British History Coursework: The Irish Famine 1845-1849

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Danielle Warren        British History Coursework: The Irish Famine 1845-1849

Question:         To what extent were British Politicians to blame for the disaster resulting from the Irish potato famine of 1845?

“Is ar scáth a chiéle a maireann na daoine”

“It is with each other’s protection that the people live”

From the Fifteenth through to the Nineteenth centuries English Monarchies and Governments had consistently enacted laws which it seems were designed to oppress the Irish and suppress and destroy Irish Trade and manufacturing. In the Penal laws of 1695 which aimed to destroy Catholicism, Catholics were forbidden from practicing their religion, receiving education, entering a profession, or purchasing or leasing land; since Catholics formed eighty percent of the Irish population, this effectively deprived the Irish of any part in civil life in their own country.

In the eighteenth century the Irish condition had improved: The Irish merchant marine had been revived and ports improved, and the glass, linen, and clothing industries developed. Agriculture had also been improved and in 1782 the Irish Constitution was formed. But this changed when William Pitt became British Prime Minister. He imposed a “free trade policy”, which destroyed Ireland’s new industries, particularly linens, by eliminating independent Irish shipping. A condition of “Free trade” was that Ireland should not trade with any country where trading would clash with the interests of the East India Company; England’s mightiest corporation, who were heavily involved particularly in the lucrative trade with India. This was typical of the British belief in protectionist economics. The role of parliament was to protect the interests of the powerful few who effectively pay rolled the government by their industry and profits against the plight of the many. British politicians were also careful not to affect private enterprise, and believed that it was counter-productive to interfere in economics. Advocates of Bentham had influenced the political attitudes of a generation. They had a natural distrust of the idea of state aid, which they believed would create what would later be called a dependency culture, and lead to national bankruptcy. They did not feel it was right to put money into relieving the plight of the British poor, so they were even more opposed to intervening for the benefit of the Irish poor, whom most of the British felt were inferior and were rightly kept in their place by the Free trade policy.

In 1801 the Irish Constitution was annulled in the Act of Union, and by the 1820’s eighty percent of Irish land was owned by British or Scottish land owners, who were often absentee landlords. One quarter of Irish land was unused but unavailable for farming by the Irish. The Woollen, Poplin, Linen and Furniture and Glass industries disappeared. Fishing was reduced due to a lack of capital for boats and storage; “Free trade” caused sixty percent unemployment. In 1829 The Duke of Wellington wrote

“There never was a country in which poverty existed to the extent it exists in Ireland.”


In the summer of 1845 a potato disease struck Ireland. A fungus Photophthora Infestans turned the potato harvest into decaying blackish masses of rottenness, unfit for human or animal consumption.

Potato diseases had occurred in Ireland previously, indeed in 1741 two hundred and fifty thousand people had died as a result of a famine. There had been fourteen partial or complete famines between 1816 and 1842. The “Blight” had begun in North Carolina in America, and had spread destroying potato crops throughout the Northern Hemisphere for several years. It had spread hardship to all countries with a population of poor agrarian workers, who typically used the potato as the staple food since an acre could support a family of five or six. However, in other countries where the blight struck, there was expanding industrialisation, and the will and capacity to help those afflicted by hardship; both of which were lacking in an Ireland ruled from afar by unsympathetic British Politicians, who typically represented the interests of the privileged industrialist and the landed gentry.

The population of Ireland in 1800 was five million. However this had been rapidly expanding since 1815 to its 1841 level of over eight million souls. This had caused increased pressure on land, and holdings were divided into smaller and smaller lots, with increased competition for tenancies.

With such a rapid increase in population in a mostly non-industrialized society the economy was under severe strain; unemployment rose and two-thirds of the people fell into great poverty.

Two-thirds of the eight million people were dependent upon agriculture, the majority being tenants, farming only half an acre of land, with all their grain or barley production going to their landlords for rent. In these circumstances, the farmers had no choice but to be entirely dependent on the potato for food. The centrality of potatoes to the survival of so many people, and of farming in general, meant that if the potato crop failed dramatically, other parts of the agrarian system would also face collapse. The Irish reliance on the potato was utterly disastrous. In 1845 forty percent of the potato harvest was blighted, in 1846 the whole crop was destroyed. Successive crop failures led to “Black 47” with increases in famine, emigration, and disease in the population. One and a half million people died of starvation and disease as a result of the great famine.

I believe that the blight had such a catastrophic effect on Ireland because Britain had long treated Ireland as a second class satellite to the empire, still tainted by the supposed sympathy of the Irish to the Napoleonic cause of three decades before, with little investment in the diversification and industrialization of the country. Contemporary policies did little or nothing to mitigate suffering. It must be remembered that the attitude of the British political establishment was based on a religious conviction that “The Lord will provide” and therefore that to intervene in the “lot” of the poor was contrary to religious doctrine; the poor man improved his position with God’s help through hard work and doing his duty. This explains in part the attitude of “Laissez Faire” adopted in “handling” the crisis. At the time the famine hit Ireland, the industrial and economic policies which had been adopted by the British over the previous two hundred years had left Ireland and its people unequipped to deal with such a full scale disaster, and was an underlying cause of the extent of the suffering which resulted. The Industrial revolution never reached most of Ireland because Britain, the richest nation on earth, was loath to invest money where they felt the workers were of poor character, and when there were adequate sources of labour on the mainland. Because of this there was little opportunity for employment outside agriculture, and agriculture did not pay well as there was so great a supply of workers desperate for a way to support their families.

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Like much of the British Empire of the time, Ireland was composed of two nations, one poor and one rich, the rich having no conception of the circumstances of the poor, and in any case having little sympathy with their condition: society was entirely polarized;

“There was nothing between master and slave, nothing between all the luxuries of existence and the last degree of human wretchedness.” Costigan 1969

At the bottom of the scale forty percent of the population had a staple diet of potatoes, and the same proportion lived in one-roomed mud cabins which held an average of ...

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