THE FAMINE

The habit of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those that have not got it.
G. B. Shaw
Abundant food is in the fallow ground of the poor, but it is swept away by injustice. Proverbs
Let us explain to you Irish farmer, Irish landlord, Irish labourer, Irish tradesman, what
became of your harvest, which is your only wealth. Early in the winter it was conveyed, by
the thousand shiploads, to England, paying freight; it was stored in English stores, paying
storage; it was passed from hand to hand among corn-speculators, paying at every remove,
commission, merchants profits, forwarding charges and so forth: some of it was bought
by French or Belgian buyers and carried to Havre, to Antwerp, to Bordeaux, meeting on
the way other corn, from Odessa or Hamburg or New York, which was also earning for
merchants, ship-owners and other harpies, immense profits, exorbitant freights, huge
commissions...In other words, you sent away a quarter of wheat at 50 shillings, and got it
back, if you got it at all, at 80 shillings.
The Nation, Dublin, 12 June 1847
John Mitchel describes some of the scenes of starvation and illness he encountered when he
came to a village in the west:
Rise, then, and we shall show you the way through the mountains to seaward, where we
shall come down upon a little cluster of cabins, in one of which, two summers ago, we
supped sumptuously on potatoes and salt with the decent man who lives there, and the
dark eyed woman of the house and five small children. We had a hearty welcome though
the fare was poor; and as we toasted our potatoes in the greeshaugh, our ears drank in the
honeyed-sweet tones of the well beloved Gaelic.
As we came down towards the roots of the mountain, you may feel, loading the evening
air, the heavy balm of hawthorn blossom; here are whole thickets of white mantled
hawthorn, every mystic tree save us from the fairy thrall!
But why do we not see the smoke curling from those lowly chimneys? And surely we
ought by this time to scent the well-known aroma of the turf fires. But what may Heaven
be about us this night! What reeking breath of hell is this oppressing the air, heavier and
more loathsome than the smell of death rising from the carnage of a battlefield? Oh,
misery! had we forgotten this was the famine year? (1847). And we are here in the midst
of those thousands Golgothas that border our island with a ring of death from Cork
Harbour all the way round to Lough Foyle.
There is no need for inquiries here no need for words; the history of this little society is
plain before us. Yet we go forward, with sick hearts and swimming eyes, to examine the
Place of Skulls nearer. There is a horrible silence; grass grows before the doors; we fear to
look within, though all the doors are open or off the hinges; for we fear to see the chapless
skeletons grinning there. But our footfalls rouse two lean dogs, that run from us with
doleful howling and we know by the felon gleam in the wolfish eyes how they have lived
after their masters died.
We walk amidst the houses of the dead and out at the other side of the cluster, and there is
not one where we dare to enter. We stop before the threshold of our host of two years ago;

we put our head, with eyes shut, inside the door jamb, and say, with shaking voice God
save all here. No answer! ghastly silence and a mouldy stench, as from the mouth of
burial vaults. Ah! They are all dead; they are all dead! the strong man and the dark eyed
woman and the little ones, with their liquid Gaelic accents that melted into music for us
two years ago; they shrunk and withered together until they hardly knew one anothers
faces; but their horrid eyes scowled on each other with cannibal glare.
We know the whole story the father was on a public work and earned the sixth part of
what would have maintained his family. It was not always paid to him; but still it kept
them half alive for three months, and so instead of dying in December they died in March.
And the agonies of those three months who can tell? the poor wife wasting and
weeping over her stricken children; the heavy-laden weary man, with black night
thickening around him feeling his own arm shrink and his step totter with the cruel
hunger that gnaws his life away, and knowing too surely that all this will soon be over.
And he has grown a rogue too, on those public works; with roguery and lying about him,
roguery and lying above him, he has begun to say in his heart that there is no God; from an
honest farmer he had sunk down into a swindling, sturdy beggar; for him there is nothing
firm or stable; the pillars of the world are rocking around him. Even thirst for vengeance
he can never feel again; for the very blood of him is starved into a thin chill serum, and if
you prick him he will not bleed. Now he can totter forth no longer, and he stays at home to
die. But his darling wife is no longer dear to him; there is a dull, stupid malice in their
looks; they forget that they had five children, all dead weeks ago, and flung coffinless into
shallow graves nay, in the frenzy of their despair they would rend one another for the
last morsel in that house of doom; and at last, in misty dreams of drivelling idiocy, they
die utter strangers.
Pity and Terror! what a tragedy is here deeper, darker than any bloody tragedy ever
enacted under the sun, with all its dripping daggers and sceptred palls. Who will compare
the fate of men burned at the stake or cut down in battle men with high hearts and the
pride of life in their veins, and an eye to look up to Heaven or to defy the slayer to his face
who will compare it with this?
No shelter here tonight then; and here we are far on in the night, still gazing on the hideous
ruin. A man might gaze and think on such a scene, till curses breed about his heart of
hearts, and the hysterica passio swells in his throat. But we have many miles to walk
before we reach our inn; so come along with us and we will tell you as we walk together in
the shadows of the night.
But John Mitchel saw some of the living too:
Cowering wretches almost naked in the savage weather, prowling the turnip fields and
endeavouring to grub up roots that had been left behind; but running to hide as the mail
coach rolled by; groups and families sitting or wandering on the high road with failing step
and dim patient eyes, gazing hopelessly into infinite darkness and despair. And sometimes
I could see in front of the cottages little children leaning against a fence for they could
not stand their limbs fleshless, their bodies half naked, their faces bloated yet wrinkled
and a pale greenish hue children who could never, oh it was too plain, grow up to be
men and women.
Mitchel accurately described the horrors of the Famine but nobody in authority wanted to
admit that his was a truthful eye-witness account. And in later years, the Famine forgotten,
their energies were thereafter focused on discrediting him. To understand Mitchel it is

absolutely essential to understand the Famine or Great Hunger experienced in Ireland from
the mid-1840s until 1851.
It is one of the greatest disasters in human history. In many ways it is unparalleled. No
famine ever claimed such a high percentage of a countrys population. It was the first Postmodern famine, involving the failure of a nation to provide food and resources for its people
when there was no actual shortage of food. It was not a natural disaster; it was a catastrophe
caused by policymakers. It was a process not an event.
Undoubtedly, the Famine was the worst catastrophe in both Irish and British history,
exceeding the Black Death and Yellow Fever in its ferocity. It was responsible for the deaths
of between one in four and one in six of the population; perhaps one in two in the west of
Ireland. By contrast the Ethiopian famine of 1972-74 was responsible for the death of one in
125 and the terrible 1984 famine in the same region, which resulted in the national fund
raising effort known as Band Aid, was responsible for the death of one in fifty five.
Not only did the Famine sweep away half the population of Ireland it swept away much of its
national identity as well. Ireland was cleaned to the bone by the work of human wickedness.
Nearly twenty-five per cent of the total Irish population, for which Britain claimed
responsibility, was allowed to die of hunger and disease, while there was enough food in the
country to feed the entire population twice over. Had the sea been harvested there would have
been enough to feed them over again. Three hundred and sixty thousand dwelling places
disappeared. In 1841 Irelands population equalled the correct ratio of about one-third of the
total population of Great Britain and Ireland. By 1911 it was reduced to less than one-tenth of
the total. In Munster and Connaught the population had been reduced by 57% since the 1841
census. In the longer term, the population of the Republic of Ireland had been reduced to two
and a half million by 1961, and there was a deep psychological hurt, maybe even a genetic
memory, particularly in the west of the country, that may never go away.
This unspeakable tragedy occurred at a time when sufficient food was produced in Ireland to
feed double the population; and at a time when Ireland and England had the same
government and were essentially just different islands of the same country. The fact that
people could not access the food they produced in abundance was the direct, and inevitable,
result of the policies of successive British Governments which were designed to take control
of Irish lands and impoverish, disenfranchise and dispossess the native Irish. To understand
how a Famine of this magnitude could take place in one of the most fertile countries on earth,
we need to understand how the Irish people defenceless, disabled, etiolated and crushed
were dependent on Britain.
When a country is full of food and exporting it, claimed G. B. Shaw, there can be no
Famine. (Man and Superman) But there was. Many Irish people dislike the use of the word
Famine with regard to the condition in Ireland in the mid-1840s, but no other single word
better describes it. A famine is defined as a drastic, wide-reaching food shortage or a
severe hunger; starvation. That is what there was in Ireland, even if the wide-reaching food
shortage was man-made.
Forty five years before the great hunger the Act of Union, joining the two islands under one
government based in London, began to have a disastrous impact on the Irish economy. The
Irish portion of the Union was used as a market for the English portions surplus goods, and
Irish industry collapsed.
Catholic emancipation, expected to follow immediately after the Union, was only achieved in
1829, after a desperate thirty-year struggle. So emancipation or the removal of the last of
the Penal Laws had theoretically occurred fifteen years before the onset of famine;

however, in practical terms, nothing had changed. The hardships these laws had caused, and
the burden they placed upon day-to-day living are beyond the scope of this historical
narrative. It would be presumptuous to attempt to chronicle five hundred years of suffering,
torment and misery in any work.
It is partly summed up by the British traveller Arthur Young who, in the last quarter of the
eighteenth century, found an Anglo-Irish aristocracy of half a million joying in the triumph
of having two million slaves. He observes that the gentry, for little or no cause, lash with
horsewhip or cane, or break the bones of the people, and kill, without apprehension of judge
or jury. The Punishment Laws says Young are calculated for the meridian of Barbary. Sir
Roger Cox, himself one of the elite, wrote: If an Englishman be damnified by an Irishman
not amenable to law, he may reprise himself on the whole tribe or nation. The historian
Lecky says:
The influence of the code appeared indeed, omnipresent. It blasted the prospects of the
Catholic in all struggles of active life. It cast its shadows over the innermost recesses of his
home. It darkened the very last hour of his existence. This, as no Catholic, could be
guardian to a child; so the dying person knew that his children would be taken from the
family to be put under the tutelage of Protestants.
The enforcement of laws was as draconian as ever after the Act of Union in 1801. This act
united Ireland and England with direct rule from Westminster. The theory being that Ireland
and England, now be governed by the same laws, would enjoy the same protection. Ireland
was generously given its own set of special laws. However, despite having, in theory, equal
rights under law, the protection of British common law did not extend to the Irish people.
Quite the contrary. The penal laws remained in place and were supplemented by a further
series of repressive acts that legalised oppression and dispossession. Following the Act of
Union, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended nineteen times, thus allowing anyone to be
imprisoned without charge or trial date. At the insistence of landlords, an Act was passed
allowing Court Martials to sentence civilians to death. Seventeen Coercion Acts, ten
Insurrection and Arms Acts, and two Oath Acts were offered for the protection of the Irish.
The trivial reasons for the Coercion Acts reached the ridiculous at times.
In general, the representatives of the Protestant Churches in England and Ireland condoned
this bigotry and persecution. The general Christian attitude of the papist-hating Protestant
Bishops in Ireland may be guessed at from Dean Swifts ironic description of them:
Excellent and moral men had been selected upon every occasion of a vacancy, but it
unfortunately happened that as those worthy divines crossed Hounslow Heath, on their
way to Ireland, they were set upon by highwaymen, who frequented the Common, robbed
and murdered who seized their robes and patents, came over to Ireland, and were
consecrated bishops in their stead.
There were, however, some notable exceptions; in particular, the Protestant Bishop of Killala.
In his speech in the House of Lords, during the debate on the Catholic Emancipation Bill of
1793, he expressed sentiments that did credit to his Christianity when he said: I look upon
our Catholic brethren as fellow Christians, believers in the same God, and partners in the
same redemption.
Despite the entrenched bigotry of the established church, many individual Protestants
courageously risked life and property to save their Catholic neighbours. Decent, truly
Christian Protestants sometimes hid Catholic priests when they were hunted by bloodhounds
and soldiers, thus saving the hunted priests life at the risk of their own. Many also,
sometimes poor men, accepted the legal transfer of the lands of Catholic neighbours and held

them for their neighbours benefit, thus saving them from being forfeited to a Discoverer.
There was, for example, a poor Protestant blacksmith in Tipperary in Penal times, who, to
save the property of his neighbours, was in legal possession of thousands of acres of land. Yet
he lived and died in poverty. There were also times when Protestants found it in their interest
to hold property for Catholics, to prevent it being seized by others.
Land Tenure and Employment
An examination of the land holdings of the Irish people in the early to mid 1800s reveals how
effective centuries of successive conquests, rebellions, confiscations, plantations and Penal
Laws were in dispossessing the native people. In 1841, approximately 45% of the Irish
population had holdings of a mere 1-5 acres. Many large landholders at this time were
absentee English landlords. They found it convenient to let large tracts of land to others
who, in turn, sublet it. The landlord thus rid himself of responsibility and assured himself of a
regular income. Frequently, Irish families leased land from middlemen. As profit was the
only concern of the middlemen, the tenants were demoralised as their little rented farms were
split into smaller and smaller holdings for the sake of increased rents.
Yet, whether he held his land from a middleman or a landlord, the Irish tenant had no security
of tenure. The majority of Irish families were tenants at will on the land they worked. That
is, they were tenants at the will of the English landlord or lessor, who could turn them out at
any time. Moreover, any improvement the tenant made to his holding became the property of
the landlord, without compensation, when the tenant was evicted. In many cases the landlord
refused a lease because he had the tenant more completely under his control. In other cases,
the tenant could not afford the 10 or so for the cost of the stamp duty on the lease.
In addition, a lease gave no security because rent was generally in arrears. Tenants were
invariably without capital to make improvements, and frequently, rent was deferred for six to
twelve months or longer to allow them to become established. This practice was known as the
hanging gale gale being a term used for a periodical payment of rent. The rent was
frequently paid off by the surrender of the tenants harvest and by work performed for the
landlord, in lieu of rent, at slave-labour rates.
Once the tenant was in arrears with his rent, any security of a lease vanished, and the tenant
was thereafter kept in perpetual bondage. He could, except in a part of the north of Ireland, be
evicted at any time without compensation for improvements made to the land. In Ireland
alone, wrote John Stuart Mill, the whole agricultural population can be evicted by the mere
will of the landlord. In Ireland alone, the bulk of the population, wholly dependent on the
land, cannot look forward to a single years occupation of it. The dread of landlords was
such that people trembled before them, recorded a writer in Donegal, just before the famine.
The possession of a piece of land was, literally, the difference between life and death. Turned
off the land, the people died in a short time. In Ireland there was no agricultural employment
for labourers as it was understood in England, as Irish farms were too small to require hired
labour. Neither was there any other industry in which people could find employment, as
restrictions on export, and laws prohibiting Catholics from involvement in trade and
commerce, had successively and successfully crushed one industry after another.
As a result of the competition for land, rents in Ireland were one hundred per cent higher than
in England. If you ask the man why he bid so much for his farm, and more than he knew he
could pay, wrote Campbell Foster of the Times in 1845, his answer is What could I do?
Where was I to go? I know I cannot pay the rent but what could I do? Would you have me go
and beg? As the rent was paid by surrendering crops grown for that purpose, the steepness of

the rent meant the people were able to keep only barely adequate quantities of food for their
own sustenance.
Potatoes, no more popular in Ireland than many other European countries, became a suitable
mainstay as they were easy to cultivate. A reasonable harvest could be produced on the small
plots of land leased to Irish families. An acre and a half would provide a family of five or six
with food for twelve months, while to grow the equivalent in grain required acreage about six
times as large. If the potato crop was a big one, the farmer and his family had food; if it was
small, they went hungry. Other than this, the people, generally, had little means of buying
food as they rarely, if ever, handled money. If the store of potatoes finished before the next
crop was ready for harvesting, they faced starvation.
Under these conditions the country suffered from the most fearful distress. The landlord was
the master. He could raise rents at will, he could evict, whether rent was paid or not. If the
tenant improved his holding he could be taxed for doing so, and the rent went up. If he
defended the chastity of his daughters, or they did so, he was prone to eviction. The landlord
owned his tenant, his tenants land and his tenants vote and, as he sometimes thought, even
his tenants womenfolk. Without redress at law, the only recourse left to people was to take
the law into their own hands as members of secret societies such as White Boys and the
Ribbon Men sometimes did to defend peoples rights.
In those years preceding the famine, the Frenchman Gustave de Beaumont found in Ireland
the extreme of human misery worse than the Negro in his chains.
In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered; but an entire nation of paupers is
what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland. To explain the social condition of such
a country, it would be only necessary to recount its miseries and its sufferings; the history
of the poor is the history of Ireland.
In 1839, de Beaumont published his Irlande Sociale, Politique et Religieuse praised by A. V.
Dicey as being full not only of profound wisdom but of practical guidance. Dicey explains:
The author of this book was anxious to see with his own eyes what his reason hesitated to
believe. Twice, in 1835 and 1837, while travelling through Ireland, he visited the counties
where famine is accustomed to rage with most violence, and he verified the facts. Shall he
relate what he saw? No. There are misfortunes so far beyond the pale of humanity, that
human language has no words to represent them. Besides, were he to recall the scenes of
sadness and desolation he has witnessed; to repeat the howlings and yells of despair he
has heard; were he required to relate the anguishing tone of a mothers voice refusing a
portion of food to her famishing children; and if, in the midst of such extreme misery, he
were required to portray the insulting opulence which the rich ostentatiously displayed to
all eyes; the immensity of those demesnes where the hand of man has created artificial
waters, vales and hills the splendid residence designed for servants, the still more superb
building destined for horses; all the wonders of art, all the inventions of industry, and all
the caprices of vanity, accumulated on a spot where the owner does not even deign to
reside, but makes his visits few and far between; the sumptuous and indolent life of the
wealthy landlord, who knows nothing of the misery of which he is the author; never has
glanced at it; does not believe its existence; draws from the sweat of the industrious
poor his 20 000 a year; every one of whose senseless and superfluous luxuries
represents the ruin or destitution of some unfortunate being; who every day gives his
dogs the food of a hundred families, and leaves those to perish by hunger who support him
in this life of luxury and pride; if the author of this book were required to recall the
sinister impressions produced by such contrasts and the terrible question which such

oppositions raised in his soul, he feels that the pen would fall from his hands, and that he
would not have courage to complete the task which he has undertaken to accomplish.
Another traveller, the German Kohl wrote:
Heaven pardon my ignorance! Now I have seen Ireland, it seems to me that the poorest
among the Letts, the Estonians, and the Finlanders, lead a life of comparative comfort.
The Duke of Wellington, himself an Irishman, said there never was a country in which
poverty existed to the extent it exists in Ireland.
The landlords of Ireland were, to put it coldly, engaged in the legalised removal of what a
Royal Commission reckoned would be about one million persons. The years in which de
Beaumont was writing saw the landlords attempt to rid the country of what they called
surplus tenants. This was well before the years of the (comparatively) Great Famine. The
country was hit by regular food shortages or small famines. Forced emigration, as well as
starvation, was part of the policy. In Loughrea, Co. Galway in 1838, a meeting of landlords
was held to consider arrangements for shipping to Australia these human encumbrances as
they were described. The chairman, a Mr. Birmingham, addressing the meeting with playful
sarcasm, envisaged a new Loughrea in Australia:
In Australia we may select that quantity of land in the best situation and call it Loughrea;
and there may be a handsome lake, too, attached to it; and thus these settlers may fancy
themselves still in their dear Loughrea, with their associations and friends about them.
Poverty in the midst of plenty is never a natural disaster. It is the by-product of a policy of
wealth for the few. In the case of Ireland, all this wretchedness could be traced to a single
source seven hundred years of English rule and an unrelenting policy of dispossession of
the Irish people. What was needed of course was better government but, since all efforts to
improve conditions had been ignored by the government in London, the Irish people,
represented by Daniel O Connell, William Smith OBrien and other Irish MPs were, from the
1830s, strongly advocating giving notice to the government in London in the form of Repeal
of the Act of Union. The people simply wanted their country back to administer it themselves
from Dublin and not from London. The Government, scared of the advent of civil unrest by
the monster meetings demanding Repeal, set up a Commission in a token attempt to address
the disastrous land tenure situation. In 1843, Lord Devon was appointed to head this
commission. Its structure typified the problem government had in trying to convince the
sceptics that they were serious the whole commission was made up of landowners. The
Report of the Devon Commission, which OConnell declared to be perfectly one-sided, all
landlords and no tenants, said that the principal cause of Irish misery was the bad
relationship between landlord and tenant. It found that there were 326 000 families in Ireland
occupying plots of land insufficient to support a family. That this was a total underestimation
of the problem was tragically evident just a few years later.
Mitchel wrote in a letter to John Martin:
But, seriously, Mr. Martin, what do you think of Lord Devons Commission? I have made
up my mind upon it; and, as usual, I think OConnell altogether right. It is a humbug, a
hoax, a cod. Some things there are that may be prejudged, that require to be prejudged,
lest (before they be proved by their results to be humbugs) they cause mischief in the
mean time. This commission is one of those. It is intended to operate a diversion from the
movement; intended (as the Ecclesiastical Commission was, and as all such
commissions are) to put by the pressure of the moment; to weaken, by dividing, the
popular feeling; and then, then ah, these statesmen are liars, and will go to hell! then to
put the people off with a sham of relief, with the minimum of justice (which is the

maximum of statesmanship). But if I run on any longer, I shall get intemperate in my

