Carrion and Earth

In​ 2015 Channel 4 commissioned a script for a comedy series called Hungry, set during the Great Famine. There were protests outside its offices and more than 42,000 people signed a petition calling for the show to be dropped. At a heated debate on comedy and censorship at the London Irish Comedy Festival, members of the audience made their views on the matter clear. ‘Humour is an affront to the genocide that was perpetrated in Ireland,’ one man said; ‘should we mock our genocide, laugh at it?’ Another campaigner argued that ‘the comedy industry had a duty under the Equality Act to protect people from discriminatory practice or outright prejudice.’ In 2016 the script was quietly shelved.

The potato blight that struck Europe in 1845, and devastated successive harvests until 1850, coincided with poor yields of wheat and rye, bringing hardship to peasants across the continent. The demographic impact in Belgium, the Netherlands and Prussia was minor, however, compared to what happened in Ireland. An estimated total of 300,000 people died in those three countries; more than a million died in Ireland, one person in eight. A further 1.5 to two million emigrated, mainly to Britain, the United States and Canada, with smaller numbers settling in Australia and New Zealand. Within a few years Ireland had lost a fifth of its population through starvation, emigration, disease and falling birth rates. Today the population remains about a million lower than in 1841, making Ireland an outlier in European demography.

Depopulation was accompanied by vast social transformation. Since the English conquests of the 16th and 17th centuries, the large majority of Irish land had been owned by Anglo-Irish and British landlords, who leased their estates to tenant farmers and employed seasonal labourers. In 1845 there were roughly 650,000 landless labourers in Ireland; with their dependants, they made up 2.7 million people, more than a quarter of the population. Within sixty years this social class had all but disappeared. Post-famine shifts in agriculture from tillage to pasture reduced the demand for labour, encouraging further emigration. Tenant farmers, meanwhile, began to challenge landlords for greater rights to their holdings. They ultimately sought ownership, an aim largely achieved by 1903 and facilitated by the disappearance of the rural labourers, who left behind a smaller and more prosperous tenant class able to take advantage of land purchase schemes. At the same time, the Irish language declined. It was spoken primarily by the rural poor; the expansion of state education, which began in the 1830s, meant that English soon became Ireland’s common language.

Although Ireland had endured earlier famines – including one in the 1740s that, proportionally, claimed more lives – the Great Famine remains a decisive turning point in Irish history. It came to be seen not merely as a natural disaster, but as a political event – a symbol of colonial exploitation and neglect. In 1861 the radical nationalist John Mitchel published The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps), in which he blamed the British government for the devastation. ‘The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight,’ he wrote, ‘but the English created the Famine … and a million and a half men, women and children were carefully, prudently and peacefully slain by the English government.’ Mitchel noted that during the 1840s, butter, cattle and grain were plentiful in Ireland, but the majority was exported to Britain, often under military guard. He contrasted the red tape and bureaucracy that characterised the government’s response to the famine with its efficiency in prosecuting the Crimean War. He also pointed out that twenty million pounds had been spent compensating slaveowners in the years after the abolition of slavery in 1833, yet a fraction of that figure could not be found to save the starving Irish.

Mitchel’s argument – that political and economic decisions motivated by contempt for the Irish transformed the blight into a catastrophe – helped entrench a popular belief that the Great Famine was an intentional act. Few scholars today would accept this view, or accuse the British government of genocide. There is no archival evidence of a deliberate, organised attempt to starve the Irish population, forcibly displace them or destroy their means of survival. Historians instead tend to view the famine as the product of deep-rooted structural inequalities compounded by the government’s disastrous short-term policies.

Padraic Scanlan’s Rot: A History of the Irish Famine doesn’t seek to overturn this consensus but Scanlan’s central claim is in some ways an echo of Mitchel’s: although Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, it was, he writes, ‘imagined, governed and exploited in strikingly colonial ways … The famine – a complex ecological, economic, logistical and political disaster – was a consequence of colonialism.’ Capitalism within the British Empire created in Ireland a society especially vulnerable to the effects of crop failure. Scanlan explores the consequences of fewer than four thousand British and Anglo-Irish landlords owning almost 80 per cent of the land in Ireland. This system of landlordism made life for the rural poor, both tenant farmers and labourers, highly precarious. Land was continually subdivided into smaller plots to maximise rental income, often at the expense of productivity, even subsistence. The result was a population so impoverished that it could not withstand a crisis on the scale of the potato blight.

