10 July 1997 Edition
Remembering the Past: The Irish holocaust - An droch shaol
The Irish Holocaust, an artifical famine created by the English parliament's economic policy and their domination of Ireland was the greatest social catastrophe of 19th Century Europe. The reality of it is so appalling that there is no need for inflated statisitics. The Great Famine as it is popularly known began a process of depopulation which transformed the Irish physical, political, social and cultural landscape. The loss of three million people in five years 1845-'50 through death and emigration in effect removed an entire class - the landless rural labourer.
In a series of articles Aengus O Snodaigh in this the 150th anniversary looks at the various aspects of the Great Hunger: the potato, death, fever, workhouses, coffin ships, relief works and the response, or lack of it, from Ireland's imperial masters.
Blatant anti-Irish racism
The Famine did not occur in a vacuum, and the lack of urgency by the English government in tackling it can be attributed to many factors not least of which were racism, free market capitalism and the changed position of Ireland after the Act of Union 1800.
Having lost its `own' parliament Ireland had less representatives per head of population than England, its MPs were in the main Protestant landed gentry who had England's not Ireland's interests at heart.
Providence sent the potato blight, but England made the Famine
James Connolly
Throughout the Famine all legislation and policy emanated from Westminster, while dire warnings from relief commissioners and others were ignored. After 1847 they threw the financial burden for Famine relief exclusively onto the Irish taxpayers - thus washing their hands of it. They were in fact adhering to the views of The Times which argued that `English' taxpayers' money spent on Irish Famine relief was money wasted.
The difference of attitude and implementation of Poor Law in England and Ireland was commented on by a committee of inquiry in County Clare in 1848.
``Whether as regards the plain principles of humanity, or the literal text and admitted principle of the Poor Law of 1847, a neglect of public duty has occurred and has occassioned a state of things disgraceful to a civilised age and country, for which some authority ought to be held responsible, and would long since have been held responsible had these things occurred in any union in England.''
While the enormity of the task facing any government is to be appreciated when attributing blame for the deaths and destruction in Ireland the British government stands condemned by its genocidal tactics regarding Ireland in those years.
One fact can demolish any sympathetic hearing which they or their supporters later sought. The sum total of the humanitarian or Famine relief by the English government represented one half of one per cent of Britain's GNP (gross national product) or less than 3% of their expenditure.
Grain imports and exports 1844-'48
Year Exports (tons) Imports (tons)*
1844 424,000 30,000
1845 513,000 28,000
1846 284,000 197,000
1847 146,000 909,000
1848 314,000 439,000
*Mainly Indian meal (maize) and wheat. Source: Bourke, 1993
Approximately £7 million was provided by Westminster during the Famine years, a figure which drew Archbishop McHale of Tuam to draw the unfavourable comparison with the £20 million they paid in compensation to slave owners when slavery was abolished in 1836, or the £70 million spent within a few years on the futile Crimean War.
The attitude and the blatant racism of many of the English decision makers and their total adherence to free market capitalism left people to starve. Laissez-faire economic principles, yesteryear's Thatcherite policies, dictated that intervention would upset the equilibrium of the market. This policy meant that merchants exporting food from Ireland sought the markets for their produce where the price was highest - overseas. Despite what revisionists would have us believe vast amounts of food left Ireland annually (see table).
Protected by the over 100,000 soldiers quartered in Ireland convoys of food were transported to markets overseas. Millions of tons of flour, grain, meat, poultry and dairy products were `escorted' under gunpoint away from the starving millions. The Waterford Harbour British army commissariat officer wrote to the British Treasury on April 24 1846:
``The barges leave Clonmel once a week for this place, with the export supplies under convoy which, last Tuesday, consisted of two, 50 cavalry, and 80 infantry escorting them on the banks of the Suir as far as Carrick.''
Even those who took the initiative of arranging their own imports, smuggling, suffered at the hands of an English government which would not tolerate any interference in their economic policy. In January 1849 the Coastguard seized the Belmullet fishing fleet for off-loading flour from a passing ship. The relief from famine which fishing gave the people of Belmullet, Country Mayo, was now denied them.
In times past in Ireland, and in other arenas of their imperial adventure, the English were more than willing to set aside their principled stand on laissez-faire economics, as Trevelyan himself was to do later in India when faced with a similar crisis.
It is this willingness or unwillingness to intervene in market policies which raises the question of blatant anti-Irish racism. Key figures in the British establishment regarded the wholescale starvation, death and emigration of the Irish as an economic and political bonus. They could achieve the clearing of land, consolidate estates, and quash a rebellious people.
The English were in their own eyes a civilising force on Earth and as the Times eloquently put it in February 1847:
``Before our mercifully intervention, the Irish nation were a wretched, indolent, half-starved tribe of savages, ages before Julius Caesar landed on this isle, and that, notwithstanding a gradual improvement upon the naked savagery, they have never approached the standard of civilised world.''
