The Great Famine
by Ireland’s history and its political, economic, and social development was strongly linked to what happened in England, and after the English union with Scotland in 1707, what happened in Great Britain. The English and later the British believed that controlling Ireland was vital for their own national security.
After this Act of Union, the Irish parliament in Dublin was closed, and Irish interests were to be represented in the English parliament at Westminster. Thus England’s hold on Ireland was legalized, and strengthened. The union with Britain was popular with the Protestants of Ulster and the Anglo-Irish landowners but bitterly resented by the majority of the Irish population because they were discriminated against for being Roman Catholics, and considered to be inferior by the British.
The reason for British negligence was heavily influenced by feelings of racial and cultural superiority over the Irish people, particularly those Irish that had failed to embrace Protestantism. The British treated the Irish people as being their inferiors that needed to be controlled, only the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and the Orange Orders in Ulster were anywhere near being on a par with the British when it came to their social, economic, or cultural status.
Ireland produced high quality linen as a substantial cottage industry, renowned for its high quality and exported in large quantities. The linen industry held the potential to generate higher levels of income and lift the majority of the Irish population out of poverty, and their dependency on the potato crop and small land holdings.
Before the 1840s Ireland did not experience major industrialization, Britain had begun the process of industrial revolution before any other country and therefore was able to generate greater levels of wealth than any other country. The limited level of industrialization in Ireland meant that the country had to rely on its agricultural output to generate wealth, whilst the lack of transport infrastructure was not good for the further progress of economic development. Ireland for instance was much slower at building railways and roads which hampered relief efforts once the British government belatedly decided to send food supplies.
Due to the Navigation Acts, the Irish could not export anything without the permission of Britain; and whatever the Irish exported had to be exported through British ports. The Irish started immigrating in great numbers to other countries like the United States to find work and frequently settled for unskilled jobs with low wages. This mass emigration was mostly to North America and Canada and there they lived in poverty, often maintaining strong links with Ireland and Irish Republican movements.
Although there are many reasons for the famine, the main and the major reason is recognized as the “potato” and therefore the famine is also referred to as the potato famine caused by the “potato blight” disease that ruined the potato crops of the early to mid 1840s. The failure of the potato crop due to the potato blight was the primary cause of the famine. The abundance of previous potato crops had been the main factor in the Irish population increase. The Irish population had risen at a very high rate, for the population doubled in the forty to fifty years prior to the famine. A major contributory factor to this impressive population increase was the system of land allocation to every farmer on the lease basis, as well as the expansion of the Linen industry.
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