language.
The outcome of the Devon Commission fully justified his view. Nothing was done for the
Irish tenants for more than a quarter of century after the commission reported; and when at
last something was done, it certainly could hardly be said to be the result of the Devon
Commission.
In 1845, the population of Ireland is variously estimated at between eight and more than ten
million, having risen from about five million in 1800. In 1841, when a census was taken, the
population of Ireland was recorded as 8 175 124. This was according to Cecil WoodhamSmith in The Great Hunger pronounced universally to be no fair criterion of the present
population. Arthur Kennedy, a relief officer had tested it in Co. Clare and found the
population to be one-third greater than had been recorded. [Sir Arthur Kennedy was later
governor of Queensland when Young Irelander Kevin Izod ODoherty was a leading surgeon
there. Together, they were instrumental in raising a considerable sum of money for a famine
(187980) which threatened to be as disastrous as that of the 1840s.]
The Irish are fond of children and the family feeling is exceptionally strong. A man and
womans insurance against destitution in old age was their children. Girls married at sixteen,
boys at seventeen or eighteen. Nothing was to be gained by waiting. Asked why the Irish
married so young, the Catholic bishop of Raphoe said in 1835: They cannot be worse off
than they are ... and they may help each other. Irish females, stated George Nicholls in his
Report on Ireland, were very correct in their conduct, and his impressions were very
favourable of their morals there was no need to make provisions for bastards in Ireland.
Despite the grinding poverty of their lives, there was one luxury enjoyed by the Irish that
favoured the survival and rearing of children the house was usually well warmed by a turf
fire. They were warm in winter and they were abundantly fed as long as the potato did not
fail.
The Advent of The Great Hunger
As fate would have it, in early September 1845, a fungal growth known as potato blight
(phytophthora infestans) which caused the potato to rot in the ground and give off an
abominable smell hit the potato crop during a particularly wet harvest and the airborne
pathogen spread rapidly within crops and from one crop to another.
Where the potato blight originated and how it came to Europe is a mystery but research
indicates that the source was most likely South America, where the potato itself originated.
Early botanists and natural historians do not mention any disease resembling blight, and
potatoes had been grown in most European countries for nearly two hundred years before
blight appeared. A potato disease identical with blight was found in North Germany in 1830,
but the first fully recorded outbreak took place in North America in 1842. This attack was
followed, in Europe, by the serious outbreak of 1845 and the total loss of the crop in 1846.
However, when Potato Blight spread from America to Europe in 1844 and to England and
then Ireland in 1845, it did not cause death by famine anywhere except in Ireland. The
Famine or the The Great Hunger (the last in Europe) is usually referred to as THE POTATO
FAMINE by British historians the inference being that the Irish were pig-ignorant and knew
nothing about agriculture other than recognising a clump of potatoes if they tripped over it.
The potato was introduced to Ireland from the Americas by the English adventurer Sir
Walter Raleigh, remembered in England as a man of chivalry, for supposedly spreading his
cloak in front of Queen Bess to prevent her from stepping on a puddle. [In Ireland he is

remembered as an English land-grabber (42 000 acres in Munster) who is guilty of one of the
most heinous crimes in the annals of warfare, having directed the murder of 700 defenceless
Spanish soldiers on Golden Island (off the Kerry coast) after they had been offered
honourable terms by the Lord Deputy, Gray, if they surrendered.] The potato did not at first
find favour in Ireland. ORorke says it was not sown extensively in the 17th century and even
in the first quarter of the 18th century.
Yet the sufferings caused by the first crop failure in 1845 were such that Lord Brougham
said: They surpass anything on the page of Thucydides on the canvas of Poussin in the
dismal chant of Dante.
John Mitchel wrote:
During all the famine years, Ireland was actually producing sufficient food, wool and flax,
to feed and clothe not nine but eighteen millions of people; yet, he asserted, a ship sailing
into an Irish port during the famine years with a cargo of grain was sure to meet six ships
sailing out with a similar cargo.
It was a catastrophe that demanded the immediate, energetic, most powerful response by the
countrys government.
However, this is how those who insisted on governing the country responded.
The Tories Response
The Tory Party, under Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, was in power at the time of the first
outbreak of blight. Peel had, at one time, been an Irish MP for Cashel and later Chief
Secretary of Ireland from 1812-1817 and knew Ireland well. Although not seen as
particularly sympathetic to the plight of the Irish people and seriously criticised for many of
his policies and attitudes on Irish issues, he took some relief measures. He appointed a
commission to examine the cause of the blight and on his own initiative, without Treasury
sanction and against the strong disapproval of protectionists in his party, purchased 100 000
worth of Indian corn and meal from America to be used to prevent food prices rising. Indian
corn was purchased because this did not interfere with private commerce and did not
contravene the controversial Corn Laws which limited the importation of corn into the United
Kingdom. To put the amount of famine relief into perspective, it is often stated that at the
same time the government voted 100 000 for the relief of the two million Irish people
already dying of hunger, it voted 200 000 to beautify Londons Battersea Park. Also the
$100 000 worth of Indian meal has to be measured against a potato loss worth $10 000 000.
The Commission to examine the cause of the blight appointed professors to see if science
could do anything with the spoilt crop. A shipload of scientists to study the cause of the
potato failure in Ireland arrived from Britain. (They could have studied the potato blight in
England; the only difference was people were not dying of starvation there.) They published
a treatise titled Advice concerning the Potato crop to the Farmers and Peasantry of Ireland.
They devised a scheme whereby the labourer was to put his rotting mess of putrid potatoes
through a long process and then mix the result with meal, oatmeal or flour. The men of
science did not seem to have discerned that if the Irish labourers and small tenant farmers had
meal, oatmeal and flour, they would not be dying of starvation. They published reports in
October and November, printed 70 000 copies of their fantastic instructions, went home and
wound up the Commission. The following is an example of their extraordinary advice:
Dry the potatoes in the sun and mark out on the ground a space six feet wide and as long
as you please. Dig a shallow trench two feet wide all round, and throw the mould upon the
space. Level it and cover it with a floor of turf sods set on their edges. Place packing

stuff on this, made by mixing a barrel of freshly burnt unslaked lime, broken into pieces
as large as marbles, with two barrels of sand or earth, or by mixing equal parts of burnt
turf and dry sawdust.
The rest of the peculiar instructions were practically unintelligible. Acknowledging this, the
pamphlet concluded: If you do not understand this, ask your landlord or clergyman.
Another piece of advice was;
to procure a rasp or grater, a linen cloth, a hair sieve or a cloth strainer, a pail or tub or two
for water, and a griddle. Rasp the bad potatoes, very finely, into one of the tubs, wash the
pulp, strain, repeat the process, then dry the pulp on the griddle, over a slack fire. The
water used for washing the pulp would contain a milky substance, which was starch and
bread could then be made by mixing this with dried potato pulp, peasmeal, bean-meal,
oatmeal or flour.
One scientist advised people to get hold of chloric acid and manganese dioxide which should
then be added to salt and applied to the diseased area of the potato. Luckily, farmers (it
seems) could not get hold of such chemicals; otherwise they would have annihilated
themselves as the mixture produces poisonous chlorine gas later used to poison troops in
World War One!
The advice of the men of science, who of course were not experts on something which was
hitherto unknown to them, proved to be absolutely and totally useless; likewise, the 100 000
worth of corn purchased was utterly insufficient to provide any relief for universal starvation.
By 1846, 3 500 000 worth of potatoes had been lost. William Smith OBrien said that the
grant of 100 000 to Ireland was offset by four to five million pounds drained from the
country in the form of the corn, cattle, pigs and bacon lost to a starving land (Hansard, vol 84
13 March 1846, pp. 987-1006).
Moreover, the quality of the corn purchased was unsuitable for human consumption. Indian
corn was a very low-grade corn of little nutritional value and had a most unpleasant taste that
made it almost inedible. It was so hard it was called flint-corn and could not be ground as
ordinary grain. It was an unknown food in Europe. In America it was chopped in steel mills,
which were also unknown in Europe. Even if enough corn could be imported, only about onetenth of what would be required to relieve stress could be ground. Unground Indian corn is
sharp and irritating. It can pierce the intestines and is impossible to digest. Even long boiling
does not soften the flint-hard grain, and if eaten in this state it produces agonising pains,
especially in children. In Ireland it became known as Peels brimstone. Moreover, the corn
was purchased not to feed the people but to stabilise food prices. Generations later, when
grandmothers gave children a cupful of the corn so that they could understand something of
the hardships of the famine years, they were never to forget the awful taste for the rest of
their lives.
In November, Peel also set up a Relief Commission under Sir Randolph Routh of The
Commissariat Department of the British Army. Other members included Mr Edward Lucas,
Under Secretary of Dublin Castle, John Pitt Kennedy, Secretary of the Devon Commission,
Sir Robert Kane, Irish Scientist, James Dombrain, Inspector General of the Coast Guards
Service and Colonel McGregor, Inspector General of the Constabulary. They were seen to
have the expertise to deal with aspects of the looming crisis including Famine Relief,
sickness and, in particular, the maintenance of Law and Order at all costs ever the prime
concern of the Government. They had their first meeting on 20 November.
This Commission developed a four-point plan that consisted of:

1. The organization of Local Relief Effort Committees comprising local landowners or their
agents, magistrates, clergy and residents of importance. These committees were to raise
money to buy food to be sold to distressed persons or, in really needy cases, given free
2. The devising of employment projects (such as road building) by local committees,
overseen by The Irish Board of Works
3. Measures to care for the destitute poor who would suffer from fever
4. The sale of Indian corn to keep food prices down. As soon as food prices rose
unreasonably, sufficient corn was to be thrown on the market.
The fact that the first part of this plan required that the Relief Initiatives be funded only by
philanthropy rather than Treasury, and administered by amateur committees rather than
experienced employees, guaranteed its failure. Irish MPs, particularly William Smith
OBrien, emphasised again and again in Parliament that the Irish people needed work, not
charity.
Four bills were passed on 5 March. The first allowed five persons of respectability in a
barony, two magistrates and three taxpayers, to send to the Lord Lieutenant proposals for
Local Works. If they were approved, the works were to be executed with government funds
half being a grant and half repayable over twenty years. The second act provided for the
execution of specified works by contractors: works such as road repairs, levelling, drainage
and sewerage. However, the money had to be repaid. The other two acts dealt with the
construction of piers and fishing harbours, large drainage projects and water power. The
initial survey had to be paid for by the applicant and the amount of money set aside for these
projects was not sufficient to be effective.
Colonel Harry Jones, of the Board of Works, pointed out that it was not possible to rush into
construction projects without proper preparation and planning all of which would take more
time than was available if the works were to provide income for people in need of Famine
relief. He also advised that projects could not be funded locally in the areas most in need as
these areas were poor.
In addition, Peel was hampered by lack of support from his party and particularly by Treasury
which was presided over by Charles Trevelyan, a formidable man who saw himself as the
guard dog of the British nations money-bags. His policies were often received by officials in
Ireland with dismay. His name will be forever linked with callous mismanagement during the
period of the Irish Famine. As Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, effectively its permanent
head, Trevelyan was one of the most influential people in the Government and survived
changes of party and policy. In this capacity he was able to influence the famine strategy to a
remarkable extent.
He was a religious man and was given to reading chapters from the Bible aloud. However, he
managed to equate the standards of Christianity with the principles of another pseudo religion
altogether laissez-faire political economy. This can be translated (from the French) as Let
(people) do (as they choose) economy. Its original meaning is said to have come from the
French capitalist Legendre who, when asked by Louis XIVs finance minister (Jean-Baptiste
Colbert, 16191683) what he could do to help French industry, is supposed to have replied,
Laissez-nous faire! (Let us alone!).
There can be no Empire without profiteering. It would have been impossible to build and
operate the British Empire without large scale profiteering built into its culture. Trevelyan
supported the right of private enterprise to increase its prices and profits when supply was

scarce and did not support political or economic intervention regardless of need. He was
happy to apply this policy to food in time of famine. Famine economy Mitchel called it.
Trevelyan had at his disposal two prodigious labour-saving devices bigotry and prejudice.
These allowed him to form opinions and make decisions without having to inconvenience
himself with the accumulation of facts. Satisfied that whatever he proposed to do was
justified, he went forward, impervious to other considerations, blinded and sustained by his
own convictions. He showed a most remarkable insensitivity and has variously been
described, among other things, as remorseless, bullying, cruel, bitter, calculating, barbaric,
aggressive, mean, ruthless and, most of all, devastating in his effect on the people of Ireland.
The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not
be too much mitigated. The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical
evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the
people. Trevelyan.
Though not particularly liked by the Tory Government, he appeared able, well educated, and
knowledgeable about Ireland. However, a closer look would have revealed that he was
antagonistic towards the Irish and his knowledge was deeply tainted by religious bigotry. He
had a serious misunderstanding of Irish politics, based on prejudices developed on a trip to
straighten out a relative, when he mistook a meeting for an uprising.
The Board of Works came under the control of Treasury, and Trevelyan took it upon himself
to control its projects, stating: The Board of Works is a subordinate board of the Treasury;
and the treasury have full power to give them any directions they think proper. He restricted
the type of works that might be undertaken as public works. They were to be of such a
nature as will not benefit individuals in a greater degree than anyone else in the community,
even though Colonel Harry Jones advised that road making offered no solution, as the roads
required had already been established and only minor work needed to be done. Moreover,
while Peel wanted to speed up the commencement of projects, Trevelyan made the process
for granting approval particularly complicated. Estimates and plans had to be prepared and
submitted to three sets of officials the County Surveyor, The Lord Lieutenant, and the
Relief Commissioners. If all three approved them, an official of the Board of Works was to
visit the site to make a detailed report. At this time the Board of Works was completely
understaffed; it had only three permanent members, and was wholly unable to process the
flood of applications that poured in daily. Trevelyan did not provide any extra resources,
human or otherwise, to deal with the bureaucracy he introduced. Details of those projects that
were approved had to then be posted to the Treasury at Whitehall for final approval by
Trevelyan himself.
It was impossible for this system to muddle through; and it must have been designed that
way. The delays that resulted from the length and intricacy of the process frustrated everyone
and many gave up. On 18 March, Sir Randolph Routh, the man in charge of relief in Ireland,
wrote to Trevelyan that something simpler and more direct was necessary. This was ignored
and applications piled up, unprocessed and unanswered. The country became agitated. Some
people marched on towns demanding work and were dispersed by troops. Months later, few
projects had materialized. Tens of thousands besieged committee rooms seeking employment,
and committees issued tickets of work in panic and were criticised by Trevelyan for departing
from procedure. He simply advised that a lower rate of wages be set as a test of destitution
to deter applications. In desperation, people began to force themselves on to the works as the
supply of food dwindled. The works started at the time the years crops would be planted.
People who desperately needed money to buy food had to accept the work they got on
projects when they should have been planting for the harvest.

As pressure mounted, Trevelyan set 15 May as a date when the depots of corn would be
opened for sale. A rush followed as corn was, in some areas, the only food available for sale.
Commissariat officers were instructed to restrict the sale to the neediest cases. When relief
committees sent money for supplies they were frequently refused, even when people were
dying. Although the depots were only half full and there was insufficient food available from
other sources until the harvest was ready, Trevelyan, supporting the doctrine of the
protectionists, was determined that the Government would make no further food purchases.
On 25 June Routh was instructed to close the relief measures. The remaining supplies were to
be transferred to more destitute areas where people were too poor to afford corn, and the
price of what little meal was left was to be drastically increased to prevent them from buying
it, so that it would not run out.
Nor was there any encouragement from the crown to take a humanitarian approach to the
plight of people affected by the famine. The response of Queen Victoria to the crisis in
January 1846 is particularly notable for its lack of compassion. Her only expressed concern
was one of maintaining her control of the country. Addressing her Lords and Gentlemen at
the opening of the Parliament she observed, with deep regret, the fearful situation in Ireland,
adding, it will be our duty to consider whether any measures can be devised, calculated to
give peace and protection for life there. However, what she meant was: peace and
protection for landlords lives. Hence she advised her Lords and Gentlemen that a stringent
Coercion Bill was needed, and must be provided to relieve the unfortunate conditions
prevailing in Ireland. On 28 February, Mitchel made his observation on the Coercion Bill:
This is the only kind of legislation for Ireland that is sure to meet with no obstruction in
that House. However, they may differ about feeding the Irish people, they agree most
cordially in the policy of taxing, prosecuting and ruining them.
Mitchel also wrote:
The Irish People are expecting famine day by day... and they ascribe it unanimously, not
so much to the rule of heaven as to the greedy and cruel policy of England. Be that right or
wrong, that is their feeling. They believe that the season as they roll are but ministers of
Englands rapacity; that their starving children cannot sit down to their scanty meal but
they see the harpy claw of England in their dish. They behold their own wretched food
melting in rottenness off the face of the earth, and they see heavy-laden ships, freighted
with the yellow corn their own hands have sown and reaped, spreading all sail for
England; they see it and with every grain of that corn goes a heavy curse. Again the people
believe no matter whether truly or falsely that if they should escape the hunger and the
fever their lives are not safe from judges and juries. They do not look upon the law of the
land as a terror to evil-doers, and a praise to those who do well; they scowl on it as an
engine of foreign rule, ill-omened harbinger of doom.
The Bill was being drafted and, among other benefits, rendered the suffering people liable
to fourteen years transportation if found out of their homes after sunset in the evening and
before sunrise next morning. This repressive measure was opposed by the Irish MPs in
Westminster (such as William Smith OBrien and the OConnells), as well as by many
English MPs (including Earl Grey who spoke against it in the House of Lords on 23 March
1846). He deplored the fact that a succession of coercive measures had been passed since
1800, and outlined
how in 1800, the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, the Act for the Suppression of the
Rebellion being still in force; how the Insurrection Act was passed in 1807, which gave
the Lord-Lieutenant full power to place any district under martial law, to suspend trial by

jury and make it a transportable offence to be out of doors from sunset to sunrise; how this
Act remained in force till 1810; how it was renewed in 1814 continued in 1815, 1816,
1817 reviewed in 1822, and continued through 1823, 1824, and 1825; how another
Insurrection Act was needed in 1833, was renewed in 1834, and expired but five years
ago. And again in 1846, we are called to renew it. Then, as now, the government was not
only alert to guard the sacred rights of life English landlords lives, but also the sacred
rights of property English landlords property.
To delay its passage, William Smith OBrien, John OConnell and other Irish MPs used
stalling tactics and filibusters for months in Parliament. To silence William Smith OBrien,
he was ordered to serve on a Scottish Railway committee against the express wishes of all the
Irish MPs. When he refused, he was imprisoned in the House. The OConnells father and
son capitulated to avoid imprisonment.
While the Coercion Bill was being debated, Peel against the wishes of many in his party
abolished the Corn Laws (as the Whigs were proposing to do) to allow the importation of
corn. This proved generally unpopular with Protectionists and led to a split in the Tory Party.
Believing that, the Coercion Bill would be defeated if the Tory Government fell, some Irish
Repeal MPs formed an alliance with the rebel Tory MPs and Whigs. This alliance cost the
Tory Government its majority in the House of Commons, and Peel the leadership of the
Government on 25 June 1846.
Peel explained that Irish hardship would be lessened if the price of American cornmeal
imports could be reduced by the removal of the Corn Law customs duty. The opposite is in
effect true. Those Irish small farmers only produced food; they had no money to buy it. Corn
Law repeal could only bring about a general reduction of food prices on the English market.
Ireland, as an exporter of food, could only be disadvantaged by the lower prices. That is what
happened. The results were cheap food for England while Irish farmers had to export more
food to pay their rents. After mid-1846, when the laws were passed, the price of Irish grain
and livestock fell, with the direct consequence of more evictions and more deaths.
The Whig Governments Response to the Famine
A Whig minority Government under Lord John Russell came to power. He was disastrous for
Ireland and the lives and suffering of millions must be charged to his name. He bankrupted
the landowners and farmers by wasting their money on useless schemes. The new
Government also espoused the laissez-faire creed of the day; they too were anti-Irish in
sentiment and firmly committed to non-intervention policy. Trevelyan was now able to
follow his doctrine unchecked and marked the first week in office of the new Government by
actually rejecting a cargo of Indian corn that was on its way to Ireland, writing officially:
The cargo of the Sorciere is not wanted; her owners must dispose of it as they think proper.
He was consoled by the thought that the famine was the will of God, and he hoped that the
Catholic priests were making this clear to the people. It is hard on the poor people that they
should be deprived of the knowledge that they are suffering from an affliction of Gods
providence, he wrote. Trevelyan was keen to give the people the knowledge of which they
were deprived and the government enacted a law providing food rations to all of Irelands
Catholic clergy from what its army seized from the starving peoples crops. Thus, having
secured their own food supply, some of Irelands priests preached Gods providence to their
parishioners. In refusing to provide the starvelings involved in political action with Extreme
Unction or Christian burial, Irelands hierarchy not only backed Britains self-serving
argument that the Irish were sub-human, but that their souls lacked value; like the animals in
the fields, it did not matter if they did not enter eternal life. For those who believed that there

was a better life laid up in the hereafter, and that they needed a Christian burial to access that
better life beyond suffering, it was the bitterest blow of all.
Although there was no official government policy of extermination, there can be little doubt
that among some of the chief players, that must have been the consensus. They were
definitely under no illusion about how unendurable the situation in Ireland was at the time.
Robert Kee British historian, journalist, and documentary maker suggests that the Famine
is still seen as comparable in its impact on popular national consciousness to that of the
final solution on the Jews, and that it is not infrequently thought that the Famine was
something very like a form of genocide1 engineered by the English against the Irish people.
Overcome with a godlike zeal and now seeing himself as an agent of God the Just,
Trevelyan wound up the relief effort with vigour, and closed corn depots so that people
would understand Gods ways and not expect to be fed when they discovered for sure that the
new crop had failed. On 21 July he directed that all public works be closed in the next four
weeks, except in exceptional circumstances whatever they might be!

