British Exacerbation of the Great Hunger 1845-1852

Brian Sugrue

An Gorta Mór is the Irish word for Great Hunger, but most people know this event as the Irish Potato Famine. The Great Hunger began in 1845 when a disease in plants, that was caused by mold and fungus, spread among the crops. This plant disease is called Phytophthora infestans and it spread swiftly across the island nation. Potato crops were ruined for the next several years and this was especially devastating considering the main source of food for the Irish were potatoes. At the time Ireland was a colony that was controlled by Great Britain and due to this they were forced to be subject to the rules implemented by the British. Great Britain, being Ireland’s colonizer, took it upon themselves to send soldiers over to Ireland and implement new laws in order to help the issue from getting more out of hand. The rules subjected upon the Irish by the British hurt the country of Ireland and its people at a time when they needed as much help as possible. Life in Ireland had become so unbearable that many looked to leave the country, but unfortunately emigration was not accessible to all people. By the end of the Great Hunger there were approximately one million Irish people who had died during the famine years and another one million who were forced to seek refuge in other countries.

The Great Hunger in Ireland occurred in 1845 and lasted until 1852. Throughout the seven years things didn’t seem to get any better, but the British government insisted they were doing what needed to be done to fight this mass hunger. During this famine, if people were supplied with food and the proper resources, there would not have been widespread death across the country. The help England was claiming to give actually had the opposite effect and made problems in Ireland worse. Workhouses provided jobs that paid less than the cost of food, and landlords were being given the incentive to evict poor tenants. On top of this, Britain had not stopped exporting mass amounts of food from Ireland back to England. So when the British are claiming they are helping the issue, why are they making decisions that have the opposite effect?

The actions of the British government tell a bit of a different story to this ‘famine’.What were these decisions being made by the British government that were continually harming the already struggling Irish people? Weren’t the British supposed to be the ones helping Ireland through this dreadful period of history? By looking at the history of the Great Hunger, authors – Cormac O’Grada, Christine Kinealy, Jill Sherman, Peter Gray, Edna Delaney, Peter Solar, Tom Yager, and Mark McGowan – all give crucial details into the problems going on during the famine and what made it worse. These historians paint a picture of how a beautiful country like Ireland turned into a place of death and poverty. The heavy impact the new laws and relief measures had on the people as well as lack of care for Irish citizens’ welfare on the part of the British government is also discussed. I will also be using my sources to describe the first hand accounts of the Irish who struggled during this time. The authors actively contest the whitewashed stories behind the Great Hunger and use first hand accounts as well as written evidence to show British culpability. The argument states that the actions taken by the British government show that they knew what they were doing. Some of the authors go in depth about how the British government ended up seeing this as a solution for population control, because if people died then less would need to be fed and taken care of.

In this writing I use scholarly sources to reshape people’s thinking on the Great Hunger. Drawing from a few sources, I will use firsthand accounts of people who survived the Great Hunger, published books on the Great Hunger’s history, journals about laws enacted in Ireland, and articles about how the laws impacted Irish citizens to show how England exacerbated this famine. Ireland has dealt with a few famines throughout its history but nothing compared to the Great Hunger of 1845. Ireland had experience in how to help make the famine more manageable, but there were other factors at play that continuously made the issue worse. If Ireland had been properly supplied this famine would have ended in much less death. Other nations/groups of people saw the struggle not getting better and donated to the cause, such as the Choctaw Native Americans. In contrast the British Crown went out of their way to not help the Irish get donations. When the Ottoman Sultan offered to send money for famine relief, the representatives of the Queen rejected them, stating that they couldn’t donate that much due to the fact that it was much higher than the amount the Queen donated. This would be seen as an insult to donate more than the Queen. The actions of the British were the reason the death toll went up as high as it did and they continued to act in their best interest. This has been viewed for years as a tragedy that couldn’t be avoided, but diving deeper into this topic allows readers to see the man made factors that helped exacerbate this problem.

By looking at the significance of the laws put in place by the British government and the food being transported from Ireland to England, it is clear that this famine was very much exacerbated by the British. In general people believe this was a famine caused by a disease in the potatoes, but the lengths the British went to in order to ‘help’ Ireland actually ended up making everything worse and leading to more death. By looking at scholarly sources the reader can see that the British didn’t act in the best interest of the Irish and instead ignored the problem at hand. British bias towards the Irish drove the government to pass the Poor Relief Act, The Temporary Relief Act, or the Poor Law Extension Act which were said to be effective measures in fighting the famine but they were all ineffective. The treatment of the Irish people by Britain will always be remembered by those who survived those traumatic years, but in order to learn from history the story must be true and unbiased. In order to understand the trauma and hardships caused by the British government, one must look into the actions that harmed the Irish and how the people were affected by them. By looking at the living conditions brought upon the Irish by Britain’s relief and the laws enacted by the government it is clear that this famine was amplified by England.

