A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  The towns ... into which the poor have been driven, are thronged with squalid countenances; starvation stalks at noonday through the streets; and perhaps in no part of the world could be found so much wretchedness ‘huddled’ together in an equal space as in the town of Navan. All around the suburbs, the cabins are filthy to the last degree; a very large proportion of them have no other outlets for smoke but the broken windows; the roofs of many have fallen in.

  So dependent were the vast majority on the cultivation of the land that stands of trees could be found only within the walled demesnes of the gentry. Writing in 1839, after his visit to Ireland, the French social commentator Gustave de Beaumont noticed:

  Formerly Ireland was a vast forest.... It is now almost destitute of trees; and when, on a fine day in spring, it appears, though bare, full of sap and youth, it seems like a young and lovely girl deprived of her hair.

  He described a typical Irish cabin, the dwelling place of two-fifths of the population:

  Imagine four walls of dry mud, which the rain, as it falls, easily restores to its primitive condition; having for its roof a little straw or some sods, for its chimney a hole cut in the roof, or very frequently the door, through which the smoke finds an issue. One single apartment contains the father, mother, children, and sometimes a grandfather or grandmother; there is no furniture in this wretched hovel; a single bed of hay or straw serves for the entire family. Five or six half-naked children may be seen crouched near a miserable fire, the ashes of which cover a few potatoes, the sole nourishment of the family. In the midst of all lies a dirty pig, the only thriving inhabitant of the place, for he lives in filth.…

  This dwelling is very miserable, still it is not that of the pauper, properly so called; I have just described the dwelling of the Irish farmer and agricultural labourer.…

  All being poor, the only food they use is the cheapest in the country—potatoes.

  It was the total dependence of so many millions on this one item of food that led to the greatest tragedy in modern Irish history.

  Episode 181

  THE CENSUS OF 1841

  In 1837 Patrick McKye, a National School teacher, wrote a letter to Dublin Castle on behalf of the people of West Tullaghobegley, the parish comprising Gweedore, Co. Donegal. The inhabitants, he informed the viceroy, ‘are in the most needy, hungry, and naked condition of any people that ever came within the precincts of my knowledge’. There, among a population of some 9,000, was to be found only one cart, one plough, sixteen harrows, eight saddles, twenty shovels, seven table-forks, twenty-seven geese, eight turkeys, three watches and two feather beds. In the whole parish there was not a single wheel-car, not a pig, not a clock, and not a pair of boots. And there were neither fruit trees nor crops of turnips, parsnips, carrots or clover. McKye continued:

  None of their either married or unmarried women can afford more than one shift, and the fewest number cannot afford any ... nor can many of them afford a second bed, but whole families of sons and daughters of mature age indiscriminately lieing together with their parents, and all in the bare buff. Their beds are straw—green and dried rushes or mountain bent: their bed cloathes are either coarse sheets, or no sheets, and ragged filthy blankets.... If any unprejudiced gentleman should be sent here to investigate ... I can shew him about one hundred and forty children bare naked, and was so during winter, and some hundreds only covered with filthy rags, most disgustful to look at.

  Long storms had ruined their crops and now they faced starvation. Many could afford only one meal every three days, and McKye found

  their children crying and fainting with hunger, and their parents weeping, being full of grief, hunger, debility and dejection, with glooming aspect, looking at their children likely to expire in the jaws of starvation.

  Patrick McKye could have been writing about almost any part of Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard. This beautiful but barren coastland and its adjacent islands had only acquired a dense population over the previous century. There only by unremitting labour had the people had made the thin and leached soil fertile by spreading shell sand and seaweed on the ground.

  The first thorough census in Ireland was completed in 1841. The population of the island was enumerated as 8,175,124. Ninety years earlier the number of people in Ireland had been no more than 2,500,000. This was an astonishing growth considering that at least 1,500,000 had emigrated since the end of the war with Napoleon in 1815. No great plague or epidemic had checked the natural tendency of the population to grow.

  Just across the Irish Sea, Britain was fast becoming the greatest industrial power on earth. The burgeoning populations of the manufacturing and coalmining towns there eagerly bought up food from Ireland’s farms. Irish landlords and farmers prospered from this trade, but this intense economic activity concealed a drawback—competition from mass-produced British imports had all but destroyed the ability of the Irish poor to supplement their incomes by selling cloth and knitwear made in the home.

  In the 1840s the gap between the rich and the poor was yawning wide. The 1841 census reported that two-fifths of the houses in Ireland were single-roomed mud cabins without windows. Only seven out of every hundred farms in Ireland were of thirty acres or more—and this at a time when in Scotland a farm of sixty acres was considered small. Only a quarter of the rural population was made up of farmers; the rest were wretchedly poor labourers and cottiers. As the population rose the land was sublet into smaller and smaller scraps—in the western province of Connacht 64 per cent of holdings were of less than five acres.

