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Colour & Activity
Contact
Crafts
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Calendar Dolch Words
Freebies
Gallery
Games
Health
Homeschooling
Kids Fun Pages
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The Great Irish Famine Back to Ireland Main Download this eBook |
Detailed statistics of the population of Ireland since 1841 are available at Irish
Population Analysis.
Perhaps the best-known estimates of deaths at a county level are those by Joel Mokyr. The range
of Mokyr's mortality figures goes from 1.1 million to 1.5 million Famine deaths in Ireland between
1846 and 1851. Mokyr produced two sets of data which contained an upper-bound and lower-
bound estimate, which showed not much difference in regional patterns. Because of such
anomalies, Cormac Ó Gráda, revisited the work of S. H. Cousen's. Cousen's estimates of mortality
was to rely heavily on retrospective information contained in the 1851 census. The death tables,
contained in the 1851 census have been rightly criticised, as under-estimating the true extent of
mortality, Cousen's mortality of 800,000 is now regarded as much too low. There were a number
of reasons for this, because the information was gathered from the surviving householders and
others and having to look back over the previous ten years, it underestimates the true extent of
disease and mortality. Death and emigration had also cleared away entire families, leaving few
or no survivors to answer the questions on the census.
Another area of uncertainty lies in the descriptions of disease given by tenants as to the cause of
their relatives' deaths. Though Wilde's work has been rightly criticised as under-estimating the true
extents of mortality it does provide a framework for the medical history of the Great Famine. The
diseases that badly affected the population fell into two categories, famine induced diseases and
diseases of nutritional deficiency. Of the nutritional deficiency diseases the most commonly
experienced were starvation and marasmus, as well as condition called at the time dropsy.
Dropsy was a popular name given for the symptoms of several diseases, one of which,
kwashiorkor, is associated with starvation. The greatest mortality, however, was not from
nutritional deficiency diseases, but from famine induced ailments. The malnourished are very
vulnerable to infections; therefore, they were more severe when they occurred. Measles,
diarrhoeal diseases, tuberculosis, most respiratory infections, whooping cough, many intestinal
parasites, and cholera were all strongly conditioned by nutritional status. Potentially lethal
diseases, such as smallpox and influenza, were so virulent that their spread was independent of
nutrition.
A significant cause spreading disease during the Famine was "social dislocation." The best example
of this phenomenon was fever, which exacted the greatest toll of death. In the popular mind, as
well as among much medical opinion, fever and famine are closely related. This view was not
wholly mistaken, but the most critical connection was the congregating of the hungry at soup
kitchens, food depots, overcrowded work houses where conditions were ideal for spreading
infectious diseases such as typhus, typhoid and relapsing fever. As to the diarrhoeal diseases, their
presence was the result of poor hygiene, bad sanitation and dietary changes. The concluding
attack on a population incapacitated by famine was delivered by Asiatic cholera. Cholera had
visited Ireland, briefly in the 1830's. But in the following decade it spread uncontrollably across Asia,
through Europe, and into Britain and finally reached Ireland in 1849.
On the 1851 census both Cormac Ó Gráda & Joel Mokry would also describe it as a famous but
flawed source. They would contend that the combination of institutional and individuals figures
gives "an incomplete and biased count" of fatalities during the famine. Ó Gráda referencing the
work of W. A. MacArthur, writes, specialists have long known the Irish death tables left a lot to be
desired in terms of accuracy. As a result Ó Gráda says to take the Tables of Death at face value
would be a grave mistake, as they seriously under count the number of deaths both before and
during the famine.
In 1851, the census commissioners collected information on the number who died in each family
since 1841, the cause, season and year of death. Its disputed findings were as follows: 21,770 total
deaths from starvation in the previous decade, and 400,720 deaths from disease. Listed diseases
were fever, dysentery, cholera, smallpox and influenza; the first two being the main killers (222,021
and 93,232). The commissioners acknowledged that their figures were incomplete and that the
true number of deaths was probably higher: "The greater the amount of destitution of mortality...
the less will be the amount of recorded deaths derived through any household form; - for not only
were whole families swept away by disease...but whole villages were effaced from off the land."
