July 25, 2020 • 18 mins
We're revisiting a 2013 two-parter. The history lesson kids often get on the Irish Famine could be summed up as "a blight destroyed the potato crops, and a lot of people starved or moved away." Most kids ask, "Why didn't they eat something else?" Good question.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Earlier this month that we did an
episode on indentured workers in the Caribbean, in particular Irish
indentured workers, and in that episode we made some references
to other aspects of Irish history, including the famine that
struck Ireland in the nineteenth century after a blight that
(00:22):
killed the potato crop for multiple consecutive seasons. Since we
really couldn't get into the details of that in our
July episode, but it's relevant to the greater story there,
we thought we would bring it out of the archive
for the next two Saturdays. This episode originally came out
on June Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
(00:44):
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Polly Fry. Polly,
can I tell you a story? Please do a little.
When I was little, learned a history lesson about the
Irish potato famine, and it was basically summed up as
(01:06):
all the potatoes died and a lot of people either
starved or moved away. Right, that was sort of summing up.
That's pretty much the way I was taught about it
as well. Right, So my little kid question was, well,
how come they didn't eat something else? I think a
lot of little kids asked that question, right, And so
now grown up me kind of looks back at little
(01:27):
kid met and until I learned the whole story, I
was like that that is a very privileged question, right,
because we were a pretty modest family, and we did
grow all of our own vegetables, but we grew a
whole lot more than just potatoes, and we also generally
had enough food to eat. Uh. But it turns out
(01:48):
why didn't they eat something else? Is a really really
good question about the Irish potato famine, and that's what
we're going to talk about for the next two episodes.
This is a popular their request. You've gotten it a
lot of times. I actually ran into Katie and Sarah
over the weekend and they said they had also been
asked to talk about it very often, and that they
(02:11):
didn't have the heart to do it because it's not
exactly like a fun, jolly joy ride. No, it's one
of those things where it's clear from the beginning that
it's not a jolly joy ride because about a million
people died, and about two million people left their homes
and immigrated elsewhere. It's way worse than just that. Yeah,
(02:31):
there's definitely a lot of suffering to the story, so
you know that going in, Yes, And it's also one
that requires a fair amount of background to understand why
it is that we got to this point that everyone
was only eating potatoes. Um. So this is going to
be a two part episode, and the first is going
to really set the stage for many of the layers
of what went terribly wrong here, and then the second
(02:54):
episode will get into how all of that played out
in the history of Ireland. So we're talking about the
mid eighteen hundreds in Ireland. Catholics were really deeply disenfranchised
in this point in Irish history. Ireland had been part
of Britain since eighteen hundred under the British Act of Union,
(03:15):
and under this Act, Ireland was granted representation in Parliament,
but Catholics were not allowed to be members of Parliament,
and Catholics were the overwhelming majority of the population of Ireland.
So while Ireland technically had representation in Parliament the majority
of its its population, we're not really represented, right, And
(03:37):
there had been a number of laws in place restricting
very basic aspects of life for Catholics, like owning property
and having jobs, and some of these dated back to
the sixteen hundreds when Irish Catholics sided with James the
Second in his battle with William of Orange for the
British throne. So lots of very old rules and laws
and prejudices that were affecting these people in a very
(03:59):
real way well, and things that we really take for
granted by like being allowed to get a job, ye,
Catholics were not allowed to do. Most of these laws
had been repealed in eighteen twenty nine, which is also
when Catholics were allowed to become members of Parliament, but
by that point anti Catholic bigotry was really deeply entrenched
(04:20):
in the Irish culture, and a lot of those past
social norms about what people were allowed to do and
how they were allowed to practice their religion had been
extremely slow to change. So while maybe things were legal now,
it's still was not really easy for people to do
things like get jobs, in in property. In Ireland at
(04:40):
this point was also extremely deeply impoverished as a nation.
Only about one quarter of the population was literate, and
in a theme we've discussed another podcast, modernization had really
stripped a lot of the working people there of their livelihoods.
The linen and wool industries, for example, have been industrialized,
and so the people that made a living in those
trades suddenly could no longer find work. In rural areas,
(05:05):
large families were living in tiny mud cabins that didn't
have windows or chimneys, and most of them were subsistence farmers.
