Introduction
The blight which devastated Ireland’s
potato crops in the late 1840’s was not confined to Ireland alone. It also descended
upon other countries, notably Belgium
and the Netherlands.
It is true that these countries also lost a percentage of their populations
through famine-related deaths: the Netherlands
suffered a death toll of 60,000 and Belgium lost 48,000 ‑ about 2% and
a little over 1% of their respective populations. Yet at the same time Ireland, under
the control of the British Government, lost a staggering 13% of its population
to death by disease and starvation.
How could it be that Britain, which was still the
richest and most powerful country in the world, could not prevent this horrific
death toll? The answer is simple ‑ the British ruling-classes did not want to
minimize the death toll, on the contrary, they welcomed it!
Apologists for the British government will claim that it was
Ireland’s
over reliance on the potato that caused the death and misery that the Irish
endured during and long after the years of the ‘Great Hunger’ as it is known in
Irish history. This is an argument that must be exposed for the shameful lie
that it is. It was capitalism and landlordism, fully aided by Government
policy, which resulted in the terrible tragedy which befell the people of Ireland.
The following is a by no means comprehensive account of the
callous attitude of the British Government and the upper-classes during that
terrible period in Ireland’s
history.
The Great Starvation, as the Irish called it, known to the
rest of the world as The Irish Potato Famine or the Potato Blight, is blamed
for the unspeakable tragedy that befell the rural community of Ireland during
those terrible years. The mind-boggling death toll from starvation and disease,
together with the horrific ordeals endured on the ‘coffin ships’ by those
wretched, half-starved emigrants who fled to America, constitute the most
nightmarish chapter in Irish history, a story which will forever brand
Britain’s ruling-class and many of its so-called intelligentsia at that time
with the indelible stigma of genocide and infamy.
The Pre-Famine Years
"The miserable dress,
and diet, and dwelling of the people; the general desolation in most parts of
the kingdom; the old seats of the nobility and gentry all in ruins and no new
ones in their stead; the families of farmers who pay great rents living in
filth and nastiness upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a shoe or stocking to
their feet, or a house so convenient as an English hogsty to receive them –
these may, indeed, be comfortable sights to an English spectator who comes for
a short time to learn the language, and returns back to his own country,
whither he finds all our wealth transmitted." (Jonathan Swift, 1667 – 1745)
The living conditions of the Irish peasantry described by
Swift were no better 100 years later in the pre-famine years of the
mid-nineteenth century. The Irish agricultural labourer and his family were the
poorest of the poor. Nowhere else in the world was there such extreme poverty:
75% of the dwellings were mere mud huts, many of them consisting of only one
room, which the family shared with a pig whose manure was heaped outside the
home to fertilize the next potato crop. When fully grown the pig would be used
towards payment of the landlord’s rent and another piglet raised to repeat the
process. The great majority of agricultural labourers and their families lived
on a diet consisting of potatoes, supplemented when they could afford it with
buttermilk and, eggs if they were lucky enough to own two or three hens. The
average man in rural Ireland
consumed up to 14 pounds of potatoes each day. The potatoes the family did not
eat, along with any corn they could grow, went to pay the rent for the
miserable hovels they lived in.
Life was hard, stressful and insecure; a constant struggle
to survive where even a partial crop failure could result in the entire family
being evicted from its meagre plot and turned out onto the road. The big
landowners were mostly absentee landlords who lived in England, where
they tried to keep up with the rich life style of their English counterparts.
To this end they hired agents to run their estates, squeezing the life’s blood
out of the downtrodden peasantry. Often the agent would let out large tracts of
land to one farmer who would then be responsible for paying the rent for that
land. He in turn would sub-let the land in small plots to be worked by the
smaller farmers and labourers (cottiers). These smallholders lived in constant
dread of the agents, who were ruthless in evicting tenants who failed to pay
the rent to their parasitic masters. Those who were evicted or unemployed could
only dwell in bog holes or put makeshift roofs over ditches to shelter
themselves.
