The holocaust formerly called "Potato Famine" was not a genuine "famine" at all, because only the potato crop was affected, while the vast majority of farmland was planted to other crops and foodstuffs which were grown in sufficient quantities -- or at least nearly sufficient quantities * -- to feed the populace. Hence the human tragedy -- one million dead -- is now more accurately called the "Great Hunger" ("An Gorta Mor" in Irish/Gaelic). Whatever it is called, the disaster resulted from: (1) the fungus that totally ravaged the potato crop in 1845, 1846 and 1848, and partially ravaged it in 1847 and (2) government indifference. It not only devastated the Irish people of 1845-49, it had profound long term effects on Ireland, effects that remain to this day.

Specifically:
a. Before the Great Hunger, the population of Ireland was 8.5 million. Afterwards, the population was only 6.5 million, a decline of two million (23.5%) in four years. About half of the decline was due to death by starvation or some associated disease (cholera, typhus) which became fatal in the conditions of malnutrition. The other half of the population decline was due to emigration, principally to the United States, but even among those officially classified as "emigrants", a staggering number actually died at sea on the "coffin ships" **. Even after the famine, emigration continued, as Irish newly arrived in the United States urged family and friends to follow them. By 1881, the Irish population had declined to 5 million; by 1921 (partition), to slightly over 4 million.

b. Before the Hunger, Gaelic was the principal language among Catholics. Afterwards, English became the predominant language, largely because death and emigration hit hardest in the poorest areas where Gaelic was most common; the Gaelic speaking Counties of Mayo and Kerry, for example, lost half their populations.

c. Before the Hunger, early marriages and large families were integral to Irish culture. Afterwards, late marriages and smaller families became the norm. It became an axiom that man should not marry and have children until he had saved sufficient money to weather a disaster.
d. The trend toward late marriage dove-tailed with a "devotional revolution" characterized by greater compliance strict Catholic teaching on sexual morality, increased attendance at Catholic mass, expanded church building, and a dramatic increase in the number of priests and nuns.

d. Before the Hunger, a full 45% of farmland was held in inefficient farms of 5 acres or less, while only 7% was in farms of 30 acres or more. Afterwards, sub-5 acre farms dropped to 15%, while the more efficient farms of 30 acres or more increased to 26%. Thus the Hunger forced a much more efficient agricultural economy, but at the terrible price of one million dead and even more emigrated.

e. Before the Great Hunger, political sentiment ran towards abstract ideas, such as repeal of the Union. Afterwards, the electorate focused on "bread and butter" issues such as agrarian reform.

The cause of the crop failures, we now know, was a fungus called phytophthora infestans, also known as potato blight. It had struck the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada in 1842, and England in 1845, but had caused no great distress. In Ireland, however, it spelled disaster. In September 1845, the potato blight hit Waterford and Wexford, then spread rapidly until about half the island was affected. It hit hard again in 1846, less hard in 1847, then again destroyed the crop in 1848.

What is shocking about the famine is that throughout this entire four year period of starvation, Ireland was exporting enormous quantities of food. Indeed, up to 75% of the soil was devoted to wheat, oats, barley and other crops which were grown for export, and which were actually exported, all while the populace starved.

The problem was that about half the population -- all wretchedly poor -- worked on farms not for cash wages, but for the right to grow potatoes on tiny plots. They lived on a subsistence diet consisting almost exclusively of potatoes and milk, with a herring once or twice a year. When the potato crop failed, these peasants had neither food for their families, nor cash to buy other food ***. Initially, only the poor died, victims of starvation. Then as typically happens in conditions of starvation, epidemics of typhus and cholera broke out, felling the affluent along with the poor. In Toto, about one million died.

When the first signs of the crop failure appeared in 1845, Britain's Tory government under Prime Minister Robert Peel took modest initiatives to alleviate the distress. It paid half the cost of jobs for about 140,000 family heads on public works, which (to protect English business) were required by law to be non-productive, and it matched local voluntary contributions to hunger relief. It also imported large quantities of Indian corn and meal from the United States; incredibly, however, the government refused to distribute this food free, instead placing it on the market at low prices to prevent artificial increases in food prices.

Peel firmly opposed more radical measures. The starvation very likely could have been averted entirely by legislation prohibiting the export of food from Ireland; and any hardship on growers could have been avoided by legislation authorizing purchase of their grain using borrowed money, with repayment to be made over a period of years from increased agricultural taxes. But feeding the populace by interfering with exports was never seriously considered by Peel's government, in part because the expense might fall on the growers and/or the public treasury. Instead, Peel used the famine as an opportunity to push through his favored but controversial proposal: Repeal of the protectionist "corn laws", which imposed stiff tariffs on grain (including but not limited to corn) brought in from outside the United Kingdom. Repeal of the "corn laws" reduced food prices (as Peel intended), but did nothing to alleviate the hunger, since the starving poor could not afford food whatever the price.

The controversial repeal of the "corn laws" helped topple Peel's Tory government in June 1846. The Tories were replaced by an even less compassionate Whig government under Lord John Russell, who delegated the potato blight problem to Charles Trevelyan, the career civil service Head of Treasury. At this point, although people were hungry, no one yet had died. But the Whigs (and Trevelyan personally) were committed to the trendy Manchester school of economics, which regarded the suffering of the poor as part of the natural order of things, and prohibited government meddling in the operation of otherwise free markets. The Whig government decided that in the event of another crop failure, there would be no direct relief from the British treasury; instead, relief would be limited to public works jobs funded entirely by Irish self-taxation.

