The greatest
political failure of the Act of Union is seen in the inadequacy of Westminster’s
response to the famine. It stands to reason that a Dublin-based domestic
parliament would have been better equipped to cope with the crisis instead of an
alien government overseas which ruled without majority consent. Was the British
government right, in hindsight, to continually refuse calls for a repeal of the
Act of Union? What, in fact, was the nature of this alliance between the two
countries? Was it one of mutual benefit, or was it in fact, less of an alliance
and more of a forced betrothal, a "brutal rape" as some would have
it?
Apart from lost autonomy the structure of political and economic relations that existed under the Union drained the country of wealth and resources. When the Dublin parliament was eventually dissolved, itself leading to the economic stagnation of the capital, Grattan bemoaned more than anything the monies being remitted out of the country; 8 million pounds sterling per annum - funds that could have been used to develop proper infrastructure; roads, railways and hospitals not to mention a properly funded programme of direly needed land reform.
The truth of the matter is that there were few in England interested in nurturing democracy or developing the country let alone restoring lost and to them putative land rights; instead the country was variously seen either as a convenient overseas grain depot, a source of army recruits or an occasional locus of agrarian capital investment. At the height of the famine in 1847 when John O’ Connell was putting together his proposals to raise 40 million pounds sterling from the British treasury, which Ireland was prepared to pay the full rate of interest on and which would be used ‘to plunder the world’s markets for food’, he informed the House that, by his calculations and since the enactment of the Union, Britain had benefited from the relationship to the tune of 450 million pounds - double the international debt George III incurred trying to prevent American independence.
The schisms that existed among Irish nationalist leaders boiled down to a disagreement only over the means to achieve this independence. When the Young Irelanders broke rank with O’ Connell’s Repeal Movement after the ‘sword speech’ of Francis Meagher, John O’ Connell’s only objection arose from his conviction, having sought legal advice, that were he to drop the safeguards within the Repeal Movements’ constitution, which ruled out the use of force as a legitimate means to attain independence, he, and his followers, would be open to the charge of treason; a crime which still had the penalty of being ‘hung, drawn and quartered’. After the 1848 famine uprising, Francis Meagher and several others were tried and convicted and were due to be butchered in this manner until an international petition drew clemency and they were banished to Van Diemen’s land. (Meagher later escaped and fought in the American Civil War).
The point is of course, that Britain wasn’t welcome to be in a position to ‘mismanage’ or ‘bungle’ anything and, if Ireland had been dealt a fair hand historically, Westminster would have spent less time drafting Coercion Bills and more time securing a lifeline a little more reliable than the Indian ‘flint’ corn that was making its way haphazardly around the globe. You can debate all you want about the merits of a laissez faire market approach during famine relief - it is still practised to this day, (witness the ‘bungling’ of Niger’s drought in 2005) - but if you can’t recognise at the onset that the structure of relations between the two countries predisposed the Irish countryside to natural disaster, then I give up.
We are also suffering a bit, are we not, from a ‘crisis of the signifier’. You ‘bungle’ an outfield pass or ‘mismanage’ your electricity bills, these are trivialities. The Penal Laws and the Act of Union were designed and intended to preserve and protect the Protestant Ascendancy to the detriment of the native Irish Catholic majority. Genocide is indeed a poor descriptor but it’s a lot closer to the truth than the sanitised airbrushing that proposes we should be content with ‘mismanagement’ or ‘bungling’, when the entire thrust of nationalist politics, such as it was allowed to exist, was geared towards Ireland’s right to manage its own affairs, just like any other nation.
The term ''genocide'' did not become an accepted descriptor until relatively recent times and is associated most notably with the discourse on human rights as evinced by the UN's UDR. It's usage, in this context, and in short, amounts to a disjointed contemporary projection into the past which does little service to understanding the prevailing conditions. In the language and concept of the times the famine was seen by nationalist leaders such as John Mitchell as an inevitable by-product of Ireland's secondary status within the Union; ''murderous'' is a word he himself was wont to apply. Mitchell was quite scathing (whilst in America ) on the incapacity of the Irish peasant to revolt against this state of affairs and gave every encouragement to Fintan Lalor's attempts to rouse the nation's seeming apathy. When it became apparent that they would not do so to the extent required he was quite brutal in his contempt for the generality of the Irish peasantry whom ''as a race deserved to vanish into oblivion'' for failing to prevent through force of arms their own near destruction.
If the benchmark of culture is the possession of a living breathing language then the Irish ''as a race'' (again, in the parlance of the times) did allow themselves to be wiped out, in actuality and in fact. Davitt too, shares this harsh assessment in ''The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland'' though he, unlike Mitchell, lived to see the final throes of the land question announce itself.
However, if you read the Westminster debates for the period concerned you will see that over half the time of the House was taken up with proposals for alleviating the crisis in one form or another - it was very far from a consciously designed genocide.
Much of the debates were somewhat tangential (or proved to be); Bentinck's railways scheme which was eventually quashed wasted a good deal of time and there were several readings of Coercion Bills which attempted to quell the growing agrarian unrest as well as strengthen military forces (to protect exported grain in some cases) but the majority of House time during the first few years from 1846-48 was given over almost exclusively to the issue of the loss of the Irish potato crop. And if you are familiar with British parliamentary debates in the 1830's and 40's you will recognise that this degree of time and energy was quite unprecedented. The average British MP's pride was stung by the suggestion that their country would sit back and let a catastrophe of this magnitude unfold in their own backyard. They had their international reputation to be upheld as much as anything.
And so, most members who participated in this debate (some 50 odd regular contributors) were genuinely aggrieved at the extent of the calamity and wished the Government to do as much as was humanly possible - within the acceptable parameters allowed by the budget. It was actually the newer MP's, the ones who gained boroughs after the Reform Act, the so-called Manchester Radicals (who were in many cases backed by the Chartists), and who represented the interests of the manufacturing districts (like Roebuck for instance) - it was this group who were constantly badgering the Chancellor of the Exchequer for estimates concerning the outlays towards the Relief Schemes - for the Board of Works, the Soup Kitchens and so on. Their electioneering slogan in their own constituencies had been to ask of the govt. to reign in excessive spending; thus famine relief for them was often viewed as a case of cutting the pursestrings.
After Peel was brought down over the passage of the Corn Laws Russell's Whig cabinet was enthusiastically backed by O'Connell's Repeal movement - the Foxite Whigs to whom Russell belonged had always represented the best hope for positive reform in Ireland (though never Repeal) as their staunch liberal credentials were genuinely offended by the segragationalist apartheid nature of the anti-Catholic legislation. In practice, Russell appeared to have the best of intentions and was quite radical in his sponsorship of some legislation particularly his support for Sharman Crawford's proposal that the Ulster Custom of tenant right be extended to the South - this would eventually become the three F's of Fair Rent, Free Sale and Fixity of Tenure adopted by the later Land League under Davitt - it was duly quashed not by Russell himself but by a largely antagonistic cabinet, several of whom were themselves large Irish landowners. (eg Clanrickard and Lansdowne).
The charge of genocide could be more aptly placed on the shoulders of this small coterie of aristocrats who were actually determining policy but at this point of the game they were arguing that large scale clearances of estates and subsequent funded emigration was the best thing that could happen the tenants - the real net cost benefit from the landlord's perspective had of course been outlined in detail by Nassau Senior and other Edinburgh Review economists in terms of the Malthusian catastrophe and the need to switch from tillage to grazing and "modernise" farming techniques ie. introduce intensive capitalisation, a mode of agrarian reform which excluded small tenant farmers. Marx, amongst others, refer to deliberate "culling" of the tenant population and that is indeed what it all amounted to; the blight was a perfect opportunity for landowners who had being paying attention to the likes of Senior to finally put his theories into practice.
What was murderous or "genocidal" if you want ( I don't have any hankering in particular for definitions in this respect) was not the actions of the majority of MP's or even Russell's cabinet during the actual time of the emergency - as once it arrived and the clutches of the famine drew down upon the population the vast majority of them committed an overwhelming amount of their time and resources into it's successful handling (however misguided we now view those attempts) - but rather the lack of any agrarian policy over the previous 60 years which could identify and correct the root cause of recurrent starvation among over two million rural Irish
They hadn't enough land to live on and the little piece they had wasn't theirs. Thus their surplus grain production was taken in lieu of rent and exported abroad - it's that simple. O' Connell was as much to blame in my view - nothing less than a full-scale revolution was required to radically restructure land ownership but he infamously missed the opportunity at the last "Monster Meeting". Overall, taking a long view of things and on an extended timescale it was certainly genocide; every policy adopted from the time of the Williamite settlement was designed to obliterate the Gaelic speaking culture but within the timescale of the famine years themselves we can be less certain.
How, though, it may be asked, can such large swathes of the population be induced to subsist on the monotony of a solitary food item if not through coercion? The high calorific yield per acre along with its legendary nutritional value meant it was the ideal crop with which to keep the populace in check. As long as the small rural farmer and heriditary dispossessed were not pushed to the brink of outright starvation and could maintain themselves on ever decreasing plots via the multi-purpose and trustworthy spud, as long that is, that this ever-increasing population of cottiers, smallholders and homeless labourers would continue to subsist on a solitary food source that remained unthreatened, then for the time being at least, rural unrest in the form of 'whiteboy' agrarian outrages (increasingly seen from the 1820's onwards) and the possibility of it's more radical instigators aligning themselves with the national Catholic Repeal movement led by Daniel O' Connell - could be further postponed.
Few writers on the famine, if any, pay attention to the potato's historical capacity to soak up agrarian outrage through it's ability to absorb on hillsides and quarter acre plots the disgorged remnants (ie former tenants) of the Protestant Ascendancy's switch to wholesale grain exporting to complement the vacuum that increasingly existed in the British domestic corn market from the 1780's onwards. This re-orientation of agricultural practices was encouraged every step of the way by the Ascendency dominated Dublin Parliament prior to the Act of Union and continued thereafter by such initiatives as Foster's Corn Laws which granted subsidies to all landlords who made their land available for the increased sowing of oats, wheat and barley. Legislators in Westminster ensured the smooth passage of this and like initiatives to provide corn for their own domestic markets as one of the ongoing effects of the Industrial Revolution in England was to ensure that an ever increasing army of industrial labourers simply couldn't afford further inflated grain prices.
High grain prices were one of the main focuses of Chartist unrest in England from 1838 onwards with multiple references in parliamentary debates on the increasingly straitened circumstances of families in the industrial core regions such as Manchester being unable to afford anything beyond their day's subsistence. England was in fact no longer grain sovereign and hadn't been since long before the Napoleonic Wars - it depended absolutely on the Irish
grain trade whose own landed Ascendency aristocracy enjoyed preferential trade access to the British mainland. No other country was allowed import grain to England at the preferred rate of tariff which they enjoyed. Meanwhile, English manufacturers now plagued by rising wage demands due to inflation used their influence within Westminster to apply pressure on the landed gentry who emphatically rejected Corn Law Repeal as this would bring down the price of grain; their staple produce.
From at least 1800 onwards unless a radical restructuring of agrarian policy were initiated which didn't entail mass export of agricultural produce (not merely grain but cattle, pigs and dairy) a massive famine would almost inevitably occur in Ireland. To the extent that this was both predictable and avoidable the accumulated policies of successive British governments certainly from 1815 up until 1845 may be justly described as self consciously 'murderous'.
So we should instead take a look at those methods of long term control such as the penal laws, ostensibly designed to stamp out Catholicism, but in actuality an apartheid lever transferring Irish labour surplus back to Brittania. Nothing new there; a tried and trusted formula. We should look at tenant rights and the long struggle which culminated in Davitt's Land League. Also, Catholic Emancipation in 1829 clawed some concessions, but notably not the killer tithes to the Protestant church and O’ Connell’s monster meetings in the early 1840's calling for Repeal of the Union soon petered away along with his health.
In all events, there were still in place enough legal formulas and exclusions by 1845 to ensure that the boot would remain firmly pressed in the face of the peasantry, which had never recovered from the Williamite Wars, the Cromwellian sacking and the Acts of Settlement, and were essentially being pummelled to death one generation after the next till they were ready to collapse with the slightest caprice of nature. Blight hit most of Europe but only Ireland was devastated. Why was this? Infrastructure was sorely underveloped apart it seems from ports and rail networks to carry the booty out. What we have basically is 5 million hectares of an agrarian concentration camp. Landlord led committees were continually assigned funding responsibilities for relief works and then later soup kitchens (germinal liberal conscience?) - same landlords who squandered the Irish surplus on summer trips down the Nile or in syphilitic West End fleshpots or maybe cavorting around the splendid English countryside with some upper-class crumpet and pondered the marvels of the Enlightenment and the march of scientific progress and suggested that 'one could perhaps eventually play one's role if one were so inclined' - no less inclined to see the rag and bone workshop across the pond that paid his bread and butter.
Just because the critique against the system of absenteeism is part of what’s now called the ‘nationalist’ repertoire doesn’t mean it’s undeserved or not grounded in reality. By the time the current revisionism completes it’s circle I’ve no doubt the pyramid of agrarian labour relations shall be completely inverted and we shall be soon hearing of the cottiers exploitation of London’s wealthiest investors; the financial speculators of yesteryear. These people have received the harshest opprobrium from the ‘nationalists’ as they have purchased their land not to admire the Irish countryside or participate in the development of the country but to make profit through the export of barley, wheat and oats. The Tipperary Kingstons for instance are regularly rolled out as an exemplar of the beneficial improving landlord but it would be more surprising not to find exceptions to the general rule of alienation and distrust. It is not the individual landlords and how they manage the privileges into which they are born which was the problem. The problem is the system in it's entirety; what good a bleeding heart Mother Theresa who offers you crumbs from the table when the Big House is appropriating and exporting the farmer's harvest as rental. Without the ownership of the land there will always be hunger and want because without it the farmer is ceding half his crop for another's profit and is left in perpetual subsistence.
Christine Kinnealy, who spent 15 years researching her book "This Great Calamity" and is among the first of the post-revisionist Irish historians to examine the famine, estimates there was enough food in the country to feed 11 million - and yet the people starved. There were at least twenty failures of the potato crop in the hundred years before the famine; all of them indicating the necessity of developing a more diversified food source - something which could never happen as long as the land remained corralled off under the aegis of a conquering superpower. Pushed into the hinterlands, into the most marginal lands, the Irish cottiers and smallholders (the peasantry) were forced to live in the most appalling agrarian ‘slums’ surviving entirely on a solitary food item; you could grow a spud in your ear if need be, such is their hardiness they yield three to four times the calorific return of a similar acre of grain. The 'patata' it seems, was Raleigh’s real gift to the territorializing growth of Empire.
