Speaker 1: Happy Saturday, everybody. Earlier this month that we did an
Speaker 1: episode on indentured workers in the Caribbean, in particular Irish
Speaker 1: indentured workers, and in that episode we made some references
Speaker 1: to other aspects of Irish history, including the famine that
Speaker 1: struck Ireland in the nineteenth century after a blight that
Speaker 1: killed the potato crop for multiple consecutive seasons. Since we
Speaker 1: really couldn't get into the details of that in our
Speaker 1: July episode, but it's relevant to the greater story there,
Speaker 1: we thought we would bring it out of the archive
Speaker 1: for the next two Saturdays. This episode originally came out
Speaker 1: on June Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Polly Fry. Polly,
Speaker 1: can I tell you a story? Please do a little.
Speaker 1: When I was little, learned a history lesson about the
Speaker 1: Irish potato famine, and it was basically summed up as
Speaker 1: all the potatoes died and a lot of people either
Speaker 1: starved or moved away. Right, that was sort of summing up.
Speaker 1: That's pretty much the way I was taught about it
Speaker 1: as well. Right, So my little kid question was, well,
Speaker 1: how come they didn't eat something else? I think a
Speaker 1: lot of little kids asked that question, right, And so
Speaker 1: now grown up me kind of looks back at little
Speaker 1: kid met and until I learned the whole story, I
Speaker 1: was like that that is a very privileged question, right,
Speaker 1: because we were a pretty modest family, and we did
Speaker 1: grow all of our own vegetables, but we grew a
Speaker 1: whole lot more than just potatoes, and we also generally
Speaker 1: had enough food to eat. Uh. But it turns out
Speaker 1: why didn't they eat something else? Is a really really
Speaker 1: good question about the Irish potato famine, and that's what
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about for the next two episodes.
Speaker 1: This is a popular their request. You've gotten it a
Speaker 1: lot of times. I actually ran into Katie and Sarah
Speaker 1: over the weekend and they said they had also been
Speaker 1: asked to talk about it very often, and that they
Speaker 1: didn't have the heart to do it because it's not
Speaker 1: exactly like a fun, jolly joy ride. No, it's one
Speaker 1: of those things where it's clear from the beginning that
Speaker 1: it's not a jolly joy ride because about a million
Speaker 1: people died, and about two million people left their homes
Speaker 1: and immigrated elsewhere. It's way worse than just that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's definitely a lot of suffering to the story, so
Speaker 1: you know that going in, Yes, And it's also one
Speaker 1: that requires a fair amount of background to understand why
Speaker 1: it is that we got to this point that everyone
Speaker 1: was only eating potatoes. Um. So this is going to
Speaker 1: be a two part episode, and the first is going
Speaker 1: to really set the stage for many of the layers
Speaker 1: of what went terribly wrong here, and then the second
Speaker 1: episode will get into how all of that played out
Speaker 1: in the history of Ireland. So we're talking about the
Speaker 1: mid eighteen hundreds in Ireland. Catholics were really deeply disenfranchised
Speaker 1: in this point in Irish history. Ireland had been part
Speaker 1: of Britain since eighteen hundred under the British Act of Union,
Speaker 1: and under this Act, Ireland was granted representation in Parliament,
Speaker 1: but Catholics were not allowed to be members of Parliament,
Speaker 1: and Catholics were the overwhelming majority of the population of Ireland.
Speaker 1: So while Ireland technically had representation in Parliament the majority
Speaker 1: of its its population, we're not really represented, right, And
Speaker 1: there had been a number of laws in place restricting
Speaker 1: very basic aspects of life for Catholics, like owning property
Speaker 1: and having jobs, and some of these dated back to
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds when Irish Catholics sided with James the
Speaker 1: Second in his battle with William of Orange for the
Speaker 1: British throne. So lots of very old rules and laws
Speaker 1: and prejudices that were affecting these people in a very
Speaker 1: real way well, and things that we really take for
Speaker 1: granted by like being allowed to get a job, ye,
Speaker 1: Catholics were not allowed to do. Most of these laws
Speaker 1: had been repealed in eighteen twenty nine, which is also
Speaker 1: when Catholics were allowed to become members of Parliament, but
Speaker 1: by that point anti Catholic bigotry was really deeply entrenched
Speaker 1: in the Irish culture, and a lot of those past
Speaker 1: social norms about what people were allowed to do and
Speaker 1: how they were allowed to practice their religion had been
Speaker 1: extremely slow to change. So while maybe things were legal now,
Speaker 1: it's still was not really easy for people to do
Speaker 1: things like get jobs, in in property. In Ireland at
Speaker 1: this point was also extremely deeply impoverished as a nation.