A later historian has this to say: "In 1851, the Census Commissioners attempted to produce a table
of mortality for each year since 1841... The statistics provided were flawed and probably under-
estimated the level of mortality..."
Other, perhaps less reliable and likely underestimates are that the event led to the deaths of
approximately one million people through starvation and disease; a further million are thought to
have emigrated as a result of the famine.[126] Some scholars estimate that the population of
Ireland was reduced by 20 to 25 Percent. All of this occurred while taxes, rents, and food exports
were being collected and sent to British landlords, in an amount surpassing £6 million.
Aftermath : Main article: Legacy of the Great Irish Famine
Consequently, later mini-famines made only minimal effect and are generally forgotten, except
by historians. By the 1911 census, the island of Ireland's population had fallen to 4.4 million, about
the same as the population in 1800 and 2000 and only a half of its peak population.
Judgement of the government's handling of the Famine
Contemporary
Contemporary opinion was sharply critical of the Russell government's response to and
management of the crisis. From the start, there were accusations that the government failed to
grasp the magnitude of the disaster. Sir James Graham, who had served as Home Secretary in Sir
Robert Peel's late government, wrote to Peel that, in his opinion, "the real extent and magnitude
of the Irish difficulty are underestimated by the Government, and cannot be met by measures
within the strict rule of economical science."
This criticism was not confined to outside critics. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon,
wrote a letter to Russell on 26 April 1849, urging that the government propose additional relief
measures: "I do not think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering
as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination." Also in 1849 the
Chief Poor Law Commissioner, Edward Twistleton, resigned in protest over the Rate-in-Aid Act,
which provided additional funds for the Poor Law through a 6p in the pound levy on all rateable
properties in Ireland. Twisleton testified that "comparatively trifling sums were required for Britain to
spare itself the deep disgrace of permitting its miserable fellow subjects to die of starvation."
According to Peter Gray, in his book The Irish Famine, the government spent seven million pounds for
relief in Ireland between 1845 and 1850, "representing less than half of one percent of the British gross
national product over five years. Contemporaries noted the sharp contrast with the 20 million Pounds
compensation given to West Indian slave-owners in the 1830s."
Other critics maintained that even after the government recognised the scope of the crisis, it
failed to take sufficient steps to address it. John Mitchel, one of the leaders of the Young Ireland
Movement, wrote the following in 1860:
"I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and
fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her
people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a 'dispensation of Providence;' and
ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe;
yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud;
second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the
famine."
Still other critics saw reflected in the government's response the government's attitude to the so-
called "Irish Question." Nassau Senior, an economics professor at Oxford University, wrote that the
Famine "would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do
any good." In 1848, Denis Shine Lawlor suggested that Russell was a student of the Elizabethan
poet Edmund Spenser, who had calculated "how far English colonisation and English policy might
be most effectively carried out by Irish starvation."Charles Trevelyan, the civil servant with most
direct responsibility for the government's handling of the famine, described it in 1848 as "a direct
stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence", which laid bare "the deep and inveterate root of
social evil"; the Famine, he affirmed, was "the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is
likely to be effected. God grant that the generation to which this opportunity has been offered
may rightly perform its part..."
Historical
Christine Kinealy expresses the consensus of historians when she states that "the major tragedy of
the Irish Famine of 1845–52 marked a watershed in modern Irish history. Its occurrence, however,
was neither inevitable nor unavoidable."[135] The underlying factors which combined to cause the
famine were aggravated by an inadequate government response. As Kinealy notes,
"...[T]he government had to do something to help alleviate the suffering, the particular nature
of the actual response, especially following 1846, suggests a more covert agenda and
motivation. As the Famine progressed, it became apparent that the government was using its
information not merely to help it formulate its relief policies, but also as an opportunity to
facilitate various long-desired changes within Ireland. These included population control and the
consolidation of property through various means, including emigration... Despite the
overwhelming evidence of prolonged distress caused by successive years of potato blight, the
underlying philosophy of the relief efforts was that they should be kept to a minimalist level; in
fact they actually decreased as the Famine progressed."
