The Great Famine in Ireland. What caused it, and what were its consequences?

What caused the Great Famine, and what were its consequences?

The Great Irish Famine could be defined as “the most costly natural disaster of modern times”¹.

The so-called Great Hunger is not only the best-remembered famine but also the closest to us with a distance of fewer than 170 years. The influences of it last until today and Ireland never turned back to its pre-famine levels. The famine is therefore extraordinary because it had such a high impact on the whole nation. The duration of five years rose the psychological impact on the people enormously. They become broken people by the experience of the famine. The creation of new social and cultural conditions because of demographic decline, large-scale emigration and new economic policies lead to define the famine as a “watershed” in the history of Ireland.²

This essay discusses the question of what different reasons resulted in the big calamity and what consequences it had had and has had and how much this led to a lasting change in Ireland. The paper is organised in two main parts. First, the causes of the famine are considered and to what extent they had an influence on the catastrophe. Second, the paper focuses on the consequences of the famine and examines in what way these led to a collective national change. In the first part, the paper first shed a light on the population growth as a possible reason for the famine. The second paragraph is concerned with the dependency on the potato. Following the discussion about the economic situation before the famine, the first part concludes with the social and political structures and their influences on the tragedy. Part two, firstly, discusses the changes in population. The social and economic consequences will be explained in the second paragraph. Thirdly, cultural and political impacts will be considered. Especially the emigration and even more the Irish-being move here into the foreground. In conclusion, the final chapter draws upon the entire topic and summarizes the discussed points.

One cause of the famine was proximately the enormous growth of the population beginning with the start of the 18th century. According to Daly, there is even “an inextricably bound” between the famine and the population growth. He argues that growth was stimulated by social and economic factors. One reason was, for example, the falling age of marriage and the leading to a higher birth-rate.³ However, with the beginning of the first half of the 18th century, the population in Ireland have increased at a rate that was the fastest in western Europe.⁴ During the period of 1751-1841, the average rising was 1.4 percent per annum.⁵ From 1800 with five million people, the population increased to seven million in 1820 and 8.5 million in 1845. Comparing the numbers between 1800 and 1845 the rise of population was nearly 60 per cent. Cormac O’Gráda states that the regional contrast between the northeast of Ireland and the west and south was huge. The northeast benefited from the rapidly developing industrialization. This led to a rise of urban and middle-class living standards in Ireland, while the impoverishment of the landless poor people increased. During that time, the emigration rate started to rise slowly, and the birth rate fell. But these circumstances offered only partial relief to the increasing pressure of the population growth.⁶ In fact, a high number of the Irish population lived below the low livelihood level.⁷ But the agricultural system also helped the poorest people to survive. Additionally, both, the superior nutritional qualities of the potato as the availability of land, were seen as the trigger for the population boom.⁸ The dependency on the potato and the agricultural situation will be the topic of the following paragraph.

Ireland was and still is an agricultural country. According to the census of 1841, around 5,500,000 people or 66 per cent of the nation were dependent on agriculture. Edwards notes that of those people with land over an acre size 45 per cent were reported to be under five acres while only 7 per cent had more than thirty acres.⁹ Geographically Ireland was divided into a relatively fertile east and a relatively infertile west. For example, in Connacht, 78 per cent of the population was dependent on agriculture and 64 per cent of the farmland over one acre was under five acres in size.¹⁰ In addition, this contrast is increased by the proximity of eastern Ireland to British markets. During the 18th century, Irish agriculture had shifted from grazing towards tillage, whereby the cultivation of potatoes was getting easier for the expanding population.¹¹ By the mid 1840s, the potato was the sole food of about 2.7 million people. Additionally, it was a crucial part of the diet of a much larger number.¹² According to Ó Gráda and Eiríksson, the daily consumption for a male adult was 4-5 kilos.¹³ For the people and that time, the potato provided an alternative food to oats and other grain crops. The season of the potato was the winter when milk products were rare. Moreover, it reduced the pressure on food supply during hunger years. With the potatoes, the farmers could have an increase in the volume of their cultivated land, because the potato crop grew on the ground, which was suitable for other tillage crops, too. For this reason, potatoes allowed a family to be fed on much smaller volumes of soil than for example milk or grain. The resulting minimum of the size of the subsidence holdings of the farmers could be a reason that land scarcity was prevented, and no collapse happened, because of the rising population at a lower level. The superior nutritional qualities of the potato ensuring good health, which may have increased the Irish birth-rate and reduced mortality levels.¹⁴

