Long-disused ridged ‘lazy beds’ for potatoes near Killarney Harbour, southwest Ireland. Nearby runs an old ‘famine relief’ road, a forlorn attempt to stimulate the economy. O’Connell and many others in Ireland and in England too battered on Parliament’s door, generous donations flooded in from across the world, but the Government proved too timid to dismantle the vested interests and blinkered economic policies that were ruining Ireland faster than charity could relieve her. “I don’t believe” O’Connell wrote to Thomas M. Ray (1801-1881) “that the English Government will ever voluntarily give up any power or dominion they may have over Ireland.”
Part 1 of 2
EARLY in October [1845] it was known that the potato crop, on which almost one-third of the population depended for their existence, had rotted in the ground: everywhere nothing but a mass of decaying, stinking vegetable matter. Fortunately the cereal crop was above the average, and there was every prospect, if Government interposed with an embargo on the exportation of grain, that the calamity with which the nation was menaced might be partially averted. Warnings reached Government from all quarters.
O’Connell himself was the first to sound the alarm. Speaking at a public meeting on 28th October, he insisted on the necessity of closing the ports without delay,* of taking measures to prevent the precious grain being misused for purposes of distillation and brewing, and of importing rice from the Carolinas and Indian corn from America.* To pay for the extra supplies, he suggested a tax of fifty per cent,* on the rentals of all absentee landlords, and ten per cent, on all resident ones. For himself, he at once began to lay up large stores of rice at Darrynane for the benefit of his tenants.
* That is, closing them to exports. “There is in the country at this moment” wrote Lord Cloncurry (1773-1853) on February 9th, 1846, “corn more than enough to feed our entire population.” But the grain was going to England. In 1815, the Corn Laws had all but closed the UK’s ports to grain imports from abroad, and English consumers, unable to buy cheaply from America, paid top prices for Irish grain. The Irish, being generally poorer, missed out. On February 17th, Daniel O’Connell read Lord Cloncurry’s letter out before the Commons. “While the country produced such abundance” he told them “the inhabitants were starving. So blessed was she by Providence; so cursed by man!”
* The Carolinas, North and South, were one of the British Empire’s chief sources of rice prior to American independence, and by 1839 they accounted for some 60% of the rice grown in the USA. ‘Indian corn’ is flint corn, a hardy variety of maize formerly cultivated by Native Americans.
* In his long address to the Commons on February 17th, 1846, O’Connell asked for twenty percent. He also suggested a programme of railway construction, matching taxpayer funds to private investment pound-for-pound. Lord George Bentinck’s bill to lend the Irish £16m for railway construction was defeated in the Commons; from that date, O’Connell’s delicate health went rapidly downhill.
Précis
When the Irish potato crop failed in 1845 and 1846, many thousands of people starved because the country’s abundant grain harvest was being exported to England. Daniel O’Connell MP urged the Commons to stop the exports, ban distillation and also do throughout Ireland as he had done on his own estates, and stockpile rice. (52 / 60 words)
Part Two
‘Indian (flint) corn’ ready for harvest. Not everyone went idle or unpaid in the Great Hunger. “There were thirty thousand men in red jackets,” Sir Gavan Duffy (1816-1903) tells us, “carefully fed, clothed, and lodged, ready to maintain the law. In Enniskillen two boys under twelve years of age were convicted of stealing one pint of Indian-meal cooked into ‘stirabout,’ and Chief Justice Blackburn vindicated the outraged law by transporting them for seven years. Other children committed larcenies that they might be sent to jail where there was still daily bread to be had.”
TOGETHER with the Duke of Leinster, Lord Cloncurry, and the Mayor of Dublin he waited on the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Heytesbury, with the object of impressing upon Government the serious nature of the situation. They were answered that specialists were being sent over from England to investigate the nature of the disease!* Meanwhile, the grain was leaving the country in larger quantities than usual. [...]
Bad as things were when Parliament met on 22nd January, 1846, there was still time to alleviate the misery of the nation. On 17th February O’Connell rose to call attention to the state of famine and disease in Ireland, and to ask for a committee of the whole House to devise means to relieve the distress of the Irish people. He was answered by expressions of good-will and sympathy; but the measures he suggested as necessary to preserve Ireland from the horrors of famine and pestilence were too bold for the timidity of the ministry and the inclination of the House.* Once again, instead of the bread he asked for, he was offered a stone — instead of a fish, a scorpion.*
* “So we have got scientific men from England!” O’Connell groaned in a letter to Martin Crean on February 13th, 1846. “It appears that they would not answer unless they came from England! — just as if we had not men of science in abundance in Ireland... They suggest a thing, and then show a difficulty; again, a suggestion is made which comes invested with another difficulty; and then they are ‘your very humble servants’!”
* Robert Dunlop is closely paraphrasing O’Connell’s own gloomy but accurate predictions, in his letter to Martin Crean. O’Connell ended: “One thing alone is certain: that there is no substantial remedy for Ireland except in the restoration of her domestic parliament.”
* Compare Luke 11:11. Not everyone in England was so ungenerous. Sir Gavan Duffy mentions £2,000 (worth a hundred times that today) from Queen Victoria, £5,000 from the Methodists and over £40,000 from the Quakers (several of whom went over as aid workers). Residents of Mauritius, Madras, Bombay, South Australia and St Petersburg and many other places chipped in.
Précis
With grain still leaving Ireland in record quantities, O’Connell and other leading Irish statesmen met the Lord Lieutenant to discuss urgent action. The Government’s response was to waste precious time on commissioning a report. O’Connell then took his plea to Parliament, but despite expressing their sympathy they did not take up his proposals. (53 / 60 words)
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