Dan Snow's History Hit - Ireland's Great Famine: Counterpoint

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

Christine Kinealy joined me on this podcast to discuss the British government’s adverse policies during the Great Famine, and the effects these had on the Irish people.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Now a week ago we had Charles Read on talking about the Great Irish Famine. He is an economic historian at Cambridge University and we had him on because this month marks the 175th anniversary since the blight, the potato blight was first identified that would do such terrible harm to Ireland's population. On this podcast we've got a counterpoint. We've got someone who disagrees we've got christine keneally on the podcast she's a wonderful historian author and she's the founding director of ireland's great hunger institute at quinnipiac university in connecticut she painted a different picture of the famine itself and britain's response i think it's fascinating to have both points of

view from two very distinguished historians on this anniversary of an event that would shape British and Irish history for generations, arguably still shapes its politics to the present day. If you want to listen to these podcasts without adverts, you can become a subscriber at History Hit TV. We've also got like the Netflix for history there. You can watch lots of documentaries. Just head over there. Use the code POD1, P-O-D-1. You get a month for free, and the second month is one pound, euro, or dollar.

And you can watch all these amazing documentaries we've got coming out as well. It's a sweet deal. But in the meantime, everyone, enjoy Christine Keneally. Christine, thank you very much for coming on this podcast. I'm delighted to be here. I'm a great fan. Well, I'm a great fan of yours. Now, we've heard from an economic historian about the British government's attempts and then failure, of course, to provide humanitarian relief

over the course of the Great Famine. I'd like to talk to you just a bit more about that famine itself and the experience, given it's 175 years since the blight was first identified. Did the harvest fail immediately or was it a slower process? It's a slower process. And one of the things about the famine which makes it so complicated is it lasts for seven years. So each year is different.

But this year, as you said, is the 175th anniversary of the blight appearing in Ireland and the blight it was this new form of disease and it appeared in Europe it then was spotted in Kent the Isle of Wight and then it came to Ireland but it came to Ireland relatively late in the harvest in 1845 so it destroyed about 40 to 50 percent of the crop what made it unusual was even though there'd been disease on the potato crop before never for more than one year so people felt they could survive one year but unfortunately in 1846 this mysterious blight reappeared and reappeared much earlier in the season and it destroyed a hundred percent of the crop. 1847 it comes back

it destroys a smaller part of the crop, which gives the British government an opportunity to say, oh, the famine is over. Of course, it wasn't. 1848, the blight comes back and destroys almost all of the crop. So each year is different. Why do we think about Ireland in particular in connection with this catastrophic famine? It was a defining moment in terms of Irish history. The population within the space of six years dropped by 25%, which makes it one of the most lethal famines on record in modern history. Because of emigration, it changed the course of world history in many ways. About 80% of people who left Ireland and 2 million left in the space of 10 years.

Most of them went to North America. 1847, a higher number went to Canada than to America. So it really changed North American history. A number went to, especially orphans, went to Australia. So most parts of the world were impacted by the level of emigration. And also another thing that made it a global crisis, but one of the most uplifting things about it, was that people from all over the world contributed to famine relief, particularly

in 1847. The first place to give, this is actually 1845, was Calcutta in India. But all parts of the world gave to Ireland, which is a remarkable story. Why did Ireland suffer? You mentioned it was in Kent, it was in the Isle of Wight. Why did Ireland suffer so dreadfully? So no other country in the world had such a high dependence on potatoes. So when the disease was wiped out, about 50% of the population depended exclusively on potatoes for subsistence living. But even in places like Belfast, which was regarded as more affluent, which was overwhelmingly Protestant, which was more industrialised, what did the factory workers eat? They ate potatoes. So no part of Ireland escaped from

the impact of this potato shortage. But again, I think, yes, the blight came, but Irish Ireland has to be seen in terms of its longer history, its history as a colony of Britain, and over the centuries, the gradual impoverishment of the people, the treatment of the native Irish as second-class citizens, which effectively forced them to depend on this one crop. And the other factor, which is not exclusive to Ireland, but is part of the United Kingdom, the timing was really unfortunate. In the 1830s, there'd been many debates about poverty, what causes poverty, and the conclusion was poverty is the fault of the individual. And in the 1830s in Britain there was an amended poor law. In Ireland it was a new poor law

and it was very much introduced with the idea of punishing people who were poor and also trying to bring about change within Ireland. So the famine comes on the back of all of these debates which have concluded that Irish people are poor because they're lazy. And then for some in Britain, there was the extra layer of not only are they lazy, they're Catholic. And this is bad. Let's talk about the Poor Law first. This was a primitive form of welfare. Ireland was covered by the Poor Law, was it? To some extent, it was punitive, but it was also flexible. So England and Wales were governed by one Poor Law. Scotland was

slightly different. But people could get relief either in their own houses or they could go into a workhouse. Of course people chose to stay in their own homes if they could. In the 1830s the British government was very exercised by the whole idea of poverty, the growth of population, urbanisation, some social disorder etc. So there were all these debates about the nature of poverty and the whole Malthusian concept of poor people breeding too much and again concept of they're lazy so there were all these debates going on and in 1834 that led to a change in the poor law which made it slightly harsher then the British government turned its attention to Ireland which had no system of poor relief and And so they put an English man in charge, of course, George Nicholls, who was very much a devotee of the new, more stringent approach