Exacerbating the Famine

Ireland is no stranger to food shortages, as the Irish have experienced sixteen different food shortages from the year 1800 to 1845. But when the blight arrived in Ireland in 1845, this happened to be the first food shortage that affected the entire country of Ireland. “By late 1845 Ireland had lost about half of its potato crop to the blight. The English still believed the food shortage would not last. They thought that if the Irish people needed more help, Ireland should use its own tax revenue”( Sherman, 2017, p.18). In the beginning of the famine, government officials in England did not believe that the blight was as bad as people were saying and they thought this whole thing is an Irish problem. This was initially seen by the British government as an Irish issue that required action from no one but the Irish. What was going on in Ireland was being overlooked by those in England. It was assumed that if the British were to help the Irish by giving them government assistance, the Irish would rely too heavily on handouts and things would never get better in the country.

Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel had a harsh view of the Irish people and felt they were exaggerating when talking about how bad the blight was. When scientists told him that this should not to be taken lightly and that they weren’t overreacting, he chose to believe that they were still overreacting and that this wasn’t a big deal. When the Irish did look to see what the British were doing they were shocked and horrified to see them making things worse:

“In the midst of all this suffering, the Irish began to examine the actions of the British government. Food continued to be exported out of Ireland. British owners of Irish land were still entitled to the crops grown on that land. Their businesses relied on these crops. And British policy did not prevent the export. Starving Irish people became furious as they watched boatloads of grain depart from their docks for England. Food riots erupted at ports such as Youghal and Dungaran in southeast Ireland”(Sherman, 2017, p.22).

Ireland was growing enough food to feed its people but they had to watch this food get shipped out of the country.The fact that Britain wasn’t taking this issue seriously was clear when seeing that they continued to transport food from Ireland back to England. During a famine the goal is to get enough food to feed the entire country, but if the English government decided to keep that food they were exporting in Ireland, then the majority of people would have been fed.

Allowing Britain to export food out of Ireland hurt the poor in the country for years and allowed many people to starve to death. The exportation of food out of Ireland, made this whole issue of not having enough food worse. Importing food would help this mass hunger, but taking food away from the starving people when they could be surviving off that food is helping nobody. In the beginning it was the blight that caused Ireland’s food shortage, but as time went on it was the policies that were implemented by Britain that made the issue worse. It was said that the weak policies “did not help much” and that “stronger action by the British government could have prevented some suffering”( Sherman, 2017, p.34). The British government made efforts to start soup kitchens and public works projects to provide food and work to those who were affected the most in Ireland. The problem with these public works was they weren’t well funded and they weren’t long term solutions. Members of Parliament in England blasted the politicians who were going out of their way to do less to help the suffering Irish because it was inhumane and England would be looked down on if the problem got more out of hand. Christine Kinealy in her works “The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology, and Rebellion” points out: “The decision to make public works unproductive divided members of the Whig Party and caused a rift between the Irish Executive and the Treasury, a division that developed as the Famine progressed” (Kinealy, 2002, p.38).

There were certain members of parliament who were doing what they could to not help this famine die down. Decisions like this enraged the Irish people because they were expecting help from the country that has power over them. Instead Whig policy was focused on getting poor people off the land “and if it took mass death to achieve that directive, so be it”(McGowan, 2017, p.87). The intentions of the British government, led by the Whig party, were not that of wanting to give much help to the Irish. By overlooking mass death, the British were willing to undersupply the Irish and do less to help them. Since these were not citizens of England they were very comfortable with death amongst the Irish.

One man testified that when his grandfather talked about the public relief efforts, he would say “that there were so many making for the poorhouses that there wasn’t accommodation for half of them”(Ó Gráda, 2001, p.134). The decision to make these relief efforts not well funded or well organized hurt many Irish who were struggling. Many Irish looked to these different relief efforts put in place by the British but when people saw how little supply there was, some turned on each other to survive. Decisions like these came about due to a new thought amongst some British, which stated how this famine was an opportunity to bring about a regeneration of Ireland. The issue was that this was based on British views and was built around getting rid of religion and culture in Ireland.

