"Tháinig blianta an ghorta agus
an droch shaoghal agus an t-ochras agus bhris sin neart agus spiorad na ndaoini.
Ní rabh ann ach achan nduine ag iarraidh bheith beo. Chaill said a' daimh le
chéile. Ba chuma cé a bhí gaolmhar duit, ba do charaid an t-é a bhéarfadh greim
duit le chur i do bhéal. D' imthigh an spórt agus a caitheamh aimsire. Stad an
fhilidheacht agus a' ceol agus damhsa. Chaill said agus rinne said dearmad den
iomlán agus nuair a bhisigh an saoghal ar dhóigheannai eile ní tháinig na rudaí
seo ariamh arais mar a bhí said. Mharbh an gorta achan rud."
"The years of the Famine, of the bad life and of the hunger, arrived and broke the spirit and strength of the community. People simply wanted to survive. Their spirit of comradeship was lost. It didn't matter what ties or relations you had; you considered that person to be your friend who gave you food to put in your mouth. Recreation and leisure ceased. Poetry, music and dancing died. These things were lost and completely forgotten. When life improved in other ways, these pursuits never returned as they had been. The famine killed everything."
The above is the recorded impressions of a contemporary Donegal native who managed to live through "an t-ochras". Its a reminder for myself that what the devastatation wrought by the famine did achieve was the final obliteration of a culture and way of life which was already being compromised in sundry ways. Thomas Davis's calls to respect and preserve this way of life went largely unheeded while Carleton's "Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry" is one of the few attempts to capture in literature the anglicised folkways of bilingual rural communities pulling themselves slowly away from a Gaelic language & culture which increasingly compromised their capacity to "advance" in an anglophone, Westminster-oriented world. The Whigs had rolled out their national programme of primary education in the 1830's, hedge schools became obsolete and tally sticks were introduced (often at the behest of parents) to punish children speaking Irish. I've seen this abandonment in action here in Ireland where African refugees whose native tongue is Bamileke only talk to their children in pidgeon-English just to ensure they "get along". I always tell them never to forget their old tongue - it may well be their life's greatest regret.
The United Irishmen weren't exactly noted for their passionate commitment to the Irish language and culture; they were enlightenment ideologues committed to the rational democratic, organisation of society. We had yet to await Walter Scott, Herder and German Romanticism before the folkways and vernacular of indigenous cultures were considered even worthy of preservation. At the Belfast Harper's Festival which inspired Bunting to collect so many songs and airs of Gaelic provenance (now otherwise forgotten) Wolfe Tone struggled to conceal his utter disinterest, noting in his diary "Strum, strum and be damned!". Our own leaders consigned it to obliteration as much as any policy adopted by Westminster or the Dublin Parliament (though they certainly dug the hole) particularly the Vatican which refused to endorse the production of a vernacular Irish-language Bible in the 1720's (at a juncture when the bulk of the island spoke the language). Later, neither the clergy at Maynooth or the Repeal movement did anything to arrest its slide throughout the early 19th C. - Thomas Davis and John MacHale being one of the few who actively encouraged its sustenance.
Daniel O' Connell played a significant part in this abandonment, though a native speaker himself; he thought it were well it disappeared off the face of the earth (or words to that effect) - it simply served no purpose in the here and now. The language of learning and science, newly published literature which caught Europe by storm - little of it was published in Irish; the native vernacular, and the Maynooth-trained priests scarcely lifted a finger (insitutionally) to reverse the trend. John MacHale and many others were the exception but the malaise wasn't properly addressed (by the Gaelic League) until it was too late and as we're all aware there's little by way of authentic Gaelic institutions or a living language left in Ireland today outside the Gaelteacht and the revived Gaeilscoileanna.
Why though, did the Irish tenant farmer rely on the spud to an extent unseen anywhere else in Europe? Why were so many cottiers & conacre labourers obliged to survive on a solitary food source, stuffed into the margins and forced to reside in the most inhospitable terrains imaginable? The humble spud is uniquely geared to provide a high calorific return per acre (far more than grain) and no other root crop could have staved off revolution or famine as long as it did given the distortions in land ownership derived from the Cromwellian and Williamite settlements at whose apex sat the Anglo-Irish Crown servants (the "Protestant Ascendency") divorced from their tenantry by language, law, culture and religion.
