Street Style

I was once accused by an Irishwoman of being insensitive for belittling the trauma to the Irish people of the Great Potato Famine. I’d like to restore that woman’s faith in my humanity and compassion by explaining the importance of this harrowing historical episode to a wider audience. 

Firstly the numbers:

The famine lasted for six years

1 million people dead

1 million people emigrated

The population of Ireland reduced by 25%

 Ireland in the nineteenth century was an occupied country. The British had dissolved Ireland’s independent parliament in 1800 and instituted a range of laws discriminating directly against the 80 per cent Catholic population.

 English and Anglo-Irish landlords owned almost all the land and collected a wage from the peasants who lived on their property. Around two thirds of the population of Ireland lived in this situation, dependent on agriculture for their survival, subsisting solely on potatoes which were the staple crop in the poorest regions.

The most fertile land in Ireland was in the north and east of the island – land which was owned and occupied by the English, forcing poor Irish peasant families onto only barely fertile land in the south and west with large areas of bog and rocky soil.

The English occupiers essentially treated the Irish inhabitants of the land as a mass army of slave labour, forced to eke out a miserable existence cultivating potatoes to enrich the English aristocracy.

In September 1845 the famine began. Potato crops mysteriously began to die as a result of an unknown airborne fungus carried in the holds of ships from North America. By November 15 half the crop was destroyed. By 1846 people began to die of hunger and the British Prime Minister Robert Peel attempted to implement a large scale public works program for Ireland’s unemployed. Shortly after though, the new Whig Government in Britain, believing that the market would provide food to cover for the failed crops, halted relief programs and continued to profit from the export of wheat.

Through the next three years each harvest also failed due to the blight and, on top of a crippling famine, typhus and cholera were rife. Victims were offered temporary relief through the Soup Kitchens Act of 1847, but this act was withdrawn a few months later and the destitute left to rely on scant local assistance. Hundreds of thousands of destitute and starving peasants embarked on journeys to America or England to find work and food.

The result, along with the loss of a million lives, was the utter destruction of large swathes of villages and towns, and mass eviction of peasants from now infertile land. Historians later noted that the famine was neither inevitable nor unavoidable and that the weak British response to Irish suffering was actually a calculated act of genocide, motivated by an ideological desire for population control and consolidation of property – a deliberate measure to destroy the Irish people.

That the Irish nation was able to prosper and grow into the flourishing democracy it is today is a testament to the resilience and courage of its people.