"Genocide" as we've said is a poor descriptor, a word sculpted out of UN human rights documents and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights discourse of the modern era that presupposes 'equality' and 'self-determination' - laughable concepts totally inapplicable to weighing up the machine of 19th c. colonialism. This is a system whose proponents bypass the logic of their being a right to life - through some sort of deluded self -obfuscation, I don’t know. "Genocide" is an incomprehensible concept for the servants of racial imperialism; their filters don't process the world in any way which makes the term applicable.
“All this wretchedness and misery could, almost without exception, be traced to a single source - the system under which land had come to be occupied and owned in Ireland, a system produced by centuries of successive conquests, rebellions, confiscations and punitive legislation”
Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger
Irish historiography tends to channel very predictable grooves. The pro-Unionist ‘revisionist’ narrative focusing on the advances of Empire’s ‘civilization’ is said to be opposed by a ‘misty-eyed’ nationalist re-imagining of a glorified Gaelic past interrupted by the perceived evils of a Cambro-Norman/Tudor expansionism. But neither of these interpretative ‘schools’ are ever monolithic, or homogeneous; in the imaginations of most, their arguments blend, intersect and shed light on key events like finely graded spectra.
Thirty years after the famine, Westminster’s hand was finally forced into drafting redistributive land acts on foot of agitation and rural unrest caused by the land wars of 1879-82 and the successful campaigning of the Land League under the leadership of Michael Davitt whose own family and possessions had been flung onto the roadside during the ‘Great Hunger’ of ‘Black 47’. These land wars were themselves made inevitable by the social, economic and religious polarisation that continued to exist between the gentry and the lower strata of tenant-holder and labouring classes - a polarisation exacerbated by the fact that the majority of the 8,000 or so gentry were descended from English Tudor era Protestants and Cromwellian colonists and not Anglo-Norman settlers or native Gaels; as most of the latter who had held lands prior to the Confederate Wars had been dispossessed by the Acts of Settlement.
For the bulk of the aristocracy, their outlook remained distinctively English and Unionist and most were implacably opposed to nationalist calls for Emancipation or for dissolution of the Union, the extension of Ulster tenant right and for the demands of O'Connell's Repeal movement, all of which they naturally saw as the first steps towards their own dispossession. We should characterize the emergent Catholic middle class and the larger Catholic tenant farmers, who held maybe thirty acres or more - and were doing reasonably well, as representing a buffer zone between these two antagonistic groups; the two and a half million labourers, cottiers and paupers who regularly starved in the country whether there was a famine or not and the elite kleptocracy who monopolised it's wealth through the annual siphoning of 13 million pounds rental.
Among the many Bills confronting parliamentarians in Westminster in 1846 was a proposal to limit the working hours of English children in manufacturing (aged between 13 and 18) to twelve hours a day. I read through the debates for about an hour, in between reading Peel's presentation of the Corn Laws and realised that the poor MP who had proposed the measure and ushered the thing through committee had no chance of seeing passed what appears to us a progressive piece of legislation. The ideology of 'free trade' had completely permeated parliamentary debate, or so it seemed, and any and all measures that constrained market forces where determined to be logically flawed. A cynic would simply say they were in the pockets of big business - if not actually big business themselves. One advantage we have though is that we have seen what has actually transpired over the ensuing 150 yrs. In Ireland's context it is known that the Gaelic Order, long considered dead and irrelevant, reasserted itself with a virulent agrarian based nationalism that ended in armed rebellion followed by independence.
What was this Gaelic order, captured and re-imagined by the revivalists but the Phoenix itself arisen from the ashen bones of workhouses, coffin ships and anonymous mass graves? Famine victims are often referred to as “illiterates” and burdened with a peasantry's typical superstitions but “illiteracy” doesn’t equate to ignorance for knowledge had been transferred much as it had always been - through an oral tradition based on folk stories, songs and poems; a wholly embedded culture crackling with life, within itself and for the world around it. And when the end came there was scarcely a “cottier” or a “labourer”, of those empty economic categories we now deploy, who wasn't aware that he had belonged to a conquered and subjugated people and still fewer again, I'd wager, who didn't curse the Sassanach with their dying breath.
Much of the accumulated traditions were lost with the Tudor dispossessions with many of the Bardic order being reduced in status to that of wandering paupers but this poetic tradition exerted a tenacious hold on the Gaelic imagination. Some, such as the 17th.c Daithi O' Bruadair, still managed to get by, for the most part, purely on the strength of his verses - though he ended his days embittered and labouring in the fields like everyone else;
D'aithle na bhfileadh n-uasal,
(The high poets are gone,)
truaghsan timheal an tsaoghail;
(and I mourn for the world's waning)
clann na n-ollamh go n-eagna
(the sons of those learned masters)
folamh gan freagra faobhair.
(emptied of sharp response.)
D'aithle na bhfileadh dar ionnmhas eigse is iul
(After those poets for whom art and knowledge were wealth)
is mairg de-chonnairc an chinneamhain d'eirigh dhuinn:
(alas to have lived to see this fate befall us)
a leabhair ag titim i leimhe's leithe i gcuil
(their books in corners greying into nothing)
's ag macaibh na droinge gan siolla da seadaibh run.
(and their sons without one syllable of their secret treasure.)
Bards like O' Bruadair were the vessel's and expositor's of the Gael's wisdom - though their learning was more often deployed extolling the virtues of their Gaelic lords - but after Kinsale (to choose one turning point) their numbers were necessarily reduced and their power base eroded. The encomiums or 'praise poems' were now eclipsed by experimentation with new genres such as the 'aislingi' or 'vision' poems which usually ended with a prophesy that Eiru, personified as a speirbhean or 'sky-woman' would be redeemed by a restoration of a Stuart monarchy. This was the dominant form throughout the first half of the 18th c ('Gile na Gile' being probably the most well known of the early aislings written by Aodhagan O' Rathaille) but as the Jacobite cause became increasingly untenable there emerged a new generation of travelling poets and seanchai (story-tellers) who specialized in parodying the conventions of the genre. Nevertheless, the political aisling could still be found as late as the 19th c with the ri thar caladh (king from overseas) being now replaced by other figures such as Daniel O' Connell.
However, this is only one genre among many. From the mid 18th century, to the time of the famine there are Gaelic poems being written - and performed - about the 'wild geese', the Whiteboys, the Defenders, the Seven Years War, the Volunteers, the American War of Independence, the United Irishmen, the French at Bantry, Catholic Emancipation, the Tithe War, Repeal; in addition to hundreds others concerning myriad events of local importance; such as O Reachtabhra's 'Anach Cuain', satires on landlords such as Sean Clarach MacDomhnaill's poem on Colonel Dawson of Tipperary and Riocard Bairead's 'Eoghan Coir' not to mention the countless elegies for historical figures such as Patrick Sarsfield, Edward Fitzgerald, Fr. Nicholas Sheehy and Thomas Davis - all of which circulated widely before the famine and predated the so-called "Gaelic Revival" of the late 19th c. To say they knew little or cared less for the Gaelic Order is absurd; it defined their very being. Even among those who had to renounce Catholicism to evade penal law apartheid, consideration of past and present oppression was an ever-present.
But there were other paths to chose; is it at all surprising that an early 18th century Gaelic speaker would leave his little plot of land and seek profit in the urban centres; taking odd jobs and menial pay for want of an education and possessing only the rudiments of the foreigner’s tongue? That he would speak to his children only in English knowing this is their only hope for advancement. That those children would in turn look upon their parents with a certain disdain; believing in the words heard all round him (in 'enlightened' propaganda streaming from the presses) that they are ‘backwards’, ‘savage’ or ‘superstitious fools’ and that they should build up for themselves through industry and guile a small enterprise and seek to protect their meagre savings and future by aligning themselves fully with what must appear to be the acme of civilization.
But theirs, the aspiring Catholic middle classes who engrafted themselves onto Empire, is not the story that has survived; because the sinking ship which they left behind them, the emaciated ruins of rural Ireland, had too many passengers and too much baggage - and the tidal wave of ‘nationalism’ that accompanied its submersion was so powerful and all-encompassing that by the 1918 War of Independence only a fool would dare swim against it.
The worst of the revisionists, the timid little woodland voles that emerged from their forest retreat sixty years after the deluge - who betray not the slightest comprehension of the passions that spontaneously erupted in those years - think that by denigrating the leaders and motivations behind 1916 they can effect ‘a peace for our time’, that by undermining turn of the century nationalism they are depriving contemporary ‘32 County’ Republicanism’ of it’s oxygen? If this is their strategy then it is a false and deluded one and persisting with it will only tickle the leviathan out of its slumber.
It is astounding to me to read the contemporary correspondence, the newspaper reports, the debates in parliament and see so little inkling among the participants that an enormous grievance could be stewing in the Irish soul. It's there, it's mentioned countless times alright that the Irish 'feel hard done by' for instance vis-a-vis the Tithe Laws - they recognise it as an intellectual construct - but they don't actually feel it, they can't appreciate it's reality. Seldom has there ever been a concession made to the promotion of democracy in Ireland under British rule without the threat of violence, a sad and grievous legacy which haunts the country to this day. Independence, when it came, a full two generations after the famine, was thanks to the slow emergence and pre-dominance of the physical force tradition - one that had it’s roots in the Irish Republican Brotherhood - itself forged in the aftermath of the famine, and by men, rocked to the core by a cataclysmic visitation, which occurred, under the perennial thumb of ‘perfidious Albion’.
The Tudor-era and Cromwellian plantations in Ireland did not entail for the native Gaelic inhabitants a simple transferral of one set of elites for another. Oftentimes it is implied by revisionist historians that there has been an almost seamless switch effected which has no great meaning for the ‘peasantry’ who stay poor and are still peasants. It is not; an entire culture has been upended, a society whose individuals have well rehearsed rights and obligations towards one another and which are codified in the seanchus law tracts, additions and embellishments to which date back over a thousand years - this entire relationship is now torn asunder. They will also have to qualify by what they mean by ‘serfdom’ and expand upon how they conceived this to have occurred in pre-Norman or pre-Tudor times, for the Gaelic clans were predominantly mixed pastoralists who practised seasonal tillage, continually shifting their herds and livestock to fresh pasture, constructed mobile shelters and readily vacated their stone fortresses as needs required. Institutionalised slavery is, by and large, not a common feature of such groups, if only for the inconvenience it causes. This mobility is also associated, as cultural anthropologists can testify, with a more egalitarian social structure. Richard II, for instance, was said to be horrified when on one occasion the Gaelic chief whom he was entertaining insisted on having his entire ‘retinue’ sit with him during the meal. There is also the question of the native Gaels relationship with the land, made free use of within the prescribed territory of their kinship groups and the special features of which are preserved for us in the Gaelic place names and endlessly referenced in works such as the Tain Bo Cuailgne.
Woods, trees, lakes, plains; all previously freely accessed and known intimately and each associated with it’s own legend, tale or piece of folklore have now been enclosed; circumscribed within the baronies, boroughs and the estates of the new colonial settlers. This lifestyle is now abruptly brought to a halt replaced by a sedentary agriculture confined within specific designated areas. Within a generation perhaps the intimate knowledge connected with that landscape will be lost but more importantly the customary rights of use and management of the soil - mentioned by Gladstone in his 1884 Home Rule Speech as ‘tribal land customs’ - have now been obliterated and in their stead stand the sprawling untouchable acres of the usurper; divided utterly from their now ‘tenants’ by language, culture and law.
The natural affiliations and reciprocal ties that might exist between an English feudal lord and vassal each bound to the other by a common national history are here nowhere to be found. In their stead lie mutual suspicion and distrust; an unnatural hierarchy sustained by no common bond but the brute exercise of force. The reason why historians such as McDowell don’t focus on secret agrarian resistance groups like the ‘Defenders’ is not because of a paucity of information, or because they are ‘not important to the big picture’ - but because this would disturb the much more tranquil narrative to be found in the chambers of the Irish Parliament; the one that blinds itself to the ultimate reality that it’s legislators, despite all their high flown rhetoric and noble sentiments, are really just haggling how best to parcel out the land and it’s resources amongst their own exclusive members - native Irish aberrations such as William Connolly aside - whilst the sedentarised Gaelic majority, through their policies, their ignorance, and their neglect are being commissioned straight into a 19th century holocaust. Where are the chapters from the Royal Irish Academy on the root causes of the famine? The root causes that is, not the arbitrary sweep of nature line or the bogus proliferating population story which they have the gall to dress up as an indicator of success, or even the ‘mismanagement and incompetence line’ but the narrative that details in minutae how the land was enclosed into the feudal estates system and it’s former inhabitants gavelkinded into oblivion.
The result of the ‘Cogadh an Da Ri’ (War of the Two Kings) in Ireland was the installation of an alien ruling class, largely composed of English military mercenaries who neither shared the culture, language or religion of the native Gaels and who proceeded to institute punitive measures which assured their predominance; known as the penal laws. Lands held by the descendents of the Anglo-Norman settlers (Old English) - who had maintained their Catholicism throughout the Reformation - and who had thrown in their lot with the native Gaels (Old Irish) during the Confederate Wars, or the ‘Cogadh na hAon-deag mBliana’ (Eleven Years War) were also forfeited. Some, such as James Connolly in his ‘History of Irish Labour’ have pointed to the suspicion and enmity that existed between the native Gaels and the Old English as a factor which contributed to the failure of their alliances on both these occasions.
Without dwelling at length on this matter, both these conflicts are viewed by the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation as the first two occasions in which independence was attempted through the use of arms;
“In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty: six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms”.
The point has often been raised that Catholics were not the exclusive focus of the penal laws; that discriminations also existed against the northern Presbyterian “dissenters” and that this fact somehow mitigates the argument that native Irish Catholics were being exclusively targeted. Now, I cannot begin to account for the various theological disputes which produced the proliferation of ‘dissenter’ faiths but at the end of the day they are all, are they not, Protestant. The northern Presbyterians and their Protestant brethren, whatever disagreements may have existed between them and whatever exclusions they may have suffered in the past from the Anglican hierarchy were always united in their condemnation of ‘popery’ and this unity becomes more pronounced after 1798. In many ways, in fact, they become joined at the hip as we can clearly see, for instance, in their common membership of Orange lodges. In referring to penal law discrimination against dissenters it needs to be acknowledged that these ties of affinity - being bound within the one Protestant faith - ultimately bind them closer to Anglicans and distance them both in turn from Catholicism.
