Their Anglo-Norman ancestors conquered the “houseess wilds” of Connemara, but by the nineteenth century the Martin family were considered good landlords. After the Union, first Richard Martin and then his son, Thomas Martin, represented Galway in the House of Commons. The elder Martin was remembered in Parliament for advocacy against cruelty to animals. “The cab horses,” one writer joked, would remember “Humanity Dick… with tears of gratitude.” When Thomas Martin came into his inheritance in 1834, he was astounded at the extent and complexity of his family’s debts, some of which dated to the mid-eighteenth century. To consolidate, Thomas Martin took out a £200,000 mortgage. When the blight struck, he employed many of his tenants and arranged for the construction of a fever hospital on his estate. Like many who ministered to the sick during the famine, Thomas Martin contracted typhus. He died in April 1847. The Law Life Assurance Society, which owned the mortgage, informed Mary Letitia Martin, Thomas’s only child, that she was in default and that if she did not make back payments, with interest, the society would take possession of the property. The estate was brought before the newly established Encumbered Estates Commission, convened to liquidate and sell deeply indebted and insolvent Irish estates. The commission granted the Law Life Assurance Society possession in exchange for writing off the debt. Mary Letitia, a novelist who published under the name Martin Bell, emigrated in 1850 and died ten days after she arrived in New York. In 1851, a Galway court approved a request filed by the new owners of the estate to evict more than three hundred tenants.1
The horrible winter of 1846–1847 did not end the Great Famine, but it did begin a new phase of the crisis. After 1847, famine conditions and epidemic disease were more localised, concentrated in Ireland’s most deprived Poor Law unions. In these unions, the slaughterhouse of Black ’47 never closed, and the indigent continued to die in squalor. Meanwhile, throughout Ireland, and especially in the poorest unions, a process of eviction and expulsion—driven by utter destitution among the impoverished, and by bankruptcies like the Martin family’s among the rich—pushed hundreds of thousands off farmland and through the gates of union workhouses or up the gangways of emigrant ships. Ireland, again, was dismayingly modern. The returns on exploiting the labour of the Irish poor had long diminished. Now, surplus to requirements, they were expelled. Exclusion and eviction through the retrenchment of the Poor Law became the newest “natural” consequences of the alleged failure of the Irish poor to interpret the signals of the market.2
After the Russell government cut bait in 1847, responsibility for both famine and poor relief in Ireland devolved onto the Poor Law unions. The number of Irish unions increased from 130 to 163, and each was reorganised under the control of a board of guardians. In August 1847, Edward Twistleton, the Ceylon-born son of the Anglican archdeacon of Colombo, was appointed chief commissioner of the new system. From November 1, 1847, relief was restricted under the Gregory Clause to those labourers occupying a quarter acre of land or less. All magistrates were given the power to imprison beggars found outside their home union for up to a month’s hard labour. The commissioners argued that Irish society could be protected from “a state of almost universal pauperisation” only by rigid rules.3
As international donations ran out, unions repeatedly raised the poor rates—taxes paid by wealthier residents in the union based on the number of people claiming workhouse relief. However, many unions did not, or could not, collect enough rates to support the poor, and Parliament was divided over how to fund these “distressed” unions. When some unions approached bankruptcy, another new law, the 1849 Rate-in-Aid Act, established an Irish national tax that could be applied in emergencies to support the poorest unions. The new system emphasised the principle adopted by the Whig government during the humanitarian and financial crisis of 1847: Irish poverty was an Irish problem, and not a problem for the wider United Kingdom. In theory, the Poor Law system was designed to impel the poor to better their station by looking for wage work, and it was up to the rich to either offer wages in exchange for labour or pay high rates to support an overflowing workhouse. However, in practice, most unions gave outdoor relief, usually in the form of food, sometimes after a stay in the workhouse, sometimes after another “test of destitution.” In 1849 alone, more than 930,000 people were relieved at the workhouse, either indoors or out.4
The retrenchment of the Irish Poor Law accelerated and expanded an ongoing housing crisis. Evictions increased in number as more land changed hands. The poor had always been vulnerable to eviction for unpaid rent. Now they could be evicted, whether they were paid up or not, as a condition for the consolidation of their landlords’ debts. Officials in Britain had noted that many Irish estates attracted little interest from potential investors since many were entangled in complex mortgages and other debts. In response, the Encumbered Estates Commission was formed to hasten the liquidation and sale of these properties. George Grey, the home secretary, argued “that a remedy for the over population of Ireland could only be found in the gradual operation of natural laws.” The government had, in effect, built an eviction machine.5
The blight returned in 1848 and 1849 and struck hardest in the west of Ireland, where many Poor Law unions had complex, pressing needs and fragile tax bases. In late 1847, outrages became more common as the Irish poor wielded familiar weapons of last resort: murder, arson, and intimidation. In response, the Russell ministry fell back on coercion, adding to the usual powers of martial law a series of provisions to suppress a small but vocal nationalist movement. Soon, after a brief and quixotic march through the countryside of Tipperary and Kilkenny in summer 1848, the leaders of the Young Ireland movement declared open rebellion against the United Kingdom, skirmished with the Royal Irish Constabulary, were defeated, and were sent into exile. Instead of a national uprising, the grind of hunger and rent and rates and workhouse stone-breaking and lice and fever and death and leave-taking continued, and the famine years slouched to an end in 1851–1852.6
After two years of famine, outrages in Ireland increased in the late summer and autumn of 1847—but one murder, of Major Denis Mahon, of Strokestown, County Roscommon, became a lightning rod. In the spring of that year, after a series of successful eviction proceedings, Mahon and his agent had arranged passage from Liverpool to Quebec for hundreds of Mahon’s former tenants. Many died on the passage or in cramped and miserable Canadian quarantine stations, and reports that Mahon had evicted his tenants and then sent them to die on “coffin ships” were repeated back on his estate. A few months later, in November, Mahon was shot and killed, and bonfires were lit across Roscommon in celebration. A Roman Catholic priest who had served on a relief committee with Mahon was suspected of having incited the murder—or even of planning it. Other attacks on landlords and their agents followed. The lord lieutenant, Lord Clarendon, requested a Coercion Bill—the usual response to rural crime in Ireland.