Throughout the famine years politicians would expect lots of crops to be grown during the farming seasons. In Ireland they were producing enough food to feed the majority of the country but many people were still starving and unable to get access to food. Britain showed how seriously they took this problem:

“In autumn 1846, the Treasury decided that a portion of the modest amount of grain imported by the government should be sent in the first place to Scotland, despite the greater destitution in Ireland. This action caused considerable alarm amongst relief officials in Ireland. It was also an early example of decisions being made in London which ignored advice from relief officials on the ground”( Kinealy, 39).

This was a huge indicator to the Irish that they were not being taken seriously. People were starving and struggling to survive, but the British government continued to claim that this was not a big deal and that if the Irish needed help they should help themselves. Since this issue wasn’t taken seriously, people assumed that this was an Irish problem which required solutions made by the Irish government.

After debates about what to do, in the Autumn of 1845 Prime Minister Robert Peel decided to implement a Temporary Relief Committee with the goal of feeding the poor. He also shipped in 100,000 pounds of Indian Corn into Ireland with the thought that this food will replace potatoes in Ireland. These relief efforts were not put into place immediately because Prime Minister Peel felt that there was enough time to wait before the impacts of the shortages were to be felt in the following Spring and Summer. He expected the cheap Indian corn to take the place of the potato on the Irish palate. The relief efforts were better than nothing, but this was also seen as temporary relief. The British government expected this to get Ireland back up on its feet, but that was not the case. Prime Minister Peel was replaced in 1846 by Prime Minister John Russell. This then led to new relief efforts under the Russell administration.

When Prime Minister Russell came into power he introduced new relief efforts that were vastly different from the measures in which Peel put into place. Robert Peel’s measures were already not much help for the poor Irish, but when Russell’s relief efforts replaced the old ones it was clear that this would hurt the Irish. Russell’s measures meant much less food being provided for them and access to places to stay and eat were going to be more restrictive than they were before. These new measures also made Public Works the centerpiece of the help offered, but the measures were made to be unproductive. The most important part of the relief systems that was changed after the transition of leadership, the government still did not import food into Ireland.

During a famine, importing food would have been one of the best things they could have done. The only reason Peel’s relief efforts were more successful than Russell’s was because the new administration was clearly trying to make relief efforts in Ireland as unproductive as possible.

The Whig government had made the Public Works much harsher than it was before. Some big issues with the Public Works were that there were delays in people getting paid, people got paid low wages that did nothing against inflation, and changes in working hours to 6am to 6pm with a pay cut penalty for being late.“Despite daily reports to Trevelyan recounting instances of death from starvation of people dependent on the relief works, the Treasury insisted that the wages paid were adequate. The lowness of the wages contrasted with the high level of administrative expenses for the public works”( Kinealy, 40). The Irish thought that Public Works should be properly funded and the workers should be paid enough to survive during the famine. The pay was less than the cost of food for poor people and the jobs didn’t make much sense in terms of economic relief or famine relief. The thought process of adding jobs was also ineffective because the British would have Irish workers build things such as roads but these roads wouldn’t go anywhere. The jobs were not meant to help boost job growth or the economy, they were instead put there to provide some type of work for the Irish. The British government used the excuse that they were spending a lot of money on these relief systems but they should be using some of that money to properly pay the poor, hard working people. When the British realized the public works were failing they decided that:

“At the beginning of 1847, in recognition of the failure of the public works, the government decided to abandon them and replace them with a new relief measure based on the provision of free food in a number of specially established soup kitchens. The legislation, known as the Temporary Relief Act or ‘Soup Kitchen Act’, opposed current orthodoxy which viewed the provision of gratuitous relief as both ideologically flawed and expensive”( Kinealy, 41).

This is another example of the British doing something nice but it is not getting a lot of applause because members of the Whig party thought this would cost Britain too much money. They also had their own biases, in which they believed that the thought of generously helping the Irish was erroneous. Even though the British government was actively talking about helping the Irish, there were members of the government who allowed their biases to get in the way of providing relief to people who were struggling.

In the year 1847, when looking at the crops across the country, there was very little blight to be found, but the potato and there wasn’t as much corn being grown. The new policies instituted by the British marked a turning point because in their minds this was where responsibility shifted from Britain to Ireland. This led the British to feel that the Irish would finance relief efforts on their own from now on. As time went on more evictions occurred and more people were in poverty each day. During the Great Hunger land prices started to drop which allowed wealthy businessmen from Britain to seize this golden opportunity. As they started to buy up all the land, the landowners immediately either evicted the tenants or raised rent so they would have to move out. If families couldn’t afford these high prices then they would be left homeless and their homes would be knocked down so the land could be used. By increasing rent on farmers there was a now homelessness problem which made the poverty/death rate rise. By evicting families from their home or land, they were effectively giving them a death sentence because being evicted meant they lost everything. Experts claimed that “ultimately, there is history to blame: the creation of the landlord class”( Solar, 2015, p.73). Without the land they couldn’t support their family in any way, because that land gave them a home and a source of income. By putting responsibility of the poor on landlords they created a divide amongst those trying to survive in Ireland.