  Most of the produce of even the tiniest plots of land had to be set aside to pay rent. More than ever, the Irish depended on the potato. The potato provided more nourishment per acre than any other crop. By the 1840s half the population of Ireland was almost totally dependent on the potato for sustenance. The precarious position of so many people was recognised by the Devon Commission, which reported to the government in 1845:

  It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which they habitually and silently endure.... In many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water ... their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather ... a bed or a blanket is a rare luxury ... and nearly in all their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property.

  Such people were fatally vulnerable when a previously unknown disease struck the potato crop in Ireland in August 1845.

  Episode 182

  PHYTOPHTHORA INFESTANS

  On 13 September 1845 the editor of the Gardeners’ Chronicle held up publication to make a dramatic announcement:

  We stop the Press with very great regret to announce that the potato Murrain has unequivocally declared itself in Ireland. The crops about Dublin are suddenly perishing.... Where will Ireland be in the event of a universal potato rot?

  The potato ‘murrain’ or blight was phytophthora infestans, a microscopic fungus spread by the wind and the rain, particularly during mild and humid weather. This previously unknown disease, brought from America, rapidly turned the potato stalks black and reduced the tubers in the soil to a stinking pulp. As the crop was being lifted during the autumn of 1845 reports of failure came from across the island. A Belfast newspaper, the Vindicator, predicted on 22 October:

  The failure of the potato crop in Ireland ... is now confirmed.... A large portion of the crop turns out to be quite useless for purposes of food. A dearth is inevitable; and a famine is extremely probable.... The Irish peasantry rely almost exclusively upon potatoes for their subsistence; and when the crop fails, they have nothing to fall back upon but grass, nettles, and seaweed.

  The failure of the potato crop in 1845 was not total, however. Parts of Ulster and much of the Atlantic coast escaped. Over the whole island between one-quarter and one-third of the crop had been lost. The real worry was whether or not the potatoes successfully saved would escape the blight. Soon the worst fears were confirmed. News began to come in that potatoes were rotting in clamps and stores. The m
edical officer for Coleraine workhouse reported: ‘Nothing else is heard of, nothing else is spoken of.... Famine must be looked forward to.’

  Sir Robert Peel, the Tory Prime Minister, acted swiftly by the standards of the day. In November 1845 he set up a central relief commission, and, fearing criticism from his colleagues, he secretly arranged the purchase of £100,000 worth of maize—then known as ‘Indian corn’—from the United States. As the cargoes arrived from February 1846 onwards Peel made more money available and ordered the army commissariat to set up depots across the country to store 44 million pounds of corn. The plan was not to give out the corn free, but to sell it at cost price. The effect was to keep down the price of other foodstuffs. This ‘yellow meal’, as the Irish called it, was at first condemned as ‘Peel’s brimstone’. But a government halfpenny pamphlet, telling people how to cook it, sold in tens of thousands. Peel also set up a scientific commission which issued completely useless advice on how to protect stored potatoes from infection. The experts of the day were quite unable to find a way of halting the blight.

  The Prime Minister also put bills through parliament in January 1846 to fund public works for the destitute so that they could earn money to buy food. Then, in June 1846, Peel committed an act of political suicide. With the aid of the Whig opposition, he brought about the repeal of the Corn Laws in an attempt to encourage the importation of cheap grain into Ireland. For the Tory grandees this was unforgivable treachery. The Duke of Wellington was outraged: ‘Rotten potatoes have done it all,’ he expostulated; ‘they put Peel in his damned fright.’

  Peel had no choice but to resign. In July the opposition Whig leader, Lord John Russell, formed a government. Russell turned for advice to Charles Trevelyan, the civil servant at the head of the Treasury. Trevelyan recommended a drastic reduction in the distribution of subsidised food and a major extension of public works. Free market forces must not be disrupted by government interference. The poor must work for their food. In his memorandum to the cabinet on 1 August 1846 Trevelyan advised that ‘The supply of the home market may safely be left to the foresight of private merchants.’

  At the same time a disaster on an unprecedented scale was unfolding in Ireland. One of the many who recorded it was the Rev. Samuel Montgomery, rector of Ballinascreen, Co. Londonderry. He made this entry in the parish register:

  On the three last days of July and the first six days of August 1846 the potatoes were suddenly attacked, when in their full growth, with a sudden blight. The tops were first observed to wither and then, on looking to the roots, the tubers were found hastening to Decomposition. The entire crop that in the Month of July appeared so luxuriant, about the 15th of August manifested only blackened and withered stems. The whole atmosphere in the Month of September was tainted with the odour of the decaying potatoes.

  Underneath his signature he wrote this prayer:

  Increase the fruits of the earth by Thy heavenly benediction.