to relieving poverty. So he came to Ireland, he sort of did this tour very quickly around Ireland, and he said, yes, the English poor law is suited to Ireland, which nobody in Ireland believed it was. But a form of the English Poor Law was imported into Ireland, except it was more draconian. So from the very start, Irish people had no right to relief. They had to get all relief within a workhouse. There was no relief given at home. And the law of settlement was established in the English, Welsh and Scottish Poor Laws, but no similar residency requirement was in the Irish Poor Law. But when this really becomes significant is at the height of the famine, when some Irish

people who couldn't afford to go to North America sought relief in Britain, but because of the British laws of residency they were not eligible to receive relief, despite the so-called Act of Union, despite there being a United Kingdom. And so thousands of Irish people were literally deported back to Ireland during the famine years. Now, you have read the sources and read all the accounts of what those famine years were like. How bad did it get in the parts of Ireland where the entire harvest failed? Of course, again, you're coming back to some of the British press. They insisted things were exaggerated. But people who went and who are eyewitnesses, and we have many eyewitnesses who were disinterested eyewitnesses.

So some English Quakers went to the most remote parts of Ireland, Eris in County Mayo, and they all agreed that words were not adequate to describe the suffering. We know from some eyewitness accounts, you know, some of the awful things that people were so weakened by famine, they were literally eaten alive by pigs, by rats, by dogs. The whole process of dying, most people die from disease before they actually die of starvation, but it's an extremely painful and can be slow process. And various functions of the body just die. People become blind, their body becomes distended,

they grow hair on their body. There's a lethargy, which again, some observers said, oh, this is because Irish people are lazy. But this is part of the process of starvation. So it's a painful, painful process. And for those who survived and had witnessed that, they must have been changed. And we know your recent studies in epigenetics which talk about if you suffer malnutrition or trauma sustained malnutrition or trauma it actually becomes transgenerational and it probably stays within your dna for five generations so people my age we are still children of the famine in many many ways and we know one of the impacts of this trauma is that it can result in high levels of

mental illness. And we know Ireland at the end of the 19th century had the highest incident of committals of anywhere in the world. So again, the famine, sometimes people say, oh, it ended in 1852. In many ways, it still hasn't ended. Epigenetics, mental disease, and today the population of Ireland is still smaller than it was in 1845, which for a modern democracy is pretty shocking. The British government initially launched a sort of rescue package, a welfare package, that people claimed was among the most generous ever. Is that the impression you get from looking at the sources at the time? I'm not sure it was generous, but it was certainly effective. And at that stage, Sir Robert Peel was the Prime Minister. He had a smaller problem to deal with than subsequent governments. In 1846 was a change of government, and Lord John Russell, head of the Whig government, he was in power then

from 1846 to 1852, which were the more devastating years of the famine. So Peel did introduce a relief package, which was effective. He could have done more. This was not the first famine in Ireland. Pretty well every generation in Ireland had suffered from localised famine and food shortages. So people were pretty resilient themselves. People themselves, they would pawn what they had, slaughter the pig, sell the pig in order to survive. But in previous famines, other measures had been introduced, which the British government from 1845 to 1852 refused to do. One of them was to stop the distillation of alcohol, which sort of seems obvious, and in previous food crises that had been done by the government, and that meant there was more grain available for people, for animals, etc. In previous periods of shortages, the government had placed an embargo on food being

exported. At this time, people said, no, the market will rectify itself, and so massive amounts of food left Ireland as people were starving within the country. So in some ways, the British government could have done more, but the problem that Peel was facing 1845 to 1846 was much easier than what subsequent governments faced. The failure of the potato crop was 40 to 50%. People still had resources and resilience. And after 1846, that changes. Yes, we've been hearing on this podcast recently that the British government's ability to borrow money and pay for famine relief in Ireland was severely compromised. And the British government, therefore, was just, was it unable or was it partly unwilling to do what was required during the peak catastrophic years of the famine? I would argue it was unwilling.

The famine was seen by some people in power as an opportunity to bring about change in Ireland. And as we know from the debates about the Poor Law, this change was much desired to stop people being so dependent on potatoes, etc, etc. So in one way, it was seen as maybe a good thing. In fact, the census report of 1851 said, even though the population has dropped so dramatically, we feel some good will come of this calamity. So people in high places were saying that. But to me, what really is very telling about the government's willingness to save lives is in 1846, the government introduced public works, which meant the people who were starving had to work six days a week, 10 hours a day on hard physical labour, which served no purpose except to act as a test of destitution. except to act as a test of destitution. And 1846-1847 was the coldest winter on record for 100 years. It snowed as late as April 1847. So people who'd pawned their shoes, their cloaks,

