In Our Time - The Great Irish Famine

Episode Date: April 4, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss why the potato crop failures in the 1840s had such a catastrophic impact in Ireland. It is estimated that one million people died from disease or starvation after the blight and another two million left the country within the decade. There had been famines before, but not on this scale. What was it about the laws, attitudes and responses that made this one so devastating?The image above is from The Illustrated London News, Dec. 29, 1849, showing a scalp or shelter, "a hole, surrounded by pools, and three sides of the scalp were dripping with water, which ran in small streams over the floor and out by the entrance. The poor inhabitants said they would be thankful if the landlord would leave them there, and the Almighty would spare their lives. Its principal tenant is Margaret Vaughan."With Cormac O'Grada Professor Emeritus in the School of Economics at University College DublinNiamh Gallagher University Lecturer in Modern British and Irish History at the University of CambridgeAnd Enda Delaney Professor of Modern History and School Director of Research at the University of EdinburghProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, in 1845, the potato crop failed in Ireland, struck by a blight which came from North America. Over three million people depended on the potato, a third of the population,

and within a few years a million of them were dead, at least a million migrated and more were to follow. The numbers aren't precise, but conveys something of the scale of the disaster that fell on so many of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, then the world's leading economy. They'd been famines before, but this was made worse by a succession of bad harvests and by the Westminster government not providing enough relief. With me to discuss the great Irish famine are, Ender Delaney, Professor of Modern History and School Director of Research at the University of Edinburgh, Neve Galaher, University Lecturer in modern British and Irish history at the University of Cambridge and fellow of St. Cathman's College and Coma Cograder, Professor Emeritus in the School of Economics

at University College, Dublin. Cormacograder, what was the experience of famine in Ireland before the Great Famine? Well, famines were common in medieval and early modern Ireland, and there had been two massive famines before the Great Famine that we know of. There was one in the mid-17th century at the time Cromwell came and you had wars

and there was a plague outbreak at that time as well and then better documented there was another famine in 1740-41 which was absolutely devastating and may have killed as many people in proportional terms as the Great Famine but then between that and the Great Famine you had a succession of small famines but nothing that would prepare you for what happened in the mid-1840s.

So what is so distinctive about the Great Famine? The Great Famine is unlike most famines in that it wasn't just the product of a harvest failure or a series of harvest failures. It was the product of an ecological disaster in the form of the fungus. And what that meant was that there would be no return to the stage, quo ante because the damage inflicted on the potato was permanent. It wasn't like the periore crop would return to its usual state in a few years. It didn't. And what that meant, of course, was that the population that was kept alive by the potato before 1845, that could not

be sustained anymore. I gave some numbers at the opening of the program. Could you perhaps be more precise or confirm them, whatever, how many people? did die from the famine in various ways and where in Ireland were they? Well, I think you were right to say that we can never be absolutely precise. The million dead is a best guess. Were the truth 1.1 or 0.9, I wouldn't get too excited about that. The issue of famine emigration, again, you know, people argued the immigration is not that well documented, actually. and the number is kind of inferred from what we think the mortality was

and what we know population was in 1841 and 1851. But your estimates are good ballpark estimates, I would say. And what did most people die of? I mean, you might imagine starvation, and that would not be accurate. Most people died of diseases rather than literal starvation. Some of those diseases were, of course, closely linked to malnutrition, such as dysentery and scurvy and edema and marasmus and so. And those were all related to the lack of food.

But then a lot of people died of typhus, what was known at the time as fever. And you didn't have to be hungry to die of typhus. Typhus was caused by lice and by dirt. And the reason people died of that is that once the famine struck, once hunger became a problem, people start to move around. You get people migrating, people wash less, people change their clothes less, and you get the spread of typhus. And several people who were by no means hungry and who were well known at the time died of typhus or fever. So that was, and then there was also what was called relapsing fever, but not so much with hunger as dysentery and the others I mentioned at the beginning.

But you would not be unfair to say that the root of this, or a huge factor in this was the malnutrition, the lack of a staple diet, and that diet poor. Well, let me qualify that. Before the famine, before the fungus, and when the potato did not fail, the potato was good food. and the Irish were relatively healthy, and by the standards of the time,

even though they were very poor, they seemed to have lived relatively long lives compared to, say, people in France or Italy or in other parts of Europe. So the potato was kind of a health food. The trouble is that, as you mentioned also, about a third of the population consumed virtually nothing else.

And when the potato failed, there was no food then you could trade down to. Like in other cases where there were famines, people might be depending on, say, wheat and they could trade down to rye. But that was not a possibility in Ireland in 1845, 1846, 1847. Niem Galaher, could you, let me go into more detail here. In what areas was the potato the dominant food? Particularly in rural areas, so really the rural population of the west of Ireland, particularly Munster as well. They're the sort of geographical areas where you find deaths being very high during the famine years.

