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    The Ireland Series Book 4: 19th century
    The Ireland Series Book 4: 19th century
    The Ireland Series Book 4: 19th century
    Ebook62 pages57 minutes

    The Ireland Series Book 4: 19th century

    By Brian Igoe

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    This is the fourth in the series of LiteBite Books telling the story of Ireland. It covers the time of the Nineteenth Century, to my mind one of the most stimulating times in Ireland’s history. The Great Famine was not in itself, of course, stimulating, but it’s results were surprising. The title The Irish in America deserves a book in itself, one book at the very least. Here we just take a glimpse at the early days. The Transport Revolution with its Atmospheric Railways and its Fly Boats and its steamers and railways should have another book, while The Fenians and Parnell laid the foundation for Modern Island. This, I think, is the most exciting book in this series.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrian Igoe
    Release dateAug 1, 2013
    ISBN9781301840342
    The Ireland Series Book 4: 19th century
    Author

    Brian Igoe

    You don’t need to know much about me because I never even considered writing BOOKS until I was in my sixties. I am a retired businessman and have written more business related documents than I care to remember, so the trick for me is to try and avoid writing like that in these books…. Relevant, I suppose, is that I am Irish by birth but left Ireland when I was 35 after ten years working in Waterford. We settled in Zimbabwe and stayed there until I retired, and that gave me loads of material for books which I will try and use sometime. So far I have only written one book on Africa, “The Road to Zimbabwe”, a light hearted look at the country’s history. And there’s also a small book about adventures flying light aircraft in Africa. And now I am starting on ancient Rome, the first book being about Julius Caesar, Marcus Cato, the Conquest of Gaul, (Caesar and Cato, the Road to Empire) and the Civil War. But for most of my books so far I have gone back to my roots and written about Irish history, trying to do so as a lively, living subject rather than a recitation of battles, wars and dates. My book on O’Connell, for example, looks more at his love affair with his lovely wife Mary, for it was a most successful marriage and he never really recovered from her death; and at the part he played in the British Great Reform Bill of 1832, which more than anyone he, an Irish icon, Out of Ireland, my book on Zimbabwe starts with a 13th century Chief fighting slavers and follows a 15th century Portuguese scribe from Lisbon to Harare, going on to travel with the Pioneer Column to Fort Salisbury, and to dine with me and Mugabe and Muzenda. And nearer our own day my Flying book tells of lesser known aspects of World War 2 in which my father was Senior Controller at RAF Biggin Hill, like the story of the break out of the Scharnhorst and Gneisau, or capturing three Focke Wulfs with a searchlight. And now for my latest effort I have gone back to my education (historical and legal, with a major Roman element) and that has involved going back in more ways than one, for the research included a great deal of reading, from Caesar to Plutarch and from Adrian Goldsworthy to Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni.

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      Book preview

      The Ireland Series Book 4 - Brian Igoe

      .

      The Story of Ireland ‒ Book Four. Nineteenth Century.

      Brian Igoe

      Copyright 2013 by Brian Igoe

      Smashwords Edition

      This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      This is the fourth in the series of LiteBite Books telling the story of Ireland. It covers the time of the Nineteenth Century, to my mind one of the most stimulating times in Ireland’s history. The Great Famine was not in itself, of course, stimulating, but it’s results were surprising. The title The Irish in America deserves a book in itself, one book at the very least. Here we just take a glimpse at the early days. The Transport Revolution with its Atmospheric Railways and its Fly Boats and its steamers and railways should have another book, while The Fenians and Parnell laid the foundation for Modern Island. This, I think, is the most exciting book in this series.

      Contents.

      Chapter 1. 1844 – 1851. The Great Famine.

      Chapter 2. 1816 – 1875. The Irish in America.

      Chapter 3. 1800 – 1875. Transport Revolution

      Chapter 4. 1848 – 1893. The Fenians and Parnell

      Chapter 1. 1844 – 1851. The Great Famine.

      So much has been written on ‘The Famine’ that I comment on it here with great diffidence. In my opinion it is the most studied, the most commented upon, the most reviled, and yet the most formative event in modern Irish History. The most recent work I have seen, one of the many books written on Irish History by Desmond Keenan, Ph.D, presents a most unorthodox view, contrary to otherwise current perceptions. Here I shall restrain myself to a few pages, and hopefully steer a middle course between the extremes of violent opinions I have read.

      Background. Land in Ireland in 1844 was largely held by landlords and farmed by tenants. The history of conquest and plantations made this inevitable. The great landlords, like Castlereagh and Palmerston, were generally an enlightened class, who improved their lands, built decent houses for their tenants and workers, constructed lime kilns and roads, farmed scientifically. Castlereagh, let me say in passing, has been much misunderstood, largely because of Shelley who wrote ‘I met murder on the way - He had a face like Castlereagh’, which is about all most people seem to know of him. Those that have heard of him.

      The poem was in fact written in the heat of the reaction to the so-called 1819 Peterloo massacre in Manchester in England, but that is another story. Castlereagh in my view was a great European who arguably constructed 100 years of peace. He hated violence, death and war with every fibre of his being. And in Ireland he was a very good landlord. They made good profits, the better landlords. But they were a rarity in the countryside. Then there was a huge class of poorer landlords, mostly descendants of the planters or grantees of the previous centuries, who were ignorant and uneducated and often living little better than their tenants. The tenants’ leasehold properties themselves had by now become subdivided and subdivided again, originally because the Penal laws had made it compulsory for Catholics to leave everything to all their sons equally, and latterly because they were used to it. Most were wholly uneconomic.

      There were over eight million people in Ireland at the time, twice the present population. That was almost three times the population of only a hundred years before, an increase due in large measure to the arrival of the potato. And of that eight million, over 5.2 million, 65%, depended on agriculture. Of landholdings of more than an acre, 45% were less than 5 acres and only 7% more than 30 acres. The typical farm was between 5 and 10 acres, but there were 65,000 holdings of an acre or less, and these were mostly planted only with potatoes. You can’t feed a family on an acre of anything else. These people were at the bottom of the tree, the cottiers. Well, almost, because there were one further miserable class, the rundale holders.

      The rundale system was in effect a joint tenancy, whereby perhaps ten tenants shared one tenancy contract. It acted as a multiplier of the rampant subdivisions on inheritance, and in areas where it was common, mainly in Mayo, it resulted in a much larger proportion of potatoes to

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