The further incentive for landlords to evict, was a raucous product of the new Poor Law Relief. From when this started in 1847 to the peak in 1850, there were 100,000 Irish men, women, and children stranded without a home. The evictions didn’t stop in 1850 either, “many more were illegally evicted or voluntarily surrendered their holdings in an effort to become eligible for relief, forced to do so by the harsh regulations of the new Quarter-Acre Clause which deemed that anybody occupying more than this quantity of land was not eligible to receive relief. Homelessness and social dislocation, therefore, became a major source of distress and death in the latter years of famine”(Kinealy, 44-45). Families who didn’t leave their homes or land suffered consequences. Many families had the roofs burned off their homes because the soldiers knew that a home without a roof wouldn’t help a family during the brutal Irish winter. At this point thousands have died or are in poverty, but the British still felt it was right to continue shipping food out of the country. Shipping food out of Ireland made the hunger worse, but when Irish families were being kicked off their land things were thrown more into turmoil.

The brutal winter that came also interfered with importation of foods from the United States to Ireland, which led England to look to other European countries for help. Unfortunately due to other European countries also being hit with blight the English couldn’t look to them for Irish aid. The Irish were struggling during the winter because there wasn’t more help on the way but evictions also started to rise leaving more people homeless. Scholars said that “evictions reached massive proportions during the winter which is commonly regarded as the Famine’s worst”( Yager, 1996, p.30). During the worst time of the year people are being kicked out of their homes and left homeless. People who refused to leave had the roof burned off or were forcefully removed. Many had no choice but to give up their homes because when they were formally evicted, landlord’s hired men to burn roofs or destroy the affected dwellings there. They would then, as soon as the tenants’ effects had been removed, have soldiers or police who were likely to quell any thought of resistance. During this brutal winter, many soldiers burned the roofs off people’s homes in order to ensure people don’t stay on the land. The winters in Ireland had been ruthless, so not having a roof over their homes would ensure they would freeze to death if they stayed. Tenants were evicted in the dead of winter and ended up losing their lives due to the unbearable conditions. But even through all of that, British Home Secretary Sir George Grey communicated that landlords were not going to get into any trouble with the government for destroying people’s homes.

Landlords were able to brutally evict people without having to fear for any consequences from the government. But landlords were acting in response to the Irish Poor Law, which put the government’s responsibilities of famine relief on landlords. Local newspapers stated that the good landlords were turning into not so good ones because they used cruel and heartless methods of removal. Landlords were put in a situation where they were responsible for stuff the government should have taken care of. When these landlords’ livelihoods were turned upside down, they decided to help themselves, but not all turned to burning roofs or having soldiers remove the tenants. Some landlords went to efforts to pay for their tenants to emigrate instead of forcefully evicting them. Many weren’t lucky enough to have someone pay for them to emigrate, but even those who were lucky enough experienced the brutal times at sea on ‘coffin ships’.

Mass immigration caused by England

The Great Hunger in Ireland started a mass exodus from the country starting in 1845. It’s estimated that more than one million people emigrated from Ireland due to the horrible living conditions. The cost of leaving the country was often too great to help entire families, so oftentimes only one person was given the money to leave. But there were many who continued to live a life of horrors even after getting onto the boat:

“The horrors of famine did not end on leaving Ireland as disease and mortality were rampant on board the ships, especially during the long journeys to America or Australia. Moreover, on arrival, the survivors were frequently subjected to degrading periods of quarantine or anti-irish prejudice. Because the demand to leave Ireland was so high, vessels which had previously been considered unseaworthy were utilized, leading to the sobriquet ‘coffin ships”(Kinealy, 58-59).

There were so many people trying to leave Ireland that ships were overcrowded and unsanitary.

They were called coffin ships because this was essentially a coffin for the Irish who rode in it. These ships were not well supplied with food or water and often were riddled with disease so many people died at sea. The use of unseaworthy boats were only just the start to the fright at sea. Many Irish were treated like cargo and this resulted in examples of Irish people suffocating on boats exiting Ireland. Emigration to North America was a lifeline for so many Irish people and unfortunately many didn’t get the opportunity to leave famine-stricken Ireland.

