The first thing to note is that
the crisis confronting Peel and the Conservatives was of far more manageable
proportions than that with which Russell and the Whigs had to confront in the
winter of 1846/47. Whereas the first crop failure was partial in 1845 the
following year was a disaster - the soup kitchens were only rolled out in early
1847 after the abysmal failure of the Whig's 1846 Labour Rate Act; jobbery, low
pay, unwieldy bureaucracy, high grain prices and the absence of an integrated
cash economy all conspired to render ineffectual the Board of Works schemes. A
set rate of 8d a day was maintained while bread and oatmeal prices were allowed
to treble in accord with the dictates of "political economy" i.e. free market
laissez faire.
Workers simply couldn't earn enough to feed themselves and by December/January 1847 they were actually dropping dead by the roadsides of exhaustion & starvation. At this point, private charity subscriptions were encouraged and promoted and the exchequer costs of maintaining the public works were being grilled fiercely in Parliament which is what led the Russell administration to adopt the successful Quaker schemes of direct relief via soup kitchens but this in itself was only a stopgap measure until the burden of relief could be shifted from British exchequer funded schemes onto the Irish Poor Law system supported by taxing Irish landed property (c. Sept 1847).
In essence, the Whigs had displaced the entire burden of relief on Irish landed proprietors whose property was now taxed to support the overflowing workhouses. The "rate-in aid" scheme of the 1848 legislative session which was one of the few material concessions to indebted Irish Poor Law Unions via a redistributive extra tax on less encumbered other Irish Unions was typical of their thinking at this time - i.e. no English Poor Law Unions were forced to make a contribution. "There is no legislative Union without joint responsibility", came the cry from the Irish nationalist, Repealer and even some sections of the liberal British press e.g. the Morning Chronicle. All the money, in other words, from mid-47 on had to be raised solely out of the pockets of Irish ratepayers; a complete abnegation of responsibility which led to the mass evictions of 1848/49 as landlords struggled to clear their estates of tenanted "paupers" whose poor relief dues they wished to discharge themselves from.
Now, its reasonable to assume that Peel and the Conservatives would scarcely have done things a whole lot different as they supported by and large most of these measures while sitting in the opposition benches. Peel's template for relief was, in fact, with some slight tweaks by Trevelyan, lifted wholesale by the Whigs in 1846 - local relief committees, public works, encouragement of private philanthropy & non-interference in the market.
Peel's "brimstone", the Indian 'flint' corn, £50,000 of which was purchased surreptitiously and released into the most needy areas by Relief Commissioner, Randolph Routh, in niggardly dribs and drabs in 1845/46 was claimed by Peel to be a novel food source and therefore strictly speaking not interfering with any pre-existing market - but this nevertheless was an inventive way of circumnavigating laissez faire orthodoxy. But this was a "one-trick pony" which couldn't be repeated by the incoming Whigs unless they were prepared to ignore the threats of Irish grain suppliers to not buy any grain whatsoever unless they received guarantees by the government that they wouldn't compete with their trade by purchasing food for distribution.
The first point then is that the Whig approach was fundamentally similar to the Conservatives - insofar as both of them completely ignored Irish opinion which was summed up in the recommendations of Daniel O' Connell's November 1845 visit to the Viceroy which was -
(1) to close all the ports from exporting Irish food; the enormous quantities of wheat, barley, oats, pigs, sheep, cattle, butter which in an ideal "entitlements" framework would have been more than enough to feed the starving populace. (Christine Kinealy's recent research over O' Grada, Donnelly etc. on this matter which estimates a domestic production capacity suitable to the wants of over 11 million).
(2) The diversion of all grain for brewing - Ireland yet exported colossal quantities of grain-derived spirits abroad throughout the crisis.
(3) Proceeds from the sales of Irish forests to contribute to relief.
(4) The raising of an international loan; "to scour the world's markets for food" - on the assumption that the ports were not allowed close,
(5) the taxing of absentee rental. and (among other measures)
(6) legislation to safeguard tenant right from eviction.
Secondly, neither government paid the slightest attention to any of these requests/demands not because they were hopelessly locked into a philosophy of laissez faire orthodoxy; the relative effectiveness of which was still the subject of much contention (for what was the recent Corn Law debate about if not the variant merits of Free Trade vs. Protectionism?) - but because there were higher interests to serve; to wit -
(1) the security of the domestic British food supply (Irish produce fed two million English and kept grain prices in the manufacturing districts artificially low - a perennial hotbed of Chartist grievance) and
(2) the demands for a re-structuring of the Irish agrarian landscape into a pyramidal schema of landlords, small farmers and a mobile proletarian labour force; i.e the extinction of the cottier and conacre farming class via their forced removal by eviction, starvation, emigration or proletarianisation.