The attempt to reclaim lost rights in the soil wrested from them throughout the 18th century by the battery of exclusions known as the Penal Code manifested itself in widespread agrarian unrest; Whiteboyism in the 1760's-80's, Defenderism in the 1790's, Ribbonmen in the 1800's, Rockites in the 1830's, not to mention the Tithe War of the 1830's which protested a 10% levy on agricultural produce to uphold a church alien to an 85% dispossessed minority. All of these movements stood to coalesce on the eve of the famine if "tenant right" were granted a-la the Ulster Custom but the Catholic nationalist opposition was landlord led, middle class in outlook and had thrown in it's lot with the liberal "reformist" Whigs of Russell whose mantra (when out of power) was "Justice for Ireland".
The penny finally dropped for the Young Irelanders who seceded from O' Connell's Repeal movement forming the short-lived Confederacy from whose loins sprang the 1848 rebellion; inspired principally by Fintan Lalor's articles to the Nation proposing agrarian revolt and a right to "ownership of the soil" for those who worked it - a call, in other words, to end the Ascendency feudalism which hamstrung all attempts of effective relief and which contributed much to Lalor's horror and so fatally to the disintegration of an entire class of native smallholder. He was the first in fact to grasp the nettle of the land question and realise it's primacy over the political struggle - hence the Land League of the following generation which was not won by 'legitimate' parliamentary wrangling but by a vicious Land War, spearheaded by Davitt, who had seen his own family evicted & thrown onto the roadside during the Hunger.
Mitchel (too late) recognised the urgency of Lalor's prophesies and thundered revolt through the pages of the United Irishman in the early months of 1848. This was when all Europe was aflame and revolutionary France was inviting delegations from newly installed republican & democratic governments everywhere who had managed to topple Metternich's post Congress of Vienna 'forest of bayonets' which copper-fastened pan-European ancien regime legitimacy, largely thanks to the diplomacy of Castlereagh, the crusher of Irish 1798 republicanism. Mitchel was lifted after referring to the Lord Lieutenant as His Majesty's "chief butcher and executioner", tried before a blatantly packed jury and dispatched post-haste to Van Diemen's.
Smith O' Brien and Meagher "of the sword" followed suit, initially tried by like means and sentenced to the capital crime of being "hung, drawn and quartered" until an international petition drew clemency and were likewise bundled off to the New World. Mitchel's critique (Last Conquest of Ireland) remains a valid one, he was de facto political editor of Ireland's largest circulating daily throughout the crisis and his open calls for revolution were reigned in by a Catholic hierarchy still loyal to the Liberator.
In the end, policy boiled down to a number of principles which Russell vainly attempted to swerve his Irish Ascendency dominated cabinet from pursuing; the landlord must be protected from poor-law exactions which threatened to submerge him in workhouse sponsored debt (the enaction of Gregory's 1/4 clause); the land must be cleared to make way for capital intensive large scale commercial farming based on pasture as opposed to grain which the cottiers hitherto grew to pay rent (rapid escalation of eviction notices from 1848 -1852); the Malthusian "problem" needed to be addressed (large scale deportations to Canada and Australia were regularly discussed in the years leading up to the famine) and, certainly in the early days with the Anti-Corn Law League and Chartist bread riots, England's domestic grain supply must not under any circumstances be threatened.
As to famine relief schemes under the Board of Works, early Victorian notions of inculcating thrift, industry and good working habits (which the 'lazy' Irish cottier decidedly lacked in their opinion) manifested in emergency measures to transfer cash (the means of buying bread and grain) into a predominantly barter economy in exchange for calculated man-hours building all sorts of god-forsaken projects with no ultimate end-purpose. So today, the countryside is still littered with 'famine-roads' leading nowhere and walls enclosing nothing in particular. Sometimes they'd have to lay a road one day only to dig it up the next. Inside the workhouse the same philosophy reigned; "I'd rather die than crack stones for ten hours a day" being one memorable fragment left to us by the Folklore Commission. Some work was worthwhile; canals were dredged, bogs reclaimed, bridges built but the pay was so measly and the work so exhausting many died anyhow. Putting food directly into people's mouths was the way to go (a-la the soup kitchens) but this meant over-coming the aforementioned prejudice and disturbing the sacrosanct 'free market' mechanisms
The Industrial Revolution and the huge displacements therein ensured England's urban/rural ratios triggered a crisis of grain sovereignty partially addressed by Foster's Corn Laws in the 1780's which offered massive bounties to Irish landlords to transport grain across the channel. Hence Peel's primary concern to pass Corn Law Repeal in the face of O' Connell's deputation to the Viceroy that Ireland's ports should be closed and its brewing grain diverted for domestic consumption - the standard economic response to dearth of the time - yet smothered by a wave of absolutist laissez faire claptrap resurrected by the Edinburgh Review and Trevelyan in particular, who delighted in circulating Burke's (poorly conceived) 'Thoughts on Scarcity'.
