Three Famines (19 page)

Up to the very eve of his fall, Mengistu depicted his enemies as dangerous Arabist fronts, even though the majority of both the Eritrean and Tigrayan rebels were Coptic Christians. The rebels were pawns of other Arab states! he cried, and their success would turn the Red Sea into an utterly Arab lake! This was a rhetorical ploy with which he and his ministers abroad had considerable success.

Mengistu’s punishment was coming. The Eritreans had made a great military advance in 1988, when the EPLA took all but a handful of urban centres and captured or killed 18,000 hapless young Ethiopian troops. It was in that context that a massacre of Eritreans at the town of She’eb to the north-west of Massawa occurred, carried out by the Ethiopian army, and thus in part by Ethiopian conscripts previously recruited from high schools and the streets of cities and villages. The She’eb massacre in 1988 motivated the EPLF even more, for some of the victims had been crushed to death by tanks. This was not an isolated incident, however. Reprisal massacres had been common in Eritrea since the mid 1970s.
Massacres occurred in Tigray and the Ogaden as well. But those in Tigray and Eritrea, together with a further threat of famine in 1986–7, fuelled the inevitability of Mengistu’s fall from power.

The final Eritrean rebel encirclement of Asmara occurred when the port city of Massawa fell to the rebels in February 1990. According to a Human Rights Watch report of 1991, a number of Eritrean hostages were used as human shields by Mengistu’s forces, in an attempt to hold onto the port. As Asmara itself fell to the Eritreans in 1991, and as the Tigrayan tanks advanced on the city of Addis Ababa, Mengistu fled and caught a plane into exile in Zimbabwe. His Ethiopian trial for war crimes would begin in 1994 and at last find him guilty,
in absentia
, in 2006.

With the end of the conflict, the infield operations of those remarkable agencies, ERA and REST, were scaled down. As for the results of the famine and the rebellions, the way the new Eritrean and Ethiopian governments, led by former schoolmates Issayas Afeworki and Meles Zenawi, came to betray the goodwill of the people who had brought them to power is the subject for another book.

I
N
I
RELAND IN
November 1845, a Relief Commission was created to administer the sale of the Indian maize Peel had ordered from the United States. Peel genuinely thought this supply of maize would see the Irish through the summer, and thus that he had dealt with the crisis, for no one expected the blight to come back.

The Indian maize was to be distributed to central depots that would be established in various parts of Ireland under the direction of the officers of the army commissariat, with sub-depots under the charge of the constabulary and coastguard. When the supplies in the local market were deficient, meal was sold from these depots at reasonable prices to local relief committees for re-sale to the public. The officers of the central depots were to receive and collate reports from the local relief committees, which were made up of members of the local gentry, Church of Ireland ministers, lawyers and
other worthies. The overall Relief Commission contained such figures as Thomas Redington, the undersecretary of the Irish Executive, Sir Randolph Routh of the army commissariat and Colonel Harry Jones of the Board of Works.

They began to wonder where to turn to for relief funds. They saw there would be a need for further government intervention above the Indian maize Peel had bought. But they knew it was against the principles of government and of political economy for Westminster to spend money directly on feeding the Irish.

By January 1846 the first of the Indian corn from North America, the same that in the southern United States produced the food called hominy, began to reach Irish ports, Cork first of all. All up, the shipments were estimated as sufficient to feed 1 million people for forty days. But it would still take some months of organisation before the first corn was distributed, stored and ready for sale.

Unlike the corn grown in Ireland, the Indian corn was so hard to crack that it should rightly have been chopped in steel mills, but there were no such mills in Ireland. It was very difficult to cook and, if not properly done, could cause bowel disorders. Sir Randolph Routh, the old quartermaster appointed as the chairman of the relief commissioners, issued a pamphlet on how the Indian maize should be prepared by the officers at the depots. It had to be kept in kilns for eight hours, dried for forty-eight hours, ground, allowed to stand for seventy hours and then left for another twenty-four before it was placed in sacks. This difficulty of its preparation and the inappropriateness of the food to the necessity derived from a belief that would be evident in the Bengal famine as
well: relief food must be made troublesome and unsavoury to ensure that people did not lightly have recourse to it. It was tested with the inmates of some of the workhouses, who refused to touch it. But everyone knew that the hungry of Ireland would need to sooner or later.

Come 15 May, the date assigned for the first sale of meal, many women queued up outside the warehouses to buy their pound of Indian meal, their pennies – acquired by labour or by selling clothes or furniture or the family pig – in hand. The maize was sold to the Irish at cost price at first, and later for a little more than that. Some relief committees bought up supplies for unofficial distribution to those who could not afford it, even at its moderate price.