As a general point to illustrate that Catholics were not being singled out exclusively for discrimination under the penal code this argument is well taken - but let’s be clear, the penal laws, in themselves, are not the immediate problem with the conditions that prevail in Ireland from the 17th to 19th centuries; what is of more concern is the fact that the country has been colonised. The ‘Jacobite’ French monarchy’s persecution of Protestants is appalling and well known, as is the anti-catholic hysteria that culminated in the massacres of Vendee and the Roman Catholic Church was just as grasping as it’s Anglican counterpart in Ireland in extracting tithes from the French peasantry; but in France, as is the case with England, the discrimination against Protestant and Catholic minorities is not proceeding in the context of colonialism. It is Englishmen and Frenchmen legislating against their fellow country men, or upholding their own faiths as a means to diminish them; in Ireland the laws are being applied, stiffened and relaxed, as according to the measure of the times, by “Irishmen” of English stock under the ultimate auspices of the Crown of England. What is more, whereas in France the Protestants were a significant minority; in England, Catholics comprised only 4% of the population and didn‘t by themselves constitute a threat to the status quo. In Ireland, the discriminatory laws are being applied to a 70-75% majority, by a minority Anglican ascendancy of mainly English extraction, with a corresponding alien culture and language; in short, they are colonists unsustainably lording themselves over an alienated populace.
Apart from lost autonomy the structure of political and economic relations that existed under the Union drained the country of wealth and resources. When the Dublin parliament was eventually dissolved, itself leading to the economic stagnation of the capital, Grattan bemoaned more than anything the monies being remitted out of the country; 8 million pounds sterling per annum - funds that could have been used to develop proper infrastructure; roads, railways and hospitals not to mention a properly funded programme of direly needed land reform.
The truth of the matter is that there were few in England interested in nurturing democracy or developing the country let alone restoring lost and to them putative land rights; instead the country was variously seen either as a convenient overseas grain depot, a source of army recruits or an occasional locus of agrarian capital investment. At the height of the famine in 1847 when John O’ Connell was putting together his proposals to raise 40 million pounds sterling from the British treasury, which Ireland was prepared to pay the full rate of interest on and which would be used ‘to plunder the world’s markets for food’, he informed the House that, by his calculations and since the enactment of the Union, Britain had benefited from the relationship to the tune of 450 million pounds - double the international debt George III incurred trying to prevent American independence.
The schisms that existed among Irish nationalist leaders boiled down to a disagreement only over the means to achieve this independence. When the Young Irelanders broke rank with O’ Connell’s Repeal Movement after the ‘sword speech’ of Francis Meagher, John O’ Connell’s only objection arose from his conviction, having sought legal advice, that were he to drop the safeguards within the Repeal Movements’ constitution, which ruled out the use of force as a legitimate means to attain independence, he, and his followers, would be open to the charge of treason; a crime which still had the penalty of being ‘hung, drawn and quartered’. After the 1848 famine uprising, Francis Meagher and several others were tried and convicted and were due to be butchered in this manner until an international petition drew clemency and they were banished to Van Diemen’s land. (Meagher later escaped and fought in the American Civil War).
The point is of course, that Britain wasn’t welcome to be in a position to ‘mismanage’ or ‘bungle’ anything and, if Ireland had been dealt a fair hand historically, Westminster would have spent less time drafting Coercion Bills and more time securing a lifeline a little more reliable than the Indian ‘flint’ corn that was making its way haphazardly around the globe. You can debate all you want about the merits of a laissez faire market approach during famine relief - it is still practised to this day, (witness the ‘bungling’ of Niger’s drought in 2005) - but if you can’t recognise at the onset that the structure of relations between the two countries predisposed the Irish countryside to natural disaster, then I give up.
We are also suffering a bit, are we not, from a ‘crisis of the signifier’. You ‘bungle’ an outfield pass or ‘mismanage’ your electricity bills, these are trivialities. The Penal Laws and the Act of Union were designed and intended to preserve and protect the Protestant Ascendancy to the detriment of the native Irish Catholic majority. Genocide is indeed a poor descriptor but it’s a lot closer to the truth than the sanitised airbrushing that proposes we should be content with ‘mismanagement’ or ‘bungling’, when the entire thrust of nationalist politics, such as it was allowed to exist, was geared towards Ireland’s right to manage its own affairs, just like any other nation.
The term ''genocide'' did not become an accepted descriptor until relatively recent times and is associated most notably with the discourse on human rights as evinced by the UN's UDR. It's usage, in this context, and in short, amounts to a disjointed contemporary projection into the past which does little service to understanding the prevailing conditions. In the language and concept of the times the famine was seen by nationalist leaders such as John Mitchell as an inevitable by-product of Ireland's secondary status within the Union; ''murderous'' is a word he himself was wont to apply. Mitchell was quite scathing (whilst in America ) on the incapacity of the Irish peasant to revolt against this state of affairs and gave every encouragement to Fintan Lalor's attempts to rouse the nation's seeming apathy. When it became apparent that they would not do so to the extent required he was quite brutal in his contempt for the generality of the Irish peasantry whom ''as a race deserved to vanish into oblivion'' for failing to prevent through force of arms their own near destruction.
If the benchmark of culture is the possession of a living breathing language then the Irish ''as a race'' (again, in the parlance of the times) did allow themselves to be wiped out, in actuality and in fact. Davitt too, shares this harsh assessment in ''The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland'' though he, unlike Mitchell, lived to see the final throes of the land question announce itself.
However, if you read the Westminster debates for the period concerned you will see that over half the time of the House was taken up with proposals for alleviating the crisis in one form or another - it was very far from a consciously designed genocide.
Much of the debates were somewhat tangential (or proved to be); Bentinck's railways scheme which was eventually quashed wasted a good deal of time and there were several readings of Coercion Bills which attempted to quell the growing agrarian unrest as well as strengthen military forces (to protect exported grain in some cases) but the majority of House time during the first few years from 1846-48 was given over almost exclusively to the issue of the loss of the Irish potato crop. And if you are familiar with British parliamentary debates in the 1830's and 40's you will recognise that this degree of time and energy was quite unprecedented. The average British MP's pride was stung by the suggestion that their country would sit back and let a catastrophe of this magnitude unfold in their own backyard. They had their international reputation to be upheld as much as anything.
And so, most members who participated in this debate (some 50 odd regular contributors) were genuinely aggrieved at the extent of the calamity and wished the Government to do as much as was humanly possible - within the acceptable parameters allowed by the budget. It was actually the newer MP's, the ones who gained boroughs after the Reform Act, the so-called Manchester Radicals (who were in many cases backed by the Chartists), and who represented the interests of the manufacturing districts (like Roebuck for instance) - it was this group who were constantly badgering the Chancellor of the Exchequer for estimates concerning the outlays towards the Relief Schemes - for the Board of Works, the Soup Kitchens and so on. Their electioneering slogan in their own constituencies had been to ask of the govt. to reign in excessive spending; thus famine relief for them was often viewed as a case of cutting the pursestrings.
After Peel was brought down over the passage of the Corn Laws Russell's Whig cabinet was enthusiastically backed by O'Connell's Repeal movement - the Foxite Whigs to whom Russell belonged had always represented the best hope for positive reform in Ireland (though never Repeal) as their staunch liberal credentials were genuinely offended by the segragationalist apartheid nature of the anti-Catholic legislation. In practice, Russell appeared to have the best of intentions and was quite radical in his sponsorship of some legislation particularly his support for Sharman Crawford's proposal that the Ulster Custom of tenant right be extended to the South - this would eventually become the three F's of Fair Rent, Free Sale and Fixity of Tenure adopted by the later Land League under Davitt - it was duly quashed not by Russell himself but by a largely antagonistic cabinet, several of whom were themselves large Irish landowners. (eg Clanrickard and Lansdowne).
The charge of genocide could be more aptly placed on the shoulders of this small coterie of aristocrats who were actually determining policy but at this point of the game they were arguing that large scale clearances of estates and subsequent funded emigration was the best thing that could happen the tenants - the real net cost benefit from the landlord's perspective had of course been outlined in detail by Nassau Senior and other Edinburgh Review economists in terms of the Malthusian catastrophe and the need to switch from tillage to grazing and "modernise" farming techniques ie. introduce intensive capitalisation, a mode of agrarian reform which excluded small tenant farmers. Marx, amongst others, refer to deliberate "culling" of the tenant population and that is indeed what it all amounted to; the blight was a perfect opportunity for landowners who had being paying attention to the likes of Senior to finally put his theories into practice.
What was murderous or "genocidal" if you want ( I don't have any hankering in particular for definitions in this respect) was not the actions of the majority of MP's or even Russell's cabinet during the actual time of the emergency - as once it arrived and the clutches of the famine drew down upon the population the vast majority of them committed an overwhelming amount of their time and resources into it's successful handling (however misguided we now view those attempts) - but rather the lack of any agrarian policy over the previous 60 years which could identify and correct the root cause of recurrent starvation among over two million rural Irish
They hadn't enough land to live on and the little piece they had wasn't theirs. Thus their surplus grain production was taken in lieu of rent and exported abroad - it's that simple. O' Connell was as much to blame in my view - nothing less than a full-scale revolution was required to radically restructure land ownership but he infamously missed the opportunity at the last "Monster Meeting". Overall, taking a long view of things and on an extended timescale it was certainly genocide; every policy adopted from the time of the Williamite settlement was designed to obliterate the Gaelic speaking culture but within the timescale of the famine years themselves we can be less certain.
How, though, it may be asked, can such large swathes of the population be induced to subsist on the monotony of a solitary food item if not through coercion? The high calorific yield per acre along with its legendary nutritional value meant it was the ideal crop with which to keep the populace in check. As long as the small rural farmer and heriditary dispossessed were not pushed to the brink of outright starvation and could maintain themselves on ever decreasing plots via the multi-purpose and trustworthy spud, as long that is, that this ever-increasing population of cottiers, smallholders and homeless labourers would continue to subsist on a solitary food source that remained unthreatened, then for the time being at least, rural unrest in the form of 'whiteboy' agrarian outrages (increasingly seen from the 1820's onwards) and the possibility of it's more radical instigators aligning themselves with the national Catholic Repeal movement led by Daniel O' Connell - could be further postponed.
Few writers on the famine, if any, pay attention to the potato's historical capacity to soak up agrarian outrage through it's ability to absorb on hillsides and quarter acre plots the disgorged remnants (ie former tenants) of the Protestant Ascendancy's switch to wholesale grain exporting to complement the vacuum that increasingly existed in the British domestic corn market from the 1780's onwards. This re-orientation of agricultural practices was encouraged every step of the way by the Ascendency dominated Dublin Parliament prior to the Act of Union and continued thereafter by such initiatives as Foster's Corn Laws which granted subsidies to all landlords who made their land available for the increased sowing of oats, wheat and barley. Legislators in Westminster ensured the smooth passage of this and like initiatives to provide corn for their own domestic markets as one of the ongoing effects of the Industrial Revolution in England was to ensure that an ever increasing army of industrial labourers simply couldn't afford further inflated grain prices.
High grain prices were one of the main focuses of Chartist unrest in England from 1838 onwards with multiple references in parliamentary debates on the increasingly straitened circumstances of families in the industrial core regions such as Manchester being unable to afford anything beyond their day's subsistence. England was in fact no longer grain sovereign and hadn't been since long before the Napoleonic Wars - it depended absolutely on the Irish
grain trade whose own landed Ascendency aristocracy enjoyed preferential trade access to the British mainland. No other country was allowed import grain to England at the preferred rate of tariff which they enjoyed. Meanwhile, English manufacturers now plagued by rising wage demands due to inflation used their influence within Westminster to apply pressure on the landed gentry who emphatically rejected Corn Law Repeal as this would bring down the price of grain; their staple produce.
From at least 1800 onwards unless a radical restructuring of agrarian policy were initiated which didn't entail mass export of agricultural produce (not merely grain but cattle, pigs and dairy) a massive famine would almost inevitably occur in Ireland. To the extent that this was both predictable and avoidable the accumulated policies of successive British governments certainly from 1815 up until 1845 may be justly described as self consciously 'murderous'.
So we should instead take a look at those methods of long term control such as the penal laws, ostensibly designed to stamp out Catholicism, but in actuality an apartheid lever transferring Irish labour surplus back to Brittania. Nothing new there; a tried and trusted formula. We should look at tenant rights and the long struggle which culminated in Davitt's Land League. Also, Catholic Emancipation in 1829 clawed some concessions, but notably not the killer tithes to the Protestant church and O’ Connell’s monster meetings in the early 1840's calling for Repeal of the Union soon petered away along with his health.
In all events, there were still in place enough legal formulas and exclusions by 1845 to ensure that the boot would remain firmly pressed in the face of the peasantry, which had never recovered from the Williamite Wars, the Cromwellian sacking and the Acts of Settlement, and were essentially being pummelled to death one generation after the next till they were ready to collapse with the slightest caprice of nature. Blight hit most of Europe but only Ireland was devastated. Why was this? Infrastructure was sorely underveloped apart it seems from ports and rail networks to carry the booty out. What we have basically is 5 million hectares of an agrarian concentration camp. Landlord led committees were continually assigned funding responsibilities for relief works and then later soup kitchens (germinal liberal conscience?) - same landlords who squandered the Irish surplus on summer trips down the Nile or in syphilitic West End fleshpots or maybe cavorting around the splendid English countryside with some upper-class crumpet and pondered the marvels of the Enlightenment and the march of scientific progress and suggested that 'one could perhaps eventually play one's role if one were so inclined' - no less inclined to see the rag and bone workshop across the pond that paid his bread and butter.
Just because the critique against the system of absenteeism is part of what’s now called the ‘nationalist’ repertoire doesn’t mean it’s undeserved or not grounded in reality. By the time the current revisionism completes it’s circle I’ve no doubt the pyramid of agrarian labour relations shall be completely inverted and we shall be soon hearing of the cottiers exploitation of London’s wealthiest investors; the financial speculators of yesteryear. These people have received the harshest opprobrium from the ‘nationalists’ as they have purchased their land not to admire the Irish countryside or participate in the development of the country but to make profit through the export of barley, wheat and oats. The Tipperary Kingstons for instance are regularly rolled out as an exemplar of the beneficial improving landlord but it would be more surprising not to find exceptions to the general rule of alienation and distrust. It is not the individual landlords and how they manage the privileges into which they are born which was the problem. The problem is the system in it's entirety; what good a bleeding heart Mother Theresa who offers you crumbs from the table when the Big House is appropriating and exporting the farmer's harvest as rental. Without the ownership of the land there will always be hunger and want because without it the farmer is ceding half his crop for another's profit and is left in perpetual subsistence.