Nassau Senior belonged to that select coterie of economists (contributors to the afore-mentioned Edinburgh Review) who played a vital role in determining Whig policy throughout the crisis; they may not have sat in Cabinet but they had the ear of Lansdowne, Clanrickard & Palmerstown who as Irish landlords themselves consistently furnished wrecking-ball amendments to progressive land bills intoroduced at the behest of Russell to provide protection to tenants. By the time these three in particular had done with them - the orientation of legislation was decidedly skewered towards landlord right; hence the convulsions of Lalor & Mitchel as outlined above, at the evictions, mass-death and needless starvation. Russell was a weak leader outmanouevred.
Hence the devastation; the total amount of funds given in official government aid (some £7.5 million) over the course of the entire "famine" (which nevertheless continued to dispatch the land's produce overseas; pigs, poultry, cattle, wheat, oats, barley, maize, eggs) should be seen in light of an average exchequer income from 1844-1850 of £55 million per annum - a sum some way short in fact of the outlay required (and readily raised) for the Crimean War less than a decade later. To talk of charity or "mismanagement" in this context is to insult the intelligence.
As Davitt himself noted in the Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, after 'black 47' the backbone agitators of the Land League were those who had learned their lessons & tactics from the early agrarian movements which preceded O' Connellite pacifism. The Irish independence struggle had in fact polarised (such was the animosity generated by the Repealer-Confederate split over government famine policy) between the Constitutional Nationalists (Parnellism, Redmondism) and the IRB (Fenianism) as a direct result of the devastation left in the wake of the Great Hunger; dispossessed 'sons o the soil' generally forming the backbone of the
latter.
O' Donovan Rossa for instance (b. 1832), founder of the Fenian precursor Phoenix Society, convicted felon, IRB fundraiser in America (the milk and honey from the Irish coffers of famine emigrant descendants continued to fund Republicanism right up until to the present day) and over whose corpse Pearse exclaimed in such stirring terms the necessity for "blood sacrifice" in 1913; underpinned in justification as always by the writings of his 'holy quartet' of Irish revolutionaries; Emmett, Lalor, Mitchel and Tone.
Michael Collins, as like so many of his generation, were first and foremost IRB men, who traced their filial descent back to the stance of the 1848 revolutionary men of Young Ireland and therefore the writings of Mitchel and Lalor in particular, which denounced in the strongest terms possible British government policy throughout the crisis. We are perhaps too far removed to pronounce objectively on the matter, but that it was murder in their eyes, the eyes of living contemporaries engrossed in the day to day horrors, should never be forgotten, or be erased from the record, as is the wont of modern scholarship.
"The years of the Famine, of the bad life and of the hunger, arrived and broke the spirit and strength of the community. People simply wanted to survive. Their spirit of comradeship was lost. It didn't matter what ties or relations you had; you considered that person to be your friend who gave you food to put in your mouth. Recreation and leisure ceased. Poetry, music and dancing died. These things were lost and completely forgotten. When life improved in other ways, these pursuits never returned as they had been. The famine killed everything."
The above is the recorded impressions of a contemporary Donegal native who managed to live through "an t-ochras". Its a reminder for myself that what the devastatation wrought by the famine did achieve was the final obliteration of a culture and way of life which was already being compromised in sundry ways. Thomas Davis's calls to respect and preserve this way of life went largely unheeded while Carleton's "Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry" is one of the few attempts to capture in literature the anglicised folkways of bilingual rural communities pulling themselves slowly away from a Gaelic language & culture which increasingly compromised their capacity to "advance" in an anglophone, Westminster-oriented world. The Whigs had rolled out their national programme of primary education in the 1830's, hedge schools became obsolete and tally sticks were introduced (often at the behest of parents) to punish children speaking Irish. I've seen this abandonment in action here in Ireland where African refugees whose native tongue is Bamileke only talk to their children in pidgeon-English just to ensure they "get along". I always tell them never to forget their old tongue - it may well be their life's greatest regret.
The United Irishmen weren't exactly noted for their passionate commitment to the Irish language and culture; they were enlightenment ideologues committed to the rational democratic, organisation of society. We had yet to await Walter Scott, Herder and German Romanticism before the folkways and vernacular of indigenous cultures were considered even worthy of preservation. At the Belfast Harper's Festival which inspired Bunting to collect so many songs and airs of Gaelic provenance (now otherwise forgotten) Wolfe Tone struggled to conceal his utter disinterest, noting in his diary "Strum, strum and be damned!". Our own leaders consigned it to obliteration as much as any policy adopted by Westminster or the Dublin Parliament (though they certainly dug the hole) particularly the Vatican which refused to endorse the production of a vernacular Irish-language Bible in the 1720's (at a juncture when the bulk of the island spoke the language). Later, neither the clergy at Maynooth or the Repeal movement did anything to arrest its slide throughout the early 19th C. - Thomas Davis and John MacHale being one of the few who actively encouraged its sustenance.