The Irish had various names for the corn –
min dèirce
, beggar’s meal, Indian buck, or, as previously described, ‘Peel’s brimstone’. The first to have recourse to it were the people of the extreme west and south-west of the country. They needed something to eat, but the reality was that, though the maize might relieve hunger, it was of little nutritional value. One commentator declared that the distribution of raw meal to starving, weak and homeless beggars was as useful as giving them river sand.

Yet, despite all the suspicion of ‘yellow male’, and the difficulty in preparing it, the maize, minimal as it was in quantity, probably saved a number of lives in that grim time and thereafter.

In London, Trevelyan, execrated in history for being a man of ideology, was pragmatic to the extent that in December 1845
he permitted a scheme of public works to be put in place, run and supervised by the Irish Board of Works. The public works were scheduled to begin in March 1846. Local relief committees were to apply for funds to run works in their areas, which would give employment to the hungry. The British Treasury would grant 50 per cent of the cost of road improvements and other public works, the rest having to come from local grand juries – that is, the local gentry and better-off tenants who were eligible to sit on such juries. In Ireland the grand juries did more than sit at trials – they were also involved in road repair, fever hospitals and other civil institutions, and during the famine their members would make up the relief committees and the Boards of Guardians.

Trevelyan regretted the generosity of his public works scheme almost as soon as it was put in place. Many of the projects were designed to improve facilities around a particular landlord’s property. Others were merely make-work projects. Local relief committees were accused of issuing tickets of employment in ‘an irregular manner’. As well as that, a system of measuring how much work a person did in the day had not been put in place. And then there were not enough surveyors and other qualified people to supervise the work. Famine roads, which begin nowhere and lead nowhere, are often seen as a symbol of the futility and indignity of the relief works, but they were also a windfall to corrupt supervisors, who could create fictitious workers and pocket their wages.

The fact that in the summer of 1846 there had been far fewer Irishmen turning up in England to work on the English harvest was taken as a sign by Trevelyan that the Irish
were finding it too easy to earn money on the scheme. He was also concerned that it was taking men away from working on the Irish harvest. He did not take account of the fact that the smaller number of Irishmen coming to Britain might have been based on physical weakness brought on by the last winter of want, and by the necessity of getting money immediately.

After the works had lasted through the summer, the further failure of the potatoes made it necessary to continue them. Over the winter of 1846 –7, Trevelyan urged that the pay on the works be dropped. That winter would be one of northern Europe’s worst, and in it the bare-footed went to labour. Two million people were dependent on this relief by now, either directly or indirectly. Some dropped dead while crushing stone, many of them with rocks or shovels in hand. The public works became a venue of death, often from relapsing fever. The Irish generally spent all their winters indoors and were not used to exposing themselves for hour upon hour, day upon day, to the ferocious Atlantic-brewed weather of the Irish outdoors.

The scheme was also imperfect in that it rewarded those who laboured hardest, and so discriminated against the weak. Many families nonetheless knew that this work was their only chance in that bitter winter, which accounted for the fact that the labourers referred to what they built as ‘male [meal] roads’ or ‘stirabout [porridge] drains’. Men, women and children presented themselves in bleak landscapes for a daily wage of ninepence or tenpence, deliberately set low to stop the Irish exploiting it. Due to a lack of small coin and of pay clerks, the handing out of the weekly wages would often not end
until midnight on Saturday, a further test of the endurance of labourers.

Captain Henry O’Brien, a retired artilleryman who was an official of the Board of Works in East Clare, wrote to Trevelyan on the day after Christmas 1847, worried about all the reported corruption and inefficiency on the works, but aware that, for all their faults, they were necessary for the survival of many people. He declared, ‘The labourers worked for their wages, but seeing clearly that what they are doing on the public roads is of no clear value, their heart, they say, is not in it. Naturally quick in feeling and acute in intellect, they have no lively interest in the completion of a task which, though it keeps them from starvation, is manifestly unproductive.’ He told Trevelyan that he took pains to ensure that only the destitute were employed on the roads, and possibly needed to assure Trevelyan that this was so as a means of proving that he was not a soft-hearted exaggerator.

An engineer employed on the works described ‘the poor enfeebled labourer’ lying on the side of the bog he has been employed to drain, or by the road debris, ‘giving his dying blessing to the bestowers of tardy relief’. Some parliamentarians’ idea for legislation to employ Irish labour on railway construction was voted down in part because it would benefit certain landowners over others. It became politically impossible, too, for the prime minister to implement a scheme to distribute £50,000 worth of seed to tenants.