In the eyes of many influential orthodox economists this bottom rung class were simply Malthusian 'human encumbrances', surplus to the requirements of modern, mechanised, large-scale farming and a preferred post-Corn Law Repeal switch from tillage to pasture as the ubiquity and cheapness of imported American corn now demanded a re-orientation of the Irish agricultural market towards cattle and sheep export. The research of economist Amartya Sen, notably his concept of an "entitlements framework" which focuses on 'democratic deficits' in afflicted famine zones, highlights the breakdown in distributive food channels & consequent 'starvation in the midst of plenty' where this deficit is classically pronounced; as it clearly was in Ireland.
The Whigs Encumbered Estates Act (1949) was part of the machinery used to clear the small-holders and conacre labourers from the soil and given their total lack of representation in Westminster, outside of a small coterie of Repealers, their plight may be said to be consequent to and illustrative of the 'entitlements deficit' thesis. Nobody, publically at any rate, argued for the replacement of "Irish landlords" with "English" ones - what orthodox economists, and later, the bulk of the Russell cabinet argued for was the dissolution of insolvent estates, their speedy processing via the Chancery land courts and their 'encumbered' titles to be passed forthwith to "men of capital" irrespective of their provenance so that they could provide the investment necessary to transition the hotch-potch amalgam of small-holder plots into "viable large farms" geared for pasture.
Classic 'disaster capitalism', in other words, and opportunistic economic re-orientation of the Kleinian "Shock Doctrine" mould which paid scant attention to indigenous conceptions of land-ownership. The impetus to affect meaningful land reform (on the line of the "Three F's" - Fair Rent, Free Sale & Fixity of Tenure - and borrowing from the principles of the Ulster Custom) came far too late on the Repeal side, but even if O' Connell had put it on the agenda earlier it's doubtful whether any Westminster administration (Tory or Whig) would've risked alienating Irish landlords by jeopardizing "the rights of property".
William Smith O' Brien and Thomas Davis are credited with the Repeal Association's working paper on the land issue in 1845 and this was in part to counter the Devon Commission's recommendations which were essentially 'assisted emigration', 'land reclamation' and the proletarianisation of conacre labourers - sweeping the surplus population from the soil in short - by converting small-holdings into larger, more 'sustainable' agricultural conglomerates geared towards intensive pasture and cattle export as opposed to tillage and grain production (now rendered redundant in the face of eliminated tariffs post-1846 Corn Law Repeal).
Davis had written an important article in the Citizen prior to joining the Nation called 'Udalism and Feudalism' extolling the success of owner-occupied small-hold farming where a 'vested interest' in the soil ('a sturdy yeomanry') would erase many of the evils of an otherwise precarious tenantry subject to rent hikes and summary eviction. Russell actually came under the influence of Sharman Crawford and J.S. Mill both of whom (along with Davis, and later, Lalor and Mitchel) rejected the Edinburgh Review consensus of a tripartite re-structuring of Irish agriculture along these lines into landlords, comfortable farmers (20 acres plus) and paid labourers with no stake in the soil (i.e. the elimination of cottiers and the conacre system).
In these circles, Malthus was typically invoked to highlight the population explosion among the 'lower orders' and this I think is the key to grasping the net beneficiary effect which was commonly perceived & uttered among relief officials and policy-makers as the crisis unfolded and hearts hardened; Nassau Senior and Trevelyan particularly have left on record several statements to the effect that a mass loss of life would ultimately provide a necessary "Malthusian correction" as well as, and by extension, a boon in the long run to the Irish economy.
When you couple this undercurrent with the more fundamentalist strains of Clapham Evangelicalism (the blight being "the stroke of an all-wise Providence") and the natural prejudice of policy makers to regard Ireland's woes as rooted in the 'feckless, lazy habits' of its inhabitants you have a strong impulse, however unconscious it may be rooted in some, to simply turn aside and declare the famine "over" - as was done to all intents and purposes when the soup kitchens were wound down in mid-47.
From this point on the British purse strings were shut tight and the Irish Poor Law Union rate-payers were left to fend for themselves financially but with the important caveat that the land laws and workhouse relief requirements favoured mass evictions via the Gregory Clause - that the cabinet and astute observers in Parliament didn't realise the ultimate by-product of this composite of measures in advance, beggars belief; the long sought for idealised pyramidal structure in land tenure.
