If the Union were to be a political success, it had to bring about some definite change in Irish life. Its justification lay in ushering in a new era. The one thing it could not afford to be in everyday terms was meaningless. Yet, for the vast majority of Irishmen clinging with unceasing precariousness to their small holdings of land, the Union made no practical difference at all; if anything, by making them more remote from government, it made things worse. The ground swell of social discontent remained as before, a vast unwieldy incoherent force, available to any political skill that might be bold enough to try to harness it.
There is an uncanny similarity about the way in which all eye-witnesses describe the conditions of the majority of the population of Ireland over a vast span of nearly two centuries. In the middle of these two centuries stands the Union of 1801, an almost irrelevant landmark. The commonest feature of all such descriptions is the comparison between Ireland and other countries to the detriment of Ireland, and this is stressed even more heavily after the Union.1
‘I have seen several countries,’ said a Resident Magistrate of Cork in 1824, ‘and I never saw any peasantry so badly off.’2 Richard Cobden, the Free Trader, told a friend that once after spending three months in Ireland he had gone direct to Egypt and that, taking the difference of climate into consideration, the condition of the fellaheen was infinitely better than that of the Irish cottier, or labouring class.3
‘The wretchedness in some of the western parts of the County of Clare,’ stated a Constabulary Inspector in 1824, ‘is as great as human nature can almost be subjected to.’4 And Sir Walter Scott visiting Ireland a year later noted in his diary: ‘Their poverty has not been exaggerated: it is on the extreme verge of human misery.’5 Nor were the years 1824–5 years of famine as 1817 and 1822 had been. Nor had anything like the worst yet been seen.
In 1844 a German traveller echoed many earlier comments with the words: ‘To him who has seen Ireland no mode of life in any other part of Europe however wretched will seem pitiable.’6 And a year later the Devon Commission, the last government inquiry to report on Ireland before the Great Famine, confirmed this with a reference to ‘the patient endurance which the labouring classes have generally exhibited under sufferings greater we believe than the people of any other country have to sustain’.7 But by that time the greatest disaster of all in the Irish common people’s long history of suffering was already befalling them. It was a disaster which everyone, including the government, had in one sense been able to see coming for decades, but which, since they felt quite powerless to do anything about it, they had preferred to treat as if it might never materialize.
A Frenchman, De Latocnaye, who toured Ireland fifty years before in 1796 had confirmed the continuation of the middleman system that had even then long been in existence.**
… A rich man, unwilling to be at any trouble, lets a large tract of country to one man, who does not intend to cultivate it himself, but to let it out to three or four others; those who have large shares farm them to about a score, who again let them to about a hundred comfortably situated peasants, who give them at an exorbitant price to about a thousand poor labourers, whom necessity obliges to take their scanty portion at a price far beyond its real value …8
Fifty years later this situation had become a nightmare. The early years of the nineteenth century saw a great surge of agricultural prosperity in Ireland, started partly by earlier government corn bounties to farmers in the days of the Irish Parliament, but accelerated by the high farm prices obtainable as a result of the Napoleonic War. Yet in Ireland, where land was virtually the only source of livelihood, and competition for land therefore unlimited, agricultural prosperity meant prosperity only for those who received rents. For the rest of the population, who would pay any price that gave them a minimum subsistence, prosperity meant only that subsistence was at least for a time not in doubt, and that more such subsistence was available for more such people.
More such people soon appeared by the normal processes of nature to take advantage of the fact. The census of 1841 gave a population of just over eight million, probably double what it had been at the beginning of the century.†† Middlemen on the land, taking a natural commercial advantage of the multiplying masses’ desire and indeed absolute need for land, themselves multiplied accordingly on the pattern described by Latocnaye. Holdings were increasingly subdivided and sub-let to others who increasingly subdivided and sub-let in turn. Soon tenants on any sizeable piece of land were increasing at a terrifying rate of progression, and it became common enough to find a chain of succession on any one piece of land going down four or five times from the initial landlord. In the early 1820s when the simple lease of one of the Duke of Leinster’s 500-acre farms fell in, he found that on some parts of it there were tenants at seven removes from himself.9 And the Catholic barrister Daniel O’Connell said he knew of farms, where he remembered only two farmhouses, supporting, in 1825, nearly two hundred families.10
All this was possible because land was the only means by which a man could procure a living for his family. The vast majority of the population naturally found themselves at the end of these series of middlemen; almost half the total number of holdings being less than five acres, and, by 1841, only seven per cent of them more than thirty acres.11
As each middleman in each series had to take his profit, the rent paid by those at the end of the series was all that a man could possibly afford to pay and continue to survive. Indeed, the series only came to an end in any given piece of land when that point had been reached.