So how did the people of Ireland get themselves into this
drastic state of extreme poverty and over-population? The English middle-class
and ruling-class of that time seemed to think they knew the answer, although
very few of them had ever set foot in Ireland: it was obvious, wasn’t it?
– the Irish were stupid, they were lazy, they lacked initiative, they were
nothing more than a backward nation of beggars and human sheep who had to be
led and looked after by the superior race; the superior race of course was that
of the "True born Englishman".
The historian Macaulay wrote: ‘The English have become the greatest and most highly civilized people
the world ever saw.’ Other eminent historians, such as Lord Acton and
Charles Kingsley, expressed similar ‘master race’ nationalistic sentiments.
Such was the arrogance of the middle and upper classes of 18th
century England.
Ever since the days of Cromwell the gentry and rulers of England believed that
to be English and Protestant was to be superior in every aspect to all other
breeds of men; they considered themselves especially superior to the Celts,
particularly the Irish Celts. It must be said that some of the Scottish
intelligentsia, such as philosopher David Hume and historian Thomas Carlyle
also held this racist contempt for the Irish. All the more praise, therefore,
to those more honourable Englishmen such as economists John Stuart Mill and
George Scrope who had the courage to point the finger of blame for Ireland’s
plight exactly where it belonged – at the ruthless exploitation of Ireland by
the British!
But the relentless racist diatribe continued. Popular
journals claimed that living in rags and squalor came naturally to the Irish
(Blackwood’s Magazine) and that Celts in general and the Irish in particular
were lazy and workshy (Fraser’s Magazine). Even Benjamin Disraeli, who should
have known better, made his own contribution to this racist ranting with a
bigoted article in The Times: "…This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain
and superstitious race has no sympathy with the English character…"
Of course the Irish were far from being inferior to the
British.. Nor were they lazy, they were as tough and hard-working as any race
on the planet, as later generations were to prove beyond doubt. As for being
backward, Ireland was
renowned for its learning and its culture throughout Europe in the Middle Ages:
it had the first hospital in Europe and
students from many countries, including Anglo-Saxon England, flocked there to
study medicine and religion; at least one English king, Aldfrith of
Northumbria, studied there.
Then came the Anglo-Norman invasion: in 1169 the first Earl
of Pembroke (Strongbow) invaded Ireland
to settle a feud on behalf of the Irish chief Diarmuid MacMurrogh. Strongbow
saw the opportunity to make himself Ard-Ri,
the equivalent of becoming king of all Ireland, and Henry II was not going
to put up with that. Henry had long been urged by Pope Adrian IV and his
successor, Pope Alexander III, to conquer and rule Ireland. He decided to invade in
1170; that was the real beginning of Ireland’s troubles. Thereafter Ireland endured
feuds, rebellions, oppression, the Tudor and Cromwellian invasions (the latter
reducing the country’s population to half a million), and repeated confiscation
of their land and estates.
The result of all this is that the Anglo-Irish landlords
earmarked all the best farmland for the raising of cattle, sheep and pigs, and
for the growing of grain, barley and oats which they exported to England at
great profit. The remaining land was rented out to the rural poor and was
mainly only fit for growing potatoes. One acre of potato crop could feed three
times as many people as an acre of grain. Consequently the land could be rented
out to three times as many people thus enabling three times as many workers to
rent a plot, get married and start a family. This also led to land being
sub-divided repeatedly till some were living on small strips of land and some
were unemployed and had no land at all.
Hence, through a set of circumstances imposed upon them by
others, the rural Irish became over-populated and over dependent on the potato
for sustenance. The acclaimed historian Mrs Cecil Woodham Smith, in her book The Great Hunger (the most widely read
work on Irish history) sums it all up perfectly: ‘All this wretchedness and misery could, almost without exception, be
traced to a single source – the system under which land had come to be occupied
and owned in Ireland, a system produced by centuries of successive conquests,
rebellions, confiscations and punitive legislation’.