Daniel O' Connell played a significant part in this abandonment, though a native speaker himself; he thought it were well it disappeared off the face of the earth (or words to that effect) - it simply served no purpose in the here and now. The language of learning and science, newly published literature which caught Europe by storm - little of it was published in Irish; the native vernacular, and the Maynooth-trained priests scarcely lifted a finger (insitutionally) to reverse the trend. John MacHale and many others were the exception but the malaise wasn't properly addressed (by the Gaelic League) until it was too late and as we're all aware there's little by way of authentic Gaelic institutions or a living language left in Ireland today outside the Gaelteacht and the revived Gaeilscoileanna.
Why though, did the Irish tenant farmer rely on the spud to an extent unseen anywhere else in Europe? Why were so many cottiers & conacre labourers obliged to survive on a solitary food source, stuffed into the margins and forced to reside in the most inhospitable terrains imaginable? The humble spud is uniquely geared to provide a high calorific return per acre (far more than grain) and no other root crop could have staved off revolution or famine as long as it did given the distortions in land ownership derived from the Cromwellian and Williamite settlements at whose apex sat the Anglo-Irish Crown servants (the "Protestant Ascendency") divorced from their tenantry by language, law, culture and religion.
The attempt to reclaim lost rights in the soil wrested from them throughout the 18th century by the battery of exclusions known as the Penal Code manifested itself in widespread agrarian unrest; Whiteboyism in the 1760's-80's, Defenderism in the 1790's, Ribbonmen in the 1800's, Rockites in the 1830's, not to mention the Tithe War of the 1830's which protested a 10% levy on agricultural produce to uphold a church alien to an 85% dispossessed minority. All of these movements stood to coalesce on the eve of the famine if "tenant right" were granted a-la the Ulster Custom but the Catholic nationalist opposition was landlord led, middle class in outlook and had thrown in it's lot with the liberal "reformist" Whigs of Russell whose mantra (when out of power) was "Justice for Ireland".
The penny finally dropped for the Young Irelanders who seceded from O' Connell's Repeal movement forming the short-lived Confederacy from whose loins sprang the 1848 rebellion; inspired principally by Fintan Lalor's articles to the Nation proposing agrarian revolt and a right to "ownership of the soil" for those who worked it - a call, in other words, to end the Ascendency feudalism which hamstrung all attempts of effective relief and which contributed much to Lalor's horror and so fatally to the disintegration of an entire class of native smallholder. He was the first in fact to grasp the nettle of the land question and realise it's primacy over the political struggle - hence the Land League of the following generation which was not won by 'legitimate' parliamentary wrangling but by a vicious Land War, spearheaded by Davitt, who had seen his own family evicted & thrown onto the roadside during the Hunger.
Mitchel (too late) recognised the urgency of Lalor's prophesies and thundered revolt through the pages of the United Irishman in the early months of 1848. This was when all Europe was aflame and revolutionary France was inviting delegations from newly installed republican & democratic governments everywhere who had managed to topple Metternich's post Congress of Vienna 'forest of bayonets' which copper-fastened pan-European ancien regime legitimacy, largely thanks to the diplomacy of Castlereagh, the crusher of Irish 1798 republicanism. Mitchel was lifted after referring to the Lord Lieutenant as His Majesty's "chief butcher and executioner", tried before a blatantly packed jury and dispatched post-haste to Van Diemen's.
Smith O' Brien and Meagher "of the sword" followed suit, initially tried by like means and sentenced to the capital crime of being "hung, drawn and quartered" until an international petition drew clemency and were likewise bundled off to the New World. Mitchel's critique (Last Conquest of Ireland) remains a valid one, he was de facto political editor of Ireland's largest circulating daily throughout the crisis and his open calls for revolution were reigned in by a Catholic hierarchy still loyal to the Liberator.
In the end, policy boiled down to a number of principles which Russell vainly attempted to swerve his Irish Ascendency dominated cabinet from pursuing; the landlord must be protected from poor-law exactions which threatened to submerge him in workhouse sponsored debt (the enaction of Gregory's 1/4 clause); the land must be cleared to make way for capital intensive large scale commercial farming based on pasture as opposed to grain which the cottiers hitherto grew to pay rent (rapid escalation of eviction notices from 1848 -1852); the Malthusian "problem" needed to be addressed (large scale deportations to Canada and Australia were regularly discussed in the years leading up to the famine) and, certainly in the early days with the Anti-Corn Law League and Chartist bread riots, England's domestic grain supply must not under any circumstances be threatened.