None virtually none of them owned the land that they
were farming. For the most part, they were overwhelmingly Catholic
tenants who were paying their rent to overwhelmingly Protestant absentee
landlords who for the most part, we're living in England,
(05:27):
not in Ireland, and many of these Irish families weren't
paying their rent directly to their landlords, so there was
a level of complexity to it. Much of the land
had been parceled out through a middleman system, which had
been in place since the seventeen hundreds. So a Protestant
middleman would rent a sizeable piece of land from the landowners,
subdivide it and then rent that out to tenants, and
(05:49):
the tenants paid the middleman, and the middleman paid the landowner,
and so that inflated the rent and to raise their profits.
Middlemen would divide the land into smaller and smaller parcels
and raise rent at the same time. So by eighteen
forty five, half of these little farms were on five
acres or less, and pretty much everybody had less than
ten acres. Like, they were all really pretty small for
(06:10):
a farm. So to add just another layer of ugliness
to this whole situation, a lot of these tenants were
renting land that their families had previously owned but had
been confiscated from them following Cromwell's invasion of Ireland in
the seventeenth century. So you have people who really are
(06:30):
pretty poor in terms of how much money they have,
living on a tiny amount of land, paying inflated rent
to people who own land that their own families used
to own and don't anymore. Already, very uplifting story, I know,
we'll just let that settle for a minute. Yeah, And
(06:56):
there were some communal aspects to this setup. People often
barter instead of using money, and those who couldn't afford
land would often find work with tenant families, and these
labors would help with chores and help bring in the
harvest in exchange for being able to build their own
cottage and plant their own little garden plot. And this
brings us to the potatoes. Potatoes really thrived in the
(07:18):
Irish soil and climate. It was a reliable and pretty
nutritious food staple. Um. It. Although you know, potatoes get
a lot of flak nowadays nowadays for their high carbohydrates
and all that kind of stuff, very starchy food, but
they have lots of ittamin see, lots of other nutrients,
and so people who were living largely on potatoes a
(07:39):
lot of times really were better nourished than people who
were living mostly on save bread. Um. So the introduction
of the potato had led the Irish population to double
between seventeen eighty and eighteen forty five. So more people
meant that they needed to grow more food, and as
the supply of arable land got used up, farms or
(07:59):
get smaller and smaller to accommodate this increase in the population,
and of course smaller and smaller farms made it harder
for farmers to grow enough food to feed their families.
So doing this had required potatoes, which had a much
larger yield than any other food crop, with a good
harvest and a cultivated plot of land. A family of
six could subsist for a year on an acre of potatoes,
(08:23):
including potato scraps that they could feed their animals, and
it would take three times as much land to grow
the same amount of grain, so enough grain to feed
that same family would take a longer land. So people
were planning potatoes because that was the only way they
could get enough food. Any Other land they rented was
being used to keep animals or to grow crops, and
those were grown to sell so that they could pay
(08:44):
rent rather than eating and providing them for their families. Right,
so potatoes were for eating and everything else was to sell.
Thanks to this combination of factors, by forty five, sixty
of the Irish food supply was potatoes, and the host
people in Ireland were living almost exclusively on potatoes. And
(09:05):
most people were also planting the same variety of potatoes,
which were called lumpers, and they gave a really high yield,
but they weren't as nutritious as some other varieties. They
plant around March and harvest round September or October, and
then they could bury the harvested potatoes into pits where
they'd keep until around July of the following year. So
this meant that July and August were really rough and
(09:27):
lean months, even in the best of times, and it
also meant the diseases were really likely to spread easily
because everyone was planting the same strain of potato. Yeah,
there wasn't a lot of diversity to resist pathogens that
came around. This also meant that life for farmers in
Ireland had some periods of intensely hard work during planting
(09:48):
and harvesting, and some spans of relative leisure in between.