Several writers single out the decision of the government to permit the continued export of food
from Ireland as suggestive of the policy-makers attitude. Leon Uris suggested that "there was
ample food within Ireland", while all the Irish-bred cattle were being shipped off to England.
The following exchange appeared in Act IV of George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman:
MALONE. He will get over it all right enough. Men thrive better on disappointments in love than
on disappointments in money. I daresay you think that sordid; but I know what I'm talking about.
My father died of starvation in Ireland in the black 47, Maybe you've heard of it.
VIOLET. The Famine?
MALONE. [with smouldering passion] No, the starvation. When a country is full of food, and
exporting it, there can be no famine. My father was starved dead; and I was starved out to
America in my mother's arms. English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland. Well, you can keep
Ireland. I and my like are coming back to buy England; and we'll buy the best of it. I want no
middle class properties and no middle class women for Hector. That's straightforward isn't it, like
yourself?
Critics of British imperialism point to the structure of empire as a contributing factor. J. A. Froude
wrote that "England governed Ireland for what she deemed her own interest, making her
calculations on the gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving moral obligations aside, as if
right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the Universe."[139] Dennis Clark, an
Irish-American historian, claimed that the famine was "the culmination of generations of neglect,
misrule and repression. It was an epic of English colonial cruelty and inadequacy. For the landless
cabin dwellers it meant emigration or extinction..."
Suggestions of genocide
Ireland's Holocaust mural on the Ballymurphy Road,[141] Belfast. "An Gorta Mór, Britain's genocide
by starvation, Ireland's holocaust 1845–1849."
The famine is still a controversial event in Irish history. Debate and discussion on the British
government's response to the failure of the potato crop in Ireland and the subsequent large-scale
starvation, and whether or not this constituted genocide, remains a historically and politically-
charged issue.
In 1996 Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote a
report commissioned by the New York-based Irish Famine/Genocide Committee which concluded
that "Clearly, during the years 1845 to 1850, the British government pursued a policy of mass
starvation in Ireland with intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnic and racial group
commonly known as the Irish People.... Therefore, during the years 1845 to 1850 the British
government knowingly pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland that constituted acts of
genocide against the Irish people within the meaning of Article II (c) of the 1948 [Hague]
Genocide Convention."On the strength of Boyle's report, the U.S. state of New Jersey included the
famine in the "Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum" at the secondary tier.
Historian Peter Duffy writes that "The government's crime, which deserves to blacken its name
forever ..." was rooted "in the effort to regenerate Ireland" through "landlord-engineered
replacement of tillage plots with grazing lands" that "took precedence over the obligation to
provide food ... for its starving citizens. It is little wonder that the policy looked to many people like
genocide."