The word genocide, derived from genos (race) and cide (to kill) was 100 years short of being fashioned by
Raphael Lemkin at the time of the Irish Famine. The word was produced to refer to the planned, systematic
extermination of an entire ethnic group.
Robert Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, had this to say about genocidal
behaviour:
No regime bent on exterminating another peoples will describe their intent in so many words, since such intent
is imbedded in the very operation of the system of extermination. On the contrary, the actions of the agencies of
murder are enough proof of such intent, and therefore when the transporting of people into the conditions of
disease and death is condoned and facilitated by a government, and when these crimes are concealed from the
scrutiny of the world of the same government or other agencies, it can be safely asserted that this regime intends
to annihilate the targeted people and is guilty before the world of crimes against humanity.
Was it something akin to genocide that was practised on the Irish people in the years from 18451850 and
beyond? How deliberate was it? This indeed was the question that the Irish people what was left of them
were to ask themselves for ever after. The potato blight affected other European countries, many less affluent
than the British Empire, but in no other country was a section of the population left to die of starvation.
A 1996 report commissioned by the New York based Irish Famine/Genocide Committee, written by F.A. Boyle,
a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, concluded that: Clearly, during the years
1845 to 1850, the British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with intent to destroy in
substantial part the national, ethnic and racial group commonly known as the Irish People.... Therefore, during
the years 1845 to 1850 the British government knowingly pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland that
constituted acts of genocide against the Irish people within the meaning of Article II (c) of the 1948 [Hague]
Genocide Convention.
Professor James Donnelly, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, wrote in his work Landlord and Tenant in
Nineteenth-Century Ireland, I would draw the following broad conclusion: at a fairly early stage of the Great
Famine the governments abject failure to stop or even slow down the clearances (evictions) contributed in a
major way to enshrining the idea of English state-sponsored genocide in Irish popular mind. Or perhaps one
should say in the Irish mind, for this was a notion that appealed to many educated and discriminating men and
women, and not only to the revolutionary minority...And it is also my contention that while genocide was not in
fact committed, what happened during and as a result of the clearances had the look of genocide to a great many
Irish...
In an article in the Washington Post newspaper 17 September 1997 Timothy Guinnane, associate professor of
economics at Yale, wrote: Several states have mandated that the Great Irish Famine of 1845 1850 be taught in
their high schools as an example of genocide.

There was a sense of glee amongst a certain class that the Irish had been subdued by this act
of God. For example, Trevelyan, in a private letter to Lord Monteagle on 9 October 1846,
wrote:
The deep and inveterate root of social evil remains, and I hope I am not guilty of
irreverence in thinking that, this [the problem of Ireland] being altogether beyond the
power of man, the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise providence in a
manner as unexpected and unthought of as it is likely to be effectual. God grant that we
may rightly perform our part and not turn into a curse what was intended as a blessing.
His personal ideology was strengthened by this deception. Charles Trevelyan and the Empire
had God on their side!
When the blight appeared again in the new potato crop in 1846 and the loss of the crop was
almost total, Fr. Mathew (the apostle of temperance) wrote to Trevelyan in August 1846
that the food of the whole nation had perished. However, Ireland did not starve for potatoes
any more that Britain and the rest of Europe starved for potatoes. From 1845 onwards, it
starved for food; and huge quantities of that food including wheat, oats, barley, butter, eggs,
and meat in plenty were exported to England throughout the period. Anything that
remained behind was prohibitively expensive. But these do not seem to have been
exceptional circumstances.
Had the Government been determined to secure enough food for the people during the winter
of 1846 through the famine years of 1847 and 1848, it would have purchased some of the
food being exported and imposed a moderate tax on absentees, as requested by William
Smith OBrien. This could have consisted of the surrender of some of their produce which
could then be made available to the people most in need. Records show that 4 000 shiploads
of Irish food sailed into Liverpool alone in 1847. Shipping records indicate that 9 992 Irish
calves were exported to England during the year known as Black '47, a 33 percent increase
from the previous year. Alcohol, made from grain, was also a major item of export. In the
first nine months of 1847, 874 170 gallons of porter (a dark sweet beer similar to light stout,
made from malt that has been browned or charred) and 183 392 gallons of whiskey were
exported from Ireland to Liverpool, and 278 658 gallons of Guinness went to Bristol. And
yet, while there are no official figures, the local Irish constabulary provided an unofficial
estimate that 400 000 people died due to a lack of food in the Irish winter of 1846-47.
The people could not withhold the food they produced in lieu of rent as the rent was the first
necessity of life. It would be a desperate man who ate his rent, with the certainty before him
of eviction and death by slow torture. The bishops proclaimed, as did the Queen and the
British Prime Ministers, Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell, that the landlord must be
paid his rent, even if that involved selling the food off the table so to speak; property rights
transcended peoples lives. A Munster bishop thanked God that he lives in a country where a
farmer would starve his own children to pay his landlords rent! Therefore, the Irish farmer
sold or surrendered his little produce, even when his children were starving to death to save
them from a worse fate beyond death.
Lord John Russell introduced new relief measures in the form of the despised Labour Rate
Act on 17 August 1846. Under this Act it was proposed that Public Works would be
undertaken on a large scale. The whole expense was to be paid by the district in which the
works were carried out, from taxes collected from property owners in that district. Many Irish
Landlords had already contributed generously to Public works the previous year, in which
Committees had raised 98 003. Moreover, no particular landholder could benefit from any
of the works. They would have to be of general benefit for the district but not improve the

worth of any one persons holding. The cost of works could be met initially by Treasury, but
would have to be repaid entirely at an interest rate of 3.5% over 10 years. This policy was to
be in place for one year only, until August 1847. Over and above this, Treasury would
contribute 50 000 to assist areas that were too destitute to raise any money.
Now, in the midst of famine, and still guided by his own curious logic, Trevelyan decided the
Government would not import or supply any food but would leave it to private enterprise. He
cancelled the orders that had been placed for the importation of Indian corn from America,
suggesting that the food could be bought on British markets even though he was aware that
there was a perennial shortage of food in Britain. He thought the shortage would encourage
people to be more economical and traders could make good profits from a scarce commodity.
The Treasurer, Charles Wood, supported this policy and told the House of Commons that the
government was not prepared to interfere in the provision of food. Instead, the people could
earn enough money from public works to buy what they needed from private suppliers. In
consternation, Routh pointed out to Trevelyan that merchants could not get organized at such
short notice to become importers of food. On 4 August he pressed Trevelyan to import food
at once. He wrote to Trevelyan: You cannot answer the cry of want by a quotation from
political economy. You ought to have 16 000 tons of Indian corn...you ought to have half of
the supply which you require in the country before Christmas.
Nothing was done. When it became evident, towards the end of August, that the entire potato
crop for that year had perished, it was too late. The failure of the potato crop through Europe
had meant that Indian corn had been bought up heavily by other countries and this, coupled
with the inability of ships to make the rough Atlantic voyage in winter, meant he would have
to wait until spring before any food could be shipped. The harvest generally was poor that
year and little food remained in Ireland for purchase after that taken in lieu of rent was
removed. Nor could the ordinary people buy much food at the inflated prices set by those
who set out to profit from the calamity. From among the horrible and tragic details with
which the newspapers were filled, there was this report from Co. Cork:
A countryman, apparently almost deranged, entered a shop which was attended by a
respectable female, and asked for money. Not receiving it he took from under his coat a
dead child which he cast upon the counter in desperation, telling her he was unable to
procure a coffin for it and immediately fled.
Although Trevelyan was well briefed on the situation, at no time did he acknowledge that he
was aware that the supply of food was insufficient. Instead, knowing that depots were almost
empty and no new provisions were being purchased to replenish them, he maintained the
facade that there was food for distribution and those depots would be opened when food ran
out. This lie was designed to prevent relief organisations from eliciting support more
vigorously elsewhere. The reality was that the only food in depots was the little that remained
of that which Peel had purchased the previous year. The Times, no advocate of Irish relief,
found it impossible to understand why the government cut off supplies with the undisputed
fact of an extensive failure of this years potato crop staring them in the face.
The Board of Works was again swamped. Trevelyan had thought that committees would be
deterred from proposing public works when he had decreed that all the money used would
have to be repaid. But people clutched wildly at Public Works as their only hope of staying
alive. However, Trevelyan had procedures in place to thwart their attempts at staying alive.
He insisted on personally vetting the large numbers of works proposed at presentment
meetings. Projects were turned down because they did not strictly adhere to the specific
government condition stipulated in the Act that the work must be unprofitable, nonproductive and of no benefit to individuals: conditions that were impossible to comply with.

Trevelyan strictly enforced these conditions, despite being petitioned by Lord Monteagle,
Lord Bessborough, William Smith OBrien and others to allow some of the vast number of
useful projects that needed to be undertaken.
Trevelyans curious logic for declining projects beggared belief. For example, it was argued
that the money could not be used to build Irish railways, as advocated by Smith OBrien,
because that would discriminate against English railways; even though, since the Act of
Union, England and Ireland were, supposedly, just different islands of the same country with
the same government. Nor could it be used for seeding land, or reclaiming the millions of
acres of wetlands, because that would be giving the Irish farmer an unfair advantage over his
English counterpart and might enable him to undersell the latter in the market. As a result,
presentment committees had to abandon proposals for useful, much needed projects and
propose pointless schemes such as building walls that were not needed and cutting down
roads where there was no hill, filling in roads where there was no hollow, building roads
where nobody ever travelled, having them start anywhere and end nowhere, erecting bridges
where no river flowed, and erecting piers where a ship was never seen. Some of these
pointless projects that were eventually approved are still to be viewed in various parts of
Ireland as monuments to British Government wisdom and solicitude during the Famine
roads that are only frequented by the daisy and the briar, broken bridges and tumble-down
piers that stood in solitude for years, before sinking down in despair. Another sad relic of the
famine is still to be seen on many a farm in the west of Ireland where, when the sun casts its
shadows across a hillside, the outline of the potato beds that were never dug is plainly
evident.
Delays in approvals dragged on in some cases until the end of November. When works were
approved there were often no engineers available to lay them out. Board of Works officers
often turned away people who had valid Government tickets to work on projects. Bands of
starving people were roaming the country begging for food. In some areas, local relief
committees were forced to put the name of every person old enough to walk, on the
employment lists. Those who failed to get employment tickets forced themselves on to public
works. A Limerick Magistrate told the Lord Lieutenant on 29 October that the men defied all
regulations and attempts to restrain them and masses of hungry people going off to work
with spades and pickaxes in their hands are perfectly unmanageable.
Engaging in public works, however, did not immediately provide income. Work was to be
paid by task, on completion, but the Board of Works was so short of staff that it was
impossible to get work measured properly or promptly. There was an acute shortage of coin,
which added to delays in payment and an even more acute shortage of pay clerks. This
shortage of coin and clerk placed so much pressure on the existing engineers and pay masters
that many of them resigned in despair, not wishing to be agents of death in a scheme designed
to force workers to die slowly.
The wages paid were so low 6d or 7d a day that even those who were paid could barely
afford daily starvation rations for themselves. They certainly could not feed their families.
Captain Pole, a commissariat officer, warned Trevelyan that, with rising prices, the wages
proposed by the Board of Works would not prove enough to buy food; however, the rates
were not increased. Demonstrations demanding better rates were ignored. At Mallow, Co.
Cork, an assembly of 218 labourers marched to the Poor House and forced their way in,
demanding to be admitted as paupers rather than left to die slowly from hunger at 7d a day.
The Mallow relief committee declared that the men at work were starving. On 3 November
the Lord Lieutenant called for a report on the number of persons who had died from

starvation while working. To avoid embarrassment, people were soon laid off in the middle
of a harsh winter.
While a considerable amount of money was raised under the Labour Rate Act and from
charity, most of it went, as John Mitchel said, chiefly in salaries to the many thousands of
landlords and Anglo Irish employed as Commissioners, Superintendents of work,
Inspectors of work, and so forth. In addition, a huge staff was paid to administer a large
part of the little of the fund that remained. At the beginning of 1847 there were ten thousand
government servants under salary to administer the portion of the relief fund their salaries did
not consume. Some of these gentlemen, says Mitchel, got more pay than an American
Secretary of State. What did remain was paid in half wages to starving men for doing
unprofitable work. The Act served to alleviate such polite poverty as existed among the
Anglo-Irish class in Ireland. In fact, it enriched some of its administrators to a considerable
extent.
Trevelyan was not under any pressure to act otherwise. There was little sympathy for Irish
paupers, or others, from British politicians on all sides, or from the press or the general
populace. Although the population of Ireland was, proportionally, much smaller than the
population of England, and enough food was produced in Ireland to feed not only the
population of Ireland but a significant portion of England as well, it was said, disdainfully,
that the Irish had over-bred and needed reducing. Establishment Britain defined the famine as
a cure for Irish overpopulation, the definition of which could be paraphrased as any
population over zero.
The Malthusian notion, (that population tends to increase at a faster rate than its means of
subsistence and that unless it is checked by moral restraint or by disease, famine, war or other
disaster, widespread poverty and degradation inevitably result) had become popular and was
used to lend scientific respectability to callous indifference. There was also an expansion of
the theory which suited industrialists that only low wages would slow the population
growth of workers. It was endorsed by noted economists and Charles Darwin was influenced
by the social theories of Malthus, who defined ruthlessness as a law of nature.
***
However, the famine theory was not applied in England even though Englands potatodependence was also excessive and, unlike Ireland, it was genuinely grossly over-populated
relative to its food supply. When potatoes also failed there during the 1840s, it too faced
famine unless it could import vast amounts of alternative food. Alternative food was made
available even for the poorest. For those apologists who constantly and consistently claim
that England did as much as it could for Ireland during the famine, let you be reminded yet
again that it was not a charitable state of affairs between the island of Ireland and Britain: it
cannot be overemphasised that during this entire time Ireland existed not as a separate nation
depending on alms, but as part of the United Kingdom. These same apologists feel that there
was nothing that any government could have done to ameliorate the situation in Ireland. The
poor British tried to help their sister island, but were simply overwhelmed by the logistics of
the operation. In their view, the starvation was the inevitable outcome of demography and
Irish stupidity. For example, Trevelyan wrote:
It has been a popular argument in Ireland, that as the calamity was an imperial one, the
whole amount expended in relieving it ought to be defrayed out of the public revenue.
The west and the south of Ireland was the peccant [guilty] part. The owners and holders
of the land in those districts had permitted or encouraged the growth of excessive

population which depended upon the precarious potato, and they alone had it in their
power to restore society to a safe and healthy state.
In other words, let them die.
***
While it is accepted that England did not cause the failure of the potato crop, she was entirely
responsible for the deaths from starvation in a part of her kingdom closer to the seat of power
than Yorkshire. It seems that it is necessary to write it down again and again and, if it were
possible, it would be necessary to shout from the rooftops and into the ears of the dim-witted:
The government of Ireland and the government of England were one-and-the-same! England
was in total control of Irelands purse strings, her commerce, land, food and security and,
therefore, responsible for the destruction of its people. It is essential to keep in mind that
during the entire period of the famine, Ireland was not only a part of the British Empire, but
was governed directly from London. There had been no home-government in Ireland for over
forty years when the so-called famine came. But the economy of Ireland was made
subservient to the economy of England and degraded for its benefit. Moreover, one has to
simply look at the might of the Empire and the efficiency with which it could muster its
forces when English interests were threatened to appreciate the stupidity of the argument that
England did as much as it could for Ireland during the famine. It would be comparable to the
Japanese Government in Tokyo, which is on the island of Honshu, ignoring the plight of
those on the northern island of Hokkaido and allowing half of the population of that island to
die of starvation; indeed, not only allowing them to die of starvation but actually taking the
food from them to help them on their way.
Ireland was treated as a colony not as an equal. Ireland was not the only land effected by
potato blight but every other country managed to save its population. It seems impossible to
believe that some European countries imported food, via England, from Ireland. Potatoes
failed all over Europe and there were food shortages and civil unrest, but there was no famine
anywhere except in Ireland. Mitchel wrote:
The British empire as it stands, looks vast and strong; but none know so well as the
statesmen of that country how intrinsically feeble it is: and how entirely it depends for its
existence on prestige. England herself that begged for us, that passed round the hat all over
the globe, asking a penny for the love of God to relieve the poor Irish; and further, that,
constituting herself the almoner and agent of all that charity, she, England, took all the
profits of it (The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps).
Mitchel illustrated the point elsewhere when he wrote:
If blight and famine fell upon the South of France, the whole common revenue of the
kingdom would certainly be largely employed...until the season of distress should pass
over and another harvest should come. If Yorkshire and Lancashire had sustained a like
calamity in England, there is no doubt such measures as these would have been taken
promptly and liberally. And we know that the English Government is not slow to borrow
money for great public objects, when it suits British policy so to do. They borrowed
twenty million sterling to give away to their slaveholding colonists for a mischievous
whim. Yet they are happy to take Irelands resources for a pittance and provide nothing in
return.
He made the point: Assuming that Ireland and England are two integral parts of a United
Kingdom (as we are assured they are), it seems hard to understand why a district in Leinster
should be rated to relieve a pauper territory in Mayo, and a district in Yorkshire not.

Further:
When the new Outdoor Relief Act began to be applied, with its memorable quarter-acre
clause, all this process went on with wonderful velocity, and millions of people were soon
left landless and homeless. That they should be left landless and homeless was strictly in
accordance with British policy; but then there was danger of the millions of outcasts
becoming robbers and murderers. Accordingly, the next point was to clear the country of
them and diminish the poor rates by emigration (The Last Conquest).
And again:
Nature has laws. Because the Irish have been taught peaceful agitation in their slavery,
therefore they have been swept by a plague of hunger worse than many years of bloody
fighting. Because they would not fight, they have been made to rot off the face of the
earth, that so they might learn at last how deadly a sin is patience and perseverance under
a strangers yoke. (Jail Journal).
Of course John Mitchel was not the only witness to the horrors of the Famine. For example,
Father John Sheehan, Parish Priest of Ennistymon in Co. Clare, wrote to The Clare Journal
on 24 December 1846:
Dear Sir Our workhouse is already, and for several weeks crammed full to overflowing;
every available space occupied, the apartments that before were empty, are become thickly
tenanted with human beings. They have been frightened in rapidly, and have made a run
for shelter from the death-dealing strokes of famine. The house was built for the
accommodation of 600, for some time past it occasionally contained more than 700
paupers, closely wedged together; like negroes in a slaveship. More than seven hundred
more are looking out still for some other asylum. There is no room for them in the
workhouse.
It is difficult for a poor family to enforce its claim to relief under the poor law act, it is
more so to get on the public works. Many families, who one week might have some little
reserve remaining, have seen that little store completely exhausted in the next. The
cabbage gardens, the great resource of hundreds since the first breaking out of the famine,
are now eaten away. Even the cabbage leaves, formerly reserved for cattle, have
disappeared: the turnip crop, wherever such had been planted, is consumed; the wheat and
oats and barley is being stripped away. Man has trespassed on the food of the animal
creation, and the cattle too are deprived of the usual quantity of their natural subsistence,
and both the people, and beasts created for their use, are in danger of perishing. The
remnant of the potato, which hitherto might have held out in some few and scattered
localities, can no longer be taken into account; not even has the seed survived the ravages
committed upon it.
Such are the dreary prospects before us, all that the poor could look upon as conducive to
the sustainment of life within their reach, annihilated, absorbed. Now are we in earnest in
the commencement of our miseries, in the first encounter with the grim monster, famine,
with all its concomitant horrors of sickness, pestilence and death. Nothing now but
monopoly and heartless speculation on human food, buying at famine price, and expecting
Indian meal over land and water carriage thousands of miles. Oh! What a country, and
what a government, and what a state.
Here then are we this side of Christmas, the cry of distress echoed back from every vale
and mountain, the reports of death by starvation coming by each returning post in fearful
succession, the services of relief committees hardy perceptible in combating the
magnitude of the evil

While those in the western part of the Kingdom Ireland were dying in hundreds of
thousands from hunger, those in the eastern part England were, according to the financial
statement issued in February 1847 by Sir Charles Wood, Chancellor of the Exchequer,
steadily growing more comfortable, nay more luxurious in their style of living. For
example, he explains:
In the matter of coffee, they had used nearly seven million pounds of it more than they did
in 1843. Of butter and cheese they devoured double as much within the year as they had
done three years before within the same period. Of currants, the quantity used by the
working classes had increased from 254,000 hundredweight to 359,000 hundredweight. Of
tea, consumption had increased by 5,400,000 since 1843. They had as much beef and
bacon as they could eat, and bread at discretion, and beer!
There was of course an underclass in England too who would not have been steadily
growing more comfortable, nay more luxurious in their style of living, but they were not
dying from starvation nonetheless. Nor was the food being taken out of their mouths by
military means. Historically, Britain was ever-ready to use the strong arm of what they
defined as law in Ireland, untempered by considerations of mercy or understanding and this
was never more evident than during the course of the famine. Far from ensuring that the food
and the people who needed it remained united, the Government despatched soldiers to ensure
that the food parted company with the people and the people parted company with life.
Unlike their inability to make any effective response to the famine, the Whigs were not
restricted by principles of Political Economy from financing unprecedented numbers of
troops for deployment in Ireland. Within six months of the first potato crop failure, heavily
armed escorts were accompanying Irish food transports. Within a year, a mobile force of tens
of thousands of troops had been deployed and the military guarded food depots, export ships
and harvest fields.
A letter from Smith OBrien to Lord Russell in September 1846, warning him that he faced a
calamity of far more awful magnitude than had occurred to date, and that thousands would
soon be dying, was met with the deployment of extra troops drafted into trouble spots where
food riots were taking place in mid-October 1846. In November, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, Charles Wood, wrote to his Irish lord lieutenant urging him to go to the verge of
the law and a little beyond in suppressing revolt. A month later, a new emergency powers act
was in place. England had its Coercion Bill though it was to wait until after the general
election the following year to ratify it. Fifteen thousand extra troops were sent to Ireland that
same month and an additional 10 000 in 1848; however, with rare exceptions, food trains
passed unhindered to port for shipment.
When The Tralee Relief Committee implored the government to send food because the
district was starving, the government responded by sending additional troops to distressed
districts. Famished and penniless people could do nothing except wish, as they did in
Ballinrobe as the Seventh Hussars came to town: Would to God the Government would send
us food instead of soldiers. Forced by economic necessity to sell their produce when their
families were in danger of dying, the Irish farmers were devastated when food left the market
towns, protected by a military escort of field guns, cavalry and infantry. It was a sight that the
Irish people found impossible to understand and impossible to forget. The government had
declared war on its own starving people.
Depending on the historical sources, anywhere from 12 000 to over 200 000 British Troops
were assigned to the famine problem. No one really knows how many troops were stationed
in Ireland but it is known that seventy-one Regiments were there at one time or another
during the period of the famine. In A Military History of Ireland (History of the British