The Famine Strikes
There had been a serious crop failure affecting parts of the
country in 1865, but those affected managed to survive on whatever scraps of
food and potatoes they could salvage, along with relief measures brought in by
Peel’s Tory Government. Peel’s government had also introduced public works schemes
which were unpopular because they were inefficiently and often corruptly
administered by local officials and also because they took workers away from
the farms. This experience, hard though it was to live through for those
involved, was nothing compared to what lay ahead.
Things were looking good in the summer of 1846. There had
been a small outbreak of the disease in early June in some parts of County Cork,
but it had been contained and had done little damage. Then it returned. In late
July farmers awoke to find the air filled with a vile, overwhelming stench so
putrid and unbearable that it filled them with alarm. When they opened their
doors that morning their alarm turned to fear: the stalks of their potato
plants were discoloured and the leaves were brown-spotted and withering. The
stalks broke off in their hands when they tried to pull up the potatoes, so in
desperation they tried to dig them up with their bare hands. The potatoes had
to be saved at all costs – their lives, their families’ lives, the entire
community’s lives, depended upon it. But all their hands unearthed was a
blackened, slimy, inedible pulp. And this time the disease was not restricted
to Cork; every
corner of the land was affected. The potato famine had arrived – and hell came
riding on its back!
"Political Economy"
Man’s inhumanity to
man,
Makes countless
thousands mourn.Burns.
Yes, hell came riding on its back: the hell of dying by
inches with unrelenting pangs of hunger gnawing and clawing at your insides,
your starving body eating its own muscle and brain tissue until your emaciated,
lice-ridden body gives up the fight and disease or starvation finally kills
you.
Starvation was not the only fate visited upon the
long-suffering Irish rural community: there were also the horrific diseases
that came with the famine, diseases such as typhus and cholera to which, with
their weakened immune systems, they became easy prey; there were the cynical
evictions, when sick and starving families had there homes demolished and then
were kicked off their rich landlord’s estate; and there was the Hobson’s choice
of death or emigration, resulting in families, friends and whole communities
being forever split asunder.
All of these horrors, and more, could have been avoided or
greatly reduced if the British Government had met its responsibilities;
instead, by its action and inaction, this government, this abhorrent,
abominable group of parasitical oligarchs, was instrumental in inflicting most
of the suffering on those tragic victims of the famine, or, to be accurate,
victims of so-called "Political Economy".
So what was Political Economy? It was a loose conglomeration
of nonsensical ideas, along with Providentialism and Moralism, which shaped the
political ideology of the day. It’s most famous proponent was Thomas Malthus (
1766-1834) who claimed that food production could never keep up with population
growth and therefore population growth would have to be curtailed either by
prudence or natural disaster – he considered birth-control to be wicked but on
the other hand famines could be very helpful. He also believed charity to the
poor to be a dangerous thing, something that had to be kept strictly under
control. Unfortunately for the Irish, the influential Charles Edward Trevelyan,
permanent head of the treasury, along with many other leading political figures
of those days, was very much in favour of such ideas. To strip Political
Economy of all its hypocritical arguments all it meant was ‘Let the rich get
richer and let the poor go to hell!’ In other words, like its repugnant
political descendant, Thatcherism, it was nothing more than unfettered,
dog-eat-dog capitalism.
There is no doubt that the British Government had the
political and moral responsibility to resolve the problems caused by the
famine. The Act of Union which came into effect on January 1, 1801, puts the
political as well as the moral argument beyond doubt. But this act, following
an Irish uprising in 1798, was achieved with bribery and false promises, and
was no more than a pact between the landed gentry of both countries to watch
each other’s backs and keep the peasantry in their place. The ferment of
revolutionary republicanism that was manifest in Ireland
and Europe was contagious; the English ruling
classes, alarmed at the thought of this unrest affecting the English peasantry
and working-class, deemed it wise to close ranks with their Anglo-Irish
counterparts.