There was indeed a second failure, in autumn 1846, and this time it was complete. Making matters worse, the winter of 1846-47 was the harshest in living memory. Now the dying began. The suffering reached its peak in February 1847, when hundreds of thousands of homeless, freezing and starving peasants left the farms for the towns, hoping for employment in public works, which already had hired 500,000 family heads. Cholera and typhus then broke out, and some died from disease, some of starvation, and some froze to death, hundreds of thousands in all. Finally, the Whig government was forced to relent and extend some direct aid through the "Soup Kitchen Act" providing free soup to the starving. This was augmented by charity from the Quakers and other private groups. The aid was too little and too late, as hundreds of thousands more perished, and Ireland literally ran out of coffins. When sailing weather arrived, panic emigration started in earnest.

There was indeed a second failure, in autumn 1846, and this time it was complete. Making matters worse, the winter of 1846-47 was the harshest in living memory. Now the dying began. The suffering reached its peak in February 1847, when hundreds of thousands of homeless, freezing and starving peasants left the farms for the towns, hoping for employment in public works, which already had hired 500,000 family heads. Cholera and typhus then broke out, and some died from disease, some of starvation, and some froze to death, hundreds of thousands in all. Finally, the Whig government was forced to relent and extend some direct aid through the "Soup Kitchen Act" providing free soup to the starving. This was augmented by charity from the Quakers and other private groups. The aid was too little and too late, as hundreds of thousands more perished, and Ireland literally ran out of coffins. When sailing weather arrived, panic emigration started in earnest.

Blight hit less hard in the autumn of 1847, but this simply furnished the British government with a convenient excuse for closing down the soup kitchens. Trevelyan wrote: "The only way to prevent people from becoming habitually dependent on the government is to bring operations to a close" [1846] "too much has been done for the people. . . we must now try what independent exertion can do" [1847]. He announced that the government had already done everything it was going to do, even if blight and starvation returned.

Blight indeed did return with the harvest of October 1848, and it destroyed virtually the entire potato crop. And with no government assistance at all, 1848-49 proved to be just as bad, if not worse, 1846-47. Hundreds of thousands more perished, routinely falling dead on the streets; and in the extreme conditions of starvation and illness, their bodies sometimes were left unburied for weeks at a time. One road inspector reported burying 140 corpses scattered along his route. The magnitude of fatalities was so overwhelming that authorities were unable to record the precise number of deaths, but fatalities certainly approached one million.

Finally, with the 1849 harvest, the potato blight and the famine were over. But Irish culture would never be the same. Long standing animosity towards England now became a genuine hatred (called "Anglophobia" by some commentators). Further, a grim "never again" mentality, similar to that of Jewish survivors of Auschwitz a century later, took root among famine survivors who felt embarrassment over a culture that allowed family members to die passively rather than forcibly expropriate food grown on Irish land which (prior to the British) was the common property of society. In the century that followed, otherwise law abiding Irishmen found themselves supporting anti-British terrorist groups, such as the IRA.

In retrospect, no one can be blamed for the potato blight itself, which like earthquake or flood, was a natural disaster; but the British response was wrongheaded, indifferent and utterly devoid of common sense and compassion. The tragedy likely could have been avoided entirely by appropriate legislation which fed the populace with food grown for export. Some commentators have equated the government's non-action with genocide, but a better analysis would be a callous indifference towards an unsupportive ethnic group long perceived as less than 100% human, coupled with an unwillingness to spend taxpayer money on such undeserving and ungrateful people.


PART 10 FOOTNOTES:

*  Experts agree that one acre can sustain 2 people if planted to wheat, or 4 people if planted to potatoes. Ireland had 6,000,000 tillable acres in 1845, on the eve of the Hunger. Professor Edmund Curtis (in A History of Ireland) states that 75% (4,500 acres) was planted to crops other than potatoes, while Professor Cormac O'Grada (in The Great Irish Famine) estimates two-thirds (4,000 acres). If Curtis' 4,500 acres is accepted, there was grown enough non-potato food for 9 million people, or 500,000 more than the population, and this does not even include fish taken from the sea or the minimal percent of the potato crop which survived. If O'Grada's 4,000 acres is accepted, there was grown enough food for 8 million people, about 500,000 fewer than the 1845 population, but this does not include fish from the sea or the unaffected potatoes. It must be remembered, however, that distribution is never perfect - there always will be some who discard surplus food while others starve.

**  On the seven week ocean voyage to the United States and Canada, the ships' crews typically protected themselves from cholera, which was rampant in Ireland, by nailing the ships' holds shut to keep the emigrants in the unbelievably crowded and unhealthy squalor below board. Based on Canadian statistics, it is estimated that in these unhealthy conditions, about 20% of passengers died at sea, while another 20% arrived sick with fever, so sick that they probably died within weeks. Hence the name "coffin ships".

***  Food from Britain and elsewhere in Europe certainly would have found its way to Ireland if the starving peasants had had the cash to purchase it. But the peasants had no cash, so they died. For this reason, some historians and economists regard the Irish holocaust as more of a poverty crisis than a food crisis.