To fully understand the meaning of these figures, the vast scale of death and emigration and their disastrous impact on the nation’s development, it is worth reflecting that Ireland is the only country in Europe whose population was higher in the mid-nineteenth century than it is today. But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the massive loss of life is that it happened in the colony closest to the heart of the British Empire – the richest and most powerful force in the world at the time. Nationalists and revisionists may argue over the details – for instance, the role of the landlords in exacerbating the crisis, the over-dependency on the potato as a crop – but one central reality is clear: if the British state had wanted to avert famine in Ireland, it had all the power and means to do so.
This is not only my opinion. The eminent Dutch-American economic historian Joel Mokyr, also with no nationalist or revisionist axe to grind, analysed the financial realities of the mid-nineteenth-century British and Irish states, and came to this devastating conclusion in his pioneering work published in 1983:
There is no doubt that Britain could have saved Ireland. The British Treasury spent a total of about £9.5 million on famine relief … A few years after the famine, the British government spent £69.3 million on an utterly futile adventure in the Crimea. Half that sum spent in Ireland in the critical years 1846–9 would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives … It is not unreasonable to surmise that had anything like the famine occurred in England or Wales, the British government would have overcome its theoretical scruples and have come to the rescue of the starving at a much larger scale. Ireland was not considered part of the British community.fn2
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[In Skibbereen] I entered some of the hovels … and the scenes that presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearance dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horse-cloth and their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached in horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive – they were in fever, four children, a woman, and what once had been a man. It is impossible to go through the detail. Suffice it to say, that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 of such phantoms, such frightful spectres as no words can describe. By far the greater number were delirious either from famine or from fever. Their demonic yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed on my brain.
Nicholas Cummins, a Justice of the Peace in Cork, December 1846
Disease and death in every quarter – the once hardy population worn away to emaciated skeletons – fever, dropsy, diarrhoea, and famine rioting in every filthy hovel, and sweeping away whole families … seventy-five tenants ejected here, and a whole village in the last stage of destitution there … dead bodies of children flung into holes hastily scratched in the earth without shroud or coffin … every field becoming a grave, and the land a wilderness.
Cork Examiner, December 1846
In a dark corner … a family, the father, mother and two children, lying in close compact. The father was considerably decomposed; the mother, it appeared had died last, and probably fastened the door, which was always the custom when all hope was extinguished, to get into the darkest corner and die, where passers-by could not see them.
Account of a man in Connaught, on opening the door of a closed cabin, just outside the town, early 1847
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One of the earliest voices to articulate Irish fury about the Famine was the nationalist activist and author John Mitchel. Trained as a lawyer, he witnessed the Famine years first-hand, became part of the ‘Young Ireland Movement’, establishing a weekly paper, the United Irishman, in February 1848. Mitchel’s vituperative criticism of British rule, and particularly their disastrous handling of the Famine, so alarmed the authorities that in May 1848 he was tried on charges of sedition in Dublin. On 26 May he was convicted of treason and sentenced to fourteen years’ hard labour in Van Diemen’s Land – the same year that the last few surviving Tasmanian Aboriginals were being transported back to the mainland, at Oyster Cove. It took two more years for Mitchel and other Irish political prisoners to reach Hobart (via spells in prison ships in Bermuda, and the Cape of Good Hope) – but Mitchel used this time to secretly start writing his Jail Journal which would be published to great acclaim subsequently. Three years later, with the aid of an American supporter, Mitchel escapes from Tasmania on a boat, eventually arriving in New York to a hero’s welcome, in November 1853.
In America, Mitchel publishes his Jail Journal in 1854, but then – infuriated at the British state’s attempts throughout the late 1840s and early 1850s to whitewash their record, and evade responsibility for the deaths of more than a million of his compatriots in the Famine (his own estimate was 1.5 million deaths) – he begins to write The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps). Originally a collection of articles serialised in newspapers in 1858, it is subsequently published in book form in 1860 (in Dublin) and 1861 (in London and New York) and causes a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. Reading his words today, the rage still burns off the page; these are words used as incendiaries, perhaps more powerful than bombs. He eviscerates the arguments of the British authorities that the Famine was a ‘natural process’, possibly even the work of a God that sought to punish the Irish people for (to quote The Times newspaper from March 1847) ‘being born and bred, from time immemorial, in inveterate indolence, improvidence, disorder and destitution’. Here is Mitchel’s riposte:
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 … to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call that famine a ‘dispensation of Providence’ and ascribe it entirely to the blight of the 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.
Speaking 135 years later, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, a world authority on famines and their causes, supported Mitchel’s fundamental argument here, stating that ‘in no other famine in the world was the proportion of people killed as large as in the Irish famines in the 1840s’.fn3 Although successive generations of revisionist historians and others have criticised Mitchel for his inflammatory tone and exaggerations, it is important to understand the reasons for the enormous resonance his work had – which was due to the fact that he had identified two critical issues.
Firstly, he highlighted the fact that there had been food exports during the Famine years: ‘During each of these five years of famine from ’46 to ’51, that famine-struck land produced more than double the needful sustenance for all her people.’ Yet the government had decided to export this food, just at the time it was needed most urgently in the country where it had been produced. Even at the height of the Famine, when the British authorities tried to highlight their limited attempts at relief, Mitchel explains that ‘A government ship sailing into any harbour with Indian corn was sure to meet half a dozen sailing out with Irish wheat and cattle.’ Mitchel’s assertions about the amount of food produced in Ireland in the Famine period, and the volume of exported produce may certainly have been exaggerated, and his rhetoric inflammatory, but his principal point – that large quantities of food were exported from Ireland during the Famine years – cannot be disputed.