Christine Kinnealy, who spent 15 years researching her book "This Great Calamity" and is among the first of the post-revisionist Irish historians to examine the famine, estimates there was enough food in the country to feed 11 million - and yet the people starved. There were at least twenty failures of the potato crop in the hundred years before the famine; all of them indicating the necessity of developing a more diversified food source - something which could never happen as long as the land remained corralled off under the aegis of a conquering superpower. Pushed into the hinterlands, into the most marginal lands, the Irish cottiers and smallholders (the peasantry) were forced to live in the most appalling agrarian ‘slums’ surviving entirely on a solitary food item; you could grow a spud in your ear if need be, such is their hardiness they yield three to four times the calorific return of a similar acre of grain. The 'patata' it seems, was Raleigh’s real gift to the territorializing growth of Empire.
"Genocide" as we've said is a poor descriptor, a word sculpted out of UN human rights documents and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights discourse of the modern era that presupposes 'equality' and 'self-determination' - laughable concepts totally inapplicable to weighing up the machine of 19th c. colonialism. This is a system whose proponents bypass the logic of their being a right to life - through some sort of deluded self -obfuscation, I don’t know. "Genocide" is an incomprehensible concept for the servants of racial imperialism; their filters don't process the world in any way which makes the term applicable.
“All this wretchedness and misery could, almost without exception, be traced to a single source - the system under which land had come to be occupied and owned in Ireland, a system produced by centuries of successive conquests, rebellions, confiscations and punitive legislation”
Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger
Irish historiography tends to channel very predictable grooves. The pro-Unionist ‘revisionist’ narrative focusing on the advances of Empire’s ‘civilization’ is said to be opposed by a ‘misty-eyed’ nationalist re-imagining of a glorified Gaelic past interrupted by the perceived evils of a Cambro-Norman/Tudor expansionism. But neither of these interpretative ‘schools’ are ever monolithic, or homogeneous; in the imaginations of most, their arguments blend, intersect and shed light on key events like finely graded spectra.
Thirty years after the famine, Westminster’s hand was finally forced into drafting redistributive land acts on foot of agitation and rural unrest caused by the land wars of 1879-82 and the successful campaigning of the Land League under the leadership of Michael Davitt whose own family and possessions had been flung onto the roadside during the ‘Great Hunger’ of ‘Black 47’. These land wars were themselves made inevitable by the social, economic and religious polarisation that continued to exist between the gentry and the lower strata of tenant-holder and labouring classes - a polarisation exacerbated by the fact that the majority of the 8,000 or so gentry were descended from English Tudor era Protestants and Cromwellian colonists and not Anglo-Norman settlers or native Gaels; as most of the latter who had held lands prior to the Confederate Wars had been dispossessed by the Acts of Settlement.
For the bulk of the aristocracy, their outlook remained distinctively English and Unionist and most were implacably opposed to nationalist calls for Emancipation or for dissolution of the Union, the extension of Ulster tenant right and for the demands of O'Connell's Repeal movement, all of which they naturally saw as the first steps towards their own dispossession. We should characterize the emergent Catholic middle class and the larger Catholic tenant farmers, who held maybe thirty acres or more - and were doing reasonably well, as representing a buffer zone between these two antagonistic groups; the two and a half million labourers, cottiers and paupers who regularly starved in the country whether there was a famine or not and the elite kleptocracy who monopolised it's wealth through the annual siphoning of 13 million pounds rental.
Among the many Bills confronting parliamentarians in Westminster in 1846 was a proposal to limit the working hours of English children in manufacturing (aged between 13 and 18) to twelve hours a day. I read through the debates for about an hour, in between reading Peel's presentation of the Corn Laws and realised that the poor MP who had proposed the measure and ushered the thing through committee had no chance of seeing passed what appears to us a progressive piece of legislation. The ideology of 'free trade' had completely permeated parliamentary debate, or so it seemed, and any and all measures that constrained market forces where determined to be logically flawed. A cynic would simply say they were in the pockets of big business - if not actually big business themselves. One advantage we have though is that we have seen what has actually transpired over the ensuing 150 yrs. In Ireland's context it is known that the Gaelic Order, long considered dead and irrelevant, reasserted itself with a virulent agrarian based nationalism that ended in armed rebellion followed by independence.
What was this Gaelic order, captured and re-imagined by the revivalists but the Phoenix itself arisen from the ashen bones of workhouses, coffin ships and anonymous mass graves? Famine victims are often referred to as “illiterates” and burdened with a peasantry's typical superstitions but “illiteracy” doesn’t equate to ignorance for knowledge had been transferred much as it had always been - through an oral tradition based on folk stories, songs and poems; a wholly embedded culture crackling with life, within itself and for the world around it. And when the end came there was scarcely a “cottier” or a “labourer”, of those empty economic categories we now deploy, who wasn't aware that he had belonged to a conquered and subjugated people and still fewer again, I'd wager, who didn't curse the Sassanach with their dying breath.
Much of the accumulated traditions were lost with the Tudor dispossessions with many of the Bardic order being reduced in status to that of wandering paupers but this poetic tradition exerted a tenacious hold on the Gaelic imagination. Some, such as the 17th.c Daithi O' Bruadair, still managed to get by, for the most part, purely on the strength of his verses - though he ended his days embittered and labouring in the fields like everyone else;
D'aithle na bhfileadh n-uasal,
(The high poets are gone,)
truaghsan timheal an tsaoghail;
(and I mourn for the world's waning)
clann na n-ollamh go n-eagna
(the sons of those learned masters)
folamh gan freagra faobhair.
(emptied of sharp response.)
D'aithle na bhfileadh dar ionnmhas eigse is iul
(After those poets for whom art and knowledge were wealth)
is mairg de-chonnairc an chinneamhain d'eirigh dhuinn:
(alas to have lived to see this fate befall us)
a leabhair ag titim i leimhe's leithe i gcuil
(their books in corners greying into nothing)
's ag macaibh na droinge gan siolla da seadaibh run.
(and their sons without one syllable of their secret treasure.)
Bards like O' Bruadair were the vessel's and expositor's of the Gael's wisdom - though their learning was more often deployed extolling the virtues of their Gaelic lords - but after Kinsale (to choose one turning point) their numbers were necessarily reduced and their power base eroded. The encomiums or 'praise poems' were now eclipsed by experimentation with new genres such as the 'aislingi' or 'vision' poems which usually ended with a prophesy that Eiru, personified as a speirbhean or 'sky-woman' would be redeemed by a restoration of a Stuart monarchy. This was the dominant form throughout the first half of the 18th c ('Gile na Gile' being probably the most well known of the early aislings written by Aodhagan O' Rathaille) but as the Jacobite cause became increasingly untenable there emerged a new generation of travelling poets and seanchai (story-tellers) who specialized in parodying the conventions of the genre. Nevertheless, the political aisling could still be found as late as the 19th c with the ri thar caladh (king from overseas) being now replaced by other figures such as Daniel O' Connell.
However, this is only one genre among many. From the mid 18th century, to the time of the famine there are Gaelic poems being written - and performed - about the 'wild geese', the Whiteboys, the Defenders, the Seven Years War, the Volunteers, the American War of Independence, the United Irishmen, the French at Bantry, Catholic Emancipation, the Tithe War, Repeal; in addition to hundreds others concerning myriad events of local importance; such as O Reachtabhra's 'Anach Cuain', satires on landlords such as Sean Clarach MacDomhnaill's poem on Colonel Dawson of Tipperary and Riocard Bairead's 'Eoghan Coir' not to mention the countless elegies for historical figures such as Patrick Sarsfield, Edward Fitzgerald, Fr. Nicholas Sheehy and Thomas Davis - all of which circulated widely before the famine and predated the so-called "Gaelic Revival" of the late 19th c. To say they knew little or cared less for the Gaelic Order is absurd; it defined their very being. Even among those who had to renounce Catholicism to evade penal law apartheid, consideration of past and present oppression was an ever-present.
But there were other paths to chose; is it at all surprising that an early 18th century Gaelic speaker would leave his little plot of land and seek profit in the urban centres; taking odd jobs and menial pay for want of an education and possessing only the rudiments of the foreigner’s tongue? That he would speak to his children only in English knowing this is their only hope for advancement. That those children would in turn look upon their parents with a certain disdain; believing in the words heard all round him (in 'enlightened' propaganda streaming from the presses) that they are ‘backwards’, ‘savage’ or ‘superstitious fools’ and that they should build up for themselves through industry and guile a small enterprise and seek to protect their meagre savings and future by aligning themselves fully with what must appear to be the acme of civilization.
But theirs, the aspiring Catholic middle classes who engrafted themselves onto Empire, is not the story that has survived; because the sinking ship which they left behind them, the emaciated ruins of rural Ireland, had too many passengers and too much baggage - and the tidal wave of ‘nationalism’ that accompanied its submersion was so powerful and all-encompassing that by the 1918 War of Independence only a fool would dare swim against it.
The worst of the revisionists, the timid little woodland voles that emerged from their forest retreat sixty years after the deluge - who betray not the slightest comprehension of the passions that spontaneously erupted in those years - think that by denigrating the leaders and motivations behind 1916 they can effect ‘a peace for our time’, that by undermining turn of the century nationalism they are depriving contemporary ‘32 County’ Republicanism’ of it’s oxygen? If this is their strategy then it is a false and deluded one and persisting with it will only tickle the leviathan out of its slumber.
It is astounding to me to read the contemporary correspondence, the newspaper reports, the debates in parliament and see so little inkling among the participants that an enormous grievance could be stewing in the Irish soul. It's there, it's mentioned countless times alright that the Irish 'feel hard done by' for instance vis-a-vis the Tithe Laws - they recognise it as an intellectual construct - but they don't actually feel it, they can't appreciate it's reality. Seldom has there ever been a concession made to the promotion of democracy in Ireland under British rule without the threat of violence, a sad and grievous legacy which haunts the country to this day. Independence, when it came, a full two generations after the famine, was thanks to the slow emergence and pre-dominance of the physical force tradition - one that had it’s roots in the Irish Republican Brotherhood - itself forged in the aftermath of the famine, and by men, rocked to the core by a cataclysmic visitation, which occurred, under the perennial thumb of ‘perfidious Albion’.
The Tudor-era and Cromwellian plantations in Ireland did not entail for the native Gaelic inhabitants a simple transferral of one set of elites for another. Oftentimes it is implied by revisionist historians that there has been an almost seamless switch effected which has no great meaning for the ‘peasantry’ who stay poor and are still peasants. It is not; an entire culture has been upended, a society whose individuals have well rehearsed rights and obligations towards one another and which are codified in the seanchus law tracts, additions and embellishments to which date back over a thousand years - this entire relationship is now torn asunder. They will also have to qualify by what they mean by ‘serfdom’ and expand upon how they conceived this to have occurred in pre-Norman or pre-Tudor times, for the Gaelic clans were predominantly mixed pastoralists who practised seasonal tillage, continually shifting their herds and livestock to fresh pasture, constructed mobile shelters and readily vacated their stone fortresses as needs required. Institutionalised slavery is, by and large, not a common feature of such groups, if only for the inconvenience it causes. This mobility is also associated, as cultural anthropologists can testify, with a more egalitarian social structure. Richard II, for instance, was said to be horrified when on one occasion the Gaelic chief whom he was entertaining insisted on having his entire ‘retinue’ sit with him during the meal. There is also the question of the native Gaels relationship with the land, made free use of within the prescribed territory of their kinship groups and the special features of which are preserved for us in the Gaelic place names and endlessly referenced in works such as the Tain Bo Cuailgne.
Woods, trees, lakes, plains; all previously freely accessed and known intimately and each associated with it’s own legend, tale or piece of folklore have now been enclosed; circumscribed within the baronies, boroughs and the estates of the new colonial settlers. This lifestyle is now abruptly brought to a halt replaced by a sedentary agriculture confined within specific designated areas. Within a generation perhaps the intimate knowledge connected with that landscape will be lost but more importantly the customary rights of use and management of the soil - mentioned by Gladstone in his 1884 Home Rule Speech as ‘tribal land customs’ - have now been obliterated and in their stead stand the sprawling untouchable acres of the usurper; divided utterly from their now ‘tenants’ by language, culture and law.
The natural affiliations and reciprocal ties that might exist between an English feudal lord and vassal each bound to the other by a common national history are here nowhere to be found. In their stead lie mutual suspicion and distrust; an unnatural hierarchy sustained by no common bond but the brute exercise of force. The reason why historians such as McDowell don’t focus on secret agrarian resistance groups like the ‘Defenders’ is not because of a paucity of information, or because they are ‘not important to the big picture’ - but because this would disturb the much more tranquil narrative to be found in the chambers of the Irish Parliament; the one that blinds itself to the ultimate reality that it’s legislators, despite all their high flown rhetoric and noble sentiments, are really just haggling how best to parcel out the land and it’s resources amongst their own exclusive members - native Irish aberrations such as William Connolly aside - whilst the sedentarised Gaelic majority, through their policies, their ignorance, and their neglect are being commissioned straight into a 19th century holocaust. Where are the chapters from the Royal Irish Academy on the root causes of the famine? The root causes that is, not the arbitrary sweep of nature line or the bogus proliferating population story which they have the gall to dress up as an indicator of success, or even the ‘mismanagement and incompetence line’ but the narrative that details in minutae how the land was enclosed into the feudal estates system and it’s former inhabitants gavelkinded into oblivion.
The result of the ‘Cogadh an Da Ri’ (War of the Two Kings) in Ireland was the installation of an alien ruling class, largely composed of English military mercenaries who neither shared the culture, language or religion of the native Gaels and who proceeded to institute punitive measures which assured their predominance; known as the penal laws. Lands held by the descendents of the Anglo-Norman settlers (Old English) - who had maintained their Catholicism throughout the Reformation - and who had thrown in their lot with the native Gaels (Old Irish) during the Confederate Wars, or the ‘Cogadh na hAon-deag mBliana’ (Eleven Years War) were also forfeited. Some, such as James Connolly in his ‘History of Irish Labour’ have pointed to the suspicion and enmity that existed between the native Gaels and the Old English as a factor which contributed to the failure of their alliances on both these occasions.
Without dwelling at length on this matter, both these conflicts are viewed by the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation as the first two occasions in which independence was attempted through the use of arms;
“In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty: six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms”.
The point has often been raised that Catholics were not the exclusive focus of the penal laws; that discriminations also existed against the northern Presbyterian “dissenters” and that this fact somehow mitigates the argument that native Irish Catholics were being exclusively targeted. Now, I cannot begin to account for the various theological disputes which produced the proliferation of ‘dissenter’ faiths but at the end of the day they are all, are they not, Protestant. The northern Presbyterians and their Protestant brethren, whatever disagreements may have existed between them and whatever exclusions they may have suffered in the past from the Anglican hierarchy were always united in their condemnation of ‘popery’ and this unity becomes more pronounced after 1798. In many ways, in fact, they become joined at the hip as we can clearly see, for instance, in their common membership of Orange lodges. In referring to penal law discrimination against dissenters it needs to be acknowledged that these ties of affinity - being bound within the one Protestant faith - ultimately bind them closer to Anglicans and distance them both in turn from Catholicism.
As a general point to illustrate that Catholics were not being singled out exclusively for discrimination under the penal code this argument is well taken - but let’s be clear, the penal laws, in themselves, are not the immediate problem with the conditions that prevail in Ireland from the 17th to 19th centuries; what is of more concern is the fact that the country has been colonised. The ‘Jacobite’ French monarchy’s persecution of Protestants is appalling and well known, as is the anti-catholic hysteria that culminated in the massacres of Vendee and the Roman Catholic Church was just as grasping as it’s Anglican counterpart in Ireland in extracting tithes from the French peasantry; but in France, as is the case with England, the discrimination against Protestant and Catholic minorities is not proceeding in the context of colonialism. It is Englishmen and Frenchmen legislating against their fellow country men, or upholding their own faiths as a means to diminish them; in Ireland the laws are being applied, stiffened and relaxed, as according to the measure of the times, by “Irishmen” of English stock under the ultimate auspices of the Crown of England. What is more, whereas in France the Protestants were a significant minority; in England, Catholics comprised only 4% of the population and didn‘t by themselves constitute a threat to the status quo. In Ireland, the discriminatory laws are being applied to a 70-75% majority, by a minority Anglican ascendancy of mainly English extraction, with a corresponding alien culture and language; in short, they are colonists unsustainably lording themselves over an alienated populace.
The discontent among the Gaelic clans reached it’s height
under the appalling Charles I during the 1630’s when his minister Wentworth was
rumoured to be planning further plantations. The later alliance with the
Royalists was a marriage of convenience, only a springboard used to further the
ultimate goal of eventual independence. Likewise, in the support for James II
during the Williamite War; the interest of the Gaelic clans would be best served
under a Catholic monarch. Public declarations of support and privately held
convictions are two entirely different things; there is no love of the Crown
amongst the Gaelic majority whether it be Stuart or Hanover, Catholic or
Protestant. If the ‘Glorious Revolution’ had not occurred and a Catholic monarch
had sat on the throne for the next hundred years the native Gaels and the Old
English would still be struggling to have their lands back; only this time that
struggle to repossess these lands wouldn’t be conducted through the sectarian
framework of the penal laws - but through some other mechanism of civil
apartheid which would need to be invented to justify their dispossession and
continual subjugation.
After all, what plausible steps did James II take to reverse Cromwell’s plantations in the three years of his reign? The penal laws were less about religion and more about the ownership and control of the land in Ireland and to this end they were designed to ensure the continued quiescence of an already subjugated native population. If they were entirely about achieving security from a restless “Catholic” population they would have been relaxed in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht, which, by ending the Spanish War of Succession, restored the balance of power in Europe and thereby diminished considerably the threat of France or Spain using “Jacobite” Ireland as a backdoor to unseat the Hanoverians.
Certainly, by the time we reach the implosion of “Forty-Five” and the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, Jacobitism is no longer tenable as wish-fulfilment, let alone as a political creed. When the Netherlands were defeated during this war, the British in settling terms with the French in 1748 requested the expulsion of the Bonnie Prince from French soil. They duly obliged, probably grateful for the opportunity of relieving themselves of this source of embarrassment, arrested him as he was blithely making his way to the Opera and jailed him for a brief period before sending him packing. Of course, during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 Ireland wouldn’t have been too fruitful a source of recruits at any rate, given it was in the midst of yet another 18th century famine, this time claiming half a million lives, and known, and still remembered as ‘An Gorta Mor’ (the Great Famine) to the Defenders and United Irishmen of the 1790’s - of course by then the native Gaels should have been more wary in choosing superlatives to describe their enforced starvation.
Finally, when the ‘Old Pretender’ James VIII/III died in 1766 the Holy See refused to recognise any further Stuart claims to the throne of Great Britain and so surely with the support of France and Rome withered away we would have expected a significant amelioration of the penal laws but, this of course, did not happen, because the southern Anglican Ascendancy were by now completely entrenched and in effective control of every single apparatus of political power at local, county and national level; the latter under the provisions of Poyning’s Law. The ostensible reason for keeping the penal laws on the statute books - the threat of Jacobitism - elapsed, in reality, with the passage of 1745, and certainly, with the renunciation of Stuart claims to the throne in 1766 it may have been expected that they would be amended, but this wasn't the case. Catholics had to wait until 1778 for the first major relief measure; the right was granted to hold longer land leases along with the ability to inherit land in the same fashion as Protestants. In 1882 Catholic 'secular' clergy were allowed perform their duties, though they were still forbidden to use churches 'with a steeple or a bell' or 'assume any ecclesiastical rank or title whatsoever'. Also, they could now own a horse worth over £5; sounds innocuous enough but this is the one that cost Art O Laoghaire his life.
The creeping pace of these reforms are usually looked at in the context of Britain now fighting a war on two fronts; with the American colony and with France. The threat of agrarian unrest by the Defenders in the late 18th century and the growth of the Volunteers - protestant militias set up to defend the country in case of 'invasion' - are the most striking developments during this time. (Apparently Charles Stuart Parnell kept Volunteer flags and insignia from this period proudly displayed in his hall.) But pre-revolutionary France was not a likely candidate to stage an invasion in my opinion and the Volunteers were as much a response to fears of domestic disquiet as is seen in the Augmentation Bill which was being considered to draft some 5,000 soldiers stationed in Ireland for service in America. The strategy therefore was to offer some concessions to Catholics with the promise of further reform in the hope this would quell any potential unrest whilst simultaneously addressing the issue of their depleted security.
In addition to all this the Anglican Ascendency parliament in Dublin were squeezing trade concessions from Westminster and advocating for more autonomy by repealing the Declaratory Act and Poyning's Law. Gains on this front in 1882 has led us to regard this period as the highpoint of 'colonial nationalism' - fed of course by a natural, if seldom expressed sympathy, with the American secessionists. Then of course the French Revolution exploded onto the scene and if any country was ripe for absorbing it's principles it was Ireland with a by now entrenched Anglican aristocracy of some 8,000 strong monopolising almost the entire country's farmland whilst withholding the franchise - let alone representation - from the 70% Catholic majority.
It's unavoidable if we are to talk of the progression of democracy and human rights in the history of the country that we must naturally refer to this simple fact however much we disturb the sensitivities of some who see the act of placing this transparently injust and unsustainable state of affairs 'front and centre' in our narrative as being somehow misleading or distortive of the truth.
Yes, we can go so far as to accept that the penal laws as originally conceived were necessary to protect the Ascendency from the potential of revolutionary outbreak in the years following the Treaty of Limerick - but that uprising were it to occur would have been in the name of reclaiming lands and title that were originally claimed through conquest - the original aggressors would have been toppled in their turn. There is only so much sympathy you can extend to the plight of the aggressor who is compelled to introduce punitive legislation to keep the majority which he has subjugated under his thumb. If they relaxed the penal laws to allow Catholics carry arms for instance, sure they would only rebel!? Well, yes of course, precisely because they are oppressed.
Equally, I find it just as grating to read a narrative exclusively focusing on the little successes of Grattan's parliament, the erection of all those magnificent buildings etc when I realise that even as they chink glasses congratulating one another for winning another battle for "Irish" industry - the vast majority of the population are living in filth and squalor, excluded from education, denied any say in politics, unrepresented at every level, excluded from juries, civil service, teaching, taxed to pay a church of a foreign denomination and generally allowed fester in the margins of society in increasingly smaller allotments sustained by a solitary food source. This was the time to end this tyranny - and no other word more fitly describes it - now, on the occasion of the French Revolution; when Paine had issued his rebuttal to Burke, when men of the enlightenment were to the fore with the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire swimming in their heads and when the American First Amendment, the Rights of Man and ideas of religious tolerance were on everybody's lips. I don't blame the small-minded sectarian bigotry on both sides of the fence whose violent encounters crushed any hope of the United Irishmen becoming a more potent body - instead it is to the administration of the imperial British government and the clutching Anglican Ascendency to whom the focus must inevitably dwell. Personally, I can't look at any of those stately country sprawls, no matter how magnificent they are, without retching, and thinking if the vast acres they encompassed were instead parcelled out equitably, as opposed to cultivating export crops for a British nation that couldn't feed it's own populace then the Irish farmer would have been food sovereign, and the disaster of the famine years would never have occurred.
The penal laws were ostensibly designed to stamp out Catholicism but in actuality operated as an apartheid lever which transferred Irish labour surplus back to Britannia which needed to expand and further consolidate it’s industrial revolution. Irish low wage labour and agricultural produce were required to produce the food it couldn’t and if it wasn't a rivalry from Spain, it was the threat from France, then Holland, Russia and next Napoleon - there really is no end to it is there - by the time we get to 1916 it's the Kaiser; wherein we decided to pull the plug on the whole endless charade and shoot our way out of it's tormentuous cycle of exploitation.
But England’s Industrial Revolution and it’s implications for the re-orientation of Irish farming practices certainly needs to be addressed in any assessment of the vulnerabiity of the Irish peasant to the otherwise unremarkable potato blight. Eric Hobsbawm dates this rapid industrialization from about the 1780’s whereas T.S. Ashton reckons it to be from as early as the 1760’s but for our purposes it is enough to know that these dates coincide with the loss of English grain sovereignty. From around about the mid 1760’s England is henceforth a net importer of grain and by the 1830’s only 22% of it’s population is employed in agriculture; by far the lowest proportion in the world.
This is not to say that agricultural productivity in England hadn’t improved. In the 1720’s the average yield for wheat was 19 bushels per acre compared to 30 bushels an acre by the 1830’s; it’s just that productivity couldn’t keep pace with the demands of the growing urban populations. Grain shortages in England became a recurring problem towards the end of the 18th century and in fact emerged as the single biggest issue that dogged successive governments right up until the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. In England, the interests of manufacturers and industrialists are being compromised by the feudal aristocracy. They are pressured into conceding higher wages (which they refuse to do by and large via their new found enthusiasm for laissez faire) because of the bloated grain prices which are driving up the costs of living and are thus engaged in a direct struggle against the grain-producing members of the landed aristocracy who, of course, because of the property holding qualifications, compose the majority of MP’s in Westminster and almost all members of the House of Lords.
This was a long and protracted struggle which centred around the reduction of the hardships of the English working classes and the amelioration of conditions found in the ‘dark, satanic mills’. It takes us from the St. Peter’s Field massacres in 1819, to the Reform Bill of 1832, the rise of the Chartist Movement in the mid 30’s, the eventual formation of the anti-Corn Law league and the Bills which (narrowly) expanded the franchise. All of this political agitation is of course of direct concern to anyone seeking to understand the policies that will be adopted by Westminster in response to the Irish crisis.
The era was referred to as the ‘Time of Troubles’ with the 1840’s in England characterised by severe depression, widespread unemployment and rioting. After all, it may be wondered whether Tennyson had the fiery speeches of the Chartist leaders in mind when he wrote in Locksley Hall;
“Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly dying fire”
Perhaps we’ll never know, but what we do know is that Westminster’s response to the industrial revolution’s grain shortages was to reassess the “Colonial System” as it pertained to Ireland and particularly their policy of mercantilist protection in the sphere of agriculture. Hitherto forbidden to export anything but "servants, horses, victuals and salt" (to the plantation colonies) and confronted by prohibitive import tariffs for exports to England (which sought to protect it’s own industries), various schemes and inducements were now being proposed to stimulate Irish grain production.
Early in the 18th century, the Irish Ascendency Parliament had made vain attempts to promote tillage and wheat production but they didn’t amount to much as can be seen in the remarks of Bishop Berkeley in 1735;
"whether it be not a new spectacle under the sun to behold in such a climate and such a soil so many roads untrodden, fields un-tilled, houses desolate and hands unemployed". He goes on asking "whether there be any other nation possessed of so much good lands, and so many able hands to work it, which yet is beholden for bread to foreign countries".
(Berkeley is writing here in between the Irish famines of 1727, 1728, 1741 and 1742).
So, the Irish Parliament, beginning in the 1760’s, were now encouraged to provide ‘bounties’ (subsidies in today’s terms) to the carriage of Irish corn on the ‘coastways’ to Dublin. In time, the practice was spread nationwide and became such a success that by 1772 the country was for the first time a net exporter of grain. Further stimulus was provided by the Irish Corn Laws of 1784, known as Foster’s Corn Laws, and Westminster facilitated this development in turn by making Ireland an exceptional case and lowered it’s import tariffs - anathema to English grain producers, but necessary of course to keep inflation down and popular unrest at bay. Very soon, the export of grain to England became so profitable that every landholder in the country found ways to turn their unproductive acres over to the cultivation of barley, wheats and oat. Taking note of the changes in the grain market as registered in the Mark Lane exchange we see that from 1742 to 1756 prices averaged around 24 shillings a quarter.
From 1766 on when England is no longer food sovereign we can see an abrupt shift in the market;
1765-74 - 51 shillings a quarter
1775-84 - 43s " "
1785-94 - 47s " "
1795-1804 - 75s " "
1805-1814 - 93s " "
1815-24 - 68s ..
On average, as can be seen, prices have trebled and in certain instances quintupled. The price increase from 1792 is explained by the fact that grain imports now predominate and the large hikes between 1800 and 1815 are a result of Napoleon’s continental blockade but nevertheless these prices still maintain themselves up to the 1840’s with the popular unrest spurred on by the Chartists.
From 1780 to 1840 Irish grain exports rose from 20% to 80% of the total amount of grain imported by England. The networks of supply and demand built up in the cross-channel grain trade proved to be too entrenched to dislodge even in the face of natural disaster. The Corn Laws of 1815 were designed to protect this important segment of the market by offering the Irish landlords near monopoly access to the English market and we know from Chartist agitation that grain prices were a powder keg for successive British governments and that Corn Law repeal was held back by landed interests in Westminster. If the Irish ports were closed to keep food within the country which is the normal response of sovereign governments at such times - Holland closed theirs in 1847 during it's blight though their population were far less dependent on the potato - then grain prices would have shot up in England and led to further social unrest. With an election looming in 1847 this option had been dismissed.