And that's where the rural poor were tended to be concentrated. Of course, they're everywhere within Ireland. I mean, it's a rural country and remains a rural country today. And what was the makeup of society? We know that the poorest were worst hit. How many were they in proportion of the population? They were a considerable number, actually. So there are many statistics used by British authorities at this time to try and estimate poverty,

in Ireland and across the British Isles and one of those was housing and fully 60% of Irish people lived in the worst grade of housing at the time. These are essentially in mud huts and mud cabins and this would be the group though it would be most harshly hit by the famine. I've been reading turf outside easily accessible

so there was some heat available. Absolutely, yeah. So as Cormick mentioned, the Irish peasants before the famine actually in some ways were better off than counterparts in Russia or elsewhere. They had a food supply available to them and they had a heating supply, a cooking supply.

Turf was very plentiful. So both of those things together meant that before the famine, the Irish, weren't so relatively badly off, but of course their sheer reliance on this sole crop is what caused part of the devastation. As I understand it, the great disaster of this was that it went on and on and on. In 1946 there was a famine, but people wasn't...

I mean, this is ridiculous, comparative to them, wasn't terrible compared to what was going to happen, but then he went on and then he went on and on and on. And that accumulation was the driving force for a lot of the miseries that followed. Indeed, yes. Accretion, I should have said, yeah. Yes, it's the scale and the intensity of this famine that makes it out to be quite a different one. And there are a number of different reasons why it hit Ireland as badly as it did.

We mentioned the sheer poverty within Ireland, but of course Ireland's population had also grown to around 8.5 million on the eve of the famine. So it had grown from around 5 million at the times of the Act of Union. So you had a large, rural, poor population, and this has made much worse by the peculiar system of land tenure in Ireland on the eve of the famine. Robert Peel was Prime Minister. What steps did he take?

Yes, so Robert Peel, exactly. He was Conservative Prime Minister since 1841, and he had to initially manage the crisis. And when news of the famine became known to the British authorities, initially they took some time to do anything about it. And this is because, again, as Cormac has mentioned, famines were not uncommon. They weren't uncommon at this time.

Harvest failures, in fact, were fairly regular. But by October of 1845, it became very clear to peel and his government that actually this famine was one of a different nature. So what did he do? So he really had two options to hand. First of all, he could either stop exports of food from Ireland. And this remains one of the really controversial aspects of the history. The fact that there still was food in Ireland that was exported from the country during the famine years.

So that was one option. But there was a second option, and this is the one that he chose, and that was to import food to Ireland. So in November of 1845, he spent around £100,000 and importing grain from North America. So they're the first policies, but he also inaugurates a public relief works. And that's essentially a form of employment for the poor so that they can earn money and buy other foodstuffs. And it seemed to be generally effective. But he's better remembered throughout British history for his decision to repeal the corn laws. and the corn laws were protectionist tariffs on domestic agriculture in Britain.

So is this affecting Ireland directly? It does because it changes the government. Yes, it changes the government in June 1846, and this is really the government that emerges from the crisis as being the one at fault. This is the Russell administration of June 1846. So it affects Ireland directly. So, and let's turn to this new government under Russell. They had a different policy from Peel.

Peel, as I get from your notes, the three of you, is in the scale of things, regarded as having a bit of a good go at it. I think I can just about say that. You're nodding, thank goodness. Then Russell came with a different policy. Can you tell us what that was and how ineffective that was? The Liberal Whigs, the core of their ideology,

was basically laissez-faire, which is an ideology which stresses that the role of the state is not to interfere in economy and society. and this had a very practical consequence for the situation in Ireland because in this sense what was the key issue that emerges is what is the state going to do in response to the failure of the potato crop and their policies right throughout the period are conditioned by this ideology but the best thing that a state can do is stand back

and let the free market dictate what actually happens this in I think in the benefit of hindsight which is of course always a great benefit of. benefit, this is seen to be an ideology which has lethal consequences for Ireland. And wasn't there a policy that the Irish himself should solve the problem, that property should solve poverty? In the initial years up to 1847, there's exceptional or emergency measures which are introduced by the British government. After 1847, there is decision that Ireland should be left to deal with the issue of famine on its own resources. And even at the

time, Lord Clarendon, who's the Lord Lieutenant, he declared in October 1840s. 1847 that Ireland cannot survive on the basis of its own resources. This was a pan-UK-wide problem involving Britain and Ireland, yet after 1847, Ireland is basically left to deal with this issue on its own. Does Russell and his, as it were, Chief Aid Trevelyan, do they do things which help or do other things which help or hinder? What's happening there? I think on the hinder side, the key issue is,

the use of public works, which is a fairly well-established policy in Ireland in relation to the family. That is basically getting people to work for income, which they can then use to buy food. This is, by January 1847, this is seen to be a complete failure. And even Trevelyne acknowledges. Why isn't it to do that? Because people can't work during, when they're suffering from malnutrition. The whole system is a bureaucratic monster. It takes them ages to get it going.

So it doesn't provide a very effective relief measure. The one thing which they do, which they borrowed from the Quakers, is they establish an 1847 soup kitchens, and that is a very effective response, which is feeding people directly and making sure that they have sufficient nutrition, but they then decide to wind that up in October 1847. Even though it had reached a massive scale quite quickly, hadn't it? Millions of people were going to soup kitchen. The soup kitchens were their success story of Irish family relief policy. But why did they stop them?

