distributed, without moving people off the land then more would have survived. It was the act of kicking people off the land for defaulting on rent and the fact that landlords were charged for each person claiming poor relief (leading them to kick them off the land) that killed more than the lack of food. This is why whole villages were wiped out more than the crop failure itself.

It also needs to be remembered that those who did manage to survive, ended up with better living conditions because population growth had been so large in the years before the famine and it had put pressure on land. This meant longer life spans for the generations that followed. Those who moved to North America certainly had better prospects than those who stayed - which is one of the reasons there was chain migration from Ireland for generations after as family members followed those who had gone before. The Great Famine was the last big famine in Ireland. There were fears it would be repeated in the 1880s but efforts were made to stop it and a huge number of Irish migrants in the USA sent relief to family members and friends still back in Ireland because they felt responsible (probably an effect of the trauma).

I'm not saying the famine didn't cause trauma on a huge scale. It did. And it shouldn't have happened. It was fundamentally wrong on every level. However you also have to put it into context about what was likely to happen in an alternative reality. Saying that it would have had a huge increase in population and industrialised like England isn't necessarily the outcome that would have happened. Given that so many people were subsistence farming and plots of land had been sub divided so much under the farming system, it's more likely that there would have been significant civil unrest (and resulting deaths) and even huger numbers would still have migrated in appalling conditions to the US where conditions might not have been so favourable as a result of even larger numbers moving. And it's likely there would have been later famines too.

The politics were long established and significant social change had to happen at some point because of how England and Ireland had come to be by 1840 - it was always likely due to these politics that would have been a traumatic event of some description unfortunately. It was so deeply rooted by that point. The Famine was just the event that happened to pass.

Inter generational trauma from poverty wasn't restricted to Irish famine survivors and we shouldn't forget this either. Yesterday I was talking to a third cousin of DH on Ancestry. Their common ancestors were born in 1810s. We talked about the siblings and their life experience. It transpired that there was a history of abuse spanning several generations on both lines - we suspect as a result of their dreadful experiences as they moved from the rural countryside and into Southampton.

As a further aside about the Irish famine being 'closer than you think', Grandmother died only four years ago and her younger sister is still alive. Their grandfather was born in 1820 and lived through the famine. He was typical of his generation and married late - once they knew they had secure rented land and food to support a family.

I take the attitude that we are where we are. It's like the debate about if you could time travel would you kill Hitler as a child? And whether the world would have been better or whether we might have had an even more terrible tyrant. We simply don't know and it's pure fantasy to ponder the multitude of alternative scenario. The world could have been better, but it also could have been worse. And that's before you consider the prospects of individuals.

Ultimately many of us might never have been born if history had been different.

no, not biologically, not in epigenetics, which as far as we currently understand have a decreasing affect across 3 generations, down the female line. There would be no evolutionary advantage to being born now adapted to something that happened 200 years ago, would there. 50 years ago, yes, probably

Yes, the irish government certainly failed in many ways, particularly failed to distribute the aid that was sent effectively, much of which "disappeared" -most of it rotted

Offensive in what way?

I dont think this is clearly understood, and it might not be exclusive, but almost all examples of epigentics that have been proven are passed down the female line. The two biological sexes have very different roles to play in reproduction. Saying we get half our genetic material from each parent is a GCSE level over simplification, although it serves for most purposes. The sex that contributes the larger gamete also contributes everything else inside that gamete, the mitochondria, and other material.

Also, in evolutionary terms, the mother is going to be closer to the growing children than the father, in most animals, so what the mother ( and her mother) have lived through is likely to be of more relevance to offspring than what the father has lived through

no, that might all be relevant, but the definition of epigentics is characteristics which CANNOT be accounted for by the eggs forming in the baby while still in the womb. That would not be epigentics. That would just be a common environmental response. Epigenetics HAs to be shown to cross more generations than that, to even be classed as epigenetics, and be part of a study of epigentics, rather than a study of environmentally influenced changes. The assumption that epigenetic changes were related to eggs developing in a baby while she was still in the womb is what has held up and obscufated the study for so long

uhm… what Irish govt?

In 1800 the Act of Union dissolved the Irish parliament and elected mps were sitting in Westminster.

There was no Irish govt in Ireland until the 1920s.

But factually completely wrong!

This may be true, but are you aware mathematically every one of us is related to people who straved to death, and to people who caused it. There is no person now who can accuse any other person of being decended from the "baddies" because we all are

ok, the irish administrators then, if you want to quibble and be pedantic - the irish with power in ireland, who were given aid, and failed to distribute it.

i am not saying the aid was adequate, or appropriate, I am just saying the powerful men in ireland who were given it, eithr sold it or left it to rot.