The biological cause of the famine is named phytophthora infestans, or the potato blight. This fungus multiplied in hot, damp weather and can be spread really quickly by wind. Rainwater carries the spores from the leaves of the potatoes to the roost which causes an infection of the tubers. This procedure can destroy a whole field of potatoes within hours.¹⁵ The potato blight probably arrived in 1844 in Ireland and spread throughout the whole country until 1845. In 1845 the fungus destroyed one-third of that year’s crop and nearly the whole harvest of the following year.¹⁶ The seed potatoes were scarce with the beginning of the year 1847, because the hunger continued, although a few had been sown and average yields were recorded. To survive, the farmers and their families had to eat their savings from the last year, whereby also the sowing potatoes for the fields were consumed.

When searching for causes for the human catastrophe, looking at economic history is inevitable or even essential. Brantlinger argues in his article that inclusion of the economic situation helped to overcome earlier Irish nationalist interpretations of the famine as a charge of deliberate genocide on the part of the mainly English government.¹⁷

The laissez-faire economic and practiced Malthusianism, but also evangelicalism and racism are ideological factors that in political and economic terms had been processing for years. This idea of economic behaviour assumed that if the state intervened in the economic affairs, it would probably interrupt “the healthy and harmonious play of the natural forces” on the market.¹⁸ The potato blight at the end of that process was then the decisive event. “The blight was unpreventable, but that it should turn into the Famine was not inevitable.”¹⁹ On an economical basis, the infrastructure and the development of the economy were extraordinarily uneven. In some rural areas, the largely home-based textile industry collapsed which aggravated the situation. Particularly regions in south Ulster and north Connacht were affected.²⁰ In general, Ireland benefited from the export of agricultural goods to industrialized England. Despite the higher export prices, most parts of Ireland stayed poor because simultaneously with the rise of the income, the food prices rose.

As already mentioned in the paragraph about the population, Ireland was a poor country. The government decided to tackle this issue in the 1830s with the so-called Irish Poor Law. The law divided in the country into 130 new administrative units and each of them had its own workhouse. A workhouse provided the people relief because in Ireland it could only be obtained in that way. However, there was no right to relief, which means that if a workhouse became full, the Poor Law was not committed to providing alternative aid.²¹ The income per head was only half of that in the rest of the United Kingdom.²² The social landscape was structured in cottiers, labourers, smallholders, and landlords. A huge number of the Catholic people lived in conditions of insecurity and poverty, although the Catholic emancipation happened in 1829. These made up 80% of the population. The big landlords who owned most of the land had more or less unchecked power over their tenants. In society, the Catholic people were considered as a reason for the famine. The famine was “a judgment of God” to teach the Irish devil people, in the person of the Catholics, a lesson.

However, one social problem in pre-famine time was the access to food. Cereal based food, for example, was not available to most of the poor people. They had neither grain fields, nor money to buy something.²³ The dependency on the potato was therefore a comprehensibly result, also because of the perfectly characteristics of the potato. In the following second part of this paper, the variety of consequences of the famine will be discussed.