Well, there is an assumption by late 1847 that the Irish famine is over within the British governing elite. Trevelyan writes up his account of the Irish famine and it's published in January 1848 as if that moment has passed. Was this ideological blindness or was it based on some kind of observation? I think there's a sort of ideology, but there's also consideration of the financial Britain and 1847 is in a financial crisis with the collapse of their sort of railway mania. And then the whole issue becomes about restricting the exposure of the Treasury to the costs of alleviating the distress of the Irish poor. Can I turn back to you, please, Coma. What influence did the churches have at this time?

The Quakers, the Catholics, the Angians and the Presbyterians? One could answer that both at an institutional level and at the level of individual clergy. And like at an institutional level, organized a collection of funds from both within Ireland and abroad. And there is a sense in which, and this has been remarked on before, that the Irish famine is one of the first to be relieved from abroad. You know, there was, in a sense, global relief, particularly through the Catholic Church and through the Society of Friends, through the Quakers. And like the Catholic Church,

wherever there were Irish people, organized collections and sent to sent money back. Now, there was a limitation to this, and that is that most of this happened in the early stages of the famine in 47 and maybe into 48. And then after that, the enthusiasm for that kind of activism and relief tended to wane. The famine simply continued, and the relief did not continue. And I think in a sense, people talk about famine fatigue, compassion fatigue, you know, that there's a lot of enthusiasm and in the end people get kind of tired of helping out.

And like, this is also of course, a reminder that private charity cannot really substitute for public action from government relief. When did the famine become known as a disaster? It seems to be. You tell me.

Yeah. Well, my take on this is that had the potato not failed again, in the summer of 1846, we wouldn't be here talking about the famine at all because the famine that would have happened would have been like many of the mini-famines that had happened in Ireland before 1845,

famines which might have resulted in the deaths of hundreds or the low thousands. It's only when the potato fails again, much more disastrously, because the failure in 1845 is, partial. About a third of the crop is lost. The failure in 1846 is

total. And once that happened, a lot of people began to realize that this is not an ordinary famine, this is not an ordinary subsistence crisis. And there was a sense that like I mentioned earlier, there was no

going back to where we were before. And that a whole system of life, a whole way of organizing society, employment, agricultural production was gone. Would it be fair to say that at the time when the famine was established in some people's eyes as being much, much bigger than anything else and there to stay? It was the time that the British government took its foot off the pedal if it was ever really on the pedal and pulled back.

Yeah, I mean, in late 46, I think they did try fairly hard and there was this effort. which N-Demention, in particular, to set up public works. But I would have said that already, before 1846 was over, there were some influential people in the government who said we will not continue this, and we cannot continue bailing out the Irish indefinitely. And one individual that I don't think gets enough of a bad press, we often hear of Charles Carvalian,

but for me, the bogeyman is the other Charles, or Charles Wood, who was the Chancellor, of the exchequer and who was an out-and-out ideologue and who thought that the best remedy in Ireland was to spend as little as possible. Now, the reason he argued that way is that he was a providentialist, a moralist. He believed that the famine was, as he described it, a visitation from the Almighty. In other words, it was a kind of a godsend. It was a way of reorganising Irish society.

So there was a sense in which if God did something for you, you should not meddle too much. You should not try to interfere with divine action. Can I tell you, Neve, can you just give us more detail, it's been mentioned earlier, the effect of the public relief schemes, how effective thereby, what was happening, how many people were employed, what were they doing? Yeah, so the release schemes, they varied, of course, over the course of this disaster. Initially you have the public work schemes that Peel introduces in November of 1845

and they're employing around about 140,000 people before Peel leaves office. They're seen to be generally effective at the time. You do then have the public work schemes brought in under Russell and at the height of that scheme in March 1847 you have around 700,000 people working on these schemes and we have to remember a lot of them are adult men, they are labouring men, they're earning money to feed themselves and their families. And families were large at this time. Three or four or five people wouldn't have been uncommon.

There are other relief policies as well. Of course, there are the public works. And as already mentioned, the more positive policies, the Soup Kitchens Act, for example, of February 1847, which is feeding around 3 million people in spring, summertime of 1847. What about the workhouses? So the workhouses are part of the poor law. And so in Ireland, you have the Poor Law Act of 1838.

it's modelled on the English poor law of 1834. There are 130 workhouses in Ireland on the eve of the famine. They have a capacity of around anywhere between 80,000 and 100,000 persons. By 1849, they have 900,000 people within their walls, right? So nine or ten times more than what they were designed to hold. And workhouses were terrible places. They were made essentially for the destitute, not even for the poor, but for those who really had no other.

option and there's social stigma attached to them and there was a health stigma of going in you were more likely to intensify a disease if you had it or catch one if you didn't absolutely yes mortality rates between people going into the workhouse and well I mean

very rarely came out of it particularly in 1847 and 48 and you've a lot of very ill people going into workhouses as well and in Delaney there was popular sympathy in Britain at the beginning can you tell us something about that and when did it start to wane?

