SYMHC Classics: Irish Famine, Part 2

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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

(00:28):
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

(00:49):
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

(01:10):
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

(01:30):
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.

(01:54):
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,

(02:16):
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,

(02:41):
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

(03:04):
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,

(03:28):
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.

(03:49):
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,

(04:11):
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

(04:32):
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

(04:53):
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

(05:13):
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

(05:37):
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

(06:00):
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.

(06:30):
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,

(06:51):
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

(07:14):
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.

(07:36):
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

(08:01):
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

(08:24):
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

(08:48):
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

(09:09):
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

(09:31):
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

(09:52):
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

(10:15):
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

(10:38):
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.

(11:00):
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,

(11:20):
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.

(11:43):
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,

(12:12):
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

(12:33):
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.

(12:56):
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

(13:17):
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

(13:38):
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

(14:00):
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

(14:22):
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

(14:46):
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

(15:07):
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

(15:28):
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

(15:49):
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

(16:12):
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

(16:34):
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

(16:57):
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

(17:18):
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,

(17:41):
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

(18:03):
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

(18:23):
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

(18:46):
it later on in the later school years. Thy so
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
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(19:06):
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(19:31):
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