Speaker 1: Only about one quarter of the population was literate, and
Speaker 1: in a theme we've discussed another podcast, modernization had really
Speaker 1: stripped a lot of the working people there of their livelihoods.
Speaker 1: The linen and wool industries, for example, have been industrialized,
Speaker 1: and so the people that made a living in those
Speaker 1: trades suddenly could no longer find work. In rural areas,
Speaker 1: large families were living in tiny mud cabins that didn't
Speaker 1: have windows or chimneys, and most of them were subsistence farmers.
Speaker 1: None virtually none of them owned the land that they
Speaker 1: were farming. For the most part, they were overwhelmingly Catholic
Speaker 1: tenants who were paying their rent to overwhelmingly Protestant absentee
Speaker 1: landlords who for the most part, we're living in England,
Speaker 1: not in Ireland, and many of these Irish families weren't
Speaker 1: paying their rent directly to their landlords, so there was
Speaker 1: a level of complexity to it. Much of the land
Speaker 1: had been parceled out through a middleman system, which had
Speaker 1: been in place since the seventeen hundreds. So a Protestant
Speaker 1: middleman would rent a sizeable piece of land from the landowners,
Speaker 1: subdivide it and then rent that out to tenants, and
Speaker 1: the tenants paid the middleman, and the middleman paid the landowner,
Speaker 1: and so that inflated the rent and to raise their profits.
Speaker 1: Middlemen would divide the land into smaller and smaller parcels
Speaker 1: and raise rent at the same time. So by eighteen
Speaker 1: forty five, half of these little farms were on five
Speaker 1: acres or less, and pretty much everybody had less than
Speaker 1: ten acres. Like, they were all really pretty small for
Speaker 1: a farm. So to add just another layer of ugliness
Speaker 1: to this whole situation, a lot of these tenants were
Speaker 1: renting land that their families had previously owned but had
Speaker 1: been confiscated from them following Cromwell's invasion of Ireland in
Speaker 1: the seventeenth century. So you have people who really are
Speaker 1: pretty poor in terms of how much money they have,
Speaker 1: living on a tiny amount of land, paying inflated rent
Speaker 1: to people who own land that their own families used
Speaker 1: to own and don't anymore. Already, very uplifting story, I know,
Speaker 1: we'll just let that settle for a minute. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: there were some communal aspects to this setup. People often
Speaker 1: barter instead of using money, and those who couldn't afford
Speaker 1: land would often find work with tenant families, and these
Speaker 1: labors would help with chores and help bring in the
Speaker 1: harvest in exchange for being able to build their own
Speaker 1: cottage and plant their own little garden plot. And this
Speaker 1: brings us to the potatoes. Potatoes really thrived in the
Speaker 1: Irish soil and climate. It was a reliable and pretty
Speaker 1: nutritious food staple. Um. It. Although you know, potatoes get
Speaker 1: a lot of flak nowadays nowadays for their high carbohydrates
Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff, very starchy food, but
Speaker 1: they have lots of ittamin see, lots of other nutrients,
Speaker 1: and so people who were living largely on potatoes a
Speaker 1: lot of times really were better nourished than people who
Speaker 1: were living mostly on save bread. Um. So the introduction
Speaker 1: of the potato had led the Irish population to double
Speaker 1: between seventeen eighty and eighteen forty five. So more people
Speaker 1: meant that they needed to grow more food, and as
Speaker 1: the supply of arable land got used up, farms or
Speaker 1: get smaller and smaller to accommodate this increase in the population,
Speaker 1: and of course smaller and smaller farms made it harder
Speaker 1: for farmers to grow enough food to feed their families.
Speaker 1: So doing this had required potatoes, which had a much
Speaker 1: larger yield than any other food crop, with a good
Speaker 1: harvest and a cultivated plot of land. A family of
Speaker 1: six could subsist for a year on an acre of potatoes,
Speaker 1: including potato scraps that they could feed their animals, and
Speaker 1: it would take three times as much land to grow
Speaker 1: the same amount of grain, so enough grain to feed
Speaker 1: that same family would take a longer land. So people
Speaker 1: were planning potatoes because that was the only way they
Speaker 1: could get enough food. Any Other land they rented was
Speaker 1: being used to keep animals or to grow crops, and
Speaker 1: those were grown to sell so that they could pay
Speaker 1: rent rather than eating and providing them for their families. Right,
Speaker 1: so potatoes were for eating and everything else was to sell.