The Irish, who depended almost entirely on the potato for survival, were deemed inferior by the British middle classes, whose more varied diet relied on complex divisions of labour and industrial production. Potato farming, by contrast, was straightforward: the crop thrived in poor soil and required little cultivation. Consumption in Ireland was higher than among any other peasantry in Europe. Charles Trevelyan, the Treasury official who oversaw famine relief, called the potato ‘the deep and inveterate root of social evil’ and blamed it for creating a nation of paupers. Scanlan points out that such attitudes rested on a false opposition between industrial, urban progress and rural, agricultural backwardness. Although the potato was a relatively modern crop, influential British commentators considered it to be an ancient feature of Irish culture. Similarly, Ireland’s distinctive system of landholding and subsistence farming was assumed to be a remnant of pre-modern life rather than a product of imperial capitalism. The empire created a system in Ireland characterised by monocropping and poverty, but British officials believed it to be an inevitable result of a reluctance among the Irish rural poor to work for wages or embrace industrialisation. For many people in Britain, the Irish were simply incapable of becoming more ‘civilised’. As Scanlan argues, successive governments and reformers ‘concluded that Ireland was poor not because it was overexposed to the modern British market’, but because it ‘was not yet modern enough’.

Officials such as Trevelyan regarded the famine as an opportunity for Ireland to modernise. Scanlan points out that 19th-century British political economy – with its faith in free markets and moral discipline – largely shaped famine relief. The government initially resisted direct intervention to ease Irish suffering, insisting that the market could solve all ‘Irish problems’. It argued that the laws of supply and demand would ‘civilise’ the Irish by drawing them into the discipline of waged labour and market exchange.

The effects of these political assumptions are still visible in the Irish landscape. In the west, narrow roads wind through valleys and over hills before coming to a sudden stop. These ‘famine roads’ were built between 1845 and 1847 as part of British public works schemes. The aim was to provide employment so that labourers could earn money to buy Indian maize, imported from the US; in time, the Irish would depend less on the potato. Wages were kept below private rates to avoid rewarding what officials called the ‘indolence’ of Irish labourers. The policy reflected a moral belief that aid should promote self-reliance and distinguish the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ poor. As Trevelyan explained, ‘Our plan is not to give the meal away, but to sell it.’

By March 1847 public works schemes employed more than 700,000 people, whose wages supported millions of dependants. Scanlan describes the resulting administrative chaos, as part of which some counties were inundated with projects while others were largely neglected: 20 per cent of all the work took place in County Clare, yet fewer than two hundred people were employed in Donegal. He calls the public works ‘disastrous’. Demand for places far outstripped supply; the able-bodied competed for scarce places on the scheme, while others sought work tickets through an emerging black market. Eavan Boland’s poem ‘The Famine Road’ captures one of the famine’s defining images – starving labourers building roads that led nowhere in exchange for the means to buy food:

It has gone better than we expected, Lord
Trevelyan, sedition, idleness, cured
in one; from parish to parish, field to field,
the wretches work till they are quite worn,
then fester by their work.

While Scanlan devotes considerable attention to powerful figures such as Trevelyan and the two prime ministers of the period, Robert Peel and John Russell, he believes that no individual should be held responsible for the way the British government handled the famine. The real culprit was the imperial capitalist system. He offers a fresh interpretation of Peel’s decision to import £100,000 worth of maize from the US in the early years of the crisis and arrange its transport to Ireland. For Scanlan, this was not a purely humanitarian gesture but part of a calculated, risk-free attempt to extend Britain’s ‘civilising mission’, and because the imported corn was not grown in Britain, domestic producers of oats and wheat were protected from competition. Even famine relief had to serve the interests of free trade, by linking Irish demand with US supply and expanding transatlantic markets.

Rot sometimes overlooks contradictions within famine policy. In January 1847 the government announced the Temporary Relief Act, which established a network of soup kitchens to feed the starving without tying the aid to work or wages. The soup kitchens were intended to replace the public works, which would eventually be shut down. By the summer the kitchens were providing food to more than three million people a day. (Officials decided whose need for relief was ‘genuine’.) The scheme was financed through a combination of public money and private donations, as news of the famine spread. Major contributions came from the Bank of England, the Corporation of London and bankers such as Lionel de Rothschild and Thomas Baring. Smaller donations arrived from the Quakers, charitable organisations in the British colonies, even enslaved workers in Alabama and the Choctaw Nation in North America. The Great Famine was one of the first humanitarian crises to attract global attention and co-ordinated international relief.