The potatoes didn't involve they didn't require tons of upkeep
um and so even when people were farming other stuff
a lot of times they a life that balanced hard
work with periods of rest. Unfortunately, in many places of
the world that we're not Ireland, people viewed this as
(10:08):
laziness and idleness and shiftlessness, and that may have contributed
to some of the reluctance to send help once help
was really needed here. Uh So, to characterize the start
of the problems involving the potatoes, the Irish potato famine,
which is what it's called in the rest of the world,
but in Ireland it's called the Great Hunger or on
(10:29):
Gorth the Moore or the bad Life droo uh started
in a forty five when a blight destroyed part of
the potato crop. The blight hit potatoes in other parts
of the world too, and it had economic effects in
other areas as well, but really nowhere else in the
world was relying as much on potatoes as Ireland was,
(10:50):
so while the effects were much more wide reaching in
terms of the food supply, Ireland was really hit the hardest.
And this blight started by a acting the leaves and stems,
causing them to turn black and rot. And the potatoes
would look edible when they were dug out of the ground,
but within days they'd turned slimy and black. The initial
(11:11):
response from the government was actually kind of on the ball.
The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, sent a commission to
evaluate what was going on that October and the commissioner
came back with the report that Ireland was probably going
to lose half of its potato crop. The scientific community
pretty quickly concluded that some kind of disease was to blame,
(11:31):
but the people whose lives really depended on those potatoes,
as we said before, not a very educated community blamed
everything from static electricity to fumes from the newly built railroads.
And this was by far not the first potato blight
that had ever happened in history. Crops had failed certainly
before this, but even a whole season of crops had
(11:51):
failed before. But Ireland had never seen anything on this scale,
and it had never encountered two years of light in
a row, which you can imagine was really devasty. Yes,
so when Prime Minister Peel made some efforts to send relief,
(12:13):
because everybody was kind of expecting this to be a
temporary thing that would resolve itself with the next year's
harvest um, it wasn't a huge governmental response. The general
consensus was sort of things would be back to normal.
This is going to be a short lived, difficult period
that would resolve itself in another season. But unfortunately, in
(12:35):
eighteen forty six, the blight returned, and to sort of
add insult to injury, it was actually much worse the
second year, thanks to the wet weather conditions and the
fact that diseased potatoes had been used as seed. It's
spread farther and faster than it had in its initial incarnation,
so people didn't have enough to eat and they didn't
have enough to feed the animals, and hunger related illnesses
(12:57):
like typhoid and cholera started to spread it and since
people had been getting most of their vitamin sea from potatoes,
scurvy also became a problem. The British government did a
couple of things to try to help. Prime Minister Peel
pushed through a repeal of the Corn Laws. These were
laws that were meant to protect British grain growers from
foreign competition by imposing really high tariffs on imported grain.
(13:21):
So by reducing the grain supply, the Corn Laws caused
British grain growers to be able to get a higher
price for their crops. Repealing the Corn Laws was supposed
to bring more grain into Ireland and drive prices down,
but Ireland and the Irish people didn't really have enough
money to buy the grain, even at the lower prices
(13:43):
that spring. Prime Minister Peel, without going through Parliament, bought
maze from the US to be distributed as food. Maze
was cheap, but it also needed to be milmed to
be edible, and there weren't enough meals to actually handle it.
On top of that, Maze is a very sturdy grain
that needed more process than other grains, so the mills
that already were not numerous enough to process it were
(14:05):
streamed even more because it took more time to process
the amount that they could handle. Once it was milled
into meal, the maze was going to be sold at
the rate of a penny per pound, but just like
with the imported grain, a lot of people who really
needed it just could not afford to buy it. Um
This corn meal was also a lot different from the
(14:25):
potatoes that the Irish were used to eating, both in
terms of nutrition and digesting it, and so diarrhea and
scurvy became really common complaints among the people who were
managing to buy this corn meal to eat. Additionally, the
British grain industry was really angry over both the repeal
of the corn laws and the import of maze. The
(14:46):
Conservative government started to falter and Prime Minister Peel resigned
on June twenty n The new Liberal government, also known
as the Whig Party, came into power, and it really
followed the principle of lais ay fair, which is basically,
leave it alone and it's going to work itself out.
The Liberal government was really reluctant to make decisions that
(15:06):
would affect private enterprise. So once Prime Minister Peel was
out of office, the British government did not do a
lot to intervene in the blight. There were no big
influxes of food or monetary relief coming from the government.