The competition for land had ‘attained something like the competition for provisions in a besieged town or in a ship that is out at sea’.12 Whatever the size of a holding (and few were more than fifteen acres) the tenant-farmers lived almost entirely on potatoes, selling their crops to pay the extortionate rent. Frequently they could not even afford salt for their potatoes, which themselves were of the coarsest quality.
The Irish [wrote a desperate tenant farmer to the lord lieutenant] are reduced to the necessity of entirely subsisting on the lumper potato – a kind that grows something better in the poor man’s impoverished land than the potatoes of good quality. The lumper is not indeed human food at all. Mix them with any other kind of potatoes and lay them before a pig, and she will not eat one of them until all the good kind are devoured …. People like you cannot have the least idea of our misery. The great governors of nations ought to go in disguise through the country and enter the hovels of the peasantry to make themselves acquainted with the kind of food they live on and how they must labour for that food.13
Bread itself was hardly eaten by the average Irishman from one year’s end to the other. Nor was this only true of the poorest. A farmer with a holding of above average size on the Marquis of Conyngham’s estate in 1846 declared: ‘Not a bit of bread have I eaten since I was born, nor a bit of butter. We sell all the corn and the butter to give to the landlord’ [for rent] ‘yet I have the largest farm in the district and am as well off as any man in the county.’14
During the first half of the nineteenth century a number of most thorough inquiries were made by Parliament into the state of Ireland, and all reveal clearly this wretched life lived by the majority of the inhabitants, paying rents, ‘by which it was impossible for the tenant at any time to pay, reserving the means of decent subsistence’, living huddled together without distinction of age or sex, usually in the company of their livestock, on the bare floor of cabins through which ran open sewage, possessing hardly any bedding except straw, and often only able to go to Mass on alternate Sundays because there were not enough clothes to go round.15 The lowest class of all could not even afford to pay rent, but in return for a minimum plot on which to grow enough potatoes for survival gave their labour for nothing all the year round like serfs. Some families of this type occupied as little as a quarter of an acre (though not less than two to three acres was regarded as necessary for the proper support of a large family).** So far down the economic scale were many of them that they hardly ever handled money at all.
Moreover, with a drop in agricultural prices after the Napoleonic War and the general trend for grazing land to become more profitable than tillage, landlords, appalled by the number of poor people they found multiplying on their land, understandably enough began to try and consolidate their property. A parish priest described what happened when they did.
‘About three weeks or a month ago,’ he said in May 1824, he had seen ‘a certain farm (about 500 acres) that had 40 families residing on it, thinned in this manner. These 40 farms consisted of 200 individuals. When the lease fell in … 28 or 30 of these farms, consisting of 150 individuals, were dispossessed; they were allowed to take with them the old roofs of the cabins, that is the rotten timber and the rotten straw; and with these they contrived to erect stands upon the highway. The men could get no employment, the women and children had no resource but to go and beg; and really it was a most affecting scene to behold them upon the highway, not knowing where to go.’16 Some, thus evicted, moved to the towns where they crowded into small apartments and perhaps four or five families would live huddled together in a garret without proper clothes or bedding or food, while the men scavenged for casual labour, which was seldom to be had.
In all these circumstances it needed no social or economic genius to foretell what would happen if the potato crop, which alone was keeping the vast majority of the population alive, were to fail. In any case, the potato crop had failed quite frequently before, and history had already recorded the terrible famines which then ensued. There had been famines with particularly appalling spectacles of misery and death in 1720, 1739, 1741, 1800, 1817 and 1822. The great famine of the years 1845–8 was only the worst because by that time the population had grown to such a size that the pressure on land was that much greater, and the whole precarious system that much more disastrously balanced. A little over twenty years before, a parliamentary inquiry had asked a witness: ‘Looking ahead to 15 or 20 years or more, what must this increase in population without employment end in?’ and he had replied, ‘I do not know; I think it is terrible to reflect upon.’17
Terrible indeed it proved to be, killing probably about a million people altogether and reducing the population of Ireland by death or agonizing emigration by as much as a quarter in six years. Men found that the scenes long spoken of with awe as characterizing earlier famines were now taking place, on an even more horrifying scale, before their eyes. The dead were already lying unburied six or eight days in the streets of Skibbereen and it was possible to plead on behalf of a sheep-stealer that his wife was so hungry that she had been eating the thigh of her own daughter who had died from famine fever.18 And since starving and dying people had not the strength to till the soil to pay the rent – only the potato was affected by blight: other crops were good in the famine years – eviction on an unprecedented scale now took place in horrifying circumstances. One eye-witness described the eviction of 143 families (700 persons) from an estate in Tipperary as ‘the chasing away of 700 human beings like crows out of a cornfield’.19 Often they were too weak to be chased or had to be evicted dead. In either case, their corpses were found soon afterwards littering the hedgerows.
