To an extent this had happened, Catholic Emancipation — giving Catholics equal civil rights — was passed in In short, the years before the famine saw a dramatic rise in the Irish rural population without an equivalent rise in economic opportunity and saw the rural poor increasingly reliant on the potato.
All of these elements helped to exacerbate the famine. The potato blight or Phytophthora infestans is a fungus that attacks the potato plant leaving the potatoes themselves inedible. It spread from North America to Europe in the s, causing severe hardship among the poor. However, Ireland was much harder hit than other countries; with over a million deaths as a result, compared to about , deaths in all of the rest of Europe.
The blight hit Ireland in and in the late summer and autumn of that year, it was found that the potato crop was spoiled by a dark fungus and the potatoes themselves rendered inedible. About half of the crop failed.
This immediately plunged the rural poor into a crisis as they depended almost solely on the potato as their source of food. What little money or saleable goods they had generally went on paying rent. 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. Third, the wages that the government paid on its vast but short-lived public works in the winter of needed to be much higher if those toiling on the public works were going to be able to afford the greatly inflated price of food.
Fourth, the poor-law system of providing relief, either within workhouses or outside them, a system that served as virtually the only form of public assistance from the autumn of onwards, needed to be much less restrictive.
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.
There are regional dimensions to the Holocaust and temporal variations in its incidence, but I am not sure that those perspectives take us very far. Consequently, death rates approached saturation point where there was German occupation.
Neither does it make much sense to speak of age, gender or occupational factors in shaping overall death rates. It is true that those chosen for slave labour were selected on the basis of age, gender and special skills — and these factors could prove vital to the survival of individuals and small groups of survivors.
The remarkable fact about Nazism was how it subordinated major forms of social hierarchy — class, status and gender — to a hierarchy of race. In the case of the Great Famine no reputable historian believes that the British state intended the destruction of the Irish people, and the Famine-Holocaust comparisons provide no support either. Yet one million died. Does intentionality matter? It does matter, for at least three reasons. First, it directly determines the scale of the tragedy.
It is easy to forget that had Germany not lost the war, many more Jews would have been killed, such was the strength of commitment to the Final Solution. By contrast, when the Irish economy recovered some strength at the end of the s the crisis was largely, though not wholly over — to the evident relief, not only of people in Ireland but of British policy makers also.
Second, the cruelty, often wanton cruelty which attached to the treatment of Jews has virtually no parallels in the Irish case. We know much, for instance, about the ineffectual role of medicine during the Great Famine, despite the zeal of many Irish doctors, but no one has uncovered cases of medical experiments at the expense of Famine victims. True enough, evictions were heartless affairs and on a massive scale, but even in these cases there was the assumption that alternatives, however bleak, existed.
Third, intentionality is relevant to the question of responsibility, a question inextricably bound up with the politics of memory. Mitchell makes a useful distinction, albeit implicitly, between causation and responsibility. The Famine was an ecological disaster but it was not simply that.
I think it is important to distinguish between 3 distinct notions: causation, responsibility and blame. And at the bar of history we might want to call to account, not only Lord John Russell and his Whig administration, but a host of other historical actors as well, from landlords to Young Irelanders and the strong farmers and merchants of eastern Ireland. But to narrow the focus simply to the role of the British government for a moment: for all the massive irresponsibility and buck-passing that characterised the five years of crisis, the state succeeded in organising public relief schemes that employed three-quarters of a million workers, and at one point was responsible for feeding three million people on a daily basis.
Have a question about Irish History or studying at Queen's? Have an opinion? Check out the Discussion Forum!! Approach to Crisis II. Workhouses and ghettoes III. Mortality IV. Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
About 33 million Americans can trace their roots to Ireland, the small island off the western coast of Europe, which has a population of just 4. The Irish, like many immigrant groups arriving in America, were fleeing hardships at home, only to endure further troubles Scientists have long known that it was a strain of Phytophthora infestans or P.
The refugees seeking haven in America were poor and disease-ridden. They threatened to take jobs away from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime.
They were accused of More than , Irishmen, most of whom were recent immigrants and many of whom were not yet U. Some joined out of loyalty to their new home. Others hoped that such a conspicuous display of patriotism might put a stop to The discrimination that Irish immigrants encountered in their new home was hardly subtle.
0コメント