Several commentators have argued that the searing effect of the famine in Irish cultural memory
has effects similar to that of genocide, while maintaining that one did not occur. Robert Kee
suggests that the Famine is seen as "comparable" in its force on "popular national consciousness to
that of the 'final solution' on the Jews," and that it is not "infrequently" thought that the Famine was
something very like, "a form of genocide engineered by the English against the Irish people." This
point was echoed by James Donnelly, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who
wrote in his work Landlord and Tenant in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, "I would draw the following
broad conclusion: at a fairly early stage of the Great Famine the government's abject failure to
stop or even slow down the clearances (evictions) contributed in a major way to enshrining the
idea of English state-sponsored genocide in Irish popular mind. Or perhaps one should say in the
Irish mind, for this was a notion that appealed to many educated and discriminating men and
women, and not only to the revolutionary minority...And it is also my contention that while
genocide was not in fact committed, what happened during and as a result of the clearances
had the look of genocide to a great many Irish..."[133]
Historian Cormac Ó Gráda disagreed that the famine was genocide: first, that "genocide includes
murderous intent and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of
the day sought the extermination of the Irish"; second, that most people in Whitehall "hoped for
better times in Ireland" and third, that the claim of genocide overlooks "the enormous challenges
facing relief efforts, both central, local, public and private". Ó Gráda thinks that a case of neglect is
easier to sustain than that of genocide
Well-known Irish columnist and song-writer John Waters has described the famine as the most
violent event in a history which was characterised by violence of every imaginable kind and
stated that the famine "was an act of genocide, driven by racism and justified by ideology",
arguing that the destruction of Ireland's cultural, political and economic diversity and the reduction
of the Irish economy to basically a mono-cultural dependence was a holocaust waiting to
happen. Waters contends that arguments about the source of the blight or the practicability of
aid efforts once the Famine had taken hold were irrelevant to the meaning of the experience.
Memorials
Further information: List of memorials to the Great Famine
Famine Memorial in Dublin
The Great Famine is memorialised in many locations throughout Ireland, especially in those regions
that suffered the greatest losses, and also in cities overseas with large populations descended
from Irish immigrants. These include, at Custom House Quays, Dublin, the thin sculptural figures, by
artist Rowan Gillespie, who stand as if walking towards the emigration ships on the Dublin
Quayside.
See also
* Great Irish Famine (1740–1741)
* Irish Famine (1879)
* Legacy of the Great Irish Famine (continuation of this article)
* Highland Potato Famine (agrarian crisis in Scotland at the same time)
* European Potato Famine (the wider agrarian crisis in Europe at the same time)
* List of natural disasters in the United Kingdom
* "Fields of Athenry," a popular song about the famine
* List of famines
* Holodomor, a 1930s famine in Ukraine, the causes of which are also the subject of debate
Population Analysis.
Perhaps the best-known estimates of deaths at a county level are those by Joel Mokyr. The range
of Mokyr's mortality figures goes from 1.1 million to 1.5 million Famine deaths in Ireland between
1846 and 1851. Mokyr produced two sets of data which contained an upper-bound and lower-
bound estimate, which showed not much difference in regional patterns. Because of such
anomalies, Cormac Ó Gráda, revisited the work of S. H. Cousen's. Cousen's estimates of mortality
was to rely heavily on retrospective information contained in the 1851 census. The death tables,
contained in the 1851 census have been rightly criticised, as under-estimating the true extent of
mortality, Cousen's mortality of 800,000 is now regarded as much too low. There were a number
of reasons for this, because the information was gathered from the surviving householders and
others and having to look back over the previous ten years, it underestimates the true extent of
disease and mortality. Death and emigration had also cleared away entire families, leaving few
or no survivors to answer the questions on the census.
Another area of uncertainty lies in the descriptions of disease given by tenants as to the cause of
their relatives' deaths. Though Wilde's work has been rightly criticised as under-estimating the true
extents of mortality it does provide a framework for the medical history of the Great Famine. The
diseases that badly affected the population fell into two categories, famine induced diseases and
diseases of nutritional deficiency. Of the nutritional deficiency diseases the most commonly
experienced were starvation and marasmus, as well as condition called at the time dropsy.
Dropsy was a popular name given for the symptoms of several diseases, one of which,
kwashiorkor, is associated with starvation. The greatest mortality, however, was not from
nutritional deficiency diseases, but from famine induced ailments. The malnourished are very
vulnerable to infections; therefore, they were more severe when they occurred. Measles,
diarrhoeal diseases, tuberculosis, most respiratory infections, whooping cough, many intestinal
parasites, and cholera were all strongly conditioned by nutritional status. Potentially lethal
diseases, such as smallpox and influenza, were so virulent that their spread was independent of
nutrition.
