Speaker 1: Happy Saturday, everybody. Today we have the second part of
Speaker 1: our two parter on the Great Famine that struck Ireland
Speaker 1: starting in eight This famine grew out of ongoing persecution
Speaker 1: and subjugation of Irish people, particularly Irish Catholics, which we
Speaker 1: talk more about in part one. This episode originally came
Speaker 1: out on June n Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
Speaker 1: History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I am
Speaker 1: Tracy V. Wilson. So, Tracy, we're going to continue, yes,
Speaker 1: the story we started last time, So we're gonna pick
Speaker 1: up on the the Irish potato Famine and to recap
Speaker 1: just a little bit, in the mid eighteen hundreds of
Speaker 1: the social and political climate that we talked about in
Speaker 1: the previous episode had led Ireland to depend really heavily
Speaker 1: on the potato as a food crop. The poorest people
Speaker 1: in Ireland ate almost nothing but potatoes, and anything that
Speaker 1: was anything else that was being grown on a farm
Speaker 1: wasn't really being raised to eat. It was being raised
Speaker 1: to sell to pay the rent. So potatoes were filling
Speaker 1: bellies and everything else was paying for the land that
Speaker 1: you were living on So when a blight cut just
Speaker 1: a huge swath through the potato crop in eighteen forty
Speaker 1: five and almost wiped it out entirely in eighteen forty six,
Speaker 1: the impact on Ireland was severe. So in this episode
Speaker 1: we're going to look at how this intersection of politics
Speaker 1: and farming unfolded. So in eighteen forty six, when the
Speaker 1: blight was in full swing, the British government's response was minimal.
Speaker 1: In the government's less a fair view and that of
Speaker 1: many landowners who had holdings in Ireland, all of the
Speaker 1: obvious relief measures like providing food or subsidies were counterproductive.
Speaker 1: They would threaten free enterprise and cause the Irish to
Speaker 1: become dependent upon government handouts. The government's desire not to
Speaker 1: influence free enterprise also meant that it didn't want to
Speaker 1: meddle in other business affairs, like the practice of exporting
Speaker 1: grain out of Ireland and into England. Instead, it was
Speaker 1: pretty much business as usual, so food exporters in Ireland,
Speaker 1: many of whom were owned by people living in England,
Speaker 1: just kept exporting food as normal. So when the potato
Speaker 1: crops died, Irish farmers kept selling all their other crops
Speaker 1: to pay the rent, the choice was one of starvation
Speaker 1: or eviction. Uh the people who owned the farms would
Speaker 1: then export the other crops out of Ireland. So throughout
Speaker 1: the famine, Ireland continued exporting grains, rabbits, butter, fish, onions, honey,
Speaker 1: and other foods, along with non food items like woolen leather.
Speaker 1: So they were sending food away while they were starving
Speaker 1: to death. So weather stopping these exports and distributing this
Speaker 1: food to Irish farmers would have stopped the famine is
Speaker 1: a hotly contested subject. Some scholars argue that the potato
Speaker 1: made up so much of the Irish food supply that
Speaker 1: no amount of other food grown there could have possibly
Speaker 1: filled that gap. But regardless, shipping food out of Ireland
Speaker 1: while people were starving looked really bad. There were riots
Speaker 1: and ports cities in response to these shiploads of food
Speaker 1: that were living leaving Ireland bound for England. River boats
Speaker 1: and ports were appointed military guards. And really, even if
Speaker 1: keeping the food in Ireland would have been a feudal effort,
Speaker 1: this continued export was really deeply damaging to the relationship
Speaker 1: between England and Ireland. People scavenged what they could eat
Speaker 1: and they sold their belongings to try to pay for food.
Speaker 1: Even in coastal areas where fish were plentiful, the fish
Speaker 1: were generally in water that was too deep and treacherous
Speaker 1: for people to reach in their small boats with ordinary nts.