etc, were working in these terrible conditions, and mortality increased immediately. So because of the failure of the public works, they were bureaucratic, they were expensive, and they failed anyway to save lives. In the summer of 1847, the public works, they were bureaucratic, they were expensive, and they failed anyway to save lives. In the summer of 1847, the British government, for the first time and the only time, actually gave people free food. They introduced soup kitchens throughout Ireland, greatly helped, it has to be said, by the Society of Friends, the Quakers, who provided the soup cauldrons. the soup cauldrons. In the summer of 1847, as a result of new legislation, for the first time during the whole of the famine, and the only time during the famine, the British government gave the people what they needed, which was free food. A network of soup kitchens throughout Ireland fed over three million people for three months. And to me, what this shows is that the British

government had the administrative, the logistical ability to feed everybody who needed food. They chose not to do so after that period. But the British government certainly could have done that. And it was a pretty cheap way of getting food to the people. And mortality did decrease during those months. Does the catastrophe deepen when the British government tries to switch the taxation burden onto the Irish taxpayers themselves? The Temporary Relief Act, the Soup Kitchen Act as it's called, operated in the summer of 1847. It was to be a temporary measure and it was so the British government could make changes to the Poor Law because essentially after the end of summer they wanted all relief to come from Irish resources, from Irish tax. And so the Poor Law was the perfect

mechanism because the country was divided into Poor Law unions and each Poor Law union was self-financing. So this was a way of throwing the whole tax burden for famine relief on Irish taxpayers. Again, to me, this brings into question what was the meaning of the United Kingdom if, you know, at the time of this great distress, Ireland was to be separated. But this really did put a great burden on landlords, even benign landlords, and there were some who for two years had given rent abatement and helped their tenants. Now, you know, some of them said, the Marquis of Sligo said, you know, I have no choice now but to evict because now it is a question of my survival. So the change to poor law relief in the autumn of 1847 really was a mistake and people died, people emigrated. But this was combined

with the British government really washing its hands by saying, well, the famine is over, the harvest, you know, the blight wasn't that bad this year. So Irish people should and can depend upon themselves. And one of the arguments, and we use these words, we hear these words this day, if we keep on helping Ireland, this will just happen again and we'll create this culture of dependency. We have to use this as a lesson. And some people who are very high in government, very influential civil servants, use the providentialist argument. They said, God has sent this blight and so we shouldn't interfere too much by giving too much relief. said, God has sent this blight and so we shouldn't interfere too much by giving too much relief. So all these arguments were marshaled against the Irish in their hour of need. So the impression the British government was, although one of the most advanced in the world,

was just unable to borrow enough money to execute the massive relief required by this gigantic natural disaster. You think it was more, there were political considerations there as well. This was not a matter of practicality and logistics. I think the British government had the resources. This was the wealthiest government, which had untold resources throughout the British Empire. We know there was a bumper harvest in India. Australia was offering to send goods across. And the British government wasn't acting in a disinterested, benevolent way. The money it was giving to Ireland was a loan. So all this money it was sending to Ireland, 80% of it was given as a loan,

which even as the famine was unfolding, had to be repaid. So people were under tremendous stress within Ireland. And again, this is the British government. It had umpteen resources. As we know, and there are parallels today, a few years later, the British government fought the Crimean War. It found £64 million to fight the Crimean War. It found £10 million to finance the famine, £8 million of which was a loan. A few years earlier,

they'd found £20 million to pay the slave owners for the ending of slavery. So those resources were available. The British government chose not to avail of them. There is, in fact, a magic money tree. What did the famine mean in terms of Ireland and in terms of Irish politics and nationalism in the century that followed? It changes Irish nationalism. Irish nationalism was actually at a peak in the 1840s. Daniel O'Connell's repeal movement, 1846 at the height

of the famine, that split into Old Ireland and Young Ireland, which meant Irish nationalism then was weakened at the height of the famine. The export of so many people, if I can put it that way, or the exile of so many people took Irish nationalism overseas, especially to North America, and it became, North America became a centre of the next wave of Irish nationalism, which was much more militant, which is associated with Fenianism. But Irish nationalism really oscillated in the post-famine years between constitutional nationalism, as advocated by Daniel O'Connell, and more militant nationalism, as advocated by supporters of Fenianism. So Irish nationalism became international as a result of

that. At home, the population just kept declining. So people looked overseas for financial support and other support. But what it did for Irish nationalists, it was the ultimate proof of British dislike and misrule of Ireland. And so in many ways, it did become a watershed in the nationalist movement. Thank you very much indeed. What is your latest book? Let's tell everybody what it is. Well, I have two up this year. And one is an edited collection, but it's on Irish famines before and after the Great Hunger. So I think that's something we need to see the famine in context of other famines in Ireland. And again, why are there so many famines in Ireland,

in India, which are part of this great British empire? So that came out, and there's 20 chapters in that by different famine experts. And then my other, my latest research is actually on the abolition movement. I've moved away a bit from the famine, and I've just brought out a book on 10 black abolitionists who visited Ireland between 1790 and 1860, including Frederick Douglass, and who were given a really warm welcome. So that's my latest project. It's absolutely fascinating. And thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. It's my honour.

Thank you so much. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps, and basically boosts up the chart,

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