Irish Famine

DURING THE CENTURY and a half preceding the Great Famine, Ireland's population had dramatically increased to about eight million people. The widespread cultivation of the potato, imported to Europe from the western hemisphere, had provided an unprecedented source of nutrition for Ireland's poor, the bulk of the island's population. Despite the crowding that was created by the population growth and that was exacerbated by the shift from tenant farming to grain planting and sheep grazing on the estates of many absentee landowners, the potato had sustained increases in birthrates and longevity.

On even an acre or two, tight rows of plants treated with simple and readily available fertilizers (such as seaweed that could be gathered after each tide and mounded around the seed potatoes) produced fairly bountiful harvests. In the century and a quarter preceding the Great Famine, there had been some 20 instances in which blight had regionally or seasonally ruined harvests, but no one seems to have anticipated the possibility of widespread and sustained blight.

[Page 580]During the Great Famine, blight ruined the potato crop from one end of Ireland to the other for five consecutive years. One and a half million of the eight million Irish people died of starvation or of disease that was a consequence of malnutrition or the ever-worsen-ing living conditions. More than one million Irish emigrated to other nations—in the greatest concentrations to the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and, ironically, England.

In the United States, they were initially treated with great disdain because of their impoverishment and because of the perception that they were not simply more subject to disease but virulent carriers of disease. Still, despite their initial mistreatment, the Irish arrived in such great numbers that they doubled the populations of eastern cities such as New York and Boston in less than or little more than a decade, and they learned to marshal their numbers to great local and regional political advantage.

Later groups of immigrants of other nationalities would arrive in greater numbers in the last two decades of the 19th century. But no other group would come to constitute a majority of the population of major American cities and accrue the same sort of political power that the Irish were able to acquire and then sustain in those cities. Thus the Great Famine had a major impact on subsequent historical conditions in the United States and other nations, as well as in Ireland.

Among the survivors of the Great Famine, the indigenous hatred of the English was compounded by the deep belief that the English had welcomed the reduction of the Irish population and had done very little to mitigate the famine. Although millions of Irish were starving in public view, record grain shipments were being produced on the great Irish estates and shipped through Irish ports to English cities.

Reflecting the prevailing belief that the poor suffered because they had not properly learned the hard lessons of self-reliance, the British government was slow to offer relief. Although it eventually earmarked the unprecedented sum of 8 million pounds sterling to famine relief, it required the relief to be delivered by private entrepreneurs, who typically were more concerned with maximizing profits than with the urgency of alleviating the famine.

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