I was talking with an irish friend, and the talk turned to the well-known “Potato Famine” of ca 1840. I have heard statements like “half the population starved or emigrated”…, but do any good records exist? I did hear that entire villages became dep[opulated as a result of the failure of the potato crop. Anyway, why did Ireland come to depend upon one crop? i mean, didn’t they grow stuff like wheat, turnips, corn, etc. as well? The emigration I can understand-but why would the landlords stand by and watch their tenants starve to death-didn’t they depend upon their tenant’s labor to run their estates?
Supposedly, the famine resulted in the largest demographic decline (in Europe) since the “Black Death”-is this true?
Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people died from the Great Famine in the five years from 1846. The decline in population of Ireland as a whole between the censuses of 1841 and 1851 was 19.9%, through death, plummeting fertility, and emigration.
Why … well, potatoes are unbelievably easy to grow–literally almost no cultivation, etc., needed to grow them–they provide huge amounts of calories per land area, and when combined with the fresh milk they had on hand from their dairy cows, pretty well took care of all of your nutritional needs. Potatoes are a trap of leisure and scarcity (scarce land, time, etc.)–but they don’t store.
Ireland grew more than enough grain to feed everyone at the time … but it all went to England to be sold. So everyone starved. That’s the f—ed up way that the world was, then. Hopefully, we’re a little better now. (Not much, but a little.)
“Peel lied, hundreds of thousands died…”
Sadly, even those who took the ships to the New World continued to die:
Sadly, the “Great Famine” was preceeded by a number of other famines throughout the preceeding 100 years.
Read The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith. It’s considered to be the Bible of the Irish Famine.
Three references from my own shelves:
This Great Calamity - Christine Kinealy
Black 47 and Beyond - Cormac O Grada
The Great Shame - Thomas Keneally
I seems hard to believe-the seas around Ireland teamed with fish-you would think they would have organized fisherm,an to supply fish to the poor. of course, those were the days of laissez-faire. Truly applling
The Irish as a people have never been big on fishing their coasts. It just wasn’t part of their culture. It also takes a substantial investment in boats and training and experience to fish the North Atlantic. Something the Irish just didn’t have in the 1840s.
Depends.
Partly it depends on how reliable you judge the population statistics. One argument is that the totals for the 1841 census were underestimated, which has the effect of increasing the subsequent decline.
Partly it depends on recognising that ‘demographic decline’ is not simply people dying. As Walloon has already pointed out, the decline in total population was also caused by decreased fertility and by emigration. And everyone agrees that significantly more people emigrated than died (vast numbers of people died, but vaster numbers left).
And if the issue is just confined to deaths, it actually isn’t obvious that the Famine was even the greatest incidence of mortality in post-medieval Irish history. That depends as much on how one estimates the total deaths during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Which involves even less reliable statistics, or rather almost no statistics at all and some rough estimates. However, the standard view is that the percentage decline in total population in Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century was probably slightly less than that during the Potato Famine. But that was without the equivalent levels of emigration and so may well have involved greater levels of mortality.
(There’s the separate issue of how far the seventeenth-century decline was caused by the Cromwellian invasion; the preceding civil wars within Ireland and several outbreaks of plague complicate the picture.)
Partly it depends on which statistics you use for other cases of demographic declines. Many of the estimates for the percentage population decline in Germany during the Thirty Years War are in the same ballpark as those for the Potato Famine, although that was admittedly over a rather longer period.
It’s a little more complicated than that. The wealthy owned the land, and the poor had to work to raise grain that was sold away, so there wasn’t much time for fishing. Nothing is ever simple in Ireland.
I second this recommendation. The Great Hunger is a beautifully written, highly informative book.
I feel the need to post about one of the greatest extemporaneous puns in the history of the English language. I just wish my Google-fu were better, as I can’t seem to find reference to this, and can’t recall the name of the man who said it. I read it in one of Richard Lederer’s books.
Vast amounts of the land in Ireland was owned by Englishmen who rarely if ever came to Ireland. They were known as ‘absentee landlords.’ Irish people would work their fields, and the product would go to England. When the famine hit, many Irishmen were caught stealing this food before it could be sent away. Many of those so caught were sent off to penal colonies, such as those in Australia and Tasmania.
An MP was speaking in Parliament in support of the Irish, and he made some sort of comment that due to the conditions in Ireland, it shouldn’t be considered a crime to steal food to feed one’s starving family. Someone in the gallery shouted, “Treason!” when this comment was made.
The MP, apparently without pause, replied, “What is treason in England is reason in Ireland, because of the absentee!”
Get it? Absent-T? Oratory like this just doesn’t come about often enough.