But at that moment, the situation was uniquely tense. The usual worries about rural unrest were augmented by rumours of organised rebellion against the United Kingdom. In the winter of 1847, the Young Ireland movement had formally split from the Repeal Association and founded a new group, the Irish Confederacy, with a charter to seek an end to the Union—by force if necessary. In early 1848, revolutions broke out over continental Europe: in Italy, Austria, France, Hungary, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and elsewhere. These revolutions aimed at the overthrow of monarchies and the formation of new governments based on the idea of the nation rather than the Crown. The combination of rising rural crime as the famine dragged on and revolutionary movements in Ireland and Europe made London more acutely fearful that a new, Romantic Irish nation would rise in unstoppable numbers against the United Kingdom.7
Irish and British newspapers reported on and evoked the 1848 revolutions in what must have felt like real time, as reports from journalists were carried quickly by steamship and sometimes by wire from Ireland and appeared in print within hours of receipt. In Britain, the Home Office worried that the People’s Charter movement (or Chartism), dedicated to the reform of Parliament through an expanded franchise, salaries for MPs, and other measures, would organise a revolt like the one in Paris that had pushed King Louis Philippe off the French throne in February 1848. A planned Chartist march in April 1848 was suppressed by government order, and police were on alert. In Ireland, troops camped near towns, including a regiment in Phoenix Park in Dublin, and “moveable columns” of infantry were activated, ready to occupy the country if necessary.8
Aware of the tumult on the Continent, John Russell was sceptical that a Coercion Act would calm Ireland. Moreover, having come to power after defeating Peel’s Coercion Bill, he knew he would seem a fool and a hypocrite if he pushed for the same measure barely two years later. Coercion, he wrote, would be “an aggravation rather than a cure of the organic disorder.” Instead, Russell tried to persuade his cabinet to grant more resources to Irish Catholic clergy, protect tenants against arbitrary eviction, and extend to all of Ireland the Ulster system of “tenant right” that offered some compensation to tenants who improved land they rented. Lord Lansdowne spoke for the majority in the cabinet when he dismissed Russell’s plan: “You might as well propose that a landlord should compensate the rabbits for the burrows they have made on his land.” Russell backed down, and in December 1847 the Crime and Outrage Act came into force. But the lord lieutenant, Lord Clarendon, wanted even more: he asked the government to suspend habeas corpus to arrest nationalist leaders. The “condition of Ireland,” Clarendon wrote to Russell, was already that of a “servile war,” a peasant or slave rebellion.9
The government had new legal tools with which to respond to revolution. By law, treason—which included armed rebellion but also advocating for the overthrow of the government in print or in public—was punishable by death. However, the government recognised that juries were reluctant to execute offenders for nonviolent dissent. The Whigs did not want martyrs or humiliation at the hands of sympathetic juries willing to nullify Crown prosecutions. The 1848 Treason Felony Act reduced the penalty for treason from death to life imprisonment or transportation. In Ireland, the act was used to indict and convict John Mitchel, whose newspaper, the United Irishman, had called for insurrection. In May 1848, Mitchel was convicted and bundled onto HMS Shearwater, a steamer bound for Bermuda, whence he was transshipped to Australia. The United Irishman was closed and its offices raided. In June, Thomas Devin Reilly and James Fintan Lalor founded another newspaper, the Irish Felon. It was suppressed after only five issues, its type and printing press seized. Reilly was sentenced to transportation to Tasmania, and Lalor died in prison. To escape arrest, other prominent Young Irelanders, including William Smith O’Brien, the leader of the movement in Parliament, fled south. Large parts of counties Dublin, Cork, and Waterford, as well as the town of Drogheda, were put under martial law. On July 22, 1848, the government finally caved to Clarendon and suspended habeas corpus. In response, Young Ireland declared war.10
On July 29, a Manchester telegraph office received a cable relayed via Dublin and Liverpool. The south of Ireland was in open revolt. The train station in Thurles, County Tipperary, was burning, and miles of railroad track leading to and from the town had been sabotaged to slow the arrival of reinforcements. Irish soldiers in British regiments were refusing to fire and deserting in numbers. Kilkenny was under the control of the rebels. In Manchester, civic officials worried that a riot would start in the city’s Irish neighbourhoods, and its Irish Confederation clubs were put under surveillance. In London, Chartists cheered “vociferously at every allusion to hostility to the Government or to physical force.” A Belfast newspaper alerted “every loyal inhabitant” to make ready to fight for the Union. The London Times reminded readers that although the Irish countryside might be close to Britain in geography, it was distant and alien in time. The Irish poor would erupt like medieval peasants in revolt. “If, in the nineteenth century,” the Times warned, “Ireland is to bear the pangs of internecine strife, the war will be servile also, and marked by atrocities as barbarous as the world has ever witnessed.”11
On July 28, a crowd that some guessed was as large as five thousand people gathered in Mullinahone, in the Tipperary countryside, to hear Smith O’Brien speak. Smith O’Brien and his entourage then travelled to a coal mine near the village of Ballingarry. British Army dragoons and riflemen occupied Cork, marching from Great George’s Street (now Washington Street) to the Grand Parade. Residents gathered to watch, “from motives of curiosity and wonder at this inexplicable movement.”12
On July 29, about fifty officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary, on the march to Boulagh Common, in Ballingarry, met a group of armed rebels, led by Smith O’Brien. The size of the rebel force depends on who tells the story. Celebrations of the police claim that Smith O’Brien led five thousand men, but his followers may have been as few as four hundred. In any case, the rebels outnumbered the police. However, the rebels were mostly armed with pikes and pitchforks. The police had rifles. The constabulary retreated into a two-storey stone house near the common, surrounded by a square stone wall. According to reports, when the insurgents began piling straw and hay around the doors, to smoke out—or burn alive—the police, the officers opened fire, killing at least two. The crowd lost its nerve and melted away. “Smith O’Brien and his friends,” according to one report, “then appear to have got disgusted… declaring that as the people would not stand by him, he would not stand by them.” Smith O’Brien was arrested soon after. The rebellion was over. Many of the Irish Confederacy clubs had dissolved after Mitchel’s arrest, although the Freeman’s Journal reported that die-hard Confederates in Tipperary had holed up in a safe house, “a perfect fortress on a small and domestic scale.”13
In the end, almost nothing had happened. Russell and his cabinet were relieved to learn that “the news… telegraphed from Liverpool, was totally destitute of foundation.” Young Ireland failed to ignite a mass movement. Young Ireland sought an alliance among Catholics, Anglicans, and Presbyterians—a secular politics that appealed to middle- and professional-class Irish liberals but was suspicious to many others. And unlike the conservative Catholicism of Repeal, Romantic nationalism and Celtic revivalism were alien to many of the exhausted, starving rural poor. Among calls for revolution, the Irish Felon ran advertisements from W. J. Kelly, a Dublin engraver, who sold a range of nationalist swag, including gilded stickers to seal letters and “the celebrated Shirt Studs,” made of transparent ivory, “engraved with national devices… a very beautiful emblem of nationality.” The studs were available depicting either a harp, a shamrock, a wolfhound, a set of pikes, or a cameo of John Mitchel (“3d. per set extra for those having the likeness”). For Irish intelligentsia, the idea of an Irish nation was coming into focus. But for the poor, the politics of starvation were blunt, local, Catholic, and cautious.14
A week after the rebellion, the Times, which only a week earlier had warned readers of a bloody civil war, now chuckled at the “Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch.” According to the Times report, Smith O’Brien, “King of Munster,” was found “squatted in her cabbages to avoid the fire of the little garrison.” A naïve reader would have been forgiven for imagining that Ireland was a distant colony rather than a partner in the United Kingdom. The officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary were almost all Irish and many were Catholic; the victory was one of “Papists over Papists… of Irishmen trained in the school of loyalty and duty, over Irishmen debauched and demoralized by disaffection and rebellion.” The loyal Irish troops reflected the vitality of the British Empire, while “O’Brien crawling among the cabbages” was “an emblem of the national degeneracy” of independent Ireland. There were two Irelands, the Times implied, on either side of a civilisational divide. One people were guided by Britain, integrated into the Union, and supplied the empire with brave and disciplined soldiers and policemen. The other rejected British rule—and were cowards, slithering in the dirt.15
