WHY THEY LEFT IRELAND:

 

AN GORTA MOR: THE IRISH HOLOCAUST

THE GREAT IRISH FAMINE AND STARVATION: 1845-1849

There were many bad harvests in Ireland before the Great Famine of 1845-1849, but the size of that Disaster dwarfed those that preceded it. A contemporary comment was that "God sent the blight, but the English made the famine": and to some extent this was true because the governments of both Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850) and Lord John Russell (1792-1878) did little to help the starving Irish population.

The bad harvests of 1815 and 1816, resulted in near-famine conditions in 1817. Consequently, emigration levels increased dramatically. During the French Wars, the Irish economy had thrived since the country supplied much of the foodstuff required by the British army. The demand for food had increased employment in Ireland; however, at the end of the wars in 1815, with the Battle of Waterloo, the Irish economy had been hit by depression. Unemployment increased at a time when soldiers and sailors were being demobilized, causing further distress.

Shipowners took advantage of the situation, offering low prices and passage to places such as New Brunswick and Quebec, where the Irish could go for only £5 instead of the £10 needed to sail to America. However, many Irish emigrants went to Scotland and England because it was cheaper. Since shortage of money was a major problem, the few shillings needed to sail to Liverpool was all most emigrants could afford. Most emigrants were labourers or servants. The trend towards emigration to escape the abject poverty in Ireland was to continue throughout the nineteenth century.

The Gormans, Dorans, and Doyles were Irish and all of them emigrated to England, most lkely through Liverpool, and then made their way to Wigan, Lancashhire just prior to and during the Great Famine of 1845-1849 in Ireland.

Like most Irish emigrants in the 1830s-1840s they were "rural-poor" who lived in abject poverty. In England and Wales the Poor Law Amendment Act came into force on 21 August 1834 and was specifically and explicitly aimed at discouraging people from applying for relief which would, in turn, reduce the poor rates paid by the parishes. The legislation also was supposed to prevent idleness among the working classes at a time when unemployment was rising and the number of jobs available was falling rapidly. In 1838, despite strong advice to the contrary, Lord Melbourne's government decided to implement the English Poor Law as the Irish Poor Law Act.

Prior to 1839, unlike England, Ireland had no poor law system of any kind, and with the increasing pressure of population the need for some such provision had become more and more obvious. In 1833, when the reform of the English Poor-law system was being considered, the Government appointed a Commission under the Chairmanship of Richard Whatley, Archbishop of Dublin, to enquire into the need for a system of poor-relief in Ireland. The Commissioners instituted a vigorous and exhaustive investigation and concluded that the deterrent English workhouse system, whose fundamental aim was to force the poor to find work, was totally unsuited to Ireland, as the root cause of Irish poverty was lack of employment. The Commission's proposals were hardly even considered, clashing as they did with government policy.

Since the end of the Eighteenth Century a large proportion of the rural population of Ireland had come to depend on the potato as its staple food because this crop produced more food per acre than wheat and could also be sold as a source of income. Because of the widespread practise of conacre the peasants needed to produce the biggest crop possible. Conacre is the term used to describe land rented for the planting and harveting of a single crop, most commonly potatoes. Conacre was taken by tradesmen, small farmers, and most typically by agricultural labourers who invested all or most of their earnings in "potato ground" from which to feed their families.

The second half of the eighteenth century was the high point for the potato, with several varieties under cultivation. The one of greatest merit was the 'Irish apple', which was valued for its keeping quality and its highly flavoured mealy flesh. By the early nineteenth century, to additional varieties, the 'sup' and the 'lumper' were gaining. A clear hierarchy in quality and preference held, with the Irish apple considered the most superior, followed by the cup and the lumper. By virtue of its high quality, the Irish apple commanded the best market price; and as the population continued to grow to record levels (from 6.8 million in 1821 to 7.8 million in 1831) the poor and labouring classes concentrated increasingly on the cultivation of the cup and the lumper.

