71 Help! Responses To The Famine

One of the things that made the Irish famine especially bad was a lack of help for the starving. The British government was reluctant to help too much, partly out of fear that the poor would depend on aid and not try to help themselves. The mid-nineteenth century was the heyday of laissez faire economics, which taught that the free market would solve all problems and that the government should never intervene. Unfortunately, that approach led to tragedy for the Irish population.

Politicians quickly got word that the Irish peasantry had nothing to eat. Many English were not particularly impressed with the Irish plight.

A number of them thought that the famine was a punishment for Ireland’s sin of overpopulation. According to population theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, Ireland had far too many people for its land to support, and the best solution was to get rid of most of them. The famine would take care of that.

The truth was, the factors that contributed to the Irish famine were far more complex than mere overpopulation. There was plenty of food in Ireland. The island grew and exported more than 1 billion pounds of grain every year. Many Irish actually sold this food willingly so they would have the money to pay rent. Ireland also was not allowed to import rice or corn from the British colonies. This was the effect of the Corn Laws (the British call wheat “corn”; they call corn “maize”), which set artificially high prices for British grain and locked out cheaper imports until the entire British crop was sold. This was a problem for the Irish, who had no money.

Prime Minister Robert Peel initially took pity on the starving Irish, and, unbeknownst to his own government, ordered Indian corn from the Americas to be delivered to the island. This corn was only a last resort for the sufferers; it was difficult to grind and cook, not nearly as filling as potatoes, and it lacked vitamin C. It ran out quickly, too, and was not replaced.

Peel resigned in 1846, and for the next four years the man he appointed to oversee famine relief, Charles Edward Trevelyan, handled matters. Trevelyan didn’t have a very high opinion of the Irish, and in fact only visited Ireland once; he thought distance helped him maintain objectivity. He was a firm believer in laissez faire and thought donated food actually exacerbated the problem by relieving the Irish of the obligation to feed themselves. Unfortunately, in some places, no one had either food or money, so feeding themselves was completely impossible. Irish crops continued to be exported, which led to great resentment on the part of the Irish people.

When people got truly desperate, there was a place that they could go: the workhouse. These houses had been established in the early 1840s to provide relief to the poorest people. Opponents of workhouses feared that the Irish would abuse the system, using the workhouse if they weren’t truly desperate. But supporters countered that they could solve this problem by making workhouses so unpleasant that only people with no alternative would enter them.

Unpleasant they were. Anyone who owned land had to give it up before entering a workhouse, which forced many families to choose between staying on their farms and starving or giving up their land for a chance to eat. People who entered a workhouse were segregated by sex, which meant dividing up families. They were forced to live there, essentially sentencing themselves to prison. They had to give up their own clothes and wear pauper’s uniforms, which marked them as destitute. They had to work at menial jobs to earn their keep—men broke up rocks, women knitted, and children either had lessons or learned to do various industrial tasks. Families only got together on Sundays.

The Irish people did everything they could to avoid the workhouse. They found the splitting up of families especially hard to bear. The unpleasant regimen did succeed in keeping people away from public charity in the early 1840s and even into 1846, before the second bad potato crop.

But after the second nonexistent potato harvest in the autumn of 1846, people were more willing to surrender their dignity in the hopes of not starving. Poorhouse food was bad and often inadequate, but at least it was food. By mid-October, most workhouses in the worst-hit areas were full and turning away inmates.

Crowding did nothing to improve the workhouse atmosphere. The stench became overpowering as hundreds of unhealthy people contributed their bodily products to the building. Typhus, cholera, and other diseases thrived in this environment, and many people died.

Not everyone could fit into the workhouses, and many people refused to even consider the possibility. The government provided an alternative for them: working for pay on public projects. Local relief committees made lists of people who needed help, and then one member of each needy family was allowed to work for pay.

This was a nice idea, but ineffective in practice. The projects in question involved hard physical labor—digging ditches, breaking and moving rocks to build roads—and the workers were already malnourished. The winter of 1846 to 1847 was especially harsh, and the workers had no adequate clothes. Many of them fell sick and dropped dead on the job. In fact, 1847 was such a bad year that it became known as Black ’47.

The wages for public works would have been generous in the days of plentiful potatoes, but during the famine food prices went through the roof. A week’s wages were barely adequate to buy half a week’s sustenance for a family of any size, and many Irish families were large. Families were desperate to keep someone on the works to collect money, though, so they would often deprive nonworkers of food to keep up the strength of the wage-earner. Children would go hungry so their father could eat.

In many cases, the person going out to work was also the person who would have planted the next year’s potato crop at home. Without that labor, the next year’s harvest suffered.

At the start of the famine, the government insisted that charity was best done by private institutions. The Quakers in particular rose to the occasion, opening soup kitchens to feed paupers. Some landlords helped their tenants, providing food, clothes, or housing. Irish peasants helped one another when they could; many stories from the famine years tell of housewives who gave away their last cabbage in the garden or last drop of milk from the cow, only to have their supplies miraculously renewed the next morning. These are nice stories, but unfortunately usually not true.

In 1847, the government stopped the public-works programs and announced that from now on, private aid would be the solution. The British still feared that too much aid to the Irish would prevent them from ever going back to work. The British decided that Irish landlords must be responsible for the famine, so it would be their job to fix it. Local governments were supposed to organize charitable soup kitchens paid for by taxes collected by local relief committees.

But as the famine years progressed, Ireland had less and less food and money. Landlords went bankrupt as their tenants failed to pay rents, and property taxes went up, ironically, to provide money to feed the starving. In an effort to lower their property values and thus their taxes, some of them evicted the peasants still living on their land and tore down their huts. Britain sent more and more soldiers to Ireland to enforce evictions and see that taxes were collected. This combination of military might and no food made the Irish even more resentful of the occupying British government. Though there was more food available now, no one had the money to buy it.

Matters were made even worse by a financial crisis in Britain in 1847. Wheat prices plummeted, railroad stocks fell, and many businesses went bankrupt. The British had less money to help the Irish, even if they had wanted to.

The winter of 1848 to 1849 was a nightmare for the Irish. They had gambled on the potato crop, spending every cent they had to buy seed potatoes that they planted in the spring; after all, the blight hadn’t attacked the 1847 crop, so they had reason to hope that it was gone. But they were terribly wrong; the blight was still around and it devastated potatoes all over the island. Landlords kept evicting peasants, and the British government kept raising Ireland’s taxes in the vain hope that this would help the island pull itself up by its bootstraps. The poorest people shrank down to human skeletons before dying. Some turned to crime as an alternative to starvation—in prison or on a ship heading to Australia there would at least be something to eat. Wealthier people gave up on Ireland and left for other countries.