Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Irish Potato Famine

Starting point is 00:00:00 In 1845, farmers around Europe suffered from a blight that devastated the potato crop. This lasted for several years, but nowhere was more pronounced than it was in the island of Ireland, where it resulted in death and mass migration. The effect of this potato blight can still be witnessed in the world today. Learn more about the great Irish famine, also known as the Irish potato famine, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:47 It effectively turned day and tonight. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thurline podcast from NPR. To understand how and why the Irish potato famine occurred, there are a few things we need to understand first. And the most important was the economic and political situation in Ireland at the time. Despite the fact that Ireland was supposedly fully integrated into the United Kingdom, it was in reality a colony. Having been conquered by England, almost all major landowners in Ireland were English or Anglo-Irish. In theory, they had representation in Parliament in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords,

Starting point is 00:01:28 but almost all of those people were also wealthy Englishmen. Many of the landowners in Ireland also didn't even live there. They simply had no connection to the land or the people who worked on the land. It was simply an investment. Almost all of the land was confiscated by force by aristocratic English starting back in the 17th century. Irish Catholics were for all practical purposes second-class citizens in their own country. The way the absentee landlords would make money was by renting their lands out to peasants who would grow crops for export. This was all conducted via system known as the middleman system.

Starting point is 00:02:02 Agents would be hired who lived in Ireland and collected all the rents. These agents held great power, and they could and did abuse this power, on a regular basis. Their bosses weren't there, and quite frankly, didn't really care, so long as their rents were paid. Almost all of the money made in Ireland was sent out of the country. This system resulted in Ireland being the poorest country in Europe in the mid-19th century. Parliament conducted many inquiries into the problems of Ireland. One such report which the Earl of Devon oversaw reported, quote, It would be impossible adequately to describe the privations which the Irish laborer and his family

Starting point is 00:02:37 habitually and silently endure. In many districts, their only food is the potato, and their only beverage, water. Their cabins are seldom a protection against the weather. A bed or blanket is a rare luxury. And in nearly all, their pig and a manure heap constitute their only property. End quote. On top of this, Ireland also had the highest population density of any country in Europe at the time, and it had a population of about 8.75 million people. I should also note that at this time, much of the native population, in Ireland didn't even speak English. They spoke Gaelic. A poor, large population resulted in high rents for very small plots of land, which were the only things that peasants had to grow their own food. And this brings me to the subject of the potato. If you remember back, I did an entire

Starting point is 00:03:23 episode on potatoes. Potatoes were actually a miracle crop for Europe, once Europeans opened up to it. Potatoes provided far more calories and nutrients than any other crop which could be grown. If the amount of land you had was limited, then the smart option was to grow potatoes. For poor Irish Catholics, potatoes were the foundation of their diet. They would literally eat potatoes in almost every form for every meal. They might occasionally have some butter and onions with them, but that was about it. Not only did people eat potatoes, but so did the livestock. It turns out that Ireland was also very well suited for potato production. They grew well, and Ireland was one of the first countries in Europe to adopt the potato. The potato was really the

Starting point is 00:04:04 food that made life in Ireland even possible in the mid-19th century. And then something happened around 1842 to 1844. In the Toluca Valley in Mexico, a pathogen began to spread in potatoes. It was a fungus that could wipe out entire crops and make the products inedible. The blight spread north into the United States, but the impact wasn't that severe because Americans weren't reliant on potatoes. They had a wide variety of foods that were grown, and without potatoes, they had plenty of substitutes.

Starting point is 00:04:31 From the U.S., the blight spread by ship to U.S. the blight spread by ship to Europe. And here I should note that the potato blight didn't only occur in Ireland. The Irish potato famine was just a subset of what was known as the European potato failure, which affected most of Europe where potatoes were grown. In fact, many countries suffered worse potato harvest than Ireland did. What magnified problems in Ireland was the poverty, land ownership, and the over-reliance on a single crop. When the blight arrived in Ireland in 1845, nobody was sure what caused it. It was a bad year for weather, the worst that anyone of any age could remember. The blight was first reported on the Isle of White in mid-August, and it was spreading through Ireland like wildfire by September.

