A MOMEN TOUS LESSON SATURDAY ESSAY
For many, it is the most damning indictment ever of British (mis)rule: what most call ‘The Great Famine’, but many consider ‘The Starvation’, or even ‘a genocide’. And yet most people in the UK have no idea of what happened – or why. As Britain’s young royals visit the Famine Memorial, though, that may finally change...
SO many things could have gone wrong when Queen Elizabeth visited here in 2011. Even after years of peace, security was always going to be the main concern. But there was also the risk of protocol blunders, embarrassing public protests or other unwelcome distractions that could cast a shadow over the occasion.
Meanwhile, the pressure factor can only have been increased by the fact that exactly a century had passed since a reigning British monarch had last set foot on this part of the island.
It turned out that there was no need to worry. Not even the most optimistic of souls, on either side of the Irish Sea, could have expected the visit to go as well as it did.
The Queen received widespread credit for her Dublin Castle speech on evolving relations between Ireland and the UK. She was also praised for laying a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance and for visiting Croke Park where, of course, 14 civilians were shot dead by British forces in 1920.
Next week Prince Harry and his new bride, Meghan Markle, will also call on the GAA headquarters during their two-day stay in Dublin. Arguably, though, the most significant and symbolic item on their itinerary is a visit to the Famine Memorial on the banks of the River Liffey. No one who has seen sculptor Rowan Gillespie’s series of statues is ever likely to forget them. They show emaciated victims with their faces contorted in agony and desperation. It is no exaggeration to describe the impact as truly haunting.
Yet the plain truth of the matter is that our nearest neighbours know practically nothing about the Great Famine, or the part their forefathers played in it.
The subject doesn’t feature in any meaningful way on the history curriculum in British schools. At best, most people are only vaguely aware that it has something to do with potato crops failing, back in the dim and distant past.
THERE is a persuasive case to be made, though, that the Famine is the single biggest wrong suffered by this country during several centuries of colonial rule. Shortly after he was elected prime minister for the first time, Tony Blair acknowledged as much when he described it as ‘a defining event in the history of Ireland and Britain’.
He said it had left ‘deep scars’ and the fact that so many people died ‘in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain’. Mr Blair added: ‘Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy.’
Even two decades after those remarks were made, though, it is clear that there is no real understanding across the wider British public as to why the Famine has such emotional resonance here. Nor, for the avoidance of doubt, is that intended as a criticism.
While anyone educated in the Irish school system knows about the legacy of death and emigration, many of us only have a hazy recollection of how it all transpired.
If the statistics make for grim reading, so does the story behind them. It all began on August 20, 1845 when Phytophthora infestans – potato blight – was identified at the Botanic Gardens in Dublin.
The blight was discovered in Mexico and had destroyed crops in America and Canada, before apparently crossing the Atlantic on trade ships. It then spread from England to several locations in continental Europe, as well as to Ireland. But the problem had far graver consequences in this country because millions of people were entirely dependent on the potato for their daily diet.
Quite apart from anything else, the British had commandeered the best land for rearing cattle to ensure a plentiful supply of quality beef on the far side of the Irish Sea.
The upshot was that there were around 500,000 peasant farmers – along with their
1.75million dependants – working the unprofitable and far less fertile plots. Many holdings were so small that tenants could only feed their families by growing potatoes.
Between 1801 and 1845, the Westminster authorities set up more than 100 separate commissions and 60-plus special committees to look at the Irish situation.
The historian Cecil WoodhamSmith later noted that ‘without exception their findings prophesied disaster; Ireland was on the verge of starvation, her population rapidly increasing, three-quarters of her labourers unemployed, housing conditions appalling and the standard of living unbelievable low’.
Months before the outbreak of the Famine, a commission headed by the Earl of Devon noted, ‘the patient endurance which the labouring classes have exhibited under suffering greater, we believe, than the people of any other country in Europe have to suffer’.
The official report also remarked that the typical dwelling was ‘seldom a protection against the weather’, ‘a bed or blanket is a rare luxury’ and that ‘in many districts their only food is the potato, their only beverage water’.
YET there was little in the way of tangible sympathy from key figures in the political establishment. Granted, the Tory prime minister Robert Peel ordered two substantial consignments of maize from America at a cost of £100,000 to feed the starving.
