The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (31 page)

There were, in fact, many private sources of succour: Quaker groups in Ireland and Britain ran soup kitchens; and as international attention was trained increasingly on Ireland, so other assistance arrived. (This assistance assumed a variety of forms: the French celebrity chef Alexis Soyer, for example, set up a soup kitchen to feed Dublin’s hungry, delivering one hundred gallons of soup for a mere pound in cost and saving numerous lives. In a Bedlam-esque footnote, however, Soyer supplemented his efforts by charging the city’s elite five shillings to observe proceedings; it cost only a shilling more to watch the animals eating in nearby Dublin Zoo.) A number of Ascendancy families were also prepared to do all they could for their tenants, some nearly bankrupting themselves in the process. The response of many others, however, was not so flexible: many families were evicted from their holdings and thrown upon the mercy of workhouses and of a Poor Law system that had not been designed with such a calamity in mind, and could not possibly cope with the numbers seeking aid.
³
‘The Irish landlords as a class,’ observed the
Spectator
, ‘have shown no capacity for the business of landlords’ – and many agreed with such opinions.

The human toll in these years was stark, mounting inexorably into the tens and then into the hundreds of thousands. Epidemics of typhus, incubated in the overcrowded workhouses, swept through the population: as a result, the cities and the middle class began for the first time to feel the impact of what was taking place in the countryside. Famine victims were buried in mass graves; in the west, whole towns and villages began to empty. The British media devoted considerable resources to the disaster, with the
Illustrated London News
, for example, dispatching an illustrator to Skibbereen in County Kerry to record the event. Images of the Famine therefore spread rapidly, accompanied by reports of scenes of horror in Ireland. In response, the
Times
complained that the Irish were exaggerating, declaring that ‘it is the old thing, the old malady breaking out. It is the national character, the national thoughtlessness, the national indolence.’ In Cork, the
Examiner
retorted acidly that Victoria had sworn at her coronation a decade before to protect and defend her subjects without exception: ‘How happens it then, while there is a shilling in the Treasury, or even a jewel in the Crown, that patient subjects are allowed to perish with hunger?’

On 3 October 1846, the
Vindicator
in Belfast printed a simple appeal: ‘Give Us Food or We Perish’; and by the summer of 1847 the government, under pressure from events, had wound up its programme of useless and body-destroying public works and instituted soup kitchens in its place. For a brief period, rations were dispensed for free and without strings attached: soon, some 3 million people were receiving food aid. But before long, the government suspected that among these 3 million lurked the feckless and idle; and the soup kitchens were abruptly closed at the end of September of that year. The deaths continued to mount – but now the government had concluded its interventions, and soon it began to claim that the emergency in Ireland was ending. Balls and the usual round of social engagements carried on in Dublin; and in 1849, Victoria paid her first visit to the country. The failure of the potato crop that summer was as absolute as in earlier years; after this point, however, the Famine began slowly to peter out.

Famine years had been an intrinsic part of the fabric of Irish history. In 1740–1, for example, severe famine killed, proportionate to the then population of Ireland, as many people as did the crisis of 1845–9, but this earlier event holds no such well-defined place in the collective consciousness. This has much to do, of course, with the fact that a modern media and swift communications ensured widespread coverage of the nineteenth-century Famine. What makes it unique in Irish history, however, is the fact that it fused with issues of politics and national identity. As 1845 approached, the country had been in the midst of a debate on its destiny; the future of the Union itself was under discussion; and Daniel O’Connell had succeeded in forging, in the minds of the great majority of the population, a national consciousness that was distinctively Catholic and that questioned the British connection.

Moreover, the British response to the crisis fed this debate, for it undermined the central claim of the Act of Union: that the fates of Great Britain and Ireland were bound together now by sacred ties of mutuality. In the eyes of many, the government’s willingness to countenance scenes of mass death and unparalleled misery in Ireland meant that it was abdicating its responsibility and demonstrating in the process that the philosophical foundations underpinning the Union were hollow. Such sensations led to, for example, the incoherent Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 – the year of revolutions in Europe – that began and ended most ignominiously in a County Tipperary cottage garden. Its leaders scattered to the winds: some were transported to Australia and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania); others fled the country, carrying their potent version of national radicalism to France, the United States and beyond.

An estimated 1 million people died of hunger and disease in the course of the Famine, and more than a million emigrated, gathering in a host of Irish ports to take ship for Britain, North America and further afield. The conditions aboard these ‘coffin ships’ were frequently horrifying: disease and thirst claimed the lives of untold thousands; and more died within days of landing in such notorious quarantine camps as Grosse Isle in Quebec. The emigration statistics are startling: between 1851 and 1921 some 2.5 million people left Ireland, a proportion of the population that far outstrips the exodus from any other country. As many females left as males; the young inevitably in greater numbers than their elders. The crisis also had the effect of fraying the potent bonds of society, sometimes to breaking point: cherished norms and values were forgotten, so that aged parents were abandoned by their children and young children by their desperate parents; bodies were dumped in ditches for want of coffins and the strength to dig a grave; foodstuffs were stolen from equally desperate neighbours; crimes undreamt of were committed in the struggle to stay alive. In the light of such facts, it is little wonder that the Irish looked for guilt in the corridors of Whitehall. Young Irelander John Mitchel summed up this response in his famous claim that ‘the Almighty sent the potato blight but the English created the Famine’ – an attitude that formed a central plank of later historiography. It was perhaps inevitable that the collective trauma brought about by the years of hunger would be distilled and heaped, in grief and rage, on to the head of the British government.

