Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843-1850 (review)

Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843-1850, by Peter Gray; pp. ix + 384. Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 1999, £39.50, $49.50.

An gorta m G (the Great Hunger), the Irish Famine of 1845-49, was caused by the potato blight, Phytophthora infestans, which in five successive seasons destroyed the staple food, indeed sometimes the only food, of the Irish peasantry. A population of nearly 8 million shrank to 6.5 million; a million people died, either of hunger or the accompanying "famine fever." The rest emigrated, some to die in "coffin ships" or on arrival in North America. The Famine left a scar on the national psyche that affected Irish attitudes and mores for over a century, and the Irish rural landscape still features abandoned fields, ruined cottages, deserted villages, and "famine graveyards."

Peter Gray does not repeat the story of the Famine, nor does he draw on the numerous eyewitness accounts describing the dead and dying, or the evictions of those no longer able to pay their rent. His subject is rather the political and bureaucratic response to the Famine in London, and among British administrators in Ireland, as ministers and civil servants suggested policies and examined their options.

Robert Peel and the Tories were in office when the first blackened potatoes appeared in August 1845. Lord John Russell's Whig government inherited the crisis on taking office in July 1846, and was thereafter responsible for such measures as were taken or not taken. For Peel and Russell, the Famine was one issue among many, as Gray implicitly reminds us. Peel found it useful in his efforts to abolish the Corn Laws. Russell had worked with Daniel O'Connell in the 1820s to pass the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, and was popular in Ireland, but he failed to develop a consistent Famine policy.

Both Tories and Whigs recognized that the Famine's drastic effects were due to the peasantry's total reliance on the potato, and that this reliance was in turn due to Irish poverty and to the nature of land tenure in Ireland. Most Irish farmers were tenants with no security of tenure. Their rents could be raised arbitrarily, since leases were rare outside Ulster. They could be replaced at any time if a tenant willing to pay a higher rent could be found; and the landlord did not have to compensate for improvements made by the tenant. The poverty and improvidence of many landlords was a further problem. But both political parties were too timid to interfere with a landlord's right to do as he pleased with his land.

Irish poverty meant that there was very little infrastructure around which relief work could be organized. In the West, the area hardest hit, roads were primitive, and the economy was primarily based on barter. Most tenants had quarter- or half-acre holdings. Their one-room cabins had dirt floors and no chimneys, and even needles were scarcely known. When Peel arranged for "Indian" meal to be distributed, few had any way of turning it into bread or even mush; the ubiquitous but now useless potato pot was their sole culinary device. In her Annals of the Famine in Ireland (1851), Asenath Nicholson, who toured the country distributing relief sent by American Quakers, reprints a list of items owned by the 4,000 inhabitants of a Donegal parish in 1831. The list includes one plow, twenty shovels, seven table-forks, no boots, no clock, no swine, no fruit trees, no turnips, no parsnips, no carrots. No woman had more than one shift; some had none. Most families slept together in a single straw bed. Below the tenantry was a class of day laborers and their families, paupers who lived as best they could in hovels always threatened with demolition.

Since landlords were usually Protestant, and the peasantry Catholic, there was little mutual loyalty...