The Great Irish Famine 1845-1851 – A Brief Overview from the Irish Story

The Great Irish Famine 1845-1851 – A Brief Overview from the Irish Story

by John Dorney 

The Great Famine was a disaster that hit Ireland between 1845 and about 1851, causing the deaths of about 1 million people and the flight or emigration of up to 2.5 million more over the course of about six years.

The short term cause of the Great Famine was the failure of the potato crop, especially in 1845 and 1846, as a result of the attack of the fungus known as the potato blight. The potato was the staple food of the Irish rural poor in the mid nineteenth century and its failure left millions exposed to starvation and death from sickness and malnutrition.

However, the crisis was greatly compounded by the social and political structure in Ireland in the 1840s. Most poor farmers and agricultural labourers or ‘cottiers’ lived at a subsistence level and had little to no money to buy food, which was widely available for purchase in Ireland throughout the famine years.

They did however have to continue to pay rents either in cash or in kind, to landlords. Failure to do this during the famine saw many thousands being evicted, greatly worsening the death toll.

The response of the British Government, directly responsible for governing Ireland since 1801, was also unsatisfactory. Their decision to drastically cut relief measures in mid-1847, half way through the famine, so that Irish tax payers, as opposed to the Imperial Treasury, would foot the bill for famine relief, certainly contributed greatly to the mass death that followed.

Background

An agrarian disturbance in 19th century Ireland, as locals stone a military eviction party.

The mostly rural Irish population had been growing rapidly at a rate of about 2% per year since the mid-18th century, so that it grew from about 2 million in 1741 to up to 8.75 million by 1847.[1]

The rural population was driven by high birth rates, increasing smallpox inoculation and a relatively healthy diet, that centred around the potato and buttermilk. The rural poor were however dangerously dependent on the potato as their staple food.

Outside of north east Ulster, which had a growing linen industry, there had been no industrial revolution to absorb the excess population, which, especially in the west and north west, was concentrated in increasingly smaller plots of rented land.

The ownership of this land was largely in the hands of a largely Anglo-Irish and Protestant landlord class that was often alien to its tenant population in terms of nationality, religion and in many areas of the west, language also. About a third were absentee landlords who did not live in Ireland, leaving the management of their estates to their agents. [2]

Ireland’s population had doubled from 4 million to 8 million between 1800 and 1845, most of whom were poor and dependent on the potato.

Conflict between landlords and tenants simmered throughout the early 19th century, often escalating to the level of a rural insurgency during the for instance the ‘Rockite’ rebellion of the 1820s; a protest movement against raised rents and evictions and the ‘Tithe War’ of the 1830s, in which the mostly Catholic peasantry violently resisted the collection of tithes or taxes to the Protestant Church of Ireland.

Ireland had been governed, since the Union of 1801, directly from London, via the Chief Secretary for Ireland and the Lord Lieutenant. The Union, which abolished the Irish Parliament, was enacted to pacify the country after the Rebellion of 1798, under the premise that it would reform the country, including giving equal rights to Catholics.

To an extent this had happened, Catholic Emancipation – giving Catholics equal civil rights – was passed in 1829. Reform of the Corporations in 1840 had given Catholics the vote in municipal elections, meant that for example Catholic nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell became Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1841. However O’Connell’s peaceful campaign for Repeal of the Union or Irish self-government was suppressed by use of the military in 1843.

In short, the years before the famine saw a dramatic rise in the Irish rural population without an equivalent rise in economic opportunity and saw the rural poor increasingly reliant on the potato. It also saw persistent conflict between landlords and tenants and between the British government and the nationalist or ‘Repeal’ movement. All of these elements helped to exacerbate the famine.

The potato blight hits

Digging for potatoes during the famine.

The potato blight or Phytophthora infestans is a fungus that attacks the potato plant leaving the potatoes themselves inedible. It spread from North America to Europe in the 1840s, causing severe hardship among the poor. However, Ireland was much harder hit than other countries; with over a million deaths as a result, compared to about 100,000 deaths in all of the rest of Europe.[3]

The blight hit Ireland in 1845 and in the late summer and autumn of that year, it was found that the potato crop was spoiled by a dark fungus and the potatoes themselves rendered inedible. About half of the crop failed.

This immediately plunged the rural poor into a crisis as they depended almost solely on the potato as their source of food. What little money or saleable goods they had generally went on paying rent.

The failure of the potato in 1845 caused great hardship but not yet mass death, as some stores and seed potatoes from the previous year still existed and farmers and fishermen could sell animals, boats or nets or withhold the rent to pay for food, for at least one season.

The potato blight destroyed about half the crop in 1845 and virtually all of it in 1846.

In addition, the British Prime Minister Robert Peel imported what was known as ‘Indian meal’ from North America, which was sold at discount prices to the poor. He also repealed the ‘Corn Laws’, which placed tariffs on bread imported into Britain, in order to try to make bread cheaper.

All this might have staved off the catastrophe had the blight not hit again the following year. But in 1846, the potato crop not only failed again, but failed much more severely, with very few healthy potatoes being harvested that autumn.

