The Great Hunger: Ireland: 1845-1849
by Cecil Woodham-Smith
A Masterpiece
The Irish potato famine of the 1840s, perhaps the most appalling event of
the Victorian era, killed over a million people and drove as many more to
emigrate to America. It may not have been the result of deliberate
government policy, yet British obtuseness, short-sightedness and
ignorance - and stubborn commitment to laissez-faire solutions - largely
caused the disaster and prevented any serious efforts to relieve suffering.
The continuing impact on Anglo-Irish relations was incalculable, the
immediate human cost almost inconceivable. In this vivid and disturbing
book, Cecil Woodham-Smith provides the definitive account. A moving and
terrible book. It combines great literary power with great learning. It
explains much in modern Ireland - and in modern America - D.W. Brogan.
Personal Review: The Great Hunger: Ireland: 1845-1849 by Cecil
Woodham-Smith

"By a lonely prison wall, I heard a young girl calling
'Michael, they have taken you away
For you stole Trevelyan's corn
So the young might see the morn'
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay..."
THE GREAT HUNGER is the definitive history of the Irish Potato Famine
of 1845-1849. When the Englishwoman Cecil Woodham-Smith published
this book in 1962 she was vilified and branded a Communist by the British
establishment which had spent the previous 120 years explaining away
what is undoubtedly the greatest European famine since antiquity.
Estimates of the dead are difficult to quantify. Conservative historians put
the number at 1-2 million; others place it closer to 6,000,000. At least
another 1.5 million Irish fled their homeland.
Like most disasters, "An Gortha Mor" seems both inevitable and avoidable
in retrospect. The Irish population exploded in the first half of the 19th
century reaching an official 8.2 million (and an unofficial ten million) just
before the Famine. But unlike Britain, which had become heavily
industrialized and was moving confidently into the modern and scientific
Victorian Era, Ireland was sunk in a morass of poverty and dejection. The
average Irish countryman led a life no better than the poorest serfs of
Imperial Russia of the day, and the Irish were subject to all manner of legal
restrictions, mass unemployment, subsistence agriculture, exploitation by
landlords, and eviction at whim from the land and their homes, often just a
rude mud cabin. With no education, and few skills other than potato
farming, eviction meant almost certain death for husbands, wives and
children. Often, they were driven even from the bogs where they'd found
shelter after being put out.
The Blight, too, meant certain death for far too many. Eating nothing but
potatoes and buttermilk, these most wretched people literally had nothing
at all to sustain them after the crop turned into a glutinous, stinking mass of
black rot. They died in droves, particularly in the poor west of Ireland, bleak
and rocky Connaught. The typhus which followed killed more.
As hideous as all this seems, Cecil Woodham-Smith tells us that the Blight
was only one factor in the disaster that overtook the Irish. More insidious
was the attitude of the British administration which largely stayed hardset
in its laissez-faire attitude, refusing to step in and feed the Irish, refusing to
interfere with the free market economy of the day, and worst of all, refusing
to grasp that the market economy only works when people have money or
skills to trade for products and services. In 1845, Ireland was still a pre-
capitalist economy, and the mercantile approach of the British simply could
not be applied there; still, the British tried, and blamed their own failure to
address the Famine on their convenient perceptions of Irish intransigence
and laziness.

Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan may be one of the most hated figures in
Ireland even to this day. Effectively the head of British efforts at Famine
Relief, Trevelyan was unenamored of the Irish, he was a rock-ribbed
capitalist, and, though moral and moralistic to a fault, was also just as
singleminded, blind to the suffering of the populace, but fixed on promoting
Irish efforts at self-help. He bought a parsimonious 100,000 Pounds
Sterling worth of unmilled American corn, and doled it out to provide for the
eight million Irish. Amazingly, Trevelyan kept food EXPORTS flowing out of
the country at pre-Famine levels throughout (!) Nothing could interfere with
trade.
A disciple of the philosopher Thomas Malthus, Trevelyan cast a cold and
dispassionate eye over Ireland's circumstances, seeing them as a form of
natural population control. At the same time, the British placed the country
under virtual martial law, decreeing "seven long years Transportation way
on down to Van Diemen's Land" (Tasmania) for minor infractions and acts
of desperation (such as stealing corn).
Was this, as many have posited, an organized genocide? Certainly, there
were those among the British who despised the Irish to that extent. On the
other hand, if this had been an organized killing field, then why did the
British do anything at all to help the Irish, little as it was?
Woodham-Smith's tales of people living in bogs, of coffinless mass
funerals, of fever patients being abandoned by their terrified relations, of
Ireland starving to death, cannot help but touch the reader. The British are
presented as less calculating than more stupid, unable to adjust their
thought processes to meet the crisis. Conditions were so awful and the
Irish were so reduced and brutalized, forced to filthiness, criminal
desperation and hair-trigger violence that when the Irish left Ireland (on
rotten-bottomed Coffin Ships, like as not), their arrival in American and
Canadian ports can be summed up shortly: NO IRISH NEED APPLY.
"Paddy Wagons" were so named because they carried Irish miscreants
almost exclusively for a time. Miraculously, the Irish rose, and rose all the
way to the U.S. Presidency in just three generations.
More than just a history of the Potato Famine, THE GREAT HUNGER is
an indictment of the too-common human propensities of blaming the
victim, making gestures instead of taking action, and that of ultimately
doing nothing. The truth behind every human tragedy can be found in the
pages of THE GREAT HUNGER.
This is an essential read.
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