Was the Irish Potato Famine a Genocide?

It's a shocking concept to imagine.  Worse still, when you realize that it's actually true. That it happened; and millions of people died as a result.

During 1845-1851, Ireland was one of the world's largest net exporters of food. 

This period has gone down in history as An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger; or An Drochshaol, the bad times.  It is better known to the world as the Irish Potato Famine. 

But the clue there is in the title.  It was only the potatoes which were blighted; only the spuds which were inedible.

Throughout the country, cattle were still producing milk and butter, or being slaughtered for their meat. The oceans, rivers and streams still contained fish.  The fields were yielding bumper crops of grain. 

So why were the Irish people starving?  Mostly because all of the rest of the food was being exported across the Irish Sea into England. The free market protected the trade; and red-coated men with guns escorted the food convoys right away from Ireland's ports. 

Over half of the British army was stationed in Ireland during the potato blight.

Seventy-five different regiments were guarding the food convoys. The ports of Ballina, Ballyshannon, Bantry, Dingle, Killala, Kilrush, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee and Westport were like fortresses.

This may adequately explain why Irish resistance to their own starvation and eviction found little success. 

Yet the population did not die passively, as so many history books would imply.

There were food riots and notable assassinations of land-owners. Daniel O'Connell, the Young Irelanders and the Tipperary Uprising were just three of the larger rebellions.  There were many more on a smaller scale. 

Black '47 was the year when the worst of the hunger led to the greatest number of emigrants; and it saw the most deaths through starvation and pandemics. It was also the year when agrarian violence reached an all time peak. 

In short, the Irish were fighting back. In tiny, local skirmishes - that never individually made the history books - they fought and sometimes died in attempts to keep that food for their own survival.

Evictions

The Devon Report of 1845 was supposed to safeguard tenants against landlordism. People could not be evicted from their homes without some financial recompense.  However, in the light of what was transpiring in Ireland, this recommendation was quietly left to rot.

If it had made it onto the legislature, then hundreds of thousands of Irish people would have been maintained in their homes; or given the financial aid to feed themselves once homeless.

It wasn't even heard in Parliament until late in 1847, when the measure was defeated by 112 votes to 25.

Free Trade

The Repeal of the Corn Laws, in June 1846, effectively made it possible to starve the Irish people. It was through this legal change that food was able to be shipped out. 

In contrast, ports had been closed during a famine earlier in the 19th century.  That measure had saved the Irish from starvation.  By refusing to do the same now, the British government ensured that the opposite would occur.

Many acts and bills were passed which protected property over people during this period. For example, the Encumbered Estates Act (1849) allowed the wealthy British to snap up land in Ireland, without also being liable for the debts incurred by bankrupt Irish landowners.

Decentralization of Health

In August 1846, the Central Board of Health was disbanded. This stopped a single center monitoring the spread of pandemics; and advising accordingly. 

A year later, it finally dawned on the British government that this was a little silly.  It was reinstated the following February.

Bureaucracy

While emergency legislation was passed to permit the opening of fever hospitals, the same law demanded weekly reports.  The reality was that the administrators had so many forms to fill in, that the hospitals could barely function.

Funding was not forthcoming without the reports; and the money could be stopped at any time.

Food relief programs also found themselves bogged down in paperwork.  Often stocks spoiled before they could be distributed, due to official wrangling over the best way to share it out.

The Gregory Clause

During Black '47, there was an amendment made to the Poor Law.  Named the Gregory Clause, it stated that any Irish person in possession of a quarter of an acre of land was not entitled to any food or work aid at all.

This also freed landowners from giving aid to their tenants. The result was a mass clearance by landlords, who were no longer bound to keep people in their homes.

Legal Removal of Civil Liberties

During the time of the famine, the Irish lost many of their previously existing civil rights.  Between 1845-1851, there were no less than ten Acts of Parliament, which restricted the legal recourse of the Irish.