This time the food crisis was much more severe as most poor tenant farmer families now had nothing to fall back on and 1846 marked the start of mass starvation and death, made even worse by an unusually cold winter. Most deaths were not from out and out starvation but as a result of diseases such as typhus and dysentery (referred to at the time as ‘famine fever’) which took hold among malnourished and weakened people. Eyewitnesses began to report whole villages lying in their cabins, dying of the fever.

The following year, 1847, known as ‘Black ‘47’ in folk memory, marked the worst point of the Famine. The potato crop did not fail that year, but most potato farmers had either not sown seeds in expectation that the potato crop would fail again, did not have any more seeds or had been evicted for failure to pay rent. The result was that hardly any potatoes were harvested for the second year in a row.

1847 became known as ‘Black ’47’ due to the mass death and evictions that occurred that year.

Large bands of hungry people began to be noticed wandering countryside and towns, begging for food. Many flocked to the workhouses – where the destitute were granted food and shelter in exchange for work – but due to insanitary conditions, many died there. [4]

The figures for deaths in workhouses spiraled uncontrollably in the famine years, rising from 6,000 in 1845 to over 66,000 in 1847 and remaining in the tens of thousands until early 1850s.[5]

There was a poor potato crop again in 1848, but it picked up in the years afterwards, leading to a gradual fall off in famine deaths by about 1851. The peak of the death toll occurred in the winter of 1847-48, where in some districts up to a quarter or the population perished due to hunger, cold and disease.

This period was also when most of the mass evictions took place, in which many landlords took the opportunity to ‘clear’ their estates of unprofitable tenants, who could not pay the rent and to replace them in many cases with livestock. One of the most high profile cases was that of Major Dennis Mahon, of the Strokestown estate in county Roscommon, who cleared 1,500 families off his land during the famine. Mahon was later murdered by his vengeful tenants. In all over 70,000 evictions took place during the famine, displacing up to 500,000 people. [6]

Being evicted often meant that Bailiffs and the Sheriff, usually with a police or military escort, not only ejected tenants from their homes but also commonly burned the cabins to prevent their reoccupation. Losing a house and shelter in midst of the famine greatly increased the chances of dying. Though some landlords went to great lengths to set up charities and soup kitchens, the popular memory of the famine years was of the tyranny of cruel landlords backed by the British state.

British government responses

Sir John Russell, Prime Minister of Britain and Ireland 1847-1852

The British administration in Dublin was overwhelmed by the famine crisis, seeing 5 Chief Secretaries and 4 Lord Lieutenants in just six years from 1845-1851.

The central government in London’s response was very inadequate. This was especially true after the Conservative Prime Minister Robert Peel was replaced by the Liberal Sir John Russell after an election in 1847.

The Liberals or ‘Whigs’ believed in ‘laissez faire’ or non-interference in the market and cut many of the initiatives that might have averted mass death. Russell and the Treasury official in charge of famine relief, Charles Trevelyan are therefore often seen as being culpable for the worst of the famine.

They were reluctant to either stop the export of food from Ireland or to control prices and did neither, in fact deploying troops to guard food that was being exported from Ireland. They put more faith in the public works scheme, first initiated by the Peel government, by which the destitute poor worked for wages. But many were by this stage too weak and malnourished to work.

The Liberal Government cancelled the soup kitchen aid programme at the height of the famine and discontinued direct financial aid from the London government.

In January 1847, the Government set up free soup kitchens; which were inexpensive and relatively successful at feeding the poor. But, worried that the poor, 3 million of whom were attending the soup kitchens by mid 1847, would become dependent on the Government, they discontinued the soup kitchens at the height of the famine in August 1847.[7]

In June of that year, the Government decided not to use any more Imperial (i.e. central) funds to alleviate famine in Ireland, but put burden back on Irish tax payers, predominantly landlords. Many landlords however avoided paying for ‘poor relief’ by use of the ‘Gregory Clause’, by which any tenant with a plot of over a quarter acre was not considered ‘destitute’ and not eligible for ‘relief’. It is calculated that only one third of landlords actually contributed at all towards famine relief.[8]

Taken together, these decisions had a calamitous impact, not only failing to solve the crisis but undoubtedly making it far worse than it need have been.

Relieving the famine ranked low on British Government spending priorities. Spending on famine relief in Ireland over six years was about £9.5 million (almost all of which was spent before mid 1847), out of a tax income in those years of over £300 million [9], whereas £4 million was spent on the Irish Constabulary police and £10 million on an increased military presence (up from 15,000 men in 1843 to 30,000 by 1849) to keep order in Ireland during the same years.[10]

And dwarfing all of these figures is the £69 million the British Government spent on fighting the Crimean War of 1853-1856.[11]

Impact of the famine

It has been calculated that at least 1 million people, or about 12-15% of the population died, mostly from disease, during the famine, the dead being overwhelmingly from the rural poor. Connaught and Munster were the worst affected provinces followed by Ulster and then Leinster, but the latter still saw well over 100,000 deaths.[12]

Cities such as Dublin, Belfast and Cork saw a rise in population as the destitute flocked there in the hope of aid.

Skibbereen in West Cork, one of the worst affected areas, became the site of mass graves, holding up to 10,000 bodies.

