A little note on Black '47

 I tried this year to do some tours of Toronto and explain the impact of the Great Hunger had on the city, as this year is the 175th anniversary of Black '47, the worst year in the famine. Unfortunately time and the weather (too hot, too cold, too rainy) never once cooperated. I ran into this fellow on Youtube, and he appears to be popular, and he gave a brief overview of the Famine. I thought I would share it here, and explain why this is deceptive. The Famine was far more complicated than can be explained in a minute, and the actions of the British were far, far worse than mere negligence and a bad idea. Strap in. This will be rather verbose.

The Great Hunger was centuries in the making. In a sense, the history of the Irish will sound familiar to many North Americans. They lived for centuries in their land, loosely formed into family groups or clans based on kinship, with the clans headed by chieftains and with the chieftains ruled loosely by a King. Also, the Church was there. That is important.

One day, some strangers showed up from across the sea and said 'Lovely land you got here. It's ours now.' This had, of course, happened many times before in their past, but those previous strangers had eventually left. These new ones showed a marked propensity to stay. Fighting ensued, and would continue to ensue off and on for centuries, as the Irish tried to throw off the English, but the rebellions almost invariably failed and the English would retaliate and place punitive measures upon the Irish.

At any rate, the Irish now no longer owned their own land, and had to pay rent to the English for the Land they had always lived upon. Also, the English began setting up colonies in the northern part of Ireland, so on and so forth. Also, Henry the Fat one day decided he was the head of his own religion, and anyone who denied this was committing treason. Since the Irish didn't go along on the whole with his new religion, they were now committing treason, thus inviting greater restrictions and greater punitive measures down upon them. Okay, how does that play in to the Famine? Be patient, I am getting there.

Occasionally, the Irish would try to better their lot by, say, going into business, which in the early centuries meant trade. Ireland was at that time a land of farms, so they started trading the products of their land. So far so good, but the English, soon to be British, started passing laws about that. So they started, among other things, to trade their livestock with the English. However, the English livestock producers complained about the competition from Ireland. and around the time of Henry VIII or his daughter Elizabeth the law was changed, banning the Irish from exporting their livestock. So the Irish said alright, we can't trade the living animals, how about the dead ones? So they started producing and exporting smoked meats and corned beef and other preserved meats. All was well until the British producers of said foodstuffs complained, and, Bob's your Uncle, the export of Irish preserved meats was banned. So, they can't trade the live animal, nor the meat, how about the skins? Ireland began producing leather for trade, which raised the ire of the English leather makers, and the export of Irish leather was banned. Come the industrial revolution, the Irish played with the idea of industrializing , built some factories.... you can guess what happened.

When I say the Irish could not export their wares, I mean the Irish Catholics. Their goods could not be exported by themselves. But goods still flowed out of Ireland. English landlords still collected grains and meat and cheese and butter and whatnot for rent. Merchants in the North could buy it. But both were operating without any competition, so they could pay the Irish whatever they wanted or value the Irish goods and produce for as low as they pleased, because, by law, the Irish literally had nowhere else to go to sell their wares. So, when the gentleman below says the British thought the potato made the Irish lazy and indolent and refused to modernize.... Yeah.

The upshot of all this is that by the times the 1800s rolled around, about the only way you could be Irish and eat was if you farmed. Keep that in mind, I'll get back to it in a moment.

All for all, it is not surprising that the Irish rebelled whenever they felt they could- rebellions which were almost always doomed to failure at least in part because they couldn't afford to buy the weapons necessary. The rebellion which occurred in the 1790's brought one of the strongest crackdowns in the history of Ireland. The Irish Catholics were, among other things, banned from keeping records- births, deaths, weddings, baptisms- all of it. These penal laws as they were called were in place until 1850, so, if you're Irish and interested in your family history, you will run into a wall at 1850. Going back beyond that is very difficult, and for many impossible. The education of Catholics was also highly restricted. Most Irish were illiterate in the period by law.