A witness giving evidence in 1848 to a special committee of the House of Lords feared that “the only practical remedies” remaining for Irish poverty and unrest “are death or emigration.” The crisis of 1846–1847 inspired pity and feelings of solidarity with the famine-stricken Irish. But after the transition to the Poor Law and the Young Ireland rebellion, British public sympathy gave way to indifference and resentment. In Punch, a satirical “Irish-to-English dictionary” defined “Saxon Oppression” as “Paying Irish debts out of English pockets, feeding Irish famine with English subscriptions, and supporting Irish labour out of English wages.” Irish death began to appear to Britons less as a tragedy and more as a deliberate, petulant rejection of civilisation and a rebuke to British imperial prestige. The rebellion, in this context, seemed to be a final and intolerable act of ingratitude. If the Ireland that hid among the cabbages could not be reformed, it would be expelled.16
The Whigs remained committed to the market and to laissez-faire. But now that the Irish Poor Law unions were officially responsible for famine relief, many in government argued that there was nothing more that Parliament could or should do to intervene. “The true thing to do” in Ireland, said Charles Wood, the chancellor of the exchequer, to Lord Clarendon, is “to do nothing.” As Charles Greville observed, some in government believed that the “incurable madness of the people” meant they deserved starvation. By February 1849, as Greville wrote in his journal, “the English members and constituencies have become savage and hard hearted toward the Irish.” Ireland, he continued, “a few hours removed from the richest and most civilized community in the world,” had fallen into “a state so savage, barbarous and destitute that we must go back to the Middle Ages or to the most inhospitable regions of the globe to look for a parallel.” Ireland had not been brought into the present—if anything, it was sliding deeper into the past. “All call on the Government for a plan and a remedy,” Greville wrote, “but the Government have no plan and no remedy.”17
Instead, the bureaucracy built up around the Irish Poor Law carried the weight. It was designed with austerity and less eligibility in mind, and its officials supervised and administered layers of tests to measure hardship. The system funnelled the poor either to the workhouse or out of Ireland entirely. To qualify for relief at union workhouses, indoors or outdoors, applicants had to prove that they had no other income or work and held no parcel of land larger than a quarter acre. Tenants renting more were expected to surrender their land as proof that their poverty and need were genuine. Entering the workhouse, which some unions required as a condition of outdoor relief, was another test of destitution. Workhouses were notorious and feared. They were symbols of disease, disorder, and violence, where families were separated and housed in self-contained and usually locked wings. John Mitchel wrote that the real purpose of the Poor Laws was “uprooting the people from the land, and casting them forth to perish.” The workhouses offered a bitter choice: give up land in exchange for a marginally better chance of survival.18
The workhouses, “of vast dimensions, tasteful in architecture, surrounded with walls, like the castle or mansion of some lord” stood out in the wide-open spaces of the countryside. Though many had impressive façades and exterior flourishes, workhouse interiors were hostile. There were heavy doors, and gates that could be barred. High walls surrounded dormitories, which were closed and locked, and segregated by age and by sex, with spaces for men, boys, women, and girls. Inmates often worked in enclosed yards. Food was limited, and workhouse officials tinkered with the inmates’ diets to find the minimum calories required to preserve life and labour. Inmates usually wore uniforms. These prisonlike conditions—like the tests of destitution for admission—expressed the principle that workhouse relief should always be worse than what wages could buy outside the walls, and they reinforced the lesson that relief was only for the most desperate and that it always came at a price.19
The Poor Law, however, was designed to work best in a thriving economy, where the poor would have many chances to find paid work and where ratepayers would be acting in their own self-interest in offering employment rather than paying rates. Yet Ireland in 1848 and 1849 was not a normally functioning—to say nothing of thriving—economy. Although the 1847 potato harvest was good, the devastation of the previous winter meant that many farmers had planted less than usual. Families weak from hunger, fever, and grief did not return to the fields. Many relied on outdoor relief. In February 1848, the cost of outdoor relief was £72,039; by March it was £81,339. At the peak of demand during the first year of the Poor Law system, 703,762 people took outdoor relief weekly, and 140,536 were in workhouses. In addition, more than 200,000 children received cooked meals in school.20
During the planting season in 1848, across the poorest parts of Ireland, farmers planted more land with potatoes than in any year since the beginning of the blight: as much as three-quarters of the prefamine crop. “All the hopes and efforts of the people were directed to the re-introduction of this plant,” an official noted. The consequence was a shortage of seed potatoes, which pushed many farmers to seek relief since they had planted all their food. To make up the shortfall, the Quakers distributed more than thirty-six thousand pounds of turnip seed. “The people seem aware of the benefit of turnip culture,” a relief officer wrote hopefully. However, the turnip—as much as the workhouse—might have made the poor nostalgic for the world the potato had created for them in its better years. Turnips are less nutritious and vitamin-rich than potatoes, and the swollen bellies of malnourished “turnip-eaters,” especially children, made many suspicious of both the crop and the people who promoted it as an alternative to the potato. The turnip began to seem like another way to starve, exclude, and evict—“a happy expedient for [a landlord’s] purse.”21
And then in autumn 1848, in the aftermath of the failed rebellion, the blight returned. In Ballinrobe, observers estimated that four out of six potatoes were dead. In the poorest Irish counties, where farmers had stretched themselves to the limit to get seed potatoes in the ground, and where infrastructure to import grain remained rudimentary, the winter of 1848–1849 was as bad as or worse than 1846–1847. In County Clare, for example, the death rate kept rising from 1847 until early 1850. By July 1849, a million people depended on workhouse relief, either indoors or out. Although this was one-third of the number who had relied on soup kitchens two years earlier, the demand for relief in 1849 was regional, concentrated in the poorest counties along the western coast and in the countryside of the southwest. Across Ireland, the cost of relief increased from £1.7 million in 1848 to £2.2 million in 1849. Although a fraction of what the UK had borrowed and spent from 1845 to 1847, this was still a very large bill—and coming due to a much less robust and creditworthy debtor. For perspective, in 2022 pounds, scaled in proportion to the size of the economy, the Irish Poor Law unions spent the equivalent of more than £534 million over two years. Even in 1850, when the situation had stabilised, some unions were still supporting one-third or more of the population in their districts.22
The Poor Law unions took over relief at a perilous time. The Irish poor were still vulnerable to famine. Many seem to have hoped that a return to potato planting would reconstruct the familiar, if meagre, comforts of the era before the blight. The Irish economy was still low-capital and low-technology, and still oriented around rent and export crops. But after two years of famine, Ireland was too shattered to be rebuilt as it had been before 1845. Hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted. Families that had once crowded into cottages were dispersed by emigration or reduced by death. Landlords and larger farmers were poorer as well, indebted and exposed after two years of rising poor rates, falling rents, and abysmal yields.
And yet officially, the famine was over. The charities that had pumped money and energy into soup kitchens and other projects in 1846–1847 closed their operations. By September 1848, the British Association had nearly spent its capital. The association had covered a large proportion of the costs of relief after the transfer of responsibility from the Relief Commission to the Poor Law unions. From October 1847, the British Association had outspent the Treasury in Irish relief at a rate of roughly five to three. The Society of Friends also closed its soup kitchens in order to better support the working of the Poor Law. The financial crisis had reduced its donors’ finances, and the death from disease in Ireland of “many of our best and most trusted assistants” had left many Quakers demoralised. Irish property, much reduced, would have to support Irish poverty—a poverty as raw as ever.23
