Shane Hagaman

4/8/2021

Mrs. Percival

Honors Literature P4

State Induced Cultural Corrosion of the Irish: English Tyranny

Can you imagine in your country 1,100,000 people dying from disease or starvation, in

addition to one and a half million others desperately immigrating to other countries in an attempt

to escape the overwhelming sickness and fatality? (Irish Potato Famine) Try to imagine the

government that controls you and is responsible for your well being, almost totally neglecting to

even acknowledge or take charge of this problem until it is too late. If one looks at Ireland from

1845 to 1849, this is exactly what happened when a potato famine struck the British ruled

country. The relationship between England and Ireland reaches back more than 500 years, but

never was the powerful and cruel domination of the British over the Irish more exhibited than

during the terrible years of 1845 to 1849, when Britain used the Irish Potato Famine to commit

genocide on a people they had tried to eradicate already for hundreds of years.

In the 1500's, England took control of Ireland, after a few hundred years of holding

scattered areas of land across the country. King Henry VIII began the persecution of the Roman

Catholics, which mostly all Irish people were. The Penal Laws, a group of laws restricting the

freedom of the Roman Catholics attempted to pressure them into converting, but only succeeded

in straining the lives of the Irish people. When the Penal Laws were put into effect, the Irish were

stripped of their rights, including the right to vote, hold any public office, or own land. After the

land was taken from the Roman Catholics, Britain it gave to wealthy English and Scottish
Protestants. Although the majority of its people could not hold office, Ireland still had its own

parliament up until the 1801. At that time the Act of Union was passed and Ireland merged with

Great Britain to form the United Kingdom, thus dissolving Ireland parliament.

Ireland, because of its location and mineral-barren land, had never been a large trading

country, nor had it been able to prosper from the industrialization of the 1800's, as most of

Europe had. Nevertheless, the outlook for Ireland just before 1845 seemed fairly promising.

Exportation of grain and other crops to Europe was growing and the linen industry was

developing also. The population had been steadily rising, and an enormous class of agricultural

laborers rose along with it. By 1845, the population had almost reached nine million. (Duffy; pg.

100) These developments mostly benefited England though. Since most Irish could not own

land, they rented homes from landlords and worked for small plots of land they used to grow

potatoes for their family. Others that were farmers paid their landlords by animals or their crops

produced. Potatoes were the main source of food for Irish peasant families, nearly one half of the

total Irish population.

Since there were only one or two kinds of potatoes being grown, this genetically made

the crop more vulnerable to disease or any type of infection wiping out an entire crop. This is

exactly what happened in the summer of 1845. A fungus from North America, Phyophthora

infestans, entered Ireland and in the unusually warm weather that summer, thrived. This fungus

caused blights in potatoes that killed the leaves and roots of the vegetable before ever being

picked out of the ground. In September of 1845, it killed about one third of the whole potato

crop. The result was not only disease, but starvation, unemployment, and the economic collapse

of a country.
 Whole families suffered from epidemics such as typhus, cholera, and dysentery. People

that were not sick, were starving and unemployed. When people could not pay their rent, land

owners threw them out. This left multitudes of homeless and starved beggars crowding cities,

and later, soup kitchens and workhouses that were set up. The way the economy worked, the

breakdown for the farmers and poor laborers was not confined to only them. Shopkeepers and

tradesmen, along with the clergymen who depended on the community for sustainment, all

suffered too.

The state of the country was such that the renowned British historian, AJP Taylor,

declared "all Ireland was a Belsen", a reference to the infamous Nazi concentration camp.

As one of this country's most prolific and able writers, Tim Pat Coogan is critical of Irish

historians as a class for their failure to do justice to the Famine. In his latest work, Coogan

deploys the full range of his talents to passionately make the case that the Irish Famine was a

deliberate act of genocide.

The maxim of the Young Ireland leader John Mitchell was that "God sent the potato blight but

the English created the Famine".

Coogan's research gives credence to this view and he expertly catalogues a shocking

combination of ambivalence, incompetence and malignance on the part of British policymakers.

Rapid population growth was at the root of the catastrophe that devastated Ireland in the 1840s.

Between 1741, the date of the last big Famine, and the coming of the blight in 1845, the

population of Ireland had tripled.