The Whig
Administration
To be fair, considering the political climate and the times
they lived in, Peel’s administration had been relatively prompt and helpful to
the famine victims in 1845-46. Even the radical nationalist Irish newspapers of
the day offered their grudging praise. But, by repealing the Corn Laws to bring
down the price of grain, Peel committed political suicide. After the general
election of 1846 the Whig administration under Lord Russell came into power,
and those who pulled the strings of power were sympathetic to the ideas of
Malthus. It was the worst thing that ever could have happened to the people of Ireland at that
time.
Charles Trevelyan, backed by influential sympathisers such
as Charles Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Whig government, was now
going to handle the famine his way. The Peel administration had purchased corn
which they stored in several depots in the worst affected parts of Ireland. This
corn was to be resold at reduced prices. Trevelyan decided there was to be no
more of that – private enterprise must supply the food. The only exception to
this would be half-a-dozen inadequately stocked grain stores on the West coast,
where no other food but the potato was ever available, but even these were only
to be opened as a very last resort. Merchants asked for assurance that there
would be no more food supplied by the government and this assurance was readily
given along with the promise that there would be no more interfering with ‘the
legitimate profits of private enterprise’.
If the Irish wanted famine relief they would have to work
for it: with money provided by the local rates, a new public works scheme was
to be introduced. If the local rates needed to be subsidised by government
money then this money had to be repaid with interest within ten years (the
public works scheme introduced by the Peel administration the previous year had
proven much too costly). But this was not to be just an ordinary work scheme
that could be of future use to the country: there would be no houses built for
the dispossessed, nor hospitals for the sick; no improvements to existing roads
or the country’s infrastructure – that would be taking away potential business
from private contractors. Instead this blinkered administration deliberately
devised projects that would be completely useless to the people of Ireland. Thus
it came about that half-starved men were forced to expend there remaining
strength constructing roads that went from nowhere to nowhere and bridges that
spanned non-existent rivers. Often their pittance of a payment for this useless
labour was delayed; as a consequence many of them died who may have lived if
they had been paid on time. But even this nonsensical plan proved too costly
for the government’s liking and they later decided to scrap it.
This then was the basic government famine relief plan,
modified here and there as the famine continued. Trevelyan received enough
warnings from his agents and the clergy in Ireland
that to endorse these measures was like signing the death warrant for the Irish
peasantry, but, rather than visiting Ireland and seeing for himself the
plight of the famine victims, he haughtily stuck to his guns.
And the famine began to take its toll. People died. They
died on their own, they died with their entire families; they died in their
homes, they died in the poor houses; they died on the roads and in the ditches;
they died in fields and they died huddled up in caves, their skeletons still
being discovered or unearthed by the plough years later. Throughout all this
horror the landlords and food traders took enough cattle, sheep, pigs and
cereal crops out of Ireland
to feed the entire population twice over.
As news of the famine became widespread money was raised to
get food to Ireland by
people all over England,
Europe and America.
The USA sent shiploads of
food supplies hurrying to Ireland,
only to find that they had to pay to have their cargoes transferred to British
ships and then unloaded in the ports of Ireland
– the British Shipping companies had to make their profit while Ireland
starved. This legalised robbery continued for a whole year until outraged world
opinion embarrassed the government into putting an end to it.
A lot of this aid was put at the disposal of the Quaker
movement in Ireland and England, and the Quakers deserve great praise
for the effort they made on behalf of the people of Ireland. One of the measures taken
by them was to establish soup kitchens. These soup kitchens saved an
incalculable number of lives and shamed the Whig administration into
reluctantly doing the same. It must be noted that, not surprisingly, the soup
issued by the Quakers was much more nutritious than the "flavoured water"
supplied by the government.