Speaker 1: That winter, which is the winter of eighteen forty six,
Speaker 1: also saw one of the worst blizzards in Ireland's history,
Speaker 1: with snow reaching the roof lines of people's huts by
Speaker 1: eighteen forty seven, and it had become clear that this
Speaker 1: was not just a temporary situation that was going to
Speaker 1: be relieved by the next year's harvest. Even though the
Speaker 1: blight did disappear that year, the seven crop was healthy,
Speaker 1: but not enough had been planted in the spring to
Speaker 1: sustain everyone. People had resorted to eating the potatoes they
Speaker 1: would have normally reserved for replanting, and many were so
Speaker 1: weakened by hunger and illness that they weren't able to
Speaker 1: get their crops in the ground. While many people wanted
Speaker 1: to plant something other than potatoes, at this point, seeds
Speaker 1: for new crops were often beyond their means, so they
Speaker 1: planted what they could get, which was mostly potatoes. Britain
Speaker 1: opened soup kitchens to help get food to needy people,
Speaker 1: and the death toll did start to drop a little bit,
Speaker 1: but the kitchens didn't last for very long. Parliament enacted
Speaker 1: the Irish Poor Law Extension Act on June seven, which
Speaker 1: once again moved the British government away from providing direct
Speaker 1: aid to the Irish. Under this act, it was up
Speaker 1: to the Irish landlords to support their impoverished tenants. Government
Speaker 1: soup kitchens were scheduled to be closed and they had
Speaker 1: only existed for about six months, and the public works
Speaker 1: programs that were meant to support the Irish were shut down.
Speaker 1: The Poor Law Extension Act also made it a lot
Speaker 1: harder for people to enter one of Britain's workhouses, which
Speaker 1: at this point was a last refuge for the destitute farmers.
Speaker 1: Britain had created the system of workhouses in eighteen thirty eight.
Speaker 1: There were a hundred and thirty of them which could
Speaker 1: accommodate about a hundred thousand people. Once they arrived at
Speaker 1: a workhouse, families were divided up and giving given separate
Speaker 1: housing for women and men, and they wore uniforms. They
Speaker 1: weren't allowed to leave the building, and they worked for
Speaker 1: ten hour days. The youngest children would get school lessons
Speaker 1: and older children would get training on how to work
Speaker 1: in a factory. These workhouses were dirty and demoralizing, and
Speaker 1: illnesses spread really quickly in such tight quarters. And apart
Speaker 1: from all of this, the whole idea of going to
Speaker 1: a workhouse was just an extreme humiliation, which made were
Speaker 1: really reluctant to do it. But even so, conditions were
Speaker 1: so bad in Ireland the workhouses were quickly strained at
Speaker 1: the breaking point. The government implemented stricter and stricter rules
Speaker 1: about who could go to a workhouse in a in
Speaker 1: an attempt to stem the tide, and under the new
Speaker 1: poor laws, men had to give up any other means
Speaker 1: of making a living if they wanted to enter a workhouse.
Speaker 1: So two point six million Irish people went to these
Speaker 1: institutions during the faminees. They were hugely vastly overcrowded. Conditions were,
Speaker 1: on top of being overcrowded, just very dirty and difficult,
Speaker 1: and more than two hundred thousand people died in the
Speaker 1: workhouses that were meant to help them. By eighty seven,
Speaker 1: the problem was actually money. Thanks to the healthy but
Speaker 1: very small potato crop, there was plenty of food, but
Speaker 1: nobody had money to buy it or to pay the
Speaker 1: rent on the land. Even the British government was having
Speaker 1: financial problems because it had been hit by a banking crisis.
Speaker 1: Landlords who didn't want to be saddled with supporting their
Speaker 1: tenants as was required under the poor laws, or didn't
Speaker 1: have the money to do so. Because it's had it's
Speaker 1: had a trickle up effect. People who couldn't pay their
Speaker 1: rent meant that the landlords also had no money. A
Speaker 1: lot of them chose to evict people who couldn't pay
Speaker 1: the rent. About half a million Irish people were evicted
Speaker 1: during the famine. Often the male head of the household
Speaker 1: would go to jail for nonpayment of his rent and
Speaker 1: the rest of the family would just be left homeless.
