Escaping a Deadly World-View

The Irish and the Spud

What happened in Ireland during the potato famine is reasonably well known.  Why it happened in the first place is more of a mystery.  Historians can point to many causes.  But it is the broad brush question that puzzles: why did famine overtake the island? 

Historian A N. Wilson puts the issue this way:

The population of Ireland by 1845 had probably reached some 8.3 million.  True, it had increased dramatically over the years, as had the populations of other European countries, but apart from isolated cases of hunger in times of bad harvest, cases which could be (and usually had been dealt with by the charity of landlords or others in the locality, there was no obvious sense in which this was an island incapable of feeding itself.  'There was no evidence that pre-famine Ireland was overpopulated in any useful sense of that word.'  [A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Arrow Books/Random House, 2003), p.77.]

Historical causation is a minefield.  More often than not causation is a complex, multivalent hydra.  Doubtless this is true with respect to the terrible Irish famine and the consequent horrendous loss of life.  The superficial (and immediate) cause, however, was the widespread dependence upon potatoes. 

When the potato blight hit, and successive plantings and crops of the legume failed (1845-50), the landowning aristocracy and those farmers working more than twenty acres of land, were able to survive in the main.  Infrastructure, however, was pathetically backwards in many cases.
  There were only 400 miles of railway in the whole country.  There were no ports on the west coast.  There were virtually no harbours into which grain ships could pull in, moor, and unload. 

One of the major problems was that the vulnerable farmers, the small-lot diggers, were (for whatever reason) unable to help themselves.  A. N. Wilson puts the problem this way:

The big divide in Irish society was not so much between landlord and tenant as between those with at least twenty acres and those with less or none.  The great majority of Irish peasants farmed little strips of land, and their only crop was the potato.  Few of them it would seem ever went fishing, on the plenteous inland waters of Ireland, nor did they put to sea as the Welsh, Scotch and Cornish had done, time out of mind, returning with plentiful supplies of fish.  [Ibid., p.77f.]

Here is an additional conundrum.  Why were so many Irish tenant and peasant farmers so passive when it came to survival?  Where were the village leaders?  The clergy? The prominent families who could have given leadership.  One interesting curio is that there is nothing lacking in Irish genes and mind when the Irishman left Ireland and migrated to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.  Our own family were migrating Irish poor.  Our great, great grandfather could neither read nor write.  But he ended up breaking in a farm of over 600 acres.  In their new land, Irish migrants were hard-working, industrious, manually skillful, and resourceful in the main.  But in Ireland, during the potato famine, not so much.  Why?

Wilson suggests there was something perversely seductive about the spud.  It was the ideal crop for a peasant economy, he reckons.

The potato needed next to no maintenance, as a crop.  You simply planted it, watched it grow, harvested and ate it.  In the intervening months of the year, you could play your fiddle and sing your songs.  What else was there to do?  . . . .

It was simply appalling back luck that this very deprived and numerous group of people subsisted on one tuber alone which, since its introduction in the seventeenth century, had given no sight or indication that it would fail.  It was the reliability of the spud, as well as the ease of growing it, which made it the favoured peasant food.  Two million acres of Ireland were given over to the potatoes.  Three million people ate nothing else.  Nothing.  (Adult males consumed between twelve and fourteen pounds daily.  [Ibid., p. 78.  Emphasis, author's.]

Those forced-migrant peasants who made it to the New World proved to be tough, resourceful, durable, and rapidly became self-made men and women.  Why not whilst they were in their homeland?  That was the real tragedy of the Potato Famine.