These included the Crime and Outrage Act, which removed the right to bear arms and made it a legal requirement for the population to hunt down assassins; the Treason Felony Act, which made it illegal to even think bad thoughts about the Queen or her realm; Suspension of Habeas Corpus, which did what it suggests that it did.

Work Programs

Lord John Russell's government, in 1846, refused to spend money on food aid.  Instead, it demanded that Irish land-owners create relief employment.  This often took the form of road-building, or the breaking of stones.

While Irish people queued up to work, only 750,000 positions were created. This was hard, back-breaking work, which exhausted those already suffering from malnutrition. The wages were not enough to keep a starving man alive.

By 1847, even the British government was forced to concede that these programs weren't working. So it set aside £45m to create its own.  The work was deliberately made arduous, so that only the most desperate would partake. But the wages were not enough to cover the soaring price of food.

Crippling Debt

Lord John Russell's government made it clear that any monetary aid coming from Britain (including the work program funds) was a loan. 

This debt incurred a high level of interest and repayments had to be started immediately.  Thus the Irish administration found itself struggling to cope financially too.  It couldn't spend on feeding its own population, when debt repayments were owed across the Irish Sea.

At the time of the potato crop failure, Ireland was ruled by Westminster. It was a British government which took the decisions that would prove so fatal to the Irish population.

There is not the scope here to traverse the entire history between those two nations.  However, it is no understatement to say that it had been an unhappy one.

Ireland has always had the bad luck to be perfectly positioned for an invading force upon the British mainland. In the past, French and Spanish troops had been granted permission to attack Britain from there. (During World War Two, German ammunition found its way onto Irish shores too.) 

It was in the interests of Britain to subsume Ireland into its own borders, as part of the United Kingdom, as a matter of national security.

There was also a religious impetus.  Ireland is a Catholic nation, while Britain has largely become Protestant. For the state religion of the Anglican Church, there was ever the threat of Irish assistance in Catholic matters.  Not least support, when the Papists were subject to persecution.

It was to Ireland that James II turned, when his throne was usurped by William and Mary.  The disastrous Battle of the Boyne was the result.

For centuries, various tactics had been attempted.  Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell had each sent in troops and/or Protestant plantation families, desperate to convert the Irish to Anglicanism. The Troubles in Northern Ireland, which are still on-going, are the direct result of their policies.

On each occasion, the Irish had resisted.  The continued wars, insurgencies, attacks and counter-attacks had long been a drain on British military resources.

Then there was the larger Celtic issue.  It's without question that English policy has long been one of cultural genocide against all of the Celtic countries surrounding it.  At the time of the famine, the majority of Irish people were monoglot Gaelic speakers.  Their Celtic national identity was perhaps the strongest of all.

Finally, we come to economics.  Ireland is still a country with abundant agricultural wealth.  Being able to control it made a lot of absentee British landowners very rich. They would be richer still, if they didn't have tenants taking up space and eating some of the bounty.

This latter was probably the most important consideration of them all in 1845.

In 1861, Young Irelander John Mitchel wrote a pamphlet.  In it, he stated that, 'Ireland was actually producing sufficient food, wool and flax, to feed and clothe not nine but eighteen millions of people'. 

Furthermore, he contended that every ship bringing a cargo of food relief for the starving masses, would meet another six ships packed with food exports on the way out of the same harbours.

His most famous line was his conclusion: 'The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.'

For this, John Mitchel was first charged with sedition.  When that looked set to fail, the prosecution hurriedly changed it to Treason Felony.  Mitchel was found guilty by an English jury and deported to Australia.

However, it wasn't only the Irish who were levelling charges of genocide at the English government. Its own prime minister, Robert Peel, felt the same way.  He was forced to resign, when he was out-voted and out-manoeuvred on the Repeal of the Corn Laws.

Entering the legislate on June 26th 1846, these measures allowed 'money crops' to be taken out of Ireland without incurring any taxation at all. 

