Empire: World History - 236. The Great Famine: The Blight Strikes Ireland (Ep 1)

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

How did the memory of the Great Famine shape Irish identity? Could it have been prevented? From 1845 to 1852, a disease decimated potato crops across Ireland. Farmers of small plots who relied entirely on this monoculture were launched into complete destitution. Desperate families were evicted from their homes and suffered through starvation. British public policy offered limited assistance, such as workhouses and public works schemes. But people who were used to hunkering down inside during winter had no warm clothes now suddenly had to work outside in freezing conditions to earn their way. Charles Trevelyan, was put in charge of handling the famine and repeatedly promoted “self-reliance”, describing the catastrophe as a “judgement of God sent to teach the Irish a lesson”. Approximately 1 million people died of disease or starvation, and around 2 million people emigrated, causing huge societal shifts that changed Ireland forever. Listen as Anita and William are joined by writer and historian Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Long Island, and co-author of The Irish Famine, to discuss the impact of the Great Hunger on Ireland.  _____________ Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, and a weekly newsletter! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk  Blue Sky: @empirepoduk  X: @empirepoduk goalhanger.com Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremple. Thank you so much for all of your very kind comments about the Irish series that we are embarking. looking on. It's been really lovely to hear what many of you have thought. And also, it is not an easy listen. And I won't lie, today's episode is going to be a particularly difficult listen, isn't it,

William? It's going to be very rough. I have been deeply depressed all week, just reading the material for this pod. I think since we did the Armenian genocide last year, I had such a depressing and sad week of reading. It is a relentless tale of suffering and unnecessary trauma. But the bright side of this is we have one of our favorite people coming to speak to us today, which is Comteubin, who is getting up out of bed in L.A. Hello. Thank you. So look, the reason that you're here and what we are going to talk about, it's an episode that really does form the bedrock, I think, of Irish cultural identity.

It is we're going to be talking about the famine, the great hunger. And there is, I don't know whether it's because I'm not Irish, but I always sense it in song, in music, in poetry, a great fatalism about, you. the Irish mindset. And I wonder whether there is something about that, a cultural memory that is founded on something so horrific, the thing that we're going to talk about today, does stamp the Irish identity somewhat. I suppose I'd take the opposite view to that, that it's very easy to claim victimhood and great numbers of people died and great numbers survived. And it's interesting, how did people survive? Who survived? And it isn't merely that the Anglo-Irish survived,

or that the great landowner survived. Great numbers are you. of people living in towns survived, who data wasn't their stable food, or that they were in fact able to make a profit on prices going up, which they did do. And of course, there were huge land clearances at the end because of great numbers of people who lived on holdings. There were less than five acres were actually cleared away so that the land itself changed. I think a great change came over the country by the 1870s. And by the time, you know, Charles Stewart Parnell and the idea of Home Rule came, it was almost forgotten, except it survived in ballads, in popular history, in folk tales, and in this idea somehow that England had done this to, quote, us. So I can still

meet people who will claim that they personally, living now in Ireland, are affected in some very deep way by the famine itself. And it's very, very hard to accept that. It's very, very hard not to feel that this is really a sort of desecration of something that really was the most serious thing that happened in the country in the 19th century and did involve immense amounts of obviously huge suffering and death. But to claim now in this country that's always in a state of semi-boom or has been since the last 20, 30 years and people, you know, worry a lot about should they change their cars to hybrid or electric or should they take their holidays in Madagascar? That they're somehow, while in Madagascar after a few European colladas or something, singing a song about the famine

and looking off melancholy into the distance, thinking that they actually were in the famine, whereas they were actually in the feast. Combe, you make this point very beautifully in a very, very long essay that you wrote in the London review of books some time ago, which is why we've come to you to talk about this. I think most people listening to this will associate you with your novels most recently, Brooklyn. But this is a substantial work of history. Why is it that you took so much time and wrote such a sort of epic essay on this? It would be the subject that always fascinated you, or is it that irritation that you just expressed? First of all, I studied history, and I studied