Conversely, if the Irish tenant farmer had owned their own land and produce we wouldn't be talking of a famine today; the larger farmers would have sold their grain in the domestic market and the smaller farmer would have held their own crop for consumption instead of passing it over as rent - and this was the principle grievance of Fintan Lalor;
"The principle I state, and mean to stand upon is this, that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of Ireland; that they, and none but they are the land-owners and lawmakers of this island; that all laws are null and void not made by them, and all titles to land invalid not conferred or confirmed by them and that this full right of ownership may and ought to be asserted and enforced by any and all means which God has put in the power of man. In other, if not plainer words, I hold and maintain that the entire soil of a country belongs of right to the entire people of that country, and is the rightful property, not of any one class, but of the nation at large, in full effective possession, to let whom they will, on whatever tenures, terms, rents, services and conditions they will, one condition being, however, unavoidable and essential, the condition being that the tenant shall bear full, true and undivided fealty and allegiance to the nation, whose lands he holds, and owns no allegiance whatsoever to any other prince, power or people, or any obligation of obedience or respect to their will, orders or laws. I hold further and firmly believe, that the enjoyment by the people of this right of first ownership in the soil is essential to the vigour and vitality of all other rights; to their vitality, efficacy and value; to their secure possession and safe exercise. For let no people deceive themselves or be deceived by the words and colours and phrases and forms of a mock freedom, by constitutions and charters and articles and franchises. These things are paper and parchment, waste and worthless. Let laws and institutions say what they will, this fact will be stronger than all laws and prevail against them - the fact that those who own your lands will make your laws and command your liberties and your lives. But this is tyranny and slavery; tyranny in its wildest scope and worst shape; slavery of body and soul, from the cradle to the coffin; slavery with all of its horrors and none of its physical comforts and security; even as it is in Ireland, where the whole community is made up of tyrants, slaves and slave-drivers.A people whose lands and lives are thus in the keeping and custody of others instead of in their own are not in a position of common safety. The Irish Famine of 45 is example and proof. The corn crops were sufficient to feed the island. But the landlords would have their rents despite famine and fever. They took the whole harvest and left hunger to those who raised it. Had the people of Ireland been the landlords of Ireland not a human creature would have died of hunger, nor the failure of the potato been considered a matter of any consequence."
Fintan Lalor, letter to the Nation, 1848.
Lalor was a farmer himself and an agitator for land reform who initially wrote to the British government, over the heads of O’ Connell’s Repeal Association, asking them if they could please consider his urgent proposals to settle the mess that the agrarian issue had become. In these letters, which he is writing in mid 1845, when the blight has hit but has not yet exacted it's toll, he is referring to the landed aristocracy as the “Irish gentry”; it is only when the Irish Secretary is asked by Peel to check out the bona fides of this anonymous poster that his proposals are summarily dumped. This enrages him beyond measure; and he henceforth becomes a demagogue stirring up popular discontent. His collected writings are indispensable to understanding what's going on here as he is utterly consumed by the tragedy unfolding around him and is driven to use the most emotive language at his disposal as he is sure that only immediate revolution will save the lives of the peasantry. He was right. Lalor was the only radical nationalist writer of the day who was steeped in agriculture (Gavan Duffy, Smith O'Brien etc had no comparable conception of what conditions were really like) - his grandfather, his uncles, his ten brothers were farmers. His own father had famously branded “no tithes” onto his sheep during the Tithe War of the 30's, an act which saw him first courted, then roped in by the Repealers as a guarantor of strong local support. His was a family who knew the markets, the land, the capacity of the smallholders, the cottiers, the lot - with an almost mathematical precision he could detail what was going to happen and who was going to be wiped out. Lalor knew acutely the precise nature of what was unfolding as much as anyone in the country; John Mitchel, having read his later letters to the Nation immediately severed ties with the pacifist elements within the Irelanders and called openly for revolution; fulminating himself in the pages of the Felon and the United Irishman telling his readers how best to make home-made bombs etc and pelt British troops as they arrived in Dublin. Open anarchy is eventually what they advocated. It was Lalor's rebuttal from the government that threw him into a frenzy of rage and his letters to the Nation became more and more incandescent with the landlord system increasingly the focus of his wrath.
Forthwith, he now refers to the landed aristocracy as '8,000 English landlords', a semantic shift calculated to inflict maximum political damage on a Dublin Castle bulging with freshly drafted coercion bills. The established decorum has been dropped and he has simply reverted to what many of the catholic “lower classes” are calling the aristocracy behind their backs anyway. This is pretty mild compared to the language of witness depositions in trials of agrarian outrages; there are accepted public and private registers used in referring to the gentry - but now Lalor is voicing in print what everyone says anyway when his “lordship” is out of earshot. The subliminal message is clear; “They are English, they are usurpers, this is colonialism - and we are starving as a result of it. Rouse yourselves for the love of God!”.
The Irish landed aristocracy, both Protestant and Catholic, are in many ways indistinguishable from their brethren across the seas - whether they like to admit or not - in customs, affiliations, habits, ways of thinking - but also from an economic standpoint; they will be just as concerned about Corn Law Repeal - the issue that (really) gripped Westminster in this period - as their large-scale farming brethren up and down the Pennines. Here, they have a common language which removes them both as far as is possible from the world of our small cottiers and conacre farmers. The schism of class will cut like a knife through the still protean nationalist discourse, a watershed Lalor chooses, to throw into stark relief the futile disjunction propelling events;
"I will never contribute one shilling, or give my name, heart or hand for such an object as simple Repeal by the British Parliament of the Act of Union ... forever henceforth, the owners of our soil must be Irish ... unmuzzle the wolf dog .. there is one at this moment in every cabin throughout the land, nearly fit to be untied, and he will be savager by and by".
As the crisis escalated some minds crystallized on this new issue of dual agrarian reform; both class-based and nationalist. The immense wheeze of the thumb-twiddlers in the Repeal movement is seen in the furore that greeted Francis Meagher's attempt to block plans by the O'Connell camp to dilute the revolutionary potential of the movement. That the “sword speech” of Meagher was considered radical will tell you just how effeminized the gentry had become; it's the right message alright but delivered in the choicest Victorian bombast. Who do you blame for all this? - the monastic redactors, the priestly caste who continued to dull the blood?; or simply the savagery in which successive uprisings had been quashed?
We’ve all heard the one about Smith O' Brien whilst in the midst of 'rousing the country' - half dead with starvation - that he stormed a police barracks only to be told by the sergeant that 'it would be 'shameful' for them to be captured by so few, so could you please come back with more men! - the worse, O'Brien actually conceded the point - to the despair of the volunteers - went back to muster up a more respectable party of troups only to return later to find that the four officers had already decamped to a more secure barracks! Such were the leaders imbued with the myth of the chivalric code; those gallant ideals of the all-civilising English gentlemen; fully internalised by the Irelanders - young and old - they themselves were products of their finest academies. If they were the genuine oppressed, and let's not fool ourselves, they did exist - the appalling waste of life is testament to that - the Young Irelanders, the Repeal Movement, the readers of the Nation, would instead know not to dialogue, but to slit Empire's throat at the first opportunity, for how often would history give them these moments when it's collossal hide cracked with bare flesh.
Lalor was right, they were worse than timewasters.
"In the post-Union decades, it would not be difficult to compile an impressive list of landlords who showed a commendable involvement in the welfare of their tenantry. The Edgeworth estate was perhaps the best example of this attitude at work. Visitors to Mitchelstown were likewise impressed by the neatness of the cottages and by the general signs of comfort, all of which owed much to the paternalism of Lord Kingston. The ladies of the Big House often busied themselves on local committees, promoting education, inculcating thrift, and, with increasing frequency, distributing charity to the poor.
Yet, to suggest that these instances of enlightenment represented the norm would be a gross distortion. The prototypal landlord of propaganda - bleeding his tenants of rent while recognising no responsibility towards them - too often corresponded to the reality. This state of affairs owed as much to indifference as to malice. As numbers rose and prices fell, problems multiplied, and many landlords closed their eyes and ears and asked no more of agent or head-tenant than that the rent be paid in full and on time. Drummond’s famous reminder to the gentry of Tipperary - that property had it’s duties as well as it’s rights - might have been heeded by many more of their class throughout the country.
Yet even the best disposed gentry encountered difficulties in attempting to gain the confidence of the peasantry. Quite apart from a consciousness of a conflict of economic self-interest, the peasantry and most of the gentry were separated by strong social and religious barriers. Most landlords were Protestant; the minister dined with them regularly, they worshipped in his church on Sundays. Their country houses were the fixed points around which revolved a social whirl of parties, hunting, shooting and fishing; picnics for the ladies as they gossiped of family and fashion; while the men played at croquet and talked of honour and horses. In general, the career routes of the young gentlemen were predictable - school in England, then Trinity, Oxford or Cambridge, or a commission in the army; an estate and politics; the Church and the Bench. This somewhat rarified cultural syndrome was, of course, expensive, and in the post-war decades many landlords fund it increasingly difficult to stand the pace. Some could not and had to mortgage their estates. The contrast between the lifestyle of the world of the Big House and that of the mass of labouring tenants was enormous."
Gearoid O Tuathaigh "Ireland Before the Famine, 1798-1848" pg 130-131.
During the Irish potato famine there were just too many competing political stances, ideologies, received notions and entrenched interests to assert that a singular dominant mindset prevailed. There were many ideas ‘in the air’, with many possible trajectories for policy, but, in the end, what emerges clearly is that the struggle for predominance within the Whig party itself led to the derailing of much promising legislation. Ultimately, the ‘Foxite’ Whigs of Russell and their traditional call of ‘justice for Ireland’ was swamped by an interior Whig alliance of the ‘Bowood set’ centred round Lord Lansdowne and the ‘Clapham sect’ of evangelical moralists led by Wood, Grey and Trevelyan. In policy formation, a perverse reading of Benthamite utilitarianism blended with Clapham moralism which led to workhouse food relief being granted and work performed - such as cracking stones for ten hours a day - being valorised for it’s ability to inculcate moral virtue as much as being a test of true destitution. Malthusian notions of a population time-bomb were eagerly picked up and used to justify mass evictions on the pretext that intensive capitalisation on consolidated farms preceded by mass clearances was the only path to progress. To this end, the Devon Commission’s inquiry into poverty in Ireland had already recommended state-assisted emigration in 1843. Despite being landlord chaired it conceded there were 2½ million people regularly in a state of semi-starvation. In Autumn 1846 when the second potato crop failed, leading the Times to declare ‘total annihilation’ John Stuart Mill abandoned his ‘Principles of Political Economy’ and wrote a series of impassioned articles in the Morning Chronicle denouncing the barbarity of mass clearances along with the dogmatic conclusions of the orthodox economists. Many of these ‘orthodox’ economists such as Nassau Senior were being actively patronized by the Bowood Whigs.
Added to this were feudalistic conceptions of overall responsibility towards the poor in times of dearth vs. the responsibilities of government. The Labour Rate Act of 1846 effectively shifted all responsibility for relief onto the propertied classes and the payers of the poor rate levy. In England, the “Manchester School” of rising middle class, commercially minded “Radicals” were flatly opposed to the notion that the English taxpayer should be forced to bail out the Irish gentry. “Justice for England”, they cried. In the end, more money was raised within Ireland than was given by the British treasury. Expenditures under the revised Poor Law which targeted Irish payers of the poor rate - holders of farms with rental of 4 pound or more - contributed £7.3 million between September 1846 and September 1851 compared to the treasury’s outlay of £7 million. When £50,000 pound was tacked onto the 1846 Labour Rate Act to assist indebted Poor Law Unions, Archbishop Mac Hale reminded British PM Russell that 20 million pound had been raised by the British treasury to free West Indian slaves. “They may starve” roared the Freeman’s Journal. Between the same five year period the British treasury received £265 million in income tax receipts!
There was also a providentialist undercurrent to many policies; the disaster being actually the will of God ipso facto to intercede would be thwarting the plans of an all-wise providence. However, even the Quakers derided this sort of fatalism as a gross abdication of responsibility. Most importantly, there were differing conceptions over the ultimate sovereignty of the land; should the Ulster custom of tenant right be extended to the south as suggested by Sharman Crawford, Fintan Lalor and J.S. Mill amongst others or does the tenant have no right of address in the case of expulsion? Even Russell was favourable to some kind of legislation that formalised a sort of dual ownership in the soil - a position greeted with horror by landowning Whigs. Lansdowne, Clanricard, Monteagle and Palmerston all held extensive Irish estates and this quartet were instrumental in affixing wrecking amendments to successive Bills which copper fastened landlord rights over that of the tenant throughout the crisis. Meanwhile, tenant right committees were being established in the face of the escalating evictions and alarming increase in agrarian crimes. This latter development prompted an ongoing debate over the level of coercion to be adopted; with the Foxite aim to pacify through ameliorating smallholder hardships being continually opposed by the Bowood hardliners. In the end, Russell’s confidence was sapped by an antagonistic cabinet.
Even Peel’s earlier Tory administration, who oversaw the first appearance of the blight in the autumn of 1845, were divided strongly on ideological grounds. He set a scientific commission to work who confirmed the worst and determined that at least half the potato crop was lost. In October, O’Connell, in his last significant political act led a delegation to the Viceroy with a set of proposals for raising money; tax of 10% on landlord’s rental, 30-50% tax on absentee rental, a 1½ million pound loan from the treasury to be secured from the proceeds of Irish woods and forests, immediate closing of the ports to halt exports, and the cessation of all grain-derived brewing and distilling. The latter two steps had been successful in avoiding the worst effects of the last major scarcity some 50 years beforehand just prior to the enactment of the Union. On that occasion, a grant of 100,000 pounds had been issued to merchants to buy foreign grain in an attempt to keep famine prices down, a policy which, by most accounts, was largely successful.
These proposals, however, as far as we know, were never seriously considered. Peel had apparently determined that the only remedial measure worth considering was a repeal of the 1815 Corn Laws - a personal political project of his which he had long been nourishing. He had in fact drafted several economic advisers to “educate” his more intransigent fellow Tory party members on it’s benefits over the preceding several years; and now at last a raison d’etre had presented itself. English landed interests - many of whom were Tory back-benchers and members of the House of Lords - were far from impressed. In fact, it was heavy lobbying principally from Irish landlords which had them enacted in the first place. Due to the slump in agricultural prices after the Napoleonic Wars gentry on both sides of the channel felt legislation was required to protect their profit margins from foreign imports and so monopoly access to English markets was granted solely to Irish exporters. The policy was a ‘success’ and grain prices returned near enough to their war time levels at 60-70 shillings a quarter maintaining thereby the privations for the English urban working classes and fuelling Chartist agitation.
