Naomi O’Leary:
Hello, welcome to Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney:
Let’s do it.
Naomi O’Leary:
Welcome to the Irish Passport.
Tim McInerney:
I’m Tim McInerney.
Naomi O’Leary:
I’m Naomi O’Leary.
Tim McInerney:
We’re friends. Cé he bhfuil tú, Naomi?
Naomi O’Leary:
Go hana mhaith ar fad, Tim. This is your passport to Irish culture, history and politics. I’m recording. 1 2 3. OK.
:
Irish football fans singing
Naomi O’Leary:
Hi, everybody, and in case you were wondering what you heard there that was the sound of thousands of Irish soccer ,or football fans, singing “The Field of Athenry” right back in 2012.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it was a pretty extraordinary moment, I think, because the whole crowd sang in unison for about six or seven minutes, despite the fact that the Irish team had just lost the match pretty badly.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, this might seem strange, but it’s actually quite typical for Irish fans. So, some international commentators there, I suppose, they’re probably a bit bewildered at the whole thing. But if you know the song that they’re singing, it makes a bit more sense. It’s actually about the Great Irish Famine, which lasted from 1845 to 52, that song talks about a father who steals food to keep his children alive, and he gets deported to Australia as a criminal for that and his wife misses him forever. So, it’s a song that’s become symbolic of this sense of resilience in the face of catastrophe, which is quite a recurrent theme in the history of Ireland, and this football scene it was quite poignant because it was 2012. Ireland was kind of at the lowest point after its economic disaster, the financial crash, which really crushed the economy and it also restarted this old tradition of mass emigration.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, for sure. And it’s a good example, Naomi, of how the Great Famine still resonates so strongly in Irish culture and the Irish psyche. It might make you wonder why this event in particular, you know, out of all events which happened over 150 years ago, is still so important to Irish people now.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yes, absolutely. That’s what we’re going to explore today in this history special. We’re going to look at exactly what went wrong during the Great Famine and why this disaster was so momentous and why had a knock-on effect for generations afterwards. It largely defined the future of Ireland. And, Tim, you probably know this, but the history book taught in schools, it would always divide history into pre- and post-famine. The history book that was taught four generations of Irish children was Ireland Since the Famine.
Tim McInerney:
Right, so later on we’ll be hearing from Irish Famine from an expert, Dr Frank Rynne, who has this to say:
Dr. Frank Rynne:
The Great Famine was the largest civilian human disaster of the 19th century. Nothing else in European history in the 19th century caused such disruption and such death in peacetime.
Naomi O’Leary:
And we’ll be hearing from two artists who have commemorated the Famine’s impact on the world at large in very different ways.
Tim McInerney:
We’ll also be tackling the contentious question of blame. In recent years, there has been quite a strong movement to interrogate the Famine and as a deliberate act of genocide on the part of the British Empire. So, we’ll be looking at how different historians have approached this thorny issue and what the arguments really are from either side.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yes, this whole history can be hugely contentious, even down to the words used to describe the event.
Tim McInerney:
For example, in the U.K. and the U.S.A, you’ll often hear this event described as the Potato Famine, which is a term that’s pretty much never used in Ireland. I mean, you know, it’s quite misleading and somehow plays down the whole thing. But this goes even further. Some people even refuse to use the very word famine at all.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, it is always sort of jarring to hear people talk about the Potato Famine. I dunno, it seems so trivializing and it always seems to be a joke. In Ireland, it’s called the Great Hunger, right?
Tim McInerney:
Oh, very much so. Yeah. That’s a translation of the Irish An Gorta Mór, like we’ll hear later. It also, you know, it implies a little bit that this was a famine of potatoes. This was a famine of all food. You know, people had nothing to eat. It wasn’t a question of just there not being enough potatoes to eat. The potato did play a very key role in the famine, you know, but that’s not really what it was about.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK. So, let’s set the scene, right. So, we’re in Ireland. It’s 1845. The population is somewhere in the region between eight and nine million people on the island. And most of these people, especially Irish Catholics, are farmers who don’t actually own their own land, so they’re tenant farmers. And at this stage Ireland had been part of the United Kingdom for about 50 years because there had been something called the Act of Union, which abolished what had been the colonial Irish Parliament in 1881, so all decisions about Ireland were now being made in Westminster, in London.
Tim McInerney:
And at this stage, there were still stark divisions between a very, very large Catholic majority that mostly didn’t have any land and a small, tiny, really wealthy Protestant elite called the Ascendancy — We talked about them a few episodes back who — owned almost all of the land in the country. This was on after effect of those 18th century penal laws, which we also discussed in previous episodes, and they had basically worked to transfer wealth and power to this colonial, Protestant elite.
Naomi O’Leary:
Of course, these laws at this stage had already been repealed about 15 years before the famine. But their effects, you know, generation after generation had already been very deep because they had limited the Catholic majority in their education and in their prospects, so it was, they were very, very poor, pretty much uneducated and overwhelmingly employed in small-scale agriculture.
Tim McInerney:
And to make matters worse, the Protestant Ascendancy who owned most of the land were notoriously neglectful. A full third of landlords in the 1840s were absentee, preferring to live in England. And even in England, even in London, people were pretty disapproving of them as a social class.