The Famine is sometimes remembered through a sectarian frame; “Taking the soup”, or converting to Protestantism in return for food became a Catholic synonym for ‘treachery’ due to the activities of some Protestant missionaries. But the famine mortality was as high in predominantly Presbyterian areas of Ulster as many other majority Catholic areas. [13]

Up to 15% of the Irish population died in the famine, triggering a long term population decline.

The famine caused mass migration, as about 1.5 million people fled the country, mostly to north America. This mass migration, which continued throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, triggered a permanent demographic decline in the Irish population, which fell from about 8 million in 1840 to about 4 million in 1900. It also constituted the fatal blow to the Irish language, spoken by up to half the population before the famine but only 15% by 1900.[14]

For Irish nationalists the ‘Great Hunger’ represented the great blot on the Union and British government in Ireland in the 19th century. Young Ireland writers such as John Mitchel charged the British government with a deliberate plot for ‘extermination’; an interpretation still championed by some today.

However most historians stress that there was no intention for mass killing on the part of the British government and that the Great Famine was rather a case of catastrophic neglect and ideological blindness than deliberate malice.

 

 

References

[1] Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, Ed.s John Crowley, William Smith, Mike Murphy Cork University Press, 2012, p13-17

[2] Cormac O Grada, Ireland, a New Economic History, 1789-1939, p124-125

[3] Eric Vanhaute, ., The European subsistence crisis of 1845–1850: a comparative perspective

[4] For an overview see O Grada, Ireland a New Economic History, p177-178

[5] Ibid. p 177

[6] Cormac O Grada, Black 47 and Beyond, the Great Irish Famine, Pricteon,2000, p44-45, see also History Ireland, The murder of Major Mahon.

[7] Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, p48-49

[8] Ibid. p10-11

[9] O Grada, Black 47 and Beyond p77, James H Murphy, Ireland A Social Cultural and Literary History 1791-1891, p100

[10] Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, p53

[11] Murphy, Ireland 1791-1891 p100

[12] O Grada, Ireland a New Economic History, p185

[13] Atlas of the Great Irish Famine p426

[14] About 620,000 Irish speakers were recorded in the 1901 census out of a population of about 4.3 million https://www.uni-due.de/DI/Who_Speaks_Irish.h

CHERISHING THE IRISH DIASPORA PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON ON A MATTER OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE 2 FEBRUARY 1995

 https://president.ie/en/media-library/speeches/cherishing-the-irish-diaspora

A Cheann Comhairle, A Chathaoirligh an tSeanaid,

A Chomhaltai na Dala agus an tSeanaid:

Four years ago I promised to dedicate my abilities to the service and welfare of the people of Ireland.  Even then I was acutely aware of how broad that term the people of Ireland is and how it resisted any fixed or narrow definition.  One of my purposes here today is to suggest that, far from seeking to categorise or define it, we widen it still further to make it as broad and inclusive as possible.

At my inauguration I spoke of the seventy million people worldwide who can claim Irish descent.  I also committed my Presidency to cherishing them - even though at the time I was thinking of doing so in a purely symbolic way.  Nevertheless the simple emblem of a light in the window, for me, and I hope for them, signifies the inextinguishable nature of our love and remembrance on this island for those who leave it behind.

But in the intervening four years something has occurred in my life which I share with many deputies and senators here and with most Irish families.  In that time I have put faces and names to many of those individuals.

In places as far apart as Calcutta and Toronto, on a number of visits to Britain and the United States, in cities in Tanzania and Hungary and Australia, I have met young people from throughout the island of Ireland who felt they had no choice but to emigrate.  I have also met men and women who may never have seen this island but whose identity with it is part of their own self-definition.  Last summer, in the city of Cracow, I was greeted in Irish by a Polish student, a member of the Polish-Irish Society.  In Zimbabwe I learned that the Mashonaland Irish Association had recently celebrated its centenary.  In each country visited I have met Irish communities, often in far-flung places, and listened to stories of men and women whose pride and affection for Ireland has neither deserted them nor deterred them from dedicating their loyalty and energies to other countries and cultures.  None are a greater source of pride than the missionaries and aid workers who bring such dedication, humour and practical common sense to often very demanding work.  Through this office, I have been a witness to the stories these people and places have to tell.

The more I know of these stories the more it seems to me an added richness of our heritage that Irishness is not simply territorial.  In fact Irishness as a concept seems to me at its strongest when it reaches out to everyone on this island and shows itself capable of honouring and listening to those whose sense of identity, and whose cultural values, may be more British than Irish.  It can be strengthened again if we turn with open minds and hearts to the array of people outside Ireland for whom this island is a place of origin.  After all, emigration is not just a chronicle of sorrow and regret.  It is also a powerful story of contribution and adaptation.  In fact, I have become more convinced each year that this great narrative of dispossession and belonging, which so often had its origins in sorrow and leave-taking, has become - with a certain amount of historic irony - one of the treasures of our society.  If that is so then our relation with the diaspora beyond our shores is one which can instruct our society in the values of diversity, tolerance, and fair-mindedness.

To speak of our society in these terms is itself a reference in shorthand to the vast distances we have travelled as a people. This island has been inhabited for more than five thousand years. It has been shaped by pre-Celtic wanderers, by Celts, Vikings, Normans, Huguenots, Scottish and English settlers.  Whatever the rights or wrongs of history, all those people marked this island:  down to the small detail of the distinctive ship-building of the Vikings, the linen-making of the Huguenots, the words of Planter balladeers.  How could we remove any one of these things from what we call our Irishness?   Far from wanting to do so, we need to recover them so as to deepen our understanding. 

