1845-1848 The Great Hunger

An Gorta Mor
"Famine" : Managed Genocide

1 Million Dead;
1.5 Million to the "Coffin Ships"

In the autumn of 1845, a potato disease reached Ireland from America that led to the partial blighting of the crop. The distress caused among the population, half of whom were entirely reliant upon the potato, was considerable but uneven. However, the situation worsened when the blight spread during the wet spring and summer of 1846, causing an almost total failure of that year's crop. In 1847, many people had of necessity eaten their seed potatoes and the overall crop was again disastrously low. 1848 saw yet another crop failure. In 1849 and 1850, the blight was less severe.

During the time of the Famine, 1845 - 51, it is estimated that over one million people died of starvation and the diseases that followed in its wale. About one and one half million emigrated, mostly to Canada, the United States and England. The catastrophe was almost entirely born by the laborer and small farmers who, because of their circumstances under the heels of the British landlords, had nothing but the meager potato crop that they planted to sustain life. Everything else they earned went to rent and the barest necessities.

During the height of the genocide, only one crop had failed out of the many that were unaffected and, of course, livestock thrived in Ireland. Relief efforts, however, were stymied by the British government at every level least the devastation should fall short of the desired expectations -- the more Irish peasantry [i.e., Catholics] dead the better. British landowners would rather see cattle and sheep on the land than Irish people. They made sure that that happened through cold strategy and through the law.

During the crisis, as hundreds of thousands of Irish people were dying of starvation and its effects, crops and livestock were actually exported out of Ireland to England! Even foreign relief from the United States and elsewhere were routed through English ports where taxes were extracted and precious time wasted before they could reach Ireland. Humanitarian, life sustaining aid that civilized societies normally provide to those in need was denied by the British to the Irish on the grounds that such relief would spoil them in the future. Landlords wasted no time in legally evicting Irish tenants from their homes, even though there was no possibility to make rent payments. Eviction was likely to mean certain death with absolutely nowhere to go except to live in ditches or with relatives already suffering from the effects of the starvation. Emigration was only an option for the lucky few and prone to end in death of typhus or cholera as human cargo in steerage on the ghastly "coffin ships".

The scale of suffering endured by the Irish during the nightmare years of the Famine is almost unimaginable. The following account of a visit to Skibbereen in County Cork was written by Nicholas Cummins, a British magistrate, on Christmas eve 1846:

"On reaching the spot I was surprised to find the wretched hamlet apparently deserted. I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause, and the scenes which 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 appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering which seemed a ragged horsecloth, their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive -- they were in fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man. It is impossible to through the detail. Suffice it to say that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful specters as no words can describe, either from famine of fever. The demoniac yells are still ringing in my ears, and their horrible images are fixed in my brain.

"The same morning the police opened a house on the adjoining lands and two corpses were found, lying upon the mud floor, having been devoured by rats.

"A mother, herself in fever, was seen the same day to drag the corpse of her child, a girl about twelve, perfectly naked, and leave if half covered with stones. In another house, with 500 yards of the cavalry station at Skibbereen, the dispensary doctor found seven wretches lying unable to move, under the same cloak. One had been dead many hours, but the others were unable to move either themselves or the corpse."

During the years of the famine, a decline in the population of Ireland set in, one which has continued almost to the present. In 1841, the population was 8.2 million; merely ten years later, it had declined by nearly two million to 6.5 million. In 1976, the population of Ireland was 4.7 million. How could this mass evacuation from a beautiful, bountiful and beloved land, by a people who would almost rather die than to leave it, be by chance?

The Fenians

The Fenians, or the Irish Republican Brotherhood, were formed in the late 1850s, inspired by the ideas of Wolfe Tone and steeled in their determination by the British genocide policies and devastation suffered during The Famine. They pledged to achieve the complete separation of Ireland from England by force of arms.

Thousands of young Irishmen joined the movement. The Fenian watchword was "sooner or never." They set out to plan a national rising which took place in 1857. Although a failure from a military point of view, it established the Fenians as the major force in Irish nationalism.

Events in England in the course of 1867 were to lead to the hanging of three Fenian heroes -- Allen, Larkin and O'Brien -- the "Manchester Martyrs". From the dock, the men cried, "God Save Ireland!" Perhaps the two most famous members of the Fenian movement were O'Donovan Rossa, its mentor, and James Stephens, it young leader who was a strong advocate of "physical force".

The Land War

In the wake of the famine, English landlordism reigned supreme in Ireland. In 1879, Michael Davitt founded the Irish national Land League with Charles Stewart Parnell -- a constitutional nationalist -- as it s president. The objects of the Land League were: 1] To put an end to rank-renting, evictions and landlord oppression; 2] To effect such a radical change in the land system as would put it in the power of every Irish farmer to become the owner, in fair terms, of the land he tilled.

In the course of the land war a new word was coined--Boycott--when the land of a Captain Boycott, a rack-renting landlord who refused to accept the fair rents, was shunned by all the people in the surrounding areas.

In 1881, under unrelenting pressure, a land act had guaranteed the three "Fs" as they were known: fair rent, free sale, and fixity of tenure.

The land war changed the face of rural Ireland by putting an end to the old system of landlordism, although British political rule still remained as imperious as ever.