Eviction and the
Poorhouses
All the outside help, welcome though it was, was inadequate
to feed the starving Irish and counteract the damaging policies of Britain’s
government. And of course the Irish peasants and small farmers were unable to
pay the rents demanded by many of the landlords, so evictions came on a massive
scale. Whole families, sick and weakened by hunger and dysentery, and often
already infected with typhus, were thrown off the estates to wander the
countryside dressed in rags that could not protect them from the cold. Some of
them made it to the poorhouses; some of them died on the roads, their mouths
stained green from eating grass in a last desperate attempt to survive. Their
corpses, half-eaten by dogs, littered the roadside hedges and ditches. And even
the dogs began to disappear from the countryside as they were caught and eaten
by the desperately hungry peasants.
Ireland’s
130 poorhouses were designed to shelter the normal endemic unemployed and
destitute of the country; they could not hope to cope with the unprecedented
number of victims now seeking help. Even when these hostels were overcrowded
well beyond their normal capacity there were desperate crowds clamouring and
hammering at their doors pleading for food and shelter. Inevitably this
concentration of people whose immune systems were weakened by malnutrition
became ideal breeding grounds for disease and soon thousands were dying of
typhoid, dysentery and cholera. The gathering together of large numbers of
people at relief works projects and food depots also helped spread disease;
soon there were as many dying of disease as there were dying of hunger.
But the stony-hearted bureaucrats of the Treasury were
unmoved. In 1848, in the midst of all this unbearable human misery, with more
than half a million already dead, the heartless Trevelyan commented: "the great evil with which we have to
contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the
selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people… they are suffering
from an affliction of God’s providence." So there you have it – according
to the great advocate of Political Economy and private enterprise God was
lending capitalism a hand by ridding the world of the ‘morally evil’ Irish. The
shocking element of these appalling utterances is that Trevelyan and his
capitalist friends really believed them.
It is no exaggeration to say that in examining the Political
Economists’ attitude to the solution of the ‘Irish Problem’ one can detect the
same inhumane thinking that lay behind the Nazi solution to the ‘Jewish
Problem’. Should anyone debate this let him explain this statement by Benjamin
Jowett, talking about a conversation he had with the oddly named Nassau Senior,
professor of Political Economy at Oxford: "I
have always felt a certain horror of political economists, since I heard one of
them say that he feared the famine in Ireland would not kill more than a
million people, and that would scarcely
be enough to do any good."
Rebellion
For you stole
Trevelyan’s corn
So your young might
see the morn,
Now a prison ship lies
waiting in the bay.(The Fields of Athenry)
Well armed and properly trained Irishmen made formidable
warriors, as their performance in the Napoleonic War proved. Wellington said of the Connaught Rangers: "I don’t know what those men do to the
enemy, but they terrify me!" If Ireland had had a well armed
peasantry there would have been hell to pay.
It would have put a stop to the boatloads of grain, dairy produce, cattle,
sheep and pigs that were being exported out of Ireland by food merchants to fill
English stomachs and feed the British army garrisons abroad. As we have seen,
there was enough food being taken out of Ireland
to feed its entire population twice over and the food exporters and importers
of Ireland and England were
making fat profits while Irish women and children starved.
But Ireland
did not have a well armed peasantry. It had a hunger-weakened, disorientated
population of agricultural workers with little in the way of weapons to oppose
the British army, and most of them could not afford the luxury of going off to
fight while their wives and children were dying of hunger. There were isolated
incidents when small armed groups ambushed food supplies being transported by
road or canal, and there were protests against evictions and high rents; at
least one landlord was shot.
The best known of these incidents was one involving the
Young Irelanders. It is necessary to briefly explain the background to this
group: it is usually described by historians as a somewhat violent collection
of hotheads who were keen to gain freedom for the Irish people by armed
rebellion and all means of physical force. This is a misconception. The Young
Irelanders is an adopted name of the Irish Confederation, which is in turn the
name of the group who broke away from the Repeal Association which was founded
by Daniel O’Connell. In adopting the name Young Irelanders they were identifying
themselves with movements like "Young Italy" founded by the Italian
revolutionary Mazzini.
