SYMHC Classics: Irish Famine, Part 2

Published Aug 1, 2020, 1:00 PM

The second episode in our revisit of the Irish Famine covers the mid-1800s, when the poorest people in Ireland ate almost nothing but potatoes, saving other crops for selling. So a blight, plus politics, led to tragedy.

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Happy Saturday, everybody. Today we have the second part of our two parter on the Great Famine that struck Ireland starting in eight This famine grew out of ongoing persecution and subjugation of Irish people, particularly Irish Catholics, which we talk more about in part one. This episode originally came out on June n Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I am Tracy V. Wilson. So, Tracy, we're going to continue, yes, the story we started last time, So we're gonna pick up on the the Irish potato Famine and to recap just a little bit, in the mid eighteen hundreds of the social and political climate that we talked about in the previous episode had led Ireland to depend really heavily on the potato as a food crop. The poorest people in Ireland ate almost nothing but potatoes, and anything that was anything else that was being grown on a farm wasn't really being raised to eat. It was being raised to sell to pay the rent. So potatoes were filling bellies and everything else was paying for the land that you were living on So when a blight cut just a huge swath through the potato crop in eighteen forty five and almost wiped it out entirely in eighteen forty six, the impact on Ireland was severe. So in this episode we're going to look at how this intersection of politics and farming unfolded. So in eighteen forty six, when the blight was in full swing, the British government's response was minimal. In the government's less a fair view and that of many landowners who had holdings in Ireland, all of the obvious relief measures like providing food or subsidies were counterproductive. They would threaten free enterprise and cause the Irish to become dependent upon government handouts. The government's desire not to influence free enterprise also meant that it didn't want to meddle in other business affairs, like the practice of exporting grain out of Ireland and into England. Instead, it was pretty much business as usual, so food exporters in Ireland, many of whom were owned by people living in England, just kept exporting food as normal. So when the potato crops died, Irish farmers kept selling all their other crops to pay the rent, the choice was one of starvation or eviction. Uh the people who owned the farms would then export the other crops out of Ireland. So throughout the famine, Ireland continued exporting grains, rabbits, butter, fish, onions, honey, and other foods, along with non food items like woolen leather. So they were sending food away while they were starving to death. So weather stopping these exports and distributing this food to Irish farmers would have stopped the famine is a hotly contested subject. Some scholars argue that the potato made up so much of the Irish food supply that no amount of other food grown there could have possibly filled that gap. But regardless, shipping food out of Ireland while people were starving looked really bad. There were riots and ports cities in response to these shiploads of food that were living leaving Ireland bound for England. River boats and ports were appointed military guards. And really, even if keeping the food in Ireland would have been a feudal effort, this continued export was really deeply damaging to the relationship between England and Ireland. People scavenged what they could eat and they sold their belongings to try to pay for food. Even in coastal areas where fish were plentiful, the fish were generally in water that was too deep and treacherous for people to reach in their small boats with ordinary nts. That winter, which is the winter of eighteen forty six, also saw one of the worst blizzards in Ireland's history, with snow reaching the roof lines of people's huts by eighteen forty seven, and it had become clear that this was not just a temporary situation that was going to be relieved by the next year's harvest. Even though the blight did disappear that year, the seven crop was healthy, but not enough had been planted in the spring to sustain everyone. People had resorted to eating the potatoes they would have normally reserved for replanting, and many were so weakened by hunger and illness that they weren't able to get their crops in the ground. While many people wanted to plant something other than potatoes, at this point, seeds for new crops were often beyond their means, so they planted what they could get, which was mostly potatoes. Britain opened soup kitchens to help get food to needy people, and the death toll did start to drop a little bit, but the kitchens didn't last for very long. Parliament enacted the Irish Poor Law Extension Act on June seven, which once again moved the British government away from providing direct aid to the Irish. Under this act, it was up to the Irish landlords to support their impoverished tenants. Government soup kitchens were scheduled to be closed and they had only existed for about six months, and the public works programs that were meant to support the Irish were shut down. The Poor Law Extension Act also made it a lot harder for people to enter one of Britain's workhouses, which at this point was a last refuge for the destitute farmers. Britain had created the system of workhouses in eighteen thirty eight. There were a hundred and thirty of them which could accommodate about a hundred thousand people. Once they arrived at a workhouse, families were divided up and giving given separate housing for women and men, and they wore uniforms. They weren't allowed to leave the building, and they worked for ten hour days. The youngest children would get school lessons and older children would get training on how to work in a factory. These workhouses were dirty and demoralizing, and illnesses spread really quickly in such tight quarters. And apart from all of this, the whole idea of going to a workhouse was