In February 1847, it was announced in the House of Commons that 15,000 people were dying each day in Ireland. Nonetheless, subsequently, because of corruption and its administrative flaws, the public works scheme was
abandoned, at Trevelyan’s suggestion, and there was a gradual dismissal of the people labouring on it. In March 1847, 734,000 people were employed on the scheme – approximately one in every three adult males. The Treasury imposed a 20 per cent reduction on 20 March 1847, to be followed by further, gradual reductions. By June, all works projects had ceased. Families who had depended on them waited for the next manifestation of public mercy.

Now a new system had to be established to prevent people who had previously been working on the roads from stampeding the workhouses of Ireland. The Poor Law system that had been operating in England had provided the impoverished with access to a workhouse, built to be forbidding in appearance, where they were fed in return for labour deliberately designed to be unattractive. Workhouse labour included bone-crushing to make fertiliser, sack-making, picking oakum to provide rope, corn-milling.

In 1838, a Poor Law was passed for Ireland, enabling the setting-up of workhouses under the care of Boards of Guardians. Each district where there was a workhouse was called a Poor Law Union. The Poor Law Unions of Ireland were based on the administrative units known as baronies. Eighty-two workhouses were built. The system was to be paid for by a tax known as the poor rate, levied on landowners and tenants. Because not all tenants could afford it, the poor rate was restricted to those who owned or leased land worth £4 or more per year.

A special problem faced the authorities when it came to the Irish workhouses. In England they were designed to be so intimidating, so associated with tedious and hard labour, that only those genuinely desperate would go anywhere near them. A Poor Law commissioner, a member of the overall management commission for the entire system, observed that in Ireland, ‘The standard of their mode of living is unhappily so low that the establishment of one still lower is difficult.’

Yet the Irish abhorred and detested these institutions. And even as the famine progressed, anyone who could avoided the workhouse. Many had decided that whatever misfortune befell them, they would never go within its shadow, never pass through its neo-gothic standardised gatehouse. ‘O King of Glory’, went an Irish prayer:

It was just as well these sentiments existed, since each workhouse serviced a region of tens of thousands and, in the most extreme cases, of up to 200,000 people.

The chief method to stop the tens of thousands displaced from the cold comfort of road works from, nonetheless, being forced to descend on the workhouses was the February 1847 Temporary Relief Act, commonly called the Soup Kitchen Act. It provided for an end to the sale of maize, the gradual scaling-down of public works and their replacement
by soup kitchens, which were meant – at the time the act was passed – to operate for a limited period.

They were a departure – for the first time, food was to be served from premises outside the workhouse. The soup was to be free, however, and not dependent on any means test; the lists of those who needed to be fed were to be submitted to the relief committees by local figures such as priests. There was a hope that the new arrangement would make the Irish healthy enough to work through the summer and take in the harvest. The system was called ‘outdoor relief’ – although the relief was distributed sometimes indoors or under canvas. The overall body who was to administer the new arrangements was a Board of Temporary Relief, answerable to Trevelyan.

At the local level, the soup kitchens were to be run by newly appointed relief commissioners, who included the Poor Law guardians of the workhouse, leading churchmen, the three highest ratepayers and a local relief inspector. The kitchens were to be set out and put into operation at the expense of the poor rates, but until the autumn of 1847, government was willing to make advances against the security of the rates that would be collected. After that, the local relief commissioners would be dependent on their own resources. By then, in Trevelyan’s view, the famine should be over. Trevelyan hoped so. The administrative stress was damaging his health, as were criticisms of his work from those who thought him too liberal, and those who thought him inhuman. He was becoming brusque with his colleagues.

Often farmers would send their wives and children to the workhouse and stay on their smallholdings themselves. But in June 1847, the passing of a further Poor Law Amendment
Act contained the infamous Gregory clause. The clause was framed by William Gregory, a landlord of Galway and MP for Dublin, and, though contained in a Relief Act, was the antithesis of relief. It required that anyone who tenanted more than a quarter acre of land had to give it up if he wanted to enter the workhouse or the fever hospital. The Gregory clause suited landlords, of course, but also the government’s ideology, since only in the most desperate need would a farmer seek workhouse charity and thus be considered as having passed the ultimate test of genuine need while at the same time yielding up his land. It was intended both to thin out the numbers in the workhouse and to encourage emigration.