The contention is often made that policy makers at this time were imprisoned by prevailing ideologies; laissez faire in the marketplace, Malthusianism in population control, utiltarianism in drafting the Relief Acts and providing workhouse schemes, orthodox economics in justifying rapid consolidation of small farms and finally, providentialism when it came to disowning
all culpability for the dramatic loss of life.
A much easier solution to understanding the disruptions of this period would be to apply Occam’s razor and ask yourself simply who stood to gain from the mass death and emigration. Many landlords went bankrupt when the Whig government effectively wiped its hands of the matter by switching the onus of supporting poverty to the Irish gentry but this move had the effect of clearing the land and preparing the way for the long sought consolidation of small farms into more capital intensive profit-making entities. A feverish assertion of ideologies always indicates a distant tumour in the body-politic and in truth the Union was never seriously threatened, on this occasion at least, but the famine hardened the hearts of many Irish nationalists; among them Fintan Lalor and John Mitchell who both powerfully denounced the government's inaction, along with Michael Davitt and O' Donovon Rossa whose families were evicted during the clearances. It is difficult to imagine the revolutionaries of 1916 acting without their legacy and by extension the birth of an independent Ireland. In the end, it was the legacy of the famine which really consumed the western flank of the "Empire".
After all, what plausible steps did James II take to reverse Cromwell’s plantations in the three years of his reign? The penal laws were less about religion and more about the ownership and control of the land in Ireland and to this end they were designed to ensure the continued quiescence of an already subjugated native population. If they were entirely about achieving security from a restless “Catholic” population they would have been relaxed in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht, which, by ending the Spanish War of Succession, restored the balance of power in Europe and thereby diminished considerably the threat of France or Spain using “Jacobite” Ireland as a backdoor to unseat the Hanoverians.
Certainly, by the time we reach the implosion of “Forty-Five” and the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, Jacobitism is no longer tenable as wish-fulfilment, let alone as a political creed. When the Netherlands were defeated during this war, the British in settling terms with the French in 1748 requested the expulsion of the Bonnie Prince from French soil. They duly obliged, probably grateful for the opportunity of relieving themselves of this source of embarrassment, arrested him as he was blithely making his way to the Opera and jailed him for a brief period before sending him packing. Of course, during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 Ireland wouldn’t have been too fruitful a source of recruits at any rate, given it was in the midst of yet another 18th century famine, this time claiming half a million lives, and known, and still remembered as ‘An Gorta Mor’ (the Great Famine) to the Defenders and United Irishmen of the 1790’s - of course by then the native Gaels should have been more wary in choosing superlatives to describe their enforced starvation.
Finally, when the ‘Old Pretender’ James VIII/III died in 1766 the Holy See refused to recognise any further Stuart claims to the throne of Great Britain and so surely with the support of France and Rome withered away we would have expected a significant amelioration of the penal laws but, this of course, did not happen, because the southern Anglican Ascendancy were by now completely entrenched and in effective control of every single apparatus of political power at local, county and national level; the latter under the provisions of Poyning’s Law. The ostensible reason for keeping the penal laws on the statute books - the threat of Jacobitism - elapsed, in reality, with the passage of 1745, and certainly, with the renunciation of Stuart claims to the throne in 1766 it may have been expected that they would be amended, but this wasn't the case. Catholics had to wait until 1778 for the first major relief measure; the right was granted to hold longer land leases along with the ability to inherit land in the same fashion as Protestants. In 1882 Catholic 'secular' clergy were allowed perform their duties, though they were still forbidden to use churches 'with a steeple or a bell' or 'assume any ecclesiastical rank or title whatsoever'. Also, they could now own a horse worth over £5; sounds innocuous enough but this is the one that cost Art O Laoghaire his life.
The creeping pace of these reforms are usually looked at in the context of Britain now fighting a war on two fronts; with the American colony and with France. The threat of agrarian unrest by the Defenders in the late 18th century and the growth of the Volunteers - protestant militias set up to defend the country in case of 'invasion' - are the most striking developments during this time. (Apparently Charles Stuart Parnell kept Volunteer flags and insignia from this period proudly displayed in his hall.) But pre-revolutionary France was not a likely candidate to stage an invasion in my opinion and the Volunteers were as much a response to fears of domestic disquiet as is seen in the Augmentation Bill which was being considered to draft some 5,000 soldiers stationed in Ireland for service in America. The strategy therefore was to offer some concessions to Catholics with the promise of further reform in the hope this would quell any potential unrest whilst simultaneously addressing the issue of their depleted security.
In addition to all this the Anglican Ascendency parliament in Dublin were squeezing trade concessions from Westminster and advocating for more autonomy by repealing the Declaratory Act and Poyning's Law. Gains on this front in 1882 has led us to regard this period as the highpoint of 'colonial nationalism' - fed of course by a natural, if seldom expressed sympathy, with the American secessionists. Then of course the French Revolution exploded onto the scene and if any country was ripe for absorbing it's principles it was Ireland with a by now entrenched Anglican aristocracy of some 8,000 strong monopolising almost the entire country's farmland whilst withholding the franchise - let alone representation - from the 70% Catholic majority.
It's unavoidable if we are to talk of the progression of democracy and human rights in the history of the country that we must naturally refer to this simple fact however much we disturb the sensitivities of some who see the act of placing this transparently injust and unsustainable state of affairs 'front and centre' in our narrative as being somehow misleading or distortive of the truth.
Yes, we can go so far as to accept that the penal laws as originally conceived were necessary to protect the Ascendency from the potential of revolutionary outbreak in the years following the Treaty of Limerick - but that uprising were it to occur would have been in the name of reclaiming lands and title that were originally claimed through conquest - the original aggressors would have been toppled in their turn. There is only so much sympathy you can extend to the plight of the aggressor who is compelled to introduce punitive legislation to keep the majority which he has subjugated under his thumb. If they relaxed the penal laws to allow Catholics carry arms for instance, sure they would only rebel!? Well, yes of course, precisely because they are oppressed.
Equally, I find it just as grating to read a narrative exclusively focusing on the little successes of Grattan's parliament, the erection of all those magnificent buildings etc when I realise that even as they chink glasses congratulating one another for winning another battle for "Irish" industry - the vast majority of the population are living in filth and squalor, excluded from education, denied any say in politics, unrepresented at every level, excluded from juries, civil service, teaching, taxed to pay a church of a foreign denomination and generally allowed fester in the margins of society in increasingly smaller allotments sustained by a solitary food source. This was the time to end this tyranny - and no other word more fitly describes it - now, on the occasion of the French Revolution; when Paine had issued his rebuttal to Burke, when men of the enlightenment were to the fore with the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire swimming in their heads and when the American First Amendment, the Rights of Man and ideas of religious tolerance were on everybody's lips. I don't blame the small-minded sectarian bigotry on both sides of the fence whose violent encounters crushed any hope of the United Irishmen becoming a more potent body - instead it is to the administration of the imperial British government and the clutching Anglican Ascendency to whom the focus must inevitably dwell. Personally, I can't look at any of those stately country sprawls, no matter how magnificent they are, without retching, and thinking if the vast acres they encompassed were instead parcelled out equitably, as opposed to cultivating export crops for a British nation that couldn't feed it's own populace then the Irish farmer would have been food sovereign, and the disaster of the famine years would never have occurred.
The penal laws were ostensibly designed to stamp out Catholicism but in actuality operated as an apartheid lever which transferred Irish labour surplus back to Britannia which needed to expand and further consolidate it’s industrial revolution. Irish low wage labour and agricultural produce were required to produce the food it couldn’t and if it wasn't a rivalry from Spain, it was the threat from France, then Holland, Russia and next Napoleon - there really is no end to it is there - by the time we get to 1916 it's the Kaiser; wherein we decided to pull the plug on the whole endless charade and shoot our way out of it's tormentuous cycle of exploitation.
But England’s Industrial Revolution and it’s implications for the re-orientation of Irish farming practices certainly needs to be addressed in any assessment of the vulnerabiity of the Irish peasant to the otherwise unremarkable potato blight. Eric Hobsbawm dates this rapid industrialization from about the 1780’s whereas T.S. Ashton reckons it to be from as early as the 1760’s but for our purposes it is enough to know that these dates coincide with the loss of English grain sovereignty. From around about the mid 1760’s England is henceforth a net importer of grain and by the 1830’s only 22% of it’s population is employed in agriculture; by far the lowest proportion in the world.
This is not to say that agricultural productivity in England hadn’t improved. In the 1720’s the average yield for wheat was 19 bushels per acre compared to 30 bushels an acre by the 1830’s; it’s just that productivity couldn’t keep pace with the demands of the growing urban populations. Grain shortages in England became a recurring problem towards the end of the 18th century and in fact emerged as the single biggest issue that dogged successive governments right up until the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. In England, the interests of manufacturers and industrialists are being compromised by the feudal aristocracy. They are pressured into conceding higher wages (which they refuse to do by and large via their new found enthusiasm for laissez faire) because of the bloated grain prices which are driving up the costs of living and are thus engaged in a direct struggle against the grain-producing members of the landed aristocracy who, of course, because of the property holding qualifications, compose the majority of MP’s in Westminster and almost all members of the House of Lords.
This was a long and protracted struggle which centred around the reduction of the hardships of the English working classes and the amelioration of conditions found in the ‘dark, satanic mills’. It takes us from the St. Peter’s Field massacres in 1819, to the Reform Bill of 1832, the rise of the Chartist Movement in the mid 30’s, the eventual formation of the anti-Corn Law league and the Bills which (narrowly) expanded the franchise. All of this political agitation is of course of direct concern to anyone seeking to understand the policies that will be adopted by Westminster in response to the Irish crisis.
The era was referred to as the ‘Time of Troubles’ with the 1840’s in England characterised by severe depression, widespread unemployment and rioting. After all, it may be wondered whether Tennyson had the fiery speeches of the Chartist leaders in mind when he wrote in Locksley Hall;
“Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion creeping nigher, Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly dying fire”
Perhaps we’ll never know, but what we do know is that Westminster’s response to the industrial revolution’s grain shortages was to reassess the “Colonial System” as it pertained to Ireland and particularly their policy of mercantilist protection in the sphere of agriculture. Hitherto forbidden to export anything but "servants, horses, victuals and salt" (to the plantation colonies) and confronted by prohibitive import tariffs for exports to England (which sought to protect it’s own industries), various schemes and inducements were now being proposed to stimulate Irish grain production.
Early in the 18th century, the Irish Ascendency Parliament had made vain attempts to promote tillage and wheat production but they didn’t amount to much as can be seen in the remarks of Bishop Berkeley in 1735;
"whether it be not a new spectacle under the sun to behold in such a climate and such a soil so many roads untrodden, fields un-tilled, houses desolate and hands unemployed". He goes on asking "whether there be any other nation possessed of so much good lands, and so many able hands to work it, which yet is beholden for bread to foreign countries".
(Berkeley is writing here in between the Irish famines of 1727, 1728, 1741 and 1742).
So, the Irish Parliament, beginning in the 1760’s, were now encouraged to provide ‘bounties’ (subsidies in today’s terms) to the carriage of Irish corn on the ‘coastways’ to Dublin. In time, the practice was spread nationwide and became such a success that by 1772 the country was for the first time a net exporter of grain. Further stimulus was provided by the Irish Corn Laws of 1784, known as Foster’s Corn Laws, and Westminster facilitated this development in turn by making Ireland an exceptional case and lowered it’s import tariffs - anathema to English grain producers, but necessary of course to keep inflation down and popular unrest at bay. Very soon, the export of grain to England became so profitable that every landholder in the country found ways to turn their unproductive acres over to the cultivation of barley, wheats and oat. Taking note of the changes in the grain market as registered in the Mark Lane exchange we see that from 1742 to 1756 prices averaged around 24 shillings a quarter.
From 1766 on when England is no longer food sovereign we can see an abrupt shift in the market;
1765-74 - 51 shillings a quarter
1775-84 - 43s " "
1785-94 - 47s " "
1795-1804 - 75s " "
1805-1814 - 93s " "
1815-24 - 68s ..
On average, as can be seen, prices have trebled and in certain instances quintupled. The price increase from 1792 is explained by the fact that grain imports now predominate and the large hikes between 1800 and 1815 are a result of Napoleon’s continental blockade but nevertheless these prices still maintain themselves up to the 1840’s with the popular unrest spurred on by the Chartists.
From 1780 to 1840 Irish grain exports rose from 20% to 80% of the total amount of grain imported by England. The networks of supply and demand built up in the cross-channel grain trade proved to be too entrenched to dislodge even in the face of natural disaster. The Corn Laws of 1815 were designed to protect this important segment of the market by offering the Irish landlords near monopoly access to the English market and we know from Chartist agitation that grain prices were a powder keg for successive British governments and that Corn Law repeal was held back by landed interests in Westminster. If the Irish ports were closed to keep food within the country which is the normal response of sovereign governments at such times - Holland closed theirs in 1847 during it's blight though their population were far less dependent on the potato - then grain prices would have shot up in England and led to further social unrest. With an election looming in 1847 this option had been dismissed.
Conversely, if the Irish tenant farmer had owned their own land and produce we wouldn't be talking of a famine today; the larger farmers would have sold their grain in the domestic market and the smaller farmer would have held their own crop for consumption instead of passing it over as rent - and this was the principle grievance of Fintan Lalor;
"The principle I state, and mean to stand upon is this, that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of Ireland; that they, and none but they are the land-owners and lawmakers of this island; that all laws are null and void not made by them, and all titles to land invalid not conferred or confirmed by them and that this full right of ownership may and ought to be asserted and enforced by any and all means which God has put in the power of man. In other, if not plainer words, I hold and maintain that the entire soil of a country belongs of right to the entire people of that country, and is the rightful property, not of any one class, but of the nation at large, in full effective possession, to let whom they will, on whatever tenures, terms, rents, services and conditions they will, one condition being, however, unavoidable and essential, the condition being that the tenant shall bear full, true and undivided fealty and allegiance to the nation, whose lands he holds, and owns no allegiance whatsoever to any other prince, power or people, or any obligation of obedience or respect to their will, orders or laws. I hold further and firmly believe, that the enjoyment by the people of this right of first ownership in the soil is essential to the vigour and vitality of all other rights; to their vitality, efficacy and value; to their secure possession and safe exercise. For let no people deceive themselves or be deceived by the words and colours and phrases and forms of a mock freedom, by constitutions and charters and articles and franchises. These things are paper and parchment, waste and worthless. Let laws and institutions say what they will, this fact will be stronger than all laws and prevail against them - the fact that those who own your lands will make your laws and command your liberties and your lives. But this is tyranny and slavery; tyranny in its wildest scope and worst shape; slavery of body and soul, from the cradle to the coffin; slavery with all of its horrors and none of its physical comforts and security; even as it is in Ireland, where the whole community is made up of tyrants, slaves and slave-drivers.A people whose lands and lives are thus in the keeping and custody of others instead of in their own are not in a position of common safety. The Irish Famine of 45 is example and proof. The corn crops were sufficient to feed the island. But the landlords would have their rents despite famine and fever. They took the whole harvest and left hunger to those who raised it. Had the people of Ireland been the landlords of Ireland not a human creature would have died of hunger, nor the failure of the potato been considered a matter of any consequence."