Speaker 1: Thanks to this combination of factors, by forty five, sixty
Speaker 1: of the Irish food supply was potatoes, and the host
Speaker 1: people in Ireland were living almost exclusively on potatoes. And
Speaker 1: most people were also planting the same variety of potatoes,
Speaker 1: which were called lumpers, and they gave a really high yield,
Speaker 1: but they weren't as nutritious as some other varieties. They
Speaker 1: plant around March and harvest round September or October, and
Speaker 1: then they could bury the harvested potatoes into pits where
Speaker 1: they'd keep until around July of the following year. So
Speaker 1: this meant that July and August were really rough and
Speaker 1: lean months, even in the best of times, and it
Speaker 1: also meant the diseases were really likely to spread easily
Speaker 1: because everyone was planting the same strain of potato. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there wasn't a lot of diversity to resist pathogens that
Speaker 1: came around. This also meant that life for farmers in
Speaker 1: Ireland had some periods of intensely hard work during planting
Speaker 1: and harvesting, and some spans of relative leisure in between.
Speaker 1: The potatoes didn't involve they didn't require tons of upkeep
Speaker 1: um and so even when people were farming other stuff
Speaker 1: a lot of times they a life that balanced hard
Speaker 1: work with periods of rest. Unfortunately, in many places of
Speaker 1: the world that we're not Ireland, people viewed this as
Speaker 1: laziness and idleness and shiftlessness, and that may have contributed
Speaker 1: to some of the reluctance to send help once help
Speaker 1: was really needed here. Uh So, to characterize the start
Speaker 1: of the problems involving the potatoes, the Irish potato famine,
Speaker 1: which is what it's called in the rest of the world,
Speaker 1: but in Ireland it's called the Great Hunger or on
Speaker 1: Gorth the Moore or the bad Life droo uh started
Speaker 1: in a forty five when a blight destroyed part of
Speaker 1: the potato crop. The blight hit potatoes in other parts
Speaker 1: of the world too, and it had economic effects in
Speaker 1: other areas as well, but really nowhere else in the
Speaker 1: world was relying as much on potatoes as Ireland was,
Speaker 1: so while the effects were much more wide reaching in
Speaker 1: terms of the food supply, Ireland was really hit the hardest.
Speaker 1: And this blight started by a acting the leaves and stems,
Speaker 1: causing them to turn black and rot. And the potatoes
Speaker 1: would look edible when they were dug out of the ground,
Speaker 1: but within days they'd turned slimy and black. The initial
Speaker 1: response from the government was actually kind of on the ball.
Speaker 1: The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, sent a commission to
Speaker 1: evaluate what was going on that October and the commissioner
Speaker 1: came back with the report that Ireland was probably going
Speaker 1: to lose half of its potato crop. The scientific community
Speaker 1: pretty quickly concluded that some kind of disease was to blame,
Speaker 1: but the people whose lives really depended on those potatoes,
Speaker 1: as we said before, not a very educated community blamed
Speaker 1: everything from static electricity to fumes from the newly built railroads.
Speaker 1: And this was by far not the first potato blight
Speaker 1: that had ever happened in history. Crops had failed certainly
Speaker 1: before this, but even a whole season of crops had
Speaker 1: failed before. But Ireland had never seen anything on this scale,
Speaker 1: and it had never encountered two years of light in
Speaker 1: a row, which you can imagine was really devasty. Yes,
Speaker 1: so when Prime Minister Peel made some efforts to send relief,
Speaker 1: because everybody was kind of expecting this to be a
Speaker 1: temporary thing that would resolve itself with the next year's
Speaker 1: harvest um, it wasn't a huge governmental response. The general
Speaker 1: consensus was sort of things would be back to normal.
Speaker 1: This is going to be a short lived, difficult period
Speaker 1: that would resolve itself in another season. But unfortunately, in
Speaker 1: eighteen forty six, the blight returned, and to sort of
Speaker 1: add insult to injury, it was actually much worse the
Speaker 1: second year, thanks to the wet weather conditions and the
Speaker 1: fact that diseased potatoes had been used as seed. It's
Speaker 1: spread farther and faster than it had in its initial incarnation,
Speaker 1: so people didn't have enough to eat and they didn't
Speaker 1: have enough to feed the animals, and hunger related illnesses
Speaker 1: like typhoid and cholera started to spread it and since
Speaker 1: people had been getting most of their vitamin sea from potatoes,
Speaker 1: scurvy also became a problem. The British government did a
Speaker 1: couple of things to try to help. Prime Minister Peel
Speaker 1: pushed through a repeal of the Corn Laws. These were
Speaker 1: laws that were meant to protect British grain growers from
Speaker 1: foreign competition by imposing really high tariffs on imported grain.
Speaker 1: So by reducing the grain supply, the Corn Laws caused
Speaker 1: British grain growers to be able to get a higher
Speaker 1: price for their crops. Repealing the Corn Laws was supposed
Speaker 1: to bring more grain into Ireland and drive prices down,
Speaker 1: but Ireland and the Irish people didn't really have enough
Speaker 1: money to buy the grain, even at the lower prices
Speaker 1: that spring. Prime Minister Peel, without going through Parliament, bought
Speaker 1: maze from the US to be distributed as food. Maze
Speaker 1: was cheap, but it also needed to be milmed to
Speaker 1: be edible, and there weren't enough meals to actually handle it.