An economic advisor to the government, Nassau Senior, is reported as saying: ``that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good''.
By Aengus O Snodaigh
In a series of articles Aengus O Snodaigh in this the 150th anniversary looks at the various aspects of the Great Hunger: the potato, death, fever, workhouses, coffin ships, relief works and the response, or lack of it, from Ireland's imperial masters.
Blatant anti-Irish racism
The Famine did not occur in a vacuum, and the lack of urgency by the English government in tackling it can be attributed to many factors not least of which were racism, free market capitalism and the changed position of Ireland after the Act of Union 1800.
Having lost its `own' parliament Ireland had less representatives per head of population than England, its MPs were in the main Protestant landed gentry who had England's not Ireland's interests at heart.
Providence sent the potato blight, but England made the Famine
James Connolly
Throughout the Famine all legislation and policy emanated from Westminster, while dire warnings from relief commissioners and others were ignored. After 1847 they threw the financial burden for Famine relief exclusively onto the Irish taxpayers - thus washing their hands of it. They were in fact adhering to the views of The Times which argued that `English' taxpayers' money spent on Irish Famine relief was money wasted.
The difference of attitude and implementation of Poor Law in England and Ireland was commented on by a committee of inquiry in County Clare in 1848.
``Whether as regards the plain principles of humanity, or the literal text and admitted principle of the Poor Law of 1847, a neglect of public duty has occurred and has occassioned a state of things disgraceful to a civilised age and country, for which some authority ought to be held responsible, and would long since have been held responsible had these things occurred in any union in England.''
While the enormity of the task facing any government is to be appreciated when attributing blame for the deaths and destruction in Ireland the British government stands condemned by its genocidal tactics regarding Ireland in those years.
One fact can demolish any sympathetic hearing which they or their supporters later sought. The sum total of the humanitarian or Famine relief by the English government represented one half of one per cent of Britain's GNP (gross national product) or less than 3% of their expenditure.
Grain imports and exports 1844-'48
Year Exports (tons) Imports (tons)*
1844 424,000 30,000
1845 513,000 28,000
1846 284,000 197,000
1847 146,000 909,000
1848 314,000 439,000
*Mainly Indian meal (maize) and wheat. Source: Bourke, 1993
Approximately £7 million was provided by Westminster during the Famine years, a figure which drew Archbishop McHale of Tuam to draw the unfavourable comparison with the £20 million they paid in compensation to slave owners when slavery was abolished in 1836, or the £70 million spent within a few years on the futile Crimean War.
The attitude and the blatant racism of many of the English decision makers and their total adherence to free market capitalism left people to starve. Laissez-faire economic principles, yesteryear's Thatcherite policies, dictated that intervention would upset the equilibrium of the market. This policy meant that merchants exporting food from Ireland sought the markets for their produce where the price was highest - overseas. Despite what revisionists would have us believe vast amounts of food left Ireland annually (see table).
Protected by the over 100,000 soldiers quartered in Ireland convoys of food were transported to markets overseas. Millions of tons of flour, grain, meat, poultry and dairy products were `escorted' under gunpoint away from the starving millions. The Waterford Harbour British army commissariat officer wrote to the British Treasury on April 24 1846:
``The barges leave Clonmel once a week for this place, with the export supplies under convoy which, last Tuesday, consisted of two, 50 cavalry, and 80 infantry escorting them on the banks of the Suir as far as Carrick.''
Even those who took the initiative of arranging their own imports, smuggling, suffered at the hands of an English government which would not tolerate any interference in their economic policy. In January 1849 the Coastguard seized the Belmullet fishing fleet for off-loading flour from a passing ship. The relief from famine which fishing gave the people of Belmullet, Country Mayo, was now denied them.
In times past in Ireland, and in other arenas of their imperial adventure, the English were more than willing to set aside their principled stand on laissez-faire economics, as Trevelyan himself was to do later in India when faced with a similar crisis.
It is this willingness or unwillingness to intervene in market policies which raises the question of blatant anti-Irish racism. Key figures in the British establishment regarded the wholescale starvation, death and emigration of the Irish as an economic and political bonus. They could achieve the clearing of land, consolidate estates, and quash a rebellious people.
The English were in their own eyes a civilising force on Earth and as the Times eloquently put it in February 1847:
``Before our mercifully intervention, the Irish nation were a wretched, indolent, half-starved tribe of savages, ages before Julius Caesar landed on this isle, and that, notwithstanding a gradual improvement upon the naked savagery, they have never approached the standard of civilised world.''
An economic advisor to the government, Nassau Senior, is reported as saying: ``that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good''.
By Aengus O Snodaigh