In the initial years of the famine, particularly from late 1845, there's a widespread concern about what's happening in Ireland, and I think it's just both in Britain, but also internationally, as Cormac has alluded to, there's a lot of information about the events there are unfolding. By 1847, I think it would be fair to say that that popular sympathy is evaporating quite quickly.

That's partly to do with conditions in Britain, but it's also partly to do with what, Cormac described as famine fatigue, and we know this from our sort of everyday lives that people, after a while, get tired of hearing about stories of misery, stories of destitution. And that feeds in, I think, into a sense in Britain that famine has become normalized in Ireland. It's a normal. It's no longer exceptional. It's now normal. So what we must do is put in place a policy to deal with it in terms of the long term. So there's a waning in contributions? There's a collection, there's two collections taken in 1840. the first one collects quite a large sum of money the second one which is done later in the year in October 1847 is disappointing because people have got tired

of the Irish story all across Britain and I think added to that is the fact that the famine Irish are now showing up in Britain so something which was a far away problem is now something quite immediate which brings us to migration McCormack and the Irish begin to

migrate in great numbers and Lott came to Britain Liverpool Glasgow let's take those as two examples and then we're going to talk about America candidates or later. Can you tell us the part that migration played in this developing story? Well, migration is a classic coping strategy during famines everywhere. And the first victims of famines are very often people who migrate, either for charity or looking for employment.

So within Ireland, you have internal migration, first of all. But there isn't that much of it. and the reason for that is that Ireland didn't have a big industrial developed region that people could gravitate towards. So the Irish migrated not within Ireland so much as to Great Britain. And they did that in their hundreds of thousands in 47, 48. We hear of people walking across Ireland to Dublin to try to get a lift on it or try to get it. Yes, of course, in biblical numbers or... Yeah, I mean, one of the...

One of the remarkable things is that if you take County Mayo, which is, you know, some would argue that it was the worst affected county in the whole of Ireland. It lost about a quarter of its population in the famine decade. The Mayo-born population of Dublin increased by hundreds between 1841 and 1851. But the Mayo-born population of Britain increased. least by tens of thousands. Now, it's not that the Irish were made particularly welcome in Britain, and a lot of them were sent home by local unions on the basis that unions in Ireland were responsible for them,

and not Rochdale or Berry or Liverpool or wherever they tried to find relief. So if you migrated to Britain and you didn't get sick, you were okay. but if you got sick and became dependent on the workhouse, you were very likely to be sent back to Ireland, which was not a great solution to your problem. So the thing to be said about that, though, is although the Irish were not that welcome, had they not had that safety valve,

had Britain not been there as a place to go, the situation would have been much, much worse. Neve, can we talk about blame now? we've heard about the act of God were the Irish beginning to blame the British for their inaction at this time in the late 1840s? At this time there were certainly press reports within Ireland, within Britain as well,

that the government wasn't taking enough action. Within Britain, of course, who were more mixed. As Enda mentioned, the public opinion in Britain was very mixed at this time. And you see within Britain you see public opinion becoming more fed up of the famine, donor fatigue, the various things, and dimensions has kicked in. Within Ireland, you do see criticism of the government at the time.

This, of course, becomes more profound in later years, and it becomes a part of a political question, something from the 1870s, which ties the land question in Ireland to the political question, and it's the great famine that is the essential context that helps that to actually materialise. Is it becoming a political... It becomes a critical question later,

the nationalist, then much later, then continues and continues. But in the 1840, late 1840s, was it a political question then? It wasn't a nationalist political question, no, not in the 1840s. This does arise later with John Mitchell and the accusations of genocide towards the British government. But in the 1840s, it was a political question in terms of relief. Was the government generating enough relief for Ireland? And the firm belief was that it wasn't? And what action was taken against that, if any? Not much, no. Not much in terms of how the press was reporting this. No. I'm just going to come in on that point because I think it is, most nationalists were content to follow the lead of Daniel O'Connell, Conno, who of course the great nationalist leader, that the government would deliver them from this calamity. It's only after a more radical group called the Young Ireland's start to critique government policies in 1847. Onwards. But also people like Archbishop John McHale of Tume, he famously called the Lion in the West, he was critiquing government policy.

from 1846, the problem with Mackey was he was always critiquing government policy, so it was just a continuation about the famine. But he was quite a powerful voice saying that the government had a responsibility, but most people were content to follow the O'Connellite position,

which was that the Liberals would deliver the relief for us. And the famine's disasters also don't necessarily bring out the best in people. In some people they do, in some they don't. But we hear of atrocities and and so on. Do you want to talk about that as well?

