Tim Pat Coogan's "Famine Plot" - the Johnson Review

http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-feature/8770721/a-deeply-stricken-country/

The above is a lamentably inept 'analysis' from Paul Johnson, demonstrating, if little else, that he knows next to nothing about Ireland mid-19th c. What's worse, he can't even be bothered double checking to his own satisfaction the state of knowledge on the most elementary statistic of them all, the numbers who died and emigrated.

He writes;

"Tim Pat Coogan’s The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy, whose title says everything about the book, claims that ‘fully a quarter’ of Ireland’s population died of starvation or emigrated. John Kelly’s The Graves Are Walking puts the proportion at one third. There is a huge difference between one third and one quarter. Which is correct? "

Actually, both authors are correct; Coogan is referring to population decline in the traditionally ascribed famine years 1845-51, whereas Kelly is talking about the period 1845-55. Big difference. If Johnson were in any way familiar with famine literature he would have noticed and pinpointed the reasons for this 'discrepancy' immediately - the huge numbers who left the country after 1851 - 900,000 to be precise in the five years from 1852 to 1856. This is more than laziness, it actually evinces an appalling ignorance of the central plank of Coogan's argument, that mass estate clearances were actively sought by key policy makers in order to transition farming from tillage to grazing. The argument isn't new at all in fact, Mitchel wrote extensively about it in Last Conquest (1861) and even Marx devoted a chapter to it in Capital in the context of 'high farming' consolidation.

Which brings us to Johnson's next 'point' - another ill-considered ejaculation;

"There is also much emotion. Coogan writes:

If ever one required an object lesson as to the validity of a saying I first heard in Vietnam — ‘when elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled and the people are the grass’ — one need look no further than Ireland.

But if the analogy is to make any sense at all, who are the elephants? "