Broadly speaking this group (with a few honourable
exceptions) was still conservative in its outlook, respecting big business and
private property etc. and would not have done a great deal to change the status
quo. Its one abortive attempt to seize power entailed the besieging of some
constables in a house in Tipperary.
This ill-conceived incident was led and financed by the inept and indecisive
William O’Brien; it resulted in two of his followers being killed and many of
the others, including O’Brien himself, being transported to Tasmania.
One of the honourable exceptions was John Mitchell. He is
regarded by today’s establishment historians as a hot-headed firebrand, but if
the leaders of the Young Irelanders had adopted his strategy they would have
had the active support of the people and in all likelihood would have had a
much greater impact on the outcome of the famine; it would certainly have
highlighted the injustice of the grain, cattle and other food produce being
shipped out of Ireland to make profit for the landlords, food merchants and
shipping companies while the people of Ireland starved to death in their
thousands.
What Mitchell advocated was that instead of handing over
grain and other foodstuffs to the landlord the peasants should eat it
themselves and refuse to pay rent; they should also destroy railroads and
bridges and block canals to prevent food from being taken to the ports for
exporting to England.
This strategy would have been supported by the people and would certainly have
hit the pockets of the traders and landlords who were making money while Irish
women and children were being transformed into walking skeletons by private
enterprise. Mitchell expressed these ideas in the United Irishman and was consequently transported to Tasmania for inciting
rebellion.
Exodus: The Coffin
Ships
"They are going! They are going! The Irish are going with
a vengeance! Soon a Celt will be as rare on the banks of the Liffey as a red
man on the banks of the Manhattan!’
With unconfined joy The Times gloated over the mass emigration of thousands upon thousands
of desperate, downtrodden, humiliated human beings, defeated by hunger and
disease, fleeing the unbearable suffering and oppression inflicted upon them by
the British Government and its policies.
Their only escape was emigration, saying goodbye forever to
their homeland, their friends, families and the sweethearts they loved.
Some
did well in America and were
able to send for a younger brother or sister, some never got any
further than Liverpool where they were fleeced out of their money by
the crooks and tricksters who waited like vultures to prey on them. For
many
the parting was as final as death, indeed for thousands it was death,
for they
did not survive the hazardous journey to America:
instead their corpses were thrown overboard into the cold grey waters
of the Atlantic.
The mass exodus of the Irish from their homeland was a dream
come true for most landlords, after all, as far as they were concerned, Ireland was far
too good for the Irish. They were eager to clear the Irish riff-raff from their
estates in order to adapt the modern English methods of agriculture to their
farmlands: raising livestock; harvesting wheat, oats, barley, meal; anything
that would increase their profits, even if it brought heartbreak, misery and
death to their tenants. This is why the Gregory Clause (nicknamed the
eviction-made-easy Act) had been introduced to amend the Poor Law in June,
1847. This meant that any desperate Irishman who applied for benefit had to
give up the right to all but one quarter acre of his tenancy in exchange for a
mere pittance with which to feed his family. This meant that he and his family
would soon be doomed to eviction as it was impossible to exist on such a tiny
sliver of land let alone raise the rent to pay the landlord. This clause
enabled the landlord to clear his tenants off his estate quicker, thus clearing
the land for the raising of more livestock and exportable food produce to
increase his profits.
Those tenants who had not yet fallen victim of the Gregory
Clause knew that they too would still be unable to pay their rents, so when the
landlord, in his haste to clear him off the estate, offered to pay his passage
to America
he had no choice but to accept. Thus began mass emigration of the rural Irish
from their beloved homeland, a process that was to continue for decades.
Needless to say, the steamship companies made capital out of
this tragedy by greatly increasing the cost of passage from Ireland to Liverpool, the starting off point of
the voyage to the USA.
And needless to say it was even more profitable to pack the passengers in like
sardines: on one stormy voyage from Sligo to Liverpool 75 out of 200 passengers
died of suffocation because the captain of the ‘Londonderry’
covered the hatches with tarpaulin to drown out the cries of the passengers
pleading for the hatches to be opened.