A significant cause spreading disease during the Famine was "social dislocation." The best example
of this phenomenon was fever, which exacted the greatest toll of death. In the popular mind, as
well as among much medical opinion, fever and famine are closely related. This view was not
wholly mistaken, but the most critical connection was the congregating of the hungry at soup
kitchens, food depots, overcrowded work houses where conditions were ideal for spreading
infectious diseases such as typhus, typhoid and relapsing fever. As to the diarrhoeal diseases, their
presence was the result of poor hygiene, bad sanitation and dietary changes. The concluding
attack on a population incapacitated by famine was delivered by Asiatic cholera. Cholera had
visited Ireland, briefly in the 1830's. But in the following decade it spread uncontrollably across Asia,
through Europe, and into Britain and finally reached Ireland in 1849.
On the 1851 census both Cormac Ó Gráda & Joel Mokry would also describe it as a famous but
flawed source. They would contend that the combination of institutional and individuals figures
gives "an incomplete and biased count" of fatalities during the famine. Ó Gráda referencing the
work of W. A. MacArthur, writes, specialists have long known the Irish death tables left a lot to be
desired in terms of accuracy. As a result Ó Gráda says to take the Tables of Death at face value
would be a grave mistake, as they seriously under count the number of deaths both before and
during the famine.
In 1851, the census commissioners collected information on the number who died in each family
since 1841, the cause, season and year of death. Its disputed findings were as follows: 21,770 total
deaths from starvation in the previous decade, and 400,720 deaths from disease. Listed diseases
were fever, dysentery, cholera, smallpox and influenza; the first two being the main killers (222,021
and 93,232). The commissioners acknowledged that their figures were incomplete and that the
true number of deaths was probably higher: "The greater the amount of destitution of mortality...
the less will be the amount of recorded deaths derived through any household form; - for not only
were whole families swept away by disease...but whole villages were effaced from off the land."
A later historian has this to say: "In 1851, the Census Commissioners attempted to produce a table
of mortality for each year since 1841... The statistics provided were flawed and probably under-
estimated the level of mortality..."
Other, perhaps less reliable and likely underestimates are that the event led to the deaths of
approximately one million people through starvation and disease; a further million are thought to
have emigrated as a result of the famine.[126] Some scholars estimate that the population of
Ireland was reduced by 20 to 25 Percent. All of this occurred while taxes, rents, and food exports
were being collected and sent to British landlords, in an amount surpassing £6 million.
Aftermath : Main article: Legacy of the Great Irish Famine
Consequently, later mini-famines made only minimal effect and are generally forgotten, except
by historians. By the 1911 census, the island of Ireland's population had fallen to 4.4 million, about
the same as the population in 1800 and 2000 and only a half of its peak population.
Judgement of the government's handling of the Famine
Contemporary
Contemporary opinion was sharply critical of the Russell government's response to and
management of the crisis. From the start, there were accusations that the government failed to
grasp the magnitude of the disaster. Sir James Graham, who had served as Home Secretary in Sir
Robert Peel's late government, wrote to Peel that, in his opinion, "the real extent and magnitude
of the Irish difficulty are underestimated by the Government, and cannot be met by measures
within the strict rule of economical science."
This criticism was not confined to outside critics. The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon,
wrote a letter to Russell on 26 April 1849, urging that the government propose additional relief
measures: "I do not think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering
as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination." Also in 1849 the
Chief Poor Law Commissioner, Edward Twistleton, resigned in protest over the Rate-in-Aid Act,
which provided additional funds for the Poor Law through a 6p in the pound levy on all rateable
properties in Ireland. Twisleton testified that "comparatively trifling sums were required for Britain to
spare itself the deep disgrace of permitting its miserable fellow subjects to die of starvation."