Nobody knows this more than the local communities throughout the island of Ireland who are retrieving the history of their own areas.  Through the rediscovery of that local history, young people are being drawn into their past in ways that help their future.  These projects not only generate employment;  they also re-generate our sense of who we were.  I think of projects like the Ceide Fields in Mayo, where the intriguing agricultural structures of settlers from thousands of years ago are being explored through scholarship and field work.  Or Castletown House in Kildare where the grace of our Anglo-Irish architectural heritage is being restored with scrupulous respect for detail.  The important excavations at Navan fort in Armagh are providing us with vital information about early settlers whose proved existence illuminates both legend and history.  In Ballance House in Antrim the Ulster-New Zealand Society have restored the birthplace of John Ballance, who became Prime Minister of New Zealand and led that country to be the first in the world to give the vote to women.       

Varied as these projects may seem to be, the reports they bring us are consistently challenging in that they may not suit any one version of ourselves.  I for one welcome that challenge.  Indeed, when we consider the Irish migrations of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries our pre-conceptions are challenged again.   There is a growing literature which details the fortunes of the Irish in Europe and later in Canada, America, Australia, Argentina. These important studies of migration have the power to surprise us.  They also demand from us honesty and self-awareness in return.  If we expect that the mirror held up to us by Irish communities abroad will show us a single familiar identity, or a pure strain of Irishness, we will be disappointed.  We will overlook the fascinating diversity of culture and choice which looks back at us.  Above all we will miss the chance to have that dialogue with our own diversity which this reflection offers us.

This year we begin to commemorate the Irish famine which started 150 years ago.   All parts of this island - north and south, east and west - will see their losses noted and remembered, both locally and internationally.  This year we will see those local and global connections made obvious in the most poignant ways. But they have always been there.

Last year, for example, I went to Grosse Ile, an island on the St. Lawrence river near Quebec city.  I arrived in heavy rain and as I looked at the mounds which, together with white crosses, are all that mark the mass graves of the five thousand or more Irish people who died there, I was struck by the sheer power of commemoration.  I was also aware that, even across time and distance, tragedy must be seen as human and not historic, and that to think of it in national terms alone can obscure that fact.  And as I stood looking at Irish graves, I was also listening to the story of the French-Canadian families who braved fever and shared their food, who took the Irish into their homes and into their heritage.

Agus is ón dul i dtír ar Grosse Ile ar a dtugtar freisin Oileán na nGael a shíolraigh an bhean a d'inis an scéal sin dom.  Labhair sí liom as Fraincis agus is le bród ar leith a labhair sí Gaeilge liom a bhí tógtha aici óna muintir roimpi.  Dá mhéad taistil a rinne mé sea is mó a chuaigh sé i bhfeidhm orm gur tháinig an Ghaeilge slán ó aimsir an ghorta agus go bhfuil sí le cloisteáil i gcanúintí New York agus Toronto agus Sydney, gan trácht ar Camden Town.  Tá scéal ann féin sa Ghaeilge den teacht slán agus den chur in oiriúint.

Ach ar ndóigh bhí seasamh aici i bhfad roimhe seo mar theanga léinn san Eoraip.  Tá stair na hEorpa ar bharr a teanga ag an Ghaeilge.  Tá cuntas tugtha ina cuid litríochta nach bhfuil in aon áit eile ar chultúr na hEorpa roimh theacht na Rómhánach.  Ní ionadh ar bith mar sin go bhfuil staidéar á dhéanamh uirthi in ollscoileanna ó Ghlascú go Moscó agus ó Seattle go Indiana.  Agus cén fáth go deimhin go mbeadh ionadh ar bith orm gur as Gaeilge a chuir an macléinn ón bPolainn fáilte romham go Cracow.

Is le pléisiúr agus le bród a éistim le Gaeilge á labhairt i dtíortha eile agus tugann sé pléisiúr dom freisin nuair a chloisim rithimí ár n-amhrán agus ár bhfilíochta á nglacadh chucu féin ag teangacha agus traidisiúin eile.  Cruthaíonn sé seo rud atá ar eolas cheana ag na mílte Éireannach thar lear, gur féidir grá agus ómós d'Éirinn agus don Ghaeilge agus do chultúr na hÉireann a chur in iúl ina lán bealaí agus ina lán teangacha.

[Indeed, the woman who told me that story had her own origins in the arrival at Grosse Ile.  She spoke to me in her native French and, with considerable pride, in her inherited Irish.  The more I have travelled the more I have seen that the Irish language since the famine has endured in the accents of New York and Toronto and Sydney, not to mention Camden Town.  As such it is an interesting record of survival and adaptation.  But long before that, it had standing as a scholarly European language.  The Irish language has the history of Europe off by heart.  It contains a valuable record of European culture from before the Roman conquest there.  It is not surprising therefore that it is studied today in universities from Glasgow to Moscow and from Seattle to Indiana.  And why indeed should I have been surprised to have been welcomed in Cracow in Irish by a Polish student?  I take pleasure and pride in hearing Irish spoken in other countries just as I am moved to hear the rhythms of our songs and our poetry finding a home in other tongues and other traditions.  It proves to me what so many Irish abroad already know:  that Ireland can be loved in any language.]