This is a concept that probably seems seems incomprehensible to
the years of a modern audience in a world where
(15:28):
disasters lead to immediate efforts at relief, but that's not
what the ideology was like in the mid nineteenth century,
and there were private fundraising efforts internationally, notably in major
cities in the US and India. Quakers led fundraising efforts,
and the Choctaw Indians recently relocated during the Trail of
Tears actually sent a donation as well. So while there
(15:49):
was some international response and some relief on the part
of private citizens, it still just was not enough. Under
the new Prime Minister John Russell, famine policy fell to
Charles Edward Trevillian, who was the Assistant Secretary of the
British Treasury. He had been involved in the famine response
during Peel's administration, but now he was basically running the show.
(16:11):
He ordered an end to the sale of Maze and
he rejected an incoming shipment of it, saying that he
was going to try to prevent the Irish from becoming
dependent on government handouts. Apart from the laz a fair
principles under which the Whig Party was operating, uh Trevillian
himself had a belief in divine providence, which also influenced
(16:32):
his hands off approach to the whole situation. In the famine,
everyone was sort of working under the assumption that private
citizens were going to step up and provide relief, and
that Ireland could use its tax revenue to fund public
works projects that would employ Irish farmers. The farmer's income
would be taxed, and that tax money would fund more
projects and a cycle that would pull Ireland up out
(16:53):
of poverty. But the Irish government didn't really have enough
money to start with. People's wages were too low for
income tax to keep up with the need for government spending,
and also really too low for people to actually meet
their own daily needs. So in addition to they weren't
making enough money to buy things, their wages were not
enough too for the tax revenue to be adequipped for
(17:14):
the government. So what happened instead was that public works
projects were flooded with way more workers than they could
possibly use or pay. And so that's where we're going
to pause on this part of the story. Uh So
we're leaving at eighteen forty six. Ireland situation is extremely
dire and Britain has taken a largely handsoff approach to
(17:35):
mitigating this crisis. So in the next part of this episode,
we're going to pick up in eighteen forty six and
eighteen forty seven and and tell how the rest of
the the famine unfolded in Irish history. Thanks so much
(17:56):
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
or a Facebook U r L or something similar over
the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart
radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address
no longer works, and you can find us all over
(18:17):
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
(18:39):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday, everybody. Earlier this month that we did an
episode on indentured workers in the Caribbean, in particular Irish
indentured workers, and in that episode we made some references
to other aspects of Irish history, including the famine that
struck Ireland in the nineteenth century after a blight that
(00:22):
killed the potato crop for multiple consecutive seasons. Since we
really couldn't get into the details of that in our
July episode, but it's relevant to the greater story there,
we thought we would bring it out of the archive
for the next two Saturdays. This episode originally came out
on June Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
(00:44):
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Polly Fry. Polly,
can I tell you a story? Please do a little.
When I was little, learned a history lesson about the
Irish potato famine, and it was basically summed up as
(01:06):
all the potatoes died and a lot of people either
starved or moved away. Right, that was sort of summing up.
That's pretty much the way I was taught about it
as well. Right, So my little kid question was, well,
how come they didn't eat something else? I think a
lot of little kids asked that question, right, And so
now grown up me kind of looks back at little
(01:27):
kid met and until I learned the whole story, I
was like that that is a very privileged question, right,
because we were a pretty modest family, and we did
grow all of our own vegetables, but we grew a
whole lot more than just potatoes, and we also generally
had enough food to eat. Uh. But it turns out
(01:48):
why didn't they eat something else? Is a really really
good question about the Irish potato famine, and that's what
we're going to talk about for the next two episodes.
This is a popular their request. You've gotten it a
lot of times. I actually ran into Katie and Sarah
over the weekend and they said they had also been
asked to talk about it very often, and that they
(02:11):
didn't have the heart to do it because it's not
exactly like a fun, jolly joy ride. No, it's one
of those things where it's clear from the beginning that
it's not a jolly joy ride because about a million
people died, and about two million people left their homes
and immigrated elsewhere. It's way worse than just that. Yeah,
(02:31):
there's definitely a lot of suffering to the story, so
you know that going in, Yes, And it's also one
that requires a fair amount of background to understand why
it is that we got to this point that everyone
was only eating potatoes. Um. So this is going to
be a two part episode, and the first is going
to really set the stage for many of the layers
of what went terribly wrong here, and then the second
(02:54):
episode will get into how all of that played out
in the history of Ireland. So we're talking about the
mid eighteen hundreds in Ireland. Catholics were really deeply disenfranchised
in this point in Irish history. Ireland had been part
of Britain since eighteen hundred under the British Act of Union,
(03:15):
and under this Act, Ireland was granted representation in Parliament,
but Catholics were not allowed to be members of Parliament,
and Catholics were the overwhelming majority of the population of Ireland.