Feeding so many was already a problem before the Famine with the bulk of the Irish population

surviving on a subsistence diet.

Coogan demonstrates that the British government was not oblivious to the plight of

Ireland. The Whatley Commission on Irish poverty in 1833 had suggested that large-scale

emigration to the colonies be encouraged and proposed that fisheries be developed and land be

reclaimed among other measures.

Had these recommendations been implemented, it would have done much to mitigate

against the scale of the disaster which engulfed Ireland just over a decade later. If a misguided

faith in a procyclical economics has caused financial hardship for this generation then the fact

that laissez-faire economics was en vogue in the Famine era significantly contributed to the huge

death-toll in Ireland.

Farmers thought they would be relieved with the next crop in 1846, but unfortunately

they were wrong, and for a second time the blight contaminated the potatoes. The effect on the

people was even worse than before. A harsh winter that year helped to trouble the lives of the

Irish even more, causing more death and starvation. With coffins being much too expensive

when people barely had enough money to buy food, bodies were wrapped in coarse sheets or

simply thrown into mass graves. Mobs of men sacked bakeries and mills for food, but this did

not help to ease the starvation. The condition of Ireland at the opening of the year 1847, writes

the Irish patriot, statesman, and historian Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, is one of the most painful

chapters in the annals of mankind. An industrious and hospitable race in the pangs of a

devouring famine. (Famine in Ireland)

 It’s estimated 1 million tried to escape by immigrating to places such as the United States,

Canada, Australia, and Great Britain. ( Donnelly, James Jr) Large, unclean and under supplied

ships called coffin ships carried hordes of people, sometimes double the legal amount, to the

U.S. or Canada. Under such terrible conditions, people were malnourished and barely clothed,

disease spread easily, and over one fifth of the passengers died before even reaching their

destination. Of the people that made it to Canada or America, finding homes and jobs was

difficult. They accepted any employment possible, many times with such little pay, it was hardly

enough to buy a meal. Others were too weak or sick to find work and died in America. The

influx of immigrants to America was seen as a problem by U.S. citizens because of how many

beggars filled up the streets of cities, mainly New York and Boston, plus the new diseases they

brought. It is because of this great migration of the Irish people during and in years following the

famine, that they are now one of the largest ethnic groups in America today.

From the very beginning, Britain had persecuted the Irish people because of their faith.

They treated them as second class citizens, if even that, by denying them their freedom and many

rights that allowed few to prosper. As mentioned before, England benefited from the huge

working class that labored for bits of land and the profitable export of grain this yielded.

Throughout the potato famine, all other crops and meat still flourished, but were exported

because the Irish did not have enough money to buy them. Estimated in the worst year of the

famine, 1847, crops other than potatoes that were exported to English and Scottish areas

amounted to 4,000 shiploads of food. (Joyal

Throughout the entire nightmare, the response of Britain to help the desperate Irish, was

substantially less than should have been. At the start of the famine in 1845, Sir Robert Peel,

British prime minister at the time, did make scattering attempts to relieve the starvation and
unemployment by bringing in Indian maize and cornmeal from the United States. He also tried to

take away tariffs on imported grain in England, hoping this would provide more jobs.

Unfortunately, both of these events proved unsuccessful. The Indian maize, enough for about 1

million people, only lasted three months, and many people developed scurvy from the lack of

Vitamin C after eating only cornmeal. As for the dissolving of tariffs, it proved unpopular among

the English and caused Lord John Russell to take the office of prime minister in 1846.

The Whig government under Lord John Russell proved to be much less enthusiastic to

help the problems in Ireland than that of the preceding government. At first, many British

statesmen did not believe Irishmen were in any serious threat of starvation because of a lazy and

backwards stereotype they had of the Irish. Once the truth became apparent, relief efforts were

still put off. Russell himself thought it was better to let Ireland rely on its own resources to keep

a free market. Letting Ireland rely on its own resources meant throwing the burden onto the Irish

landlords, who were desperately struggling to maintain their wealth while having to deal with

their starved and ailed tenants. Many greedy upperclassmen went so far as to use grants given to

them for the purpose of helping the poor living on their estates for themselves.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the official dealing with government revenue, was at

that time Sir Charles Trevelyan. He was in charge of the relief efforts, but did very little because

of his belief in free trade and capitalism. Both Charles Trevelyan and Lord John Russell believed

in the laissez faire, an attitude popular among British aristocrats at the time. They felt it was

wrong and hopeless to intervene with the economic laws. (Nick Ghillielaidir) To quote the

