The Irish Famine: Potato Blight and Death

Ireland had been the battleground of other peoples ambitions for hundreds of years and its people were some of the poorest and most destitute in Europe. However, its majority Catholic population and geographical position off the west coast of England made it a security issue for the British Government. Catholic incursion had been greatly feared, especially during the long religious wars. Its people, viewed by many in Britain as little better than superstitious savages, needed to be suppressed. Over the previous centuries much of the north of Ireland had been colonised by Protestants from Britain and most of the land was owned by a largely absent anglo-Irish aristocracy. The Irish people were very much under the thumb of their dominant English neighbours, but they never accepted it. Ireland was frequently in a state of rebellion but the English stubbornly refused to loosen their grip or seriously contemplate providing the means whereby the Irish could run their own affairs.

In 1801, the Act of Union made Ireland formally a part of Great Britain. From now on it would be run by officials directly appointed by the Government in Westminster, and Protestantism would be the State religion in the form of the Church of Ireland. It seemed that any prospect for Irish freedom had been quashed forever. The future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, however, expressed his fears for Ireland, a country with, ” a starving population, an absent aristocracy, and an alien Church.”

Prior to the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, Catholics in Britain had been banned from voting or holding political office, working in the civil service, or attending university. They had also been banned from many of the professions. In Ireland the Catholic majority had been forced of the best pasture land which was now owned by Protestant farmers who exported their grain and beef to England.

The Irish landscape was dominated by the vast estates of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. They rarely visited their estates and were for the most part absent landlords. Instead, eager to squeeze every penny from their holdings, they handed the running of their estates over to often corrupt and brutal middlemen. Most of the small-holdings were either owned by or leased to Irish peasants. Often the land leased was of poor quality and one crop that could be guaranteed to prosper in unfavourable soil was the potato. Indeed, so small were some of these holdings that the potato was the only viable crop. By the 1840’s it had become the staple diet of the majority Irish population. Rarely was enough ever produced to go to market. Rather, it was a subsistence crop only, and the Irish people depended on it for their survival.