So while Ireland technically had representation in Parliament the majority
of its its population, we're not really represented, right, And
(03:37):
there had been a number of laws in place restricting
very basic aspects of life for Catholics, like owning property
and having jobs, and some of these dated back to
the sixteen hundreds when Irish Catholics sided with James the
Second in his battle with William of Orange for the
British throne. So lots of very old rules and laws
and prejudices that were affecting these people in a very
(03:59):
real way well, and things that we really take for
granted by like being allowed to get a job, ye,
Catholics were not allowed to do. Most of these laws
had been repealed in eighteen twenty nine, which is also
when Catholics were allowed to become members of Parliament, but
by that point anti Catholic bigotry was really deeply entrenched
(04:20):
in the Irish culture, and a lot of those past
social norms about what people were allowed to do and
how they were allowed to practice their religion had been
extremely slow to change. So while maybe things were legal now,
it's still was not really easy for people to do
things like get jobs, in in property. In Ireland at
(04:40):
this point was also extremely deeply impoverished as a nation.
Only about one quarter of the population was literate, and
in a theme we've discussed another podcast, modernization had really
stripped a lot of the working people there of their livelihoods.
The linen and wool industries, for example, have been industrialized,
and so the people that made a living in those
trades suddenly could no longer find work. In rural areas,
(05:05):
large families were living in tiny mud cabins that didn't
have windows or chimneys, and most of them were subsistence farmers.
None virtually none of them owned the land that they
were farming. For the most part, they were overwhelmingly Catholic
tenants who were paying their rent to overwhelmingly Protestant absentee
landlords who for the most part, we're living in England,
(05:27):
not in Ireland, and many of these Irish families weren't
paying their rent directly to their landlords, so there was
a level of complexity to it. Much of the land
had been parceled out through a middleman system, which had
been in place since the seventeen hundreds. So a Protestant
middleman would rent a sizeable piece of land from the landowners,
subdivide it and then rent that out to tenants, and
(05:49):
the tenants paid the middleman, and the middleman paid the landowner,
and so that inflated the rent and to raise their profits.
Middlemen would divide the land into smaller and smaller parcels
and raise rent at the same time. So by eighteen
forty five, half of these little farms were on five
acres or less, and pretty much everybody had less than
ten acres. Like, they were all really pretty small for
(06:10):
a farm. So to add just another layer of ugliness
to this whole situation, a lot of these tenants were
renting land that their families had previously owned but had
been confiscated from them following Cromwell's invasion of Ireland in
the seventeenth century. So you have people who really are
(06:30):
pretty poor in terms of how much money they have,
living on a tiny amount of land, paying inflated rent
to people who own land that their own families used
to own and don't anymore. Already, very uplifting story, I know,
we'll just let that settle for a minute. Yeah, And
(06:56):
there were some communal aspects to this setup. People often
barter instead of using money, and those who couldn't afford
land would often find work with tenant families, and these
labors would help with chores and help bring in the
harvest in exchange for being able to build their own
cottage and plant their own little garden plot. And this
brings us to the potatoes. Potatoes really thrived in the
(07:18):
Irish soil and climate. It was a reliable and pretty
nutritious food staple. Um. It. Although you know, potatoes get
a lot of flak nowadays nowadays for their high carbohydrates
and all that kind of stuff, very starchy food, but
they have lots of ittamin see, lots of other nutrients,
and so people who were living largely on potatoes a
(07:39):
lot of times really were better nourished than people who
were living mostly on save bread. Um. So the introduction
of the potato had led the Irish population to double
between seventeen eighty and eighteen forty five. So more people
meant that they needed to grow more food, and as
the supply of arable land got used up, farms or
(07:59):
get smaller and smaller to accommodate this increase in the population,
and of course smaller and smaller farms made it harder
for farmers to grow enough food to feed their families.