Speaker 1: Many families, once they got a notice of their impending eviction,
Speaker 1: chose to flee rather than standing trial for this reason,
Speaker 1: or landlords would pay for their tenants to be transported
Speaker 1: to British North America, primarily Quebec Canada, on chips that
Speaker 1: were so poorly made, overcrowded, and disease written that they
Speaker 1: were actually nicknamed coffin chips. Following eighteen four seven's healthy
Speaker 1: but small harvest, many people were hopeful that Ireland had
Speaker 1: turned a corner. You know. People kept thinking that this
Speaker 1: was just a temporary thing and that one more good
Speaker 1: harvest would would fix the problem. But people had spent
Speaker 1: the very last of their money getting a potato crop
Speaker 1: into the ground to support themselves for the following year,
Speaker 1: and then in again thanks to wet weather conditions, the
Speaker 1: blight came back and uh the English, not understanding why
Speaker 1: the Irish had planted potatoes instead of something else, demanded
Speaker 1: that the Irish pay for their own relief. So taxes
Speaker 1: were actually increased on farmers and landlords. For Irish farmers,
Speaker 1: this was really the last straw, and immigration out of
Speaker 1: Ireland began in earnest. People had been immigrating from Ireland
Speaker 1: in the years before the famine, so immigrating was not
Speaker 1: a new thing. In particular, young men had gone to
Speaker 1: the United States to work as manual labors, and American
Speaker 1: companies would advertise for workers and Irish cities in the
Speaker 1: years before the famine. Between eighteen fifteen and eighteen forty five,
Speaker 1: nearly a million Irish people had gone to America for
Speaker 1: the sake of comparison, that's about half as many as
Speaker 1: left Ireland in the ten years between eighteen forty five
Speaker 1: and eighteen fifty five, which are thought of as the
Speaker 1: famine years, but the immigration during the famine was different,
Speaker 1: both in scale and just in sheer awfulness. On the
Speaker 1: Coffin ships to Canada, the trip could take up to
Speaker 1: three months. The people aboard were so sick by the
Speaker 1: time they arrived that the quarantine facility in Quebec ran
Speaker 1: out of room, leading to a backlog that kept the
Speaker 1: passengers on newly arrived ships from being able to disembark,
Speaker 1: so the ships would just sit there in port with
Speaker 1: sick and dying and deceased people aboard. Eventually, quarantine and
Speaker 1: inspection procedures were abandoned and the passengers were allowed to
Speaker 1: go on their way, meaning that the Irish people arriving
Speaker 1: at various cities in Canada were extremely ill, They were homeless,
Speaker 1: and they were destitute. So many sick people arrived in
Speaker 1: Quebec that there was a typhus epidemic in Canada, which
Speaker 1: came directly from the influx of immigrants from Ireland. In
Speaker 1: eighteen forty seven, about a hundred thousand people sailed from
Speaker 1: Ireland to Canada and about twenty percent of them died
Speaker 1: from disease or malnutrition. Those who could afford it went
Speaker 1: instead to the United States, mostly to the port cities
Speaker 1: of New York, Boston, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, where
Speaker 1: for the most part they faced illness, poverty, discrimination and
Speaker 1: bigotry and intense competition for unskilled jobs. And in New
Speaker 1: York Irish conman who built them out of their money
Speaker 1: in exchange for a filthy place to stay. Yeah, basically
Speaker 1: New York had been, of course one of the most
Speaker 1: common ports of entry for people immigrating from Ireland, so
Speaker 1: people who were getting off the boats during the blight
Speaker 1: would be greeted by what seemed to be a friendly
Speaker 1: face who spoke their language, and that would in fact
Speaker 1: be a person who was going to steal all their money.