history at University of College of Dublin. And I don't think the famine was mentioned at any point during that period. In other words, it was not on the curriculum. Because the Irish professors of history tended to have done their PhD at Cambridge. And they came back to Dublin, you know, got their nice job, but they had no interest in studying ships records or workhouse records. They were really interested in parliamentary history in the history of power. And also, it was very worrying. This was 1972. It was very worrying if you began to train a generation of Irish people who would like to become teachers or civil servants, as we were, in this idea of Irish victimhood in the 19th century. That instead they were talking about,

you know, parliamentary politics in the 19th century. The same is true of many great traumas, though, isn't it? I mean, no one ever wrote anything about the Armenian genocide for several generations, deto the Holocaust, which suddenly became a sort of massively subject thing in the 1970s rather than the 40s and 50s. So I think that this then began to change. And so what I became interested in at the time of, say, the 150th anniversary, which coincided with the reign of Mary Robinson, Mary Robinson as president, who began to mention the famine in all her speeches. What I agreed to do for the London Review of Books at the time was to read every single book that came out

in those two or three years for the 150th anniversary. And I realized, of course, that there are such differences between the historians, even on small matters of essential fact, how many evictions took place during these three or four years, say from 1845 to 1850. And the historians, including people working

in the same history department, had such bearing views on this that I wondered if it wasn't possible for them to have a conference where they would decide on the methodology. But no one would do all of them seem to be working alone as little independent republics. Some of them were really interested in the minutiae, in how much nourishment you would get in the workhouse in a particular place, in a particular month. And the point then I started to make was, how do you then write

prose describing catastrophe? And what tone should you take? Yes, and if it's possible that a dry tone is the last thing you need or the thing you need most, that an emotional tone to keep talking about catastrophe or the cruelty or that if you start using words that are emotional, then it won't lead you anywhere where you haven't been before because the big book that all of us read that was considered the Bible was Cecil Woodham Smith's book called The Great Hunger. I was weirdly brought up on that too. I had an Irish nanny from Ackleisle and she took me down to the public library in North Berwick. I remember when I was seven or eight and we went through, I think my memory is just looking at the woodcuts in the book.

But we went through that book, and I think it left a permanent effect on me. I mean, I remember the stories of starving children and the mothers and the babies wrench from their mother's arms and all this sort of stuff. And it traumatized her that book. Yet it's very well told that the end of the first chapter, it will end, and news came that a new thing had begun to be seen in the potato crop. It was the first sign of the blight. And that's the end of the first chapter.

So she really knew what she was doing, and she also did a huge amount of original research. The Irish historians taught the tone was wrong. I grew up in the 80s. I went to school in the 80s. And for us, I think, you know, I was in school in Essex. And we had this little song that we were taught as a class. We had to learn how to sing it. It was a little folk song.

I am a navigational. I come from County Cork. I had to leave my native home to find a job of work. The crops are bad in Ireland and the tax too much to pay. And so here I am in England digging up your waterway. We had no understanding that that was one of the saddest stories ever about, you know, people starving to death and having to come on their hands and knees and dig up the land of England because they needed to earn money for food. And that was our introduction. So, you know,

in a way they talked about it without talking about it. My introduction to the ironies or to the problems around this begin with the cathedral in Eniskorthy, which is where I'm from in Ireland. And my father was involved in writing for a book called a Century Passes, which was produced in 1946 for the centenary of the cathedral. And you look at the cathedral designed by Pugin, you know, the great English church architect. He came over to Ireland during the famine and built this massive space filled with colour, filled with neo-gothic shapes, this massive space. I think, oh, that must have been done by people who were starving and they needed work. No, it wasn't. And then my father has a list of all the people who donated. And Zess says, soon after these people would have known,