As to famine relief schemes under the Board of Works, early Victorian notions of inculcating thrift, industry and good working habits (which the 'lazy' Irish cottier decidedly lacked in their opinion) manifested in emergency measures to transfer cash (the means of buying bread and grain) into a predominantly barter economy in exchange for calculated man-hours building all sorts of god-forsaken projects with no ultimate end-purpose. So today, the countryside is still littered with 'famine-roads' leading nowhere and walls enclosing nothing in particular. Sometimes they'd have to lay a road one day only to dig it up the next. Inside the workhouse the same philosophy reigned; "I'd rather die than crack stones for ten hours a day" being one memorable fragment left to us by the Folklore Commission. Some work was worthwhile; canals were dredged, bogs reclaimed, bridges built but the pay was so measly and the work so exhausting many died anyhow. Putting food directly into people's mouths was the way to go (a-la the soup kitchens) but this meant over-coming the aforementioned prejudice and disturbing the sacrosanct 'free market' mechanisms
The Industrial Revolution and the huge displacements therein ensured England's urban/rural ratios triggered a crisis of grain sovereignty partially addressed by Foster's Corn Laws in the 1780's which offered massive bounties to Irish landlords to transport grain across the channel. Hence Peel's primary concern to pass Corn Law Repeal in the face of O' Connell's deputation to the Viceroy that Ireland's ports should be closed and its brewing grain diverted for domestic consumption - the standard economic response to dearth of the time - yet smothered by a wave of absolutist laissez faire claptrap resurrected by the Edinburgh Review and Trevelyan in particular, who delighted in circulating Burke's (poorly conceived) 'Thoughts on Scarcity'.
Nassau Senior belonged to that select coterie of economists (contributors to the afore-mentioned Edinburgh Review) who played a vital role in determining Whig policy throughout the crisis; they may not have sat in Cabinet but they had the ear of Lansdowne, Clanrickard & Palmerstown who as Irish landlords themselves consistently furnished wrecking-ball amendments to progressive land bills intoroduced at the behest of Russell to provide protection to tenants. By the time these three in particular had done with them - the orientation of legislation was decidedly skewered towards landlord right; hence the convulsions of Lalor & Mitchel as outlined above, at the evictions, mass-death and needless starvation. Russell was a weak leader outmanouevred.
Hence the devastation; the total amount of funds given in official government aid (some £7.5 million) over the course of the entire "famine" (which nevertheless continued to dispatch the land's produce overseas; pigs, poultry, cattle, wheat, oats, barley, maize, eggs) should be seen in light of an average exchequer income from 1844-1850 of £55 million per annum - a sum some way short in fact of the outlay required (and readily raised) for the Crimean War less than a decade later. To talk of charity or "mismanagement" in this context is to insult the intelligence.
As Davitt himself noted in the Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, after 'black 47' the backbone agitators of the Land League were those who had learned their lessons & tactics from the early agrarian movements which preceded O' Connellite pacifism. The Irish independence struggle had in fact polarised (such was the animosity generated by the Repealer-Confederate split over government famine policy) between the Constitutional Nationalists (Parnellism, Redmondism) and the IRB (Fenianism) as a direct result of the devastation left in the wake of the Great Hunger; dispossessed 'sons o the soil' generally forming the backbone of the
latter.
O' Donovan Rossa for instance (b. 1832), founder of the Fenian precursor Phoenix Society, convicted felon, IRB fundraiser in America (the milk and honey from the Irish coffers of famine emigrant descendants continued to fund Republicanism right up until to the present day) and over whose corpse Pearse exclaimed in such stirring terms the necessity for "blood sacrifice" in 1913; underpinned in justification as always by the writings of his 'holy quartet' of Irish revolutionaries; Emmett, Lalor, Mitchel and Tone.
Michael Collins, as like so many of his generation, were first and foremost IRB men, who traced their filial descent back to the stance of the 1848 revolutionary men of Young Ireland and therefore the writings of Mitchel and Lalor in particular, which denounced in the strongest terms possible British government policy throughout the crisis. We are perhaps too far removed to pronounce objectively on the matter, but that it was murder in their eyes, the eyes of living contemporaries engrossed in the day to day horrors, should never be forgotten, or be erased from the record, as is the wont of modern scholarship.
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