Speaker 1: So delightful. No, there's a point at some at some
Speaker 1: point in my outline previously there was just and did
Speaker 1: you think it was going to stop getting worse? Because
Speaker 1: it's just going to get worse. So the United States
Speaker 1: was also not really on board with the idea of
Speaker 1: becoming home to a bunch of really sick Irish immigrants,
Speaker 1: so fairs to the United States from Ireland became way
Speaker 1: more expensive, and ports along the East Coast started requiring
Speaker 1: bonds from the captains of the ship to guarantee that
Speaker 1: their passages were not going to become dependent on the
Speaker 1: government to live. And it wasn't just a matter of
Speaker 1: jacking up fairs. The US law had laws regulating the
Speaker 1: number of passengers a ship could hold and the ship's accommodations.
Speaker 1: They were way more strict and more strictly enforced than
Speaker 1: British laws, which meant that the voyage was more expensive
Speaker 1: to begin with. Yeah, so you were more likely to
Speaker 1: survive the ship on a on a ship that was
Speaker 1: going to America because of these laws than a ship
Speaker 1: going to Canada, but it also cost a lot more.
Speaker 1: It was much harder to get on those ships. Yes,
Speaker 1: the people who had enough money to flee but not
Speaker 1: enough money to get to the United States or Canada
Speaker 1: would instead try to immigrate to England, with Liverpool, Glasgow
Speaker 1: and South Wales being common destinations. But this trip, while
Speaker 1: it was definitely a whole lot shorter, wasn't necessarily safer.
Speaker 1: There was one ship that arrived in liver in Liverpool
Speaker 1: with seventy two dead aboard after the captain battoned the
Speaker 1: hatches in a storm, and the people inside the deeply
Speaker 1: overcrowded ships suffocated. And while the hope was that at
Speaker 1: least in England people wouldn't starve, Irish immigrants quickly overwhelmed
Speaker 1: the city's In Liverpool, for example, Irish immigrants more than
Speaker 1: doubled the population of the city and exhausted the relief services.
Speaker 1: On June one, seven, in an attempt to leave Liverpool
Speaker 1: of just this insurmountable population explosion, the British government passed
Speaker 1: a law that allowed Irish people to be deported back
Speaker 1: to Ireland. In general, what would happen is these people
Speaker 1: would be abandoned on the docks once they were returned
Speaker 1: to Ireland, where like we've said before, they had no
Speaker 1: home and no money. Similar laws were enacted in other
Speaker 1: English cities that had a big influx of Irish immigrants.
Speaker 1: So even after the blight disappeared, the famine had so
Speaker 1: completely changed the political and ethnic landscape in Ireland, England,
Speaker 1: and even much of North America. The American immigrant population
Speaker 1: became overwhelmingly Irish really quickly, and non Irish Americans who
Speaker 1: associated Irish people with poverty and disease, shiftlessness, and the
Speaker 1: still pretty distrusted Catholicism carried a lot of anti Irish prejudice.
Speaker 1: Deep anti Irish and anti Catholic sentiment remained until the
Speaker 1: Civil War, when the tide started to turn a little
Speaker 1: as Irish fighting units proved themselves to be both brave
Speaker 1: and dependable, and Irish laborers filled a need for workers.