just an extreme humiliation, which made were really reluctant to do it. But even so, conditions were so bad in Ireland the workhouses were quickly strained at the breaking point. The government implemented stricter and stricter rules about who could go to a workhouse in a in an attempt to stem the tide, and under the new poor laws, men had to give up any other means of making a living if they wanted to enter a workhouse. So two point six million Irish people went to these institutions during the faminees. They were hugely vastly overcrowded. Conditions were, on top of being overcrowded, just very dirty and difficult, and more than two hundred thousand people died in the workhouses that were meant to help them. By eighty seven, the problem was actually money. Thanks to the healthy but very small potato crop, there was plenty of food, but nobody had money to buy it or to pay the rent on the land. Even the British government was having financial problems because it had been hit by a banking crisis. Landlords who didn't want to be saddled with supporting their tenants as was required under the poor laws, or didn't have the money to do so. Because it's had it's had a trickle up effect. People who couldn't pay their rent meant that the landlords also had no money. A lot of them chose to evict people who couldn't pay the rent. About half a million Irish people were evicted during the famine. Often the male head of the household would go to jail for nonpayment of his rent and the rest of the family would just be left homeless. Many families, once they got a notice of their impending eviction, chose to flee rather than standing trial for this reason, or landlords would pay for their tenants to be transported to British North America, primarily Quebec Canada, on chips that were so poorly made, overcrowded, and disease written that they were actually nicknamed coffin chips. Following eighteen four seven's healthy but small harvest, many people were hopeful that Ireland had turned a corner. You know. People kept thinking that this was just a temporary thing and that one more good harvest would would fix the problem. But people had spent the very last of their money getting a potato crop into the ground to support themselves for the following year, and then in again thanks to wet weather conditions, the blight came back and uh the English, not understanding why the Irish had planted potatoes instead of something else, demanded that the Irish pay for their own relief. So taxes were actually increased on farmers and landlords. For Irish farmers, this was really the last straw, and immigration out of Ireland began in earnest. People had been immigrating from Ireland in the years before the famine, so immigrating was not a new thing. In particular, young men had gone to the United States to work as manual labors, and American companies would advertise for workers and Irish cities in the years before the famine. Between eighteen fifteen and eighteen forty five, nearly a million Irish people had gone to America for the sake of comparison, that's about half as many as left Ireland in the ten years between eighteen forty five and eighteen fifty five, which are thought of as the famine years, but the immigration during the famine was different, both in scale and just in sheer awfulness. On the Coffin ships to Canada, the trip could take up to three months. The people aboard were so sick by the time they arrived that the quarantine facility in Quebec ran out of room, leading to a backlog that kept the passengers on newly arrived ships from being able to disembark, so the ships would just sit there in port with sick and dying and deceased people aboard. Eventually, quarantine and inspection procedures were abandoned and the passengers were allowed to go on their way, meaning that the Irish people arriving at various cities in Canada were extremely ill, They were homeless, and they were destitute. So many sick people arrived in Quebec that there was a typhus epidemic in Canada, which came directly from the influx of immigrants from Ireland. In eighteen forty seven, about a hundred thousand people sailed from Ireland to Canada and about twenty percent of them died from disease or malnutrition. Those who could afford it went instead to the United States, mostly to the port cities of New York, Boston, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, where for the most part they faced illness, poverty, discrimination and bigotry and intense competition for unskilled jobs. And in New York Irish conman who built them out of their money in exchange for a filthy place to stay. Yeah, basically New York had been, of course one of the most common ports of entry for people immigrating from Ireland, so people who were getting off the boats during the blight would be greeted by what seemed to be a friendly face who spoke their language, and that would in fact be a person who was going to steal all their money. So delightful. No, there's a point at some at some point in my outline previously there was just and did you think it was going to stop getting worse? Because it's just going to get worse. So the United States was also not really on board with the idea of becoming home to a bunch of really sick Irish immigrants, so fairs to the United States from Ireland became way more expensive, and ports along the East Coast started requiring bonds from the captains of the ship to guarantee that their passages were not going to become dependent on the government to live. And it wasn't just a matter of jacking up fairs. The US law had laws regulating the number of passengers a ship could hold and the ship's accommodations. They were way more strict and more strictly enforced than British laws, which meant that the voyage was more expensive to begin with. Yeah, so you were more likely to survive the ship on a on a ship that was going to America because of these laws than a ship going to Canada, but it also cost a lot more. It was much harder to get on those ships. Yes, the people who had enough money to flee but not enough money to get to the United States or Canada would instead try to immigrate to