Peel's closing speech railed against his profiteering peers, as he demanded, "Good God, are you to sit in cabinet and consider and calculate how much diarrhoea, and bloody flux, and dysentery a people can bear before it becomes necessary for you to provide them with food?"

His successor, Lord John Russell, openly reassured the business community that his government would no longer interfere with the grain market.  By the following winter, prices on maize alone had 'virtually tripled'.

It was not an issue which was only determined by hindsight.  In March 1847, the leader of the Conservative Party, Lord George Bentinck, was moved to question the ruling Whigs. 

He spoke accusingly in Parliament, saying, "They know the people have been dying by their thousands and I dare them to inquire what has been the number of those who have died through their mismanagement, by their principles of free trade. Yes, free trade in the lives of the Irish people!"

During the same month, Queen Victoria herself was leading a Day of Atonement.  The idea was for Christian people to have a day of fasting, as penance for the situation in Ireland.  With such a patron, English congregations flocked to join her, but not to petition their government to do anything about it.

No doubt those Irish who heard about the gesture found it to be very cold comfort.  But it is extremely telling that even the monarch judged that they had something about which to feel penitent.

Occasionally, a prominent member of parliament let slip their real motivation.  Writing to an Irish landowner, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Charles Wood actually stated, "I am not at all appalled by your tenantry going. That seems to be a necessary part of the process... We must not complain of what we really want to obtain."

Those representing the interests of the British government, actually inside Ireland, sometimes found the 'process' too much to bear.  Edward Twisleton, an officer of the Poor Law Commission, resigned in 1849.  He claimed that he was an 'unfit agent for a policy that must be one of extermination'.

His words were echoed a few months later, when Lord Claredon, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, wrote to his prime minister.  He did not mince his words, raging, "I don't think there is another legislature in Europe that would disregard such suffering as now exists in the west of Ireland, or coldly persist in a policy of extermination."

His appeal for aid, like so many others before him, was solidly ignored.

No-one has tried to argue that the British government acted well during the Irish famine, but was it genocide?

There is a tendency to judge the early Victorians by the moral standards of today.  We're sitting cosily here on the other side of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Victorians were a century away from even conceiving of it.

Lord John Russell (pictured) was under a lot of public pressure NOT to help the Irish. When his government proposed more food aid, this party lost seats in a by-election.

Newspapers, like the London Times, staged a long campaign to keep public opinion against the Irish beggars. Then, as now, the news was in the hands of wealthy businessmen.

It's been pointed out by countless historians that the governments of both Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell did help Ireland. Their work programs may have been deeply flawed; and their financial hand-outs came with crippling interest.  But they did exist.

In the utter devastation of Black '47, government run soup kitchens were established.  (Then just as quickly demolished in the same autumn.)

The aid was largely insubstantial, ineffective and laced with bumbling bureaucracy, but the fact that it was there at all meant the British government wasn't entirely malicious. For some commentators, the charge sheet adds up to neglect rather than genocide.  Ignorance about what would work rather than targeted killing.

For those people, the British were not so much the villains, as the product of their time.

In 1997, a memorial concert was held in County Cork to mark 150 years since Black '47.  The actor Gabriel Byrne was given a statement to read out. It was written by the then British prime minister, Tony Blair.

The text said:

The famine was a defining event in the history of Ireland and of Britain. It has left deep scars. That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today.

Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy. We must not forget such a dreadful event.

For many, including the media on both sides of the Irish Sea, this was a long-awaited apology from the British government.

Some cheered. Some were annoyed.  As recently as February 2012, Jeremy Paxman - a political television journalist and historian - was dismissing the statement as 'moral vacuousness'.  It was his contention that Blair can't apologize for the events of 1845-1851, because he wasn't there.

However, the statement never actually said 'sorry'.  Blair did little more than criticize his predecessors at the time.  It's hardly an admission of out and out genocide.  It's merely a recognition that it's not going to go away for Britain any time soon.