The weight of the past, the researches of our local interpreters and the start of the remembrance of the famine all, in my view, point us towards a single reality: that commemoration is a moral act, just as our relation in this country to those who have left it is a moral relationship.  We have too much at stake in both not to be rigorous.

We cannot have it both ways.  We cannot want a complex present and still yearn for a simple past.  I was very aware of that when I visited the refugee camps in Somalia and more recently in Tanzania and Zaire.  The thousands of men and women and children who came to those camps were, as the Irish of the 1840s were, defenceless in the face of catastrophe.  Knowing our own history, I saw the tragedy of their hunger as a human disaster.  We, of all people, know it is vital that it be carefully analysed so that their children and their children's children be spared that ordeal.  We realise that while a great part of our concern for their situation, as Irish men and women who have a past which includes famine, must be at practical levels of help, another part of it must consist of a humanitarian perspective which springs directly from our self-knowledge as a people.  Famine is not only humanly destructive, it is culturally disfiguring.  The Irish who died at Grosse Ile were men and women with plans and dreams of future achievements.  It takes from their humanity and individuality to consider them merely as victims.

 

Therefore it seemed to me vital, even as I watched the current tragedy in Africa, that we should uphold the dignity of the men and women who suffer there by insisting there are no inevitable victims.  It is important that in our own commemoration of famine, such reflections have a place.  As Tom Murphy has eloquently said in an introduction to his play FAMINE:  "a hungry and demoralised people becomes silent".   We cannot undo the silence of our own past, but we can lend our voice to those who now suffer.  To do so we must look at our history, in the light of this commemoration, with a clear insight which exchanges the view that we were inevitable victims in it, for an active involvement in the present application of its meaning.   We can examine in detail humanitarian relief then and relate it to humanitarian relief now and assess the inadequacies of both.  

And this is not just a task for historians.  I have met children in schools and men and women all over Ireland who make an effortless and sympathetic connection between our past suffering and the present tragedies of hunger in the world.  One of the common bonds between us and our diaspora can be to share this imaginative way of re-interpreting the past.  I am certain that they, too, will feel that the best possible commemoration of the men and women who died in that famine, who were cast up on other shores because of it, is to take their dispossession into the present with us, to help others who now suffer in a similar way.

Therefore I welcome all initiatives being taken during this period of commemoration, many of which can be linked with those abroad, to contribute to the  study and understanding of economic vulnerability.  I include in that all the illustrations of the past which help us understand the present.  In the Famine Museum in Strokestown there is a vivid and careful re-telling of what happened during the Famine.  When we stand in front of those images I believe we have a responsibility to understand them in human terms now, not just in Irish terms then.  They should inspire us to be a strong voice in the analysis of the cause and the cure of conditions that predispose to world hunger, whether that involves us in the current debate about access to adequate water supplies or the protection of economic migrants.  We need to remember that our own diaspora was once vulnerable on both those counts.  We should bear in mind that an analysis of sustainable development, had it existed in the past, might well have saved some of our people from the tragedy we are starting to commemorate.

I chose the title of this speech - cherishing the Irish diaspora - with care.  Diaspora, in its meaning of dispersal or scattering, includes the many ways, not always chosen, that people have left this island.  To cherish is to value and to nurture and support.   If we are honest we will acknowledge that those who leave do not always feel cherished.  As Eavan Boland reminds us in her poem "The Emigrant Irish":

"Like oil lamps we put them out the back,

Of our houses, of our minds."

To cherish also means that we are ready to accept new dimensions of the diaspora.  Many of us over the years - and I as President -  have direct experience of the warmth and richness of the Irish-American contribution and tradition, and its context in the hospitality of that country.  I am also aware of the creative energies of those born on this island  who are now making their lives in the United States and in so many other countries.  We need to accept that in their new perspectives may well be a critique of our old ones.  But if cherishing the diaspora is to be more than a sentimental regard for those who leave our shores, we should not only listen to their voice and their viewpoint.  We have a responsibility to respond warmly to their expressed desire for appropriate fora for dialogue and interaction with us by examining in an open and generous way the possible linkages.   We should accept that such a challenge is an education in diversity which can only benefit our society.

Indeed there are a variety of opportunities for co-operation on this island which will allow us new ways to cherish the diaspora. Many of those opportunities can be fruitfully explored by this Oireachtas.  Many will be taken further by local communities. Some are already in operation.  Let me mention just one example here.  One of the most understandable and poignant concerns of any diaspora is to break the silence:  to find out the names and places of origin.  If we are to cherish them, we have to assist in that utterly understandable human longing.  The Irish Genealogical Project, which is supported by both governments, is transferring handwritten records from local registers of births, deaths and marriages, on to computer.  It uses modern technology to allow men and women, whose origins are written down in records from Kerry to Antrim, to gain access to them.  In the process it provides employment and training for young people in both technology and history.  And the recent establishment of a council of genealogical organisations, again involving both parts of this island, shows the potential for voluntary co-operation.