The opportunity was also seized of clearing all unwanted people off land, even those who were managing to pay their rent regularly. In one such case, seventy-six families, or about three hundred persons, were evicted from the estate of a Mr and Mrs Gerard in County Galway in spite of having the rent ready, and they were even driven from the ditches to which they had fled to try to fix up some sort of shelter with sticks and mud.20 A bizarre individual instance of an eviction where no rent was owing was that of James Brady, cleared with his family from a holding near Kells in the rich farming county of Meath, though he had always paid his rent regularly. After spending nine days and nights with his wife and four little girls in a ditch, he dug the family a living grave in a churchyard on the plot of a man called Newman. Newman then served him with an eviction order but, before it could be enforced, himself died of famine fever and was buried in the grave beside the squatters, who thus continued to defy him into eternity.21
Sir Robert Peel, who had been Prime Minister when the potato crop first failed in 1845, said of one set of evictions at Kilrush in County Mayo involving the clearance of some fifteen thousand people like rubbish over a period of twelve months, that he did not think the records of any country, civil or barbarous, presented materials for such a picture.22 And he went on to quote a government inspector’s account of one significant but poignant incident involving a man employed breaking stones.
He [the inspector] saw that man suddenly seize on the remnant of a pair of shoes and run across a heath. He followed the direction the man took and saw a fire blazing. On making inquiry as to the cause of it, he was told that upon the man being driven from his home, he had occupied a still more wretched hovel of his own construction and that it was this last place in which he had sought shelter that had been set fire to in order to get rid of him.23
There are countless descriptions of what happened in those years on such a vast scale in the workhouses and fever hospitals, in the prisons to which people chose entry by the most direct means only to find the packed cells riddled with typhus, in the lonely derelict cabins where families of dying and dead were stretched out one above the other in layers, in the cramped emigrant ships in which as many as one-fifth of all the passengers sometimes had to be buried at sea, and in the fever-ridden camps on the other side of the Atlantic. But it was in millions of individual memories, often incoherent and inarticulate, handed down in America and Ireland from one suffering generation to the next, and from them to men and women who were young in the twentieth century, that the sense of fundamental outrage and resentment at this monstrous thing that had happened under civilized government to the humble people of Ireland lived on.24
It is easy, over a hundred years later and after the successful establishment of an Irish Republic, to look back and say, quite correctly, that the accusations of genocide made by some Irish writers at the time and since were unjust and absurd; that the government was the prisoner of the economic philosophy of the day, which taught that economic laws had a natural operation and that to interfere with them was to breed chaos and anarchy; that, far from looking on callously, the government looked on with an increasing sense of dismay at what it regarded as its helplessness before irresistible economic and social forces; that, eventually, by what seemed a superhuman effort at the time, it succeeded in abandoning at least some of the principles it held most sacred and brought itself to distribute government charity, expecting only in return that its recipients should continue to live. All this is true.
It is also true, as the appalling conditions from which the English working classes suffered at the same time make clear, that there was no specifically anti-Irish callousness in the government’s outlook. The agricultural lower classes of Ireland were of no less theoretical concern to the government than the industrial working classes of England. The trouble was simply that in neither case was the concern great enough. Complex situations had developed within both patterns of lower-class living with which government had never contemplated having to deal. In Ireland the problems, besides being physically more remote, were also more complex, being bound up with a historical land system that went much further back than the industrial revolution; and the sufferings of the lower classes there were correspondingly greater. But the government were dealing ‘with their own people’ in both cases, however ironic the phrase may seem in the circumstances.