Johnson doesn't even bother to speculate, clearly he could care less - if it comes from the pen of Coogan it has to be nonsense right? Actually, the analogy is quite apt in the context of what Coogan's argument is, but then in order to appreciate that he would (a) have to have read his book, something Johnson clearly has no intention of ever doing and (b) actually understand the dynamics of shifting policy decisions throughout the crisis - something Johnson will never grasp at this stage of the game. When the laissez faire & budget conscientious Whigs (supported by the Manchester 'radicals') assumed power mid 1847 they introduced the Poor Law Extension Act which shifted the whole burden of relieving distress on the landlords who, in turn, via the Gregory '1/4 acre' Clause and the £4 rate rule proceeded apace with mass evictions to save themselves from ruination. The first measure denied relief of any kind (outdoor or inside the workhouse) to those who held land over 1/4 acre thus leaving thousands with no option but to starve or quit the land and the second placed a cap on those liable to pay the poor rates which supported that relief - again this legislation provided a get-out clause for indebted landlords burdened with unsustainable poor rate levies; simply evict the tenants whose property was valued at £4 or less and therefore eliminate their transferable dues, or, which became more desirable, fund their emigration as opposed to supporting them in the workhouse or on outdoor relief. Lansdowne ran the figures on this one (from how far back we can only guess) and found it was much more economical  to offload his entire estate to Five Points then support them any where else. Who are the elephants? Very simple, the landed gentry, who as a class struggled to keep themselves afloat and Russell's Whig government who refused anymore to support Irish 'distress' via the British Exchequer. Of course, unlike the peasantry who had no representatives in cabinet, Irish landlords were ably represented by Palmerston, Clanrickard & Landsdowne who from the first initiated wrecking amendments to successive Bills introduced by Russell which sought to further tenant right in the face of eviction; Sharman Crawford's Bill to extend the 'Ulster Custom' etc. Amidst the stolid refusal of Wood (Chancellor of the Exchequer) to open the purse strings and the equally obstinate refusal of the landlords to see themselves sunk under generations of famine acquired Poor Law debt, 1.1 million cottiers, conacre holders & landless labourers were literally trampled to death - that Johnson doesn't even attempt to engage with these fundamentals is a pretty sad reflection on a supposedly knowledgeable 'reviewer'. For the record, the niggardly budget allotted by the British exchequer (some £7.5 million over the entire course of the famine (1845-52)) despite tax receipts which averaged £53 million per annum. Or, to put it in even sharper perspective, consider a largely pointless and futile Crimean War outlay the following decade which amounted to an unbudgeted £69 million!!; data which should tell you just how in thrall the Whigs supposedly were to laissez faire. Supposedly, because alternatively, you could take Coogan's line and raise a cynical eyebrow at the suggestion that mass estate clearances & thus the transition to 'high farming' opulence were effected knowingly along with 'the unshakeable principles of free trade' under the (equally?) rhetorical cloaks of 'Providentialism' (which conveniently absolved all parties of the need to interfere with what is after all divine ordination) & 'Benthamite utilitarianism' (which made workhouse life & relief schemes a living hell - "I'd rather die than crack stones for ten hours a day" being one memorable fragment left to us by the Folklore Commission). Also, Johnson's suggestion that Ireland 'enjoyed' parliamentary democracy is so frankly ludicrous & scoffworthy it scarcely merits a response - the vote was only extended to Catholics in 1829 on threat of a revolution while the simultaneous buffering expedient of eliminating the 'forty shilling' freeholders shrunk the electorate from 200,000 + to less than 40,000 - a small minority of middle class Catholics wound up gaining a foothold in local government but no more. O' Connell, who had there been such a thing as a popular mandate would have won any election in a landslide was 'made to feel his nothingness' (in the words of Clarendon, which neatly summed up much of British paternalism at the time) when his delegation to the Viceroy proposing measures to stem the worst effects of blight (closure of ports, cessation of brewing etc) were summarily rejected as Peel gambled all on dismantling the Corn Laws - a disaster for the country as that threw the Repealers in with Russell's Whigs whose liberal mantra had always been, ironically, "Justice for Ireland". Had the Conservatives stayed in power (anathema to nationalists) the much loathed Peel may well have overseen a revolt a little more substantial than the 'cabbage patch' skirmish of '48. Either way, this was no democracy, even by 19th c standards.   Of course, the perennial blindspot which seldom invites discussion is the whole question of how single crop dependency evolved in the first place? Academics of the revisionist stamp naturally shirk from the task as this invites scrutiny of  the landmunching 'Penal-era' Ascendency which, apparently, must at all costs be excluded in assessing long term precipitating structural factors (what are they?? is there such a thing??) Of course, there will never be any satisfactory 'academic' resolution owing to the dearth of 18th century primary sources; tithe hearth returns only make reference to dwelling size, data from scattered estate records are inconclusive, detailed census returns weren't compiled till the 1820's and specialist scientific ascendency journals paid little attention to how small Catholic farmers in an era of French sponsored Jacobitism eked out an increasingly precarious living. Arthur Young's Tour (1776) assessing farming practices on large estates is far and away the most detailed study of Irish agriculture we've got and while he confirms the spud's ubiquity among the 'lower orders' little speculation is accorded as to why & when this state of affairs came about. It seems to have become more pronounced certainly after the Williamite Wars (1688-91) with the final disruption of the traditional mobile mixed pastoralism practiced by Gaelic herdsmen; former driving grounds for cattle & livestock where by now definitively circumscribed within the new colonial boundaries vis-a-vis counties, baronies and the landlord's demesne, though this process had been ongoing from Elizabethan times. Wheat, oats, barley & a multitide of dairy derivatives had been in use by all strata for millenia but it seems the