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

Like the Holodomor in 1930s Ukraine, it's an event triggered by politici-economic doctrine. It didn't have to happen. Depopulation was considered to have merits.

You do know that the reason land was divided between all sons was due to the penal laws that required the land be divided rather than left up one child? Although if the eldest son converted to protestantism he inherited it all.

Because the term "potato famine" is incorrect. It Ireland it is referred to as The Great Famine.

Calling it a potato famine misrepresents what actually happened and its causes.

No, there weren't. Your history of Monserrat is woefully lacking. The Irish were never slaves - they were indentured servants. In practice small difference at times, but still different. The Irish were there first, black slaves came later. And there was absolutely no "Irish women were impregnated by black men in order to produce mixed race children" - there were mixed race relationships and marriages, yes, but you imply systematic rape. Monserrat still has a lively and well-established uniqe culture that blends the African and Irish heritage built there. It is something they are proud of.

There were a very small number of black slave owners, spread quite widely across the USA and the islands, and in the main they held small numbers. By 1830, for example, there were 3,775 black (including mixed-race) slaveholders in the South who owned a total of 12,760 slaves. There were around 2 million black slaves in the South at that time.

The Irish famine was weaponised as a tool to subjugate the Irish people by the British crown. It was ethnic cleansing at its finest. A starving people can’t rebel.

I think the issue seems to be that some people think it's best to put the past behind us and move on. I guess I think history can provide learning and can stimulate conversation.

Some posts seem to suggest that some of us are wallowing in the history. We are not. We are talking about it online. It's leading us to explore epigenetics (fascinating) and culture and all sorts of things. What's wrong with that?

A starving people can’t rebel.

Or that was the theory anyway. In actual fact evidence shows that the areas worst hit were more likely to join the independance movement, and that increased calls for independance grew out of the Great Famine. People are perverse. You kick them and they bloody well get up and fight back...Ungrateful sods 😁

Well that's a myth based on what actually happened.

I don't think you do 'just move on' if you understand, acknowledge and reflect on.

Understanding the past is the best way to shape the present and have a better future.

Ideas of reparations are stupid though. If you look at historical examples of reparations, you don't necessarily come up with great stories.

One of the things that fueled resentment in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s was the imposition of reparations on the country which was experiencing financial hardship at the time. It helped to give rise to future nationalistic sentiments, and we all know where that lead.

(Sorry to invoke Godwin twice on this thread but it is actually the best known and easiest example).

What an ignorant statement …the Irish were among the first to recognise the state of Palestine because we as a people are taught about our history and recognise political forced genocide . The British government are complicit in its silence.
We recognise genocide because it’s ingrained in our DNA . My Grandmother told story’s passed down through generations of how her people survived , she would remember names of landowners who helped the starving and those that didn’t who’s decedent’s still lived locally . Irish oral tradition documented such things. We speak for Palestine because of a shared past and present . We speak for those that can’t .

Yes, it was interesting that she chose to make more of an issue of her ancestors opposition to the English than her ancestors benefit of the Famine!

National myths rely on a very one sided view of a complex situation

Our view of historical events is never objective. Irish nationalists used the famine to win support for independence. They still use it today. In fact, everyone interprets history to suit themselves. Lincoln has been re-branded as the great man who ended slavery. In reality, he didn't care about the slaves at all. His priority was saving the union. He even said this. Or take Churchill. The left are systematically demonising all Britain's heroes, and Churchill is the number one target. So we're told, for example, that he wanted to "drop poison gas on Arab tribesmen." In reality, he suggested dropping tear gas on them, and he makes that quite clear. But people deliberately misinterpret facts to suit their agenda. And they do it in the other direction. Everyone now thinks the Native Americans were peace-loving hippies. In reality, they were constantly raiding one another, and when they defeated a neighbouring tribe, they'd kill the prisoners, rape the women and, if they'd got time, enjoy a bit of torture. That was just the norm.

The more Irish nationalists can make it look like deliberate genocide/ethnic cleansing, the more support and sympathy they'll win. I'm suspicious of this idea that British politicians sat in Westminster rubbing their hands and smiling at the thought of Irish people starving. It's the Mel Gibson school of history. It conjures up images of arrogant, fox-hunting English toffs snorting with contempt at the 'paddies'. People imagine a 19th-century Rees Mogg lounging on the Parliament benches and saying "let 'em starve" – and that's exactly what the nationalists want people to imagine. Ignorance, incompetence, callousness, and a fanatical belief in laissez-faire economics are not the same as deliberate genocide.

You have to understand these events in their historical context. It's the same with Cromwell. Yes, he did awful things to the Irish, but only by the standards of a humane, 21st-century person. Cromwell lived in a time when people still burned witches and hung children in public. When he said the Irish papists were in league with the devil, he meant Irish people were literally on the side on the devil and were literally in alliance with demonic powers. He wasn't speaking ironically or metaphorically, like we do. Cromwell lived before the scientific revolution and the European Enlightenment. To find his equivalent today, you'd have to visit the Taliban.