With the return of the blight and the withdrawal of most government and charitable support for relief, mortality spiked in the poorest counties. From 1846 to 1850, Galway, Clare, Mayo, Kerry, and Cork in the southwest had the highest excess death rates—as much as 17.3 percent in Galway—while wealthier counties had excess death rates as low as 5.1 percent. Excess mortality correlated strongly with poverty in 1848–1849, except in Ulster, where even the poorest county, Donegal, saw a drop in excess deaths. The potato crop in the northeast was also struck by blight, but a good harvest of oats and financially solvent Poor Law unions weathered the crisis. Compounding the problem, many of the poorest unions were also among the largest. Of the 130 unions established in 1838, more than 100 were larger than one hundred thousand acres, and nearly a quarter were larger than two hundred thousand acres. The Ballina Union, one of the poorest in Ireland, was over five hundred thousand acres. As one British critic put it, Ballina Union was so large that if it were in England it would stretch “from London to Buckingham and Oxford, in one direction, and from London to Basingstoke in another, with a poorhouse in St. Albans.”24
In 1848–1849 and 1849–1850, famine was regional, but little else about it was novel. The records of the “distressed Unions” are all too familiarly shocking. In April 1848, according to a report in the Galway Vindicator, a man named John Connolly, convicted of sheep rustling, was sentenced to three months’ hard labour. John Dopping, an officer in the Royal Marines and a magistrate, defended Connolly. Connolly’s family had been starving, Dopping explained, and Connolly’s wife had resorted to eating the body of one their children after the child had died of fever. When the body was exhumed, “nothing but the bones remained of its legs and feet.” Thomas Carlyle, an idol to the revolutionary intellectuals of Young Ireland, visited Kildare in the summer of 1849 and wrote with characteristic disgust about “the wretchedest wild villages I ever saw… a harpy-swarm of clamorous mendicants—men, women, children.”25
The shift to Poor Law unions accentuated and amplified the most ruthless elements of famine relief: a callous austerity and a procrustean faith in means testing. The new regulations, as described earlier, required that people seeking relief give up their land for outdoor relief, and their land and their freedom for workhouse relief. Political economy predicted that the poor would make the rational choice, choosing life over land, liberty, and family unity. The price of relief was designed to be high, but in the Irish countryside it may have been too high. Many were reluctant to seek relief until they or their children were near death. In one cabin, a mother and three children lay stricken with typhus. On the other side of the cabin, the father’s corpse, dead for days, lay rigid and swollen. “They linger on in their miserable, unventilated hovels” before applying, a frustrated relief officer wrote, “till their cases are beyond hope.” While some waited until they were nearly dead to apply for Poor Law relief, officers were sure that many others were dissembling to dodge eligibility requirements. People holding more than a quarter acre of land tried to pass their land along to relatives or collude with their landlords to keep their land and still receive relief.26
Before the blight, the pillars of abundant potatoes and a moral economy of generosity and collective solidarity had borne, at least to some extent, the weight of rent and land. By 1848–1849, three years of famine had demolished those supports. There were no potatoes; there could be no abundance, no sociability, no collective effort at harvest, no sharing. A cruel and ruthless world made many cruel and ruthless. Caring for the sick was dangerous. If a carer became ill, they might die—or become so ill themselves that they were forced to go to the workhouse. Either way, the family would lose food and income. Reports of children forcing their parents into the workhouse and of parents abandoning their children to workhouse care were common. As in 1846–1847, the weakest and most vulnerable were victimised. Unmarried women with children were refused shelter in many villages, “hunted from house to house in a most unfeeling and unchristian manner.” Many took shelter in abandoned buildings. “Three years of famine and pestilence,” argued a letter to the commissioners, “have tended to loosen all the natural ties, which formerly knit together the human family in this wretched country.” Facing another season of famine and now without the limited security of soup kitchens and other universal relief, the poor had been gripped by “the fear of death…, which extinguish[ed] every natural feeling, save… a desire for self-preservation.”27
The hardness of everyday life was created in part by the workhouse itself. The workhouse offered a cruel bargain; it embodied and stoked endless competition for resources, security, and preferment. It epitomised the notion of the market as a purifying force, a means of separating Irish workers ready for the future from those consigned to the past. Overcome with famine, some Irish people did shameful things to preserve their own lives. Others wandered the roads, begging, or went “burrowing in bogs or behind ditches,” before applying to the workhouse. It is difficult to tell what to make of these anecdotes. Some people must have avoided the workhouse until it was too late, but there were also many reports of the indigent clamouring outside the walls, desperate to gain admission. Relief officials seem to have been exasperated in either case. When the poor refused to seek admission, they were deemed stupid and self-destructive. When they begged for admission, they were deemed liars or dissemblers, seeking relief to which they were not (yet) entitled. In either case, the misery and humiliation of the poor confirmed officials’ belief that many of the people seeking relief in the workhouse were “scarcely human in habits and intelligence.”28
Most people who received relief from famine in the Poor Law era received outdoor relief; nevertheless, the workhouse still exemplified the logic of the system. Making industriousness second nature to the Irish remained the goal, and the Poor Law Commission and individual unions tinkered with the best way to teach Irish paupers who sought relief how to work steadily and with discipline. Recipients of both kinds of aid were expected to work for it, but the labour needed to be so tedious or difficult that other kinds of work were appealing in comparison. The commission preferred to require stone-breaking for a minimum of eight hours a day (more would have been preferable; eight was a concession to the short daylight hours in the winter in northern latitudes). Some unions, with thousands of people claiming outdoor relief, protested there were not enough rocks to go around. In Newcastle Union, the board of guardians worried that they would have to buy rocks from private quarries in order to have enough to keep five thousand or six thousand able-bodied paupers swinging sledgehammers. The commissioners’ response, however, was firm: “Stone-breaking is less attractive and more capable of effectual superintendence than any other kind of out-door labour on a large scale.” Still, even breaking rocks was “inferior to the workhouse as an effective test of destitution.”29
Labour exchanged for relief at the workhouse was supposed to be strenuous but purposeless. This already austere principle became an absurdity in famine conditions as the Poor Law Commission policed the tasks assigned by unions to people seeking relief. Galway Union was scolded for putting prisoners to work farming, as it might “weaken the efficiency of the workhouse.” Wages, which had been the public works plan from August 1846 to the summer of 1847, were anathema in the new system. “The strongest line,” the commissioners wrote, “should… be drawn between relief and wages.” If employers could hire workhouse labourers for next to nothing, the commission argued, it would increase unemployment outside the workhouse and drive down wages.30
The workhouses were funded with local poor rates. However, the poorest unions often had both the poorest labourers and the most indebted and exposed ratepayers. A long-serving workhouse doctor described the divisions within many boards of guardians supervising workhouses. “The economists,” he wrote, “thought that unless expenses were controlled the Poor Law would bring ruin on the country,” while others argued that “a judicious outlay was the truest economy.” The principle of “less eligibility”—that conditions inside workhouses had to be worse than conditions for even the humblest workers on the outside—although a “very excellent doctrine,” the doctor wrote, was no longer a deterrent to seeking relief “when most houses had little to wear and nothing to eat.”31
This problem was compounded by the eroded, precarious tax bases in the poorest unions. The poorer the union, the smaller the rental income but the higher the rates. In these unions, funding workhouse relief became a decaying orbit, collapsing toward bankruptcy. Poor Law guardians and other ratepayers could be the people with the most to lose by raising taxes to pay for relief. Austerity had always been a principle of famine relief. Now austerity organised nearly every aspect of the workhouse. In Ballyshannon Union, it was common for crowds to form around the workhouse doors, pleading to be admitted or put on the outdoor-relief lists. Some in the crowds were naked, screaming with hunger. Some relief officers broke down and found places for people in extremis, but they knew that compassion might cost them their jobs, because most guardians “are so averse to increase the expense, that these functionaries are almost afraid to exercise a discretion.”32
