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A Brief History of Án Gorta Mór
Nineteenth-century Ireland was the most densely populated country in Europe. In 1800 its population was 4.5 million but by 1841, when the first official census took place, it had risen to 8 million. Yet much of the population existed in conditions of misery and this shocked foreign visitors. The root of this misery lay in the dependence of the peasantry on just one staple crop, the potato; in western counties like Mayo and Galway nine-tenths of the people ate nothing else.
The Irish people had assured themselves of abundant, healthful food by adopting a potato diet. Not only is the potato an almost ideal food, especially if supplemented by milk, but the produce in potatoes of a given area of ground is much greater than that for any grain crop. Over two-thirds of the Irish people were dependent on agriculture for a livelihood in 1841. The survival of a vast impoverished population depended on the recurring fruitfulness of the potato and on that alone. The potato too, is perishable and cannot be held in store to relieve scarcity like grain. In such circumstances, if anything were to happen to the potato harvest, disaster would occur on a scale which Ireland would be unable to control. Here was a disaster waiting to happen, made worse by the rapid rise in population in the first half of the century which forced the peasants to subsist on smaller plots of land. Crops other than potatoes had to be sold to pay the rent.
Hopes were high in the summer of 1845, however, when there was every sign of a fine, healthy crop of potatoes. But the weather that summer was curious, and in retrospect sinister. Summer heat was mingled with thunderstorms, mists, and big variations in temperature unusual in Ireland. So a superstitious peasantry wondered what lay in store for them. The first rumors of blight came from Cork in June, but as late as August peasants and farmers still expected a bumper crop of what they called `praties.' Reports from Galway, for example, still spoke of potatoes of `the most luxuriant character.' By mid-September all this had changed. On 11 September the Freeman's Journal reported a case where a man had been digging in a fine field of potatoes on the previous Monday, but on the Tuesday he found `the tubers all blasted, and unfit for the use of man or beast.' In fact, the whole potato plant was changed into a filthy, odorous black mush, all the more appalling because the crop had seemed so healthy.
The villain in this tragedy was a humble fungus called Phytophthora infestans, brought to Ireland by ship from America, which unknown to the peasantry infested first the soil and then the potato plants. And because they did not, and could not in the state of existing scientific knowledge, know this, the peasants attempted to save their crops by hauling them out of the ground to dry or cutting away seemingly healthy bits to eat. In their ignorance this was understandable, because the leaves of the plant had black spots with a whitish mould underneath, and they could not know that once the fungus established itself, both potato and stalk were doomed. Equally incomprehensible was the sinister speed with which the blight spread, so that by early 1846 every county in Ireland was affected. In fact, wind, rain and insects carried the fungus spores to other potato plants.
The situation in Ireland had reached its worst by February 1847. Great gales blew and the country was covered in thick snow.
Starving people crowded into the towns and flooded to the public works which the government was proposing to close. A fever epidemic now spread like wildfire through the country. What people called `famine fever' was in fact two separate diseases, typhus and relapsing fever.
People everywhere were now seized by a panic to get out of Ireland. The poor cottiers went first, and then the small farmers began to forsake the country in droves. Six thousand emigrants sailed from Liverpool alone in January. So great was the demand for passages that direct sailing's began from Ireland. It was mainly from smaller Irish ports that the notorious `coffin ships' sailed, so called because many died en route or arrived half dead in Canada or the USA. Liverpool was the first city to be invaded by what was virtually an army of refugees. The population of the port at that time was about 250,000, and in one January week of 1847 over 130,000 people had to be given poor relief. By June, it was reckoned that 300,000 destitute Irish people had landed in the town. A very high proportion of them, of course, soon sailed for North America, but a residue of the most poverty-stricken inevitably remained. ' To take but two examples; from the month of July 1847, it is known that 804 out of 4,227 persons sailing from Cork and Liverpool to Canada were dead on arrival. Also in January 1847, the Virginus sailed from Liverpool to Quebec with 476 Irish emigrants. 158 passengers died and 106 caught fever, including the captain. More than 100,000 emigrants sailed for Canada in 1847 (the most economical way to the United States at the time being by this indirect route), of whom it is estimated that at least a fifth perished of privation and disease.
"In a very short time there was nothing but stillness, a mournful silence in the villages, in the cottages grim poverty and emaciated faces…The tinkers…fled to the cities, the musicians…disappeared and never returned. Many of the residents too made their escape at once, finding employment or early graves elsewhere…There were no more friendly meetings at the neighbours' houses in the afternoons, no gatherings on the hillsides on Sundays, no song, no merry laugh of the maidens. Not only were the human beings silent and lonely, but the brute creation also, for not even the bark of the dog, or the crowing of a cock was to be heard…"
Hugh Dorian in "Donegal Sixty Years Ago"
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