Yeah, I think one of the things that's about the Irish famine is it's often portrayed as a universal experience. Famines, whether they're in Ireland or elsewhere, are never universal. They always, the hardest hit are always the underclass which in Ireland composing, you know, three to four million

people, the stories about hoarding, the stories about speculation, the story... It's all the part of landlords? Well, on the part of tenant farmers who were often Catholics themselves. So it wasn't just landlords. it was large tenant farmers

and people who had an investment in ensuring that the market was maintained during the course of the famine. And these stories exist right throughout the 1840s and sometimes they continue on. Car Marks famously said that the Irish famine killed poor devils only and he was right in that respect. It was a social class disaster and the middle classes which were relatively small

they escaped the worst ravages, only because they had the resources and the capital to protect themselves from the famine. Ney, back to you, you want to come in, but I do want to press, it might be painful about the atrocities mentioned, that give us some idea of them, because I've read it in the notes of all,

even other stuff I've read. I think we should have something of that in this programme. So whatever you're going to say, can you ask to that as well? Okay, sure. Well, first of all, I was going to comment on the peculiar system of land tenure in Ireland, which I think is really important to understand

why so many people are actually hit by the famine. So from the confiscations of land in the 16th and 17th century, part of the plantations of Ireland, most land in Ireland is actually owned by a small elite, an elite that often tended to be of English origin. This wasn't wholly the case by the time of the famine, but it was generally the case. These are the landlords, and they're going to come under a lot of stick by the governments at the time. So the landlords tended to rent out plots of their land to tenant farmers, as Enda mentioned. And a tenant farmer could rent anywhere up to maybe 10 acres of land. land. This group was at risk by the famine, but even more at risk were the poor, the poor that

Enda mentioned, the landless labouring class who didn't have enough resources to rent land from tenant farmers. They, in fact, often just could sublet a plot of land from the actual tenant farmers and surrender some of their crops that they grew on this as a form of payment, or indeed they exchanged their own labour in order to have access to the land. And it's this group really that suffers so heavily by the famine. In fact, they're virtually extinguished by the crisis. Coma, is there? Yeah, I'm not sure

atrocity is the right word, but cruelty, neglect, these were widespread pervasive, and the trouble is that people are trying to live, people are trying to survive, and that

instinct for self-preservation brings out the worst in people. And people do things to each other, and this is not just rich on poor, it's poor unpoor that would be unimaginable in normal times. People desert their children.

Husbands go off and leave the wife and the kids to fend for themselves. People steal from each other. People hurt each other. So there's all this nastiness. A historian in Ireland, Brendan Moxivna, refers to this and the analogy is with the

concentration camps of World War II, the grey zone of famine. And this is a zone within which there is a different morality at work, which in normal times we could not imagine. But the thing is, if we don't understand that that happened, we don't fully understand what famine is about. We have to, I think, try to engage with this. I mean, one aspect of this, which I've written a little bit of myself,

and this is exceptional. But nevertheless, it did happen in Ireland, and had you asked me 20 years ago, I would have said no. I'm talking here about famine cannibalism. There are well-documented, well-attested examples of famine cannibalism. Not many, but nevertheless, it happened. Now, this is what I would call survival cannibalism. It's not people killing others in order to consume their corpses.

It's people trying to live off the cadavers of people who had pre-deceased them. And this, you know, like I say, this is well documented. What is even more scandalous about this is we talked earlier about the famine being declared over in the autumn, the summer of 1847. The examples that I've seen of this, with one exception, occur in 1848 and 1849, you know, when as far as Westminster was concerned, some kind of normality had returned to Ireland. Was there any sense up for anybody? Was there any sense in which there were movements against it within Ireland itself stopping the exports of food going to Britain?

Yes, in the early years of the famine there's well-documented instances where food convoys were attacked by people not necessarily seeking to take the food but seeking for the food to remain within Ireland and be available on the market. So it's not a case of stealing food, it's a case of imposing a sort of a moral economy

that food isn't exported and one of the interesting things which Trevelyan who we mentioned already he reinforces military the role of the military in protecting food convoys that are going up and down through on so it's not as if people sat by

and didn't take action they did in the early years of the famine there's less instances as time goes on there was a sort of popular protest to try and ensure that food remained at prices that people could afford. Was there less fewer instances because as time went on, it became like an accelerator. More people were dying, more people were migrating to various places, and they were just taken up with survival. Yeah, I mean, as human nature is that everyone hopes that the next year is going to be better,

and that is that sense, the cumulative effect of the failure of the potato crop means that essentially people move into a situation of despair and lack of hope by the later years of the famine. I think one of you used the two words were despair and resignation. Neve, what impact was the famine having on the relationship between Britain and Ireland? Yeah, a very important one. I mean, I mentioned earlier on that oddly at the time, apart from this Young Ireland movement that End is mentioned,

which is very small in Ireland in the 1840s, there really is no organised political movement as a backlash. And really, as a result of the... the famine, you get a very important relationship that develops, and that's that important political relationship between land and the national question. So this then takes an organised political form by the end of the 1870s under Michael David. We heard Mayo mentioned earlier on. David himself was from Mayo, his family was from there. They were evicted by landlords during the famine and in fact walked that distance that we mentioned, distance of maybe 140 miles or so, from Mayo

to Dublin to get the ferry across to Liverpool. And David, it becomes the head of this movement. This is the Land League in 1879, and it desires to wrest the control of the land away from these landlords, to restore ownership of the land to the Irish people. And this is a very important political movement, which successive, liberal and conservative British governments respond to. They pass a series of land acts, first of all,

from Gladstone's 1870 Land Act, right up until 1903. The Land Act passed under George Wyndham, who's Chief Secretary for Ireland at the time and this essentially restores land to the Irish people. It builds out the landlords so that Irish people actually are able to own the land.