Fintan Lalor, letter to the Nation, 1848.
Lalor was a farmer himself and an agitator for land reform who initially wrote to the British government, over the heads of O’ Connell’s Repeal Association, asking them if they could please consider his urgent proposals to settle the mess that the agrarian issue had become. In these letters, which he is writing in mid 1845, when the blight has hit but has not yet exacted it's toll, he is referring to the landed aristocracy as the “Irish gentry”; it is only when the Irish Secretary is asked by Peel to check out the bona fides of this anonymous poster that his proposals are summarily dumped. This enrages him beyond measure; and he henceforth becomes a demagogue stirring up popular discontent. His collected writings are indispensable to understanding what's going on here as he is utterly consumed by the tragedy unfolding around him and is driven to use the most emotive language at his disposal as he is sure that only immediate revolution will save the lives of the peasantry. He was right. Lalor was the only radical nationalist writer of the day who was steeped in agriculture (Gavan Duffy, Smith O'Brien etc had no comparable conception of what conditions were really like) - his grandfather, his uncles, his ten brothers were farmers. His own father had famously branded “no tithes” onto his sheep during the Tithe War of the 30's, an act which saw him first courted, then roped in by the Repealers as a guarantor of strong local support. His was a family who knew the markets, the land, the capacity of the smallholders, the cottiers, the lot - with an almost mathematical precision he could detail what was going to happen and who was going to be wiped out. Lalor knew acutely the precise nature of what was unfolding as much as anyone in the country; John Mitchel, having read his later letters to the Nation immediately severed ties with the pacifist elements within the Irelanders and called openly for revolution; fulminating himself in the pages of the Felon and the United Irishman telling his readers how best to make home-made bombs etc and pelt British troops as they arrived in Dublin. Open anarchy is eventually what they advocated. It was Lalor's rebuttal from the government that threw him into a frenzy of rage and his letters to the Nation became more and more incandescent with the landlord system increasingly the focus of his wrath.
Forthwith, he now refers to the landed aristocracy as '8,000 English landlords', a semantic shift calculated to inflict maximum political damage on a Dublin Castle bulging with freshly drafted coercion bills. The established decorum has been dropped and he has simply reverted to what many of the catholic “lower classes” are calling the aristocracy behind their backs anyway. This is pretty mild compared to the language of witness depositions in trials of agrarian outrages; there are accepted public and private registers used in referring to the gentry - but now Lalor is voicing in print what everyone says anyway when his “lordship” is out of earshot. The subliminal message is clear; “They are English, they are usurpers, this is colonialism - and we are starving as a result of it. Rouse yourselves for the love of God!”.
The Irish landed aristocracy, both Protestant and Catholic, are in many ways indistinguishable from their brethren across the seas - whether they like to admit or not - in customs, affiliations, habits, ways of thinking - but also from an economic standpoint; they will be just as concerned about Corn Law Repeal - the issue that (really) gripped Westminster in this period - as their large-scale farming brethren up and down the Pennines. Here, they have a common language which removes them both as far as is possible from the world of our small cottiers and conacre farmers. The schism of class will cut like a knife through the still protean nationalist discourse, a watershed Lalor chooses, to throw into stark relief the futile disjunction propelling events;
"I will never contribute one shilling, or give my name, heart or hand for such an object as simple Repeal by the British Parliament of the Act of Union ... forever henceforth, the owners of our soil must be Irish ... unmuzzle the wolf dog .. there is one at this moment in every cabin throughout the land, nearly fit to be untied, and he will be savager by and by".
As the crisis escalated some minds crystallized on this new issue of dual agrarian reform; both class-based and nationalist. The immense wheeze of the thumb-twiddlers in the Repeal movement is seen in the furore that greeted Francis Meagher's attempt to block plans by the O'Connell camp to dilute the revolutionary potential of the movement. That the “sword speech” of Meagher was considered radical will tell you just how effeminized the gentry had become; it's the right message alright but delivered in the choicest Victorian bombast. Who do you blame for all this? - the monastic redactors, the priestly caste who continued to dull the blood?; or simply the savagery in which successive uprisings had been quashed?
We’ve all heard the one about Smith O' Brien whilst in the midst of 'rousing the country' - half dead with starvation - that he stormed a police barracks only to be told by the sergeant that 'it would be 'shameful' for them to be captured by so few, so could you please come back with more men! - the worse, O'Brien actually conceded the point - to the despair of the volunteers - went back to muster up a more respectable party of troups only to return later to find that the four officers had already decamped to a more secure barracks! Such were the leaders imbued with the myth of the chivalric code; those gallant ideals of the all-civilising English gentlemen; fully internalised by the Irelanders - young and old - they themselves were products of their finest academies. If they were the genuine oppressed, and let's not fool ourselves, they did exist - the appalling waste of life is testament to that - the Young Irelanders, the Repeal Movement, the readers of the Nation, would instead know not to dialogue, but to slit Empire's throat at the first opportunity, for how often would history give them these moments when it's collossal hide cracked with bare flesh.
Lalor was right, they were worse than timewasters.
"In the post-Union decades, it would not be difficult to compile an impressive list of landlords who showed a commendable involvement in the welfare of their tenantry. The Edgeworth estate was perhaps the best example of this attitude at work. Visitors to Mitchelstown were likewise impressed by the neatness of the cottages and by the general signs of comfort, all of which owed much to the paternalism of Lord Kingston. The ladies of the Big House often busied themselves on local committees, promoting education, inculcating thrift, and, with increasing frequency, distributing charity to the poor.
Yet, to suggest that these instances of enlightenment represented the norm would be a gross distortion. The prototypal landlord of propaganda - bleeding his tenants of rent while recognising no responsibility towards them - too often corresponded to the reality. This state of affairs owed as much to indifference as to malice. As numbers rose and prices fell, problems multiplied, and many landlords closed their eyes and ears and asked no more of agent or head-tenant than that the rent be paid in full and on time. Drummond’s famous reminder to the gentry of Tipperary - that property had it’s duties as well as it’s rights - might have been heeded by many more of their class throughout the country.
Yet even the best disposed gentry encountered difficulties in attempting to gain the confidence of the peasantry. Quite apart from a consciousness of a conflict of economic self-interest, the peasantry and most of the gentry were separated by strong social and religious barriers. Most landlords were Protestant; the minister dined with them regularly, they worshipped in his church on Sundays. Their country houses were the fixed points around which revolved a social whirl of parties, hunting, shooting and fishing; picnics for the ladies as they gossiped of family and fashion; while the men played at croquet and talked of honour and horses. In general, the career routes of the young gentlemen were predictable - school in England, then Trinity, Oxford or Cambridge, or a commission in the army; an estate and politics; the Church and the Bench. This somewhat rarified cultural syndrome was, of course, expensive, and in the post-war decades many landlords fund it increasingly difficult to stand the pace. Some could not and had to mortgage their estates. The contrast between the lifestyle of the world of the Big House and that of the mass of labouring tenants was enormous."
Gearoid O Tuathaigh "Ireland Before the Famine, 1798-1848" pg 130-131.
During the Irish potato famine there were just too many competing political stances, ideologies, received notions and entrenched interests to assert that a singular dominant mindset prevailed. There were many ideas ‘in the air’, with many possible trajectories for policy, but, in the end, what emerges clearly is that the struggle for predominance within the Whig party itself led to the derailing of much promising legislation. Ultimately, the ‘Foxite’ Whigs of Russell and their traditional call of ‘justice for Ireland’ was swamped by an interior Whig alliance of the ‘Bowood set’ centred round Lord Lansdowne and the ‘Clapham sect’ of evangelical moralists led by Wood, Grey and Trevelyan. In policy formation, a perverse reading of Benthamite utilitarianism blended with Clapham moralism which led to workhouse food relief being granted and work performed - such as cracking stones for ten hours a day - being valorised for it’s ability to inculcate moral virtue as much as being a test of true destitution. Malthusian notions of a population time-bomb were eagerly picked up and used to justify mass evictions on the pretext that intensive capitalisation on consolidated farms preceded by mass clearances was the only path to progress. To this end, the Devon Commission’s inquiry into poverty in Ireland had already recommended state-assisted emigration in 1843. Despite being landlord chaired it conceded there were 2½ million people regularly in a state of semi-starvation. In Autumn 1846 when the second potato crop failed, leading the Times to declare ‘total annihilation’ John Stuart Mill abandoned his ‘Principles of Political Economy’ and wrote a series of impassioned articles in the Morning Chronicle denouncing the barbarity of mass clearances along with the dogmatic conclusions of the orthodox economists. Many of these ‘orthodox’ economists such as Nassau Senior were being actively patronized by the Bowood Whigs.
Added to this were feudalistic conceptions of overall responsibility towards the poor in times of dearth vs. the responsibilities of government. The Labour Rate Act of 1846 effectively shifted all responsibility for relief onto the propertied classes and the payers of the poor rate levy. In England, the “Manchester School” of rising middle class, commercially minded “Radicals” were flatly opposed to the notion that the English taxpayer should be forced to bail out the Irish gentry. “Justice for England”, they cried. In the end, more money was raised within Ireland than was given by the British treasury. Expenditures under the revised Poor Law which targeted Irish payers of the poor rate - holders of farms with rental of 4 pound or more - contributed £7.3 million between September 1846 and September 1851 compared to the treasury’s outlay of £7 million. When £50,000 pound was tacked onto the 1846 Labour Rate Act to assist indebted Poor Law Unions, Archbishop Mac Hale reminded British PM Russell that 20 million pound had been raised by the British treasury to free West Indian slaves. “They may starve” roared the Freeman’s Journal. Between the same five year period the British treasury received £265 million in income tax receipts!
There was also a providentialist undercurrent to many policies; the disaster being actually the will of God ipso facto to intercede would be thwarting the plans of an all-wise providence. However, even the Quakers derided this sort of fatalism as a gross abdication of responsibility. Most importantly, there were differing conceptions over the ultimate sovereignty of the land; should the Ulster custom of tenant right be extended to the south as suggested by Sharman Crawford, Fintan Lalor and J.S. Mill amongst others or does the tenant have no right of address in the case of expulsion? Even Russell was favourable to some kind of legislation that formalised a sort of dual ownership in the soil - a position greeted with horror by landowning Whigs. Lansdowne, Clanricard, Monteagle and Palmerston all held extensive Irish estates and this quartet were instrumental in affixing wrecking amendments to successive Bills which copper fastened landlord rights over that of the tenant throughout the crisis. Meanwhile, tenant right committees were being established in the face of the escalating evictions and alarming increase in agrarian crimes. This latter development prompted an ongoing debate over the level of coercion to be adopted; with the Foxite aim to pacify through ameliorating smallholder hardships being continually opposed by the Bowood hardliners. In the end, Russell’s confidence was sapped by an antagonistic cabinet.
Even Peel’s earlier Tory administration, who oversaw the first appearance of the blight in the autumn of 1845, were divided strongly on ideological grounds. He set a scientific commission to work who confirmed the worst and determined that at least half the potato crop was lost. In October, O’Connell, in his last significant political act led a delegation to the Viceroy with a set of proposals for raising money; tax of 10% on landlord’s rental, 30-50% tax on absentee rental, a 1½ million pound loan from the treasury to be secured from the proceeds of Irish woods and forests, immediate closing of the ports to halt exports, and the cessation of all grain-derived brewing and distilling. The latter two steps had been successful in avoiding the worst effects of the last major scarcity some 50 years beforehand just prior to the enactment of the Union. On that occasion, a grant of 100,000 pounds had been issued to merchants to buy foreign grain in an attempt to keep famine prices down, a policy which, by most accounts, was largely successful.
These proposals, however, as far as we know, were never seriously considered. Peel had apparently determined that the only remedial measure worth considering was a repeal of the 1815 Corn Laws - a personal political project of his which he had long been nourishing. He had in fact drafted several economic advisers to “educate” his more intransigent fellow Tory party members on it’s benefits over the preceding several years; and now at last a raison d’etre had presented itself. English landed interests - many of whom were Tory back-benchers and members of the House of Lords - were far from impressed. In fact, it was heavy lobbying principally from Irish landlords which had them enacted in the first place. Due to the slump in agricultural prices after the Napoleonic Wars gentry on both sides of the channel felt legislation was required to protect their profit margins from foreign imports and so monopoly access to English markets was granted solely to Irish exporters. The policy was a ‘success’ and grain prices returned near enough to their war time levels at 60-70 shillings a quarter maintaining thereby the privations for the English urban working classes and fuelling Chartist agitation.
The contention is often made that policy makers at this time were imprisoned by prevailing ideologies; laissez faire in the marketplace, Malthusianism in population control, utiltarianism in drafting the Relief Acts and providing workhouse schemes, orthodox economics in justifying rapid consolidation of small farms and finally, providentialism when it came to disowning
all culpability for the dramatic loss of life.
A much easier solution to understanding the disruptions of this period would be to apply Occam’s razor and ask yourself simply who stood to gain from the mass death and emigration. Many landlords went bankrupt when the Whig government effectively wiped its hands of the matter by switching the onus of supporting poverty to the Irish gentry but this move had the effect of clearing the land and preparing the way for the long sought consolidation of small farms into more capital intensive profit-making entities. A feverish assertion of ideologies always indicates a distant tumour in the body-politic and in truth the Union was never seriously threatened, on this occasion at least, but the famine hardened the hearts of many Irish nationalists; among them Fintan Lalor and John Mitchell who both powerfully denounced the government's inaction, along with Michael Davitt and O' Donovon Rossa whose families were evicted during the clearances. It is difficult to imagine the revolutionaries of 1916 acting without their legacy and by extension the birth of an independent Ireland. In the end, it was the legacy of the famine which really consumed the western flank of the "Empire".
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