His second critical intervention was to show that many of the senior figures in the British government were fanatical ideologues, and this explained the decisions they had made. Far from allowing human compassion to save lives, the extreme free marketeers had decided that the principle of non-intervention was more important than anything else. In an extraordinary passage, Mitchel identifies the destruction caused by nineteenth-century desk killers from their ministries in London. Ireland was
an ancient nation stricken down by a war more ruthless and sanguinary than any seven years war, or thirty years war, that Europe ever saw. No sack of Madgeburg, or ravage of the Palatinate, ever approached in horror and desolation to the slaughters done in Ireland by mere official red tape and stationery, and the principles of political economy.
Writing a hundred years later, the great historian A. J. P. Taylor echoed the core of truth that lay behind Mitchel’s hyperbole – looking at the ideologically driven nature of the prime minister, the chancellor and the secretary to the Treasury, which blinded them to all human considerations, Taylor states: ‘Russell, Wood and Trevelyan were highly conscientious men … [but] they were gripped by the most horrible, and perhaps the most universal of human maladies: the belief that principles and doctrines are more important than lives.3 They imagined that rules, invented by economists, were as “natural” as the potato blight.’
Sir Charles Trevelyan, the powerful assistant secretary to the Treasury from 1840 to 1859, was fanatical in his belief in the economic orthodoxy of the day – laissez-faire capitalism and, above all, the Manchester School’s principle of non-intervention in markets, under any circumstances. He wrote this statement in his book The Irish Crisis, published in 1848 – in which human sympathy for the victims in Ireland is non-existent – attempting to justify the British government’s response to the Famine: ‘It has been proved … that local distress cannot be relieved out of national funds without great abuses and evils, tending, by a direct and rapid process, to an entire disorganisation of society.’
If we understand the extremity of this mindset, then we will realise why there were no attempts to ban the export of food from Ireland during the Famine years, nor would substantial funds from the British Treasury be forthcoming to feed the starving of the neighbouring island. Instead of sending food, ‘Trevelyan sent his subordinates to Ireland equipped with Adam Smith’s writings, like missionaries sent to barbarian lands armed with bibles.’4
Much of the subsequent debate relating to what today could be called the ‘perpetrators’ of the Irish Famine circle around the question of intentionality. To what extent did the British government in London simply see the Famine in Ireland as a ‘Visitation of Providence, an expression of divine displeasure’ with that island, ‘a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence’ as Trevelyan had written? And such a belief in Providentialism could be seen as a justification for minimal intervention – Trevelyan believed that God had ‘sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson … it must not be too much mitigated.’ Or did the British government want to go even further, and realise it was an opportunity to deliberately reduce the population of a country they saw as poor, backward, Catholic and immoral? Mitchel undoubtedly believed the latter was the case – and, to use today’s terminology, would have considered Britain’s response to be ‘genocidal’ (‘the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’.)
Arguments have raged over this particular question over the last decades. There were certainly aspects of the British government’s behaviour which appear to prove intent to cause harm – the most striking of these being the infamous Gregory clause, the 1847 amendment to the Poor Law passed in the House of Commons, which meant that any family holding more than a quarter of an acre of land could not be granted relief, either in, or outside, the workhouse, until they gave up their land. Peter Gray has described this as ‘a charter for land clearance’, and Canon John O’Rourke wrote, after the Famine, of the Gregory clause: ‘a more complete engine for the slaughter and expatriation of a people was never designed’. It is estimated that up to 100,000 families were forcibly evicted from their land and homes as a result, often with fatal consequences. James Donnelly has described the impact of this law as being so ‘serious that they give plausibility to charges (then and later) that there was genocidal intent at work’.
The effects of the land clearances were certainly devastating to the traditional rural pattern of agricultural smallholdings in Ireland – the so-called ‘cottier’ class. Between 1845 and 1851, owners of smallholdings under five acres halved – from 181,950 to 88,083, and those owning over fifteen acres reduced from 276,618 to 90,401. All of this led to massive loss of population, not only in the south and west of Ireland – County Clare lost 42 per cent of its farms between 1847 and 1853 – but also in east Connaught and south Ulster. It is certainly true to say that this was all part of a wider strategy by the British government to fundamentally change the land ownership and agriculture of a colony that Whitehall regarded as backward and full of ‘social evils’, and to do this regardless of the human cost – but to move from this to suggesting that most figures in the British government wanted the entire elimination of the rural Irish people is to overstate the case. Having said this, I would also dispute the statement of the economic historian Cormac O’Grada that ‘nobody wanted the extirpation of the Irish as a race’fn4 – there were certainly some fanatical zealots within senior British positions who wanted the most extreme measures taken. For example, the prominent economist and government advisor Nassau William Senior said at the beginning of the Famine in 1845 that he ‘feared that the famine … would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good’.
And we know, from a letter Lord John Russell (who had been prime minister at the beginning of the Famine) wrote in 1868, that this was not an isolated opinion:
Many years ago the Political Economy Club of London, came … to a resolution that the emigration of two million of the population of Ireland would be the best cure for her social evils. Famine and emigration have accomplished a task beyond the reach of legislation or government.fn5
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the debate around the genocidal intent, or not, of senior British political figures and advisors, it is fascinating that Mitchel’s original charge that Britain had intentionally let the Famine kill a million people is still current. No doubt he would have been delighted to learn that in October 1996, the New York State legislature ruled that ‘The Famine Curriculum’ must include a unit on the Irish Famine as an act of genocide to be taught in all schools in New York State and New Jersey. He would also have welcomed Tim Pat Coogan’s recent work, The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, in which Coogan explicitly calls the Famine ‘genocide’ and criticises many other Irish historians, over the years, for being revisionists who have attempted to sanitise this story. In the final chapter, Coogan looks compellingly at the cultural context in which the British perpetrators lived – the remarkable level of extreme racism towards the Irish, the portrayals in popular magazines such as Punch of the Irish as grinning monkeys, always plotting against the English. This, for instance, appeared in an essay in Punch in 1862, ‘The Missing Link’: