When was irish famine

The Whig Party also shut down food depots that had been set up and stocked with Indian corn. The British government did take some steps to help the poor. Before the famine, in , the government had passed a Poor Law Act. It established workhouses for the poor around the country, funded by taxes collected from local landlords and farmers.

Conditions in the workhouses were grim. Families lived in crowded and miserable conditions, and men were forced to work 10 hours a day cutting stone. Many people avoided workhouses if they could because moving in meant almost certain illness and likely death.

The government also established a public-works program. The program was supposed to be run by local committees that would employ laborers to build railroads and other public-works projects. The British government advanced money for the projects, but the local committee members had to sign a contract promising to repay the British government in two years plus interest.

The projects were too few to support the hundreds of thousands of desperate families that needed help. Most of the workers—including women and children who were put to work building stone roads—were malnourished and weakened by fever, and many fainted or dropped dead as they worked.

In early , about , Irish worked on projects, but did not earn enough money to eat. Between March and June of , the government shut down the public-works projects. The Soup Kitchen Act was intended to provide free food in soup kitchens sponsored by local relief committees and by charity.

Free food was desperately needed. For most of the poor, this was the only food they had each day, and many were still dying of starvation. By September , the local relief committees that operated the soup kitchens were almost bankrupt, and the government shut down the soup kitchens after only six months. With no more soup kitchens to feed starving people, little hope was left.

Driven by panic and desperation, a flood of emigrants left Ireland in Many left dressed in rags with not enough food to last the day journey across the Atlantic and not enough money to buy food sold on board. Some went to Great Britain and to Australia, but most intended to go to America. Because fares on the Canadian ships were cheaper, many emigrants went by way of Canada and walked across the border into Maine and then south through New England. The shipowners were happy to carry human ballast, but their ships were not equipped for passenger travel.

The conditions on the timber ships were horrible. One philanthropist, named Stephen de Vere, traveled as a steerage passenger in the spring of and described the suffering he saw:. Hundreds of poor people, men, women and children of all ages, from the driveling idiot of ninety to the babe just born, huddled together without air, wallowing in filth and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart. One expert has calculated that almost 30 percent of the , immigrants to Canada in died on the ships or during quarantine, and another 10, died on their way to the United States.

Others who could afford the fare traveled directly to New York on American ships where conditions were much better. Some were already suffering from fever and were kept in quarantine on Staten Island. But the vast majority of immigrants who came between and did survive the journey. Almost all of the Irish who immigrated to America were poor peasants from rural counties.

Most were illiterate, and many spoke only Irish and could not understand English. And although they had lived off the land in their home country, the immigrants did not have the skills needed for large-scale farming in the American West. The men took whatever jobs they could find—loading ships at the docks, sweeping streets, cleaning stables.

The women took jobs as servants to the rich or working in textile factories. All sorts of obstacles were placed in the way, or allowed to stand in the way, of generous relief to those in need of food. This was done in a horribly misguided effort to keep expenses down and to promote greater self-reliance and self-exertion among the Irish poor. Fifth, the government might have done something to restrain the ruthless mass eviction of families from their homes, as landlords sought to rid their estates of pauperized farmers and labourers.

Altogether, perhaps as many as , people were evicted in the years from to The government might also have provided free passages and other assistance in support of emigration to North America - for those whose personal means made this kind of escape impossible. Last, and above all, the British government should have been willing to treat the famine crisis in Ireland as an imperial responsibility and to bear the costs of relief after the summer of Instead, in an atmosphere of rising 'famine fatigue' in Britain, Ireland at that point and for the remainder of the famine was thrown back essentially on its own woefully inadequate resources.

There were three in particular-the economic doctrines of laissez-faire, the Protestant evangelical belief in divine Providence, and the deep-dyed ethnic prejudice against the Catholic Irish to which historians have recently given the name of 'moralism'. The idea of feeding Laissez-faire, the reigning economic orthodoxy of the day, held that there should be as little government interference with the economy as possible.

Under this doctrine, stopping the export of Irish grain was an unacceptable policy alternative, and it was therefore firmly rejected in London, though there were some British relief officials in Ireland who gave contrary advice.

The influence of the doctrine of laissez-faire may also be seen in two other decisions. The first was the decision to terminate the soup-kitchen scheme in September after only six months of operation. The idea of feeding directly a large proportion of the Irish population violated all of the Whigs' cherished notions of how government and society should function. The other decision was the refusal of the government to undertake any large scheme of assisted emigration.

The Irish viceroy actually proposed in this fashion to sweep the western province of Connacht clean of as many as , pauper smallholders too poor to emigrate on their own. But the majority of Whig cabinet ministers saw little need to spend public money accelerating a process that was already going on 'privately' at a great rate. There was a very widespread belief among members of the British upper and middle classes that the famine was a divine judgment-an act of Providence-against the kind of Irish agrarian regime that was believed to have given rise to the famine.

The Irish system of agriculture was perceived in Britain to be riddled with inefficiency and abuse. According to British policy-makers at the time, the workings of divine Providence were disclosed in the unfettered operations of the market economy, and therefore it was positively evil to interfere with its proper functioning.

A leading exponent of this providentialist perspective was Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant chiefly responsible for administering Irish relief policy throughout the famine years.

In his book The Irish Crisis , published in , Trevelyan described the famine as 'a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence', one which laid bare 'the deep and inveterate root of social evil'. The famine, he declared, was 'the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again.

Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. All rights reserved. The failure of the potato in caused great hardship but not yet mass death, as some stores and seed potatoes from the previous year still existed and farmers and fishermen could sell animals, boats or nets or withhold the rent to pay for food, for at least one season. The potato blight destroyed about half the crop in and virtually all of it in All this might have staved off the catastrophe had the blight not hit again the following year.

But in , the potato crop not only failed again, but failed much more severely, with very few healthy potatoes being harvested that autumn. This time the food crisis was much more severe as most poor tenant farmer families now had nothing to fall back on and marked the start of mass starvation and death, made even worse by an unusually cold winter. Eyewitnesses began to report whole villages lying in their cabins, dying of the fever. The potato crop did not fail that year, but most potato farmers had either not sown seeds in expectation that the potato crop would fail again, did not have any more seeds or had been evicted for failure to pay rent.

The result was that hardly any potatoes were harvested for the second year in a row. Large bands of hungry people began to be noticed wandering countryside and towns, begging for food.

Many flocked to the workhouses — where the destitute were granted food and shelter in exchange for work — but due to insanitary conditions, many died there. The figures for deaths in workhouses spiraled uncontrollably in the famine years, rising from 6, in to over 66, in and remaining in the tens of thousands until early s. There was a poor potato crop again in , but it picked up in the years afterwards, leading to a gradual fall off in famine deaths by about The peak of the death toll occurred in the winter of , where in some districts up to a quarter or the population perished due to hunger, cold and disease.

One of the most high profile cases was that of Major Dennis Mahon, of the Strokestown estate in county Roscommon, who cleared 1, families off his land during the famine. Mahon was later murdered by his vengeful tenants. In all over 70, evictions took place during the famine, displacing up to , people.