Speaker 1: After the war was over, and eventually Irish Catholics found
Speaker 1: that they could influence local politics by voting. Irish Catholics
Speaker 1: made their way into public office and started influencing public policy,
Speaker 1: which made life for Irish immigrants a little easier in
Speaker 1: the United States. Back in Ireland during the Blades aftermath,
Speaker 1: the economy was still in dire straits. Landowners were deeply
Speaker 1: in debt, and many sold their land just to get
Speaker 1: out from under it. This lieutenant farmers who had been
Speaker 1: working that land homeless. Ireland's recovery continued to just be
Speaker 1: really slow after the famine was gone um, both because
Speaker 1: of the sudden population drop and the consequent drop in
Speaker 1: how much farm labor was available uh and the economic
Speaker 1: fallout from the famine. It's hard to make precise estimates
Speaker 1: of exactly how bad the final death hole was. Census
Speaker 1: records at the time weren't super precise, but the most
Speaker 1: commonly cited statistics are that one million people died. Most
Speaker 1: didn't die of starvation, but of diseases like relapsing fever, typhus, dysentery,
Speaker 1: and cholera. Hunger made people more susceptible, and poverty and
Speaker 1: overcrowning cause these diseases to spread rapidly. Another about two
Speaker 1: million people left Ireland as a direct result of the famine,
Speaker 1: with most of them heading to England, Canada or the
Speaker 1: United States. The population was about eight point four million
Speaker 1: people in Ireland in eighteen forty four. That had fallen
Speaker 1: to six point six million in eighteen fifty one, and
Speaker 1: in the end that the years thought of as the
Speaker 1: Famine Years saw a drop in the Irish population by
Speaker 1: twenty to twenty five, and the population actually continued to
Speaker 1: drop in the aftermath, so that when Ireland gained independence
Speaker 1: in one its population was actually half of what it
Speaker 1: was before the famine began. Debate about how to interpret
Speaker 1: the government's response to the famine continues today. On the
Speaker 1: one hand, is the Nationalist review that the government could
Speaker 1: have made better choices and is pretty much responsible for
Speaker 1: the huge death toll. The revisionist view is more sympathetic
Speaker 1: to the government and the landlords, and it takes the
Speaker 1: opposite stance and the most extreme national nationalist view. This
Speaker 1: famine wasn't really a famine. It was genocide. Uh that's
Speaker 1: not that doesn't gain a lot of traction in the
Speaker 1: world of academia, but it is a view that a
Speaker 1: lot of people take that because a lot of the
Speaker 1: policy was so anti Irish that what was happening was
Speaker 1: the deliberate extermination of Irish people through the tool of hunger.
Speaker 1: Because of the famine and the blight was actually identified
Speaker 1: what this disease had actually been in May of as
Speaker 1: a probably now extinct strain of uh phight Opthora infestans,
Speaker 1: which is native to South America and Mexico. It almost
Speaker 1: certainly came to Ireland the board ships from Mexico having
Speaker 1: contaminated other crops, and it completely changed their history forever.
Speaker 1: It did it and consequently the history of other countries
Speaker 1: as well, right and it's it became sort of the
Speaker 1: hallmark of more recent Irish history. Like Ireland, Ireland has
Speaker 1: had a lot of unhappy events in its history, UM,
Speaker 1: and the potato famine is cited as one that just
Speaker 1: had a deep and long lasting effect on everything about Ireland,
Speaker 1: and there are there's a whole body of literature that
Speaker 1: draws directly from the famine. UM. When you talk to
Speaker 1: people who live in the United States who have Irish family,
Speaker 1: a lot of people will say, that's when my grandparents
Speaker 1: came to the United States, or that's when my great
Speaker 1: grandparents came to the United States. And yet a lot
Speaker 1: of the education about it, it begins and ends with
Speaker 1: potatoes and they died. Yeah, it's pretty quick. I mean,
Speaker 1: we really don't get that much in depth in it. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and some of that is because some of the classroom
Speaker 1: discussions on the famine are in sort of the late
Speaker 1: elementary and middle school years. Uh, and it's, you know,
Speaker 1: getting into all the political complex complexity surrounding it is
Speaker 1: maybe not quite appropriate for that age level. But even so,
Speaker 1: considering you know, you and I live in the United States,
Speaker 1: considering what a huge effect the famine had on the
Speaker 1: demographics of the United States and politics and religion and
Speaker 1: all of that kind of thing, it seems a little
Speaker 1: weird that there's not a more through uh discussion of
Speaker 1: it later on in the later school years. Thy so
Speaker 1: much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
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