Armed Forces in Ireland), by Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffrey (Cambridge University
Press, 1996), there is a map (p.362) which locates 215 British regiments and battalions in
Ireland during the years of the famine. In addition, it reports that these regiments were
supported by 30 000 militia, and 60 000 to 70 000 armed Protestant yeomanry; and a further
12 000 to 17 000 police augmented the force. The total armed troops in Ireland during the
famine could be potentially greater than 200 000.
In the Famine Diary, Gerald Keegan (a school teacher in Co. Mayo) gave an eyewitness
report:
There is corn, wheat, meat, and dairy products in abundance. For putting his hand on any
of this food a peasant is liable to a prison sentence, execution or exile.A third measure
that should be adopted is the removal of thousands of police and militia who are here to
imprison, execute or send into exile anyone suspected of a vaguely defined offence called
treason including stealing a cob of corn destined for export.
And again from Gerald Keegan on 10 March 1847: News has leaked out that England
intends to add 20 000 more troops to the already formidable number billeted in Ireland. Of
course the troops were maintained by the rich to uphold the morals of the ever recalcitrant
poor and it is easy for the rich to be moral and to look down on the morals of the poor. Only
someone who is hungry steals food. The rich never stoop to stealing food; they pay others to
do it on their behalf.
Trevelyan once again took refuge in his own peculiar logic: that to send food to Ireland
would be unjust to the rest of the kingdom as it would increase the price of food in his
English portion of the kingdom. The Commissariat officers who had opened some depots in
distressed areas without being authorised to do so were ordered to close them. He told Routh
that he must exert a little pressure on people to eat the supplies of food he presumed they had
concealed under their straw beds on the floor perhaps. When given this instruction,
members of the Commissariat in charge of depots protested furiously, but to no avail. Some
refused to close their depots. Routh pleaded for more food as did magistrates, landowners
and the Board of Works but no food was forthcoming.
The sea was one resource that could have provided some additional food. As it was, all
accessible edible material along the coastline was used and, at the end of 1847, it was
reported that there was no seaweed anywhere on the southern and western shores. Mitchel, in
his Last Conquest, describes how he was called upon to defend poor starving creatures on
charges of trespass because they had gathered seaweed below the high water mark, and poor
farmers who were indicted for robbery because they had taken limestone from a rock (that
was uncovered at low water only) and burnt it on their lands, to fertilize and try to force a
little crop, Britain having decreed that the British landlords rights reached into the seas
realm.
The resources of the sea were not used because the fish lay many miles from the coast in
forty fathoms of water. To fish in these conditions required a vessel of at least fifty tons,
capable of going to sea for several days to face the frightful swell of the Atlantic. These
vessels did not exist, nor was there any means of building them. Britain had deliberately
suppressed Irish shipbuilding, because an Irish fleet might support Britains European
enemies and the Irish forests were already gone, some to sea in British ships. The only
vessels generally available in villages were small fishing boats called curraghs. Although
curraghs ride easily over the Atlantic swells and can cover large distances, they are not
suitable for deep-sea fishing with nets. In 1846 47 people could not afford the cost of
building or purchasing any boat, however inexpensive, having spent what little money they

had purchasing at inflated prices the little food that was available. Many had pawned or
sold their boats and nets to buy what food they could.
Had Trevelyan and the British Government been serious about maximising food resources in
the Irish portion of their kingdom they would have used the well-equipped British Navy
(which was largely idling in port) in this crisis, as it was pointed out that the resources used to
fight their wars could be employed to fight their famine. Using the British Navy was not a
consideration to bring food to the starving Irish because after all it was their famine and they
would do with it as they would. However, they did deploy the Navy and the Army to ensure
that the food left Ireland.
When Mr W.T. Mulvany, Commissioner for the Fishery Department urged Treasury to spend
just 100 000 at once on the construction and improvement of harbours, and to set aside an
additional 10 000 a year be for repairs to make up for past neglect, his request was refused.
His next suggestion that Irish fishermen should be allowed small loans, direct from the
government, to improve their boats and tackle was also rejected. Trevelyan feared that it
would be damaging to the fishermens morale! When the British Association offered 500 to
the government for loans to fishermen, this too was refused. Similarly, when the Society of
Friends, the tiny Quaker community (who had in the past been victims of severe persecution
themselves) proposed to make small loans to poor fishermen to repair and replace their
tackle, this too was cast off by the Treasury.
***
In an age of intolerance and bigotry against the Irish, the attitude of the Quakers in Ireland
shines like a beacon. The Quakers or to give them their proper name the Society of
Friends was founded by George Fox in 1648 in a small Leicestershire village. Fox and his
followers renounced all forms of ostentation in dress and manner and refused to fight or even
to wear swords. They only uncovered their heads in their meeting houses, as they called
them, and refused outside them to doff their hats to any man. They also held that all organised
religions were leading men astray from the true worship of God. Their belief that God was
not to be found in the preaching of ministers often led them to interrupt church services when
they claimed that they were moved by the Lord to do so.
Realising that the Government in London was not disposed to do anything constructive for
the starving people in Ireland, the Society of Friends gave substantial help directly to fishing
communities. Hundreds of families were kept alive through the winter of 1847 because the
Friends had lent them money to redeem their boats and nets, as well as providing warm
clothing so they could remain at sea for several days. At Belmullet in Erris, a fleet of ten
curraghs and other fully equipped boats was provided for a cost of 300.
However, despite the courage and skills of the Irish fishermen who went out in their frail
curraghs whenever an opportunity offered and in desperate weather the famine winters
were so severe that no small boat could survive at sea. The winter of 1846 47 was the most
severe in living memory. Snow fell early in November, there was continuous frost, icy gales
blew daily and rivers were a mass of floating ice. In some places, fishermen had to row
twenty-five miles to fishing grounds, and if a squall blew up when the small boats were laden
with fish, they never came back.
On 13 November 1846 the small Quaker community formed the Central Relief Committee of
the Society of Friends which established soup kitchens. However, the crisis was too great for
the Friends; despite their best efforts, resources remained woefully inadequate. The fishermen
were so poor they could not afford salt to preserve their catch, and people were to be seen
grubbing amongst rotting fish in an effort to stay alive. The biggest impediment to the

fishermen of the western coastline was their inaccessibility to markets. They had no means of
transporting their catch to people further inland.
Little grows in the fields of an Irish winter landscape, and the famine winters were fierce.
Food has to be stored for winter, but there was no food to store. Picking food, fishing or
hunting on a landlords demesne constituted poaching, for which the sentence was
imprisonment and transportation. Such sentences are recorded against destitute people who
stole for example, turnips to feed themselves or their families.
Because of British control of the sea, people could not import any food directly or receive
charity from other countries without being arrested for smuggling. Towards the end of the
worst of the famine, in January 1849, Belmullet in Co. Mayo lost its fishing fleet when
Britains Coast Guard arrested its enterprising fishermen in the act of off-loading flour from a
passing ship ten miles at sea. They were sentenced to prison and their boats were confiscated.
***
Wages on the public works had to be lower than those prevailing on the ordinary labour
market to comply with the so called laws of political economy, although the ordinary labour
market had by now disappeared. An excerpt from an editorial in The London Times, 1846
sums up the general attitude towards providing public works. There was generally no
sympathy for such schemes in London:
The Government provided work for a people who love it not. It made this the absolute
condition of relief. The Government was required to ward off starvation, not to pamper
indolence. Alas! the Irish peasant has tasted of famine and found it was good...There are
ingredients in the Irish character which must be modified and corrected before either
individuals or Government can hope to raise the general conditions of the people...For our
own part, we regard the potato blight a blessing.
Worse than the low wages was the fact that, quite often, wages were not paid at all. At
Skibbereen in Co. Cork men were working on the roads, weak and exhausted from want of
food, but wages had not been paid. On the morning of Sunday, 11 October 1846 the body of
Jeremiah Hegerty, a labourer who had been employed on the public works, was found on the
road just outside Skibbereen. The coroners jury found that he met his death for want of
sufficient sustenance for many days previous to his decease, and this want of sustenance was
occasioned by his not having been paid his wages on the public works. Similarly, Denis Mc
Kennedy died of starvation on October 24 while working on public works in West Carberry.
The coroners inquest returned the verdict that the deceased died of starvation caused by the
gross neglect of the Board of Works. There were hundreds like them. Labouring all day on
the public works in rags, in the icy rain, snow and driving sleet meant many succumbed to the
hunger, cold and exposure, and fell down dead.
James MacHale, the parish priest of Hollymount, Co. Mayo (later Bishop), wrote:
Deaths, I regret to say, innumerable deaths from starvation are occurring every day; the
bonds of society are almost dissolved. The pampered officials...removed as they are from
these scenes of heart-rending distress, can have no idea of them and dont appear to give
themselves much trouble about them. I ask them in the name of humanity, is this state of
society to continue and who are responsible for these monstrous evils?
To these complaints, the Times in London retorted:
Such are the thanks that a government gets for attempting to palliate great afflictions and
satisfy corresponding demands by an inevitable but ruinous beneficence...It is the old

thing, the old malady is breaking out. It is the national character, the national
thoughtlessness, the national indolence.
Mr W.E. Forster, who above all other Englishmen deserved the gratitude of Ireland for his
efforts, has left terrible descriptions of the scenes of which he was himself an eye-witness. In
one of his reports he writes:
The town of Westport was itself a strange and fearful sight, like what we read of in
beleaguered cities; its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers, sauntering to and fro with
hopeless air and hunger-struck look a mob of starved, almost naked women around the
poor-house clamouring for soup-tickets. Our inn, the head-quarters of the road engineer
and pay clerks, beset by a crowd of beggars for work.
In another place, he says:
The survivors were like walking skeletons the men gaunt and haggard, stamped with the
livid mark of hunger; the children crying with pain; the women in some of the cabins too
weak to stand. When there before I had seen cows at almost every cabin, and there were
besides many sheep and pigs owned in the village. But now the sheep were all gone all
the cows, all the poultry killed only one pig left; the very dogs which had barked at me
before had disappeared no potatoes; no oats.
And one more simple and moving extract:
As we went along our wonder was not that the people died, but that they lived; and I have
no doubt whatever that in any other country the mortality would have been far greater; that
many lives have been prolonged, perhaps saved, by the long apprenticeship to want in
which the Irish peasant had been trained, and by that lovely touching charity which
prompts him to share his scanty meal with his starving neighbour.
Children began to die in large numbers. In Skibbereen more than fifty per cent of the children
admitted to the workhouse after October died soon after admission. Deaths of children
occurred throughout the country, either at home or when admitted to workhouses. Many
examples are reported in chronicles from the famine similar to the one that follows:
On Sunday last, 20 December, a young woman begging in the streets of Cork collapsed
and was at first unable to move or speak. After she had been given restorations and taken
home to her cabin she told those helping her that both her mother and father had died in
the last fortnight. At the same time she directed their attention to a heap of dirty straw that
lay in the corner and apparently concealed some object under it. On removing this
covering of straw, the spectators were horrified on beholding the mangled corpses of two
grown boys, a large proportion of which had been removed by the rats while the remainder
lay festering in its rottenness. There they had remained for perhaps a week or maybe a
fortnight.
Fever began to spread among the starving. People were found dead beside the roadside with
no one alive to bury them. Commissariat officers reported the gravity of the situation to
Routh who said it was the obligation of the local landlords to deal with the problem and
urged them to do so. No official assistance was ever made. How the people were faring was
made clear by this report:
Woe, want and misery are fearfully depicted on the countenances of our people. Sorrow,
suffering and mute despair seem to have taken possession of their souls. Their feelings are
blunted, their ideas confused and their energies paralysed. Starvation has so completely
prostrated them that they have more the appearance of ghosts than living beings.

The confusion of ideas, the paralysis of energies, and general confusion are classic
symptoms of fever.
At this time Lord Monteagle made a personal appeal to Routh, begging him to open the
depots. Routh, who had no power to override Trevelyan, replied on 21 November 1846 that
people needed to be subjected to a little pressure to do what they could before they were
given any assistance. He did, however, ask Trevelyan to open the depots in December.
Trevelyan, knowing there was very little in the depots, said the opening should be postponed,
provided there was no real danger. He considered the death toll insignificant. Furthermore, he
stubbornly refused to make any food purchases, despite being told by William Smith OBrien
and other Irish MPs that the calamity in Ireland was equivalent to a war that must be won
without consideration of political economy. He refused to provide assistance in districts
such as Skibbereen where landlords were absent and where there were no relief committees.
Instead, he insisted that committees sell food at all times at 5% above the market value. When
they sold below this value or gave food away to the destitute, they received no subsidy at all.
The funds in the hands of the relief committees were exhausted by the end of December
because of the exorbitant cost of food and the huge number of people being fed. Finally, on
28 December, he agreed to open the depots for the sale of food in distressed areas, still
insisting that the price which the dying people could not afford whatever it was be set
above the market rate. Pleas from Routh to Trevelyan that the prices be reduced were rejected
with the argument that, if that were done, the whole country would come on them. Meal
eventually sold for 23 a ton more than three times the normal price. None of this money,
however, was returned to the people who produced it. They were not to have any benefit from
Trevelyans laissez-faire economy. Public works had virtually come to a standstill and, by
January 1847, people in the west in particular were dying in large numbers.
Private charities were set up to fill the void left by the Government. The most influential of
these was The British Association, founded on 1 January 1847 at the instigation of Stephen
Spring Rice, Lord Monteagles son. It included merchant princes, such as Baron Lionel de
Rothschild and Mr Abel Smith, who were founding members, and Mr Thomas Baring, the
first Chairman. The Association bought and supplied food and clothing to be distributed by
committees. The Central Relief Committee under the Duke of Leinster raised 63 000,
Irishmen in the Indian army sent 50 000. The generosity of the English public and The
Society of Friends brought this tribute from Daniel OConnell: If the exhibition of those
qualities by individuals could save Ireland in her present misery, we should be saved.
At no time did the Irish ask for gifts, alms or charitable aid. However, the Irish MPs
complained many times that the country needed decent government legislation, not charity.
Russell responded to Irish delegations by quoting extracts from Adam Smith on the limits of
Government intervention. Then the authorities, still overcome by government wisdom,
followed up by distributing pamphlets instead of food in Ireland. These pamphlets
contained quotations from Smith (the writings of whom influenced economists such as
Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo) on principles of political economy.
However, principles of political economy did not preclude the spending of large sums of
money on buildings like Buckingham Place and the new Houses of Parliament. Trevelyan,
whose principal concern was the expense of the whole operation to the Treasury, decided to
wind up the scheme of public works and use the soup kitchens established by the Quakers,
with some extension, to under-feed the people. On 20 January relief committees were notified
that the free issue of soup was permitted to the destitute, provided the workhouses nearby
were full, though soup should be sold wherever possible. On 25 January, Lord John Russell
presented The Temporary Relief of Destitute Persons Act (popularly called the Soup Kitchen

Act) to the House of Commons. This stipulated amongst other things that distressed persons
were to be classed as paupers, placed under the poor law and, when strictly necessary, given
outdoor relief. Public works were to be gradually closed. An advance of 30 000 was to be
made to buy seed and was to be repaid by the following December. When half the money
from public works was repaid, the other half was to be remitted.
Not surprisingly, the money for this relief was to come from a new tax on the Irish people,
determined by striking a rate; that is, by agreeing on the amount of rate in the pound to be
levied, and issuing an order for collection. This ignored the evidence that, even in more
prosperous times, it was extremely difficult to collect the levied rates from people who had
no money. In March 1844, seven hundred troops, besides police, had been required to collect
the poor rate in Galway alone. In Co. Mayo, the warship Stromboli and two revenue cruisers,
Dee and Comet, stood by in Clew Bay. In addition, the Mayo rate collectors had the
assistance of two companies of the 69th Regiment, a troop of the 10th Hussars, fifty police,
two police inspectors and two stipendiary magistrates. These combined operations of navy
and army brought in only a quarter of the rate. Dean Kirwan, the Catholic Bishop of Mayo,
calculated that each shilling (one twentieth of a pound) had cost a pound or more to collect.
Yet the British Government, still overcome by acumen, was now working on the assumption
that, when Ireland was famine-stricken as well as poverty stricken, a poor rate, fifty times
larger than ever before, could be collected. (Years later, in 1897, the Report of a Royal
Commission on taxation discovered, among other things, that Ireland was being taxed at over
three million pounds a year beyond her obligation under the enforced Act of Union.
Restitution to Ireland of the vast sum of which she had been robbed in fifty years, one
hundred and fifty million pounds was point blank refused.)
At this time people were not just dying of hunger but of typhus and relapsing fever. Cases of
fever were reported from the end of 1846 and in the winter and spring of 1847, deaths from
fever had reached epidemic proportions. It had spread throughout the country and was
particularly devastating in workhouses. Although the Irish people abhorred workhouses (or
poorhouses as they really were), they had nowhere else to go. Once people were admitted
they lost all status as individuals and were henceforth merely paupers. That was the lowest
rung on the social ladder. They were stigmatised forever. The workhouse was run by a
master, usually a non-commissioned officer from the army or constabulary. They were not
chosen for their humanitarian qualities. The job of the master included the provision and
enforcement of employment by all able-bodied workhouse occupants. If a family arrived
together at the workhouse, they were immediately separated. Usually, they died that way.
The workhouses were typically built to house 600 to 1 000; however, in the winter of
1846/47, they were filled well beyond capacity. A report commissioned by the Central Board
of Health in March 1847 found that people, especially children, were sleeping as many as six
to a bed, and that ventilation and drainage were lacking. Disease spread rapidly from even a
single infected person and entire populations of workhouses were wiped out.
Many newly established fever hospitals were in even worse condition. Dr Stephens reported
that in the fever hospital at Bantry patients were lying naked on straw, the living and dead
together. There was no medicine, no drink, no fire, no trained staff and the doctor was ill.
They were crying out for water but there was no one to give it to them. Typhus is
characterised by swelling of the face and the skin turning dark. This has given typhus its Irish
name of black fever (galair dubh). There is also a rash, severe pain and acute vomiting,
followed by sores, sometimes gangrene and, eventually, death. The smell in a fever ward that
is not meticulously cleaned is almost intolerable. Cleaning cannot completely eradicate the
smell. There is also delirium, which affects the patients judgment. Patients need supervision

as the fever becomes so intense that the sufferer is apt to jump out of a window and run to the
nearest water to plunge in. There was also an outbreak of other diseases including relapsing
fever. The outbreaks were so infectious that many doctors, nurses and clergy working with
fever patients died.
People flocked to the towns, weak and ill. When packed together, they made an excellent
hothouse for fever. Death struck savagely. Nobody knows how many people died of fever.
Whole families were to be seen lying in fever by the roadside. Thus, the contemporary name
for the epidemic was road fever. Where hospitals and workhouses were full, people seeking
admission with fever were left to die on the streets and in open fields. Nor were people keen
to enter hospitals. The knowledge of the death rate in the hospitals and workhouses fuelled
the peoples dread of them, and they were justified. Deaths in Ennis in Co. Clare were far
fewer among those who were not in hospital, while it was said that persons who would go to
hospital contrary to all advice were quickly attacked by fever.
Thousands preferred to die in their own houses. For those struggling to maintain their
independence, the abnormal severity of the winter drove them to huddle together for warmth.
In addition, families often accepted people into their homes, who had been evicted from their
homes, and who were already ill. When one member got fever it spread to the whole family,
and families were frequently found on the floors of their cabins in the late stages of
decomposition, as there was no one left to bury them. In other circumstances, the evicted
would seek refuge in a scalp a two to three foot hole in the ground, roofed over with sticks
and pieces of turf; in this burrow, a family existed. Again, when they were discovered, the
victims were remorselessly hunted out.
The lack of proper burial increased the terror tenfold, as the Irish, more than most, are
accustomed to bestow care and attention on the funerals of their family, friends and relatives.
The honours which they were wont to lavish on the departed to show their respect the wake,
the mingled merriment and sorrow, the excess with which they spent the hoarded gains of
hard-working labour, and the long walking train to the churchyard , should now all be
forgone. People were buried from coffins, with hinged bottoms for repeated use, in mass
graves which remained unmarked, sometimes near workhouses which later disappeared,
covered up in shallow graves, or under rocks near their homes. Many were not buried at all.
In lonely districts fever-stricken persons died in their cabins without anyone coming near
them, and their bodies were left to rot. Often families buried the bodies of their relatives in
fields and on hillsides, perhaps saying, Better times will come and we will get church rites
for the bones. But better days never came to most of them and more often than not, they took
the secret of the burial place of their kin-folk to their own graves, still groaning with the
anger and sorrow of unlived life.
In Cliften, Co. Galway, corpses were burned. Sometimes they were buried under the cabin
floor; the family then fled and pulled down the roof over the dead. Many were buried in
ditches unknown to anyone. No legal register of deaths existed at the time. Major Halliday,
Inspecting Officer for Leitrim (not the worst affected area), thought the population had been
recently reduced by about a quarter. Commander Brown, RN, after inspecting Kenmare in the
company of both the Protestant and Catholic clergymen, reported that the number of dead
could not be ascertained. Too many had died, the clergymen told him, for a funeral service to
be said over the bodies, and corpses had been buried at night, leaving no trace.
Large numbers of people who did not have fever were weak and ill. They were like skeletons,
many too weak to walk and exhibiting hunger oedema. Their bodies had swollen to twice
their normal size. Their jaws were distended and they had lost their voices so that, even in