I turn now to those records which are still only being written. No family on this island can be untouched by the fact that so many of our young people leave it.  The reality is that we have lost, and continue every day to lose, their presence and their brightness.  These young people leave Ireland to make new lives in demanding urban environments.  As well as having to search for jobs, they may well find themselves lonely, homesick, unable to speak the language of those around them;  and, if things do not work out, unwilling to accept the loss of face of returning home. It hardly matters at that point whether they are graduate or unskilled.  What matters is that they should have access to the support and advice they need. It seems to me therefore that one of the best ways to cherish the diaspora is to begin at home.  We need to integrate into our educational and social and counselling services an array of skills of adaptation and a depth of support which will prepare them for this first gruelling challenge of adulthood.

The urgency of this preparation, and its outcome, allows me an opportunity to pay tribute to the voluntary agencies who respond with such practical compassion and imagination to the Irish recently arrived in other countries.  I have welcomed many of their representatives to Aras an Uachtarain and I have also seen their work in cities such as New York and Melbourne and Manchester, where their response on a day-to-day basis may be vital to someone who has newly arrived.  It is hard to overestimate the difference which personal warmth and wise advice, as well as practical support, can make in these situations.

I pay a particular tribute to those agencies in Britain - both British and Irish - whose generous  support and services, across a whole range of needs have been recognised by successive Irish governments through the Dion project.  These services extend across  employment, housing and welfare and make a practical link between Irish people and the future they are constructing in a new environment.  Compassionate assistance is given, not simply to the young and newly arrived, but to the elderly, the sick including those isolated by HIV or AIDS, and those suffering hardship through alcohol or drug dependency or who are in prison.  Although I think of myself as trying to keep up with this subject, I must say I was struck by the sheer scale of the effort which has been detailed in recent reports published under the auspices of the Federation of Irish Societies.  These show a level of concern and understanding which finds practical expression every day through these agencies and gives true depth to the meaning of the word cherish.

When I was a student, away from home, and homesick for my family and my friends and my country, I walked out one evening and happened to go into a Boston newsagent's shop.  There, just at the back of the news stand, almost to my disbelief, was The Western People.  I will never forget the joy  with which I bought it and took it back with me and found, of course, that the river Moy was still there and the Cathedral was still standing.  I remember the hunger with which I read the news from home.  I know that story has a thousand versions.  But I also know it has a single meaning.  Part of cherishing must be communication.  The journey which an Irish newspaper once made to any point outside Ireland was circumscribed by the limits of human travel.  In fact, it replicated the slow human journey through ports and on ships and airplanes.  Now that journey can be transformed, through modern on-line communications, into  one of almost instantaneous arrival. 

We are at the centre of an adventure in human information and communication greater than any other since the invention of the printing press.  We will see our lives changed by that.  We still have time to influence the process and I am glad to see that we in Ireland are doing this. In some cases this may merely involve drawing attention to what already exists.  The entire Radio 1 service of RTE is now transmitted live over most of Europe on the Astra satellite. In North America we have a presence through the Galaxy satellite. There are several internet providers in Ireland and bulletin boards with community databases throughout the island.  The magic of E-mail surmounts time and distance and cost.  And the splendid and relatively recent technology of the World Wide Web means that local energies and powerful opportunities of access are being made available on the information highway.

The shadow of departure will never be lifted.  The grief of seeing a child or other family member leave Ireland will always remain sharp and the absence will never be easy to bear.  But we can make their lives easier if we use this new technology to bring the news from home.  As a people, we are proud of our story-telling, our literature, our theatre, our ability to improvise with words. And there is a temptation to think that we put that at risk if we espouse these new forms of communication.  In fact we can profoundly enrich the method of contact by the means of expression, and we can and should - as a people who have a painful historic experience of silence and absence - welcome and use the noise, the excitement, the speed of contact and the sheer exuberance of these new forms. 

This is the second time I have addressed the two Houses of the Oireachtas as provided under the Constitution.  I welcome the opportunity it has given me to highlight this important issue at a very relevant moment for us all. The men and women of our diaspora represent not simply a series of departures and losses. They remain, even while absent, a precious reflection of our own growth and change, a precious reminder of the many strands of identity which compose our story.  They have come, either now or in the past, from Derry and Dublin and Cork and Belfast.  They know the names of our townlands and villages.  They remember our landscape or they have heard of it.  They look to us anxiously to include them in our sense of ourselves and not to forget their contribution while we make our own.  The debate about how best to engage their contribution with our own has many aspects and offers opportunities for new structures and increased contact. 

If I have been able to add something to this process of reflection and to encourage a more practical expression of the concerns we share about our sense of ourselves at home and abroad then I am grateful to have had your attention here today.  Finally, I know this Oireachtas will agree with me that the truest way of cherishing our diaspora is to offer them, at all times, the reality of this island as a place of peace where the many diverse traditions in which so many of them have their origins, their memories, their hopes are bound together in tolerance and understanding.

Irish Great Hunger Museum - Ireland: A Brief Overview

“The Irish Famine of 1845 to 1852 was the greatest social calamity, in terms of morality and suffering, that Ireland has ever experienced.”

