Irish Famine Memorial, Dublin, Ireland
Rolling News
52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Amy Johnson Crow’s prompt for week 9 of 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks was the word disaster. My ancestors came from Ireland, and even though I do not have a particular disaster to write about, I know of no greater disaster for them than the Irish Potato Famine. Therefore, I decided to write a brief history of the Irish Potato Famine that lasted for seven years from 1845 – 1852. Often called the Great Hunger by the Irish, the famine caused mass starvation and disease throughout the island.
The potato was introducted to Ireland in the sixteenth century by the British. For generations the Irish relied on the potato as one of their primary sources of food. Their potato of choice was called the Irish lumper, not a particularly handsome looking vegetable, it grew well in the poor
Irish soil and could feed a lot of mouths. Eventually, the fungus-like organism called Phytophtora infestans (or P. infestans) was found to be the cause blight. The fungus turned the potatoes black and rancid and the people had no way to stop it. [It was not until 2013 that scientists pinpointed the exact cause
of the blight by studying 100 year old dead potato plants.] In 1845, the fungus ruined up to one-half of the potato crop and about three-quarters of the crop over the next seven years.
The people in western and southwestern suffered the most from the Famine. Skibbereen, on the southern tip of County Cork West was described as the “very nucleus” of the scourge. County Mayo, especially in the mountainous and coastal regions was also hit particularly hard.
Mid-19th Century Ireland
The British Acts of Union in 1801 made Ireland a colony of Great Britain and the combined nations were known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Most of the land in Ireland was owned by British landlords and/or their sons. The Irish were tenants of the British and as such were not allowed to own land. Roman Catholics were also prohibited from owning land.
Workhouses, also known as poor houses, operated in Ireland for 80 years, from the early 1840s to the early 1920s. They were established in ancient times as a means to take care of the poor and hungry. Population estimates at the time of establishment of the workhouses was 8 million people, with approximately 2.3 million near starvation.
“There were 163 workhouses in total. If people could not support themselves, they could come into the workhouse. Here they would do some work in return for food. People had to stay and live in the workhouse and so the system was known as indoor relief.
The whole family had to enter together. This was a way for the landlords to clear the land of tenants who could not pay rent. Life in the workhouse was meant to be harsh so as not to encourage people to stay. One of the cruellest aspects of the workhouse was that family members were split up into separate quarters. Children aged two or less could stay with their mothers. Sometimes, family members never saw each other again.
The workhouse was not a prison. People could leave if they liked. The high walls surrounding the workhouses were for keeping out, not for keeping people in.” (i)
Unfortunately, workhouses were the bane of the Irish people’s existence as they were filled with fever, hunger and cholera.
Inhabitants of the workhouses were given ration cards and were fed soup from great soup pots, which can still be seen in Ireland.
The soup pots were part of a direct intervention by Quakers of Dublin, followed by Quakers of England and America to help alleviate the misery of the starving Irish people. Quakers brought 294 soup pots to 27 counties in Ireland during the Famine. Soup was made from corn and other vegetables from Britain and America. Millions were fed from the soup pots.
In 1845, at the beginning of the potato blight, British Prime Minister Robert Peel worked vigorously to counter the potato failure. Peel led his conservative government party to build makeshift shelters, import corn from America and create government public works projects, often road-building, for men, women and children on the brink of starvation. The workers were weak and did not have the energy to work, but no one died of starvation under Peel’s administration. However, by mid 1846, Peel was ousted by the government and his career became a casualty of the Irish potato famine.
Prime Minister Peel had appointed Charles Trevelyan to oversee relief operations. After the ouster of Peel, Trevelyan took over control of the situation under the new prime minister, John Russell. Trevelyan believed that the Famine was a God-sent opportunity to reorder Irish society. He and others like him did not share Peel’s compassion for the suffering people. Relief measures were stopped and food depots were closed. While the Irish suffered from starvation, typhus fever and cholera, crops like barley, oats and wheat were grown in Ireland and exported to Britain. Livestock grazed in the fields of Ireland, but like the crops, slaughtered livestock was sent to feed the British people.
By late July 1846, after another potato crop failure, and faced with sick and dying men, women and children the British government was forced to reopen the food depots and reconvene the public works projects. More workhouses were established. Typhus fever and cholera were running rampant in Irish towns and countrysides. Parts of the workhouses were designated as “fever sheds” and those with fever were quarantined there with little hope of survival. Tenant farmers were no longer able to pay their rent to landlords and massive evictions were carried out. Groups of people, often accompanied by constables, evicted residents by chasing them from their homes with only the clothes on their backs. To make sure residents did not return to their homes, the structures were destroyed by pulling down the thatched roofs. If residents were too ill to leave their homes, or dead, the structures were torn down right over their heads. In some areas, homes were burned. Many of these ruined structures can be seen in Ireland today.
Historical accounts of what the Irish people endured are hard to read. They endured horrible living conditions, wore rags for clothes, ate weeds, berries, grass and whatever they could scrounge from the land. Horses and donkeys disappeared and became sources of food. People died right where they stood. Bodies were put in mass graves or were buried in bogs and ditches where they died. Those who were lucky enough to have animals kept them in their homes with them for fear of them being stolen as food. Rats and wild dogs were everywhere.
More than one million Irish people died during the famine and another one million or more emigrated to Canada and America. Families were separated as the men often emigrated first and sent money back to their families in Ireland until they had enough money to emigrate to the new world, hoping for prosperity and a good life.
By 1852 the Famine had largely come to an end other than in a few isolated areas. This was not due to any massive relief effort – it was partly because the potato crop recovered but mainly it was because a huge proportion of the population had by then either died or left.
The Irish population in 2020 is estimated to be 4.9 million. This is the highest recorded number of residents since the Census of 1851 that recorded 5.1 million residents.
I leave you with the traditional Irish poem Skibbereen. The poem tells the story of a father and child talking about why the father left the Erin isle.
“Skibbereen”
O, father dear, i oft times heard you talk of erin’s isle,
Her lofty scene, her valleys green, her mountains rude and wild
They say it is a pretty place where in a prince might dwell,
Oh why did you abandon it, the reason to me tell?
Oh son i loved my native land with energy and pride
’til a blight came over on my crops, my sheep and cattle died,
The rent and taxes were so high, i could not them redeem,
And that’s the cruel reason why i left old skibbereen.
Oh, it’s well i do remember that bleak december day,
The landlord and the sheriff came to drive us all away
They set my roof on fire with their demon yellow spleen
And that’s another reason why i left old skibbereen.
Your mother too, god rest her soul, fell on the snowy ground,
She fainted in her anguish seeing the desolation round.
She never rose but passed away from life to mortal dream,
She found a quiet grave, my boy, in dear old skibbereen.
And you were only two years old and feeble was your frame,
I could not leave you with your friends, you bore your father’s name,
I wrapped you in my cóta mór in the dead of night unseen
I heaved a sigh and said goodbye to dear old skibbereen
Author Unknown
Sources:
(i) http://irishworkhousecentre.ie/the-workhouse-story/
Coffey, Michael (1997) Editor, Golway, Terry (1997). The Irish in America. Disney Enterprises, Inc., New York, NY
irishfaminepots.com
Lannon, Mattie (2013). Irish Central Dec 01 2013. Amazing story of the Quakers and the Irish famine pots they brought
Nosowitz, Dan (May 21, 2013), Popular Science, popsci.com/science/article/2013-05-cause-irish-potato-famine-has-been-discovered
sacredsites.ie
The Potato Famine. history.com/topics/immigration/irish-potato-famine