agony, they could not cry out. Scurvy (black leg) was also widespread. Scurvy is produced by
a diet lacking in vitamin C and had hitherto been unknown in Ireland. When Indian corn
(maize) which contains no vitamin C replaced potatoes, scurvy became general. The
progress of scurvy is painful and revolting: teeth fall out and joints are enlarged and cause
acute suffering. In the advanced stage, the legs turn black up to the middle of the thigh.
The total of those who died of the fever epidemic and famine diseases will never be known,
but probably about ten times as many died of disease as directly of starvation. Finally, the
British Government was convinced that an epidemic was raging and a new Fever Act was
introduced on 27 April 1847, placing authority for providing relief for fever patients in the
hands of Relief Committees. They were empowered to go over the heads of the Board of
Guardians and erect and equip temporary Fever Hospitals. The Fever Act was slow in coming
into operation and did not service some areas. Towards the end of May, the Lord Lieutenant
asked for tents and the Board of Ordnance dispatched hospital marquees used by the British
Army.
William Smith OBrien was left to fight almost single-handedly for Famine Relief in the
British Parliament. His parliamentary onslaught was fought desperately between 19 January
and 30 March 1847, trying by all means in his power to force Russells Whigs to abandon
laissez-faire. He had argued vehemently against the inadequacy of the Soup Kitchen Act and
the injustice of the striking rate in dealing with the famine. Asserting that it was within the
governments power to prevent a single death if it acted to stop food leaving the country or
bought on world markets, he argued that it should have lifted all duty on foreign grain and
ransacked the world for corn. He pointed out that merchants were now enjoying monopoly
prices. He argued the need for a tax on the large number of absentee landlords, which would
ensure there was enough money for the unions to provide the assistance needed. He argued
that there should be a minimum union size and taxation should be evenly distributed, as a few
resident landlords were now bearing the whole burden of relief. He argued that Permanent
relief committees should be established in each district and guardians empowered to care for
orphans and destitute children under the age of thirteen. His arguments died like seeds that
fell on stony ground.
He advocated tenant compensation for land improvements and fair prices for produce. He
advocated productive works such as the development of fisheries and railways and the
reclamation of wasteland. He decried the fact that people were forced to give up employment
to receive outdoor relief and was particularly scathing of the notorious Gregory Clause which
he discovered had been slipped into the Irish Land Improvement Bill. This forced people
seeking relief to surrender land greater than a quarter of an acre, thus forfeiting their only
means of support for a few bowls of watery soup, and leaving them with no means of ever
recovering from the famine. He was one of only two MPs to oppose it.
While Smith OBrien accepted the extension of the Poor Law Act to provide outdoor relief
for the able bodied providing it was backed by employment and other proposed amendments,
a less optimistic Lord Monteagle opposed the extension as it meant the cessation of
government assistance and placed the entire onus for relief on struggling unions. He did not
believe the necessary amendments would be made to the Bill and, in Smith OBriens
absence, persuaded Irish MPs to vote against it.
The final heartbreaking blow came for OBrien when he learned that the Government
planned to close public works. His frustration was deep. He forced Parliament to publicly
admit that it intended to dismiss about 20% of labourers on the public works programs when
the Soup Kitchen Act came into force. In despair, he returned to Ireland on 30 March 1847 to

work with Mitchel and the Irish Confederation, hoping to persuade the deeply divided Irish
political factions to take more concerted action.
Soup Kitchens
Trevelyan, whose principal concern was the expense of the whole operation to the Treasury,
started to wind up the scheme of public works. In keeping with Trevelyans program, men
began to be dismissed from the works in March 1847, after almost two years of famine. At
this time, there was not a single soup kitchen in operation. For those who were to be turned
off the works, there was, as one of the discharged wrote, nothing to do but bar the door, lie
down and die.
The soup, when it was finally available, was not so much soup for the poor, as poor soup
soup made from the shadow of a scrawny chicken that had itself died of starvation. The
recipes were alarmingly economical. Medico, writing to the press from the Athenaeum, the
most authoritative scientific and literary weekly, described the recipes as preposterous, and
emphasised that soup was totally unsuitable as a food for people dying from starvation. The
debilitating effects of a liquid diet were well known to medical officers of our hospitals,
prisons and other public establishments. Mr Bishop, Commissariat officer in West Cork,
complained in a letter that soup runs through (people) without affording any nourishment,
while a doctor in the starving town of Skibbereen had told him it was actually injurious to
the very large number of people who were suffering from dysentery. The Protestant Rector of
Killymaule wrote that, on soup kitchen rations, his people were starving. All complaints
received the same official reply, signed by the Under-Secretary: the Board of Health had
approved the ration issued.
The Irish people detested the method of soup distribution. Collecting it in cans outdoors
outraged Irish pride, even though they were in a state of starvation. Each person was required
to bring a bowl and stand in line like a beggar, until their turn came to have soup or
stirabout ladled into it. Resistance was in vain, however. The choice was the soup kitchen or
death. Some of the Catholic clergy were also responsible for some of the antagonism towards
the soup kitchens. They hampered the relief work of Protestant charities, fearing that some of
their flock might, even nominally, turn to Protestantism for a ladle of soup. This was
considered an even greater peril than death itself.
All of this ruthlessly imposed legalised pauperisation of the entire nation was made
humiliating by an ill-mannered and sadistic form of charity; it was this as much as anything
which turned the stomachs of normal-minded, comfortably-circumstanced Irishmen like those
who wrote against it in the pages of The Nation and the United Irishmen. Again, it is the
vivid pen of Mitchel in an Open Letter to Lord John Russell to which we must turn for a
description of an Easter Monday scene in Dublin in 1847, when Dublin saw one of the most
ignominious Easter festivals one of the ghastliest galas ever exhibited under the sun the
solemn inauguration of the Irish nation in its new career of national pauperism. This is
Mitchels account:
There, in the esplanade before the Royal Barracks, was erected the national model soupkitchen, gaily bedizened, laurelled and bannered, and fair to see; and, in and out, and all
around, sauntered parties of our supercilious second-hand better classes of the Castle
offices, fed on superior rations at the peoples expense, and bevies of fair dames, and
military officers, braided with public braid, and padded with public padding.
And there, too, were the pale and piteous ranks of model-paupers, broken tradesmen,
ruined farmers, destitute seamstresses, ranged at a respectable distance till the genteel
persons had duly inspected the arrangements and then marched by policemen to the

place allotted them, where they were to feed on the meagre diet with chained spoons to
show the gentry how pauper spirit can be broken, and pauper appetite can gulp down its
bitter bread and bitterer shame and wrath together; and all this time the genteel persons
chatted and simpered as pleasantly as if the clothes they wore, and the carriages they drove
in, were their own as if Royal Barracks, Castle and soup-kitchen were to last for ever.
In general, people were simply badly treated and the following, from Asenath Nicholsons
Lights and Shades of Ireland, gives another example of how poorly starving people were
treated by those in charge of food distribution:
Going out one cold day in a bleak waste on the coast, I met a pitiful old man in hunger and
tatters, with a child on his back, almost entirely naked, and to appearance in the last stages
of starvation; whether his naked legs had been scratched, or whether the cold had affected
them I knew not, but the blood was in small streams in different places, and the sight was a
horrid one. The old man was interrogated, why he took such an object into sight, upon the
street, when he answered that he lived seven miles off, and was afraid the child would die
in the cabin, with two little children he had left starving, and he had come to get the bit of
meal, as it was the day he heard that the relief was giving out. The officer told him he had
no time to enter his name on the book, and he was sent away in that condition; a penny or
two was given him [by the writer], for which he expressed the greatest gratitude; this was
on Wednesday or Thursday. The case was mentioned to the officer, and he entreated not to
send such objects away, especially when the distance was so great.
The next Saturday, on my way from the house where the relieving-officer was stationed,
we saw and old man creeping slowly in a bending posture upon the road, and the boy was
requested to stop the car. The old man looked up and recognised me. It was he who had the
child upon his back in the dreadful state. I did not know him, but his overwhelming thanks
for the little that was given him that day, called to mind the circumstances; and, inquiring
where the child was, he said the three were left in the cabin, and had not taken a sup nor a
bit since yesterday morning, and he was afraid that some of them would be dead upon the
hearth when he returned. The relieving-officer had told him to come on Saturday, and his
name should be on the book, he had waited without scarcely eating a mouthful till then,
and was so weak he could not carry the child, and had crept the seven miles to get the
meal, and was sent away with a promise to wait till the next Tuesday, and come and have
his name on the books. This poor man had not a penny nor a mouthful of food, and he said
tremulously, I must go home and die on the hearth with the hungry ones.
Evictions
The situation was exacerbated by the mass evictions that took place over the winter of 1846
47, though some landlords evicted tenants earlier, fearing they would not be able to continue
paying rent. One of the most notorious instances recorded was the eviction of 300 tenants by
Mrs Gerhard of Ballinglass, Co. Galway, on 13 March 1846. The inhabitants of sixty-one
houses who were not in arrears with their rent, and had, by their hard work and industry,
reclaimed an area of around 400 acres from a neighbouring bog, were ordered to give up
possession without compensation. The village of Ballinglass consisted of sixty-one houses,
solidly built and well kept, with thick plastered walls. They were evicted with the assistance
of police and troops and the houses then demolished, in order that the holding might be
turned into a grazing farm. The scene was frightful: women running and wailing, clutching
pieces of their property and clinging to doorposts from which they had to be forcibly torn.
That night the people slept in the ruins; next day they were driven out, the foundations of the
houses were torn up and razed, and no neighbour was allowed to take them in.

Lord Londonderry, an Ulster landlord, made a statement in the House of Lords with regard to
the Ballinglass evictions. He was deeply grieved that
76 families, comprising 300 individuals, had not only been turned out of their houses but
had even the unfortunate wretches been mercilessly driven from the ditches to which
they had betaken themselves for shelter and where they were attempting to get up a
covering of some kind by means of sticks and mud ...these unfortunate people had their
rents actually ready ...If scenes like this occurred, ...was it to be wondered at ...that deeds
of outrage and violence should occasionally be attempted?
Lord Brougham, however, a staunch supporter of laissez faire, held a different view. He said
in the House of Lords:
Undoubtedly it was the landlords right to do as he pleases, and if he abstained, he
conferred a favour and was doing an act of kindness. If on the other hand he chose to stand
on his right, the tenants must be taught by the strong arm of the law that they had no
power to oppose or resist ... property would be valueless and capital would no longer be
invested in cultivation of land if it were not acknowledged that it was the landlords
undoubted, indefeasible and most sacred right to deal with his property as he wished.
In 1846/47 a large proportion of rents were in arrears and Captain A E Kennedy, Kilrush, Co.
Clare, reported to the Poor Law Commissioners that at the end of March 1847, cabins were
being thrown down in all directions, and the workhouses were full. He wrote in his diary: I
cannot think where the evicted find shelter. A thousand cabins had been levelled in three
months. He sent in a report on oath that the great mass are tenants at will, and dare not
resist. Many evicted in Co. Clare, he said,
had taken refuge in bog dens, holes in the living bog, roofed over with sods. Several of
these wretched dens were without light or air and I was obliged to light a piece of bog fir
to see where the sick lay, while many good substantial houses lay in ruins around them.
Whatever future good these clearances may effect, they are productive of a present amount
of suffering and mortality which would scare the proprietors were they to see it. [The
evicted] dont know where to face, [they] linger about localities for weeks or months
burrowing in ditches or among the rafters of their former dwellings ... the poor are hunted
off land, when perhaps they have never been five miles away.
There were landlords who had supported not only their own peasantry but who had assisted
the stragglers; but there were also the many who took advantage of the famine to implement
their land clearances. While William Smith OBrien and his family, led by the energetic and
determined Grace OBrien, were among the better supporters of the poor, his brother Sir
Lucius while playing the role of the Good Samaritan had evicted forty families from his
estates. Later, he also had them ejected from Weavers Road at Newmarket-on-Fergus where
they had been camping in the ditches and makeshift humpies.
This useful practice, perfected and unimpeded during the famine years, continued long
afterwards. Mulhalls Dictionary of Statistics gives the details (taken from official British
sources) of the number of Irish families evicted yearly from 1848 to 1882; and the thirtythree year total of officially reported evictions (which falls far short of the full number)
represents the appalling total of 482 000 families. Because families often consisted of
grandparents, unmarried uncles and aunts, as well as several children, this represents up to
four million creatures cast out to starve or die in a third of a century. Peter Berresford Ellis, in
The History of the Irish Working Class, gives the number of families evicted between the
years 1878 and 1886 as 130 000. This amounts to nearly a million people in just six years.

The 4 clause in the Poor Law precipitated a spate of evictions because, under the new poor
rate, landlords were required to pay rates on any holdings leased for 4 or more. As many of
the tenants were in arrears with their rents, landlords evicted them to escape the rate liability.
Some landlords evicted tenants, into the hail and snow, without even a rag to cover them.
There were some exceptions, however. Some landlords lived on Indian meal themselves in
order to save more for the starving some of whom were eating turf and grass.
The Poor Law
Trevelyan ordered commissariat operations wound up on 9 August and by the second week
this was complete. Extreme distress in the west and southwest made some delay in closing
soup kitchens unavoidable. Trevelyan reported that the multitude was again gradually and
peacefully thrown on its own resources at the season of harvest, when new and abundant
supplies of food became available, and the demand for labour was at its highest. Trevelyan
was ever eager to keep everything within the letter of the law, including expanding the law to
keep everything he did within it. This year, he wrote to Sir John Burgoyne, the
responsibilities and duties which we lay down have been imposed by Legislature on the Poor
Law Commissioners and the Boards of Guardians. In July, the Prime Minister Lord John
Russell promised money, saved from the operation of the soup kitchens, for profitable works.
He reneged on this pledge however when a stock market crash (following wild speculation
encouraged by laissez-faire economic principles) left the Government short of money. The
Chancellor Charles Wood told Clarendon, the newly appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
that he must not expect any money.
Unbelievable as it must now seem, English ministers the Government of Ireland had
already done all they were ever going to do to deal with the starvation in Ireland. Trevelyan,
in a terrifying phrase, stated that he had decided to leave that part of his jurisdiction to what
he described as the operation of natural causes. In my opinion, he wrote, too much has
already been done for the people. Under such treatment the people have grown worse instead
of better, and we must now see what independent exertion can do. Trevelyan was anxious to
be rid of the stigma of Irish famine. He decided to end it in 1847. The soup kitchens were
closed down. Meal and grain in store were sold, not cheaply, but at current market prices.
Any grain that could not be sold was not given away, but picked up by government steamer
and taken to England. Ship off all, close your depot and come away, was the order sent to
outlaying stations on 9 August 1847.
Mr. Twistleton had the responsibility of establishing the Irish Poor Law but failed to produce
a plan because no funding was available. Trevelyan, against his will, was forced to take over
once again and drafted the plan, without funding, for the new Irish Poor Law Extension Act.
His plan drew an impassable line between distressed and non-distressed unions. Only the
distressed unions were to receive assistance. He determined to make relief for able-bodied
men as unattractive as possible and, to this end, the able-bodied were to receive relief only
within the workhouse. Workhouses were to be emptied of the aged and infirm, women and
children. They were to be given outdoor relief only. The Commissariat was to return to
organise the supply of food. The contemplated transfer of all responsibility to the Poor Law
Commissioners had to be abandoned.
The Society of Friends refused to work through the Poor Law, as they did not think it capable
of relieving the masses in areas where no workhouses existed. The Irish unions were an
immense size some over 200 000 acres which meant that workhouses could not service
most of the distressed people. This put an efficient system of relief through the workhouses
out of the question. James Hack Tucke of the society pointed out that The Union of Ballina,
for example, covered 509 154 acres and had vast tracts of desolate country where distress

wore its most appalling form. People would have to travel 40 or 50 miles to obtain relief and
would be turned away if their districts had not paid rates. Furthermore, the workhouses were
totally overtaxed from the previous winters catering for starving and fever stricken patients.
They had no money to buy food; many were in debt and had no beds, no blankets or clothing.
Where workhouses owed money their contents were seized and the inhabitants evicted. On 12
August, Lord Clarendon wrote that only eight of the one hundred and thirty unions had any
money.
He estimated relief under the Poor Law Act cost at least 42 000 a week but the most that
was ever collected in a month was 64 000. Wood and Trevelyan were determined to return
nothing collected in revenue from Ireland back to Ireland. Lord Clarendon was told no more
money would be forthcoming and he must collect rates at 15 pence in the pound from
property. The Boards of Guardians must provide everything needed from these rates.
However, before rates could be collected, landlords seized crops for rent and tenants had
nothing left with which to pay rates.
In the six months from June 1847 almost 1 000 000 of a newly levied rate was collected
from those who were still experiencing one of the worst famines known in history. On 22
November Charles Wood instructed Clarendon to send horse, foot and dragoons and go to the
very edge of the law and beyond to collect more rates. The troops were instructed to seize
anything they could from destitute people. However, nothing was done to compel absentee
landlords to pay for any portion of the relief.
Although fever was still raging, after 1 October there was no further money. The only money
available for relief was the 160 000 donated in August by the British Relief Association for
outdoor relief. This money, Clarendon pointed out, would not cover debts already incurred.
Trevelyan dismissed all appeals for further funding from Clarendon and Routh. The only
funding contributed by Treasury, in addition to 160 000 and the proceeds of the new Poor
Law was 50 000. As John Mitchel reported:
Parliament appropriated a further sum of 50,000 to be applied in giving work in some
absolutely pauper districts where there was no hope of ever raising rates to repay it.
50,000 was just the sum which was, that same year, voted out of English and Irish
revenue to improve the buildings of the British Museum.
Whilst it was often remarked (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) in Ireland, that Queen Victoria
gave 5 towards famine relief, while at the same time giving 5 to the Battersea Dogs Home,
the truth is, in fact, worse than the somewhat embroidered story. Early in 1847, Queen
Victoria subscribed 2 000 to The British Association for the relief of distress in Ireland. It
represented no more than a penny for every ten persons who died of hunger during the
famine. Charles S Parnell made reference to Queen Victorias contribution in the course of a
speech that he made during his tour of America in 1880 (thirty-three years later) and was
subsequently attacked in the English press. Lord Randolph Churchill, for example, attempted
to contradict his statement. In the New York Herald, Parnell replied:
In reference to Lord Randolph Churchills contradiction of my statements, that the Queen
gave nothing to relieve the Famine in 1847, I find I might have gone still further and have
said with perfect accuracy, that not only did she give nothing, but that she actually
intercepted 8,000 of the donation which the Sultan of Turkey desired to contribute to the
Famine fund. In 1847 the Sultan had offered a donation of 10,000, but the English
Ambassador at Constantinople was directed by the Queen to inform him that her
contribution was to be limited to 2,000, and that the Sultan should not, in good taste, give
any more than her Majesty; hence the net result to the Famine fund by the Queens action

was a loss of 6,000. All this is perfectly understood by students of Irish history, and
would have been known to Lord R. Churchill were our history not proscribed in English
schools.
Charles S Parnell (1st February, 1880).
DArcy Magees history of the Irish settlers in North America also elaborates on this subject.
He writes:
The Czar, the Sultan, and the Pope sent their rubies and their pearls. The Pasha of Egypt,
the Shah of Persia, the Emperor of China, the Rajahs of India, combined to do for Ireland
what her so-styled rulers refused to do to keep her young and old people living in the
land. America did more than all the rest of the world.
John Mitchel summarised Britains attempts to downplay the Famine to the rest of the world
and distort the political situation that led to it as follows:
In this year (1847), the Irish famine began to be a worlds wonder, and mens hearts were
moved in the uttermost ends of the earth by the recital of its horrors... (however) the
constant language of English ministers and members of Parliament created the impression
abroad that Ireland was in need of alms, and nothing but alms; whereas Irishmen
themselves uniformly protested that what they required was a repeal of the Union, so that
the English might cease to devour their substance.
Even the poor and hunted Choctaw Indian Nation in America, on hearing of the Irish tragedy,
sent what they could. They fundraised for the starving in Ireland, raising US$170, a
considerable sum of money for them at that time. Their own history is one of great sadness
also and they had recently completed the forced journey, with other tribes, known as the The
Trail of Tears, with great loss of life, from their ancestral lands to the reservations, opening
up millions of acres for white settlement.
***
As the food shortages and evictions worsened, hostility towards landlords increased to such
an extent that some of them felt they were in enemy country. Seven were assassinated and the
Lord Lieutenant, Clarendon, became concerned that a revolution was afoot. He requested
extraordinary powers and threatened to resign unless he got them. With misgivings, Russell
granted him what he wanted and on 29 November Sir George Grey introduced the Crime and
Outrage (Ireland) Bill in the House of Commons. Fifteen thousand extra troops were sent to
Ireland, with no misgivings about the expense. The reality was as Russell suspected:
Clarendon had overreacted. A revolution was not being planned by the starving people.
However, this influx of troops seriously provoked them.
A revolutionary movement did emerge; however, it originated among the intellectual and
middle classes and it proved difficult to enlist the support of the hungry, poor and
dispossessed. The Coercion Bill was the main catalyst for this movement. It saw the end of
Mitchels and other Young Irelanders conservatism for despite John OConnells opinion
they were, if anything, excessively conservative up until the end of 1847. In Mitchels case,
the influence of his legal training and his family background had imposed constraint. His
letters and recorded speeches of the 1845 to 1847 period suggest he was still clinging to the
hope that the landlords would recognise the fact that they had a major responsibility. He,
Thomas Meagher and Gavan Duffy had enthusiastically worked on the sub-committee of the
Repeal Association and the Irish Council, encouraged by the fact that there were landlords
involved and hopeful that national cooperation was possible so that Britain could be
persuaded to heed Irelands needs through concerted rational argument. However, the