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LEARN ABOUT THE GREAT HUNGER

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Ireland: A Brief Overview

Ireland possessed its own distinctive culture, language, religion and people prior to England’s repeated invasions. During the 16th and 17th centuries, England not only conquered Ireland by military force, but under Oliver Cromwell (1649–53) and his forces, killed tens of thousands of Irish, and drove hundreds of thousands more off their land in Northeastern Ireland (Ulster). These Irish-Catholics were then forcibly relocated to rocky, desolate areas in the West of Ireland (Connaught), where the land was suitable only for the potato crop.

The land taken from the Irish-Catholics in Ulster was offered to Protestants from Scotland and England to entice them to relocate to Ireland. This policy created a sizeable group of Protestant settlers in Northern Ireland loyal to the British government. In 1695, England enacted a series of Penal Laws that denied civil and human rights to Irish-Catholics, and for all practical purposes outlawed the Catholic religion in Ireland, the religion of more than 90 percent of the Irish population. Ireland’s Gaelic language also was outlawed.


Finally, the 1801 Act of Union abolished the independent Irish Parliament and officially made Ireland part of the United Kingdom. As a result, all of Ireland was governed by the British parliament in London during the Great Hunger (1845–52) and the years following, until 1921 when the Anglo-Irish Treaty divided Ireland. Of the 32 counties that make up the island of Ireland, 26 eventually became the independent Republic of Ireland in the wake of 1948 legislation, while the 6 counties that make up Northern Ireland, remain part of the United Kingdom.

The Potato Blight

Phytophthora infestans, the fungus that invades the potato plant and causes its rapid decay, struck for the first time in the eastern United States in the summer of 1843. The invisible fungus spores were transported to Belgium in a cargo of apparently healthy potatoes, and in the summer of 1845 the fungus revived and reproduced, devastating the potato crop in Flanders, Normandy, Holland and southern England. By August of 1845 the blight was recorded at the Dublin Botanical Gardens, and a week later, a total failure of the crop was reported in County Fermanagh. By October, there was panic in the west of Ireland as the blight destroyed healthy potatoes harvested in August.

In 1845, the blight had been localized and variegated, but from early reports in 1846 it was obvious that blight had affected the potato crop throughout Ireland. While it had been difficult to obtain an accurate estimate of the damage caused by the blight in 1845, as its appearance was spread over a number of months, in 1846 the destruction of the potato crop was as rapid as it was comprehensive. The nutritious potato had been the mainstay of the agricultural laborers and cottier class and dominated the diets of at least two-thirds of the population. No other country in Europe depended on the potato as extensively as Ireland.

When the blight hit the first year, it was a disaster for those who depended on the potato. When the blight returned in the following years, it meant death for many of those who were already living precariously at subsistence level, and emigration for those who had the resources to flee disease, death and poverty.

The British Response


The Famine was a disaster of major proportions, even allowing for statistical uncertainty as to its estimated effect on mortality. Yet the Famine occurred in a country that, despite concurrent economic problems, was at the center of a still-growing empire and an integral part of the acknowledged workshop of the world. There can be no doubt that, despite a short-term cyclical depression, the resources of the United Kingdom could have either completely or largely mitigated the consequences of consecutive years of potato blight in Ireland.


Within Ireland itself there were substantial resources of food that, had the political will existed, could have been diverted, even as a short-term measure, to feed the starving people. The policy of closing ports during periods of shortages in order to keep home-grown food for domestic consumption had on earlier occasions proved to be effective in staving off famine within Ireland. During the subsistence crisis of 1782–84, an embargo was placed on the export of foodstuffs from the country. The outcome of this humanitarian and imaginative policy was successful. The years 1782–84 are barely remembered as years of distress. By refusing to allow a similar policy to be adopted in 1846–47, the British government ensured that Black ’47 was indelibly associated with suffering, famine, mortality, emigration, and to some, misrule.

“It must be thoroughly understood that we cannot feed the people…. We can at best keep down prices where there is no regular market and prevent established dealers from raising prices much beyond the fair price with ordinary profits.”

Lord John Russell, 1847
British Prime Minister

Exports in Famine Times

Throughout the entire period of the Famine, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food to England. In "Ireland Before and After the Famine," Cormac Ó Gráda points out, “Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. But that was a 'money crop' and not a 'food crop' and could not be interfered with.” Up to 75 percent of Irish soil was devoted to wheat, oats, barley and other crops that were grown for export and shipped abroad while the people starved.

Cecil Woodham-Smith, noted scholar and author, wrote in “The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849” that “…no issue has provoked so much anger or so embittered relations between the two countries (England and Ireland) as the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation.”

In History Ireland magazine (1997, issue 5, pp. 32-36), Christine Kinealy, a Great Hunger scholar, lecturer and Drew University professor, relates her findings: “Almost 4,000 vessels carried food from Ireland to the ports of Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool and London during 1847, when 400,000 Irish men, women and children died of starvation and related diseases. The food was shipped under military guard from the most famine-stricken parts of Ireland; Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee and Westport. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during 1847, including peas, beans, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, herring, lard, honey, tongues, animal skins, rags, shoes, soap, glue and seed. The most shocking export figures concern butter. Butter was shipped in firkins, each one holding 9 gallons. In the first nine months of 1847, 56,557 firkins were exported from Ireland to Bristol, and 34,852 firkins were shipped to Liverpool. That works out to be 822,681 gallons of butter exported to England from Ireland during nine months of the worst year of the Famine.”