When emigrating out of Ireland, the treatment of the Irish was horrendous and they were often judged based on their appearance. If they appeared to look poor, hungry, or in any sign of poverty they were looked down upon, almost as if they were sick. The health officers at ports would inspect the Irish to determine if they have ‘Irish fever’ but would run into trouble with the emigrants because they tended to hide themselves on instinct. It is also very important to note that those who were emigrating had basically nothing with them most of the time so they were not prepared for setbacks or delays on departures. People would come to the port expecting the ship to depart but oftentimes would have to scramble to find somewhere to stay when the departure is delayed. These desperate emigrants were also often victims of devious practices. These practices were commonly used on the Irish, because they were very vulnerable due to desperation from their recent living conditions and many weren’t educated enough to understand otherwise. Many of the thieves practiced stealing the Irish people’s baggage and made them pay for its return. Half-fare children’s tickets were often sold to illiterate adults who would be turned away when trying to get on the boat. Frauds also sold worthless out-of-date tickets that were altered to the gullible or desperate. These little immoral practices piled on to the hard time the Irish already were enduring. People saw an opportunity to pick on the Irish who were already poor and suffering. Many people lost their possessions while traveling to new places because their bags would get stolen and they wouldn’t have the money to get it back. A lot of people didn’t have more money to use after paying for the boat out of the country. It was very common for families to use their savings to get however many of their children out of the country. It was seen as the only way to give their kids a good future, but what they didn’t know about was the conditions on board the boats.

The conditions on the ships were unsanitary and caused a lot of deaths. These ships were often not supplied well and provided horrible living conditions of passengers on board. Depending on where these boats were going, Irish emigrants had to endure long journeys through rough seas with little supplies:

“The food, de Vere continued, was seldom sufficiently cooked because there were not enough cooking places. The supply of water was hardly enough for drinking and cooking-washing was impossible; and in many ships the filthy beds were never brought up on deck and aired, nor was the narrow space between the sleeping-berths washed or scraped until arrival at quarantine. Provisions, doled out by ounces, consisted of meals of the worst quality and salt meat; water was so short that the passengers threw their salt provisions overboard – they could not eat them and satisfy their raging thirst afterwards. People lay for days on end in their dark dose berths, because by that method they suffered less from hunger”(Kinealy, 85).

In the eyes of Prime Minister Peel emigration was seen as the most humane method for helping the country, which he believed to be overpopulated. He thought it was wrong to evict the people, but believed that having them emigrate was the only solution. This was also seen as the cheapest solution for England because employing them in a workhouse cost a lot more over time. The British and sometimes landlords often paid for Irish to leave the country because it was half the cost of what it would be to provide famine relief for them. Authors christine Kinealy and Gerard Moran discuss why the British believed encouraging emigration to the Irish was the best solution:

“But how different from such an Ireland with which we have to deal – bare, naked, and unimproved! – no capital in the hands of its people – its population unskilled – its natural advantages unemployed – such an Ireland is incapable of supporting its present population”(Kinealy, 2018, p. 347).

By the time this was decided within the government, they were tempted to ship people off in order to save their money. This again showed the English government looking to help in a way that will cost them the least amount of time and money. The British government thought getting the population to decrease would be the easiest and cheapest way to end this issue. On top of encouraging emigration from the country, members of the House of Lords named Mr. Murray, Mr. Shafto Adair, and Colonel Torrens used pamphlets to get people to consider leaving the country. These pamphlets that they handed out “urged strongly in the pamphlet titles… the necessity of encouraging emigration[1] ”(Kinealy, 346). The British politicians went out of their way to encourage emigration because it was beneficial to the English. By encouraging emigration the British would only have to pay half the cost to ship them than it would to provide them famine relief. But what these politicians didn’t consider were the horrendous conditions at sea. By not taking this into consideration, they allowed other countries to see how inhumane these people were treated. This often sparked concern in other countries when boats would show up with half naked Irish men, women, and children.

There was often outrage at ports when seeing men, women, or children naked or barely clothed on these crowded ships. On top of that they were also very sick and all stuck in a small space where this illness was able to spread among the passengers. This made people who already looked and were very ill from the conditions in Ireland even worse than before. There had sometimes been women who were fully naked when the boats docked and they would wrap her in a sheet before they brought her ashore. The conditions were inhumane and many lost their lives in the pursuit to save their own.