Scanlan​ shows that the relative success of the soup kitchens was exploited for propaganda purposes. Alexis Soyer, head chef at London’s Reform Club, was invited to Dublin to inspect a model kitchen and demonstrate how cheap soup could be produced on an industrial scale. Wealthy Dubliners could view the poor queuing for food in exchange for a donation of five shillings. One critic complained that the fee was too high, since ‘the animals in the Zoological Gardens can be inspected at feeding time for sixpence!’ Scientific observers, meanwhile, pointed out that the soup had little nutritional value; it was estimated that each serving contained no more than fourteen calories and 21 grams of solid food.

In the spring of 1847, even as most of the soup kitchens were opening, a financial crisis prompted the British government to introduce the Poor Relief (Ireland) Bill, marking a decisive shift in policy. The Treasury would in the near future no longer fund Irish relief, transferring responsibility to Ireland’s landlords under the maxim that ‘Irish property should pay for Irish poverty.’ As a result many landlords sought to lower their tax bill by reducing the number of tenants on their estates – either by evicting families with nowhere to go or by financing their emigration. In 1847 an estimated 11,166 evictions were processed in Irish courts; the figure rose to 16,349 in 1848 and 16,979 in 1849. While this was not an explicit policy of forced displacement, the outcome was effectively the same. Many families ended up in workhouses, established under the 1838 Poor Law as a basic form of welfare, and now the main channel of famine relief. Severe overcrowding led to widespread outbreaks of typhus and other diseases.

In March 1847 the Russell administration suspended 20 per cent of the public works schemes. By the autumn, the remaining schemes and the soup kitchens, too, had been closed, with responsibility for relief moving to the Poor Law system. Testimonies demonstrate the calamitous impact of this decision. ‘We earnestly entreat the government at once to rescind the order suspending these works, and to sanction the finishing of these roads without delay,’ the Relief Committee of Ardrahan, County Galway, wrote to the lord lieutenant. ‘Neither life nor property is safe, and no magistrate can control the fierce instincts of a famishing multitude.’

Relatively little was known about the lived experience of the rural poor during the famine until the publication of The Death Census of Black ’47 (2023), a collection of eyewitness reports by clergymen describing conditions in their parishes in April and May 1847. Their accounts reveal the dehumanising realities of everyday life. Priests reported finding the dead along roadsides or abandoned beside bushes and ditches. People resorted to eating nettles and seaweed, carrion and earth. Relief provided by the government failed to meet basic needs. One priest in Derry complained that his parishioners had to walk seven miles to receive the ‘sham relief’ of ‘very unwholesome’ soup. Several reports described parishioners dying from gastrointestinal illnesses caused by the abrupt shift to maize, which, when improperly prepared, led to dysentery, diarrhoea and other inflammatory conditions.

The famine also eroded normal patterns of social interaction. Neighbours grew fearful and suspicious of one another, anxious about the spread of disease. Rev. Cleary of Lorrha and Dorrha, in County Tipperary, recalled visiting a house where a young boy answered the door. When Cleary asked after his father, the boy replied: ‘He is sick, sir.’ ‘Where is your mother?’ ‘She is sick, sir.’ ‘Where are your brothers?’ ‘They are all dead, and one is dead in the corner.’ Cleary’s report concluded bleakly: ‘This unhappy family consisted of seven … last week; now they are only three.’

There is no doubt that food was available in Ireland throughout the crisis – just not to those who needed it most. The year 1845 was a vintage one for oats; in 1846, 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs, most of which were exported to Britain. Between May 1846 and February 1847, Waterford alone shipped out more than 20,000 barrels of wheat and almost 59,000 barrels of oats.

Scanlan’s book offers many examples of people trying to resist a catastrophe they couldn’t control. Crowds ransacked towns and seized food from ships. Farmers and shopkeepers either sold their goods quickly to prevent theft or handed them over to hungry mobs, hoping to keep a portion back for export. Even the marginally better-off were constrained by the market, forced to grow and sell food to meet inflated rents instead of feeding themselves. ‘Rot’, Scanlan argues, existed not simply in the diseased potato crop but in imperial capitalism: ‘the crisis … was the system.’