So doing this had required potatoes, which had a much
larger yield than any other food crop, with a good
harvest and a cultivated plot of land. A family of
six could subsist for a year on an acre of potatoes,
(08:23):
including potato scraps that they could feed their animals, and
it would take three times as much land to grow
the same amount of grain, so enough grain to feed
that same family would take a longer land. So people
were planning potatoes because that was the only way they
could get enough food. Any Other land they rented was
being used to keep animals or to grow crops, and
those were grown to sell so that they could pay
(08:44):
rent rather than eating and providing them for their families. Right,
so potatoes were for eating and everything else was to sell.
Thanks to this combination of factors, by forty five, sixty
of the Irish food supply was potatoes, and the host
people in Ireland were living almost exclusively on potatoes. And
(09:05):
most people were also planting the same variety of potatoes,
which were called lumpers, and they gave a really high yield,
but they weren't as nutritious as some other varieties. They
plant around March and harvest round September or October, and
then they could bury the harvested potatoes into pits where
they'd keep until around July of the following year. So
this meant that July and August were really rough and
(09:27):
lean months, even in the best of times, and it
also meant the diseases were really likely to spread easily
because everyone was planting the same strain of potato. Yeah,
there wasn't a lot of diversity to resist pathogens that
came around. This also meant that life for farmers in
Ireland had some periods of intensely hard work during planting
(09:48):
and harvesting, and some spans of relative leisure in between.
The potatoes didn't involve they didn't require tons of upkeep
um and so even when people were farming other stuff
a lot of times they a life that balanced hard
work with periods of rest. Unfortunately, in many places of
the world that we're not Ireland, people viewed this as
(10:08):
laziness and idleness and shiftlessness, and that may have contributed
to some of the reluctance to send help once help
was really needed here. Uh So, to characterize the start
of the problems involving the potatoes, the Irish potato famine,
which is what it's called in the rest of the world,
but in Ireland it's called the Great Hunger or on
(10:29):
Gorth the Moore or the bad Life droo uh started
in a forty five when a blight destroyed part of
the potato crop. The blight hit potatoes in other parts
of the world too, and it had economic effects in
other areas as well, but really nowhere else in the
world was relying as much on potatoes as Ireland was,
(10:50):
so while the effects were much more wide reaching in
terms of the food supply, Ireland was really hit the hardest.
And this blight started by a acting the leaves and stems,
causing them to turn black and rot. And the potatoes
would look edible when they were dug out of the ground,
but within days they'd turned slimy and black. The initial
(11:11):
response from the government was actually kind of on the ball.
The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, sent a commission to
evaluate what was going on that October and the commissioner
came back with the report that Ireland was probably going
to lose half of its potato crop. The scientific community
pretty quickly concluded that some kind of disease was to blame,
(11:31):
but the people whose lives really depended on those potatoes,
as we said before, not a very educated community blamed
everything from static electricity to fumes from the newly built railroads.
And this was by far not the first potato blight
that had ever happened in history. Crops had failed certainly
before this, but even a whole season of crops had
(11:51):
failed before. But Ireland had never seen anything on this scale,
and it had never encountered two years of light in
a row, which you can imagine was really devasty. Yes,
so when Prime Minister Peel made some efforts to send relief,
(12:13):
because everybody was kind of expecting this to be a
temporary thing that would resolve itself with the next year's
harvest um, it wasn't a huge governmental response. The general
consensus was sort of things would be back to normal.
This is going to be a short lived, difficult period
that would resolve itself in another season. But unfortunately, in
(12:35):
eighteen forty six, the blight returned, and to sort of
add insult to injury, it was actually much worse the
second year, thanks to the wet weather conditions and the
fact that diseased potatoes had been used as seed. It's
spread farther and faster than it had in its initial incarnation,
so people didn't have enough to eat and they didn't
have enough to feed the animals, and hunger related illnesses
(12:57):
like typhoid and cholera started to spread it and since
people had been getting most of their vitamin sea from potatoes,
scurvy also became a problem. The British government did a
couple of things to try to help. Prime Minister Peel
pushed through a repeal of the Corn Laws. These were
laws that were meant to protect British grain growers from
foreign competition by imposing really high tariffs on imported grain.