Speaker 1: On top of that, Maze is a very sturdy grain
Speaker 1: that needed more process than other grains, so the mills
Speaker 1: that already were not numerous enough to process it were
Speaker 1: streamed even more because it took more time to process
Speaker 1: the amount that they could handle. Once it was milled
Speaker 1: into meal, the maze was going to be sold at
Speaker 1: the rate of a penny per pound, but just like
Speaker 1: with the imported grain, a lot of people who really
Speaker 1: needed it just could not afford to buy it. Um
Speaker 1: This corn meal was also a lot different from the
Speaker 1: potatoes that the Irish were used to eating, both in
Speaker 1: terms of nutrition and digesting it, and so diarrhea and
Speaker 1: scurvy became really common complaints among the people who were
Speaker 1: managing to buy this corn meal to eat. Additionally, the
Speaker 1: British grain industry was really angry over both the repeal
Speaker 1: of the corn laws and the import of maze. The
Speaker 1: Conservative government started to falter and Prime Minister Peel resigned
Speaker 1: on June twenty n The new Liberal government, also known
Speaker 1: as the Whig Party, came into power, and it really
Speaker 1: followed the principle of lais ay fair, which is basically,
Speaker 1: leave it alone and it's going to work itself out.
Speaker 1: The Liberal government was really reluctant to make decisions that
Speaker 1: would affect private enterprise. So once Prime Minister Peel was
Speaker 1: out of office, the British government did not do a
Speaker 1: lot to intervene in the blight. There were no big
Speaker 1: influxes of food or monetary relief coming from the government.
Speaker 1: This is a concept that probably seems seems incomprehensible to
Speaker 1: the years of a modern audience in a world where
Speaker 1: disasters lead to immediate efforts at relief, but that's not
Speaker 1: what the ideology was like in the mid nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: and there were private fundraising efforts internationally, notably in major
Speaker 1: cities in the US and India. Quakers led fundraising efforts,
Speaker 1: and the Choctaw Indians recently relocated during the Trail of
Speaker 1: Tears actually sent a donation as well. So while there
Speaker 1: was some international response and some relief on the part
Speaker 1: of private citizens, it still just was not enough. Under
Speaker 1: the new Prime Minister John Russell, famine policy fell to
Speaker 1: Charles Edward Trevillian, who was the Assistant Secretary of the
Speaker 1: British Treasury. He had been involved in the famine response
Speaker 1: during Peel's administration, but now he was basically running the show.
Speaker 1: He ordered an end to the sale of Maze and
Speaker 1: he rejected an incoming shipment of it, saying that he
Speaker 1: was going to try to prevent the Irish from becoming
Speaker 1: dependent on government handouts. Apart from the laz a fair
Speaker 1: principles under which the Whig Party was operating, uh Trevillian
Speaker 1: himself had a belief in divine providence, which also influenced
Speaker 1: his hands off approach to the whole situation. In the famine,
Speaker 1: everyone was sort of working under the assumption that private
Speaker 1: citizens were going to step up and provide relief, and
Speaker 1: that Ireland could use its tax revenue to fund public
Speaker 1: works projects that would employ Irish farmers. The farmer's income
Speaker 1: would be taxed, and that tax money would fund more
Speaker 1: projects and a cycle that would pull Ireland up out
Speaker 1: of poverty. But the Irish government didn't really have enough
Speaker 1: money to start with. People's wages were too low for
Speaker 1: income tax to keep up with the need for government spending,
Speaker 1: and also really too low for people to actually meet
Speaker 1: their own daily needs. So in addition to they weren't
Speaker 1: making enough money to buy things, their wages were not
Speaker 1: enough too for the tax revenue to be adequipped for
Speaker 1: the government. So what happened instead was that public works
Speaker 1: projects were flooded with way more workers than they could
Speaker 1: possibly use or pay. And so that's where we're going
Speaker 1: to pause on this part of the story. Uh So
Speaker 1: we're leaving at eighteen forty six. Ireland situation is extremely
Speaker 1: dire and Britain has taken a largely handsoff approach to
Speaker 1: mitigating this crisis. So in the next part of this episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to pick up in eighteen forty six and
Speaker 1: eighteen forty seven and and tell how the rest of
Speaker 1: the the famine unfolded in Irish history. Thanks so much
Speaker 1: for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is
Speaker 1: out of the archive, if you heard an email address
Speaker 1: or a Facebook U r L or something similar over
Speaker 1: the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Speaker 1: Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart
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