British policies
did
, of course, exacerbate famine in Ireland. And other decisions were equally disastrous: the government’s claim, for example, that property taxes levied solely in Ireland would suffice to cover relief work in the country was simply wrong: there never was the wealth base in Ireland to manage such a situation alone. Indeed, later government claims on private British charity to cover the shortfall implied as much – though they did not bespeak a concomitant change in heart: ‘No assistance whatever will be given from national funds to those unions [workhouses] which, whether they have the will or no, undoubtedly have the power of maintaining their own poor and…the collection of the rates will be enforced so far as it can, even in those distressed western unions in which some assistance from some source or other must be given.’
⁴
British policy towards the calamity in Ireland, then, was short-sighted, counter-productive and characterized by ignorance, wilfulness and incomprehension. Famine followed: and politicians then failed, in a host of ways, to change or augment policy in time to head off further disaster. But these facts do not – as Mitchel suggested at the time – imply an
intention
to create famine in order to weaken and diminish Ireland.

Had the politicians cared to look about them in these years, they would have found no shortage of advice emanating from the voluble and quarrelsome British press: after all, the various political and cultural situations that manifested themselves in Ireland had always been a favourite topic of discussion. For some, government stupidity was manifest; other voices, however, complained bracingly that policy towards Ireland was in fact a good deal too indulgent: aid would be embezzled; the Irish were congenitally idle; and as a result the country should be left to its own devices and to the will of God. And there was a broad spectrum of opinion in Ireland too: in advance of the Famine, Young Ireland and the
Nation
had rejected the very notion of humanitarian aid, disgraceful and degrading as it would be to Irish society, and had called for the country to be given control of its own economic destiny: ‘It is a blundering system of legislation which converts the whole population of the country into paupers, by taking away the produce of the labour and giving it to idlers, and then sets up a costly machinery for the purpose of relieving their distress.’
⁵
Later, in the teeth of the disaster, the movement would step back from such rigorously noninterventionist attitudes and condemn the British government for its failure to apply the laws of economics in a manner that took account of Ireland’s specific situation and needs.

The Famine altered the nature of Irish society in manifold and far-reaching ways. The disaster had of course affected disproportionately the poorest layer of society; but a number of wealthier Catholic families did quite well out of the crisis, acquiring land quietly and in the process laying the foundation for future prosperity. The number of Irish speakers, which had long been on the decline, now went into freefall; by 1851, only 5 per cent of the population spoke Irish alone. And the population of the country would continue an inexorable decline for another century: it would become a demographic truism that Ireland could simply not hold on to its population.

The million and more emigrants and their descendants, meanwhile, would change for ever the relationship between Ireland and the rest of the world. The nature of British society, for example, was affected permanently by the massive Irish influx during and following the Famine. This swelling population soon made its presence felt: Irish itinerants and navvies, for example, slip into the fringes of novels and paintings of the period. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Cranford
(1853), female Irish vagrants disturb the profound rural peace of Cheshire and attempt to force their way into spinsters’ cottages. Ford Madox Brown’s panoramic
Work
(1852–65) seeks to capture a representative moment of everyday life in mid-century London: the artist describes, among the throng of characters crowded on to the canvas, ‘a stoic from the Emerald Island, with hay stuffed in his hat to keep the draft [sic] out…a young, shoeless Irishman, with his wife, feeding their first-born with cold pap’.
⁶

In the United States and Australia, and to a lesser degree in New Zealand and Canada, large and increasingly confident Irish Catholic communities grew in political and economic clout. These same communities would alter the face of Ireland itself: not only as a result of the remittances that at once began to flow, but also in the form of new ideas and new expectations that the emigrants fed back into the Irish social and political scene. They would also influence the attitude of their host countries towards Ireland and its politics. Even before the Famine had begun, Repeal meetings had been commonplace in American politics; and the language that featured at such rallies was striking, connecting as it did the plight of Ireland with specifically American imagery: ‘Ireland has just toiled from out the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The sunshine is around her and about her. She is standing upon the top of the Delectable Mountains, and the shining city is in full view. That shining city is Repeal – the total repeal of the miscalled, tyrannical, and accursed union between Great Britain and Ireland.’
⁷
Moreover, the bitterness against the British that the emigrants carried with them on their long and foetid journeys to New York, Quebec and Sydney would form an important note in the new cultures they founded overseas – and provide an invaluable flow of ideas and resources to Irish nationalists in the years to come.

In 1863, one of these Irish emigrants stepped ashore into an America convulsed by civil war. He had arrived with a unique aim: to recruit angry and armed young men in the fight for Irish independence. James Stephens (1824–1901), County Kilkenny-born and Protestant, had been a Young Ireland activist before fleeing the country for France in the aftermath of 1848. While in Paris, Stephens had attended the Sorbonne and imbibed a radical political education; in 1856, however, he had returned to Ireland to assess the extent to which his native country was inclined towards revolution. The result was the evolution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), yet another secret society created with the intention of severing the British connection. The organization was one aspect of a more general oppositional movement that came into being at this time, with roots deep in an array of varying traditions and contexts. Radical French politics, indigenous agrarian disaffection and Irish-American émigré emotion and money jostled together in this movement: it was truly international in scope, drawing strength not only from Ireland itself but also from Irish communities in Britain and the United States.

Across the Atlantic, a similar organization was founded in 1859 on a wave of sympathy and interest, and at once began building upon the already considerable Irish influence in the northeastern states – and in New York in particular. By this point, Irish interests had come to dominate the Democratic Party’s so-called ‘Tammany Hall’ political machine that controlled the affairs of New York City. Tammany bought and sold votes, jobs and influence, operating on the basis of a nod and a wink – and these characteristics of a secret society inevitably appealed to Irish nationalist operatives. The American organization was named the Fenian Brotherhood – after the Fianna, the warriors of Irish mythology – and since it was permitted to operate legally and in the open, the name ‘Fenians’ came to be associated with the entire international movement.