Firsthand accounts

Those who felt the effects of this hunger the most were those of the lower classes. The people who were part of that quarter lost were farmers, farm laborers, elderly people, and those who depended on smaller farms. “However, the famine’s impact was uneven; poverty and death were closely correlated, both at local level and in cross section”(Ó Gráda, 123). This was a tragedy that unfortunately impacted mainly lower-class people and for years things kept getting worse. Since things continuously got worse, people were always on the move in order to find food, money, or anything to help their families. Some were on the move because they didn’t have a home meanwhile others would have one family member go out to get resources while the others hide in the home. Many died on the roadside while out looking for food, and others died while waiting for their family member to return. One man described the conditions of the bodies found on his journey as “emaciated corpses, partly green from eating docks (weeds) and nettles and partly blue from the cholera and dysentery”(Kinealy, 76). The bodies were all sorts of different colors due to the conditions from weather, quality of food, and the lack of food intake. Many wouldn’t be buried out of fear that those who would be around the body would get sick. It also was physically too much for some people to do proper burials for their family members. Many of the people were very sick and had little strength to do anything due to lack of food and water. “The people had neither the material nor the strength to make coffins nor dig graves. When a person died they got a plank and tied the feet of the corpse to one end of it and the head to the other end, and the hands together, then two men took hold of it at each end and carried it to a bog nearby where the water was deep and threw it in”(Kinealy, 78). These burials were unfortunate for family members who couldn’t give their loved ones a proper burial. The death count got so high that graveyards didn’t have enough plots to bury people. Trenches were dug in graveyards to fill the demand needed for deaths. They would fill every inch of the trench with bodies then fill it in with dirt. The living conditions England brought upon the Irish prevented them from being able to bury their dead.

Some Irish who journeyed through the country searching for help of any kind stumbled across terrifying scenes when looking at huts or other homes. One man described his experience looking into what seemed to be an abandoned home:

“A cabin was seen closed one day a little out of town, when a man had the curiosity to open it, and in a dark corner he found a family of the father, mother, and two children, lying in close compact. The father was considerably decomposed; the mother, it appeared, had died last, and probably fastened the door, which was always the custom when all hope was extinguished, to get into the darkest corner and die, where passers-by could not see them. Such family scenes were quite common, and the cabin was generally pulled down upon them for a grave”(Kinealy, 76).

Many didn’t have the strength to venture for help and unfortunately died in their huts. It was custom for the last person alive to shut the door so people walking by couldn’t see the dead bodies. An occurrence like this also provided a place for the family members to be buried at a time when people were afraid to go near the dead. The scenes in this cabin were horrendous, but it describes how a lot of families were found and the conditions in which people died.

One man who worked for the relief committee in Killane described the reactions of some poor when they noticed favoritism among who was given help and who was not:

“A man half starved, and considerably more than half naked, bare head, bare legs, and arms, nothing to cover him but the skeletons of an old pair of breeches and waistcoat…[who] seized me by my coat with the grasp of death” (Delaney, 2012, p.108). There were examples of Irish men and women who would go to famine relief institutions and would either get nothing or would see workers giving some people more resources than others. Actions like this caused a lot of commotion because everyone was desperate and starving yet some people would get special treatment.

Another story describes a man’s experience meeting a traveler looking to get help: “Going out one cold day in a bleak waste on the coast, I met a pitiful old man in hunger and tatters, with a child on his back, almost entirely naked, and to appearance in the last stages of starvation; whether his naked legs had been scratched, or whether the cold had affected them I knew not, but the blood was in small streams in different places, and the sight was a horrid one. The old man said he lived seven miles off, and was afraid the child would die in the cabin, with the two little children he had left starving, and he had come to get the bit of meal, as it was the day he heard food relief was being given out. The officer told him he had no time to enter his name in the book, and he was sent away in that condition. A penny or two was given to him, for which he expressed the greatest gratitude”(Kinealy, 76).

Parents had to walk several miles with very little energy in hopes of getting something that would help the family. This man was lucky enough to get at least some money, but many often had to make the journey with nothing to show for it. It is very important to note that without much food or water it is very hard for people to gain the energy to do things, so walking for many miles is a sign of desperation on the part of the Irish. The living conditions were made so poor that people did anything they needed to survive. They even took risks when going on these journeys for example, in the last quote the man had to leave two of his kids at home, and he had fears that they wouldn’t be alive by the time he got back.