According to Peter Gray, in his book The Irish Famine, the government spent seven million pounds for
relief in Ireland between 1845 and 1850, "representing less than half of one percent of the British gross
national product over five years. Contemporaries noted the sharp contrast with the 20 million Pounds
compensation given to West Indian slave-owners in the 1830s."
Other critics maintained that even after the government recognised the scope of the crisis, it
failed to take sufficient steps to address it. John Mitchel, one of the leaders of the Young Ireland
Movement, wrote the following in 1860:
"I have called it an artificial famine: that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and
fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her
people and many more. The English, indeed, call the famine a 'dispensation of Providence;' and
ascribe it entirely to the blight on potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe;
yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first, a fraud;
second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the
famine."
Still other critics saw reflected in the government's response the government's attitude to the so-
called "Irish Question." Nassau Senior, an economics professor at Oxford University, wrote that the
Famine "would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do
any good." In 1848, Denis Shine Lawlor suggested that Russell was a student of the Elizabethan
poet Edmund Spenser, who had calculated "how far English colonisation and English policy might
be most effectively carried out by Irish starvation."Charles Trevelyan, the civil servant with most
direct responsibility for the government's handling of the famine, described it in 1848 as "a direct
stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence", which laid bare "the deep and inveterate root of
social evil"; the Famine, he affirmed, was "the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is
likely to be effected. God grant that the generation to which this opportunity has been offered
may rightly perform its part..."
Historical
Christine Kinealy expresses the consensus of historians when she states that "the major tragedy of
the Irish Famine of 1845–52 marked a watershed in modern Irish history. Its occurrence, however,
was neither inevitable nor unavoidable."[135] The underlying factors which combined to cause the
famine were aggravated by an inadequate government response. As Kinealy notes,
"...[T]he government had to do something to help alleviate the suffering, the particular nature
of the actual response, especially following 1846, suggests a more covert agenda and
motivation. As the Famine progressed, it became apparent that the government was using its
information not merely to help it formulate its relief policies, but also as an opportunity to
facilitate various long-desired changes within Ireland. These included population control and the
consolidation of property through various means, including emigration... Despite the
overwhelming evidence of prolonged distress caused by successive years of potato blight, the
underlying philosophy of the relief efforts was that they should be kept to a minimalist level; in
fact they actually decreased as the Famine progressed."
Several writers single out the decision of the government to permit the continued export of food
from Ireland as suggestive of the policy-makers attitude. Leon Uris suggested that "there was
ample food within Ireland", while all the Irish-bred cattle were being shipped off to England.
The following exchange appeared in Act IV of George Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman:
MALONE. He will get over it all right enough. Men thrive better on disappointments in love than
on disappointments in money. I daresay you think that sordid; but I know what I'm talking about.
My father died of starvation in Ireland in the black 47, Maybe you've heard of it.
VIOLET. The Famine?
MALONE. [with smouldering passion] No, the starvation. When a country is full of food, and
exporting it, there can be no famine. My father was starved dead; and I was starved out to
America in my mother's arms. English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland. Well, you can keep
Ireland. I and my like are coming back to buy England; and we'll buy the best of it. I want no
middle class properties and no middle class women for Hector. That's straightforward isn't it, like
yourself?
Critics of British imperialism point to the structure of empire as a contributing factor. J. A. Froude
wrote that "England governed Ireland for what she deemed her own interest, making her
calculations on the gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving moral obligations aside, as if
right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the Universe."[139] Dennis Clark, an
Irish-American historian, claimed that the famine was "the culmination of generations of neglect,
misrule and repression. It was an epic of English colonial cruelty and inadequacy. For the landless
cabin dwellers it meant emigration or extinction..."
Suggestions of genocide
Ireland's Holocaust mural on the Ballymurphy Road,[141] Belfast. "An Gorta Mór, Britain's genocide
by starvation, Ireland's holocaust 1845–1849."
