THE IRISH POTATO FAMINE

By the nineteenth century, Ireland had become dangerously reliant on the potato. Most farmers had only about five acres of land, and only potatoes could produce a sufficient crop to feed a whole family, so they became the staple diet for about half of the island's eight million people, who planted them in every nook and cranny. In larger fields crops like wheat and oats were grown, and sold to pay the rent. In 1741 two years of cold, rainy weather had caused poor potato harvests, and up to a quarter of a million had died. In 1816 the harvest failed again, and, with typhus putting in an appearance too, about 50,000 people died over the next two years.

Much worse was to corne, though. In the summer of 1845 reports began to emerge from the Isle of Wight that potatoes in the fields were decaying. This was because of a microscopic fungus, phytophthora infestans, that had appeared in the United States three years before and probably crossed the ocean in the hold of a ship. Once ashore, its spores could spread on the wind or be carried by insects. Soon there were stories of crops rotting in other parts of Britain, as well as in Holland and France. At first, this did not cause too much alarm in Ireland: the potato was routinely attacked by a variety of pests and was regarded as a hardy plant. The summer was warm and the countryside thick with bright potato flowers, but by September leaves began to curl at the edges in the fields around Waterford and Wexford. A plant might look fine in the morning, but by the evening it would be turning black, soft and slimy. By October, blight was being reported in sixteen counties, but even then the government thought that overall the crop would be good. Experts in Britain decided the decay was being caused by damp, so Sir Robert Peel's government sent out thousands of sets of instructions on how to build a well-ventilated store. It was a waste of paper. Potatoes that had looked fine when they were pitted had turned to a stinking mess by the time they were uncovered. Even some tubers that looked healthy might be contaminated, and if they were used as seeds for the next crop, it would be blighted. A disaster was in the making.

Britain's Corn Laws kept grain prices artificially high by restricting imports, so Peel now took on many of his own party and insisted they be repealed. He won, but it cost him his job. Before he fell, though, he had begun secretly importing maize, 'Indian corn', from America into Ireland. Unfortunately, there were not enough mills to grind it into corn meal, and when people received the maize they did not know how to prepare it. A doctor at Ballinrobe, County Mayo, said he had even seen people 'devouring it raw, from hunger'. Eating inadequately cooked maize brought an increase in deaths from dysentery, and the emergency food became known as 'Peel's brimstone'. During that first year of blight many peasants kept themselves alive by selling livestock, pawning their belongings, or borrowing from money-lenders. After all, the crop could surely not fail again; and indeed, during the damp, hot summer of 1846, luxuriant growth began to cover the potato fields. Within a few days, though, the stalks again turned black and died. On 27 July a priest travelling from Cork to Dublin saw blooming flowers that promised 'an abundant harvest', but on the journey back, just six days later, he 'beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation. In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly of the destruction that had left them foodless.' The Reverend Samuel Montgomery, from Ballinascreen, County Londonderry, wrote: 'The whole atmosphere in the month of September was tainted with the odour of the decaying potatoes.'

This time the crop seemed to fail all over the island, and the price of potatoes rose from two shillings a hundredweight to seven shillings; then to twelve, if they could be found at all. Unfortunately for Ireland, Peel's Tories had by then been succeeded by the Whig government of Lord John Russell, who felt that interfering with the market was not only unwise but wicked. He fervently believed that if food was just handed out to the Irish it would make them lazy and dependent, so the government stopped importing maize. That could safely be left to private enterprise.

The blight in 1846 was much more widespread, and the winter that followed was unusually severe. Famine began devastating the land. As ever, it also brought a number of diseases. The most common was oedema: 'first the limbs, and then the body swell most frightfully, and finally burst'. Many victims were children: 'too weak to stand, their little limbs attenuated, except where the frightful swellings had taken the place of previous emaciation'. Then there was scurvy, which made people's teeth drop out and their legs turn black as blood vessels ruptured, and, as ever, typhus. The fear of disease made parents abandon their children, and children their parents. The Belfast Newsletter reported 'haggard, sallow and emaciated beings ... stretched prostrate upon the footways of our streets and bridges'. County Cork was hit particularly badly, and local magistrate Nicholas Cummins warned the government that unless 'great amounts' of food were supplied immediately, 'the prospect is appalling ... the people must die'.