upheavals of conquest created the specific conditions wherein a solitary food source became the staple of so many. How could this occur?? We can't know precisely but let's take a stab at it .. Without knowing the exact mechanisms we may hazard (surely) that it was largely down to the natural fissures created by the colonisation process itself; Penal law legislation which prevented Catholics from buying land, inheriting it via primogeniture (thereby encouraging subdivision), disbarred from holding long-term leases and untitled to claim compensation for 'improvements', these measures (and others like them) had the cumulative effect of forcing the now 'cottier' class peasantry into ever smaller allotments until a point was evidently reached where survival depended entirely on the cheapest foodstuff available. The intense land competition could only be met by resort to a product which satisfied all the vital vitamin and nutritional needs, was easily sown and readily manured (lime or seaweed will do the trick) and could be grown in the often barren and rocky soil in which the indigenous were now obliged to live - the potato is uniquely qualified to do all these things yielding four times the calorific return per hectare as the finest grain. Another point is that we know by the time of the famine perhaps 3/4 of the smallest holdings of five acres or less (ie the vast majority of tenancies) resided in 'rundale' collectives which were it seems residual agrarian social organisations derived from the pre-Tudor Gaelic era whose communal mode of inheritance still echoed the system of tánaistry found in the ancient extended derbfine. Briefly put, in the old Gaelic system a chief was annually elected from all the male descendents of the old leader (down to great grandson) whose task it then was to re-allot land entitlements among the extended family (tuath) - everybody had a share one way or the other and the concept of ultimate ownership rights didn't exist; 'title' to the 'tribal' land was non-transferable as no individual had the right to grant any of it to anyone outside the derbfine irrespective of how much power or wealth they individually may have accumulated. Thus the difficulties the great Gaelic chieftains such as O' Neill and O' Donnell had 'selling' Henry's 'surrender and regrant' policy to their people - as it effectively entailed their own disinheritance - Irish laws of inheritance thus were wholly incompatible with the English (and largely continental notion) of an Earl or baron's Crown-backed claims of private ownership and impartible inheritance. It's significant then that by the time we reach the 1840's, though the land has been effectively usurped from under them, what little they had (and were now paying rent on) was still being divvied up according to the ancient custom. This is despite all best efforts of the Crown and sundry political economists (Malthus, Ricardo) warning of the dangers of over-reliance on a solitary food item, the perils of subdivision and the 'intolerably unproductive' mode of farming that 'rundale' collectives clearly represented (referred to misleadingly as 'joint tenancies' in parliamentary reports), without it seems, having any cognisance that it was the Penal era generations of social, economic and political apartheid that created the conditions within which these hardy communities were attempting to survive. Famine policy from mid-47 on was actively engaged in the wilful eradication of these traditional communal settlements in accordance with the dictats of 'high farming' commercialisation despite empirical evidence furnished by several heterodox economists & prominent thinkers such as J.S. Mill, Poulett Scrope & Sharman Crawford which stressed the viability of smallholdings - as if 'economic performance' were in any case a plausible criterion to assess a person's right to reside in the land of their ancestors!! Gladstone belatedly conceded the principle of their being 'tribal inheritance laws' the following generation and once the idea of 'dual ownership' took hold via Davitt's cry of 'fixity of tenure' most of the ascendency were deservedly and belatedly swept from the soil.    'What hope', Trevelyan wrote in 1848, 'for a nation which relies solely on potatoes?' What hope indeed. The very reliance of 4.2  millions of the population on the humble spud as it's primary, and in most cases, sole source of subsistence is here raised as the principle scandal explicable only in terms of native indolence and moral degeneration; the by-product of the absence of those habits of thrift and industry 'so commonly observed' (evidently) in the hardworking English peasant and  sturdy yeomanry classes. This is Clapham moralism gone spare! The shiftless, indigent Celt of simianized Punch fame won't 'get with the programme', assimilate into the tripartite schema sought for (the landowner/tenant/landless labourer pyramid) - howled after in fact by the ever observant Edinburgh scriveners - not to offset the Malthusian 'catastrophe' of population, but the far bolder fears of Empire shattering revolution. Clinging stubbornly to outmoded notions of equal  rights vested in the soil (the literature hesitantly granting this much; inserted, then deserted of course) - though duality in faith was just the tip of this impenetrable, sullenly bound outlier -  for here you had two parallel worlds of contested sovereignty, the one vamp-like compounding the other, a vanishing, osmotic, claustrophobic reduction, its actors barely afforded a vista of their historic and imminent collapse, leaders long decapitated, their insensate cub-lings straying unconsciously into the abyss, unaware, untold, pauperised & pit-bound, the event and its horizons mutually occlusive, swallowed forever by the dark tolling night of 'modernity'. So hung the last scrap of land left to them in this subversive name of 'tenant right', so wrapt in this fading brittle cocoonage, it's threadbare pathetic vitals vainly pulsing the last lights of a dimming yet proudly recalled ancient provenence while a fanciful alterior chain of causation imputing a 'corrupt native constitution' necessarily robs them, even to the last, this dignity of resistance. Having identified the faultlines and having nimbly shelled the skull, 'Hill of Gweedore' is commensurately vaunted, so elegantly dispatching through 'the soundest principles of scientific management' the last pathetic embers of Gaelicism. What a hero. Johnson's right about the Atlas, a superb piece of collaborative scholarship (albeit glossy and sanitised), but such a shame he feels compelled to flippantly dismiss two important contributions to famine history without it seems even bothering to read them. Too much impalatable world-view dissonance for Empire's trumpet-master to stomach it seems. I find it hard to keep it down meself sometimes.