The consequences of the famine had a great influence on the further development of Ireland and reach until today’s times. Firstly, there were massive changes in population. It needs to be mentioned that the Great Hunger was not the only famine, by far. Before 1845, famines were not unknown in Ireland. In the 1650s and the 1740s, for example, two famines took place, because of reasons for war and extremely harsh weather conditions. However, the population loss was not nearly as devastating as in the Great Famine in the 1840s. The famine killed one-eighth of the entire population.²⁴ The following decline of population lasted for more than one century.²⁵ MacMahon states that the census of 1851 illustrates an Irish population of 6,552,385 people, compared with 8,175,124 in 1841 the loss of population is nearly 25 per cent.²⁶ But this only affected rural Ireland, whereas in Irish urban areas the population even rose by 7.3 per cent between the years 1841-1851.²⁷ Within these 10 years, 1.5 million people emigrated and approximately one million died.

The major cause of death is attributable to attendant famine diseases as typhus, relapsing fever and dropsy. Therefore, it was not the actual starvation which was a major cause of the famine. Laurence Geary relates in his article that relapsing fever was the prevalent population while the higher classes tended to the more deadly typhus fever.²⁸ Ó Tuathaigh suggests the labourer and the cottier classes as the chief victims of the Great Famine.²⁹ To respond to the famine diseases, special hospitals were established to isolate the infected people. Moreover, additionally, 373 emergency institutions were added to the approximately one hundred fever hospitals.³⁰

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¹ Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798-1998: Politics and War (Oxford, 1999), p. 69.

² Roy F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London, 1989), p. 318.

³ Mary E. Daly, and Dublin Historical Association, The Famine in Ireland (Dundalk, 1986), p. 1.

⁴ Daly, The Famine in Ireland, p. 3.

⁵ Timothy W. Guinnane, ‘The Great Irish Famine and Population: The Long View’ in The American Economic Review, Volume 84, No. 2 (1994), pp. 303-308 at p. 303.

⁶ Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Ireland’s Great Famine: An Overview’ in Research Repository University College Dublin (Centre for Economic Research/Working Papers Series), WP04/25 (2004), pp. 1-26 at p. 3.

⁷ R. Dudley Edwards, Thomas Desmond Williams, and Cormac Ó Gráda, The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845-52 (Dublin, 1994), p. 3.

⁸ Daly, The Famine in Ireland, p. 1.

⁹ Edwards, The Great Famine, p. 89.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Edwards, The Great Famine, p. 90.

¹² Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland before the Famine, 1798-1848 (Dublin, 1972), p. 203.

¹³ Cormac Ó Gráda and Andrés Eiríksson, Ireland's Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Dublin, 2006), p. 7.

¹⁴ Daly, The Famine in Ireland, p. 8.

¹⁵ Bryan MacMahon, The Great Famine in Tralee and North Kerry (Cork, 2017), p. 53.

¹⁶ Ó Gráda and Eiríksson, Ireland's Great Famine, p. 7.

¹⁷ Patrick Brantlinger, ‘The Famine’ in Victorian Literature and Culture, Volume 32, No. 1 (2004), pp. 193-207 at p. 194.

¹⁸ Edwards, The Great Famine, p. 7.

¹⁹ Brantlinger, ‘The Famine’, p. 202.

²⁰ Ó Gráda, ‘Ireland’s Great Famine’, p. 3.

²¹ Christine Kinealy, ‘The Irish Famine 1845-52’ in North Irish Roots, Volume 2, No. 5 (1990), pp. 158-161 at p. 158.

²² Ó Gráda and Eiríksson, Ireland's Great Famine, p. 8.

²³ Margaret E. Crawford, ‘Food and Famine’ in Cathal Póirtéir (ed.), The Great Irish Famine (Dublin, 1995), pp. 60-73 at p. 62.

²⁴ Ó Gráda, ‘Ireland’s Great Famine’, p. 13.

²⁵ Guinnane, ‘The Great Irish Famine and Population’, p. 303.

²⁶ MacMahon, The Great Famine, p. 324.

²⁷ Ó Gráda and Eiríksson, Ireland's Great Famine, p. 17.

²⁸ Laurence Geary, ‘Epidemic Diseases of the Great Famine’ in History Ireland, Volume 4, No. 1 (1996), pp. 27-32 at p. 28.

²⁹ Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland before the Famine, p. 205.

³⁰ Geary, ‘Epidemic Diseases’, pp. 30-31.