Cummins told The Times in December 1846 that he and four others had gone to a 'wretched hamlet' with as much bread as they could carry. He was surprised to find it apparently deserted. Then he went into one of the hovels: 'six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth ... I approached with horror, and found by low moaning that they were still alive - they were in fever, four children, a woma!1 and what had once been a man.' When he left, he was 'surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such fearful spectres as no words can describe, suffering either from famine or from fever. Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears ... I found myself grasped by a woman with an infant just born in her arms and the remains of a filthy sack across her loins - the sole covering of herself and her baby ... A mother, herself in a fever, was seen the same day to drag out the corpse of her child, a girl about 12, perfectly naked, and leave it half covered with stones.' At a house in Skibbereen, 'the dispensary doctor found seven wretches lying unable to move, under the same cloak. One had been dead many hours, but the others were unable to move either themselves or the corpse.' He related another episode in which police opened up a house after reports that there had been no signs of life for days, and found two corpses lying on the mud floor, 'half devoured by rats'.

At about the same time a local official wrote to his superiors:'Although a man not easily moved, I confess myself unmanned by the extent and intensity of the suffering I witnessed.' In the turnip fields  saw people scattered 'like a flock of famishing crows, devouring the raw turnips and mostly half-naked, shivering in the snow and sleet, uttering exclamations of despair, whilst their children were screaming with hunger'. Many were reduced to eating nettles, roots and grass, but throughout the famine grai.n and livestock were constantly shipped out of Ireland. One Irish writer watched 'immense herds of cattle, sheep, and hogs ... floating off on every tide, out of everyone of our thirteen seaports, bound for England'. For the government, this might be nothing more than the normal workings of the market, but in Ireland it caused riots. At Youghal, near Cork, peasants tried unsuccessfully to seize a cargo of oats, while at Dungarvan British troops opened fire on a crowd, killing two and wounding several more. Overwhelmed by the suffering in the west of Ireland, the coastguard's inspector-general, Sir James Dombrain, ordered food to be handed out, and was publicly rebuked by the senior British civil servant in charge of relief, Sir Charles Trevelyan. The government had had to resume imports of maize in December 1846, but it still tried to limit relief operations. It wanted anyone needing help to be sent to the workhouse, as happened in England, but those in Ireland could accommodate only about 100,000 and it was clear they would soon be overwhelmed, so the Whigs also set up a programme of emergency 'outdoor' relief, though under very restrictive terms. No man who was renting more than a quarter of an acre, for example, was entitled to help, even if his land was producing nothing; and no government depot was supposed to open while there was any food in the district. The one in Skibbereen was kept closed until 7 December, even though many people had died in November, and there were strict regulations on the prices to be charged because the government did not want to undercut local retailers. So maize that had cost the government thirteen pounds a ton was being sold in the depots at nineteen pounds a ton. Free food was to be distributed only to the infirm and only when there was no room in the local workhouse.

A senior army official, Sir Ronald Routh, was in charge of organising the relief effort, but obviously he was not completely up to speed with the free market ideology. He complained about wheat and oats being exported from Ireland while people starved, and he encouraged local committees to set up soup kitchens. By March 1847, despite the government's reluctance, nearly three-quarters of a million people were receiving 'outdoor relief'. These were often literally job creation schemes - with starving people ordered to build fine roads leading from nowhere to nowhere. Another eccentricity of the scheme was that people were paid by results, so presumably the weakest, and most in need of help, received least. At Cong, County Mayo, it was reported that families ran out of money and could not afford to eat for up to thirty-six hours before each pay day, which of course further limited their ability to earn enough. Eventually, the government was forced to abandon piece work. Another problem was that payment was often late. Denis McKennedy of Caharagh, County Cork, died on the roadside while he was employed by the Board of Works. He was owed two weeks' wages, and the inquest jury declared he 'died of starvation due to the gross negligence of the Board'. 'Death by starvation' verdicts became increasingly common, even though the Board of Works tried to stop them, but often juries went even further. One at Lismore, County Waterford, blamed 'the negligence of the government in not sending food to our country', while another at Galway delivered a verdict of wilful murder by Russell and Routh.

Another problem with making starving people build unnecessary roads before giving them food was that they had no energy to work in their fields, so production fell even further. Finally, the government closed down the public works schemes and opened soup kitchens to simply give food to the starving, but there was so much red tape - the commissioners in charge handed out fourteen tons of paperwork - that the start was delayed. As a result there was an interval between the two schemes during which many people received no state help, so it was left to private charity, such as that offered by the Quakers, to fill the gap. Even when the new scheme finally got going applicants were sometimes refused because they owned a horse or a cow or an acre of land, and much of the soup was of such poor quality that it made people ill. By mid-August 1847, though, the soup kitchens were providing food for more than three million people every day.