The consequence was a race to the bottom, a heedless commitment to cutting expenses in order to “preserve the existence of the inmates at the smallest possible cost.” Boards of guardians were selected from among the propertied in each union. They collected rates, oversaw expenses, and hired the overseers, clerks, stewards, and matrons who staffed the workhouses. In theory, the guardians’ duty was to their community. In practice, most behaved as though their duty was to their fellow ratepayers. In addition, the staff of most workhouses were often drawn from among ratepayers and their clients, generally from the families of the more precarious, larger tenant farmers and middlemen—precisely the people for whom famine meant the erosion of both rental income and opportunities for arbitrage on crops and land. Every comfort for workhouse inmates threatened the staff’s security and wealthier ratepayers’ solvency. Consequently, the workhouses of poorer unions were places of legendary squalor. The workhouse, one visitor wrote, was at most “a place to die” for the poor, so “they might be buried in a coffin.”33
Virtually every workhouse operated at above capacity—more evidence that although some of the Irish poor avoided the workhouse until the brink of death, many others recognised that they had no choice but to apply. Staff often neglected the records they were expected to keep. Inspectors were shocked to find that the books of New Ross Union had not been updated for months. The inmates had been seen wandering the countryside; some even “knocked at a gentleman’s door in the vicinity and demanded alms.” The buildings became so crowded that dining areas and dayrooms became dormitories at night, with straw beds laid out on the floors or hammocks strung from walls. Many dormitories were unventilated, and the smell of close-packed, unwashed, ill bodies produced “a dense steam of confined air… almost intolerable to endure even for a moment.” In one union, inmates nicknamed a dormitory the “hulk,” after the decommissioned warships sitting at anchor offshore that were sometimes used as overflow for Britain’s prisons.34
Cramming workhouse spaces with inmates under limited supervision was one way to cut costs; another way was to restrict rations or choose the cheapest possible food. Some baked bread in-house, using bran ground by the inmates mixed with maize. Many unions preferred imported maize to other grains. The American import, officials wrote, “rendered the support of human life as cheap as it was before the potato failure.” Food provided as outdoor relief was usually given out cooked, or at least “steeped” in water (if not hot or fully prepared for eating), so that relief seekers could not hoard it and were less likely to be able to resell it. Meal stored in water expanded, allowing unions to give relief recipients the same overall volume of rations each day while reducing the quantity of solid food in each portion. New steam-cooking devices, in turn, saved fuel. Meanwhile, workhouse staff found ways to skim from contractors and hide other expenses. An inspector found that Listowel Union’s master was ordering supplies and work without permission, “such as looking glasses, muslin for curtains, and feathers of the best kind” with which to stuff mattresses for staff. He also ordered a supply of milk for himself without permission.35
Full of sick and filthy people, the workhouses were ideal environments for the spread of disease, especially typhus and other louse-borne illnesses. The very ill were among the most likely to be thrown out of their homes by fearful relatives. In some unions, guardians offered people money to take in the sick outside the workhouse, but it was often refused. Their gates were often locked, but workhouses were open to circulating pathogens. The poor, sick, and well circulated in and out of confinement. Inspectors, staff, and guardians came and went. Epidemics that began inside the workhouse spread easily to the community outside, and vice-versa. In 1848, fever cases peaked in early May, when nearly one thousand people a week were dying in fever hospitals and the death rate from typhus and similar illnesses stood at nearly eight in every thousand.36
In December 1848, cholera appeared in Belfast, pulling Ireland—but especially Irish towns—into an epidemic that was spreading across England, Scotland, and Wales. Cholera spreads quickly in urban environments when the Vibrio cholerae bacillus infects the water supply. The disease causes violent, copious, and acute diarrhea and vomiting, and spreads through inadvertent ingestion of infected human feces. Between 1848 and 1850, the epidemic caused more than thirty-four thousand reported deaths in Ireland, most of them in 1849. Fear of cholera amplified the fear of contagion. Anyone with diarrhea—an extremely common affliction in famine-era Ireland—risked being thrown onto the street. One woman, already living in a cowshed, was struck with “hopeless… dysentery”; she was threatened with eviction from her hovel.37
Boredom, hunger, and brutal but uneven discipline made workhouses dangerous and unpredictable places. When opportunity appeared, staff were often attacked, inside and outside the walls. The steward of the Ballyshannon workhouse, built for five hundred but holding seven hundred, had his cowhouse burned with three cows inside. A magistrate found the smouldering ball of turf used to light the thatched roof. In another workhouse, a pet cat belonging to one of the staff hopped over the wall into the boys’ yard. They chased, captured, and tortured it, breaking the animal’s legs. A former workhouse doctor described a riot where inmates “broke windows and doors, smashed forms and tables, beat the wardmasters and ward mistresses and the master if he came in their way. They screamed and yelled like maniacs and some fell into hysterical convulsions, thus adding to the confusion.” Rumours that a boy had been beaten to death in the Ballinrobe Union workhouse caused a Catholic priest to lead a mob in “a general attack upon the house…, stones flying in every direction.”38
However, most of the violence in workhouses was directed not by inmates against staff, but by staff against inmates, or by stronger inmates against weaker ones. With the doors locked and the wardens standing between survival and death, assault and rape were common. One of the many reasons why parents waited to enter the workhouse was that they would be separated from their children, exposing them to sexual violence, or “the probable contamination of bad companionship,” to use one official’s euphemism. Guards and stronger inmates were constant threats. Rumours circulated in many unions that members of the boards of guardians lived their lives in “unremitted outrage upon the decencies of life.” Contraband, especially tea, tobacco, and alcohol, must have often been exchanged for sex, and women knitted “fancy stockings” for officers in exchange for preferment and smuggled luxuries. One woman had “seven bastard children,” inspectors wrote, with the temerity to be “all in good health.”39
The workhouses were dangerous, and outdoor relief scant and uncertain. The poorest unions had to meet the greatest needs with the fewest resources. Collecting rates was nearly as constant a struggle as managing paupers. To collect from ratepayers, collectors could sue, or they could seize livestock, furniture, or other property. In practice, rate collectors usually seized property from ratepayers with more limited means, typically graziers and farmers renting larger parcels of land, and opened formal legal proceedings against wealthier ratepayers who were in arrears. Like workhouse staff, rate collectors were drawn from the same class of residents from whom they were most likely to seize property—people from families tottering on the line between ratepayer and pauper. Accounts of self-dealing filled press reports. One Galway collector seized twenty-three sheep to pay poor rates in arrears and then arranged for their sale, at far less than their value, to himself. The barrister refused to adjudicate any other bills involving the collector, and more than two hundred civil bills collecting poor rates were thrown out of court. Justice was served, but the Clifden Union board of guardians was still short of revenue.40
After the famine, Lord Monteagle complained that the Poor Law placed an unfair burden on taxpayers. The government might as well, he wrote, “require the proprietors of the Marine Parade at Brighton to employ or relieve all the families who hire their apartments.” In Dublin, at the Northumberland Hotel, a public meeting published resolutions protesting rate increases. A local barrister gave a well-received speech at the meeting insisting that the new taxes violated the Act of Union, which specified what taxes could be collected in Ireland. The “English Parliament,” he argued, was “legally incompetent” to collect the rates. Another speaker declared the rates to be “the most galling, as well as the worst-administered imposts which had ever been inflicted on a suffering people.”41
Landowners, who were the wealthiest landlords (few ratepayers owned their land outright; many were larger tenants who collected rent from subtenants), also complained about poor rates, but were rarely at risk of being ruined by them. When collectors approached agents representing Lord Arran for £17 in rates due from “waste holdings” leased to tenants for grazing, his agent paid the bill. But as famine conditions wore on, ratepayers with lesser means became less likely to be willing or able to pay. If a ratepayer went bankrupt, it became even more difficult to collect: the bankrupt person or estate’s other creditors would also expect to be made whole. The courts appointed receivers to liquidate bankrupt estates, and estates in receivership had no incentive to pay back rates. Usually, getting rates from an insolvent taxpayer required the time and expense—and uncertainty—of a lawsuit. A receiver named John Knox, Esq., paid out the £137 owed by estates he managed when the local Poor Law unions began legal proceedings. Other ratepayers died without heirs, like a Miss Palmer, who owed £19, while absentees could be impossible to contact. Some had not been in Ireland since the beginning of the blight or earlier. Charles O’Donel, “a captain in the Bengal service, now in India,” owed £22 that would never be collected. Still other ratepayers were easy to find, but not worth suing for back rates—they had nothing left to pay, and had “scarcely… the means of supporting themselves.”42