The Irish famine did not take place in a world of satellite television. Rural Ireland was a million miles away from London. The eyes of British politicians were focused on Russia and India. They were told of starvation, but they had no grasp of the scale, or even the truth, of that claim. And in any case, to them poverty and malnutrition were the norm. Thomas Hardy recalled a little boy near him who starved to death. When inquiries were made, it was found that all he'd eaten in the previous week was a raw turnip. And this was Dorset in the 1850s! When Dostoevsky visited London in the 1860s, he saw children literally selling their bodies in the street. History is a horror story. War, starvation, torture, slavery, mass rape, public executions, etc, were routine and universal until very recently. And so was grinding, third world level poverty.

@Dappy777 Everyone now thinks the Native Americans were peace-loving hippies. In reality, they were constantly raiding one another, and when they defeated a neighbouring tribe, they'd kill the prisoners, rape the women and, if they'd got time, enjoy a bit of torture. That was just the norm.

You have watched too many John Wayne films. This is so far from the truth that it is laughable. When the continent was discovered there were thousands of indigenous cultures, representing enormous diversity of culture. All of whom were faced by an invader who for centuries killed them, raped their women (and children) and tortured them. And still do. US indigenous people are still statistically more likley to live in poverty, to have inadequate health care and education, and more likely to be murdered (their women and girls raped and murdered).

As for being the savages you describe, when some of them heard about the Great Famine they sent help to people who they felt were in sore need of it: https://www.choctawnation.com/about/history/irish-connection/

Your post is deeply offensive and racist. You have obviously no clue about the First People of the Americas.

@Dappy777 this is why I particularly like to look at my family history and have looked into the family history of a friend because it allows you to view history through the lens of a person you have a connection with and perhaps understand why you are at the position you are at.

It removes a huge degree of this politicisation (it doesn't remove it all).

I think the problem most people have is they don't have the contextual information about the environment someone was living in and what the alternatives were. We are too entrenched in our current understanding of the world rather than thinking about where things were back then. Having a line of continuity back makes this process a little easier because you do have at least a little context even if it's something like the character of a grandparent and their attitude to life.

This is a very interesting thread and I’ve learned a lot. But so much angry name calling. It’s meant to be an historical discussion/debate, but so many accusations of offensive, ignorant, arrogant, racist, colonial etc. Grow up.

@RedToothBrush

That was an interesting read, thanks.

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

I was aware that Jacobites had been transported as indentured servants after the '45 but had no idea that anyone claimed this as a badge of victimhood in the present day.

Thank you for such great explanations, it's so interesting 😊 😀

You think that racism isn't offensive? It's not others that need to grow up. My stepchildren are First Nation. I don't appreciate them being described as savages. They had civilised laws and culture when Europeans lived in mud huts.

Quite. I think if @Hellohelga had left it at the end of the first sentence it would have been so much better. No-one has the right to tell anyone to "grow up" when they have no idea of the heritage of the people they're responding to.

The mention of First Nations reminds me of Choctaw people who sent money to Ireland during the Great Hunger. It's a reminder too that people back then knew what was wrong. There were voices calling out what was happening . I would love to know more about Choctaw and how it came to be that despite (or because) of what they had experienced they reached out to a people miles away to offer help.

www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg3zvq3vz8o.amp

Sure, times were different. But I don’t think you are suggesting that if the famine had happened in let’s say Dorset, that the British government would have responded in the way they did in Ireland? That is the crucial context here and it doesn’t need to be spun by nationalists or anyone else.

Okay. "The French Foie Gras Shortage." Would you prefer that?

Wow. Never expected this flood of replies. It'll take me a while to read, but thank you for participating. For people objecting to the content, feel free to read the entire article, or the book.

There’s a very good podcast called Empire which talks about the British plantation of Scottish Protestants into (mainly) the North of Ireland. They also talk about how Ireland was a practice ground for British aristocrats to manage their estates before they progressed to managing the British empire in India.
Many Irish feel an affinity with Palestine because they consider that Ireland is still occupied by the British in the North of Ireland and want a united ireland. The DUP in the North pushed for Brexit because they don’t like the two state solution ie the Good Friday (Belfast) agreement which is underwritten by the USA and the EU.
I think that Brexit has taught everyone that a yes/no referendum is no way to deal with such historically complex issues.

The word potato in the title is what’s causing problems. Seriously, it’s not a joke.
ETA they don’t like it because this was not just a natural disaster for which people and policies bore no responsibility. It wasn’t just because of blight.
That’s why people don’t like ‘potato famine’, a term that’s never used in Ireland btw.