hunger. But I looked at the names and realized, no, no, these were the people whose grandchildren and great-grandchildren still own shops in the town. The people who donated to the cathedral were the Catholic middle class, and they did not suffer in the famine. They managed to build this massive cathedral, which was a Catholic space about Catholic power in this town, the town that had been held by the Portsmouths. Edmund Spencer had been in. And suddenly this building was going to replace the castle, which had been built by the portsmouth by Henry Wallop in 1595. And therefore, the money it must have taken to cart all that stone, to build, just to create that steeple. This isn't a simple story of a nation starving. This is a story of a certain group of

people within that nation, actually becoming victimized and being almost written out of history then, that the silence that followed them was the silence of a new prosperity. which really was in place by the 1870s. That is a complexity you bring out beautifully in our article in which we're going to try and recover in this podcast. But I think first of all, we need to go back slightly. We're getting ahead of ourselves. Because on the last pod, Jane Ormire left us at the Battle of the Boyne.

And I think we need just to very quickly canter through the history separating us from that period. Anita, do you want to kick off with the 1798 Rebellion? Sure. I mean, inspired by the French Revolution, a group called the United Irishman and an alliance of Anglicans, Presbyterians and Catholics seeking independence from British interference initiated a rebellion. But they sought French assistance. And of course, if you involve the French, whose back goes right up the English. And so, you know, you have this collision that's set right there and then, a rebellion marked by events such as dragooning of Ulster. And this is a rebellion that ultimately fails. It fails. It's put down with. the degree of savagery that we talked about in the last episode. And in 1801, the Act of Union created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland abolishing the Irish Parliament. Well, I think the hope was that it might bring English investment and free trade and all sorts

of things which proved entirely illusory. Instead, English goods flooded into Ireland, Irish industry collapsed, unemployment was widespread. And this is all in the immediate run up to the great famine. A picture I think is very important to make clear before we go into the famine is the enormous poverty of Ireland at this time, which is something that many foreign visitors comment on when they come here. There's a French visitor. It talks about how there's only magnificent chateau and miserable cabins to be seen in Ireland. And England is the richest country of the world just over the sea. And Ireland is a long way behind at this period. Tell us again about the population of Ireland and how it exploded and the kind of pressures that

created, Colt. In 1600, the population of Ireland was one million. By 1841, it had risen to something like 8 million. And by that time, half a million Irish farms were smaller than 15 acres. And almost 200,000 holdings were smaller than five acres, so that in other words, people didn't even own the five acres. They leased the five acres. If they had a pig or if they had any crops, they were used to pay the rent. And what they lived on and lived on entirely were potatoes, which had been brought to Ireland by Walter Raleigh in the 16th century. And there was enough nutrition in the single potato. So they just took the crop for granted. They knew how to do it. And also, which is very important for later on, This was a very easy crop to grow.

If you had five acre holding, you didn't have to do much, which made you sat around a lot in the winter because there wasn't hard labor. There wasn't any work for you. So you simply grew your potatoes. You picked them when the time came. You looked after your pigs and you got on with your life. Now, whether this was an oral culture of the highest sort, or whether it was just peasants sitting around in a smoky cabin,

as many visitors said, but the point is these people were very vulnerable to the almost unimaginable thing, which would be a potato flight. I've seen a really interesting study on this, which is sort of the comparison of the poor of Europe at this time. And actually, when the potatoes were going well, this was not bad. There was nutrition and vitamins of a potato that you didn't find in wheat. So, you know, elsewhere, if you had a wheat harvest that failed in France or in Russia, for example, people would fall back on rye and they would get by, but it wouldn't be great.

And it wouldn't be great all of the time. But in Ireland, you had sort of all of the, you know, the starch. is the carbohydrates, the sugar, the vitamins. And you also had turf, you know, so you had fires, you had fuel, all of this. But because it's such a monoculture, the moment that goes, you're done for. I mean, if that's all you've got, you haven't got the rye to fall back on. You haven't got another crop to fall back on. You haven't got room to grow or time to grow anything else. Three million people eat nothing else, but potatoes, apparently. It was a staple diet for at least half the population. And the blight was first noticed in the autumn of 1845.