This nightmare was repeated on the voyage across the Atlantic. In 1847 alone more than one quarter of a
million people died of starvation or disease and the Irish peasantry fled in
fear from the country. Some were aided by money sent from abroad by relatives;
some were aided by charities; some were paid to go by their landlords; all of
them fled because they feared the fate that lay in store for them if they
stayed at home. True to form the transatlantic shipping companies also swelled
their profits by cramming and overcrowding the passengers into the holds. The stifling,
suffocating, cramped conditions under which these poor wretched people were
forced to live made the ships little better than floating ‘black holes of Calcutta’. Their
overcrowded living spaces were ideal breeding grounds for the disease-carrying
lice with which many were already infected; the outcome was inevitable: in that
terrible year alone over 6,000 souls perished during the voyage and were thrown
overboard; another 12,000 died soon after reaching the shores of North America. But the shipping magnates made bigger and
better profits.
The worst effects of the potato blight were over by 1850, by
which time about one and a quarter million people had died of disease and
starvation and over a million had fled the country: this is the equivalent of
over 8 million people dying of starvation and disease in Britain today
and as many again fleeing the country. But the dying and the homeless, the sick
and the hungry, and the emigrants fleeing their ruined nation dragged on for
decades afterwards. Nor should we forget the mental trauma of those who
survived: the parents who watched in helpless despair as their once lively,
bright-eyed children turned into living skeletons then faded into
unconsciousness and died before their eyes; the man who had to carry his wife’s
corpse over his shoulder to the cemetery; the man who dragged his dead children
in a sack behind him to be dumped in the famine pit (coffins were now an
unaffordable luxury); the man who came home to find his wife, crazed with
hunger, eating the arm of her dead child. These mental and emotional scars
could never heal and such tales would be handed down to succeeding generations,
carrying with them a bitter legacy of hatred for the British which would affect
later events for decades to come.
The harrowing horror stories of Irish suffering, and of the
pitiless policies of Britain’s
capitalists, could fill countless volumes.
The Guilty
There are two schools of
historical opinion on the subject of culpability for the tragedy that befell Ireland during
the famine years: the nationalists and the revisionists. The nationalists agree
with John Mitchell, who, after all, lived through it. He put the blame squarely
on the capitalist-class and the callous genocidal capitalist policies of the
British government. The revisionist view is that it was nobody’s fault, just
one of these natural disasters, an act of God, or whatever. It almost beggars
belief, that the majority of historians who support the revisionist view are
themselves Irish. Perhaps some did their graduate training in British
Universities, but many revisionist historians were linked to Trinity College,
Dublin.
There is no denying that there were many officials who
defied government orders and gave food to starving Irish families, nor is there
any doubt that some landlords did behave humanely by foregoing their rents and
even helping supply food to their tenants – but such people were the minority.
For the revisionist case look at this piece of unmitigated
drivel from E.R.R. Green in The Course of
Irish History:
"…we need to be clear
in our minds that this was primarily a disaster like a flood or earthquake. The
blight was natural, no one can be held responsible for that. Conditions in Ireland which
had placed thousands upon thousands of people in dependence on the potato are
another matter. Yet the historian, if he
is conscientious, will have an uneasy conscience about labelling any class or
individuals as villains of the piece."
Oh really? Who does he think he’s kidding? And what about
the mountains of well documented evidence to the contrary? What about the
Government refusing to allow the people access to the food that was generously
sent to them in shiploads from America
because doing so would affect the profits of the British food traders? What
about the Government amending the Poor Law to make it easier for landlords to evict
sick and dying tenants from their homes? What about the government ruling that
relief food stored in depots must only be opened when no private traders are
available to sell for profit, and that even then the relief food must not be
sold at a price that would undercut the prices charged by private traders – so
America was willing to supply free food to the Irish while Britain, still the
richest country in the world, insisted the penniless Irish must pay market
prices to protect private enterprise? And must we ignore the previously quoted
statement by the professor of political economy at Oxford
who complained that "…the famine in Ireland would
not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do
any good."?