So it's very important for that, from that respect. And it's also important in terms of the national question as well. What sort of press, if any, and was around in the 1850s, early 1850s, because it goes on six, seven, eight, a bit of a relief and then 950, 51, 51, and it drags on there.

What was the press saying in, in London as it were and in Ireland. Most people have forgotten about the famine by the 1850s. It's interesting that things like people dying have no longer newsworthy because people have sort of moved on from the famine as a has now become an Irish issue. It's become the responsibility of the Irish poor law. And in a sense the British government has abrogated its responsibility to these people

by closing down the emergency operations in 1847. There's a statistics from one of you that compared with other troubles that were going at the time, the money spent on the Irish question was meager. Can you elaborate that? The comparison is often with the Crimean War. A couple of years later, Britain spends some in the region of 70 million on the Crimean War,

yet Irish poor the relief of the Irish family is estimated to be under 10 million so it's about priorities where there's a world there's a way It's not just The amount of money It's what it's spent on When it's spent

And like I said Earlier most of the spending Was done before Summer 1847 Very little was spent Thereafter The other point to be made about it, of course, this money was conditional. It was originally intended as a loan as money that the Irish would have in some way have to pay back.

And then there is the issue that what the money was spent on was constrained in lots of ways, that the money was spent on projects that were not conducive to saving life. I've read about accusations of genocide which were made later as well as much later Neve you've got what do you make of those Yes so they were There was a particular idea that first articulated by John Mitchell who's a Presbyterian radical and revolutionary

And he blames the British government for genocide That actually they were intent on killing the Irish during the famine And he uses these figures such as comparisons with the Crimean War indeed the 20 million pounds spent on plantation owners in the West Indies who were bailed out by the government after the abolition of slavery act in 1833. So genocide's part and parcel of Mitchell's writings and indeed its writings are widely read. And they also have a place within later historiography of the famine as well.

How accurate was he in that description? Well, I mean, genocide, he wasn't accurate. First and foremost, he wasn't accurate. Genocide is a particular... You say that emphatically, yes. I mean, genocide today has a very different meaning in the context of the Holocaust and the horrors of what happened in the Second World War. There is no historical evidence whatsoever that there was intent on the part of the British government to kill the Irish. Coma, can I come back to you?

How is Ireland fundamentally changed by this great famine? Oh, radically. Now, there used to be a school of thought among Irish historians that all the famine did was that, rushed through some changes that were inevitable in the long run anyway. So it would have been said that the 8.5 million that had been reached in 1845 would not be sustained in the long run as more and more people began to emigrate to the states. But there are important ways in which things are very different in the 1850s and 1860s than they had been before. the agricultural system is different.

The diet is different. The living standards of survivors are higher. Real wages are much higher. If you were lucky and you survived, then as an agricultural laborer, you're going to be paid much better in 1860 than you would have been in 1840. At the same time, of course,

because the potato was no longer as reliable as before, agriculture shifted from tillage to pasture and it became more like what Irish agriculture is today with fattening cattle and dairying and so on. There are other changes which social historians have been remarking on. The age at marriage in Ireland before the famine was other low, that increased.

People married less. There are these very important social changes Can I talk about one big change almost finally here? The impact that this had on the Irish political system, and particularly its relationship with America, were an enormous number of people. It was the chief country people migrated to after they tried, no, before Britain, well before Britain,

and the Irish-Americans' descendants now in America is supposed to a number about 40 million. Now, what impact has that had, the American Irish, and what impact has the famine has it developed inside the body politic of Ireland over the next 50,100 years? The role that Irish America played in Irish nationalist politics is critical right from the 1870s onwards

and when an Irish nationalist MP went to the US in the 1860s he was astounded by the level of bitterness that the famine emigrants held towards the British government. That bitterness was subsequently fostered by Irish nationalists both in America and in Ireland and became a hugely important galvanising political force

right up through the into the 1920s but arguably up into the Good Friday Agreement of the 1990s. It's almost as if the famine is the Irish-Americans' foundation story. I mean for Irish America the famine is their story that's the starting point for their journey to North America.

and it's seen as been a key ingredient of their identity. Well, final small word, Eve then. Yes, I just was going to feed in with what I ended said. Kirby Miller in his fantastic book, Immigrants and Exiles, talked about this narrative of exile, which becomes very important to immigrants who left Ireland during the famine. But even those who leave well after the famine, they feel like they're forced out of the country,

and this becomes part and parcel of their identity, which is still very much there today. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Cormacograder, Neve Gallagher and Delaide. Next week we'll discuss the evolution of teeth and why animals like sharks grow new teeth throughout their lives and we don't. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What didn't you say you'd like to say, please say it now? Do you like to start, Neve? Sure, yeah. Probably a number of things to mention. But the first thing would be the national question, which you mentioned Melvin. I think we should probably talk about that for a bit. So you have the foundation of the Land League in 1879

