The high moral ground upon which the English would stand is in fact a high mound of Iris dead. Contemporary knowledge of the
Starvation is little more than a pretty curtain lowered by the English and their sympathizers to hide the fearful truth. That curtain
has been surprising effective; an accurate accounting of the Starvation is not easily acquired. Sweep that curtain aside, and a bitter
tale is found.
An example, not to be found in the most often used reference books, reveals that in the third year of the Starvation f 1845-1850
hundreds of thousands suffered wretched deaths from starvation and disease, as had unrecorded thousands in the years before.
The dead were buried in mass graves or, likely as not, left to the rats where they fell. By the third year of the Starvation the
English government acknowledged the problem if not its extent. In that third year, as in those before and those to come, there was
no lack of food in England or even Ireland itself. In that third year of disaster, like blood from a mortal wound, food flowed out of
Ireland in scandalous amounts. From Cork alone, on November 14, 1848, the following was exported:
147 bales of bacon
120 casks and 135 barrels of pork
5 casks of ham
149 casks miscellaneous provisions
1996 sacks and 950 barrels of oats
300 bags of flour
300 head of cattle
239 sheep
9,398 firkins of butter
542 boxes of eggs
Contemporary accounts do not even hint of the food bounty which surrounded the millions who starved. Who is to be held accountable for such disaster? No one at all, by the currently accepted version of Irish history. A brief review of commonly available sources reveals inaccurate glosses of the tragedy which neither fix responsibility nor even suggest culpability.
Collier'‘s Encyclopedia vaguely informs that "This trend (against Union) was hastened greatly by the failure of the potato crop which resulted in the death of almost 250,000 peasants and the bankruptcy of many of the landlords. The sale of land by landlords and the raising of rents by the land speculators caused the emigration of another million of the population." This is the entire Collier's treatment of a five year long tragedy. At least the Collier's editors were of stout enough material that they dared advance a hard, if woefully underestimated, death toll.
The editors of New Encyclopedia Britannica appeared to be made of weaker stuff. "But these advantages (free trade between Ireland and England) were not enough to offset the disastrous effect upon Ireland of exposure to the full impact of Britain's industrial revolution. Within half a century agricultural produce had dropped in value, estate rentals declined, while the rural population increased substantially. When the potato, the staple food of rural Ireland, rotted in the ground through the onset of blight in the mid-1840's, thousands died of starvation and fever in the Great Famine that ensued, and thousand more fled abroad." While equivocally laying off blame to the industrial revolution, the Britannica editors unconscionable understate the Starvation's cost in human lives.
Very much more accurately informing us of the death toll, the editors of The World Book Encyclopedia find nothing to blame but plant disease. "During the early 1800's, Ireland's population grew rapidly. About half the people lived on small farms that produced little income. Others leased land on estates and had to pay high rents to landlords. Because of their poverty, most of the Irish people depended upon potatoes for food. But from 1845 to 1847, Ireland's potato crop failed because of plant disease. About 750,000 people died of starvation or disease, and hundreds of thousands more left the country."
Online encyclopedias off even less. The Hutchinson Encyclopedia, available through CompuServe, says of the Starvation: "During another famine 1846-51, 1.5 million people emigrated, mostly to the USA." The "1846-51 Potato famine resulted in widespread death and emigration. (The Irish population (was) reduced by 20%."
The consistent aspect of the treatments is that each more closely corresponds to fiction than to the actual events. Thus, the lie is perpetuated through the unwitting aid of the average student and the casual researcher. Worse, the true history of the Starvation has been denied and suppressed.
R. Dudley Edwards states, "Among the emigrants to the United States, the myth of England's responsibility for the famine became generally accepted..."(Edwards, A New History of Ireland). Edwards also claims that upon hearing of the potato crop disaster in 1845, English Prime Minister Robert Peel "coolly (sic) took precautions." At least Edwards' outrageous claims and half-truths allude to English responsibility. That is more than may be claimed for the editors of the encyclopedias.
The truth of the Starvation is attended by very much more complicated and frightful circumstances than those generally acknowledged to be true. "‘It was an experience for the Irish people that is sometimes seen as comparable in its impact on popular national consciousness to that of the German ‘final solution' on the Jews." (Kee, Ireland)
Potato blight was neither an unknown nor uncommon occurrence in the mid-nineteenth century. It manifested itself in the United States and in England as well as Ireland. Certainly, the tenuous hand-to-mouth existence of Irish tenant farmers and their absolute reliance upon the potato as their staple food was common knowledge. The potato crop failure of 1845, which afflicted both Ireland and England, was not unexpected and its impact was foreseen by many, including some inside the English government. Officials of the English government had, fifteen years earlier, predicted such a calamity in the face of the rapid growth of the Irish population.
The severity of the Irish plight was known by the English government from its onset. From September 1845, Prime Minister Robert Peel ordered weekly reports on the potato crop and commissioned a scientific enquiry in October. The English government knew full well that the Irish poor were unable to buy food. Had they that ability, the potato crop failure would have had no more impact in Ireland than it did in England, where even the poor had money enough to buy other food. In the face of its own dire predictions and with sure knowledge that disaster was in the making, the English government publicly disparaged pleas for help as being nothing more than Irish exaggeration.