There are numerous such sickening examples of the Whig
administration’s victimisation of the Irish peasantry in the interests of
capitalism and the landed gentry, and of the utterances of Trevelyan et al.,
about putting the profit motive above all else. And through all this pitiless,
genocidal period the press, in particular The Times, gloated and rejoiced at the plight of the Irish. The logic
of these revisionist so-called historians is beyond all understanding.
However, in 1962 Mrs Cecil Woodham-Smith’s book The Great Hunger appeared on the shelves
of Britain’s bookstores and quickly became the mostly widely read of all books
on Irish history. It remains so to this day. It was the result of ten years of
research and was written with objectivity and compassion, a truly commendable
work which deserves the great success it achieved, although if anything it was
more than fair in its judgement of the British establishment throughout the
famine years.
But Mrs Woodham-Smith made the revisionists look like the
fools they were and so they reviewed her book with disdain. Again it was
ironical that it was an English historian, the controversial and outspoken
A.J.P. Taylor, who came to her defence: "…all
Ireland was a Belsen. The English governing class had the blood of two
million Irish people on their hands…that the death toll was not higher was not
for want of trying." A.J.P. was not a man to mince his words.
Let us leave the last word to the great Marxist-Socialist James
Connolly. Scots-born Connolly, born just 20 years after the famine, always
considered himself to be Irish. He gave his life for the freedom of Ireland’s
people, not merely freedom from British rule, but freedom from the slavery of
capitalism:
"Had Socialist
principles been applied to Ireland
in those days not one person need have died of hunger, and not one cent of
charity need have been subscribed to leave a smirch upon the Irish name. At the
lowest computation 1,225,000 died of absolute hunger; all of these were
sacrificed on the altar of capitalist thought."
Conclusion
The Irish are the great survivors among Europe’s
nations. They have endured centuries of oppression, persecution, occupation and
attempted extermination: The Vikings, the Anglo-Normans; the attempt by the
Tudors to crush them, the attempt by Cromwell to exterminate them; the defeat
of their rebellions and the horrendous ordeal of the famine. All these things
they have overcome and today they are a thriving nation with a prosperous economy.
Yet there is one thing they have not overcome: they have not
overcome the warping of history by establishment propagandists. There is a
towering monument in Dublin
to Daniel O’Connell, there is even a street named after him. He is revered as
the greatest of all Irishmen. But what, in reality, did ‘The Great Dan’
achieve? Irish emancipation? The vast majority of Ireland’s poor were no more able to
vote after ‘emancipation’ than they were before. And his avowed belief that you
could not be Irish if you were not Catholic played a huge part in the religious
antagonism that divided the Irish working-class. O’Connell was a charismatic
politician, a born leader and a tireless worker for Irish nationalism. But he
was not the ‘man of the people’ that he is reputed to be. If he had achieved
his dream of repealing the Act of Union the Irish poor would have remained just
as poor, they would still have been oppressed by landlordism. In reality he was
a champion of the Irish landlords, the gentry, the men of property, as indeed
was his son, John O’Connell, who did much to slander and undermine the Young
Irelanders.
William Smith O’Brien, descendant of the legendary king
Brian Boru, was a leading figure in the Young Ireland movement and is also a
revered figure in Irish History. But he too was a landlord and respecter of
private property who, well-intentioned though he may have been, could not put
the needs of the starving Irish people above all else and was ultimately
ineffective in helping their cause.
The true heroes of the famine years were Fintan Lalor and
John Mitchell, and the greatest ever champion of the Irish people was
undoubtedly James Connolly. But there are no towering monuments dedicated to
them. It is to the writings of these brave and selfless men today’s Irish
working-class should turn if they wish to be guided in bettering their lot, and
it is to them that this article is dedicated.
