The Great Hunger was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. In the course of our research we frequently find that clients from Great Britain, the United States and Canda had ancestors who fled Ireland in this period. They were the fortunate ones. It is estimated that some 1 million of their relatives in Ireland died due to starvation or starvation related disease.
In this blog post I’ve outlined the social and economic factors that led to this tragedy.
The history of Ireland over the last several hundred years has been described as a tragedy on a national scale. Domination by the English Crown led to the country being parcelled up into huge estates, owned by absentee, non-Irish landlords. Many of these landlords never visited the estates they owned and instead used Ireland as a cash-cow, providing money to be spent elsewhere. The result was that huge sums disappeared across the Irish Sea and very little was spent on improving the infrastructure of the country or the lives of the native Irish. To make matter worse, Ireland’s new masters attempted to impose a foreign, Protestant religion on the country, with harsh measures for those – the great majority – who clung to their traditional Roman Catholic faith.
While Great Britain – England, Wales and Scotland – increasingly industrialised during the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, Ireland remained overwhelmingly rural in nature. Most earned their livings from the land, which meant renting farms from the great Landlords with the lack of security that this brought. Middlemen were hired to manage the great estates and since their only measure of success was the amount of money they could wring from the land, the exploitation of the native population was actually encouraged. It was the Celtic tradition to divide a man’s land between all of his sons, rather than passing the whole to an heir, and so the holdings of these tenants inevitably diminished over time. By 1845, around two-thirds of all holdings were of 15 acres or less (an acre is about half the size of a football field, including the grassed area around the pitch). Out of this, a farmer had not only to grow sufficient food to feed his family, but generate sufficient income to pay his rent. Anything else was a luxury that few could afford. Small wonder that poverty came to be the natural order of things for most.
Nor was there any incentive for the majority of Irish smallholders to attempt to improve their lot, for the inherent instability of being a tenant meant that they could simply be thrown off the land and the fruits of their labour lost. By contrast, in the Province of Ulster, which had by far the largest population of Protestant ‘planters’ from Great Britain, the practice of Tenant Right meant that a tenant farmer would be financially compensated for any improvements he made. It was considered that this one measure played a major part in the Province’s greater stability and prosperity.
There was a finite limit to how often a given piece of land could be sub-divided and this inevitably led to a surplus population. Some became itinerant farm labourers, hired for a year or season on very low wages, but others were inevitably forced to seek work off the land. With there being so little native industry, this meant emigration. The pressure to emigrate became particularly strong after the mid-1700’s when the population began to rapidly increase; rising from about 2-million in 1700 to 8-million by 1841. Most of those leaving were younger sons and daughters, rather than complete family units. Unusually, young women seem to have left just as often, and in equivalent numbers, to the young men. In the
30-years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and 1845, it has been estimated that between one and one-and-a-half million Irish moved overseas.
The precarious situation in Ireland led to no less than 114 Commissions and 61 Special Commissions of investigation into conditions there in the 40-years after Ireland was brought into the United Kingdom in 1801. Without exception, these identified that the population was teetering on the brink of crisis and prophesised disaster if the situation did not change.
In the event, the factor that tipped the country over the edge was the humble potato. In the late 1600’s, the diet of the rural poor was still largely based on milk, butter and grain products. Thereafter, however, the potato – which had actually been introduced to Ireland by the gentry as a garden crop – increasingly became a staple food source. With land being at a premium, the potato’s characteristics of being quick to grow, requiring little space, having a high nutritious value and being calorie dense, made it ideal for farmers needing to feed both their families and their farm animals. By 1800, it was estimated that one in three Irish were dependant upon the potato, especially during the winter months, and this was a dependency that only increased over time.
There had been periodic failures of the potato crop due to both frost and disease. The latter had been due to recurring strains known as ‘dry rot’ or ‘taint’, and ‘curl’. None had been extensive or long-lasting enough to cause widespread harm, but they had highlighted the vulnerability of the potato crop. A particular concern should have been the increased vulnerability brought about by the country’s reliance on a single strain of potato, the ‘Irish Lumper’, with its inherent lack of genetic variability.
A new threat, Phytophthora Infestans, or, more commonly, blight, arrived in Europe from the United States in around 1844. This was a parasitic organism, related to brown algae, which causes the potato tuba to rot. It had devastated the potato crop in the eastern United States in 1843 and 1844, and spread rapidly through European strains.
In 1845, between a third and a half of the Irish potato crop was lost. As related, there had been similar losses in the past, but the blight was back in 1846 and this time accounted for three-quarters of the Irish crop. The result was considerable hardship for the rural poor and the first deaths from starvation were reported in the Autumn of 1846. The knock-on effect of these losses was that the seed crop for 1847 was largely destroyed.
In an attempt to limit the hardship felt in Ireland, in 1846 the British Government of Sir Robert Peel acted to repeal the Corn Laws which kept the price of corn, and so bread, artificially high. However the measure had little effect and served only to collapse Peel’s Ministry by splitting the Conservative Party.
Peel was succeeded by the Whig Ministry of Lord John Russell. This initially followed a policy of ‘laissez-faire’, or non-interference, believing that food would eventually be provided by the open market. It even stopped the limited projects set-up by Peel to import cheap maize into Ireland. For those in want, Russell established Public Works – the construction of such things as roads and bridges by which means the poor might earn an income. By the end of 1846, these were employing half-a-million people. However, the wages paid out were low and failed to compensate for the steep rise in food prices which had accompanied the potato famine. In addition, many of the starving poor were simply too weak to work, or even make their way to one of the new Works. Nor were the new Works often even particularly effective in improving the country’s infrastructure. One of the lasting features of the period were the so-called ‘famine roads’, ill-thought out projects that cut paths across bog and moorland but without purpose. Truly ‘roads to no-where’.