So the Irish are poor illiterate farmers by the 1800's. They lived on small farms which were getting smaller, as the result of both tradition and law. The Irish tended to break up their farms and divide them amongst their children rather than give it all to the eldest son. There were also laws in place about this, which added carrot that the son could inherit it all- but only if he converted to Anglicanism. This was another way of breaking up the Irish and, I suppose, modernizing them. The farms then kept getting smaller and smaller, but the Irish still had to pay rents because they didn't own the land. So they would grow cash crops for the rent- wheat and other grains, sheep, cows and pigs, and they would give the meat, eggs, butter, cheese etc as rent. So much of their land was taken up by growing the food for rent, they needed a crop that could produce a maximum amount of food on minimal land left to keep eating.

Enter the humble Potato. It is packed with nutrients and starch, and lasted well into the winter, providing an Irish family with enough food to stay alive and thrive. The standard Irish meal of the time would be potatoes boiled in buttermilk or whey- the leftovers from making butter and cheese, respectively- and it gave them the nutrients they needed to survive. The Irish even had a reputation at the time for being the tallest people in Europe.

So, you see, the history of several centuries put the Irish into a position where their very lives depended on one thing, with no alternatives or back ups. Then, in the winter of 1845-1846, the prevailing winds shifted, and the winds and rains brought a new plant disease to Ireland, and wiped out their sole means of survival.

And it got worse. it is the dirty little secret of the Famine that Ireland exported food for the duration. Every day, as the Irish starved, the British exported ship after ship of food out of the country, away from the hands that grew it and the mouths that so desperately needed it. The potatoes rotting in the ground would have been little more than an inconvenience if only the rest of the food had stayed. But the British landlords would have it, and left not a scrap for the Irish. 200,000 British troops were sent into Ireland to make certain the food kept flowing out of Ireland, and to punish any Irish who tried to keep it for themselves. Landlords saw this as an opportunity to rid themselves of the troublesome tenants and convert the land to more profitable uses. As families died or left, their homes would be burned to keep others from moving in. Whole villages vanished.

Some tried to help. The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire heard of the Irish suffering and sent a shipload of food to Ireland. But with British import export laws, the food could not be offloaded, and rotted in the ship's hold as it lay in harbour, providing nourishment only to rats. A tribe of American Choctaw Indians, no stranger to poverty and suffering themselves, sent the Irish $150- worth over $7,000 today. The Irish have never forgotten the gesture. Queen Victoria reached into her purse and contributed five pounds to Irish relief.

There was some help for the Irish. The most common form were tickets out of Ireland.. Protestant preachers also traveled the countryside, offering soup to the starving, but only if they converted and listened to a sermon first. They would then move on, leaving starving converts behind. Virtually all the help that came from the British did so with some string attached- leave, convert, or die. Those who left often died anyway, commonly of Typhus. There are over a thousand of them buried in Toronto in a graveyard that was eventually paved over and turned into a playground. Gross Ile, Montreal, Quebec and Kingston among others all have their own cemeteries and their buried thousands. Many more died in transit and were tossed into the Ocean.

And so they left and they died, or they stayed and they died, or they found a way to survive, but only barely. It is hard to say how many, but try this: the population of Ireland before the famine was 8,000,000. Today, right now, 175 years later, it is a little over 7,000,000. There are also, right now, about 50,000,000 people around the world who claim some level of Irish descent, including your humble interlocutor. The Irish also stopped being the tallest people in Europe. Large animals need more food than small animals, and in famines they tend to die first and fastest. After the Famine, the tiny Irishman became a stereotype for many years. That is the mark the Great Hunger left on the people themselves, on Ireland and upon the world.

So calling, as the gentleman below does, the Irish Famine a issue in mismanagement doesn't quite cover the matter. I will agree with him when he refers to British of the time as 'Scumbags of History', though.