The blight also occurred elsewhere, for example, the Netherlands actually lost two-thirds of its potatoes. But of course, it didn't matter as much in the Netherlands because people were not living in this very strange way. I should say that part of the problem we have in interpreting this is that anyone who looked at this situation in Ireland, of the sheer number of people living in these tiny holdings, living entirely on the potato, realized that this is not sustainable. So that if viewed the business of public policy from London, no matter what way you look at this, it has to change. and no one was coming up with a solution that famine would be the best way of changing it.

See, the problem was that people also had become, in the opinion of those in power, lazy and indolent. So it wasn't as though these hardworking Irish were doing their best with these small holdings, was they seem to be sitting around and they seem to be laughing, you know, sitting and sitting in the doors of their cabs and laughing at you as you went by.

We've said the word blight a few times. I think we should explain what it is. So just to explain to us this blight, this blight, what did it do to the crop and how quickly did it sort of destroy the crop? And of course, nobody knew whether it was going to come to the following year or the year after. So there was that uncertainty. But you can just imagine that feeling of looking down at it and realizing if this goes on, we're doomed. And apparently a terrible smell, the rotting potatoes in the ground led this sort of miasma,

which people could smell before they even dug up their potatoes. Yeah, the smell of death came before death, as it were. The smell came from the ground itself. It is a powerful sort of symbol, you know, this great fog of stink that is sweeping the nation that is, you know, sort of the precursor to a horrible hunger. Let's take a break. So we've just come to 1846 now. And the entire potato crop is lost because of these fungal spores that remain in the ground, even though you've lost one harvest. It doesn't mean, you know, that it dies with the potatoes. It's there in the ground. It will keep coming back. Join us after the break when we find out what happens next. Welcome back. So we were just talking about the potato blight, this fungus that eats up the potato in the ground so that even before you dig it up, you can smell this rotting smell that has the same smell as bilge from a ship. And the initial British response is actually not too bad, Combs, isn't that right? Robert Peel actually does react rather quickly to this.

Yes, and there's an effort to introduce a system of public works. In other words, that since people are starving, then there's a need for them to earn their living. And so this becomes a real problem. The end of September 1846, 26,000 men are employed on relief work. And so by March, the following year, by March 1847, you're talking about 700,000 people are on public works. Now, the public works are designed almost like prison work. In other words, to be as repulsive as possible is one of the terms used and to get people up early in the morning to have them working all day for a pittance, but nonetheless there would be money at the end. Of course, it was winter work. Of course, people were not used to doing that sort of work. And of course, people were also starving at the same time as working. So as you can imagine, the number who died on the works and the winter, of course, every piece of bad luck comes with another piece of bad luck. The winter of 1846 into 847 was exceptional. cold in Ireland. I have this habit on, and I guess it's because I'm a journalist, but I look at the

newspapers at the time, and these are some of the newspapers from 1847, exactly the period that you're talking about. And the cork examiner writes, thousands are perishing on the roads in ditches and in fields, fever-stricken, worn out, and famished. This is talking about those who are having to work for their crust. Another one here from the Freeman's Journal in 1847, crowds of gaunt, yellow-skinned skeletons crawl into the workhouses where they died like rock. sheep. So, I mean, people are aware of the terrible, terrible plight of these people. And I don't think we've really talked about this properly. I think we should probably bring in the name Charles Trevelyan pretty soon, shouldn't we? Because the whole attitude to these poor starving people

is very much, you know, shaped by this one man, the official in charge of famine relief. Bizarly, Charles Trevellian is someone that I've come across a great deal from a completely different end of his life when he was in Delhi in his youth. And he's, and he's a lot of He's a kind of one-size-fits-all empire pod villain, because everything he does throughout his career is sort of cursed. First of all, in India, he's famous for being appalled by Hinduism and Islam. And although he's only 21, he blows the whistle on all the indophile Brits of the East Indycum company who are becoming very close to the Mughal Court. Then, at a later point in his life, he goes to Calcutta, where he acts against the East Indoch. all the British Orientalists who are celebrating Indian culture and interested in Sanskrit and