introduction of the Coercion Bill and the support of the landlords as a class, with few
exceptions, quashed this hope. Landlords were said to have retired from any thought of
nationality and resumed their position of avarice with the introduction of, and their protection
by, the Coercion Bill.
In a speech to the confederation on 1 December 1847, Mitchel delineated his assessment of
the Bill. This is what he had to say:
In the first place, the Lord Lieutenant is to have power to proclaim any district he thinks fit
or the whole two and thirty counties if he thinks it necessary to throw into the
proclaimed districts any number of police he pleases, and levy rates on the people instantly
for payment of all expenses. Then he may order all persons to bring their arms, even those
arms that are now more than ever necessary for their defence, to the nearest police station.
And the police are to be empowered to go into any mans house in search of arms, and if
any are found, the owner of the house will be in a misdemeanour, and liable to two years
imprisonment and hard labour. Next, all persons between the ages of sixteen and sixty are
to turn out, when called on, to hunt down persons suspected of crime that is to say, any
person at all whom the police may suspect; and in cases of non compliance, two years
imprisonment and hard labour. You see, therefore, that in its main features this Bill is just
like the sixteen or seventeen other Bills; and it is important to remark that it is brought in
with the hearty approbation of all the great parties in England.
Let me be understood, Sir, I denounce this Bill because it never can answer its end;
because it will aggravate all evils and exasperate all the fierce passions of the several
classes against one another; because the peasantry who already feel that the world is not
their friend nor the worlds law, will believe this measure to be a conspiracy against them
between hostile landlords and a hostile government; and, lastly, because this foreign
government which itself produced the misery, the despair, the disorganisation, has no right
to coerce this island.
Some of the arrests and convictions executed under this Coercion Bill surely rate among the
greatest miscarriages of justice ever recorded. For instance, John Mitchel reports that
A quiet, respectable farmer, who, when the sun was near setting strolled a short way down
the road to pay his working men, and walking back when the sun had just sunk, though it
was still broad daylight, was arrested for the heinous crime against the Queen and
Constitution of the realm of being outdoors.
At that time, the tailor and the shoemaker would be taken by the big farmers to their houses
and kept there for a week in the late autumn and early winter, to make shoes and clothes for
the family. One of these tailors was arrested on an evening as he sat at his work in a farmers
house where, of course, he was spending his nights as well as his days. The villain had
literally transgressed British law: he had been out of his house between sunset and sunrise!
He was sentenced to fourteen years transportation for failing to respect British law and the
Queen of England.
To alleviate some of the distress that grew beyond bounds as winter set in, The British
Association got around some of the impediments Trevelyan placed in the way of providing
relief, by feeding and clothing children in schools. Finally, however, on 18 December
Trevelyan was persuaded to allow outdoor relief in the most distressed districts. However, he
stressed to the Poor Law Commissioners that outdoor relief was temporary for two months
only and every effort should be made to house the able bodied men in workhouses. To this
end, women and children, the indigent old and the infirm were turned out of workhouses and
housed in derelict buildings that had no water, sanitation or heating. Nevertheless, admission

to a workhouse did not guarantee food and on 24 December Major Halliday, the Poor Law
Inspector reported that, in Sligo, workhouse people were dying of starvation. As there was no
work anywhere at that time of the year, the numbers seeking admission to workhouses were
well in excess of what could be accommodated. It was a common sight to find the dead
bodies of men who had tramped many miles to a workhouse only to be refused admittance,
lying by roadsides, in fields and at the gates of the workhouse. The autumn and winter of
1847 48 were horrific, with evictions increasing and corpses lying unburied, even in a large
town like Limerick, for days on end.
Yet in this black year of 1847, Larcom the Government Commissioner estimated at forty five
million pounds the value of the food-crops produced in Ireland. The greater portion of these
crops crossed the Channel sold to satisfy the landlord and tax-gatherer. (The value of the
potato crop that failed was around three and a half million pounds.) Ironically, at the end of
1845, exports of potatoes from Ireland to England increased and Irish potatoes even went to
Belgium and Holland. Small ports situated in some of the most famine-stricken parts of
Ireland Ballina, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee and Westport
were sending cargoes of foodstuffs to Britain. In the first nine months of 1847, over seventy
ships with grain sailed from Tralee in Co. Kerry in the west coast, to Liverpool. In addition,
six ships sailed from Kilrush (also in the west, in Co. Clare) to Glasgow, carrying a total of
6624 barrels of oats. Throughout 1847 also, both Indian corn and potatoes were exported
from Ireland.
The face of the country is covered with ripe corn while the people dread starvation, wrote
Mr Hewetson, senior commissariat officer in charge of Limerick, to Trevelyan in September
1847. The grain will go out of the country, sold to pay rent. And that it certainly did. From
Cork harbour on one day in 1847, the AJAX steamed for England with 1 514 firkins of butter
(a firkin equals nine gallons or around 41 litres), 102 casks of pork, 44 hogsheads (a
hogsheads is 2 liquid barrels or 63 gallons) of whiskey, 844 sacks of oats, 247 sacks of wheat,
106 bales of bacon, 13 casks of hams, 145 casks of porter, 12 sacks of fodder, 28 bales of
feathers, 8 sacks of lard, 296 boxes of eggs, 30 head of cattle, 90 pigs, 220 lambs, 34 calves
and 69 miscellaneous packages. In the first nine months of 1847, 56 557 firkins of butter
were exported to Bristol and 34 852 to Liverpool. During the same period, 3 435 poultry were
exported to Liverpool and 2 375 to Bristol from Cork alone. The export of livestock to
Britain increased during the famine. Over three million live animals were exported between
1846 and 1850. Some of these cattle were then re-exported to Europe. Overall, during the
famine years, food exports to Europe from Britain increased. Irish food exports, however,
went much further than Britain or even Europe. In the summer of 1847, a New York
newspaper noted that imports of grain from Ireland were larger than usual. And this was
despite a poor grain harvest in 1846 47. It is evident from these facts that the problem for
Ireland was not a potato blight, but appalling Government mismanagement that endorsed a
political and economic system that systematically starved to death a large section of the
population.
At a time when a torrent of food was leaving Ireland, Trevelyan tried to justify the famine by
denigrating the common people. There is, he wrote, scarcely a woman of the peasant class
in the West of Ireland whose culinary skills exceeds the boiling of a potato. Bread is scarcely
ever seen, and an oven is unknown. While this statement could be more or less true, the
reason bread and other foods were not available in Irish households had nothing to do with
the culinary skills of women of the peasant class but was, rather, the result of Trevelyan and
his ilk robbing them of their ingredients and even utensils. Irish soda bread was commonly
baked on a griddle an open rimless metal plate and the only culinary skills required to
bake bread in that manner, or indeed any manner, is to know that when flour is mixed with

liquid (usually buttermilk but any liquid will do) it makes dough. (The buttermilk, or sourmilk, in the dough contains lactic acid, which reacts with the baking soda to form tiny
bubbles of carbon dioxide.) Griddle breads can be leavened, or not, depending upon the
recipe. Ireland did not have a strong tradition of yeast bread manufacture although prior to the
introduction of baking soda, also known as sodium bicarbonate, similar breads were made
with sourdough and barm brack, yeast created by fermenting ale. Irish soda bread, baked over
a peat fire and with meal ground from soft Irish wheat which is a low gluten grain, is
unsurpassed for flavour. And anyone who could boil potatoes in a pot could boil meat and
other vegetables in the same vessel, were they available. The dietary habits of the Irish farmer
were always nutritionally sound, even if to an English stiff-necked pseudo sophisticate like
Trevelyan, they seemed not quite la cordon bleu. (Paul C Bragg MD, who called himself a
Life Extension Specialist, said that the farmers in the west of Ireland were among the
healthiest and longest living groups of people in the world and their diet consisted mainly of
potatoes, milk and fish.) It is also ironical that an Englishman should find himself in a situation
where he could become an international critic of the culinary arts.
The deaths in Ireland were reaching 20 000 to 30 000 per month. There was no appreciation
in England of the fact that the English population was feasting on the food of their neighbours
who were dying for its want. As John Mitchel said: Without the Famine, England could not
live as she had a right to expect: and the exact complement of a comfortable family dinner in
England is a coroners inquest in Ireland.
The reporting of Irelands devastating problems was one of the major contributors to the
animosity between the peoples of the two countries. The ordinary person in England was only
aware of what the papers passed on; and the press, controlled by the establishment, was not
questioning or condemning government policy. The Times in particular was gleeful in
attacking and denigrating anything Irish the facts often ran a poor second to puerile
attempts at ridicule. An article published in the Times on 18 September 1846 reads The
Irishman, it is said, requires a soft mouthful and a large bellyful of food. Bread is too hard for
his mouth and too compact for his other less dignified organ. But we entertain no doubt the
hungriest and most squalid bogtrotter in Connaught could be brought to bear a dinner of turtle
soup, roast beef, pheasant and ice punch every day of his life without being very much the
worse for the changePat thrives on the potato See what work he does on a good dish of
murphies! He will not thank you for bread.
Sir John F. Burgoyne, wrote to the Times trying to explain the gravity of the situation in
Ireland saying The distress of Ireland is not the ordinary distress of lowering of the condition
(of people) from one of luxury or comfort but the reducing of them from the lowest state that
can support life to one without means even to do that. Sarcastically the Times commented:
Oh for some little sense in our poor Irish kinsmen.
Another letter from Sir John Burgoyne, published in the Times on 12 October 1847,
highlighting the devastation of Ireland and calling for a better understanding of the problem
among the English population, was followed by this response the following day, 13 October:
For some days past letters have appeared in your columns from many clergymen of the
Church of England, expressing a unanimous feeling of indignation that they should again be
called upon to solicit alms from their congregations on behalf of the poor and starving Irish;
and your paper of this day contains a long letter from Sir J. Burgoyne deprecating that burst
of honest indignation at the impudent appeal, and putting forth some reasons why there
should be a further contribution of alms from England for the poor and starving Irish. We
have a right to repel the claim, as it is now being repelled industrious, and painstaking, and

enterprising Englishmen, who earn their bread by the sweat of their brows, have a right to
repel the claim with indignation and scorn.
Punch, the establishments magazine of wit, was happy to exploit the misery of dying people
in its cartoons and commentary. Nassau Senior had labelled Famine victims paupers.
Pauperisation was blamed on the paupers. A line in Punch described Irish paupers as the
blight of their own land, and the curse of the Saxon and was happy to satirize corpses in
cabins and destitution in workhouses.
Their story is starkly outlined in this evidence given by Father Moloney to the Chairman of
the Select Commission concerning the people in his parish in County Clare and the Union of
Kilrush from which food was being exported to Britain:
Chairman: Have they sufficient cabins to hold them (the local poor families) decently and
comfortably?
Answer: Frequently there are three or four or five families in one cabin due to eviction.
Chairman: How do you account for the excessive diminution of population, which you speak
of; in what way have they disappeared?
Answer: It is partly to be attributed to the evictions, which have taken place. When a family
is evicted it has no place to go. They are liable to catch fever. They have no
clothing, for, generally speaking, they will continue to keep possession as long as
they were allowed, until they have eaten everything they possess.
Chairman: Can you state what wages are usually paid to them?
Answer: At two seasons of the year, that is in spring and in harvest; the general wages given
to the persons employed is 6 pence a day without diet. Those wages do not hold for
more than the busier period, about a fortnight or three weeks. They are then reduced
down to 4 pence and at other periods of the year numbers cannot get employment
even for their mere support. They work for two meals a day without wages.
Chairman: Can you give any idea to the Committee of the number of the population, who
have died, within your knowledge of absolute hunger in your parish within the last
few years?
Answer: I could not mention the entire number in the parish, but I have a return of the
numbers in thirteen townlands and I know those almost from my own personal
knowledge and I find that since that period (since census of 1841) that 864 have
died of want.
Chairman: Was there any compensation given them (tenants) for levelling their houses?
Answer: A few shillings and in some cases no compensation. If I may make a remark to the
Committee, I would say that this townland of Shandrum might be called a miniature
of the Union of Kilrush. There is no species of suffering which the farmer or the
poor could endure which has not been endured by the people in that townland. I can
lay before the Committee as many examples as they may think proper to listen to.
One poor man, named Thomas Blake, held a small portion of land in the townland
of Shandrum. He was refused relief as he would not give up the house and he held
on for a week. As I was going to say Mass on Sunday I saw him tumbling his
house. I asked him what did he mean. The reply he made was Do you hear the
children crying? He said he could hold out no longer. On my return the house was
tumbled and he had a scalp made some time after by the side of a ditch. The owner
of the land on which the scalp was, dreaded that he might be injured by leaving him

there, and the scalp was levelled. He then made another in another part of the farm
and he took fever. I attended him and was not able to get inside, the place was so
small; it was pouring rain and the only covering that was over him was the tick of a
bed without any feathers. He remained there all night and on the following morning
he expired. There are several other similar cases.
Chairman: Do you know of any instances where they (paupers) applied to the Board for
Relief or went to the Workhouse and were sent back with their cases unheard or
being refused relief?
Answer: Several. There is the wife of Batt Donnellan to whom I alluded just now. She went
with her children as she told me on four successive Thursdays for admission.
Chairman: What is the distance?
Answer: It is over twenty Irish miles in going and coming. She carried one or two of the
children on her back and the last day she went there the day became so wet that she
caught cold. Fever was the result and she died of it.
This story was repeated throughout Ireland. The Crowbar Brigade, the gang that
accompanied the Sheriff or the bailiff to the scene of the eviction to demolish the residence,
after the occupants were evicted would demolish twenty or thirty houses in a day in all
seasons and in every kind of weather. Those evicted had to erect a scalp by the fences to
find shelter. Frequently, they had to remain out under the canopy of heaven. The results were
cholera due to hunger and exposure, followed by death.
In Clare, some of the evicted went to the Workhouse at Kilrush where conditions were
inhuman. The unfortunate people who were admitted there were bathed in cold water on their
arrival. Starved and sick from famine fever, they were taken from the bath more dead than
alive. They frequently appeared as if they were dead though many of them were not. Whether
dead or alive they were put into trap coffins a type of coffin where the bottom was hinged
and taken to the local graveyard at Shanakyle. At a common pit the bottom of the coffins was
unhinged and the bodies, some living, some dead, were thrown into a common grave. There
was no redress for the famine stricken.
They had no rights except the right to suffer, to be evicted and to die although the condition
of the sufferers was known to the authorities at every level up to that of senior members of
the British Government of the day.
The lack of Treasury support and the new impost on impoverished people was the last straw
for Twisleton, the Irish Poor Law Commissioner, who resigned in protest. Referring to
Twisletons resignation, Clarendon wrote to the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, on the
same day saying He thinks that the destitution here is so horrible, and the indifference of the
House of Commons to it is so manifest, that he is an unfit agent of a policy which must be
one of extermination ... Twisleton feels that as Chief Commissioner he is placed in a position
... which no man of honour and humanity may endure. The Earl of Clarendon had already
confided to the Prime Minister at the end of 1847 that: No-one could now venture to dispute
the fact that Ireland had been sacrificed to the London corn-dealers because you were a
member for the City, and that no distress would have occurred if the exportation of Irish grain
had been prohibited.
The influential London Times had its own angle on the Irish problem. While not ignorant of
the facts, they pandered to the prejudices of their readers. They scoffed at the Irish for being
unable to run their own country, thus forcing the benevolent English to run it on behalf of an

inferior race, agreeing that it would be difficult for most of our readers to feel near akin with
a class which at best wallows in pigsties and hugs the most brutish degradation.
London, Wednesday, October 4, 1848.
Another winter is approaching, and Ireland again appeals to the sympathies and solicitudes
of her provident and more fortunate sister. The rebellion has been suppressed, but not the
famine. Throughout extensive districts there is as great a failure of the potato as there was
two years since, and with a return of the cause we must expect a renewal of the disastrous
consequences. There are, it is true, some circumstances now in our favour. The white
crops have not been as deficient as in 1846. There is not a European famine, nor is there
likely to be. We have also the benefit of our former experience. All things considered,
therefore, the difficulty will confine itself to the relief of certain districts, with existing
agencies, and as much as possible from the local resources. For many weeks, indeed,
considerable portions of the western population, as, for example, on the wild coast of illfated Connemara, have been supported by regular doles of oatmeal-porridge, supplied
from the union funds. If such is the case now, and has continued so even in the midst of
the harvest and of the season for the fishery, what will it be when the earth is locked by
frost, or wrapped in snow, and when the ocean denies alike to the fisherman and the
emigrant its wonted hospitality?
As measures of relief are in actual operation, and we have not to construct at the eleventh
hour an original machinery for the purpose, there will be no overpowering pressure on
official responsibility and public resources. What, then, is the work to be done? In the first
place, there are vast accumulations of misery in certain parts, owing partly to the
immigration of outcasts, and partly to the secluded nature of the region, and the
consequent extraordinary ignorance and inaction of the people. There are corners of
Ireland which are the Ultima Thule [a distant or very remote place] of civilization, and
where a Cimerian [Should be Cimmerian: inhabitant of dark land: in Greek mythology, a
member of a people who lived in a land of perpetual darkness.] gloom hangs over the
human soul. The people there have always been listless, improvident, and wretched, under
whatever rulers. Ever since the onward Celtic wave was first stopped by the great Atlantic
barrier, these people have remained the same, and their present misfortune is that they are
simply what they have always been, and that from want of variety and intermixture they
have not participated in the great progress of mankind. When we see a dense population
on one of the finest shores of the world, with an inexhaustible ocean before their eyes,
yearly allowing immense shoals of fish to pass visibly before their eyes, with scarcely an
attempt to exact a toll from the passing masses of food, we must either rebuke their
perverseness or pity their savage condition. We do pity them, because they have yet to be
civilized. In Canada we have Indians in our borders, many of whom we yearly subsidize
and maintain. In Ireland we have Celts equally helpless and equally the objects of national
compassion. Such cases are only to be met by some form of public alms. Should the local
resources be utterly drained, or so severely drawn upon as to paralyse industrial
employment, England must make up her mind to some amount of imperial assistance, for
the present at least.
But how far can Ireland maintain herself? That is a question which demands an immediate
answer. It does not follow because there are districts of intense destitution that Ireland is,
on the whole, unequal to the task of supporting her people. Nor is it so in fact. There is
great wealth in Ireland. The state of cultivation, the value of the stock, and the produce,
the manufactories, the pits, the mines, the edifices, and every other form of fixed wealth,
has been immensely developed since the Union. We have given Ireland a commerce. Her

ports are prosperous. The alleged decay of her cities is a gross fable. Dublin is a thriving
metropolis, and if, as in every other metropolis, and not the least in London, certain streets
are comparatively neglected and some mansions are unoccupied or desecrated to plebeian
uses, the beautiful suburbs, on the other hand, especially in the Wicklow direction, exhibit
the same increasing rows of cheerful villas as our own Camberwell or Islington. Within
the last fifty years an immense number of gentlemans seats have been erected in all parts
of the island, and roads have been made even beyond the wants of the people. A vast
amount of British capital has been sunk with more or less profit. Such a country cannot be
a pauper. She may have her poor; but it is ridiculous to imagine that she should throw
herself altogether upon the alms of an English population, the greater part of who are as
well acquainted with hunger, and far more familiar with toil, than the most unfortunate of
our Irish neighbours
The Times
By June 1849 about one million people, who survived the winter, were destitute. Two
hundred and fifty thousand were in auxiliary workhouse accommodation and seven hundred
and sixty eight thousand nine hundred and two were receiving outdoor aid.
***
Is it possible that Britain underestimated the severity of the situation? Not a hope! In a
address to the House of Commons Lord George Bentinck said that never before was there an
instance of a Christian government allowing so many people to perish without interfering.
The time will come when we shall know what the amount of mortalitys been when the
public and the world will be able to estimate, at its proper value your management of affairs
in Ireland.
The London Times even had this to say on
MAY 23, 1849
IRELAND
(From Our Own Correspondent.)
DUBLIN, Tuesday Morning.
The Famine In The West
The Protestant rector of Ballinrobe, in a third letter addressed to the Premier, narrates the
following horrifying tale of human misery:
In a neighbouring union a shipwrecked human body was cast on shore; a starving man
extracted the heart and liver, and that was the maddening feast on which he regaled
himself and his perishing family! and nearer still a poor forlorn girl, hearing that her
mother was seized with cholera, hastened to the rescue, alas! too late, but with a deep
religious and filial devotion, desiring at least a decent interment for her dear departed
parent, was driven to the shocking necessity of carrying the corpse upon her own back for
three long miles to this very union, so that she might make her wants known, and simply
obtain a coffin from the relieving officer. Need I tell you, my Lord, the dismal sequel? She
herself died of cholera the next day. Those awful facts may have been reported, but if they
were they have been cushioned and suppressed, for who has heard of them?
With such fearful occurrences passing before his eyes, it is no wonder that the rev. writer
should speak in such impassioned language as this:
I will not, my Lord, dwell at present upon the painful subject of the workhouse, as the evil
has gone far to correct itself, the inmates having died in awful numbers, and more liberal
supplies being now remitted for the current weekly expenses alas! that those supplies

