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Also known as “The Great Hunger”

Monday is St. Patrick’s Day–a day on which, they say, the whole world is Irish. If so, then the whole world ought to know the story of the tragic times that changed the course of Irish history: the 19th-century Irish potato blight.

In the mid-1800s, after centuries of hardship, Ireland suffered a famine that killed more than a million people and drove a million more away. Few people were lucky enough to go untouched. Here’s the story of how politics, poverty, and potatoes combined to change Ireland forever.

Let Them Eat Spuds

The English practice of making life difficult for the Irish began in earnest in the early 16th century, when Henry VIII started kicking Irish Catholic gentry off their estates and handing the keys to his English Protestant friends. Few English lords warmed to the idea of living in Ireland, though. Many simply stayed in England and charged their new Irish tenants rent.

Later, laws designed to move more property to Protestant hands allowed any son who became a Protestant to inherit Dad’s whole estate, while Catholic sons had to divvy the land up. By 1801, the year Ireland became part of Great Britain, Protestants owned all but 5 percent of the Emerald Isle.

While England built factories and modernized its cities, Ireland remained rural, green, and shockingly poor. At least half of Ireland’s 8 million people lived in one-room mud huts, scraping out a bleak existence from the soil. Life was nasty, brutish, and short–not to mention potatocentric. Cheap to cultivate, simple to prepare, and rich with vitamins, the potato was Ireland’s salvation. Millions ate little else.

The Blight Begins

In 1845, September’s seemingly healthy potato crop rotted within days, causing a stink that could be smelled for miles. A deadly airborne fungus, the potato blight, claimed half the harvest. Britain’s Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, tried to avoid a crisis by shipping cheap corn from America. But that ended by the summer of 1846, when England’s new Whig government decided the Irish were better off left alone.

Treasury secretary Charles Trevelyan, now in charge of Ireland’s economy, closed Peel’s corn supply depots and announced that England would not interfere in the “rights of private enterprise.” Instead, Trevelyan proposed a plan for Ireland’s self-sufficiency. Local taxes would fund public works projects, which would provide jobs for workers, who would in turn buy food from local merchants.

The plan was a disaster. When the potato crop failed again–this time completely–panic spread. A Catholic priest wrote to Trevelyan of passing people “seated on the fences of their decaying gardens, wringing their hands and wailing bitterly.” Public works wages were too low to afford both food and rent. And local merchants exported goods, including food, rather than lower prices.

Soup and Sympathy

Though English Quakers and other groups were moved to action by the Irish plight, many English lawmakers felt the Irish should reap what they had sown, even if that meant starvation. For these hardliners, Ireland was a backward place full of lazy, superstitious, Gaelic-speaking rabble-rousers who would surely bite any hand that fed them.

Meanwhile, food riots broke out as starving men and women watched ships loaded with local grain leave for foreign shores. English soldiers, sent to police the Irish mobs, were punished for giving out food to half-dead children. London newspapers published countless sketches of emaciated children scratching in the dirt for edible roots, old women waiting to die, and dead babies in their mothers’ arms. Typhus and cholera spread, and people died in droves.

More American corn, bought by private charities, arrived in early 1847, but the afflicted Irish had no money to buy it. Food was piled high in warehouses while people continued to starve. Finally, the British government approved free soup kitchens run by religious groups and local relief committees. Three million people showed up for a daily ration of soup.

The Great Hunger

Blaming Ireland’s landlords for the whole predicament, Parliament passed the Irish Poor Law Extension Act in June 1847, a proposal to collect £10 million in taxes from property owners to help support relief funds. But people hadn’t paid rent for months. Faced with ruin, landlords were forced to evict tenants. One English landlord was murdered by two Irishmen after he evicted 3,000 people, including 84 widows.

By late summer, the soup kitchens–intended as a temporary measure–were shut down. Homeless and starving, people died on the roadsides, with no one to bury the bodies. Ironically, 1847’s potato crop was healthy, but too small to do any good, because people had eaten the seedling potatoes in desperation.

An insurrection in early 1848 provoked the London Times to complain of the people’s “monstrous ingratitude.” When the potato crop failed again that fall, English compassion had slackened considerably. Another plan to tax property owners only drove people overseas, following the hundreds of thousands who had already fled. For those who couldn’t afford the passage, the horrors mounted. Nearly naked, and without shelter, men, women, and children wandered the countryside until they dropped dead.

Road to Republic

Eventually, after more than a million people had died, and another million had fled, the blight subsided. The horror, and the loss of some 25 percent of the population, dramatically altered the political landscape. Gradually, money from Irish nationalists in America helped fund Charles Stewart Parnell’s Land League, which forced the British government to recognize tenant rights in 1881. Dormant nationalists awoke. The fight for Irish independence had begun.

–Claire Vail

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