Collectors chased the agents of large landlords, but they risked violence at the hands of smaller and more vulnerable ratepayers. One collector in Mayo, pursuing unpaid rates, was accompanied by nine other men. A group of men and women attacked his assistant and pelted him with stones. While the assistant, Pat Mahony, bled freely from his hand, a cow that had already been seized ran away, and villagers hid the rest of their cattle. When the collectors tried to seize a small flock of sheep, a crowd gathered to follow them and “forced the sheep down a narrow road to a village, where, if we followed, our lives would be in danger.” The collector took the corn of the sheep’s owner, but no one would watch over it. “As I proceeded through the electoral divisions, shouts and whistling went before, and screeching after us; and in all directions, and on all sides, men, women, and children were driving and running away with their cattle.”43
But ratepayers, even those who had slipped from genteel poverty to uncouth destitution, at least had the means to keep their homes. Among the poor, eviction proceedings—many of which were initiated by ratepayers looking to either sell or squeeze land to raise estate revenues—left many homeless. Again, faith in the market produced perverse outcomes in already market-racked Poor Law unions. In practice, to finance famine relief, the poorest parts of Ireland were obliged to raise the most money from the least prosperous or secure ratepayers. The consequence was a centrifugal force that threw the poorest out of their homes so that ratepayers could pay the rates that would cover the cost of holding the newly homeless in the workhouses. Adding to the unwholesome folly of the process, evicted families provided a short-term boon for farmers willing to exploit them by having “labour done in exchange for food alone,” instead of paying wages to working-age men and boys, “till absolute starvation brings the mother and helpless children to the workhouse; this is the history of hundreds.” Tenants, an observer noted bitterly, “having thus pauperized the labouring class, get their work done for nothing, and complain of rates.”44
The fiscal pressure that built in the poorest unions could only be relieved with infusions of cash. Through 1847–1848, unions that ran out of money were bailed out with funds from the British Association, which spent about £236,500, and from Parliament, which spent £132,000. The commissioners—using statistics that I could not find anywhere else in the records, and which were likely optimistic and self-aggrandising guesses—estimated that relief had saved two hundred thousand people from dying in the “distressed” unions in that first year of the Poor Law system of famine relief. Based on this estimate, when the blight returned before the 1848 harvest, the commissioners were confident that the Poor Laws would be “quite equal to the relief of the destitution,” provided that the unions had enough money. They didn’t. In 1847–1848, the pressure on the distressed unions had been intense, but not so heavy as to collapse the system utterly. Relief numbers peaked at more than 833,000 receiving outdoor relief during the week of July 15, 1848, a figure that fell during the harvest to 199,603 for the week of October 7 before rising to 264,704 for the week of November 25. Normally November would be a month of plenty, after the potatoes were taken in. Without a potato harvest, however, the pressure on the unions increased until it was overwhelming.45
At the beginning of 1849, the nine unions deemed distressed by the Lords of the Treasury owed £83,189 in unpaid rates. The year before, debts had been £34,844. The unions only managed to collect £74,053 in rates, and spent £232,131. In Kenmare, County Kerry, in the southwest, the workhouse was surrounded in early January 1849 by “paupers, yelling and howling for admission.” But the Kenmare Union was in chaos. Officers offered relief to tenants who had land and cattle instead of to the homeless poor, and the guardians were accused of feeding their estate employees. Inspectors were appalled at “the total want of discipline of the workhouse officers, the utter confusion of the books… the want of food, clothing, money, or credit.” The officer wondered if conditions outside the workhouse had deteriorated so much that the threat of the workhouse might no longer be useful as a tool for measuring and testing destitution.46
By now, the distressed unions were experiencing another spasm of the depravity and desolation that had occurred nearly nationwide in the winter of 1847. The unions could not afford to pay their everyday expenses, and their debts were growing. Poverty echoed and amplified itself until in some unions, like Ballina, “the distress which now exists among all classes has, perhaps, never been exceeded during the last three years.” In Castlerea Union, the poor were selling everything they had; there were hundreds of goats in the market, as well as donkeys and emaciated cattle, selling for half of what they might normally bring. In Clonmel Union, prisoners in the county jail begged to remain imprisoned, or swore to reoffend after they were released.47
In Ennis Union, in the Clondegad electoral division, 37.6 percent of the 1841 population were on outdoor relief in May 1849. Many were ill with dysentery and unable to digest maize, although they depended on it, and thus they suffered “from actual want of nutriment.” In another union district, Clonlea, County Clare, 39.6 percent of the 1841 census population were registered for relief. Rates could no longer be collected from some ratepayers. In Glenties Union in 1849, inspectors reported that small occupiers in arrears had nothing to seize and that “some of the occupiers who are ratepayers have not tasted a drop of milk” for a year. In Swineford Union, many applicants for relief were former landholders, now crowding the workhouse with letters and certificates averring that they had given up their land. In Scariff Union, farmers with nothing left to eat gave up their fields, full of planted crops, in exchange for relief. Scariff Union was broke and unable to pay its contractors, who cut deliveries of provisions by half. A group of women on outdoor relief in the union, upon learning that the ration was going to be halved, chased a relief officer, throwing rocks and threatening to stone him to death.48
In 1849, several unions collapsed as demand for relief increased beyond what an eroded tax base could support. Faced with continuing parliamentary hostility toward welfare transfers from the UK Treasury to Ireland, John Russell’s government resorted in spring 1849 to a Rate-in-Aid provision, which taxed other Irish unions with additional rates to offset costs for the unions in financial distress. In effect, this was a levy on ratepayers in the north and east to assist the west. The policy angered many outside the distressed unions, and it called into question, Isaac Butt observed, the very principle of the legislative union of 1801. Russell and Clarendon, aware of the extent of their government’s failure, fell into fatalism, while others, such as Charles Wood and Charles Trevelyan, continued to stress the palliative necessity of enforcing “self-help” on the feckless Irish. Throughout 1848 and 1849 Edward Twistleton, the chief commissioner of the Poor Law system, continued to appeal for more support from the government for the distressed Poor Law boards. Finally, on March 10, 1849, he resigned.49
By that month, twenty-one unions in the west of Ireland had been declared distressed. From February to June, £114,435 was issued under the Rate-in-Aid Act to make up the shortfall. Ballina Union received the most cash, at £11,890. Twenty-three unions received aid, and some, like Scariff Union, also received hundreds of pounds’ worth of biscuit. Charles Wood preferred this policy to the previous model and argued that if the cabinet was serious about the Poor Law, a Rate-in-Aid was the only option. Further grants and loans to Ireland should be forbidden, Wood insisted. Charles Greville supposed that the policy, in time, might be “the ultimate regeneration of Ireland,” but until then it would cause suffering “such as never was contemplated.” Some in the government suspected that Wood was in Charles Trevelyan’s pocket—that Trevelyan held a “great influence” over the chancellor’s mind.50
The Poor Law system was founded on the principle of austerity and on a faith in markets and economic incentives. The former was cruel, the latter deluded. But even if we suspend compassion and accept the ethos of the Poor Law on its face, the most poverty-stricken unions in Ireland were too unstable, too hollow, to benefit from the deterrence and discipline of the rates and the workhouse. The Poor Law was designed to test, to sift weak from strong, undeserving from deserving, industrious from lazy, useful from surplus. In the distressed unions, in addition to the fear of the workhouse and the misery of another season of blight, the Irish felt a steady pressure that pushed landlords to sell, tenants to give up their leases, and labourers to die or emigrate. The elaborate bureaucracy built to measure the eligibility of applicants for relief was, in the distressed unions, a mechanism for proving the painfully obvious—that many of the Irish poor were as vulnerable in 1849 as in 1847.
