Famine and Migration: The Luck of the Irish

Most people with a minimal education have heard of Ireland’s Great Famine or recognize it by the labels “Irish Potato Famine” or “The Great Hunger.”   It is known as a terrible event in which a large fraction of the population either died or left Ireland.  We in the United States recognize the surge of Irish immigrants as a significant event in our own history.  But do we ever stop and ask ourselves how it was possible in the nineteenth century for a country just a few miles from England and Europe to suffer mass starvation over a period of several years because potato crops failed?  Does this imply that the Irish only had one crop?  Does this suggest the Irish could raise only one crop?  Not at all.  The real cause of the tragedy was British denigration of the Irish as a people, and absurd British belief in economic principles.

Fintan O’Toole provides a wide-ranging description of the famine era in a New Yorker article titled What Made the Irish Famine So Deadly.  O’Toole’s work was prompted by a book on the famine, “Rot,” by Padraic X. Scanlan.

“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.”

“Only about one in three people born in Ireland in the early eighteen-thirties would die at home of old age. The other two either were consumed by the famine or joined the exodus in which, between 1845 and 1855, almost 1.5 million sailed to North America and hundreds of thousands to Britain and Australia, making the Irish famine a central episode in the history of those countries, too.”

No one now has any memory of a famine in the Netherlands.  What was it about Ireland that produced such a terrible disaster?

The first thing to realize is Ireland produced a lot of food, but the British did not allow the Irish to possess much of it.

“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.”

From 1801, Ireland was considered part of the United Kingdom, but for practical purposes it was a colony inhabited by people of a lower rank than that of the British.

“In the mid-nineteenth century, Scanlan notes, fewer than four thousand people owned nearly eighty per cent of Irish land. Most of them were Protestant descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who benefitted from the wholesale expropriation of land from Catholic owners in the seventeenth century. Many lived part or all of the year in England. They rented their lands to farmers, a large majority of whom were Catholics. Scanlan points out that, whereas in England a tenant farmer might pay between a sixth and a quarter of the value of his crops in rent, in Ireland ‘rent often equalled the entire value of a farm’s saleable produce’.”

 The Irish had no particular affinity for potatoes, but it was an easy crop to grow, and it was nourishing.  It would be the colonial extraction of the fruit of their agricultural labor that would drive the dependance on the potato.

“Their historically varied diet, based on oats, milk, and butter, had been reduced by economic oppression to one tuber. Nor were they reluctant to work for wages. Many travelled long distances to earn money as seasonal migrant laborers on farms in England and Scotland, and Irish immigrants were integrating themselves into the capitalist money economy in the mills of Massachusetts and the factories of New York.”

The lack of the ability of a farmer to survive the large rents charged by the landowners left them no choice but to sublet parcels of land to others who were required to grow enough food on that land to survive on.  Ultimately, with a growing population, these parcels shrank to the point that the only product that could provide hope of survival was the potato.

“Landlords could extract these high rents because their tenants, in turn, made money by subletting little parcels of land, often as small as a quarter of an acre, to laborers who had none of their own. The whole system was possible only because of the potato. Most years, those micro farms could produce enough of this wonder crop to keep a family alive. It provided enough calories to sustain hardworking people and also delivered the necessary minerals and vitamins. By the eighteen-forties, as many as 2.7 million people (more than a quarter of the entire population) were surviving on potatoes they grew in tiny fields that encroached on ever more marginal land, clinging to bogs and the sides of stony mountains.”

The potato blight began in 1845.  It continued to grow in 1846 making it clear that something must be done, but it must be done with the realization that providing unearned aid to people so backward that they were willing to live on something as primitive as a potato crop would obviously encourage even greater laziness and lack of responsibility.

“In a neatly circular argument, the conditions that had been forced on the laboring class became proof of its moral backwardness. It was relatively easy to plant and harvest potatoes—therefore, those who did so had clearly chosen the easy life. ‘Ireland, through this lens,’ Scanlan writes, ‘was a kind of living fossil within the United Kingdom, a country where the majority of the poor were inert and indolent, unwilling and unable to exert themselves for wages and content to rely on potatoes for subsistence.”

One might have thought a solution might have been to allow the Irish to share in the agricultural rents they were paying the British, but that would have stolen the property of the deserving British landowners and given it to undeserving Irish workers.  The solution chosen was to import food from America and make it available to the starving Irish.  But the food could not be a grant.  To avoid the moral hazard of encouraging bad behavior by the poorly performing Irish, the food would only be available to those who were industrious enough to be able to pay for it.

“The idea of Irish indolence fused with a quasi-religious faith in the laws of the market to shape the British response to the famine. In its first full year, 1846, Robert Peel’s Conservative government imported huge quantities of corn, known in Europe as maize, from America to feed the starving. The government insisted that the corn be sold rather than given away (free food would merely reinforce Irish indolence), and those who received it had little idea at first how to cook it. Nonetheless, the plan was reasonably effective in keeping people alive.”

“At the end of July, 1846, it became crushingly obvious that the blight had spread even wider, wiping out more than ninety per cent of the new crop. By then, most of the poor tenants had sold whatever goods they had, leaving nothing with which to stave off starvation. Fishermen on the coasts had pawned their nets for money to buy maize. The terrible year that followed is still remembered in Ireland as Black ’47, though the famine would, in fact, last until 1852.”

A new British government would take control and provide a second absurd approach to dealing with the starving Irish: they would enjoy employment in public works projects, allowing them to learn the benefits of hard work.

“The Liberals, under Lord John Russell, were determined that what they saw as an illegitimate intervention in the free market should not be repeated. They moved away from importing corn and created instead an immense program of public works to employ starving people—for them, as for the Conservatives, it was axiomatic that the moral fibre of the Irish could not be improved by giving them something for nothing. Wages were designed to be lower than the already meagre earnings of manual workers so that the labor market would not be upset.”

“The result was the grotesque spectacle of people increasingly debilitated by starvation and disease doing hard physical labor for wages that were not sufficient to keep their families alive. Meanwhile, many of the same people were evicted from their houses as landowners used the crisis to clear off these human encumbrances and free their fields for more profitable pasturage. Exposure joined hunger and sickness to complete the task of mass killing.”

O’Toole believes the story of this tragic abuse of the Irish is important to those living in the current era.  The economic/religious beliefs that drove the British of that period are still alive in the current era.

“Above all, ‘Rot’ reminds us that the Great Hunger was a very modern event, and one shaped by a mind-set that is now again in the ascendant. The poor are the authors of their own misery. The warning signs of impending environmental disaster can be ignored. Gross inequalities are natural, and God-given. The market must be obeyed at all costs.”

There is one aspect of this tale in which the poor Irish were allowed a bit of “luck.”  In that era, migration was possible.  Otherwise, many more would have died.

“There is only one thing about the Irish famine that now seems truly anachronistic—millions of refugees were saved because other countries took them in. That, at least, would not happen now.”

  

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.

Source: http://letstalkbooksandpolitics.blogspot.com/2025/04/famine-and-migration-luck-of-irish.html