Gladstone's revolution was to belatedly concede that all along there was contested rights in the soil; what he referred to as "tribal customs" that merited legitimacy. And of course, the predominantly Gaelic speaking labourer & conacre class who comprised 3/4 of the pre-famine agrarian population whose vibrant oral culture still had a tenacious hold never allowed them to legitimise an historical dispossession - hence the parallel law codes and land "rights" of Whiteboy 'moral economy'.
Workers simply couldn't earn enough to feed themselves and by December/January 1847 they were actually dropping dead by the roadsides of exhaustion & starvation. At this point, private charity subscriptions were encouraged and promoted and the exchequer costs of maintaining the public works were being grilled fiercely in Parliament which is what led the Russell administration to adopt the successful Quaker schemes of direct relief via soup kitchens but this in itself was only a stopgap measure until the burden of relief could be shifted from British exchequer funded schemes onto the Irish Poor Law system supported by taxing Irish landed property (c. Sept 1847).
In essence, the Whigs had displaced the entire burden of relief on Irish landed proprietors whose property was now taxed to support the overflowing workhouses. The "rate-in aid" scheme of the 1848 legislative session which was one of the few material concessions to indebted Irish Poor Law Unions via a redistributive extra tax on less encumbered other Irish Unions was typical of their thinking at this time - i.e. no English Poor Law Unions were forced to make a contribution. "There is no legislative Union without joint responsibility", came the cry from the Irish nationalist, Repealer and even some sections of the liberal British press e.g. the Morning Chronicle. All the money, in other words, from mid-47 on had to be raised solely out of the pockets of Irish ratepayers; a complete abnegation of responsibility which led to the mass evictions of 1848/49 as landlords struggled to clear their estates of tenanted "paupers" whose poor relief dues they wished to discharge themselves from.
Now, its reasonable to assume that Peel and the Conservatives would scarcely have done things a whole lot different as they supported by and large most of these measures while sitting in the opposition benches. Peel's template for relief was, in fact, with some slight tweaks by Trevelyan, lifted wholesale by the Whigs in 1846 - local relief committees, public works, encouragement of private philanthropy & non-interference in the market.
Peel's "brimstone", the Indian 'flint' corn, £50,000 of which was purchased surreptitiously and released into the most needy areas by Relief Commissioner, Randolph Routh, in niggardly dribs and drabs in 1845/46 was claimed by Peel to be a novel food source and therefore strictly speaking not interfering with any pre-existing market - but this nevertheless was an inventive way of circumnavigating laissez faire orthodoxy. But this was a "one-trick pony" which couldn't be repeated by the incoming Whigs unless they were prepared to ignore the threats of Irish grain suppliers to not buy any grain whatsoever unless they received guarantees by the government that they wouldn't compete with their trade by purchasing food for distribution.
The first point then is that the Whig approach was fundamentally similar to the Conservatives - insofar as both of them completely ignored Irish opinion which was summed up in the recommendations of Daniel O' Connell's November 1845 visit to the Viceroy which was -
(1) to close all the ports from exporting Irish food; the enormous quantities of wheat, barley, oats, pigs, sheep, cattle, butter which in an ideal "entitlements" framework would have been more than enough to feed the starving populace. (Christine Kinealy's recent research over O' Grada, Donnelly etc. on this matter which estimates a domestic production capacity suitable to the wants of over 11 million).
(2) The diversion of all grain for brewing - Ireland yet exported colossal quantities of grain-derived spirits abroad throughout the crisis.
(3) Proceeds from the sales of Irish forests to contribute to relief.
(4) The raising of an international loan; "to scour the world's markets for food" - on the assumption that the ports were not allowed close,
(5) the taxing of absentee rental. and (among other measures)
(6) legislation to safeguard tenant right from eviction.
Secondly, neither government paid the slightest attention to any of these requests/demands not because they were hopelessly locked into a philosophy of laissez faire orthodoxy; the relative effectiveness of which was still the subject of much contention (for what was the recent Corn Law debate about if not the variant merits of Free Trade vs. Protectionism?) - but because there were higher interests to serve; to wit -
(1) the security of the domestic British food supply (Irish produce fed two million English and kept grain prices in the manufacturing districts artificially low - a perennial hotbed of Chartist grievance) and
(2) the demands for a re-structuring of the Irish agrarian landscape into a pyramidal schema of landlords, small farmers and a mobile proletarian labour force; i.e the extinction of the cottier and conacre farming class via their forced removal by eviction, starvation, emigration or proletarianisation.