Starting point is 00:05:12 It became clear that Ireland was going to have big problems. Estimates are that the potato crop in 1845 was down by a third to a half. Now, to be sure, a failed crop is a bad thing, but if a single year's crop goes bad, it usually is something that you can survive. This happened before in Ireland, and it wasn't an unfamiliar occurrence in all agricultural societies. What made this so bad is that the blight didn't go away. In 1846, it was estimated that 75% of the potato crop was lost. What was just widespread hardship had now turned into an actual famine. The government's reaction to this was totally out of the hands of the Irish, who really didn't control anything. All around Europe, governments did two things immediately. First, they removed tariffs on food impasse, so that more food could come into the country from unaffected areas. Second, they usually banned food exports,

Starting point is 00:06:03 so more food was available to the people in their own country. This is exactly what Ireland did back in 1782 and 1783 when Ireland faced a food shortage. The British Parliament did the first thing. They removed what were known as the corn laws, which were high tariffs on grain. However, they never did anything about exports. During the entire time of the famine, Ireland was exporting food out of the country, usually to England. Food, which was owned by wealthy Englishmen who didn't live in Ireland. The person who the British sent to Ireland had up relief efforts was Sir Charles Trevelyn.

Starting point is 00:06:38 The problem was Trevelyn pretty much hated the Irish. He didn't view the famine as a problem of food or even land ownership. He viewed the famine as a result of the moral failure of the Irish. He thought that this was the judgment of God on the Catholics and said, quote, the real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse, and turbulent character of the Irish people. End quote. 1847 was probably the worst year of the famine. Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act, which modified the 1838 Irish Poor Law.

Starting point is 00:07:11 This law mandated that anyone who owned at least a quarter acre of land was ineligible for any aid or assistance. This meant that someone who had sold off everything to pay their rent would now receive nothing until the land reverted back to the landowner. This resulted in massive evictions which began in 1847, but increased all the way through 1850. Also, because of the hunger deaths which began in 1846, there were few seed potatoes available for 1847, which just made matters worse.

Starting point is 00:07:39 An estimated 50,000 families were evicted from their land between 1847 and 1850. The total number of deaths from 1845 to 1851 is unknown, but the estimates are usually around 1 million and as high as 1.5 million, and this includes deaths from starvation and from disease. In addition to the deaths, the famine also resulted in a massive wave of immigration out of Ireland. There was a peak of 250,000 people who immigrated to the United States in just 1847, with another 100,000 who left for Canada.

Starting point is 00:08:11 Immigrants brought diseases with them which ravaged the ships as they crossed the Atlantic, and they were responsible for a large outbreak of typhus in the United States in 1847. Many immigrants were often sent away by their landlords in exchange for their land. Most of the immigrants to North America were young people, predominantly, from the western counties of Ireland. Many people also immigrated to England. Liverpool became a quarter-Irish by the year 1851. Aiden donations were sent to Ireland from around the world. The most interesting donation came from the Chalktaugh Nation of Oklahoma, who had been forced to live there via the Trail of Tears just a few years earlier. They raised a $170, which was a fair amount of money for 1847, and a whole lot of money for a mid-19th century tribe that had lost its land.

Starting point is 00:08:56 The Great Famine set off a spark that resulted in massive changes to Ireland. It really could be said to have kicked off the Irish National Movement, which eventually resulted in Irish independence decades later. The biggest example of this was the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848. Immigration from Ireland didn't stop once the famine was over. Ireland saw a decrease in population every decade until the early 1960s, when the population bottomed out at around 2.1 million people. Even today in the 21st century, the population of Ireland, both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, is less than what it was in 1841. As for the blight itself, it was eventually identified as the fungus phytophyshora

Starting point is 00:09:36 infestins, which can still infect potato and tomato crops today. In fact, there was another potato blight which occurred in Ireland in 1879, but it never resulted in a mass death. So one of the big questions for historians is, why did crop failures before and after the great famine not result in the same things? Why did the same potato blight in other European countries not result in famine when it did in Ireland? The overwhelming historical consensus is that it was due to the British response and the rule over Ireland. The land confiscation, absentee landlords, the middleman system, the evictions, the failures, the failure, to stop food exports, all contributed to turning a bad situation into a disaster.

Starting point is 00:10:17 John Mitchell, one of the leaders of the Young Ireland Rebellion in 1848, wrote one of the first academic accounts of the famine in 1860, and in it he wrote, quote, The Almighty Indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine. Today, there are many commemorations of the Great Irish Famine. There is an unofficial national famine commemoration day in Ireland, which is celebrated on the third Sunday in May. In 2015, a sculpture titled Kindred Spirits was installed in County Cork, which honors the donation of the Choctaw people. There is an Irish Hunger Memorial located near Battery Park in New York, and the National Famine Museum is located in Strokestown Park, County Ross Common, Ireland. The Great Famine remains probably the singular most influential event in the history of modern Ireland.

Starting point is 00:11:02 It has directly or indirectly shape the history and demographics of the island of Ireland for over 175 years. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener P1BK over at Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, Incredible. What an incredible podcast.

Starting point is 00:11:29 From the Black Sox scandal to the history of the chicken. What more could you ask for? Thanks, P1BK. I know what you could ask for. More episodes. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show. Thank you.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Irish Potato Famine

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