As an Irishman I’ve wondered why the Great Potato Famine was as devastating as it was. The Old Sod is crossed and dotted with streams and lakes and the whole shebang is surrounded by an ocean full of fish so why didn’t my bog-trotting ancestors try fishing and supplementing with other crops?
Edflakes
New Glarus WI
Very simply, the potatoes died due to disease and the British, wanting to get rid of the Irish somehow, didnt import food for them and encouraged them to immigrate away.
Coastal areas where one can make a living fishing were *already *settled with fishermen and their families. It’s not like there were vast stretches of unoccupied coastline where displaced farmers could just move in and set up shop. Remember, too, that even subsistence fishing (as opposed to commercial fishing where you sell most of your catch for cash) requires considerable skill and equipment which farmers didn’t have.
Also food cash crops weren’t made available to the locals.
There’s also the matter of land, and of economic obligations. When you have to use most of the land available to you to grow crops for someone else, you don’t have very much left to grow the crops that are feeding your own family, which means that you need a crop that can produce a lot of yield from very little land. In Ireland’s climate, that means potatoes.
I think I remember reading somewhere that potatoes provide more calories per cultivated area than any other crop. Is this true? Intuitively, it does seems to be true. Most other vegetables contain very few calories. But taters are like solid glucose nuggets. Is there any crop than can beat potatoes in terms of caloric energy yield? If I had to make a guess, corn would also be a good one, and might come in second behind potatoes.
That assumes everyone was entitled to all food resources equally; they were not. So the devastation was due to systemic class inequality.
Corn was imported, but as food. As a crop is it enormously destructive of soil and is a very heavy feeder. Not really good for subsistence farming.
As for fishing - as noted above, the coast was already occupied, but even then, the Irish of that time period were not really accomplished deep-sea fishermen. Very little of the protein consumed in Ireland in the 1800s came from the sea. there just wasn’t the culture to amp up to feed hungry people.
Guess - sugar beets/ sugar cane?
It was and still is the most important subsistence crop throughout most of the Americas. However, it’s best suited to a warm sunny climate, not the dank cloudy one of Ireland.
If they were subsistence farmers to begin with, and they had no crop, then how would they pay for food? I presume the ones with money, did pay. If there was not enough money in the hands of the starving to pay for food for everyone who needed it, why would anyone import it - or keep wheat crops at home when there’s a cash-paying market across the foggy sea?
I don’t attribute anything to mercenary deliberate policy. There was a class system. The rich people owned farms that produced cash crops which kept them in tea and crumpets. The poor barely fed themselves in a good crop year. Presumably the overwhelming number of poor overwhelmed any charitable institutions like the church poorhouses that tried to feed the starving once the blight hit. The ones with a decent enough amount of money, used it to pay for travel away from starvation, which would be cheaper than some indeterminate several years of food until crops stopped dying.
But then, someone who barely owned a field and a plow probably could not afford a boat and the equipment even if there was a place to set up. I assume by the time the first wave of blight hit, it was too late to plant an alternate crop that year, even if they had the money to buy seed.
Before the Famine, they said a rich Irishman ate potatoes three times a day. A middle-class Irishman ate them twice a day. A poor Irishman ate potatoes once a day.
Regards,
Shodan
The OP reminds me of Sam Kinison’s solution to world hunger. (NSFW. And turn the volume down.)
Lol. I do miss Sam Kinison. Just imagine what he’d do with the material around today!
And as fast as the blight moved they’d likely be afraid to plant the seed they could afford. The definitive cause wasn’t known until it was far too late to grow crops enough to pull the needy out of the famine.
As for rivers, even if you had a river near by and you had the gear and skills needed, the fish in that river would be the property of the landowner whose land the river flowed through and catching those fish without express permission would be poaching.
The situation was even worst than this. These lands were mostly all held by the English aristocracy. The peasants worked the landlord’s lands and sent the crops over to England so the English didn’t starve. This is still in the era of Feudal overlordship where the Irish peasants had no rights to the food they grew. These Irish peasants were more of a nuisance occupying lands that would be better suited for English occupation.
Certainly the potato blight was a major stressor, but the cause of the famine was the economic policy of enriching the English barons at the expense of the Irish serfs. There’s good arguments to be made that the Irish Famine was artificial with the intent of genocide.
But that just might be my Irish ancestry talking here …
if I remember what I read years ago didn’t it take years to get the fungal infection (that’s what the book I read described it as ) out of the ground ? and much like the French wine industry which the same thing happened they had to use American bred and grown starter plants to get it going again ? except in France’s case they found an heirloom patch of old world grapes here and there
Reminding anyone whos French or Irish of that will start a nice brawl …
But there were rumors of once most of the Irish left Ireland there was talk of turning it into another Australia for the “wretched” classes ie the poor unemployed and incarcerated …
'Scuse me while I go punch the Queen in the nose, just out of general principles.
Not artificial, but it’s certainly clear that the British at the time had no problem watching casually as millions died and fled Ireland. Ireland still has a lower population than before the famine. To put it into perspective, about as many died in the famine as in all American wars combined.
In the long history of human hypocrisy, it’s cruelly amusing that slave-owning nations often sympathized with the plight of the Irish. The British were modestly anti-slave even at the time of the revolution, at least in the aristocracy as led by Lord North, and become much more so in the next generation which saw the reforms of Wilberforce. They still enslaved almost the entirety of Ireland for four centuries. One supposes that it’s in human nature to want to ignore your own failings - particularly when they are so profitable - and condemn your neighbor’s flaw, particularly when he is your rival.