Complete aside, but if Hitler had got into Art School we might be living in a different world but that's another thread.

Epigenetic modifications are heritable. Epigenetics is referring to the alteration of the normal genome, so not part of the normal DNA sequence but reflects the modifications to the genetic code. These modifications are heritable but not seen by normal DNA sequencing.

Which part?

It was certainly taught in my school . I am Scottish . I have Irish grandparents and our primary and secondary school history lesson taught us about it. I am mid 50s so maybe it is different now.

Not sure how that is relevant to my post in the slightest which merely pointed out that the English landowners kicked starving people out of their homes which they then demolished. I said nothing of their descendants.

It was often competing clans as much as Scottish/English or even Catholic/Protestant. Some clans aligned with each other and the ousted Catholic King. Others were long established rivals and aligned with the new Protestant King. They weren't necessarily even protestant themselves. Some of it was about preserving culture and language was an integral part of that. The Highland clans spoke Gaelic for much longer because of isolation, where as the low land Scots had much greater contact with the English and spoke English more.

I was surprised by a lot of what I found out and just how many Scots were fighting Scots. I also found that Gaelic was still spoken in my family until the 1830s but had died out by 1880. The anecdotal family history doesn't quite match the documentary and DNA evidence we think precisely because of translation issues and stigmas associated with the history of being part of a clan which was particularly badly targeted as being 'troublesome'. We were firmly part of a particular clan but the family mythology was that we were part of another clan. Given the history of aliases in the clan as an act of self preservation and prejudice against the clan it's perhaps not that surprising.

It's fascinating stuff.

Aisling Bea's episode of What do you think you are? from the last series is worth a watch for a different narrative about how different families fared.

If I recall correctly her family were Irish Catholic but more middle class. They ended up with more land than they had prior to the famine because many tenants got kicked off the land. They got kicked off the land because the poor houses charged the landlord for every tenant who claimed poor relief, so it was costing landlords even more money to have tenants who were not paying rent. This applies to all landlords regardless of whether they were English, Irish, Catholic or Protestant. However there were mostly English or Protestant landlords precisely because of the historic politics.

Those who managed to stay on their land, often were able to buy up more land as the cost of land plummeted whilst the cost of food shot up - if you had food to sell you made money.

So there is this small group of more middle class Irish landowners who were better off after the famine. Though this also wasn't without risk or cost. As the programme shows, her family was subject to violence and her ancestor was actually killed during the course of events and the family did still suffer considerable hardship as a consequence of that.

From what I can tell from the records one of my ancestors falls into this bracket - others don't though.

A lot depended on whereabouts in the country you were; certain counties were much harder hit by the famine than others.

There is no blanket 'this happened to all Irish catholic farmers'.

I've seen it. A lot of highlanders were sent to the USA during the 1700s as indentured servants following the uprisings.

There seems to have been a movement in recent years to almost create an greater victimhood/legitimacy to the idea of being marginalised by drawing parallels with black slavery.

This is a fairly balanced article of this phenomena, which is largely based on modern political movements rather than historic.

https://sceptical.scot/2016/03/the-myth-of-scottish-slaves/

I am at something of a loss, based on this review, to understand what is ground-breaking about writing a book about commonly known facts around the causes of the Great Famine.

I am, however, fascinated to hear " 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.”

Which version of the USA in the 1830's would that be? Because the one that I know about was wracked with indentured servants, slavery, repeated economic crises, depressed wages and widespread poverty. But I guess that people who can afford to take off on "fact-finding" trips to Ireland might not have been looking in the right direction?

There were black slave owners of Irish slaves in certain Caribbean (monserrat?) islands. I ld have to Google to find the details. Irish women were impregnated by black men in order to produce mixed race children, who were perceived as hardier and better able to handle the living conditions/weather.

There are no good nationalities or bad. Just people. The concept of slavery and indentured people goes way, way, way back and was/is widespread globally.

I think pp is referring to the referencing of the Famine as the ‘Potato Famine’. The failure of the potato was part of it but it was the policies in place at the time (and long before) that were mostly responsible for the mass starvation and death. Some people feel calling it a potato famine is offensive as it makes it seem that this was a tragic natural calamity, and nothing to do with how the British ruling class had used and abused Ireland.

It’s never called the Potato Famine in Ireland. Just The Famine, or The Great Hunger sometimes.