(13:21):
So by reducing the grain supply, the Corn Laws caused
British grain growers to be able to get a higher
price for their crops. Repealing the Corn Laws was supposed
to bring more grain into Ireland and drive prices down,
but Ireland and the Irish people didn't really have enough
money to buy the grain, even at the lower prices
(13:43):
that spring. Prime Minister Peel, without going through Parliament, bought
maze from the US to be distributed as food. Maze
was cheap, but it also needed to be milmed to
be edible, and there weren't enough meals to actually handle it.
On top of that, Maze is a very sturdy grain
that needed more process than other grains, so the mills
that already were not numerous enough to process it were
(14:05):
streamed even more because it took more time to process
the amount that they could handle. Once it was milled
into meal, the maze was going to be sold at
the rate of a penny per pound, but just like
with the imported grain, a lot of people who really
needed it just could not afford to buy it. Um
This corn meal was also a lot different from the
(14:25):
potatoes that the Irish were used to eating, both in
terms of nutrition and digesting it, and so diarrhea and
scurvy became really common complaints among the people who were
managing to buy this corn meal to eat. Additionally, the
British grain industry was really angry over both the repeal
of the corn laws and the import of maze. The
(14:46):
Conservative government started to falter and Prime Minister Peel resigned
on June twenty n The new Liberal government, also known
as the Whig Party, came into power, and it really
followed the principle of lais ay fair, which is basically,
leave it alone and it's going to work itself out.
The Liberal government was really reluctant to make decisions that
(15:06):
would affect private enterprise. So once Prime Minister Peel was
out of office, the British government did not do a
lot to intervene in the blight. There were no big
influxes of food or monetary relief coming from the government.
This is a concept that probably seems seems incomprehensible to
the years of a modern audience in a world where
(15:28):
disasters lead to immediate efforts at relief, but that's not
what the ideology was like in the mid nineteenth century,
and there were private fundraising efforts internationally, notably in major
cities in the US and India. Quakers led fundraising efforts,
and the Choctaw Indians recently relocated during the Trail of
Tears actually sent a donation as well. So while there
(15:49):
was some international response and some relief on the part
of private citizens, it still just was not enough. Under
the new Prime Minister John Russell, famine policy fell to
Charles Edward Trevillian, who was the Assistant Secretary of the
British Treasury. He had been involved in the famine response
during Peel's administration, but now he was basically running the show.
(16:11):
He ordered an end to the sale of Maze and
he rejected an incoming shipment of it, saying that he
was going to try to prevent the Irish from becoming
dependent on government handouts. Apart from the laz a fair
principles under which the Whig Party was operating, uh Trevillian
himself had a belief in divine providence, which also influenced
(16:32):
his hands off approach to the whole situation. In the famine,
everyone was sort of working under the assumption that private
citizens were going to step up and provide relief, and
that Ireland could use its tax revenue to fund public
works projects that would employ Irish farmers. The farmer's income
would be taxed, and that tax money would fund more
projects and a cycle that would pull Ireland up out
(16:53):
of poverty. But the Irish government didn't really have enough
money to start with. People's wages were too low for
income tax to keep up with the need for government spending,
and also really too low for people to actually meet
their own daily needs. So in addition to they weren't
making enough money to buy things, their wages were not
enough too for the tax revenue to be adequipped for
(17:14):
the government. So what happened instead was that public works
projects were flooded with way more workers than they could
possibly use or pay. And so that's where we're going
to pause on this part of the story. Uh So
we're leaving at eighteen forty six. Ireland situation is extremely
dire and Britain has taken a largely handsoff approach to
(17:35):
mitigating this crisis. So in the next part of this episode,
we're going to pick up in eighteen forty six and
eighteen forty seven and and tell how the rest of
the the famine unfolded in Irish history. Thanks so much
(17:56):
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
out of the archive, if you heard an email address
or a Facebook U r L or something similar over
the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart
radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address
no longer works, and you can find us all over
(18:17):
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
(18:39):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com