The Whigs and Young Ireland agreed, for different reasons, that Ireland ought to pay for its own relief—that “Irish property should support Irish poverty.” Before his brief military campaign, arrest, and exile, William Smith O’Brien supported the transition from public works to the Poor Law. “The poor should be secured a livelihood in the land in which they were born,” he told the House of Commons. “Ireland had no right to call on England to support her people.” As the famine neared a half decade, however, the poorest unions imploded. In some, there was virtually no formal work; there was little rent to collect; there was no money to pay the rates. But officially, the Great Famine was over. Critics of famine policy insisted that if only Irish property could be freed of its “encumbrances,” the Poor Law would restore the natural balance between poverty and property.51
In April 1849 The Economist pointed out that in the distressed unions, where hundreds of thousands depended on outdoor relief, land had been left unplanted and seemed to have passed from the bonds of the common law to anarchy. The editors wondered who really owned Irish land when the “measurings of the fields are all obliterated, so that no man—not even the actual owner—can define his own boundaries.” The tangled web of Irish landholding, another editorial argued, made it “practically impossible to deal with [land use] in the way which modern science has pointed out as the most profitable.” In Ireland, the editors continued, a tangle of regulations, customs, and complex debts made it impossible to properly improve land, whether landlord and tenant were well-intentioned and hardworking or cynical and lazy. Fair contracts were impossible. Profit was elusive. Voiding a lease opened a landlord to assassination. Without new tools for selling land and clearing estates, the “small liberation of so much land” would be unfeasible. If the Irish would not free themselves from the land, then the land would have to be freed from them.52
The turn to pessimism in attitudes toward the famine, and in relief policies—to reform through expulsion—was especially visible in changing attitudes to the old eighteenth-century touchstone of “improvement,” the principle that landowners had a moral obligation to increase the value and productivity of their land with scientific management. In the years before and after the Union, Ireland’s bogs and impoverished masses seemed like complementary resources. Now, a pamphlet argued, the problem was too many tenants. An unproductive tenant ought to “leave the ground he is unable to improve to those who can and will.” If landlords could not take back the land and cultivate it themselves, or find a better tenant, or help the existing tenant to emigrate, then the Poor Law unions, some argued, had an obligation to ensure “that the land may be well cultivated” by whatever means.53
Irish land was deeply embedded in the market. During the Napoleonic Wars, Irish landlords routinely used their land as collateral, borrowing freely amid frothy speculation and strong demand for Irish products. After 1815, as the rest of the UK economy sagged, this “superstructure of jointures, charges and encumbrances of every kind” began to sag and collapse too. Land was easy to entangle in leases and liens and for just that reason difficult to sell outright. In Ireland, landlords had long been permitted to “confess to judgement” when they borrowed against their land—in other words, to borrow without consolidating or paying existing debts. These debts and “confessed judgements” could be sold along with the estate, or assigned to new owners. Other legislation from the 1830s and 1840s, piecemeal solutions to the quagmire, allowed creditors to appoint their own receivers to collect debts on all land owned by the debtors, and to collect some or all of their debtor’s tenants’ rent. In short, buying land in Ireland required an accounting of these obligations—and required the buyer to take them on as a condition of the sale.
In 1848, to break the logjam and get the market moving more quickly, the Encumbered Estates Act created a new commission with the power to act as arbitrator between a landlord and their creditors in order to reach binding judgements that would allow owners to sell and discharge their debts. The act, one official declared, would “make land in Ireland a marketable commodity, which it is not now, or only to a very small extent.” Legal encumbrances were complicated by “human encumbrances” (as the geographer David Nally puts it)—that is, tenants and dependents and their customary and legal claims. The Poor Law system had forced the poor to trade their liberty and everything they produced for the “right to live.” But the Gregory Clause, one of the engines of expulsion, offered an even more perilous bargain to the Irish poor seeking workhouse relief, both within the workhouse itself and outdoors when distress was especially acute. The clause required the poor to exchange land, for generations the most important form of security for an Irish family and the object of constant labour and scheming, for access to government aid. Land, like labour, needed to be homogenised and liquified; a parcel of land needed to be as exchangeable and fungible as the people who worked it.54
The Poor Law, however, could potentially impede a liquid market in land. George Nicholls wrote, “Where the land has ceased to be productive… a poor-law will no longer be operative.” In a very poor district, new owners might be deterred by the rates and by the web of old debts that could make a new landowner who was otherwise keen to employ the poor on his estate liable “to pay an increased amount of poor’s rate in order to maintain the people not of his own property but of the estate of the adjacent proprietor.” Eviction seemed to solve this problem. The austerity of the workhouse, in turn, seemed to encourage the poor to leave rather than to seek aid. The London Daily News sent a reporter to the Encumbered Estates Commission. He praised its work. “Ireland is in a transition state,” he wrote. By allowing—or compelling—landlords with heavily encumbered estates to liquidate their debts, new landlords could take over, providing an “infusion of strength, capital, and life blood… a new system for the people.” The Poor Law, in turn, would create a new people for the system. New investment would clear the land both of complex debts and of the debtors themselves. Fewer paupers and wealthier landlords in distressed unions would, it followed, restore equilibrium in the demand for relief and the supply of poor rates.55
The Encumbered Estates Commission opened in late October 1849, and within a few days at least seventeen petitions were filed by distressed landlords or their creditors. Between October 1849 and July 1850, 1,085 estates were processed by the commission. Between 1849 and 1858, more than 10 percent of all Irish land changed hands. The commission estimated that Irish estates owed at least £12.5 million total—nearly the entire estimated rental income of all Irish land combined. The Freeman’s Journal estimated that among the 2,416 petitions made under the act, at least £30 million in encumbrances rested on the leases. The law assumed that Irish landlords and tenants could be forced out of traditional tenancy arrangements and pushed onto the open market, “making all aspects of land tenure subject to the play of capitalism.” By 1849, evictions that had been piecemeal were considered a “clearance system,” an allusion to the large-scale displacement of Highlanders from Scotland, which began after the failed 1745 Jacobite rebellion and intensified through the later eighteenth century. Eviction had long been a familiar and feared peril for tenants; now it seemed systematic. The papers in Tipperary, for example, were full of accounts of eviction, “the strides of the social revolution which is hourly hastening to a crisis the destinies of this ill-fated portion of the British empire.” Depopulation, by death or by eviction, seemed inevitable, “the bleak ocean of a cheerless world to swell the tide of misery.”56
Evictions, always a feature of the Irish rural economy, became more numerous and ferocious. At least 35,416 evictions were filed in Irish courts between 1847 and 1849, but the total number of evictions was higher. First, there was no central repository of evictions until the Irish Constabulary started keeping an incomplete count in 1849. Second, as always in the Irish rent pyramid, a single eviction displaced not only the targets of the legal proceedings but also many subtenants and labourers taking conacre. A leading historian estimates that 225,000 people were evicted between 1849 and 1854. Other historians argue that the number of evictions may have been closer to 500,000, or more. In practice, legal evictions affected about 2.5 percent of all holders of land, augmented by an unknown, but significant, number of unofficial expulsions. Patterns of eviction, as the historian Christine Kinealy shows, changed after the 1847 Poor Law Amendment Act was passed. Before 1848, evictions tended to occur in wealthier counties, especially in Ulster, often as part of capital investments in farmland or plans to convert cropland to grazing land. After 1848, Ireland’s poorest counties, like Clare, Galway, Limerick, Mayo, and Tipperary, experienced the most dramatic spikes in evictions and the largest overall declines in agricultural holdings, which fell by 20 percent nationally.57
“Unroofing” houses—pulling down cottage roofs or setting fire to the roof and walls, or both—became a routine act of terror in the era of expulsion. A clergyman wrote to the Poor Law Commission on December 17, 1847, that he had seen at Cross, in the Cong electoral division, fifteen cabins with small campfires around them and people squatting by the side of the road. A land agent named Richard O’Donnell had summoned the sheriff to unroof the homes. “I would like to know what efforts have been made by the poor-rate collectors to collect from that gentleman,” the priest wrote bitterly.58
The number of evictions was and is hard to count, but impressions of Ireland in 1849 are replete with unroofed cottages, especially in the west. Evicted people—even with food—were vulnerable to disease and exposure. In Toomevara, County Tipperary, the homeless and landless poor, evicted from their holdings, lived in lean-tos built against the walls of the parish church, while others built their huts in the graveyard. Evictions and clearances continued, with “the certain destructiveness of the plague throughout the country.” In Tipperary, the landlords had been “bitten by the mania to get rid of the poor Irish tenant, who, when the land yielded fruit, toiled like a galley slave for those who now turn upon and treat him like with the basest ingratitude.”59
