The Irish Potato Famine

In 1841 the census counted rather more than eight million people in Ireland — one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, and one of the poorest. Since the Act of Union of 1801 it had been governed directly from Westminster, part of the wealthiest state in the world, and yet most of its people lived on the land in conditions English visitors described with genuine shock. They owned nothing. They were tenants, and often tenants of tenants, holding a few acres from a landlord who in many cases lived in England and had never seen the fields his agents collected rent from. Leases were short or non-existent. Any improvement a tenant made — draining a wet corner, building a better cabin — could be answered with a higher rent, so there was little reason to improve anything. As families grew, plots were divided between sons, and divided again. By the 1840s a great many holdings had shrunk to a smallholding of an acre or two, and hundreds of thousands of labourers held less still: a patch of ground rented by the season and paid for in days of work.

On such a plot, only one crop would do. The potato had reached Ireland from the Americas in the sixteenth century, and by the nineteenth it had become the foundation of life for perhaps a third of the population. The reasons were practical rather than sentimental. Potatoes yielded more food per acre than any grain, they grew well in poor, wet, badly drained soil, they needed no mill and no expensive equipment, and — eaten in quantity, with buttermilk when there was any — they kept people reasonably healthy. A single acre could carry a family through the year. Over time, one variety came to dominate: the Lumper, a coarse, watery potato that nobody praised for its flavour but that produced heavily on bad ground. This was subsistence in its purest form, and it worked. Travellers noted that the Irish poor, for all their rags and their smoky cabins, were tall and strong. What almost nobody said out loud was that an entire people had been placed on a single plant, and on one narrow version of that plant.

A dependency of that kind is invisible only until it fails. Ireland had been warned. There had been local potato failures in living memory, and a far older catastrophe in 1740 and 1741, when a freakish frost destroyed the crop and killed a large share of the population. Parliamentary inquiries in the 1830s reported rural distress in language that left no room for surprise, finding great numbers of labourers without regular work or food for much of every year. The country was not uniform, and it is worth saying so plainly. In the north-east, around Belfast, the linen industry gave families a second income, and tenants there enjoyed a customary right to sell their interest in a holding, which made them more secure. In parts of the east, farms were larger and mixed. But across the west and south-west, and in the poorer counties of Ulster too, the pattern was the same: too many people, too little land, no savings, one crop. Everything depended on the potato coming up sound each autumn. In the late summer of 1845, it did not.

The blight arrived in 1845, carried into Europe on ships from North America. Its cause is a water mould, Phytophthora infestans, though nobody knew that at the time; theories ran from static electricity to the smoke of the new railways. What people met first was a smell — a sweetish stench of rot drifting over the fields — then blackened leaves, then, when the ridges were opened, potatoes that had looked sound collapsing into slime. Even the winter storage pits were no protection: families opened them weeks later to find the store liquefied. Between a third and a half of the crop was lost in 1845. In 1846 the failure was close to total, and the winter that followed was one of the worst in memory. In 1847 the blight was much less severe, but so little seed had been planted that the harvest was tiny anyway; that is the year remembered as Black '47, and it was the deadliest of all. In 1848 the blight returned. A single bad year can be survived. Four years in five cannot.

What was done about it has been argued over ever since. Sir Robert Peel's government acted first and, most historians agree, reasonably: it bought Indian corn — maize — from America to hold prices down, and repealed the Corn Laws, which brought his own ministry down in 1846. Lord John Russell's Whig government took a different line. Direct food aid was wound down and relief was to be earned. Hundreds of thousands of destitute people were set to breaking stones and cutting roads that led nowhere, on schemes designed not to compete with private enterprise. Men weakened by hunger laboured outdoors through the winter for wages that lagged behind food prices. When that failed, soup kitchens were opened, and for a few months in 1847 over three million people were fed daily — the most effective thing that was done. Then the kitchens were closed and the burden was transferred to the Irish Poor Law, which meant the workhouse. Behind these decisions lay a firm conviction that markets should not be interfered with, that aid corrupted those who received it, and that Irish property should pay for Irish poverty. Charles Trevelyan, the Treasury official who administered relief, is the figure most associated with that view.

The workhouses were built for a fraction of the numbers that came to their gates; families were separated inside them and fever spread through the wards. The Poor Law Amendment of 1847 added the Gregory, or quarter-acre, clause: nobody holding more than a quarter of an acre could receive relief. A family that wanted to eat had first to surrender its land, becoming permanently landless in exchange for a place in the workhouse. Landlords, now liable for the rates on their poorest tenants, often found clearance cheaper than charity. Evictions ran into the hundreds of thousands, and cabins were pulled down behind the families who left. Fever did much of the killing: typhus and relapsing fever, spread by lice in workhouses, camps and ships, took doctors, priests and relief officials as well as the poor. Throughout, food continued to leave the country. Grain, butter, cattle and pigs were exported from Irish ports, sometimes under guard, while people in the same counties starved. Historians dispute how much difference halting the exports would have made — more grain and maize came in than went out, and the hole left by the potato was enormous. What is not disputed is what those loaded ships meant to the people who watched them sail.

People left. Emigration was not new, but what happened after 1845 was of a different order: in roughly a decade, about a million people emigrated, on top of the roughly million who died. Some fares were paid by landlords keen to empty their estates; more were sent home by relatives who had gone before, a pattern that fed on itself for a century. The cheapest crossings were to Canada, on timber ships returning empty across the Atlantic, and it is these that earned the name coffin ships — overcrowded, badly provisioned vessels on which fever travelled with the passengers. In 1847 the quarantine station at Grosse Île in the St Lawrence was overwhelmed by the sick and the dying, and thousands were buried there. Others crossed to Liverpool or Glasgow and stayed in the slums of British industrial cities. The census of 1851 counted about six and a half million people in Ireland, and the fall did not stop there. Emigration became the ordinary expectation of the young, and the population went on declining into the middle of the twentieth century. Ireland today, north and south together, still holds fewer people than in 1841.

The people who left carried the story with them, and it hardened. Irish communities in Boston, New York, Liverpool, Glasgow, Toronto and Melbourne remembered the famine not as a natural misfortune but as something that had been permitted. In America especially, that memory had money behind it and no British government to answer to; the Fenian movement, founded in the 1850s by men shaped by those years, drew heavily on emigrant funds, and Irish nationalism was financed from across the Atlantic for decades afterwards. Within Ireland, the famine broke the old rural world — subdivision stopped, farms consolidated, the Irish language collapsed in its western heartlands — and it fed a long agitation over land. The bitterness was passed down in families, in songs and in speeches, and it was still being drawn on politically in the twentieth century. It has been described by some historians as the most important event in modern Irish history, and by others as the event through which everything else in that history came to be read — not quite the same claim.

The hardest argument is over the word genocide. Those who use it point to the exports, the Gregory clause, the closing of the soup kitchens, and ministers who spoke of Providence and of a lesson Ireland needed to learn; a government with the resources of the world's richest empire, they argue, chose repeatedly the policy that killed. Most professional historians reject the term while accepting much of the indictment: genocide requires a demonstrated intent to destroy a people, and the evidence shows ideology, complacency and culpable negligence rather than a plan of extermination — a distinction that matters in law even if it offers little comfort. Between the two sits the formula most used now: a natural disaster whose scale was made by policy. In 1997 the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, marked the 150th anniversary with a statement of regret, acknowledging that those governing at the time had failed the Irish people; some welcomed it as overdue, others dismissed it as words. The biological warning has not expired either. Monocultures are still how the world is fed — one dominant variety of banana, of wheat, of rice, planted across continents because it yields best, and vulnerable exactly as the Lumper was.