The Irish had every expectation that help would be forthcoming. In convincing Ireland to enter into The Act of Union of 1880, England argued that the Act would "indissolubly" bind the two "together for better or worse for all eternity." At no time during the Starvation did English actions reflect any such high motivation. Knowing full well the nature and extent of Ireland's plight, while ignoring the duty accepted by them in the Act of Union, the English government's response was, at best, indecisive and ineffective. That its actions would be so are of little wonder for they were founded upon the laissez-faire notion that the English government could not, under any circumstances, give food to the starving Irish.
Prime Minister Robert Peel's "coolly" taken precautions amounted to the ordering of American maize to be stored in depots and sold to the absolutely destitute Irish at low costs, the appointment of a relief commission to administer publics works programs and the removal grain import duties to lower the cost of bread. Peel rejected the common-sense notions of closing Irish ports to export and of conservation of food.
The penniless Irish were little comforted by the import of food to be sold at a "low" cost as Irish food flowed out of Ireland. Still Peel's plan was effective in an unanticipated direction. As a result of his lifting of protectionist grain import tariffs, Peel's government fell. In June 1846, John Russell became prime minister.
Those who may have greeted the news of Peel's fall from power with hope had little understanding of the true power behind the English relief policy. Surviving Peel and maintaining personal control of relief measures under Russell was Charles Trevelyan, permanent head of the Treasury. Trevelyan was the chief architect of the horrific English response to the Irish famine.
Under Peel, Trevelyan resisted selling maize stored in Irish depots for more than two months after the corn was received. When he finally permitted sale of the corn, Trevelyan found the strong demand for it reason enough to suspend sales almost immediately. In May 1846 the depots were opened again to desperate populace who, by then, were attacking carts of grain on their way to export.
The English responses to the disorder, created by Trevelyan's policies, were more promises of help and the passage of "‘Coercion Bill" authorizing special police measures. The aim of that noble bill was , in chief, to prevent property damage arising from the starving's desperate search for food. The grain depots were reopened, now under Russell's government. Trevelyan, who never came to believe the depth or extent of the suffering in Ireland, viewed the great demand at the depots with alarm. Though the English policy of, sometimes, making grain available at low costs did nothing aid the penniless, Trevelyan saw in it the potential for great ruin. Why he should have thought so is not clear for his notion of low cost, market prices plus five percent, provided his program a tidy profit. Still, the greatt demand was, to him, proof positive that some of those buying grain at "low" prices were underserving of such aid. Despite a clear and officially recognized need, Trevelyan again heartlessly closed the depots, not to reopen them until December 1846.
It may be fair said that profit was not Trevelyan's motive in fixing the grain prices. The more accurately described motivation was his deep and abiding antipathy of the Irish. Trevelyan said, at the suggestion of lowering grain prices, "If we make the prices lower, I repeat for the hundredth time that the whole country will come in on us." Trevelyan held the Irish in such low esteem that he refused to consider giving grain to the starving. "If the Irish find out that there are any circumstances in which they can get free government grants we shall have a system of mendicancy such as the world ever knew."
Meanwhile, england quashed outside relief efforts. Food sent to Ireland from the United States was turned away by England. Independent relief efforts organized in America and France were rebuffed. The English justification for blocking food relief, whetherfrom within or without their empire, was a wicked admixture of Malthusian principles and anti-Catholic prejudices. English elites held that the scientific remedy for over-population was mass starvation, which Irish-Catholics had brought upon themselves by irresponsible reproduction. In the larger picture, the immoral English repsonse to the starvation of a people whom they claimed as their own, was but one more battle in the struggle between the heretical Anglican church and papal authority. In fact, the one Anglican bishop (who, as such, automatically held a seat in the House of Lords) who voted in favor of sending food to the starving Irish, was defrocked for so voting.
What of the public works program? it was ill conceived and poorly implemented, too little too late. There were long waiting lists to get into the program. Many starved while waiting. Those fortunate enough to suruvive the wait were not fit enough to long survive the labor. Payments, if forthcoming at all, were often delayed eight weeks. A Catholic priest, secretary to a district relief committee, summarized the dreadful state of the program stating that he "...could at this moment refer to many cases of persons who attended the committee for weeks before they could be admitted on the books, and, when admitted a few days later, had scarcely time (left before dying) to earn themselves the price of a coffin."
The census of 1841 numbered Irish population at 8.2 millions. It was expected that the next census would find a little more than nine million Irish. The Starvation, the mass emigration spawned by it and many deaths on the emigration ships changed that. The actual 1851 census found just over 6.5 millions in Ireland.
The widely-accepted English account of the Starvation must now, at long last, give way to the truth. There is much more to English responsibility for the Starvation even than that told here. As Hibernian Brothers, it is our duty to correct the historical record by learning and teaching the truth of this, one of the most shameful episodes in Western civilization. Hibernians should ever strive to strip away England's false mantle of righteous innocence and to hold it responsible for its evil deeds, past and present.