England, with Liverpool, Glasgow and South Wales being common destinations. But this trip, while it was definitely a whole lot shorter, wasn't necessarily safer. There was one ship that arrived in liver in Liverpool with seventy two dead aboard after the captain battoned the hatches in a storm, and the people inside the deeply overcrowded ships suffocated. And while the hope was that at least in England people wouldn't starve, Irish immigrants quickly overwhelmed the city's In Liverpool, for example, Irish immigrants more than doubled the population of the city and exhausted the relief services. On June one, seven, in an attempt to leave Liverpool of just this insurmountable population explosion, the British government passed a law that allowed Irish people to be deported back to Ireland. In general, what would happen is these people would be abandoned on the docks once they were returned to Ireland, where like we've said before, they had no home and no money. Similar laws were enacted in other English cities that had a big influx of Irish immigrants. So even after the blight disappeared, the famine had so completely changed the political and ethnic landscape in Ireland, England, and even much of North America. The American immigrant population became overwhelmingly Irish really quickly, and non Irish Americans who associated Irish people with poverty and disease, shiftlessness, and the still pretty distrusted Catholicism carried a lot of anti Irish prejudice. Deep anti Irish and anti Catholic sentiment remained until the Civil War, when the tide started to turn a little as Irish fighting units proved themselves to be both brave and dependable, and Irish laborers filled a need for workers. After the war was over, and eventually Irish Catholics found that they could influence local politics by voting. Irish Catholics made their way into public office and started influencing public policy, which made life for Irish immigrants a little easier in the United States. Back in Ireland during the Blades aftermath, the economy was still in dire straits. Landowners were deeply in debt, and many sold their land just to get out from under it. This lieutenant farmers who had been working that land homeless. Ireland's recovery continued to just be really slow after the famine was gone um, both because of the sudden population drop and the consequent drop in how much farm labor was available uh and the economic fallout from the famine. It's hard to make precise estimates of exactly how bad the final death hole was. Census records at the time weren't super precise, but the most commonly cited statistics are that one million people died. Most didn't die of starvation, but of diseases like relapsing fever, typhus, dysentery, and cholera. Hunger made people more susceptible, and poverty and overcrowning cause these diseases to spread rapidly. Another about two million people left Ireland as a direct result of the famine, with most of them heading to England, Canada or the United States. The population was about eight point four million people in Ireland in eighteen forty four. That had fallen to six point six million in eighteen fifty one, and in the end that the years thought of as the Famine Years saw a drop in the Irish population by twenty to twenty five, and the population actually continued to drop in the aftermath, so that when Ireland gained independence in one its population was actually half of what it was before the famine began. Debate about how to interpret the government's response to the famine continues today. On the one hand, is the Nationalist review that the government could have made better choices and is pretty much responsible for the huge death toll. The revisionist view is more sympathetic to the government and the landlords, and it takes the opposite stance and the most extreme national nationalist view. This famine wasn't really a famine. It was genocide. Uh that's not that doesn't gain a lot of traction in the world of academia, but it is a view that a lot of people take that because a lot of the policy was so anti Irish that what was happening was the deliberate extermination of Irish people through the tool of hunger. Because of the famine and the blight was actually identified what this disease had actually been in May of as a probably now extinct strain of uh phight Opthora infestans, which is native to South America and Mexico. It almost certainly came to Ireland the board ships from Mexico having contaminated other crops, and it completely changed their history forever. It did it and consequently the history of other countries as well, right and it's it became sort of the hallmark of more recent Irish history. Like Ireland, Ireland has had a lot of unhappy events in its history, UM, and the potato famine is cited as one that just had a deep and long lasting effect on everything about Ireland, and there are there's a whole body of literature that draws directly from the famine. UM. When you talk to people who live in the United States who have Irish family, a lot of people will say, that's when my grandparents came to the United States, or that's when my great grandparents came to the United States. And yet a lot of the education about it, it begins and ends with potatoes and they died. Yeah, it's pretty quick. I mean, we really don't get that much in depth in it. Yeah. Well, and some of that is because some of the classroom discussions on the famine are in sort of the late elementary and middle school years. Uh, and it's, you know, getting into all the political complex complexity surrounding it is maybe not quite appropriate for that age level. But even so, considering you know, you and I live in the United States, considering what a huge effect the famine had on the demographics of the United States and politics and religion and all of that kind of thing, it seems a little weird that there's not a more through uh discussion of it later on in the later school years. Thy so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the art, give if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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