should have been withheld so long! I would, however, fix your Lordships deepest
attention upon the appalling fact, that we have, even at best, to encounter three months
more of sore, sore famine; and bear it in mind, my Lord, the three worst months of the
year, in point of home supply and this, with 27,000 of our population in the Ballinrobe
union on outdoor relief, while the remaining 68,000, minus the thousands already lost, are
all, with very few exceptions indeed, barely trying to hold on through the dread crisis? The
all engrossing questions with every case, gentle and simple, are these What, in the name
of Heaven, is to become of us? What are we to do? The country is gone! We must thus
again and again strive to arouse you, my Lord, for it is not possible that your or the
English people can be fully conscious or alive to the true state of things in the west of
Ireland. I grant that there may be, nay, that there is, much of imposition, but surely there
cannot be any in this, that here are the people dropping dead of utter want all around in
every direction, night and day; and can we suppose for a moment that the astounding fact
is believed when we see no really vigorous and united movement, except through private
benevolence, to stay the progress of death? Tis poor consolation to an already more than
half-starved wretch to say to him Go and break stones, no matter how unprofitable, for
that is the sole test of your destitution, and if the contractor dont disappoint, you shall get
for your eight or ten hours labour 1 lb. of Indian meal, which costs 1d. but we cant give
you fuel or clothing. Still you must deliver the tale of bricks; however, if you die, and
die you soon must, for your emaciated, famine-stricken countenance and swollen frame,
betoken as much, you will, as on the outdoor list, be entitled to a coffin from the relieving
officer, though, perhaps, he may not hear of your decease till you have become putrid in
the grave! I tell it to you, my Lord, whether believed or not, and I tell to the world at large,
and I tell it to our Father in Heaven (for I beseech redress of Him), that these are the
sufferings of this people despite of every entreaty, but not of half the people; for who can
imagine the thousandth part of the misery of those who, in large numbers, are preferring
death itself to such degradation? It is a burning shame and stain upon the legislature in any
so-called Christian country.
In 1861 in The Last Conquest of Ireland, John Mitchel wrote: The Almighty indeed sent
the potato blight but the English created the famine, Mitchell further observed that A
million and half men, women and children were carefully, prudently and peacefully slain by
the English government. They died of hunger in the midst of abundance which their own
hands created.
Such sentiment expressed by an Irishman who witnessed the horrors inflicted upon his
countrymen will always linger, refuting revisionist attempts to obscure reality. The oft-quoted
flawed figures of Austin-Bourke come to mind. They are likewise refuted by the statement of
a prominent English scholar, who saw the famine, and the politics behind it, as a colossal
human tragedy. I have always felt a certain horror of political economists, said Benjamin
Jowett, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and the celebrated Master of Balliol,
Since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill
more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good. The
political economist in question was Nassau Senior, one of the governments advisers on
economic affairs casting a cold eye on the scene and complaining that he feared the famine
toll would halt prematurely at a mere one million deaths, far short of the ideal objective
demanded by the science of political economy. Mitchels most outrageous charge, his
detractors said, was that he had alleged of the Whig Famine Relief policy initiated in 1847:
Steadily, but surely, the Government people were working out their calculation; and the
product anticipated by political circles was likely to come out about September in round
numbers two million Irish corpses.

Least it be said that Mitchel was not a credible witness or that British newspapers did not
publish accurate accounts of the horrors of the Famine some reports from the well-respected
newspaper The Illustrated London News are included here. The first is Feb. 13, 1847. The
heart-rending sketches have been omitted but the descriptions are sufficient.
Sketches In The West Of Ireland. by Mr. James Mahony.
The accounts from the Irish provincial papers continue to detail the unmitigated sufferings
of the starving peasantry. Indeed, they are stated to be on the increase, notwithstanding the
very great exertion of public bodies and individuals to assuage their pressure.
With the object of ascertaining the accuracy of the frightful statements received from the
West, and of placing them in unexaggerated fidelity before our readers, a few days since,
we commissioned our Artist, Mr. James Mahoney, of Cork, to visit a seat of extreme
suffering, viz., Skibbereen and its vicinity; and we now submit to our readers the graphic
results of his journey, accompanied by such descriptive notes as he was enabled to collect
whilst sketching the fearful incidents and desolate localities; premising merely, that our
Artist must already have been somewhat familiar with such scenes of suffering in his own
locality, (Cork), so that he cannot be supposed to have taken an extreme view of the
greater misery at Skibbereen.
I started from Cork, by the mail, for Skibbereen and saw little until we came to Clonakilty,
where the coach stopped for breakfast; and here, for the first time, the horrors of the
poverty became visible, in the vast number of famished poor, who flocked around the
coach to beg alms: amongst them was a woman carrying in her arms the corpse of a fine
child, and making the most distressing appeal to the passengers for aid to enable her to
purchase a coffin and bury her dear little baby. This horrible spectacle induced me to make
some inquiry about her, when I learned from the people of the hotel that each day brings
dozens of such applicants into the town. (See the Sketch.)
After leaving Clonakilty, each step that we took westward brought fresh evidence of the
truth of the reports of the misery, as we either met a funeral or a coffin at every hundred
yards, until we approached the country of the Shepperton Lakes. (See the Sketch.) Here,
the distress became more striking, from the decrease of numbers at the funerals, none
having more than eight or ten attendants, and many only two or three.
We next reached Skibbereen, a general view of which I send you from Clover Hill House,
the residence of J. Macarthy Downing, Esq.; and, it being then late, I rested until Monday,
when, with the valuable aid of Dr. D. Donovan, and his assistant, Mr. Crowley, I
witnessed such scenes of misery and privation as I trust it may never be again my lot to
look upon. Up to this morning, I, like a large portion, I fear, of the community, looked on
the diaries of Dr. Donovan, as published in The Cork Southern Reporter, to be highlycoloured pictures, doubtless, intended for a good and humane purpose; but I can now, with
perfect confidence, say that neither pen nor pencil ever could portray the miser and horror,
at this moment, to be witnessed in Skibbereen. We first proceeded to Bridgetown, a
portion of which is shown in the right hand distance of the sketch; and there I saw the
dying, the living, and the dead, lying indiscriminately upon the same floor, without
anything between them and the cold earth, save a few miserable rags upon them. To point
to any particular house as a proof of this would be a waste of time, as all were in the same
state; and, not a single house out of 500 could boast of being free from death and fever,
though several could be pointed out with the dead lying close to the living for the space of
three or four, even six days, without any effort being made to remove the bodies to a last
resting place.

After leaving this abode of death, we proceeded to High-street, or Old Chapel-lane (See
the Sketch) and there found one house, without door or window, filled with destitute
people lying on the bare floor; and one, fine, tall, stout country lad, who had entered some
hours previously to find shelter from the piercing cold, lay here dead amongst others likely
soon to follow him. The appeals to the feelings and professional skill of my kind
attendants here became truly heart-rending; and so distressed Dr. Donovan, that he begged
me not to go into the house, and to avoid coming into contact with the people surrounding
the doorway.
We next proceeded to the Chapel-yard, to see the hut, of which Dr. Donovan gives the
following graphic account in his diary:
On my return home, I remembered that I had yet a visit to pay; having in the morning
received a ticket to see six members of one family, named Barrett, who had been turned
out of the cabin in which they lodged, in the neighbourhood of Old Chapelyard; and who
had struggled to this burying-ground, and literally entombed themselves in a small watchhouse that was built for the shelter of those who were engaged in guarding against
exhumation by the doctors, when more respect was paid to the dead than is at present the
case. This shed is exactly seven feet long, by about six in breadth. By the side of the
western wall is a long, newly-made grave; by either gable are two of shorter dimensions,
which have been recently tenanted; and near the hole that serves as a doorway is the last
resting-place of two or three children; in fact, this hut is surrounded by a rampart of human
bones, which have accumulated to such a height that the threshold, which was originally
on a level with the ground, is now two feet beneath it. In this horrible den, in the midst of a
mass of human putrefaction, six individuals, males and females, labouring under most
malignant fever, were huddled together, as closely as were the dead in the graves around.
At the time (eleven oclock at night) that I went to visit these poor sufferers, it was
blowing a perfect hurricane, and such groans of roaring wind and rain I never remember to
have heard.
I was accompanied by my assistant, Crowley, and we took with us some bread, tea and
sugar; on reaching this vault, I thrust my head through the hole of entrance, and had
immediately to draw back, so intolerable was the effluvium; and, though rendered callous
by a companionship for many years with disease and death, yet I was completely unnerved
at the humble scene of suffering and misery that was presented to my view; six fellow
creatures were almost buried alive in this filthy sepulchre. When they heard my voice, one
called out, Is that the Priest? another, Is that the Doctor? The mother of the family
begged in the most earnest manner that I would have them removed, or else that they
would rot together; and they all implored that we would give them drink. Mr. Crowley
produced the tea and sugar, but they said it was of no use to them, as they had no fire or
place to light it in, and that what they wanted was water; that they had put a jug under the
droppings from the roof, but would not have drink enough for the night. The next day I got
the consent of the Poor Law Guardians to have my patients removed from this abode of
the dead to the fever hospital, and they are since improving.
To complete my melancholy visit to this scene of horror, and to visit every corner of
Skibbereen, next morning, accompanied by a Mr. Everett, whose knowledge of the
country I found most useful, I started for Ballidichob, and learned upon the road that we
should come to a hut or cabin in the parish of Aghadoe, on the property of Mr. Long,
where four people had lain dead for six days; and, upon arriving at the hut, the abode of
Tim Harrington, we found this to be true; for there lay the four bodies, and a fifth was
passing to the same bourne. On hearing our voices, the sinking man made an effort to

reach the door, and ask for drink or fire; he fell in the doorway; there, in all probability to
die; as the living cannot be prevailed to assist in the interments, for fear of taking the
fever.
We next got to Skull, where, by the attention of Dr. Traill, vicar of the parish (and whose
humanity at the present moment is beyond all praise), we witnessed almost indescribable
in-door horrors. In the street, however, we had the best opportunity of judging of the
condition of the people; for here, from three to five hundred women, with money in their
hands, were seeking to buy food; whilst a few of the Government officers doled out Indian
meal to them in their turn. One of the women told me she had been standing there since
daybreak, seeking to get food for her family at home.
This food, it appeared, was being doled out in miserable quantities, at famine prices, to
the neighbouring poor, from a stock lately arrived in a sloop, with a Government
steamship to protect its cargo of 50 tons; whilst the population amounts to 27,000; so that
you may calculate what were the feelings of the disappointed mass.
In my way out of the town, I made the accompanying Sketch; and, here, again, I had an
opportunity of witnessing the efforts of the Vicars family to relieve the afflictions around
them; and we met his daughters returning from their work of charity in the poorest portion
of the town.
Having returned to Skibbereen, my next object was to seek out the truth of the following
extract from Dr. Donovans Diary, as published in the Cork Southern Reporter, of Jan. 26:
A man of the name of Leahey died in the parish of Dromdaleague about a fortnight ago;
his wife and two children remained in the house until the putrescent exhalations from the
body drove them from their companionship with the dead; in a day or two after, some
persons in passing the mans cabin, had their attention attracted by a loud snarling, and on
entering, found the gnawed and mangled skeleton of Leahey contended for by hungry
dogs.
This, I need not tell you, I looked upon as designed for an effect; and so I started for
Dromdaleague, to reach which we had to pass through the miserable parish of Cahera,
where, unless something be done for the poor, and that quickly and effectively, the result
will be awful.
Here the report must terminate for the present. Next week we shall complete our painfully
interesting series of Illustrations.
The following is from August 26, 1848. It shows a deep knowledge of the Irish question and
demonstrates a lack of bias that is surprising for the time.
how is Ireland to be saved from an annual potato rot, and the famine which that and a
poor system of agriculture leaves her a prey to, which, being the question, leads me again
to Lord Clarendons practical instructors.
Let us follow some of them.
To the neighbourhood of Macroom, in the county of Cork, Mr. John Hinds was sent. A
reference to the evidence taken by the Commission which inquired into the occupation of
land in 1844, under the able Presidency of the Earl of Devon, shows us that up to that year
the custom of farming in the Macroom district was deplorably wasteful. When I visited the
district during the famine months of the spring of 1847 I found all useful farm work
abandoned, and the entire population working on the roads for the relief out of the ten
millions which was voted for the purpose by Parliament. Not a perch of ground on the

ordinary farms was broken with a spade or plough at the end of March. And, had the relief
in food only allowed, it is a moral certainty that not a spadeful of soil would have been
turned up, a grain of seed sown, or a plant planted in that district, as in others, except by a
few of the gentlemen cultivators.
But, strange to say, he adds, some large farmers and gentry told me that it was now
impossible to get farming labourers to work either by task or day upon the land, so
completely are they demoralized and upset by the new system of labour that has been
introduced among them (by the relief works). Instead of working at their own lands at
home, or hiring themselves out as daily labourers, worthy of their hire, they now prefer
working on the roads, like convicts in a penal colony; and I find groups of them in all parts
of the county breaking stones for one pound of meal a day, hardly enough to support them,
and their farms lying idle and neglected. If half the labour that is now spent on breaking
stones could find its way back into the fields, and be employed in digging and deepening
them, the country would soon feel the benefit of it, and the labouring population gradually
come back to habits of industry and labour. As it is, the present system, if persevered in,
must end in certain ruin.
To this I would add, by way of suggestion, that if one pound of meal per day keeps these
people upon the roads to break stones, a higher rate of wages than is usually offered to
them by those who hire labour in that district might draw them from the roads and the
pound of meal. It will hardly be credited that the large farmers and gentry spoken of by
Mr. hinds offer labourers threepence and fourpence per day, without other allowance. The
facts are simply these. The poor-law allowance is the very least which medical experience
orders for the bare sustenance of life. Those who seek to hire labour offer less than the
poor-law allowance, and the necessities of the wretched creatures decide in favour of the
poor-law and the roads. The lowest-priced labour, like other low-priced commodities, is
not always the cheapest. One of the most eminent political economists in England, Mr.
Morton, of Whitefield, Gloucestershire, found that he could get any number of men to
work for him for nine shillings a week on going to that farm. He preferred to give them
twelve shillings a week, and has continued to do so. He has had better workmen, and
better work, and cheaper labour for his twelve shillings, than those farmers who continue
to pay nine shillings.
The half of nine shillings per week would be wages such as were never heard of about
Macroom. If the half, instead of the fourth or the fifth of nine shillings per week, was
offered for farm labour, the miserable men of Macroom would go to the farmer who
offered it, and leave the roads and the one pound of meal a day.
But it is not so certain that those who have their five, ten, or fifteen acres of their own farm
would leave the pound of meal to cultivate for themselves. If they borrow money at
Macroom to buy seed or obtain food while the crop is growing, they must have two or
three names to a bill, and pay 20, 30, or 40 per cent. for six months. So bad is their
security deemed to be, that even that interest, nor any other interest that they may promise
(they will promise anything), can obtain loans for them since the prevalence of the potato
rot; consequently their land lies untilled. It is beyond the power of human knowledge to
devise a plan by which these people are to be made men of substance, unless the plan of
Lord Clarendon, of teaching them how to make their land fertile and their crops profitable,
be followed out, in conjunction with such aid in seed and implements as other funds may
for a time assist them in procuring. The Society of Friends in England have, through their
agents in Ireland, distributed seed and implements over a great extent of country during
the last two years.

The following article is dated Dec. 16, 1848 under the heading:
Evictions of Peasantry in Ireland
A vast social change is gradually taking place in Ireland. The increase of emigration on the
part of the bulk of the small capitalists, and the ejectment, by wholesale, of the wretched
cottiers, will, in the course of a short time, render quite inappropriate for its new condition
the old cry of a redundant population. But this social revolution, however necessary it may
be, is accompanied by an amount of human misery that is absolutely appalling. The
Tipperary Vindicator thus portrays the state of the country:
The work of undermining the population is going on stealthily, but steadily. Each
succeeding day witnesses its devastations more terrible than the simoon, and more
deadly than the plague. We do not say that there exists a conspiracy to uproot the mere
Irish; but we do aver, that the fearful system of wholesale ejectment, of which we daily
hear, and which we daily behold, is a mockery of the eternal laws of God a flagrant
outrage on the principles of nature. Whole districts are cleared. Not a roof-tree is to be
seen where the happy cottage of the labourer or the snug homestead of the farmer at no
distant day cheered the landscape. The ditch side, the dripping rain, and the cold sleet are
the covering of the wretched outcast the moment the cabin is tumbled over him; for who
dare give him shelter or protection from the pelting of the pitiless storm? Who has the
temerity to afford him the ordinary rites of hospitality, when the warrant has been signed
for his extinction? There are vast tracts of the most fertile land in the world in this noble
county now thrown out of tillage. No spade, no plough goes near them. There are no
symptoms of life within their borders, no more than if they were situated in the midst of
the Great Desert no more than if they were cursed by the Creator with the blight of
barrenness. Those who laboured to bring those tracts to the condition in which they are
capable of raising produce of any description are hunted like wolves, or they perish
without a murmur. The tongue refuses to utter their most deplorable their unheard-of
sufferings. The agonies endured by the mere Irish in this day of their unparalleled
affliction are far more poignant than the imagination could conceive, or the pencil of a
Rembrandt picture. We do not exaggerate; the state of things is absolutely fearful; a
demon, with all the vindictive passions by which alone a demon could be influenced, is let
loose and menaces destruction. Additional sharpness, too, is imparted to his appetite.
Christmas was accustomed to come with many healing balsams, sufficient to remove
irritation if not to stanch wounds; but its place is usurped by other and far different
qualifications. The howl of misery has succeeded the merry carol which used to usher in
the season; no hope is felt that an end will soon be put to this state of wretchedness. The
torpor and apathy which have seized on the masses are only surpassed by the atrocities
perpetrated by those who set the dictates of humanity and the decrees of the Almighty at
equal defiance.
Mitchel and his few friends and followers were able to dissect the argument of the English
politicians and make them look like executioners. They were later, even by Irish historians
to be accused of exaggerating the conditions of the tenant farmers in the west of Ireland
during the Famine. Yet, Mitchel was one who had seen a famine winter in Galway; his was an
eye-witness account and he has been vindicated by proper research.
There were many other eye-witness accounts corresponding exactly with those of Mitchel.
They too were ignored by historians when it suited their purpose. To indicate the condition of
the poor farmers it is probably true that one descriptive account would be as good as twenty
accounts, except one account could be dismissed as easily as was Mitchels. Alexander
Somerville (18111885), a British journalist of Scottish parentage, wrote his Letters from

Ireland during the Famine of 1847 for the Manchester Examiner, which published them
serially. There is no doubt that what he saw corresponded exactly with what Mitchel
described.
Longford, 5th March 1847.
Some Irish gentlemen may be too poor to have much to give away in the present
emergency; but the poorest of them might give something. The greatness of the necessity
seems to be, for them, an excuse for doing nothing at all literally nothing at all.
Moreover, they might pay wages sufficient to keep their work-people out of the public
soup-kitchens, and in a condition to be able to work. I shall here relate a case I witnessed
the other day; I might relate twenty such within a week.
Seven men were in a field which measured three acres, and which had just been sown with
oats. They were employed in breaking the clods of earth, in clearing the furrows for letting
off top water, and in otherwise finishing the sowing of the oats. It was about four in the
afternoon when I saw them. They appeared to me to work very indifferently; the whole
seven were doing less than one mans work. I watched them for some time, while they did
not see me, consequently they could not be enacting a part before a stranger. I was soon
convinced that the men were, some of them, leaning on their implements of work, and
others staggering among the clods, from sheer weakness and hunger. I concluded this to be
the case from the frequency of such signs. One of the men, after I had watched them some
time, crawled through a gap in the hedge, came out upon the road on his hands and knees,
and then tried to rise, and got up bit by bit as a feeble old man might be supposed to do.
He succeeded in getting upon his feet at last, and moved slowly away, with tottering steps,
towards the village, in a miserable hovel of which was his home.
I thought I would speak to the feeble old man, and followed and came up with him. He
was not an old man. He was under forty years of age; was tall and sinewy, and had all the
appearances of what would have been a strong man if there had been flesh on his body.
But he bowed down, his cheeks were sunken, and his skin sallow-coloured, as if death
were already with him. His eyes glared upon me fearfully; and his skinny skeleton hands
clutched the handle of the shovel upon which he supported himself while he stood to speak
to me, as it were the last grasp of life.
It is the hunger, your honour; nothing but the hunger, he said in a feeble voice: I stayed
at the work til I could stay no longer. I am fainting now with the hunger. I must go home
and lie down. There is six children and my wife and myself. We had nothing all yesterday,
(which was Sunday,) and this morning we had only a handful of yellow meal among us
all, made into a stirabout, before I came out to work nothing more and nothing since.
Sure this hunger will be the death of all of us. God have mercy upon me and my poor
family.
I saw the poor man and his poor family, and truly might he say, God have mercy! They
were skeletons all of them, with skin on the bones and life within the skin. A mother
skeleton and baby skeleton; a tall boy skeleton, who had no work to do; who could do
nothing but eat, and had nothing to eat. Four female children skeletons, and the tall father
skeleton, not able to work to get food for them, and not able to get enough of food when
he did work for them. Their only food was what his wages of 10d. per day would procure
of yellow meal the meal of the Indian corn. The price of that was 3s. per stone of 16 lb.
This gave for the eight persons 26lb. 10oz. of meal for seven days; being about seven
ounces and a half per day for each person. No self-control could make such persons
distribute such a starvation of food over seven days equally. Their natural cravings made

them eat it up at once, or in one, or three days at most, leaving the other days blank,
making the pangs of hunger still worse.
But in the calculation I am supposing all the wages go for meal. I believe none of it was
expended on anything else, not even salt, save fuel: fuel in this village must all be
purchased by such people; they are not allowed to go to the bogs to cut it for themselves.
Nor is this the season to go to the bogs, if they were allowed. The fuel required to keep the
household fire merely burning, hardly sufficient to give warmth to eight persons around it,
to say nothing of half-naked persons, would cost at least sixpence a day. Wherefore, no
fuel was used by this family, nor by other working families, but what was required to boil
the meal into a stirabout
And finally this sourced from: William Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks
in Ireland. London: C. Gilpin, 1847, pp. 25 9.
Many of the cabins were holes in the bog, covered with a layer of turves, and not
distinguishable as human habitations from the surrounding moor, until close down upon
them. The bare sod was about the best material of which any of them were constructed.
Doorways, not doors, were usually provided at both sides of the bettermost back and
front to take advantage of the way of the wind. Windows and chimneys, I think, had no
existence.
A second apartment or division of any kind within was exceedingly rare. Furniture,
properly so called, I believe may be stated at nil. I would not speak with certainty, and
wish not to with exaggeration, we were too much overcome to note specifically; but as
far as memory serves, we saw neither bed, chair, nor table, at all.
A chest, a few iron or earthen vessels, a stool or two, the dirty rags and night-coverings,
formed about the sum total of the best furnished. Outside many were all but
unapproachable, from the mud and filth surrounding them; the same inside, or worse if
possible, from the added closeness, darkness, and smoke.
We spent the whole morning in visiting these hovels indiscriminately, or swayed by the
representations and entreaties of the dense retinue of wretched creatures, continually
augmenting, which gathered round, and followed us from place to place, avoiding only
such as were known to be badly infected with fever, which was sometimes sufficiently
perceptible from without, by the almost intolerable stench.
And now language utterly fails me in attempting to depict the state of the wretched
inmates. I would not willingly add another to the harrowing details that have been told; but
still they are the FACTS of actual experience, for the knowledge of which we stand
accountable. I have certainly sought out one of the most remote and destitute corners; but
still it is within the bounds of our Christian land, under our Christian Government, and
entailing upon us both as individuals and as members of a human community a
Christian responsibility from which no one of us can escape.
My hand trembles while I write. The scenes of human misery and degradation we
witnessed still haunt my imagination, with the vividness and power of some horrid and
tyrannous delusion, rather than the features of a sober reality. We entered a cabin.
Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible, from the smoke and rags that covered them,
were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale
and ghastly, their little limbs on removing a portion of the filthy covering perfectly
emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stage of actual starvation.