Persian literature. And he says that this should all end. And with his brother-in-law, McCauley, he tries to get everybody to learn English and creates a movement for having Sanskrit studies and Persian studies and other Indian languages ended in British schools and universities and to have only English taught. And this famous quote by McCauley is a single shelf of a good English library is worth all the native literature of Indian Arabia, that very famous quote from McCauley's Minute on Education, is very much cooked up with his brother-in-law, Charles Trevelyan. And when McCauley comes back to London, Trevelyan comes with him and he joins the Treasury. And this is where we meet him now because he's in place just at this moment that the Peel government

falls because it's repealed the corn laws. Why? Because he wanted the corn to be cheaper. And so the government appeal, which has done quite well, providing relief at the very beginning of this famine, falls over this very issue. And Trevelyan welcomes the fall and gets very much into bed with the new regime that is far more into laissez-faire economics, that you shouldn't intervene, that you shouldn't be creating workhouses or work schemes. Travelyan also is taught by Malthus himself at Halebury in his youth. So he's brought in all these ideas of Malthusian checks to population. And he works to stop aid being given. It's a credo. The successor to Robert Peeler's Lord John Russell, and they are very much of the same mind about this, that you spoil people

by helping them at times like this. I mean, just some of the quotes from Trevelyan, turn your stomach. So what he says is, you know, the great evil which we have to contend with is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people. dependence on government is an evil which must be checked. So you've got these people who are being written about, who are known about, who are being, you know, their engravings made of them in their bones. And he's saying, actually, it's their fault. Either it's their fault, or they deserve it or as a punishment from God,

but to help them would be evil. So we must not do that. I mean, Charles Trevelyan, when I say the name Charles Trevelyan, Com, I mean, what does that do to you? Yes, you hear about him in the songs. he was made into the villain of this. The problem is that he was pushing an open door in the sense that while the active union had both the two countries together

in some ways constitutionally, it may even have drawn attention to the difference of Ireland, to how different Ireland was. And you can go through the entire period of, say, from the 1840s onwards, and find that every single public person has something rotten to say about Ireland

at some point, and often very often in their lives, stretching to people like Henry James, Ford, Maddox Ford at the end of the century, but including like Frederick Engels, who should have known better because his girlfriend was Irish. And he says, things like Phil's had drunkenness were always mentioned to have brought with them. The Irish man loves his pig as the Arab loves his horse.

This is Frederick Engels, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. And, you know, this Lord John Russell will, of course, talk about the Irish, a people born and bred from time immemorial in inveterate indolence, in providence, disorder and consequent destitution. So that Trevelli came back from India.

It wasn't as though he was preaching to the unconverted, but it was also that otherness of Ireland, the fact that Ireland almost needed to be punished, which makes it strange that he did any intervention at all. But nonetheless, it would have taken an extraordinary imagination to have intervened early in 1847 enough to have prevented what was about to occur. He did have an opposition that was pushing him to do something. But even the opposition was,

really vile about the Irish. I mean, Benjamin Disraeli, I was just looking through some of Pansard as well at the time. And Disraeli sort of says things like a starving population and absentee aristocracy, an alien church, the weakest executive in the world. This is the Irish question. So, you know, even those who are urging him to do something have nothing good to say. And you know what you said about pushing on an open door? As well as looking at what the Irish press were saying, I was looking at what the English press were saying, these are just some of the articles from 1847, which is the date you've taken us to. The Times, this is from the Times. The Irish are a lazy people. The wretched, indolent, half-savage creatures in the west of Ireland