In the eyes of many influential orthodox economists this bottom rung class were simply Malthusian 'human encumbrances', surplus to the requirements of modern, mechanised, large-scale farming and a preferred post-Corn Law Repeal switch from tillage to pasture as the ubiquity and cheapness of imported American corn now demanded a re-orientation of the Irish agricultural market towards cattle and sheep export. The research of economist Amartya Sen, notably his concept of an "entitlements framework" which focuses on 'democratic deficits' in afflicted famine zones, highlights the breakdown in distributive food channels & consequent 'starvation in the midst of plenty' where this deficit is classically pronounced; as it clearly was in Ireland.
The Whigs Encumbered Estates Act (1949) was part of the machinery used to clear the small-holders and conacre labourers from the soil and given their total lack of representation in Westminster, outside of a small coterie of Repealers, their plight may be said to be consequent to and illustrative of the 'entitlements deficit' thesis. Nobody, publically at any rate, argued for the replacement of "Irish landlords" with "English" ones - what orthodox economists, and later, the bulk of the Russell cabinet argued for was the dissolution of insolvent estates, their speedy processing via the Chancery land courts and their 'encumbered' titles to be passed forthwith to "men of capital" irrespective of their provenance so that they could provide the investment necessary to transition the hotch-potch amalgam of small-holder plots into "viable large farms" geared for pasture.
Classic 'disaster capitalism', in other words, and opportunistic economic re-orientation of the Kleinian "Shock Doctrine" mould which paid scant attention to indigenous conceptions of land-ownership. The impetus to affect meaningful land reform (on the line of the "Three F's" - Fair Rent, Free Sale & Fixity of Tenure - and borrowing from the principles of the Ulster Custom) came far too late on the Repeal side, but even if O' Connell had put it on the agenda earlier it's doubtful whether any Westminster administration (Tory or Whig) would've risked alienating Irish landlords by jeopardizing "the rights of property".
William Smith O' Brien and Thomas Davis are credited with the Repeal Association's working paper on the land issue in 1845 and this was in part to counter the Devon Commission's recommendations which were essentially 'assisted emigration', 'land reclamation' and the proletarianisation of conacre labourers - sweeping the surplus population from the soil in short - by converting small-holdings into larger, more 'sustainable' agricultural conglomerates geared towards intensive pasture and cattle export as opposed to tillage and grain production (now rendered redundant in the face of eliminated tariffs post-1846 Corn Law Repeal).
Davis had written an important article in the Citizen prior to joining the Nation called 'Udalism and Feudalism' extolling the success of owner-occupied small-hold farming where a 'vested interest' in the soil ('a sturdy yeomanry') would erase many of the evils of an otherwise precarious tenantry subject to rent hikes and summary eviction. Russell actually came under the influence of Sharman Crawford and J.S. Mill both of whom (along with Davis, and later, Lalor and Mitchel) rejected the Edinburgh Review consensus of a tripartite re-structuring of Irish agriculture along these lines into landlords, comfortable farmers (20 acres plus) and paid labourers with no stake in the soil (i.e. the elimination of cottiers and the conacre system).
In these circles, Malthus was typically invoked to highlight the population explosion among the 'lower orders' and this I think is the key to grasping the net beneficiary effect which was commonly perceived & uttered among relief officials and policy-makers as the crisis unfolded and hearts hardened; Nassau Senior and Trevelyan particularly have left on record several statements to the effect that a mass loss of life would ultimately provide a necessary "Malthusian correction" as well as, and by extension, a boon in the long run to the Irish economy.
When you couple this undercurrent with the more fundamentalist strains of Clapham Evangelicalism (the blight being "the stroke of an all-wise Providence") and the natural prejudice of policy makers to regard Ireland's woes as rooted in the 'feckless, lazy habits' of its inhabitants you have a strong impulse, however unconscious it may be rooted in some, to simply turn aside and declare the famine "over" - as was done to all intents and purposes when the soup kitchens were wound down in mid-47.
From this point on the British purse strings were shut tight and the Irish Poor Law Union rate-payers were left to fend for themselves financially but with the important caveat that the land laws and workhouse relief requirements favoured mass evictions via the Gregory Clause - that the cabinet and astute observers in Parliament didn't realise the ultimate by-product of this composite of measures in advance, beggars belief; the long sought for idealised pyramidal structure in land tenure.
Gladstone's revolution was to belatedly concede that all along there was contested rights in the soil; what he referred to as "tribal customs" that merited legitimacy. And of course, the predominantly Gaelic speaking labourer & conacre class who comprised 3/4 of the pre-famine agrarian population whose vibrant oral culture still had a tenacious hold never allowed them to legitimise an historical dispossession - hence the parallel law codes and land "rights" of Whiteboy 'moral economy'.
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