British historian A.J.P Taylor (Donnely) saying Most of all, the enlightened men feared the

whole social structure would topple down if men and women were once given food which they

could not pay for. Basically it was an excuse for the cruel and snobbish bureaucrats not to burden
themselves with the extensive and certainly costly effort of giving aid to the millions of starving

and dying people. Instead, they turned their faces and searched for answers with their noses ...in

a textbook of economics without ever once setting eyes on the living skeletons of the Irish

people, also quoted from A.J.P Taylor. ( Donnelly, James Jr)

After the effects of the famine could no longer be avoided, Britain did set up various soup

kitchens in addition to setting up public work projects such as road building to provide some

employment, but the payment from these jobs was barely enough to support one person, let alone

a family with children. Charities also set up relief works and collected money, including the

Quakers, who constantly kept the British well informed with reports of the crisis in Ireland.

Although these efforts were respectable, they were nowhere near the support Ireland needed.

Since the reaction of the British government is clearly hostile, it is not hard to believe the

people of Britain were not very hospitable either. When a bishop and twenty priests died of

typhus after caring for sick Irishmen that had come to England, the British people were so

insensitive, they criticized and protested the immigration of these poor people. After all, if it

were not for the laws of the all-powerful English, the immigrants would not have been put in that

position! As Sir Charles Gavan Duffy accounted perfectly, ...for we had no country for the

purpose of self-government and self-protection, we were acknowledged to have a country when

the necessity of bearing burdens arose.

The hypocrisy and injustice of British rule is even more disturbing when looking at the

great fire that swept London in 1846, the second year of the Irish potato famine. The distressed

city was sent 20,000 cattle from Ireland, an amount that presently would value more than what

both England and all of Europe sent to Ireland in that same year. It should also be noted that
throughout the entire famine, 30,000 British soldiers stationed in Ireland were well fed, dressed

properly, and given shelter, so as to be ready to uphold the law. (Duffy; pg.120)

By 1848, the blight started to go away, and by 1850 the potato crop was suitable, but the

desolation would not recede so quickly. Ireland was left with social and economical disaster, but

also with a resentment for the British, rooted in the survivors of the famine and passed on to their

new generation. Also, death and disease rates along with immigration rates were still high in the

years following. By the time Ireland won its independence from Britain in 1921, its population

was less than half of what it had been before the famine.

It is impossible given all this information not to believe Britain was responsible for the

struggles, suffering, immigration, and death of over two million Irish people. By intentionally

waiting until it was too late to offer any service to people they alone had complete power over,

they underhandedly aided in the demise of so many. Their undeniable negligence therefore is

nothing less than genocide. Furthermore, it was not till 1997, 150 years later, that British Prime

Minister Tony Blair formally acknowledged Britain’s lack of support during the famine during a

speech commemorating the famine. He recognized the failure of those who governed in London

at the time... through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy. Mr.

Blair also mentioned we must not forget such a dreadful event. ( In Donnelly) He is absolutely

correct. Though disgraceful to Britain, all people should still remember how little compassion or

concern Ireland received in order to learn from this grave mistake for the future.
 Bibliography

Cecil, Woodham-SMith. The Great Hunger. New York, Harper and Row, 1962.

Donnelly, James Jr. S. “The Great Famine and its interpreters, old and new.” History Ireland, vol.

1, 1993. History Ireland,

https://www.historyireland.com/the-famine/the-great-famine-and-its-interpreters-old-and-

new/.

Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan. Four Years of Irish History, 1845-1849. Scholar Select, 2015.

Encyclopedia Britannica. “Irish Potato Famine.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 Feb 2001,

Briannica.com.

Independent.ie. “Was the Famine genocide by the British?” Independent.ie,

https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/was-the-famine-genocide-by-the-british-

28954929.html.

Joyal, Sarah Armstrong. “1845-1850 CE, The Hunger.” 1998. The Clannada na Gadelica.,

http://www.clannada.org/.

Rachel, Donnelly. “Blair admits famine policy failure by British.” The Irish Times, 2 June 1997.

Accessed 13 April 2021.