The Great Famine (Gaeilge: An Gorta Mór- 1845 – 1852) was one of the greatest social disasters in nineteenth-century Europe. Over a million people died and a further million and a quarter fled the country for distant lands. By 1861, the population of Ireland had been reduced from nearly nine million to six million. Close to 300,000 family holdings were eliminated and many Irish towns were socially and economically devastated.
The Famine may also be called an age of clearances as 100,000 farm families were evicted by landlords, their holdings absorbed into larger farms and demesnes. As a result, there was a great increase in farms by 1851. Cattle and sheep once again came to dominate the emptied landscapes.
This article, however, is not written from a political view of these disastrous events. Rather, this is a deep look into the lives of the Irish people during the famine. The pain they felt, the work they did, the state of emigration, the further loss of their language and a great deal more.
What is The Great Famine, and Why Did it Start?
“They live on potatoes, milk and butter.
Scarce any but what keeps a cow or two. They are not allowed to keep pigs in general, but many will keep a tolerable quantity of poultry. The men dig turf and plant potatoes, and work for their landlord and the women pay the rent by spinning.”
– Arthur Young , “A Tour in Ireland’, 1780.
Firstly, we’ve all heard of the stereotype about Irish people being obsessed with potatoes. Well, where did this stereotype come from, and what does it have to do with The Great Famine?
Uncoincidentally, The Great Famine is also commonly known as The Irish Potato Famine, but why is that?
Ireland has never been a rich country, with generally poor growing land for crops. Much of Ireland was used for grazing, but animals didn’t have high food yield over time compared to crops. What farmland Ireland did have was used mostly for food export, as opposed to local consumption, at least that was the case under British rule of Ireland.
For a long time Ireland was sparsely populated, and it was only with the discovery of potatoes that they could grow enough food to allow for significant population growth, as potatoes could grow on harsh terrain that was unsuitable for other crops such as wheat or barley.
So, by the time that the famine occurred the Irish population was eating potato as their primary food crop, and had little to fall back on as there was not much food stored due to wheat being an export. The famine could have had its impact reduced if the British government had handled the situation better, but they made poor judgement which led to more starvation. Specifically, that the British had continued to export Irish wheat.
Basically, potatoes were not only the easiest edible for them to access, but it was also a healthy, calorie-dense plant that contained much of the nutrients the people were in need of. However, in early September 1845 the first signs of Phy- tophthora infestans, or the potato blight as it was more commonly known, were noted in Ireland. The blight is a fungal infection, which thrives in damp, mild weather conditions turning the potato flower and stalk black and making it inedible.
Language
We are all aware of how the Irish language died. It was just British colonization, right? Well, what if I told you that The Great Famine was also a big part in the decay of the language. Here’s why:
The areas that were worst affected by the famine were also the predominantly Irish speaking areas (The Gaeltacht). English was spoken in Ireland at the time, but it was predominantly the language of business, education and commerce, and was also mostly spoken in the big cities. For the people living in rural areas in which all of their plants were dying, they started switching to speaking in English. The reason for this was because they wanted their children to have a better future if they were to immigrate to English speaking countries such as England, Canada, Australia and the USA, or if they decided to move to larger counties in Ireland such as Dublin, where English would undoubtedly be of great use to them. Due to that, in the next two or so generations, most of the Gaeltacht became predominantly English speaking, and today, approximately 2% of the Irish population speaks Gaeilge.
Soup Kitchens
With the thousands of deaths that happened due to starvation and famine fever on Ireland’s freezing work sites, a very fortunate invention appeared. This was none other than the soup kitchens.
The first step in this direction was the Temporary Relief Act of February 1847, which provided for a network of state-sponsored soup kitchens to distribute food for the people of Ireland. However, even the heroic efforts of private and public charities such as the Quakers were not enough to meet the needs of the starving poor.
Newspapers published horrific accounts of what was happening in Ireland. Letters, journals and newspapers give a sense of the suffering in the country. Travellers came to Ireland to bring charity and brought away vivid descriptions of conditions that seemed impossible in a “civilised” country in the western world. Magazines such as the Illustrated London News sent over artists who brought back realistic drawings of hunger, misery and deprivation.
By July of 1847, when the soup kitchens finally came into full operation, some three million people a day were surviving on its meagre rations.
The illustration above is one that was published in the Illustrated London News on the 16th of January, 1847. The illustration depicts the Cork Society of Friends Soup House in County Cork. The society of friends, also referred to as quakers, quickly saw the need for relief in Ireland as soon as they heard about the distressing state it was in. They responded by establishing relief funds and committees. One of their relief efforts included opening Soup Kitchens across Ireland. Their soup kitchens, along with others, helped feed those suffering from starvation.
Emigration
One-quarter of a million people left Ireland in 1847 and 200,000 or more every year for the next five years. In 1851 three quarters of a million Irish immigrants were living in Britain, mainly in the growing industrial cities. On the other side of the Atlantic, New York in 1900 was second only to Dublin in the number of Irish residents. The people would be transported from Ireland to their futures on what were known as coffin ships, and whether they would find fortune in the new land, they could not know.
Any illusion that the crisis was over in early 1848 was shattered when the weather changed in mid- June. In one of his regular letters to his family in Boston, James Prendergast described the situation in Kerry in October:
“The blight swept off the potato crop and this left provision short here. We have no sort of employment for the poor, and the workhouses are scarcely sufft [sufficient] to receive them. Farmers are oppressed with poor rates and other charges. Many are deserting their farms and flying to America as fast as they can. Destitution is seen almost everywhere.”
The scattering of the Irish emigrants across the world was to provide a critical foundation for the international support network that was vital to the Irish revolution and the Anglo-Irish war. Although there is much more to be said, this is a very brief history of The Great Famine, and the pain and loss of those who endured it.