  This time no part of Ireland escaped.

  Episode 183

  ‘GIVE US FOOD, OR WE PERISH’

  When the potato blight struck for a second time in 1846, every part of Ireland was affected. Father Theobald Mathew, after travelling from Dublin to Cork, wrote to Charles Trevelyan, head of the Treasury, on 7 August:

  I 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 the destruction.... The food of a whole nation has perished.

  What should the government do? Trevelyan devised a new system of public works in August. To fit in with Trevelyan’s free market philosophy, warmly shared by the Whig government, the works were not to compete with capitalist enterprise, and they were confined to building walls, roads, bridges, causeways and fences. The new relief works were to be financed entirely out of rates—Irish property was to pay for Irish poverty. It was not until October that this cumbersome bureaucracy (eventually numbering 12,000 officials) could issue tickets giving employment to those considered sufficiently destitute.

  Commissary-General Sir Randolph Routh suggested that the Irish ports should be closed to stop the further export of corn. This proposal was firmly rejected by Trevelyan, who told Routh on 3 September: ‘Do not encourage the idea of prohibiting exports, perfect Free Trade is the right course.’ For once, Routh dared to disagree with his superior. By the end of the harvest 60,000 tons of oats alone would have left the country, he explained. But Trevelyan, fully supported by Prime Minister Lord John Russell, vehemently opposed such a radical step: ‘We beg of you not to countenance in any way the idea of prohibiting exportation.... There cannot be a doubt that it would inflict a permanent injury on the country.’

  All this time the depots providing subsidised Indian corn, set up by Peel’s Tory government in the previous year, were being closed down. Too late in the day Trevelyan decided to attempt to buy corn abroad. The harvest across Europe in 1846 had been very poor, and there was no surplus for sale. The American maize harvest had already mostly been bought up. Even if corn could be purchased, it would not be ready for transportation until December, a month when American rivers were mostly frozen over. And yet oats, wheat and barley, grown and harvested in Ireland, continued to be shipped out of the country across the Irish Sea.

  On 3 October 1846 the Repeal journal, the Vindicator, made a simple appeal:

  ‘Give us food, or we perish,’ is now the loudest cry that is heard in this unfortunate country. It is heard in every corner of the island—it breaks in like some awful spectre on the festive revelry of the rich—it startles and appals the merchant at his desk, the landlord in his office, the scholar in his study, the minister in his council-room, and the priest at the altar. ‘Give us food, or we perish.’ It is a strange popular cry to be heard within the limits of the powerful and wealthy British empire.... Russia wants liberty, Prussia wants a constitution, Switzerland wants religion, Spain wants a king, Ireland alone wants food.

  Lord John Russell’s government opposed such a simple solution: the starving must buy food with money earned on public works. But there were agonising delays before many of the relief schemes opened. The relief works were hampered by a shortage of handcarts and wheelbarrows, a lack of engineers to direct operations, and heavy falls of snow. The longest and most severe winter in living memory had begun.

  During the first weeks of 1847 the weather deteriorated even further. From the north-east blew ‘perfect hurricanes of snow, hail and sleet’ which caused the famished labourers on the relief works to collapse from exposure.

  On 17 January George Dawson, wrote from Castledawson, Co. Londonderry, to Sir Thomas Fremantle, a former Irish Chief Secretary:

  My dear Fremantle,

  ... I can think of nothing else than the wretched condition of this wretched people.... I do not exaggerate when I tell you that from the moment I open my hall door in the morning until dark, I have a crowd of women and children crying out for something to save them from starving. The men, except the old and infirm, stay away and show the greatest patience and resignation. I have been obliged to turn my kitchen into a bakery and soup shop to enable me to feed the miserable children and mothers that cannot be sent away empty. So great is their distress that they actually faint on getting food into their stomachs.... Death is dealing severely and consigning many to an untimely tomb.... I see enough to make the heart sick.... Hundreds will die of starvation.

  And, as we shall see, during that terrible winter of 1846–7 conditions were even worse in the west and the south.

  Episode 184

  THE FAMINE IN SKIBBEREEN

  After visiting Skibbereen, a village on the coast of west Cork, Nicholas Cummins, a local magistrate, wrote to the Duke of Wellington on 22 December 1846:

  My Lord Duke,

  ... Being aware that I should have to witness scenes of frightful hunger, I provided myself with as much bread as five men could carry, and on reaching the spot I was surp
rised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted.

  I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw.... I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive.... Suffice to say, that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 of such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe.... Their demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed upon my brain.... The same morning the police opened a house on the adjoining lands ... and two frozen corpses were found, half devoured by rats.... Within 500 yards of the cavalry station at Skibbereen, the dispensary doctor found seven wretches lying unable to move. One had been dead many hours ...