The Great Famine (Ireland)
A potato blight arrived in Ireland in 1845 and about a million people died over the following six years. The blight was a water mould that had crossed from the Americas and hit the whole of northern Europe. What made Ireland different was that roughly a third of its population depended on the potato almost exclusively, on plots subdivided over generations, as tenants of landlords who were frequently absentee. The country continued to export food throughout. Grain, cattle, butter and pork left Irish ports under armed guard while people starved, because the starving had no money and the market was in England. The government's response was governed by doctrine. Peel bought Indian corn and repealed the Corn Laws in 1846 and lost his premiership over it; the Whig administration that followed under Russell held that relief must not interfere with private trade, closed the food depots, and moved to public works at wages too low to feed a family, and then to workhouses under the Gregory clause, which required a tenant to give up any holding above a quarter of an acre before receiving relief. Charles Trevelyan, who administered it, wrote of a judgement of God on an indolent people. Evictions cleared hundreds of thousands off the land. Some two million emigrated in a decade, on ships with mortality rates that gave them a name. The population fell from about 8.5 million to 6.5 million and has never recovered its level. Whether to call it genocide has been argued for a century and a half, and the more defensible charge is the one Amartya Sen made generally about famines: people starved beside food they could not buy, under a government that had the means to feed them and a doctrine that told it not to.
- Year: 1845 CE
- Category: Social