It is also necessary to say that the rigidity of the formula from which the government of the day had to escape in order to govern better is, at this distance of time, very difficult to appreciate. A Poor Law Commissioner of the famine time declared that he had heard the opinion stated both implicitly and explicitly that ‘it was desirable to allow things to take their normal course; not to assist the people in their suffering but to permit disease and want to go to their natural termination’. And he added that ‘many individuals even of superior minds, who seemed to have steeled their hearts to the suffering of the people of Ireland, justify it to themselves by thinking it would be going contrary to the provision of nature to render assistance to the destitute of that country’.25 And this was at the height of the disaster when the government were in fact already distributing free soup. It was held then and continued to be held even for long afterwards that ‘the economic laws which govern all human society are fixed by divine wisdom, and that any attempt to struggle with them by human legislation invariably results in making matters worse’.26
In the current of such a social philosophy clearly the government of the famine time showed some courage and enterprise in grappling with the disaster even to the inadequate extent it did. Yet it must finally be said of men who, when faced by the manifold unmistakable warnings they had received, had felt unable to grapple with the situation earlier or more effectively, that there was about them a lack of imagination and a fear of acting outside the civilized conventions of their time that amounted to a blot on civilization itself. Certainly it made nonsense of all the fine phrases about ‘common benefit … equal laws … reciprocal affection … inseparable interests and invincible strength’ with which Pitt had ushered in the Union over forty years before.
There was also a flaw in their economic philosophy which amounted to something very like hypocrisy. For this society had no scruples about interfering by human legislation with ‘natural’ economic laws where the interests of property demanded it. It was only where the demand was in the interests of the poor that their principles were so sternly unyielding. As a future Prime Minister, Gladstone, was to comment, the law was amended over and over again in favour of the landlord but there was not to be, until 1870, a single act on the statute book in favour of the tenant.
If, then, it must be the calm judgement of history that the government which could allow such a thing to happen stands condemned, it is easy to imagine how bitter and outraged was the reaction at the time of those who survived and who understood only the pain they and their loved ones suffered. This deep resentment was to take on a profound historical importance.
For the famine and its after-effects played a role in Irish history long after the grass had grown over the mass graves and the unwanted roads and pointless earthworks which the starving had had to construct in return for the first attempts at relief. In the late forties and early fifties well over a million Irish of the poorer class, hating what passed for government in Ireland, became literally physically separate from that government when they emigrated to the other side of the Atlantic. Given the conditions under which their class had lived ever since the penal laws, there had obviously never been much enthusiasm for government as such but, in a primitive struggle like theirs, the real enemy had appeared not so much in the form of the government itself as in the more get-at-able form close at hand of a landlord or his agent, or, most frequently, of another member of the Irish peasant class refusing to combine in the common interest. Moreover, hostile as the government had been felt to be, it had been the only government there was; there had been no real conceivable alternative. Now, for a considerable section of the Irish people this was no longer so. They had separated from it. And since they and their descendants and followers to America long continued to be very Irish, for the first time in Irish history a very large body of Irish common opinion, often retaining close personal links with Ireland, could feel itself politically anti-British without the confusing factor of being somehow British too.
In Ireland itself the situation was less clear. The famine and its evictions had been only the worst in a long series of cruelties to which the humble people of Ireland had been exposed for centuries. Over and over again they had suffered and died, and society had been shocked, or had ‘steeled their hearts’, and the dead had been buried and society had continued as before, with more fine laments simply added to the stock of legend. In one sense the famine could be seen as the last straw, demanding at last some form of political atonement to the nameless millions who had suffered for centuries and, for the living, a better future. Yet to think, in Ireland itself, of creating a ‘separate’ Ireland demanded a much greater effort of the imagination than it did on the other side of the Atlantic. For the whole external fabric of society in Ireland was British, and, more confusing still, this British society in Ireland was Irish too.
One of the British Government’s nineteenth-century Chief Secretaries for Ireland, the Earl of Mayo, a descendant of one of the most ancient Norman–Gaelic families, spoke no more than the truth when, in 1868, he declared that he had considerably less Anglo-Saxon blood in his veins than ‘many of the gentlemen in green uniforms flourishing about New York’ at that time.27 And by then, too, religious divisions in Ireland, though more obvious than racial ones, were themselves becoming of less and less social or political significance. By the 1820s Catholics had once again accumulated considerable landed property in Ireland. By 1834 they owned about one-fifth of the land of Ireland outright – compared with one-fourteenth at the height of the penal laws – and a further half was held by Catholics on long lease, compared with almost none under the penal laws.28 Thus, though the land system itself had not changed, Catholic landlords now exploited it together with Protestants. When, immediately after the famine, one-third of the land of Ireland changed hands as bankrupt estates were sold off, ninety per cent of the new landlords were Irishmen of one religion or the other, and particularly harsh in increasing rent and effecting clearances they proved to be. The important divisions in Irish society were no longer those of race or religion, but those of class.
In such circumstances the idea of Irish nationalism, never precise for the masses, took on a blurred image, and, inasmuch as it came to mean something positive at all, meant different things to different people.