and the desire to restore land ownership to the Irish people. This is really important because this is mobilising thousands of tenant farmers hundreds of thousands of tenant farmers across the country who are now thoroughly politicised and British governments are taking note of them. Another key important person who joins this movement is Charles Stuart Parnell and he's a very famous figure with an Irish nationalism. He takes over this movement and he takes over this movement and he becomes the champion for the Home Rule movement,

the desire for a measure of self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom. And we're linking this back to the famine still? We are, yes. So, I mean, Home Rule essentially dominates the political landscape in the late 19th and early 20th century. And all of this comes from the famine for the desire for tenant farmers to have ownership of the land, to the creation of the Land League,

and that then becomes the foundation for this very important movement, which of course leads to the separation of Ireland from the United Kingdom. I think another important aspect of that, of course, which we didn't mention, is evictions during the famine. I mean, there were hundreds of thousands of smallholders evicted, and Parnell and the Land League used evictions as part of their rhetoric. Now, there was a certain irony to this, because those who were more likely to die during the famine were people who didn't go on any land. So there wasn't an issue of evicting them off their holdings.

But one of the slogans of Parnell and Davit was, keep a firm grip of your homesteads. And that somehow, in the 1880s, it was very effective. Even though, like I say, paradoxically, the people who suffered most were, for all intents and purposes, landless in the first place. I mean, just following on from that, one of the things which Sir Charles Wood wanted to bring about an iron was called a social revolution. And part of that social revolution, as he foresaw it, and actually came into being

was removing all these landless labours from the landscape. So in a way, the criticism of the British government is about ineffective relief measures, but there's also, I think, a criticism to be made about forcing through a social revolution in this terrible time of hunger, disease and death. But bizarrely, even Trevely, even Trevely, when he's reflecting on the famine in 1848, is saying, well, these are sure steps towards the progress that we want to achieve. And that's the progress that he wants to achieve. to achieve, which is getting rid of these huge underclass.

So it's not a case that there was premeditated. This was seen as an added benefit of what happened in Ireland at the time. Absolutely. I mean, we mentioned Trevelyan. I think maybe a word should be said on him. Of course, he's a very important character, and he's almost seen as like the Victorian Cromwell by nationalist and by later revisionists.

That's not a good thing in Ireland, by the way. And Trevelyan, you know, as you mentioned earlier on, Cormac, he believed, he was parted up and bound up in this sort of ideological view about laissez-faire, but also the idea that it was divine providence that was responsible for the famine. And he wrote about this in his book, The Irish Crisis, which he published in 1848. And he described the famine, I quote, as the deep and inveterate root of social evil, one which has been laid bare by a direct stroke of an all-wise and an all-merciful providence. So we can see it there in this writings that is very much part and parcel of this.

I add my top and's worth on Trevelyan. There is a sense in which he was neglected in the historiography until Cecil Woodham Smith, and we all know, wrote The Great Hunger. That came out in 1962. It's the best-selling book on the Irish famine of all time. It's still in print. Now, it's a flawed book, but it's also brilliant. it's a classic, but she demonised Trevelyan

and put him at centre stage in a way really nobody had done before. Mitchell mentions him a little, but I have gone through the literature. He isn't mentioned once, for example, in the oral history of the famine collected by the Irish Folklore Commission. People didn't know who Trevelyan was.

But now when Irish football and rugby supporters congregate and they sing their sons, supporting the team. They mentioned Trevelyans' corn. Fifty years ago, none of them, or their parents or grandparents, would have known who Trevelyan was. So there is a sense in which he was important because he was the senior civil servant at the Treasury. He was important during the famine. That's certainly true. But for a century after the famine, he basically was not mentioned. And that's testament to the power, the rhetorical power, of Cecil Woodham Smith's book.

Just on the point, because it's so a Trevelyne's corn, brought in mind the whole issue of food exports, which we didn't discuss, and that's a huge emote of issue for Irish nationals, the fact that food continued to be exported from Ireland in the early years of the famine. Historians would tell us that in the later years of famine, imports into the country far exceeded exports.

Other countries, other European countries, stopped exports. I think our current understanding is, that even if food exports had been stopped and that would have created what Trevalium would have feared most, which was the collapse of the market, it probably wouldn't have made a huge difference, but

for symbolic value and today it's still one of the most emotive issues that food was exported from Ireland during a time in which many people needed it. And it's, he is seen often as the architect of that and that reference in the song, the Fields

of Athenite or Trevellion's corn is a, you know, his corn being exported from Ireland during the famine? Yes, I think it's also important to talk about how in recent years historians have tried to revive or change revise is probably the right word,

revised Trevelyan's reputation. Robin Haynes, for example, she points out that he was only a civil servant after all. He was responsible to the chancellors of the exchequer. So first of all, Henry Goldburn, but later on, of course, for Charles Wood as he mentioned. And Wood actually needs more, needs to be looked at more

in terms of understanding the famine. But Trevelyan was, in a way, I find odd to find myself sort of describing or defending Trevelyan, but stuck between a rock and a hard place. He was a civil servant. He was caught between the bureaucratic discussions of Dublin, where the British administration was,

and in Westminster. And of course, he's responsible to the chancellors of the Checker, who in turn are responsible to their cabinet. I think, I may be disagree with you on that point. I think Trevellium wasn't just a neutral. actor, he was a player in the whole operation. He had a particular ideology. There was an associated with the Clapman sect in London.

