The Hunger: The Story of the Irish Famine

1845 - Europe is gripped by famine.

Having escaped from South America, a deadly fungus, Phytophthora Infestans,

triggers a blight which kills every potato crop it touches.

Everywhere in Europe where the potato

was an important part of people's diet was affected by a serious food crisis.

An estimated 100,000 people die from famine related causes,

particularly in Belgium and in Holland and the Kingdom of Prussia.

In Ireland, where a third of the population

relies almost exclusively on the potato as its primary food,

the famine will last 7 years.

Proportionally this catastrophe kills 1 in 8 of every person living on the island.

That puts it amongst one of the greatest famines in global history.

The great famine changed Ireland in so many ways.

One million dead, 2 million emigrated.

A mass of Irish migrants become refugees on the world's seas, desperate to build new lives.

They're starting at the bottom in America,

but there is a ladder in America, and by god do they climb.

As with more recent famines,

food is available but only for those who can afford it.

In the Great Hunger, it is only the poorest who will starve and die.

Not all Irish people are descendants

of people who suffered during the famine.

Some Irish people are descendants of people who prospered during the famine.

In the late 1840's, it's survival of the fittest in certain parts of the country.

The famine occurs in one of the wealthiest parts of the world: in the British Empire.

So, how could something like this be allowed to have occurred.

Great Britain fails Ireland in a catastrophic way.

Neglect, indifference, cold heartedness, insufficient humanitarian care for the Irish.

All of those million people were

real, warm, living, flesh and blood individuals.

They were sons, they were daughters, they were fathers, they were mothers,

they were lovers, they were sweethearts, they were your neighbour.

In relative time, we are actually quite close.

We're maybe five or six generations away from the worst catastrophe in our history.

The decades that precede the Great Hunger are times of tumult and transformation for Europe.

Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution,

people have rebelled against oppressive, dynastic rule.

From France to Spain, Germany to Greece,

people rise to demand an end to inequality, mass poverty

and social injustice

and the establishment of nation states based on democratic principles.

It was an undemocratic world.

It was a world in which the poor had very little voice.

On the eve of the famine, Britain stands apart.

With a vast empire that spans the globe it is confident in its position as the world's most powerful nation.

British society transforms socially and economically in this period.

This is a revolution.

Advances in farming techniques and population growth propel many

to leave the countryside and make new lives in the cities.

People are pouring in from rural areas, crowding into the towns,

the new megacities that have grown up as a result of the industrial revolution.

And with this rise in population comes with it one of the greatest social ills of the Victorian era.

And that's poverty.

Attitudes towards the poor were very negative,

but they were particularly negative towards the Irish poor.

"Their poverty is not exaggerated.

It is on the verge of human misery;

their cottages would scarce serve as pigsties in Scotland."

For centuries past, the native Irish -- so the Catholic Irish -

had been cast into a subservient status

and very definitely there was a common understanding of Catholic Irish as inferior.

Since the conquest and plantation of the island in the 1500s and 1600s,

Ireland has been ruled by Britain.

Under the Act of Union of 1801, Ireland is completely subsumed into the United Kingdom.

In principle, the Irish should be treated equally to the English, Scottish and Welsh.

But in practice Irish Catholics are treated with prejudice and disdain in their own land.

The Irish were thought to be feckless, and thought to be lazy,

indolent is a word that's used commonly at the time.

They needed to be lead, they had very little initiative themselves.

They were often considered to be the lowest of the low.

The function of Ireland from a British perspective is basically what can we can out of it.

We've got the land now, we own it.

95 percent of Ireland's landmass belongs to a small group of mainly

protestant landowners, loyal to the British crown.

The ascendancy, the elites, the major land owners, the estate owners, the titled families.

You've approximately 5000 families who would would belong to that class.

They supplied members of parliament.

They were the local authorities in many ways.

The elite farm their lands to produce massive quantities of food, mostly for export to Britain.

On the eve of the famine, 90 million eggs every year were exported to Britain.

Salmon, all sorts of fish, alcohol.

Enough corn is being exported from Ireland to feed two million people in Britain.

And so some people would describe

Ireland by the 1830s/1840s as being the bread basket of Britain.

"Ireland is an agricultural district of England to which it yields corn, wool, cattle and military recruits."

Unlike Britain, farming in Ireland has not been modernised.

Instead a force of millions of tenant farmers, cottiers and landless labourers work the fields.

The tenant farmers rent small farms from the landowning elite;

the cottiers work without payment, in return for a patch of poor land on which to subsist.

The landless labourers are also working for no other payment

but the permission to occupy a rough piece of land.

Though they have no money, the cottiers and labourers have one thing they can rely on:

the highly nutritious potato which they plant in ridges which mark the land to this day.

# FATAÍ BÁNA #

Mo mhíle slán do na fataí bána,

Ba subhach an áit a bheith in aice leo,

It's very easy to propagate it.