In December 1847, a woman in Erris pulled an old storage chest apart to make a coffin for her dead mother. Two months later, she was evicted. She sheltered in the ruin of her unroofed house but was chased out. In Carnboy, a village in the Belmullet division of the Ballina Union in County Mayo, almost the entire village had been unroofed, as well as nearly one-third in the entire district. A man who had been evicted from his cottage was breaking rocks in exchange for outdoor relief when he saw fire and smoke rising from a distant bog. He left his task, risking losing his place on the relief rolls, and walked toward the blaze. The bailiff had managed to find the lean-to, built out of blocks of dried turf, in which the man and his family took shelter at night, and set it on fire. Some evictions were brutal enough to prompt investigation. In County Galway, a man renting three acres, Daniel Conneely, had his house torn down around him by men with crowbars. His landlord, he explained, was “a long time wanting to get me out of it.” A group of cottages at Tullymore were leveled to make room for pastureland; evicted tenants were “going from house to house, frequently sleeping in our clothes by the fire-side.”60
In 1850, some were suspicious of reports that at least five times as much land had been planted with potatoes as in 1849. Potatoes meant conacre, one report concluded—and though the death or departure of one-fifth of the population might lower rents on conacre land, it would only invite the cycle of people and potatoes to begin again. “All judicious proprietors and others,” the report concluded, “are getting rid of the population as speedily and quietly as possible, and laying down all the land to sheep and cattle pasture.” The famine had not changed enough about Ireland to make the potato unappealing: “Cultivation will not pay here now.” The Quaker reformer James Hack Tuke was appalled. Near Clogher, he found evicted Irish labourers lying by roadsides, feverish, or “squatting on the bare turf to hide their naked limbs.” He argued that the physical ordeal of eviction was getting in the way of the salutary effects of a Poor Law that, in principle, demanded industriousness from the poor and prudence from the rich. If the poor were so ill from fever and exposure that they could not work, it was both a human tragedy and an obstacle to the proper operation of political economy.61
And yet, by the lights of political economy, mass unroofing was sound policy. The Poor Law system had raised taxes on landlords, both within distressed unions, where higher poverty rates translated into higher poor rates, and across Ireland, since the Rate-in-Aid could be used to raise rates across the country when the poorest unions were in financial peril. Eviction was an obvious, brutally straightforward solution to this problem. Struggling ratepayers could remove tenants who were in arrears, potentially lowering their tax burden. The Rate-in-Aid system meant that all Irish taxpayers had a financial interest in evictions anywhere in the country. Moreover, unroofing houses reduced the number of available cottages to rent. Mass death over the previous two years had lowered demand for rented land and housing. Reducing the number of available houses was a crude way to increase scarcity. Other landlords used unroofing to begin to convert their land, as in Gort Union, County Clare, to sheep walks. To either reduce taxes, raise rents, or convert tilled fields to grazing for cattle and sheep, eviction was useful.62
Relief could only be given in food, and as cabins were pulled down, the supply of housing decreased and the cost increased. “As cabins become fewer,” a relief officer wrote, “lodgings, however miserable, become more difficult to obtain.” Most of the people who left Ireland did so with their own money, on their own initiative. A small number of prominent landlords, such as Lord Monteagle, offered bonuses to tenants to emigrate, but landlord-assisted emigration accounted for at most 5 percent of all migration from Ireland in the famine era. Emigration continued to climb even after the famine, rising from ninety-three thousand in 1845 to a peak of nearly four hundred thousand in 1852—and in the next sixty years, six million more people would leave Ireland. Emigration, never centralised, and pushed along by the pressure of both famine and the Poor Law system of famine relief, was useful to British plans for Ireland. Fewer tenants simplified landholding and cut through subdivision.63
Mass evictions evoked conflicted, dissonant reactions to officials and landowners. On the one hand, political economy showed that evictions were necessary and inevitable. If there was a surplus of people with respect to the requirements of the market in Ireland, and if the Irish market stubbornly refused to modernise, capitalise, or expand, then the population had to shrink to make improvement and reform possible. On the other hand, many evictions were obviously cruel and violent. Providence had a strange sense of humour. In May 1848 the Freeman’s Journal called the campaign of evictions an “agrarian war… [of] extermination.” In July 1850, the Times reported sardonically on “the rights of property… vindicated” in the town of Loughrea, King’s County, through the “assertion of the right of devastation.” After tenants—many of whom had already paid rent—were evicted from their cottages, the cottages were burnt to the ground to deter squatters from taking shelter inside.64
John Russell considered the problem in Ireland, without the potato (as he wrote to Lord Lansdowne in November 1847), to be “the war between landlord and tenant… murder on one side: ejectment on the other.” To his credit, Russell was appalled to find Irish landlords shirking what he considered to be their moral duty as employers of labour. The Poor Law was supposed to discipline landlords and occupiers, impelling them to virtue. Russell had built his career and his ministry on the prevailing ideology of free markets, self-help, and laissez-faire, but he squirmed to see the grim consequences of his principles for the Irish poor. Amid “the fall of thrones and the crash of armies on the Continent,” a biographer put it, there was little he could do. Discomfort was a burden, but it was feather-light when weighed against an ambition to remain in office.65
And in any case, although Russell might have been unhappy with the pace and violence of evictions, the consequences of mass evictions were pushing Ireland toward some of the demographic changes that reformers had insisted the market could produce. By 1851, the Irish population had fallen by 20 percent, and the rural population by 25 percent. The class of cottier and conacre farmers shrank dramatically as holdings of less than an acre fell from 134,000 in 1841 to 36,000 in 1851, and the number of holdings of less than five acres fell from 440,000 to 124,000. Most emigrants were in the prime of adulthood; only 42 percent were under twenty or over fifty. The consequence, as one historian writes, was a process of “relaxing the peasant’s desperate hold upon his land.”66
Meanwhile, Irish landlords became scapegoats in the British press. One reporter urged readers to consider Ireland—an equal in the United Kingdom—as an imperial territory more akin to the kingdom of Oudh, in northern India, where generations of British officials had been slicing off and annexing territory by stages, often after British accusations of Indian mismanagement. Why not treat Irish landlords like Indian landlords, a newspaper editorial asked, and “tell them plainly that, unless they acted honestly at once, they, like the King of Oude, should lose British protection, and be left to the tender mercies of their outraged peasantry and oppressed tenants.” The landlord class had once been prime movers of British colonialism in Ireland, the inheritors of Irish land taken by English and British conquerors. Now that Irish landlords as well as Irish labourers were deemed to have failed to identify with the market and with “civilisation,” old landlords as well as penniless tenants were prescribed a colonial corrective.67
Although it seemed to many officials and critics to be a recrudescence of Ireland’s stubborn, atavistic poverty and backwardness, this final phase of the Great Famine was instead a fractured glimpse at capitalism’s future. Ireland had long been exploited—its land distributed to colonists and loyalists, its workers pushed into a lopsided and jerry-built export economy of low wages and high exports supported by the unusual generosity of the pre-blight potato crop. However, even before the Great Famine began, the returns on the exploitation of Irish labour were diminishing, and by the end, the expulsion of the starving poor—by death, by emigration—came to seem like the logical solution to Irish poverty. The object of the Poor Law system was not directly to expel the poor, but rather to create incentives that would force the poor to arrive at the “rational” decision to abandon their land. Eviction remains a potent political issue, and a powerful symbol, in contemporary Irish politics. In 2023, amid an ongoing housing crisis, the consequence of overheated real estate markets and callow neoliberal housing policy, the artist Adam Doyle, who uses the alias Spicebag, drew international attention for a piece that places twenty-first-century Irish gardaí in a nineteenth-century scene of a Great Famine–era eviction, enforcing a landlord’s orders. In the twenty-first century, expulsion serves a political economy that treats real estate as a speculative asset rather than a human need. In the nineteenth century, eviction served landlords and would-be investors by “liberating” valuable land from inconvenient or unproductive tenants.68
The Poor Law was applied to Ireland to impose a common system across two of the partners to the United Kingdom. But events of the last years of the Great Famine—the collapse of distressed unions, the ongoing ruin and depopulation of the countryside, the pell-mell flight from Ireland, the resentment in Westminster at Irish “ingratitude” for relief, the bitter and nihilistic response to the Young Ireland rebellion—all repeated what had been true from the very beginning of the Union: Ireland was to be a part of the United Kingdom, but it was also, in many ways that counted, still colonised.