Private Relief Efforts

The Great Hunger was one of the first national disasters to elicit an international fund-raising effort. Donations came from distant and unexpected sources. The first collections, made following the appearance of blight in 1845, took place in Calcutta in India and Boston in the United States. Most fund-raising, however, took place in the wake of the second, more devastating appearance of the potato blight in 1846. Calcutta sent approximately £16,500 in 1847, while Bombay sent £3,000. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, first became involved with the Irish Famine in November 1846. The Quakers collected mostly American food, flour, rice, biscuits and Indian meal, along with clothes and bedding. They set up soup kitchens, purchased seed, and provided funds for local employment. During 1846–47, the Quakers gave approximately £200,000 for relief in Ireland.

The British Relief Association, founded in 1847, also raised money in England, America and Australia. They received about £400,000. This money included donations from people who were themselves poor and marginalized. The Choctaw Indian Nation, in the United States, fresh from their own “trail of tears,” sent over $170.

Many major cities in America and Britain set up relief committees for Ireland. Churches of all denominations made collections on behalf of the Irish poor. Jewish synagogues in America and Britain also contributed generously.

The donors included the rich and the famous—President Polk, of the United States, Queen Victoria, Pope Pius IX—while people in Italy, Antigua, France, Venezuela, Hong Kong and Barbados were among those who sent contributions

We do not know the names of all the people who gave to Ireland during the Great Hunger, nor do we know their motivation, but we do know that their generosity saved lives.

Emigration and “Coffin Ships”

Between 1845 and 1855, nearly 2 million people emigrated from Ireland to America and Australia, and another 750,000 to Britain. The Poor Law Extension Act, which made landlords responsible for the maintenance of their own poor, induced some to clear their estates by paying for emigration of the poorer tenants. Although some landlords did so out of humanitarian motives, there were undoubtedly benefits to them, especially those who wanted to consolidate their land holdings or change from the cultivation of land to beef and dairy farming. Emigration soared from 75,000 in 1845 to 250,000 in 1851. This chaotic, panic-stricken and unregulated exodus was the largest single population movement of the 19th century.

Thousands of emigrants died during the Atlantic crossing. There were 17,465 documented deaths in 1847 alone. “Coffin ships,” plying a speculative trade, were often little more than rotting hulks. Thousands more died at disembarkation centers. On August 4, 1847, The Toronto Globe reported on the arrival of emigrant ships: “The Virginius from Liverpool, with 496 passengers, had lost 158 by death, nearly one third of the whole, and she had 180 sick; above one half of the whole will never see their home in the New World. A medical officer at the quarantine station on Grosse Île off Quebec reported that “the few who were able to come on deck were ghastly, yellow-looking spectres, unshaven and hollow-cheeked…not more than 6 or 8 were really healthy and able to exert themselves.” The crew of the ship were all ill, and 7 had died. On Erin’s Queen, 78 passengers had died and 104 were sick. On this ship the captain had to bribe the seamen with a sovereign for each body brought out from the hold. The dead sometimes had to be dragged out with boat hooks, since even their own relatives refused to touch them.” 

Population and Expenditures

According to the Irish census of 1841, the population of Ireland exceeded 8 million. By 1851, the population, which should have been about 9 million, had dropped to 6 million. Thus, close to 3 million people were lost to the Great Hunger: more than 1 million to death by starvation and related diseases, and more than 2 million to emigration, which continued at high rates through 1921. By then, 4.5 million people had left Ireland.

During the period 1845–50, Britain’s total expenditure in Ireland was £7 million, or 0.01 percent of its gross national product during the period. Irish expenditures from local taxes and landlord borrowing totaled £8.5 million. In the previous decade, the British government had given slaveholders in the West Indies £20 million as compensation for ending slavery.

Irish-American Diaspora

As a result of the Great Hunger, the Irish became a large and important part of American society. Those who came to the United States during and following the Great Hunger played a major role in the development of this country, and today more than 40 million Americans, or roughly 15 percent of the population in the United States, claim Irish ancestry. Irish immigrants were substantially involved in the early labor union movement in the United States, and the history of 20th-century urban American politics is inextricably linked to the development of Irish-American politics.

“Fleeing starvation with few or no material possessions, they brought their music and song and tales of home as they spread out across the land, until there was not a corner they didn’t touch or leave their mark upon. They became American. And, yet, despite their identification with the American way of life, they continue to have an interest in their Irish heritage, and a sometimes poignant emotional connection to the land of their ancestors.”

Patricia Harty
Author of “Greatest Irish Americans of the 20th Century”

The Catholic Church was relatively small and a minor institution in America until Irish immigrants, following the Great Hunger, swelled its ranks and helped develop it into one of the largest and most influential religious institutions in the country. Irish immigrants of the post-Great Hunger period also were instrumental in building the country’s infrastructure and in developing the parochial school system, which stands today as a model for education.

Among her first acts as Ireland’s first female president, Mary Robinson instituted a perennially lit candle in a window of her official residence, Áras an Uachtaráin, to honor the Irish diaspora worldwide.

Did your ancestors experience the Great Irish Famine?