The famine is still a controversial event in Irish history. Debate and discussion on the British
government's response to the failure of the potato crop in Ireland and the subsequent large-scale
starvation, and whether or not this constituted genocide, remains a historically and politically-
charged issue.
In 1996 Francis A. Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote a
report commissioned by the New York-based Irish Famine/Genocide Committee which concluded
that "Clearly, during the years 1845 to 1850, the British government pursued a policy of mass
starvation in Ireland with intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnic and racial group
commonly known as the Irish People.... Therefore, during the years 1845 to 1850 the British
government knowingly pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland that constituted acts of
genocide against the Irish people within the meaning of Article II (c) of the 1948 [Hague]
Genocide Convention."On the strength of Boyle's report, the U.S. state of New Jersey included the
famine in the "Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum" at the secondary tier.
Historian Peter Duffy writes that "The government's crime, which deserves to blacken its name
forever ..." was rooted "in the effort to regenerate Ireland" through "landlord-engineered
replacement of tillage plots with grazing lands" that "took precedence over the obligation to
provide food ... for its starving citizens. It is little wonder that the policy looked to many people like
genocide."
Several commentators have argued that the searing effect of the famine in Irish cultural memory
has effects similar to that of genocide, while maintaining that one did not occur. Robert Kee
suggests that the Famine is seen as "comparable" in its force on "popular national consciousness to
that of the 'final solution' on the Jews," and that it is not "infrequently" thought that the Famine was
something very like, "a form of genocide engineered by the English against the Irish people." This
point was echoed by James Donnelly, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who
wrote in his work Landlord and Tenant in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, "I would draw the following
broad conclusion: at a fairly early stage of the Great Famine the government's abject failure to
stop or even slow down the clearances (evictions) contributed in a major way to enshrining the
idea of English state-sponsored genocide in Irish popular mind. Or perhaps one should say in the
Irish mind, for this was a notion that appealed to many educated and discriminating men and
women, and not only to the revolutionary minority...And it is also my contention that while
genocide was not in fact committed, what happened during and as a result of the clearances
had the look of genocide to a great many Irish..."[133]
Historian Cormac Ó Gráda disagreed that the famine was genocide: first, that "genocide includes
murderous intent and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of
the day sought the extermination of the Irish"; second, that most people in Whitehall "hoped for
better times in Ireland" and third, that the claim of genocide overlooks "the enormous challenges
facing relief efforts, both central, local, public and private". Ó Gráda thinks that a case of neglect is
easier to sustain than that of genocide
Well-known Irish columnist and song-writer John Waters has described the famine as the most
violent event in a history which was characterised by violence of every imaginable kind and
stated that the famine "was an act of genocide, driven by racism and justified by ideology",
arguing that the destruction of Ireland's cultural, political and economic diversity and the reduction
of the Irish economy to basically a mono-cultural dependence was a holocaust waiting to
happen. Waters contends that arguments about the source of the blight or the practicability of
aid efforts once the Famine had taken hold were irrelevant to the meaning of the experience.
Memorials
Further information: List of memorials to the Great Famine
Famine Memorial in Dublin
The Great Famine is memorialised in many locations throughout Ireland, especially in those regions
that suffered the greatest losses, and also in cities overseas with large populations descended
from Irish immigrants. These include, at Custom House Quays, Dublin, the thin sculptural figures, by
artist Rowan Gillespie, who stand as if walking towards the emigration ships on the Dublin
Quayside.
See also
* Great Irish Famine (1740–1741)
* Irish Famine (1879)
* Legacy of the Great Irish Famine (continuation of this article)
* Highland Potato Famine (agrarian crisis in Scotland at the same time)
* European Potato Famine (the wider agrarian crisis in Europe at the same time)
* List of natural disasters in the United Kingdom
* "Fields of Athenry," a popular song about the famine
* List of famines
* Holodomor, a 1930s famine in Ukraine, the causes of which are also the subject of debate
| An article adapted from information provided by Wikipedia Used with Permission |
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