But Charles Trevelyan – the senior civil servant in charge of the relief effort and later immortalised in Pete St John’s ballad The Fields Of Athenry – cancelled a third shipload following a change of government in the summer of 1846. That move was largely down to the new administration’s commitment to a laissez-faire economy and free market principles.
The rationale underpinning this policy was that there should only be the bare minimum of government interference in the economy. For the same reason, calls to stop the export of food from Ireland were simply ignored.
The same principle explains the decision to close down soup kitchens in September 1847 after just six months in operation, despite the fact that they were feeding three million people a day and costing relatively little. Meanwhile, the authorities refused to introduce a system of assisted emigration that could have saved countless lives.
Perversely, there is also strong evidence to suggest the lack of response was dictated by our colonial rulers’ own religious beliefs. The brand of evangelical Protestantism that held sway in the British upper classes at the time put huge emphasis on divine providence. Put simply, there was a sizeable school of thought that reckoned Irish smallholders were an inefficient, troublesome lot who were getting their just desserts from God. Even leaving aside the religious element, there was a separate theory that we were the authors of our own misfortune.
It was commonly accepted wisdom that members of the Catholic population were lazy, feckless, prone to having too many children and, perhaps most fundamentally of all, guilty of a lack of self-reliance. It is clear that there was some crossover between these strands of thought. But remarks made at the time by Trevelyan, who only visited here once during the entire horror, reveal a profoundly anti-Irish bias that strays into the realms of outright racism.
In a letter he described the Famine as an ‘effective mechanism for reducing surplus population’ and said ‘the judgment of God [had] sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson’. He also remarked: ‘The real evil which with we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.’
IN a book called The Irish Crisis, which he wrote and published at the height of the Famine, Trevelyan sounded a more callous note. He described the Famine as ‘a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence’, which had successfully exposed ‘the deep and inveterate root of social evil’. Even more offensively, Trevelyan referred to the Famine as ‘the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected… God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part’.
Meanwhile, a vast quantity of agricultural produce – including bacon, butter and vegetables, as well as livestock – continued to be sent as exports to England. The number of evictions of tenant farmers and their families soared. One well-informed estimate suggests that in excess of half a million people were booted off their homesteads.
At the time of the 1851 census, the population of the island was close to 8.2million. The figure was 6.5million a decade later, even though the birth rate indicated it should have been slightly over nine million.
Around one million people emigrated, according to estimates, and the remainder died either through starvation or disease. The demographic, social and cultural landscapes were changed forever.
It is hardly surprising, in the circumstances, that some historians have accused the British of effectively being responsible for genocide. At the very least, it is clear that some establishment figures saw the Famine as an opportunity to finish off what Oliver Cromwell had started two centuries earlier.
For his part, the British historian AJP Taylor observed that ‘all Ireland was a Belsen’ during the long years of suffering. But academic opinion remains divided on whether the Famine amounted to genocide – defined in the dictionary as ‘the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group’ – or if it was simply down to negligence and indifference on the part of Britain.
The debate also rages on whether it should even be referred to as the Great Famine, given that the F-word implies it was entirely an act of God. The influential nationalist John Mitchel, who was himself deported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1848, wrote: ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.’
Would it make better sense to use a more literal translation from the Irish and start calling it the Great Hunger? Or, more pointedly, the Great Starvation? Another option would be to reclaim ownership entirely and once more refer to it as An Gorta Mór.
Almost 175 years on, the visit by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to the Famine Memorial raises the prospect of a broader and deeper appreciation in Britain of this particular episode in history.
Anything that promotes a better understanding of our shared past can only be a good thing, especially when relations are at a difficult juncture due to the Brexit impasse.
It goes without saying that our British neighbours can hardly be blamed for the sins of those who went before them, just as we aren’t guilty of the terrorist atrocities supposedly carried out on our behalf in more recent times. But anything that increases our knowledge of each other must be welcomed and nurtured.
We have come a long way in a relatively short period of time. It is more than a decade since Ireland faced England in a Six Nations Championship game in Croke Park of all places. No one who grew up here in the Seventies or Eighties could ever have imagined that happening. Even for those with no interest in rugby, it was a remarkable event. For all the political progress we had seen in the preceding years, this was the clearest sign among ordinary people that the old enmities were very much a thing of the past.
The only downside was that the visiting supporters presumably hadn’t a clue what the home crowd were singing about as they launched into yet another verse of The Fields Of Athenry.
Perhaps Harry and Meghan will be the ones to change all that.