You just cut a bit off a potato, you take it off and you plant it and off you go.

It could be planted in poor land, mountainous conditions and it would still provide.

As long as the potato held they were very well nourished.

They were dirt poor but they were very well nourished.

Here you you had a God-given food stock that was hugely nourishing,

that would grow almost anywhere and it fuelled the population explosion.

The decade or two before the famine...

the population increases massively from over three million people in the 1780s right up to 8 million in 1841

and so there's a huge pressure for land.

The population surged up the valleys, they surged onto the bogs,

they surged into Connemara, they surged into areas which hadn't really been very heavily populated before.

The census of 1841 records the United Kingdom's population at just

over 27 million with the Irish making up one third of the total.

The census also records the extent of Ireland's poverty.

3 million people live in basic cabins built of stone or mud.

2 million more are poorer still.

They live in primitive hovels, classified as 4th class.

The fourth class housing would be a single room, mud hovel, basically built of organic material.

"There are neither windows, bedsteads, tables nor chairs."

And often times you could have three generations living in the same hovel.

There's some later photographs which have been misidentified as famine photographs.

Generally, they're from the 1870s and later.

But many of those images, they're depicting conditions which have been very similar to the famine period.

The whole west of Ireland was full of these kinds of settlements.

Geographers sometimes call it 'clachans', which in the Irish language were called 'baile'

which means a little settlement or village but not a village in the European sense,

it's a village of just farming people.

There's no shops, there's no pubs.

It's often groups of kin-related people

and these were very vibrant in terms of oral culture.

They were singing, they were dancing, you know they were face to face neighbours.

Patrick, Hugh, James, Ryan, Mary, Bridget.

You know they're people with recognisable names.

They had human wants, they had human desires, they had human frailties.

They loved each other, they hated each other, they drank,

they smoked, they played music, they danced,

the majority were Irish-speaking, they were living breathing people.

Centuries of British rule has caused the decline in use of

the Irish language, but it remains strong among the illiterate poor.

The ancient language is rich in poetry, story and song.

Traveling in Ireland a year before the famine,

the American philanthropist, Asenath Nicholson, notes the vitality of their culture.

At night we had full proof of Irish merriment... they ate their potatoes and rose to play.

The dancing and singing were so boisterous they shook the cabin, and

reached the ears of most of the neighbourhood.

And nowadays when we look at the west of Ireland we see emptiness

and remoteness but all the people talking about it pre-famine,

what they talk about is the noise.

Everywhere people talked.

There was constant noise, constant chatting, constant hubbub.

One of the saddest things during the famine is that that culture

disappears or weakens dramatically.

On the eve of the famine, not everyone in Ireland is poor.

The 1841 census classifies 3 million people as belonging to the better off, middling classes:

larger farmers and merchants, professionals and shopkeepers living in the towns and cities.

Since the Catholic Emancipation movement of the early 1800s, led by Daniel O Connell,

Britain has granted more equal rights to Irish Catholics.

Those with access to money and education have risen up the social

ranks to join their protestant counterparts.

Some have bought land and, like the landed gentry, they rent it to the ranks below.

Ireland's poverty has not gone unnoticed by the British authorities,

among whom many are concerned with the people's over-reliance on a

single food source.

"The little industry called for to rear the potato, leads the people to indolence and all kinds of vice,

which habitual labour and higher order of food would prevent."

A series of official government reports have concluded that the way

of life of the Irish poor is not sustainable.

There is nowhere in the world today where the dependence on a single food

is as great as it was in Ireland in the 1840s.

You have poor housing, endemic poverty.

You have a single food source which was a kiss of death.

It's a system that built towards disaster really from every perspective.

From the Andes mountains of South America, the fungus, Phytophthora Infestans

escapes northwards and crosses the Atlantic in the holds of cargo ships.

In the summer of 1845, the blight makes landfall in the Port of Antwerp.

The blight arrives at the very moment the potato crop is ripening:

as it sweeps across Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Prussia,

every crop the Blight touches is destroyed.

As millions of people face starvation, European authorities move quickly to provide relief.

The Belgians and the French did something which was common practice

in Ireland during earlier famines,

and that was to put a halt to brewing and to non-food uses of crops

and also to encourage imports and restrict exports.

When the Blight finds Ireland's damp, humid climate, it spreads like wildfire.

"The withering breath of a simoon seemed to sweep over the land."

People notice a blackening of leaves in the field and they also notice a smell.

Can you imagine that mentality?

My God, what I depended on for my existence is rotting in front of my eyes as I look at it.

"I saw whole tracts of potato growth changed, in one night, from smiling

luxuriance to a shrivelled and blackened waste."

One third of the Irish potato crop is destroyed.

One million people are left with little or no food.

In London, British Prime Minister, Robert Peel understands knows the

impact this potato famine could have.

Ireland has had famines before.

Sir Robert Peel, his first government job had been