This same old man was seen again by the same person but this time his journey had not gotten him anything. This is an example of when some Irish started to understand that with barely any help there was little to no hope. “The next Saturday we saw the old man creeping slowly in a bending posture upon the road. The old man looked up and recognized me. On inquiring where the child was, he said the three were left in the cabin, and had not taken a ‘sup or a bit’ since yesterday morning, and he was afraid some of them would be dead upon the hearth when he returned. He was so weak that he could not carry the child and had crept seven miles to get the meal. He was sent away again with a promise to wait till next Tuesday, and come and have his name on the books. This poor man had not a penny nor a mouthful of food, and he said tremulously, ‘I must go home and die on the hearth with the hungry ones” (Kinealy, 76). People like him sacrificed and gave a lot just to be rejected multiple times by British soldiers. This shows how bad the relief system was in Ireland because people were being denied relief multiple days in a row. People went there because they had nothing, but they were often disappointed to find the only source of help couldn’t do anything. If people have no water or food and the relief system has barely enough to help them then can they be expected to survive? Another man by the name of Denis M’Kennedy, who worked for the Board of Works, dropped dead and was later spotted on the roadside. After the body was recovered a doctor performed a post-mortem examination on him and was shocked because “he had never seen a body so attenuated from lack of food”(Delaney, 100). The conditions of the bodies were mortifying to the doctors who had to examine them. When examining the bodies doctors could see how the Great Hunger impacted their bodies.

Another story from the Great Hunger tells of people who were so starved that eating food could kill them. Some people had been starved for so long that their bodies couldn’t handle certain amounts of food. The bodies of the Irish often struggled to absorb nutrients in foods and their hearts weren’t able to keep up with the body’s increased metabolic rate. The story went:

‘Carthy swallowed a little warm milk and died’ was the simple statement of one man’s death from starvation in Skibbereen. One man connected with the Quaker Society of Friends said, ‘If they get a full meal it kills them immediately.’ When the Indian meal came out, some of them were so desperate from starvation that they didn’t wait for it to be cooked properly, they ate it almost raw and that brought on intestinal troubles that killed a lot of them that otherwise might have survived”(Kinealy, 77).

The conditions of life brought upon the Irish were unlivable. People were so starved that eating killed them and their desperation drove them to often eat uncooked food. Other times they drank or ate anything they could because there was not food and water always readily available. There were often times where those who did have more access to resources tried to be generous but experienced frightening encounters. This story is about a woman whose family left out soup for poor people that were traveling to find food:

“The house was near the road and a pot of stirabout was kept for any starving person who passed the way. My mother Mary was a young girl at the time and alone in the house one day when a big giant of a fellow staggered in. He wolfed his share of stirabout and made for the door, but there was a tub of chopped raw cabbage and porridge for the pigs. He fell on his knees by the tub and devoured the stuff till she was in a fright, then he reeled out to the road and was found dead there a short time after”(Kinealy, 77).

This is another example of someone being so starved and desperate for food that he died due to scarfing down the first bit of food he saw. The people who survived the Great Hunger saw a whole different side of their countrymen because of how the laws and lack of help from Britain affected them. By removing mass quantities of food and not helping those struggling in the country, Britain made living conditions in Ireland unbearable for the Irish. There were families who had to “[survive] on a single meal of cabbage, supplemented by seaweed”(Delaney, 100).

Families had to be fed portions meant to serve one person and had to survive off meals like that. Meals like this led to starvation among many and made people very desperate. These first hand accounts show how the conditions of life brought on by the British were detrimental to the Irish people’s physical, mental, and overall health as well as a first hand view of the impact Britain had in exacerbating this famine.

The year 1852 marked the end of the Great Hunger in Ireland, but life did not go back to normal very quickly. The mass amounts of death and emigration meant there were less people to feed and the harvests were starting to be enough to feed people. But the biggest reason the famine came to an end was when England finally stopped exporting food out of Ireland. Throughout the next several years there would be rebellions against the British until they gained their independence in 1922. However, the history of the Great Hunger has been formed through British interpretations and has ignored the evidence suggesting that Britain is responsible for making the Great Hunger much worse than it should have been.

Conclusion

The eventual end to the Great Hunger came due to food not being exported out of Ireland, the recovery of the new harvest, and there were now less mouths to feed across the country. But this dark period didn’t end simultaneously across the country. Some counties suffered longer than others and some recovered quicker. The British could have played a different role in history, but instead worried more about themselves and let prejudice get in the way of doing what was right. They did make efforts to help the Irish but they were poor attempts at help that only did more harm than good. Choctaw Native Americans did what they could to help, but they could only donate so much meanwhile, some had their help rejected by the British government. The rejection of help was very telling of a country that didn’t want to help another in need. Famine relief was put in place as a placeholder until they could pass off the responsibility of relief onto the Irish. Rejecting help from another country and not making famine relief that is beneficial showed the intentions of the British government. The forced exportation of abundances of food that were produced in Ireland was adequate enough to prevent a famine threatened by potato failure.