By 1847 it was clear that the situation in Ireland was already starting to spiral out of control. In response, the Whigs sought to provide more relief but did so, as was the practice in Britain, through existing, local means. ‘Outdoor’ Relief was paid to ‘top-up’ incomes, while, for those most in need, there was the Workhouse or ‘Indoor’ Relief. An insidious aspect to this Relief, however, was that families were required to relinquish the land they held, and therefore their livelihood, before being admitted. In addition, because the cost of the Relief fell on local Rate-payers, a vicious circle was created. Tenants could not pay their rents because they were having to eat whatever they grew to compensate for the loss of the potato crop. This meant that landlords could not pay their Rates, so they responded by putting up rents which were already too high or by evicting tenants. Which meant that there were less tenants to pay the rents, and so it went on.
One distortion that has come out of the Hunger, however, is that while people were starving to death in Ireland, huge amounts of cash-crops and livestock were still being exported out of the country. Elsewhere in Europe, the failure of the potato crop was compensated for by limiting, or even halting, the export of cash crops. Instead, these provided alternative food sources at reduced prices. Although the British Government initially failed to follow suit, however, in 1847 almost 8-times as much grain was imported into Ireland as was exported. This was a direct reversal of the situation which had existed before the Hunger. Food was still being exported, but this was, at least in part, down to landlords attempting to raise money to finance the Poor Rates.
Had the Hunger ended at this point, it is probable that its effects, though harsh, could have been mitigated. However, potato yields were again hit in 1848 and that year hunger and want became widespread. Under such pressure, the Poor Relief system began to break down. Evictions became more commonplace and some areas were cleared of small-holdings and turned over to large-scale cattle and sheep farming. In these cases the abandoned farm-houses were demolished, often as soon as they were vacated. It is impossible to be sure how much of a problem evictions were in the early days of the Hunger since records were only centrally kept from 1849. However, between 1849 and 1854, almost a quarter-of-a-million evictions were recorded and this is undoubtedly an underestimate. If ‘voluntary’ evictions are added, where families simply walked away from their land, or were paid to do so, the figure rises to about half-a-million.
The behaviour of individual landlords varied greatly, but some undoubtedly behaved monstrously. Around 10% of all recorded evictions took place in the far-western County of Mayo in Connacht Province. George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan, owned 60,000 acres there and complained of the Poor Rate that “he would not breed paupers to pay priests”. His mass evictions were infamous - between 1846 and 1849, he evicted 2,000 people in the Parish of Ballinrobe and demolished 300 houses – with the land being turned over to large-scale livestock farming. The village of Aughadrina was cleared by Lucan’s agents and the land developed into a racecourse. Small wonder that he was known to the locals as ‘The Exterminator’. As a side-note, it was this same Lord Lucan who later commanded the British Cavalry Division in the Crimean War (1853-56) and was blamed for the disastrous ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ at the Battle of Balaclava. Nevertheless, he retired as a Field Marshal and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath; the highest grade of Britain’s most senior order of chivalry.
The potato crop in 1849 was only a third of its pre-Hunger level and the population continued to struggle. Particularly hard hit were the largely-Catholic Provinces of Connacht in the west and Munster in the south. Fortunately, thereafter the situation improved, not least because the population had been greatly reduced by this time. The last year of the Hunger is generally considered to be 1852.
Its failure to provide an adequate response to the disaster has brought a great deal of criticism towards Russell’s Ministry. Even after committing itself to delivering a measure of centrally-funded respite, its provisions were limited and were largely stopped altogether in 1847; ironically, in hindsight, the worst year of the disaster. It has been estimated that a total of £7-million of central funding was spent on famine-relief between 1845 and 1850, with perhaps another £1.5-million raised by various charitable organisations. This represented just 0.5% of the Government’s expenditure during that period. To put this into perspective, £20-million was awarded to West Indian slave owners during the 1830’s by way of compensation for the abolition of slavery.
There have also been accusations that there was another factor at play, that the British Government callously saw the Hunger as a way of ‘solving’ the age-old Irish problem. Certainly there seems to have been a perception, as already seen by the harsh treatment of the poor in Britain, that the disaster was in some way Ireland’s fault. An example was the provision of Government-funded soup kitchens during 1847. The kitchens were started in January and very quickly attracted a huge attendance. By the middle of the year an estimated 3-million people were being fed in this way. Rather than considering the measure to be a major success, however, it was instead suspected that the kitchens were discouraging the poor from feeding themselves and funding was stopped in August.
The effect of the Hunger on the Irish population has proven difficult to quantify. Civil Registration of births, marriages and deaths had yet to be introduced and Catholic Church records are incomplete. The 1841 Census recorded a population of almost 8.2-million, which, at existing levels of population increase, should have translated to a population of just over 9-million by 1851. Instead, the population recorded by the 1851 Census was just over 6.5-million; a shortfall of around 2.5-million, or about a quarter.
The generally held view is that around 1-million had died during the Hunger, the great majority due to famine-related diseases rather than starvation or other causes. Shipping lists record that a further million had emigrated to long-distance locations, mainly Canada and the United States. An unknown, but lesser number, perhaps a quarter-of-a-million, had crossed the Irish Sea to Great Britain.
Once again, this population fall was uneven, with the Provinces of Connacht and Munster being hardest hit (see above).
The effects of the Hunger were to be long lasting. In the years which followed, the population continued to decline. Continued high levels of emigration, later marriage and a higher
proportion of the population remaining single all played their part. When Ireland gained its independence in 1921, its population was still only half of what it had been in 1841.
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