Crouched over the turf embers was another form, wild and all but naked, scarcely human
in appearance. It stirred not, nor noticed us.
On some straw, soddened upon the ground, moaning piteously, was a shrivelled old
woman, imploring us to give her something, baring her limbs partly, to show how the
skin hung loose from the bones, as soon as she attracted our attention. Above her, on
something like a ledge, was a young woman, with sunken cheeks, a mother I have no
doubt, who scarcely raised her eyes in answer to our enquiries, but pressed her hand
upon her forehead, with a look of unutterable anguish and despair.
Many cases were widows, whose husbands had recently been taken off by the fever, and
thus their only pittance, obtained from the public works entirely cut off. In many the
husbands or sons were prostrate, under that horrid disease, the results of long-continued
famine and low living, in which first the limbs, and then the body, swell most frightfully,
and finally burst.
We entered upwards of fifty of these tenements. The scene was one and invariable,
differing in little but the number of the sufferers, or of the groups, occupying the several
corners within. The whole number was often not to be distinguished, until the eye having
adapted itself to the darkness they were pointed out, or were heard, or some filthy bundle
of rags and straw was perceived to move. Perhaps the poor children presented the most
piteous and heart-rending spectacle. Many were too weak to stand, their little limbs
attenuated, except where the frightful swellings had taken the place of previous
emaciation, beyond the power of volition when moved.
Every infantile expression entirely departed; and in some, reason and intelligence had
evidently flown. Many were remnants of families, crowded together in one cabin;
orphaned little relatives taken in by the equally destitute, and even strangers, for these
poor people are kind to one another to the end. In one cabin was a sister, just dying, lying
by the side of her little brother, just dead. I have worse than this to relate, but it is useless
to multiply details, and they are, in fact, unfit. They did but rarely complain. When
inquired of, what was the matter, the answer was alike in all Tha shein ukrosh, it is
the hunger. We truly learned the terrible meaning of that sad word ukrosh. There were
many touching incidents. We should have gone on, but the pitiless storm had now arisen,
beating us back with a force and violence against which it was difficult to stand; and a
cutting rain, that drove us for shelter beneath a bank, fell on the crowd of poor creatures
who continued to follow us unmitigatedly.
My friend the clergyman had distributed the tickets for meal to the extent he thought
prudent; and he assured me wherever we went it would be a repetition of the same all over
the country, and even worse in the far off mountain districts, as this was near the town,
where some relief could reach. It was my full impression that one-fourth of those we saw
were in a dying state, beyond the reach of any relief that could now be afforded; and many
more would follow.
The lines of this day can never be effaced from my memory. These were our fellowcreatures, children of the same Parent, born with our common feelings and affections
with an equal right to live as any one of us, with the same purposes of existence, the
same spiritual and immortal natures, the same work to be done, the same judgmentseat to be summoned to, and the same eternal goal.
***
Of course, for those who had money almost exclusively the Anglo-Irish portion there was
no Famine and to those not familiar with the Irish situation it was confusing. In February

1849, while the parish priest of Partree, County Galway, was writing: The great majority of
the poor located here are in a state of starvation, many of them hourly expecting death to
relieve them from their sufferings, the lady Mayoress was holding a ball at the Mansion
House in Dublin at which, in the presence of the Lord Lieutenant, dancing continued until a
late hour of the night and refreshments of a most recherch description were supplied with
inexhaustible profusion.
In June 1849, Ireland was to lose her best, and last remaining friends, the Quakers or Society
of Friends, when through exhaustion they were forced to conclude their relief work. On 2
June, Lord John Russell offered a donation of 100 towards any plan they might be drawing
up for the relief of the distress in the West of Ireland. In reply the Quakers wrote that there
would be no plan, and with their habitual courtesy and restraint administered a few home
truths. There was a great and increasing distress prevailing in many parts, but the problem
of relief was far beyond the reach of private exertion, the Government alone could raise the
funds and carry out the measures necessary in many districts to save the lives of the people ...
and we are truly sorry that it is now out of our power to offer ourselves as the distributors of
Lord Johns bounty to our suffering fellow countrymen, ...the condition of our country has
not improved in spite of the great exertions made by charitable bodies and could not be
improved until the land system of Ireland was reformed, which was a matter for legislation,
not philanthropy.
Trevelyan was knighted for his labours in the Irish Famine; in April 1848 he was made Sir
Charles Trevelyan, KCB. As for himself, it was time he took a rest: ...after two years of such
continuous hard work as I have never had in my life. He did not visit Ireland. He went off
with his family for a fortnights holiday in France. He got busy writing a history of the
famine in which he made it end in August 1847. But over eighteen months later, the Dublin
Freemans Journal was writing: We ask again: is it possible to conceive some means of
saving the people from this painful and lingering process of death from starvation? Do we
live under a regular or responsible government? Is there justice or humanity in the world that
such things could be, in the middle of the nineteenth century and within twelve hours reach
of the opulence, grandeur and power of a court and capital the first upon the earth?
This indeed was the question that the Irish people were to ask themselves; and it was the
inescapable answer to that question which was to lead them to the inescapable conclusion:
that Ireland should in the future, one way or another, run her own affairs. For nothing would
ever be able to efface the memory of this monstrous thing that had happened in those years to
Irish men, women and children in their own country, in the name of the British Government
in Ireland.
***
To conclude this chapter would be inappropriate without relating the remedy in which Lord
Clarendon was finally to put all his faith. Through his efforts, Ireland was to receive all the
benefits to which it was entitled, and that it was possible for England to bestow on it a visit
from Queen Victoria!
The Queen made her visit. If the people had known what was in the good ladys heart they
would have stayed at home, instead of rejoicing. She wrote to her cousin, Leopold of
Belgium, that she wished the people would rise in rebellion so that Britain might teach the
Irish a lesson. There were banquets and festivities costing thousands of pounds each, at a
time when the Marquess of Kildare announced that the Dublin Central Relief committee had
completely exhausted their funds. Two-and-sixpence (1/8 of a pound), the Marquess stated,
would keep a family of five alive for a week, by enabling them to buy a little meal to mix

with cabbage and other vegetables. Four royal children accompanied their parents, and the
total of the party, with servants, was thirty-six. Charles Wood was horrified; ...we never
dreamed of anything like this, he wrote to Clarendon. Clarendon was considerably
disgusted, at the petty difficulties raised and the want of consideration he felt was being
shown him by the Queen and the Prince.
The poverty of the country did not escape the Queen. She wrote, You see more ragged and
wretched people here than I ever saw anywhere else, she wrote twice on the good looks of
Irishwomen (who knows what she expected to find possibly monkeys): En revanche [on
the other hand] the women are really very handsome, even in the lowest class...such beautiful
black eyes and hair, and such fine colour and teeth. And again: The beauty of the women is
very remarkable and struck us much; such beautiful dark eyes and hair, and such fine teeth;
almost every third woman was pretty and some remarkably so.
For the sake of accuracy it should be said that the Queen and the Irish people fell in love with
each other for a few brief days in August 1849. However, the attraction was a mirage, the
participants were unsuited, the episode was soon forgotten, and the course of Irish history
was left unchanged and uninfluenced.
***
One of the reasons put forward for the Great Hunger was over-population or surplus people.
Why not let the so-called surplus people eat some of the surplus food, Mitchel said. A simple
enough point it would appear but something that everybody else seems to have missed. As
has been explained there was no shortage of food in the country only a shortage of money to
buy the food. Nobody with money went hungry. Yes, the potato failed but all other crops
thrived. Irish food was exported mainly to English markets and from there it found its
way to many parts of the world.
It is generally accepted that in the 1840s, Ireland had been supplying the grain-hungry British
market sufficient to feed two million people annually. But at the time of the Famine the
population of Britain depended heavily on Ireland for a wide range of foodstuffs, and not just
grain, including thousands of horses and ponies, honey, shoes, soap, glue and seed. Strange
that Britain would complain that Ireland was over-populated when they themselves were so
dependent on food from Ireland.
After the famine, when the population of Ireland was halved by deaths and emigration, the
poverty and hunger of her people continued. The country suffered numerous food shortages
and famines after the 1840s. The plight of the Irish never improved even when the
population halved.
THE CHURCH
The Celtic church had survived until the Famine. Afterwards, with the fall of the Gaelic
language, it fell completely under the influence of Rome, and became in a sense a
replacement for the dead Gaelic culture. Until the Famine many of the practices of the Celtic
church were of pre-Christian origin, albeit with a thin veneer of Roman dogma. When this
folk-faith disappeared the Celtic Church took on the orthodox position of today. In Gaelic
Ireland the law of the land was the Brehon Law and this meant that Church and State were
separate. The Irish mind was not fashioned by Catholicism alone but by their own native
tradition. After the Famine, the superstructure of Gaelic Ireland was swept away, and it was
into this vacuum that the Catholic Church stepped. The old superstitions, such as belief in the
pooca, the evil eye, and other supernatural manifestations, were not missed by the Church.
There had, however, been no link with Satan and the powers of darkness in these folk
traditions in Ireland, unlike England and the Continent, and this explains the survival of

these beliefs, which were not totally hostile to the teaching of the Church, through thirteen
centuries of Christianity. Now the Church had the opportunity to destroy a body of tradition
that it saw as being in competition with itself. This included a belief in an afterlife that coexisted in the Irish mind with the Christian heaven.
There were probably two main reasons for the Churchs attempt to clean up its act in Ireland.
One was, since England had strayed from Rome during the reign of Henry VIII, Rome had
yearned for Britain to return to the fold. Now under the Act of Union, Ireland was a part of
the United Kingdom and, Rome had a foot in the door, so to speak. It could, in fact, now be
said that a large percentage of the population of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland was Catholic. (It was a lot less after the Famine.)
The second reason was much simpler. Priests came from the common people of the country
and by now these people had developed an inferiority complex about their cultural
background. Since the clergy, coming as they did from this background, suffered the same
feelings of inconsequentiality, they felt it their duty to sweep away the vestiges of a failed
way of life. However, Catholicism itself did not fit into this category of failure, as its
achievement was everywhere to be seen on the Continent. Only Irish Catholicism fitted this
picture. The men and women who were staffing the Church were suffering the perplexity
caused by cultural invasion and they concentrated their attack on their own culture.
Also, in English-speaking parts of the country, weekly attendance at mass was higher than in
Gaelic-speaking areas. Professor D W Miller, in Irish Catholicism and the Great Famine has
shown that in the 1830s between thirty per cent and sixty per cent attended weekly Mass in
English speaking areas, compared with twenty per cent to forty per cent in Irish speaking
areas. This demonstrates that as the traditional way of life collapsed, dependence on the
Church increased. Soon, Catholicism became a substitute nationality. But this nationality was
Roman not Celtic.
The Catholic Church for its part was happy with the rising tide of English dominance. It
made English the language of instruction in its seminaries in Carlow and Maynooth. The Irish
language became a badge of poverty. In a universal rule that dictates that those who are
socially mobile must distance themselves from their origins, so the Catholics had to learn
English to advance. In the class-ridden days of the Ascendancy, the shame at being Gaelic
was intense. Everything about the country confirmed this, the Planters were rich, powerful
and successful; the natives were poor, weak and unsuccessful. Because the invader presented
himself as being superior, and the conquered as inferior, it was necessary to cross the cultural
barrier to succeed.
SETTLING UP
It is in the nature of humanity to ascribe righteousness to the victorious and depravity to the
vanquished. There was never to be the benefit of a general accounting and settling-up. Britain
was never to face up to its atrocities in Ireland. The truths there would be too uncomfortable.
It would plunge a knife deep into the heart of an otherwise fine and highly cultivated society.
The wound was left to fester for too long. While there is a folk memory of the Famine in the
west of Ireland that may never be forgotten, the Irish people were reluctant to speak of their
own degradation. This has allowed Britain to downplay the extent of the calamity that was
Ireland under her administration.
(The Irish have been uncharacteristically happy to allow British historians to write their
history for them. Trevelyan published his account of events in The Irish Crisis in 1848. He
described the Famine as the judgment of God on an indolent and unselfreliant people and
his son, George, was a celebrated historian as well as Chief Secretary in Ireland, some thirty

years later. While he was not as anti-Irish as his father, it would be difficult for him not to be
biased, nonetheless. Official British figures give deaths from starvation as 22,000.)
There were no monuments to these people.
There was no Famine Day to commemorate those who lost their lives, but memories of the
Famine were recalled in hushed tones around the winter fires for the next two or three
generations; events never to be told to the stranger. For your people to have died of hunger,
amidst plenty, was, in itself, shameful. But to be found dead with a mouthful of grass green
dripping mouths, maddened by the hunger was ignominious. There was also the guilt that
survival imposes on those who make it through an affliction like the famine. The relief of
escape is often offset by shame at having survived at the apparent expense of others weaker
or less lucky. The enormity of what happened was too painful to confront. It was best to
forget these things. But it was impossible to forget!
THE NUMBERS
It is impossible to put an exact figure on exactly how many lives were lost in the major
Famine years, or how many people fled the country. The impulse of the Irish to shrink from
the British Government officials meant that of the people who died during the famine years
only the names of a few hundred are known. They are known from the inquests held from
time to time on their emaciated bodies found in fields, by the side of country roads, in the
middle of towns and in work places where they had collapsed, but the vast majority went
unrecorded. Likewise, in the early rush to emigrate, few records of who boarded cargo
vessels were kept at ports of disembarkation.
It was reported that there were eight million people in Ireland at the start of the Famine but
that may have been a conservative estimate. Cecil Woodham Smith draws attention to the
fact that unofficial censuses show the population to be twenty-five percent higher than the
official census. We are therefore talking about a population figure of more than ten million.
Allowing for this, the population loss during the famine was around four and a half million, if
the 1851 census of six and a half million is correct. Irish historians (before the new breed of
apologist revisionists) estimated that the population was reduced by upwards of four million
two million dead and two million emigrated. English historians grudgingly admit to around
one million dead, one million emigrated, although the late AJP Taylor, one of best English
historians of the twentieth century, in his review of Cecil Woodham-Smiths book The Great
Hunger stated though they [the British government] killed only two million people, this was
not for want of trying.
The Census Commissioners in 1851 stated that, had the Famine not occurred, the population
would have been 9,018,799. The commissioners calculated that, as a percentage of the 1841
population, mortality from 1845 to 1850 was as follows:
1845 : 6.4%
1846 : 9.1%
1847 : 18.5%
1848 : 15.4%
1849 : 17.9%
1850 : 12.2%
The Census Commissioners wrote in their concluding report:
In conclusion, we feel it will be gratifying to your Excellency to find that although the
population has been diminished in so remarkable a manner by famine, disease and emigration
between 1841 and 1851, and has been since decreasing, the results of the Irish census of 1851

are, on the whole, satisfactory, demonstrating as they do the general advancement of the
country.
The concluding pithy sentence, so full of good tidings, is illustrative of the overall British
attitude.
The loss was particularly great in the west of Ireland. There are indications that more than
50% of the population perished there between 1845 and 1850. This is supported by the
evidence of Rev. Thomas Moloney c.c., who, at a Select Commission of the House of
Commons on 9 June 1850, states that the Catholic population of his parish was 10,700 in
1847. According to a census taken by him the population had fallen in 1850 to 5,378 a
decrease of 5,322.
The famine tyranny was the single most devastating event in Irish history and some would
say it was also the most critical, in that it changed the Irish psyche forever. A self-assured,
happy and resourceful people lost confidence in their ability to sustain themselves on the land
and by their own industry. They married later or not at all and emigration became an accepted
part of the culture down to the present day.
Apologists2 would tell us (Irish) that we have too long a memory. But we should never forget,
never, ever. Should the Jews forget the Nazi atrocities? How can we learn from the past if we
are ignorant of it or if we chose to forget it?
The same apologists also try to downgrade the numbers who died but what can be said for
sure is that since none of the figures can be fully relied upon, and no new figures have
emerged or will emerge, there is no justification for downgrading the number of famine
victims as has become the custom in recent years. They argue that the numbers do not matter
a crime is a crime. But lowering the famine death toll lowers the enormity of the crime.
Worse still, with constant reiteration, these new unreliable numbers become the new
immutable truth.
Mitchel wrote later in the Jail Journal (1876 Glasgow Edn.),
Little did the Commissioners hope then that in four years, British policy, with the famine
to aid, would succeed in killing fully two millions, and forcing nearly another million to
flee the country. At the end of six years, I can set down these things calmly; but to see
them might have driven a wise man mad. There is no need to recount how the Assistant
Barristers and Sheriffs, aided by the Police, tore down the roof-trees and ploughed up the
hearths of village after village how the quarter Acre clause laid waste the parishes, how
the farmers and their wives and little ones in wild dismay, trooped along the highways;
how in some hamlets by the seaside, most of the inhabitants being already dead, an
adventurous traveller could come upon some family eating a famished ass; how maniac
mothers stowed away their dead children to be devoured at night; [...] how husband and
wife fought like wolves for the last morsel of food in the house; how families, when all
was eaten and no hope left, took their last look at the sun, built up their cottage-doors, that
none might see them die nor hear their groans, and were found weeks afterwards,
skeletons on their own hearth; how the law was vindicated all this while; how the Armsbills were diligently put in force, and many examples made; how starving wretches were
transported for stealing vegetables at night; how overworked coroners declared they would
hold no more inquests; how Americans sent corn, and the very Turks, nay, negro slaves,
2

The term comes from the Greek word apologia, meaning the defence of a position against an attack, not from
the English word apology, which is exclusively understood as a plea for forgiveness for an action that is open to
blame.

sent money for alms, which the British government was not ashamed to administer to the
sister-country; and how in every one of those years, 46, 47, and 48, Ireland was
exporting to England, food to the value of fifteen million pounds sterling, and had on her
own soil at each harvest, good and ample provision for double her own population,
notwithstanding the potato blight. The potato blight and consequent famine, placed in
the hands of the British government an engine of state by which they were eventually
enabled to clear off not a million, but two millions and a half of the surplus population
to preserve law and order in Ireland (what they called law and order) and to maintain the
integrity of the Empire for this time.
The apologists would do well to ponder the words of the great British writer William
Makepiece Thackeray who characterized British colonialism in Ireland as follows,
It is a frightful document against ourselves...one of the most melancholy stories in the
whole world of insolence, rapine, brutal, endless slaughter and persecution on the part of
the English master....There is no crime ever invented by eastern or western barbarians, no
torture or Roman persecution or Spanish Inquisition, no tyranny of Nero or Alva but can
be matched in the history of England in Ireland.