Unfortunately, this particular strain was highly susceptive to the fungus, Phytophthora infestans, commonly known as blight, which had spread from North America to Europe.

In 1800, some five million people lived in Ireland. Forty years later, on the eve of the 1845 Great Famine, the 1841 census recorded an Irish population of 8.2 million. Ten years later, the 1851 census reported that the population had been reduced to 6.5 million. Over two million people disappeared: one million starved to death or succumbed to disease and one million emigrated to Britain and North America. Many of them were wretchedly poor, eking out a precarious living on tiny plots of land, and dependent on each year's potato crop. As mentioned above, hunger was no novelty to peasant families, for there had been partial failures of the potato crop all during the early 1800s. However, these had always been of limited duration, and confined to a small number of counties. The Great Famine lasted from 1845 to 1849, and crop failure affected every county of Ireland.

These statistics give some indication of the scale of the disaster but since many of those affected by the famine lived in remote and inaccessible places, it is more than possible that far more people died that has ever been thought.

The cause of the famine was a fungus disease which made the potato plants to rot in the ground, giving off an appalling stench. The blight first destroyed crops on the eastern seaboard of America in 1842, then appeared in England in the summer of 1845. In September, the counties of Wexford and Waterford reported the disease. More than half the Irish potato crop failed in 1845. Sir Robert Peel, the British prime minister, appointed a commission to investigate the problem, but scientists were unable to explain the disease, let alone find a cure In 1846. The potato crop was a total failure.

Peel eventually introduced relief measures. In November 1845, the government spent £100,000 on buying grain from America, in the hope of keeping food prices down in Ireland. He appointed a relief commission which set about forming local committees to raise money and to distribute food. At Westminster, in part prompted by Ireland's problems, Peel succeeded in repealing the protectionist corn laws in June 1846. This opened up the prospect of cheap imports from America.

A month later he was out of office, defeated over a bill to deal with the growing agrarian disturbances in Ireland. The new Whig government, led by Lord John Russell, believed in a free market and was content to leave the supply of food to private merchants. However, the Irish peasants were unused to a cash economy, for they had traditionally worked for a landlord in return for a plot of land on which to grow potatoes. The government hoped that Irish landlords would bear the major responsibility for their tenants' welfare, but many landlords already faced ruin. The most successful relief came from soup kitchens, originally set up by bodies such as the Society of Friends, the Quakers. Where public works continued, they were often delayed by bureaucratic procedures, and workers' health suffered from the inadequacy of wages to buy what food was available. Evictions were common.

Even the weather contributed to the distress, for the winter of 1846-47 was exceptionally cold and wet. To starvation was added typhus and relapsing fever, both commonly called "famine fever". Scurvy and dysentery flourished, and in 1849 an outbreak of cholera claimed many lives, particularly in the larger towns. Many sought to escape to America, only to drown at sea in over-crowded "coffin ships". Those who did reach the New World were often weakened beyond recovery.

Ironically, during the Great Famine, the major problem was not that there was no food in Ireland - there was plenty of wheat, meat and dairy produce, much of which was being exported to England - but that the Irish peasants had no money with which to buy the food. Here are the food exports from Irish ports for the month of July 1846:

 

 

Eventually the government reformed the Poor Law system, so that outdoor relief (in one's home) was added to the limited accommodation of the workhouses. Medical services were improved with the establishment of temporary fever hospitals. By the end of 1849, the potato blight had passed and crops returned to normal.

As I mentioned, about one million people had died, and another million had emigrated. The population continued to decline, not only through emigration but through later marriages, lower birth rates and an end of the subdivision of farms which had made Ireland so vulnerable to crop failure. The famine was to prove a watershed in Anglo-Irish relations, for the inadequacy of government measures left an enduring legacy of bitterness in Ireland and among those thousands of Irish emigrants who found a new life across the Irish Channel in England or across the Atlantic Ocean in America.

Our families crossed both bodies of water, and the rest, as they say, is history.