Meanwhile, the workhouses were being overwhelmed. One Quaker visitor said there were no mattresses: 'the floors were strewed with a little dirty straw, and the poor creatures were thus littered down as close together as might be, in order to get the largest possible number under one miserable rug'. An inspector at Lurgan workhouse in February 1847 said a shortage of clothes meant linen from some of those who had died of fever or dysentery had to be given to other inmates 'without time having been afforded to have it washed and dried'. Workhouse officials often let in people who clamoured for admittance even if they had no room, because the alternative was to leave them outside to die. Skibbereen's workhouse, designed to hold 500, had 889 inmates, of whom 869 were sick, when 90 'miserable creatures', most of whom barely had the strength to crawl, begged to be let in. The authorities decided to give them dinner, then send them away, but when it came to it they could not - 'such were the heartrending shrieks of the poor wretches, saying they would lie down and die around the walls of the house. They could not drive them out into the heavy rain.' Disease was a major risk. Ballinrobe's workhouse, though overcrowded, had been free of infection until the end of February 1847. Then it admitted a wandering beggar who died of typhus. The illness swept through the establishment and killed many inmates and staff.

The peak of workhouse overcrowding came in 1849 when more than 930,000 were in establishments for at least some of the time. At Lurgan, there were ninety-five deaths in the first week of February. The chaplain blamed this on stew made from putrid beef, while the medical officer said most new arrivals were already at the point of death: some died on the way, 'others on being raised from their beds to come to the workhouse have died before they could be put into the cart, and numbers have died in less than 24 hours subsequent to their admission'. Workhouse food was generally worse than what was served up in jail, so some inmates deliberately committed petty crimes, though this in turn led to overcrowding in the prisons, and in Castlebar two out of every five inmates and staff died of fever. Even transportation to Australia seemed preferable to staying in Ireland. One teenage convict declared: 'Even if I had chains on my legs, I would still have something to eat.'

Many landlords were absentees who hardly ever saw their tenants; hundreds of thousands of whom were evicted and had their cottages 'tumbled' to make way for cash crops or pasturage. Sometimes the evictions came when the Poor Law guardians insisted that a family must enter the workhouse before they could qualify for outdoor relief, so many of the poor preferred to stay in their hovels and risk starvation. Many landlords themselves were ruined, though, because their tenants had no money for rent. And some did all they could to help. The Marquess of Waterford sent £300 to provide soup and bread for his starving tenants, and told his agent to 'set the pot a-boiling as soon as you can'. Many relief workers also toiled selflessly. A Quaker visitor saw them 'labour from morning to night' serving soup 'to crowds of half-clad, hungry people sinking with weakness and fever'. Doctors, priests and nuns cared for the sick in spite of the risk from typhus: thirty-six doctors appointed by the Board of He2.lth died. But medical provision was often hopelessly inadequate: at Frenchpark in Roscommon there was none at all for 30,000 people.

Some people left Ireland for ever - bound for Liverpool, Glasgow, south Wales or more distant places - but many emigrants were destined never to arrive at their new homes. Of 100,000 sailing to North America in 1847, a fifth died of disease or malnutrition. Those who survived often faced hostility and discrimination when they arrived, but a 'greater Ireland across the sea' was created by the likes of John F. Kennedy's greatgrandfather, who fled County Wexford in 1849.

By the time the blight ended in that year, one and a half million out of Ireland's population of eight million had perished, and another million had fled or died trying. The British government had spent eight million pounds on relief, but in Ireland its response was seen as grudging and ineffective, and there was a burning anger at the way food had been exported throughout the famine. At the general election of 1847 the Irish had overwhelmingly returned MPs who wanted to repeal the Act of Union with England. Russell regarded this as an act of breathtaking and incomprehensible ingratitude, muttering in exasperation: 'How can such a people be assisted?' Trevelyan thought the problem was simply that Ireland had become overpopulated, and now 'the cure had been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence'.

The famine would be followed by a long struggle for independence, ending with twenty-six of Ireland's thirty-two counties leaving the United Kingdom.

By John Withington in "The Disastrous History of the World" - Chronicles of War, Earthquake, Plague and Flood - Piatkus Books, UK, 2008, excerpts pp.152-158. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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