must be tossed industry by the spur of necessity. That's the Times. The Illustrated London News, which is, you know, a little bit later, there is no doubt that the Irish peasant is improvident and reckless, looking more to immediate gratification than permanent well-being. Now, I've jumped forward two years in the headline. But that's because, and we should remind people, I think, take this opportunity, this was not a catastrophe that lasted a year, was it calm? I mean, how long did this famine drag on for? It really dragged on into the early 1850s. So you're talking about four, five, six years where the potato blight occurred and where people were suffering as implications, meaning, of course, you could pay your rent the first year. You could manage somehow to get food

it's a second year, but it was a third year that got you because the blight continued. I mean, there had been other famines, and there were other famines in the future. But this one became the one. It didn't merely stay in the imagination. It had a factual base for staying there. And the accusation is that, in a sense, it wasn't just that there was the potato blight. It was the British response to it, which exacerbated it and turned it in what was definitely going to be a very tricky time with many deaths into one of the great horrors.

of Irish history. We should also just point out what sort of what an odd character. Charles Trevely was, this is McCauley, his own brother-in-law writing about him. He says, his manners are odd, blunt, almost to roughness, at other times awkward even to sheepishness. He's rash, lacks tact, and has no small talk. His topics, even in courtship, esteem navigation, the education of the natives, and the equalization of sugar duties. You can see him courting McCorley's sister with steam navigation and seeing how that went. So he's this very odd character who's put into this vital role. And at every stage, he blocks bringing in whatever it was 100 tonnes of cheap Indian maize from America. I mean, there was a whole idea that people had to

be seen to be poor. In other words, it wasn't as though you could come in and intervene and keep that intervention going for a number of years. So that the idea then, that once the idea of the work of getting people to work that winter just really seemed to be causing death. You must remember that people didn't have winter clothes because people didn't work in the winter. People going out in the morning, the freezing cold, it killed people. So the next move was then to introduce a sort of system of soup kitchens, which the Quakers had done effectively in a number of areas. And they were able to point out, look, we can actually do this. So the second area of, I suppose, public support, of support coming from London was that they would open soup kitchens.

and that they would attempt to feed people, but not by bringing in vast amounts of maize or corn, or stopping the export of corn, but by having this sort of gruel system, really bad soup, which would be given to people. And of course, this didn't work either, because the problem was almost structural, and people began to realize this.

On these five-acre holdings, it's not sustainable. If the potato is not there to keep things going, there's nothing else to keep things going. And places like County Mayo, the population was so dense that people began to see there is only one way to deal with the situation, which is either forced emigration or assisted immigration. One other thing we haven't talked about. We've talked about Trevelyan, Boo Hiss. And we haven't even mentioned the fact that he is an ancestor of Laura Trevelyan,

who is one of the people who's trying to give back some of the money he made through slavery. I mean, Charles Trevelyan was a voracious and enthusiastic trader in human beings. So, you know, that is the Trevelyan that we're talking about. But we haven't talked about someone who I find really fascinating, the Gregory of Gregory's Clause. Now, this is also round about the same time, 1847, the Poor Law Extension Act, proposed by William Gregory in the British Parliament, has this clause in it, which becomes known as the Gregory Clause,

that bars anyone holding more than a quarter of an acre of land should receive famine relief. That is a death sentence. And this comb is the same Gregory, married to Lady Gregory, whose Yates' great muse, one of the great sort of figures of Irish nationalism. I mean, if you're looking for irony, this is the great story. In other words, it's absolutely possible that the figure of Phineas Finn in Trollope is based on Sir William Gregory, who was in Harrow with Trollope. In other words, that when Trollope came to Ireland, one of the people he knew in the country

was Sir William Gregory. And he went up to stay with him, and he got to know some of Daniel O'Connell's people, and on the other side he got to know Sir William Gregory. And Sir William Gregory had inherited an estate at Cool Park in County Galway. And later on, he married Lady Gregory, who was, of course, 35 years younger than him. So that explains how this goes into about 1900 this story. And he was a young parliamentarian, and he was the member for Galway. And when it came to this moment where they realized people are going into the workhouse,