He set out to do things. The fact that he got willing accomplices of ministers, that was not a bonus from his point of view. He had a clear ideological outlook, and I think he set out to achieve certain things in relation to Ireland. It was his good fortune and perhaps Ireland's bad fortune that the political leaders of the day agreed with them.

Coma, we've heard about controlling on God, and they're probably the clap of sect. Most of the Irish were Roman Catholics. What was their relation with God at the time? Oh, they would have been very religious. Why did they think God had sent the famine? I haven't read anything about this.

What did they think of what was doing? Some did, and some of the priests, some of their clergy did. And then there were others who argued this isn't the work of God, this is the work of people not being willing to help us out in our trouble. But sure, I mean, that kind of rhetoric was registered during the famine by, you know, some Catholic clergyman. Was there a sense of racism in the air as well? Definitely. This is part of a mid-Victorian attitude that the Irish are definitely the lowest of the low. and you can see this depicted in newspapers

so like the Times in London for example or in the satirical magazine Punch you do see these racialised depictions of the Irish and Trevelyne of course is also a part of that he visited Ireland himself before the famine in 1843 for about six weeks and doesn't have very good things to say so it's part of a view it's an elite view it's an establishment view it gets worse after

you have many sick people arriving in the shores of Liverpool and they'll swear yeah there was this sense that the Irish were lazy, they were fectless, they were violent, they were unreliable and that somehow they needed to be civilised and then some like

Sir Charles Wood and Sir Charles Trevelyne saw the famine as a means of civilising of reorganising society I think on that point there was a very clear Victorian hierarchy of races and the Kelsfeld at the very bottom of that and there's this sense that they're a nation of potato eaters, that they're at the lowest levels of civilization.

And in a sense, we were providing them with a helping hand by trying to raise their level. And that was a fairly widespread amongst British elites, because we can't know what popular views are, but we can certainly know about British elites that the Irish were seen as a sort of a lower form of civilization. Can I say something more about emigration? Because we talked about internal migration and migration to GB, but we didn't really say much about migration to the US and further afield. And of course, migration to America dwarfed migration to anywhere else.

And of course, that is an element in the role of the American Irish and their nationalist attitudes and so on. There were so many of them that this was going to matter a lot. Now, the important thing to say here is that, of course, these people leaving for America in terrible conditions is part of the tragedy. And that is reflected in two of the best-known famine monuments we have. There's one in front of the custom house in Dublin of these emaciated people trudging to a boat that would take them to Liverpool and then off to America.

And then there is the Irish National Famine Memorial, which is in Mayo. it's near Croke Patrick and it's of a so-called coffin ship where there are as a word skeletons attached to this structure, this wooden as it were wooden boat

but that is certainly one side of the story but the other side and it's one that I insist on is that had that emigration not happened had America not been there as an outlet just imagine how much worse the famine

would have been. Just imagine how worse off Britain would have been because these people if they didn't go to America, where were they going to go? They were going to come and land on Britain in a multiple of what

actually landed. So there is a sense in which Ireland I won't say, you can't say it was lucky, but the famine was probably not as bad in terms of the deaths it would have caused because there was this possibility to migrate.

Now, that has to be qualified to the extent that the poorest of the poor could not afford to leave. Those who left were that step above the worst off. So you have a kind of a hierarchy. The middle classes, they come through, they muddle through, they don't die. The small farmers, they see that the game is up. so they migrate and in very many cases landlords actually help them to migrate. But the very poorest, they're stuck, they can't move and they are overwhelmingly the people who die.

And one of the big problems with policy at the time, and this is not being anachronistic because it was pointed out at the time to the government that these people were part of a system. They were, I call them sometimes the potato people. the potato is gone what are they going to do you can't go on feeding them forever

you can't go on employing them forever you have to get them out of Ireland or else they're going to die and the government would never contemplate helping those people leave so there was really for all intents and purposes

no assisted migration of the poor during the famine there are two or three mini schemes which I have studied in detail and they worked very well but the policy that would have worked, it wouldn't have saved all the lives, but it certainly would have saved lives, is to get the poor out,

and that would have meant getting them to America and facing racial prejudice there, but they would not have been prevented from going there, sending them to Canada. This would have cost money, of course, but it wouldn't necessarily have cost more than keeping the workhouses going year in, year out.

For me, that is a policy that would have worked, would have alleviated the problem. And like I say, a lot of people pointed this out at the time. People advise the government. Really, you must help people leave. Thank you very much. That was considerable. Do you have a coffee?

Yes, I have a coffee. Coffee, please. Coffee tea, please. Tea, please. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. You know the way late at night in bed, in the dark, your tired mind can wander and strange thoughts, float like balloons escaping into the sky. Well, bunk bed is a podcast where Peter Curran and Patrick Marber find the nearest faraway place from the hurley-burly of daily life. where tired minds can wander.

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