These actions by the British illuminate the actual problems that exacerbated this famine. The Great Hunger could have resulted in much less death if the British had not stolen mass quantities of food from Ireland. But this also adds to our understanding of why this problem went on for years and only seemed to get worse. Generally it is thought that the British helped the Irish and that the problem in Ireland had to do with the potatoes. Though scholarly sources and first hand tellings of the Great Hunger paint a different picture of a country begging for help from a country that was not looking to get involved. England initially took a more hands off approach to famine relief but only changed course when there was pressure put on the government. They also did not do anything to make sure these famine relief efforts were long term and effective. This is shown through scholarly sources that show statements made by government officials and through multiple authors’ writings of the impact Britain’s laws had on the issue at hand. Through this research it becomes clear that this issue got worse over the years because England’s sad excuse for help actually made life worse for those already suffering. Britain deserves more blame for the famine getting out of control than they do credit for providing any sort of relief. The Great Hunger in Ireland was not a story of not being able to grow enough food, but instead is a story of British exacerbation of a famine.

A topic such as the Great Hunger would be a great topic to teach when learning about genocide. In school the only genocide students learn is about the holocaust and sometimes Native Americans which leaves many students not knowing that there were many more genocides that occurred in history. The fact that there have been so many in history is horrific so if we show our students more examples then we can start to teach the next generations of students about being good citizens and preventing tragedies like that from happening. As the old saying goes those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it and if schools don’t teach about more genocides then students will grow up not knowing much about genocides or how impactful they have been on so many lives. Coming out of high school I didn’t think there were many genocides besides the Holocaust and Native American removal because we weren’t taught about any others in school. Genocides also give students a deeper look into extremism and the forms of government that allows this kind of tragedy to happen. That being said this can also be used to show different forms of abuse of power by governments when teaching about different forms and levels of government.

Topics such as this can lead to conversations about discrimination and oppression and how governments have used their law making powers to push those discriminatory or oppressive laws. In the example of the Great Hunger the British Parliament made laws they knew would make the effects of the famine worse which can be compared to laws made in other countries including the U.S. that were harmful towards a specific group of people. The British government treated the Irish as if they were an inferior race which is a similar school of thought used against people of color that has been seen for years in American society.

Another interesting topic a teacher could teach the Great hunger with would be British Colonialism and how it’s impacted other nations/groups of people. The British have settled all over the world and have had impacts on the histories of many different countries. When teaching about the Great Hunger the teacher could have the class examine the effects of British Colonialism across the globe. Colonialism shapes people’s ideas of race, class, gender, and sexuality and all of these ideas are relevant in modern society. These are all topics that have some sort of controversy surrounding them in today’s society, so teaching students about the origins of the schools of thought would help them understand the world they live in. The topics of race, class, gender, and sexuality are all impacting our government today because laws are being made to protect the rights of those who are of different races, classes, genders and sexualities. By looking at British colonialism students can examine how those of different races, classes, genders, and sexualities were treated by governments in the past. There are a plethora of different topics that can be taught using the Great Hunger and it can open doors to really interesting and informative discussions which will only benefit the students.

References

Delaney, Enda. The Great Irish Famine – A History in Four Lives Personal Accounts of the Great Irish Potato Famine. Dublin: Gill Books, 2012. https://b-ok.cc/ireader/11743229.

Gráda, Cormac Ó. The Great Irish Famine. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995.

Gráda, Cormac Ó. “Famine, Trauma and Memory.” Béaloideas 69 (2001): 121. https://doi.org/10.2307/20520760.

Gray, Peter. “Was the Great Irish Famine a Colonial Famine?” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 8, no. 1 (2021): 159–72. https://doi.org/10.21226/ewjus643.

Kinealy, Christine. The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion. Basingstoke:Palgrave, 2002.

Kinealy, Christine, Jason King, and Gerard Moran, eds. History of the Irish Famine. Routledge, 2018.

McGowan, Mark G. “The Famine Plot Revisited: A Reassessment of the Great Irish Famine as Genocide.” Genocide Studies International 11, no. 1 (2017): 87–104. https://doi.org/10.3138/gsi.11.1.04.

Sherman, Jill. The Irish Potato Famine: A Cause-and-Effect Investigation. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 2017.

Solar, Peter. “Why Ireland Starved and the Big Issues in Pre-Famine Irish Economic History.” Irish Economic and Social History 42, no. 1 (2015): 62–75. https://doi.org/10.7227/iesh.42.1.4.

Yager, Tom. “Mass Eviction in the Mullet Peninsula during and after the Great Famine.” Irish Economic and Social History 23, no. 1 (1996): 24–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/033248939602300103.