are seeking public support, this is 1847, and yet at any moment they can leave the workers and go back to their holdings which they haven't paid the rent on. And this clause was introduced. It was hardly drafted by Gregory. In other words, he was used as the person to introduce it since he was a young and popular parliamentarian from Ireland. But on the night, I mean, if you look at Hansaard for that day for the debates, it was pointed out that day in British Parliament, the result of this will be. People have to make a horrible choice. They have to give up their holdings completely, walk into the workhouse with the notion they can never, ever return, there's nowhere else for them to go other than the workhouse. So they go to the workhouse,

effectively with their families to die, to be fed some and then die. This was pointed out that night. And this clause became the huge problem because you can just imagine families. There's no food at all. The children are starving. And what happened often on the very day they went into the workhouse was, their small cabin made of mud was raised to the ground. The five acres was added to the next five acres to the next five acres to the next five acres. And suddenly there was a farm and suddenly there could be a new method of agriculture other than just growing potatoes and keeping pigs. You could grow crops or you could have a dairy herd. And so agriculture changed directly as a result of this. But of course, you have to think then you're in the workhouse. How do you get out of the workhouse? Where do you go if you leave

the workhouse? What do you use instead of money if you want to leave the workhouse? And so, this clause became, especially by the 1870s when the history was written, this clause was always called the notorious Gregory Claus or the cruel Gregory Clause. And this meant that when Lady Gregory and W.B. Yates were starting the Abbey Theatre in, say, 1904, they had this shadow over them, which was that Lady Gregory was a widow of Sir William Gregory. And it doesn't come up, but you notice the Abbey Theatre does not put on plays about the famine. And that Yates' poetry does not deal with the famine, that somehow this had to be written out of

their agenda, because of course it was so shadowy and so damaging to them. This was used to cause mass evictions this clause during the famine. The landlords use it as a handle with which to empty out their estates. It was the

blueprint for the clearances. If you look at it from the point of view of the landlord, it was the blueprint for creating the clearances which in turn created in future prosperity. At the other side, if you looked at it from the victims, it was a nightmare because you had that night where you realized if I go into the workhouse, it is over. What am I going to do? There is no food. And that before this clause, that was not your dilemma. You could use some public support such as a

workhouse and leave half your family, for example, on the five acres, so you would keep it. But without the five acres, you were nobody, you had nothing and you had no future. And therefore, the people you're talking about who were founded dead in the ditches, who didn't die in the workhouse, who attempted to leave the workhouse and make their way, say, towards a port to get to Liverpool. These dead were the dead as a result of the Gregory clause. But Native Gregory actually can write, and she does write, about her husband's, how sorrowfully felt during the famine, how sad it was for him to see all of his tenants. Because, of course, on a personal level, back in Galway, away from Westminster, he was

actually seeing his own tenants dying. and that gave him a different feeling. It was a time when people could very easily have two opposite feelings, one of pure pity and the other of quite a cold way of looking at how things should proceed. There was no pity in what he said in Parliament. I was looking up his speeches as well. And what he said in Parliament defending his clause, the clause that's in his name, was it would be well if small farmers disappeared from Ireland altogether.

So there's no pity in that phrase, is there? I often wonder, I mean, I like Lady Gregory, I like the sound of her. I love the fact that, you know, she founded the Abbey Theatre. I love the fact she was a patron to Yeats. I cannot understand how she could stand to be with such a man. Just can't, on a human level, weird. People are really capable of, especially with Ireland and England, go back to your estate, you think of that journey, and you start seeing it, you start witnessing it,

and you realize that these are people you almost know. So William Gregory did feel pity. And also, you have to remember that he had a future too in the colonies. He later became governor of Salon. Yeah, that's right. considered a very good and progressive governor of Ceylon, and he was a trustee of the National Gallery in London. He became quite a distinguished old fellow. As does Trevelyne. Trevelyan, who's this hardline, let's say, fair guy, who in the middle of one of the major famines of world history is worried

