Nearly a thousand years of English colonialism in Ireland began with a Norman invasion in 1070 and the establishment of Dublin & the "Pale" under William the Conqueror. Under the Tudors in the 16^th century, the English gradually seized control of the entire isle. Within the "Pale" around Dublin and, later, Ulster, English expansion was accompanied by the expropriation of defeated Irish aristocracy in favour of English landlords, the expulsion of indigenous peasantry, and grants of land to loyal English and Scottish colonial settlers. English domination was consolidated with Oliver Cromwell's savage campaign against a royalist Irish uprising in 1649 (massacres of Drogheda and Wexford).
 

Following another unsuccessful uprising in support of the deposed Stuart monarch, James II, at the battle of Boyne in 1690, the victorious English introduced the infamous "Penal Laws". Designed after the Test and Corporation Acts aimed at Catholics in England, the Penal Laws in Ireland represented an even more thorough effort to suppress and marginalize Irish Catholics. Under the provisions of the laws (which lasted mostly until emancipation in 1828), Irish Catholics were barred from the army and navy and all other public offices, as well as the professions, schools and universities. No Catholic could vote or stand for elected office. Catholics were forbidden from practising Catholic worship and compelled to attend Protestant churches. Most damaging were the provisions which were designed to complete the dispossession of Irish land. Catholics in Ireland were forbidden to purchase or lease land, to inherit or receive land from Protestants, or to rent land worth more than 30s. a year or, for that matter, to earn profit from land exceeding a third of the rent (i.e. not the most fertile land!). Existing Catholic estates were broken up under a provision that decreed that inheritance of land was to be divided equally among all surviving males in the family, unless the first-born converted to Protestantism (primogeniture prevailed under the Common Law in England). In short, the Penal Laws were meant explicitly to deprive Irish Catholics of all civil rights and, in an agrarian society, the most important form of wealth: the land.
 

The Act of Union, passed by Parliament in 1800 in response to fears of an alliance between Irish nationalists and Napoleonic France, formally incorporated Ireland into Great Britain. Ireland became directly represented in the British Parliament, but at the same time lost its hitherto autonomous government in Dublin and came to be ruled directly from London. "Repeal" of the Act of Union became the battle-cry of Irish patriots throughout the 19^th century.
 

The system of land-holding generated by British confiscations and the Penal Laws, which saw much of the land in Ireland held by Anglo-Irish absentee landlords, who rented tiny plots to impoverished Irish peasants, generated a highly distorted economy, which served the interests of the British economy and the Anglo-Irish landlords over those of the indigenous population. Destitute tenants worked for their rent by producing cash crops for export to Britain on the landlords' estates, while relying on potatoes grown in their small leased plots for their own consumption. While the potato had been heralded at first as an highly nutritious and prolific staple, which allowed the Irish peasants to survive by cultivating small plots of marginal land, over-reliance by the great majority of the population on this single vegetable mono-culture exposed Ireland to disastrous vulnerability when the crop failed due to the spread of the potato blight in 1845-48. ⁽¹⁾
 

The blight was caused by the spread of phytophthora infestans, a fungus that caused the root to rot in the soil. The blight affected the potato crop every season until 1850. It is estimated that Ireland suffered more than 1 million famine-related deaths (out of a total pre-famine population of approximately 8 million) between 1845-51. Another 2 million Irish emigrated between 1845-55.

Throughout the famine Ireland continued to export other crops and foodstuffs in massive amounts. Had they been embargoed (as in past famines) and distributed to the hungry, the exports that would have been more than sufficient to feed the starving population. ⁽²⁾

Thousands of tenant families were evicted from their plots of land for non-payment of rent during the famine. Due to the absence of alternative employment in industry, their bleak options were emigration on the infamous "coffin ships" or vagrancy and, quite likely, starvation. Despite the obviously disastrous consequences of evictions for the Irish peasants, British authorities protected the rights of landlords to carry out such "clearances", regarding them as a necessary preliminary step for the improvement of the efficiency of Irish agriculture through the consolidation and pastoralization of Irish estates. The government's one formal policy of support for the victims of evictions was to subsidize their emigration abroad. 
 

British relief efforts were hampered partly by lack of experience and the sort of administrative machinery required to handled such a massive and unprecedented crisis, and partly by obstacles of ideology. Under Sir Robert Peel, the British government initially followed a dual policy of selling subsidized corn and supporting soup kitchens which offered rationed food to the indigent. However, Peel's laudable initiatives were swamped by the massive demand for food by the starving population (over 3,000,000 people fed per day in 1847), and were perceived in Britain to go against the grain of prevailing classical liberal ideology. Following Peel's fall from power in 1846, the Russell government decided against any attempts at direct intervention in the market place, and determined instead to adhere to the Malthusian principles of the New Poor Law introduced recently in Britain itself (1834), which provided support to the able-bodied only in return for "relief work" in the poorhouse, private employment or public works projects. Though a record number of men were employed on such schemes during the Famine (c. 750,000), this none the less proved absolutely inadequate for the scale of the disaster.
 
 

The famine came to be seen widely in Britain as a confirmation of the prevailing Malthusian doctrine (Thmas Malthus was a leading classical liberal economist) that asserted that poverty and famines were the consequences of a combination of indolence and lack of "moral restraint" by the poor, which inevitably led to over-population and, eventually, food shortages due to inadequate resources. Whereas it had once been hailed widely as the miracle food-source, the potato now came to be denounced as the "lazy root" which, by allowing the Irish peasants to provide for themselves with the minimum of effort and efficiency, had perpetuated Ireland's backward economic state and allowed the land to support a much larger population than was desirable. From this point of view, "indiscriminate charity" by the British would only encourage continued Irish irresponsibility: like the "lazy potato", charity could lead only to either a recurrence of the famine or permanent Irish dependence on British aid. These views were expressed not only in leading organs of public opinion (such as The Times), but also by leading Cabinet members. Charles Edward Trevelyan, the British Treasury Secretary overseeing Irish famine relief, regarded the famine as a providential lesson to the Irish to become less feckless and more industrious! From this point of view, the best course was to allow the famine to drive home its lesson and encourage the Irish to improve their morals and work habits. Indeed, many saw the famine as a welcome opportunity to wean the Irish off the potato, reconstruct Ireland's agricultural economy, and reform the Irish character. Such callous attitudes only hardened following the abortive Young Ireland uprising in 1848. ⁽³⁾
 
 

Back to Irish Famine

Notes:

1. On contemporary views of the potato, see Modern History Sourcebook, "Accounts of the 'Potato Revolution', 1695-1845", in http://fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1695potato.html

2. See detailed statistics in "The Great Irish Famine Curriculum" athttp://www.nde.state.ne.us/SS/irish_famine.html, 9-11; Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52 (1995) and O Grada Cormac, Ireland before and after the Famine (1989). 

3. See the contemporary articles from The Times, the Punch and the Illustrated London News collected in http://www.people.Virginia.edu/~eas5e/Irish/Famine.html and http://vassun.vassar.edu/~staylor/FAMINE/Punch/Punch.html).