about being seen to be too good to Ireland. He goes on to be governor of Madras, and other of the plum jobs of the day, and he's knighted. What Lady Gregory did was, she made the best of a very difficult situation. I mean, Terry Eagleton has a very good statement, saying, if only these aristocrats who became so interested in Irish culture, a generation earlier had not devoted themselves to wiping it out, that there would be much more folklore. There would be many more songs. There'd be a lot more things to do if you're collecting stories. But this is not the way it's worked out. I mean, all I'm claiming is the difference between standing up in Parliament, representing the government as a young parliamentarian

in London. And three or four days later, finding yourself back on the estate and watching people like the walking dead who are there on your watch, that people were capable of having two very different emotions and among them was Sir William Greggler. One of the most infamous evictions took place in Connacht, where Dennis Mahon of Strokesdown House evicted over 3,000 tenants. And, you know, many of them headed to the ports. They weren't trying to get to Liverpool. They were trying to get to Canada. And these ships became known as coffin ships because they were so sick and so unwell and so hungry that many, you know, many died on the voyage over. And the coffin ship is, again, another very strong image from this period

of people who just trying to go somewhere else and they can't make it. Yeah, there were some landlords who realized that the only solution to this is assisted or forced emigration. The problem, of course, was that you went to the port, and there it all was the ship that was ready for you, with hardly any food, obviously with no doctors, with disease being spread from one to another. and the descriptions of the boat to Liverpool are foul because it was cheaper. You could almost get on for nothing. And the description of people in rags, people arriving in Liverpool, just in rags, and also with every type of disease, spread in cholera.

Typhus. They became dangerous in Liverpool as soon as they arrived, which exacerbated the view that there was something deeply wrong, not just with Ireland or with agriculture or the blight, but with the Irish. The journeys to America were much harder because they tended to go to. to Canada first because it was less regulation on the ships. And the description of those journeys of massive numbers of people hired it together, many of them diseased, all of them starving. And so that this idea of assisted emigration became another thing that people felt fierce resentment

about, that the landlords, instead of feeding the people, instead of working out ways of supporting, of changing agriculture while including the people, had got involved in this system, of sending them away, or putting them out of their country. And this became a number another great sort of nationalist. There's an important thing to say as well that this is the beginning of print culture in Irish nationalism. In other words, that Young Ireland,

who are proposing a certain sort of violence, but are also really interested in writing ballads, for example, a ballad like a nation once again, when Ireland long a province be a nation once again, that these ballads were written by the members of Young Ireland, figures like Thomas Davis, and that they began to see that this famine could be written now in books,

an example of what England had done to Ireland. So it made its way not only into ballads, but into, for example, John Mitchell and his jail journal will write about the famine, the famine, the famine. There had been other famines, but this was the famine. And it arose partly because just by 1848, this nationalist group had realized that the way into people's hearts was not merely by monster meetings, but the writing of ballads, the production of books, print culture, which could be passed from house to house and read out loud. And this, This always included the idea that the famine was caused by not merely the potato blight, but by English published policy, which was not merely a passing mood in England,

but it was an attitude towards Ireland which would require Irish independence to solve, that nothing else would solve it. So it became a massive tool, I suppose, in the machine of Irish nationalism, that there had been a catastrophe, and this catastrophe had been effectively caused or exacerbated by England. We're going to go into the full details of that terrible catastrophe in the next episode. Com is going to come back and tell us all about it. Yeah, and we're delighted that Com is going to come back and, again, talk us through what happens, not just to those who suffer, but how actually British policy helps exacerbate that.

We haven't even talked about what happens to the soup kitchens. What happens when the soup kitchens go anywhere so much more? If you can't wait for the next release of our series here on the famine, and you want to hear from Kohlm right here right now, you can become a member of the club. Just go to Empirepoduk.com. That's Empirepoduk.com. And if you do become a member of the club, you don't have to wait.

You'll get the next episode right here, right now. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Durhampool.