Naomi O’Leary:
The interesting thing to imagine as well is the contrast that would have been between Ireland and Britain. So, if you imagine Britain in this period, it’s undergoing its great urban transformation. It’s the Industrial Revolution, so huge swathes of Britain are covered in enormous cities and a new industrial landscape was just transforming the economy and the way that people lived. So, the population was exploding in size and there were coal mines and factories springing up everywhere in England, Scotland and Wales. And the country was rich. It was a big, colonial power, the centre of an empire, and it was more powerful than ever before. And Ireland, completely different.
Tim McInerney:
Exactly. And this was no accident, right? It was all part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution. Simply put, industrial Britain needed food. It needed more food than ever. And Ireland was perfect to plug that gap.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK. So, they need somewhere with lots of land to produce all that food that they need, and it needs to be close by, you know, the longer you have to transport any food, the more it costs. So, Britain would get most of its cattle from Ireland, for instance. And it was cheap and it was efficient. It didn’t have to transport very far.
Tim McInerney:
Right. So, it was actually in the U.K.’s interest to discourage industrial development in Ireland and successive governments maintained legislation that would keep it as a firmly agricultural economy. And so Ireland could act as this breadbasket for industrial Britain.
Naomi O’Leary:
I guess if you’re thinking about this from a British planning perspective, it kind of makes sense because Ireland is part of the U.K., in their view, and it’s playing its role in this greater economic engine.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. And in many ways, the Irish economy was kind of used as a counterweight to bolster the new industrial economy of Britain. So, for instance, the protectionist corn laws which restricted the import of foreign grain, they were great laws for British merchants. You know, it made them very rich, but it came at the expense of, you know, kind of crippling the Irish agricultural economy. So, basically a bad economy in Ireland was pretty much crucial to ensure a very good economy in Britain.
Naomi O’Leary:
Mmhmm. Okay. Interesting. So basically, the Irish economy was stagnant, and the infrastructure was really, really underdeveloped.
Tim McInerney:
Right. So, we already have a looming problem here that’s going to cause a disaster, you know, no matter what was going to happen. The population in Ireland was growing just as fast as it was growing in England. In fact, our Frank Rynne, who we’ll hear from later, told me that at this point it was increasing at a rate of one million people per decade, which is just astounding. But unlike in Britain, of course, all these people had no factories to go to. They had no big cities to find employment in. They all had to somehow live off this agricultural land.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK. And let’s look at who these people were. So, because of the long-term effects of the penal laws that we mentioned, these are one of the poorest peasantries in Europe.
Tim McInerney:
This is how it works, right. Families would rent their land from the local landlord, who was more often than not a member of this Protestant elite, though a good, fair few of them were also Catholic, smaller landowners, too. And the farmers would live in these tiny little communities called clocháns.
Naomi O’Leary:
Clocháns. Am I right in thinking that has something to do with stones?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, sure. It just means it’s stony place in Irish because of course you’d build the dwellings on the worst or the stoniest land. And you can still see these clocháns all over the countryside today in Ireland, they’re mostly abandoned. And maybe 20 or 30 people would live together in these clocháns. And they’d all worked the land together. There wouldn’t be any shops or anything. And often these clocháns weren’t even connected to local road systems.
Naomi O’Leary:
Wow. So, it just would have been another world.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, right. I mean, we talked about these cabins that the peasants lived in in previous episodes. They really were just huts. They didn’t have any windows usually or chimneys even, so they would’ve been full of smoke. They also doubled up as outhouses for the animals. So in the evening, you might have 10 people sleeping together in one of these tiny huts with a pig and the chickens and whatever animals you might have. So, they’re basically like rural slums in a weird way. And the living conditions were getting exponentially worse with this massive population growth where more and more people had to survive on less and less land.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK, so they weren’t really places to live as they were sort of places even to sleep or just survive. They were just getting by. They wouldn’t really have had like much furniture, maybe one or two pieces. And, you know, this farming system, this was quite medieval. It’s not that different from what would have been place in medieval times.
Tim McInerney:
Totally. Yeah. It was called the Rundale System, and it hadn’t progressed massively beyond what was being done in the Middle Ages, really. So, out of this land, you had to pay the rent and you had to try and feed your family with what was left.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. So meanwhile in Britain, there had been an agricultural revolution as well — as well as the industrial revolution. So in England people had started using fertilizer and machines and science and modern technology and their farms becoming more and more efficient. And there was a big parliamentary support for that, and it was fuelling, you know, the economic growth. But it just wasn’t happening in Ireland, right? Why is that? Wasn’t it in Britain’s interest for Ireland to grow wealthier as well?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. Right. Good question and like there are several reasons for this. The first one is that the Ascendency landlords, they were often massively in debt. Their Irish lands just couldn’t support their lifestyles.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh okay. And so they have no money left over to invest into improving the land.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, exactly. Or certainly it wasn’t a priority a lot of the time. Even worse, in Ireland if the tenant farmers improved the lands themselves, their rents would go up often. So a farmer had an active interest, weirdly, in keeping their land underdeveloped so that they could keep their rents low.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh, the people actually living there, right. So there’s a kind of perverse incentive, which is a combination of short-sightedness and bad policy.
Tim McInerney:
The holdings were also increasingly tiny. If you fly over the west of Ireland in an airplane, if you fly into Knock airport, for example, it’s astounding to see how small these parcels of rented land really were.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. You can actually see this if you look on Google Maps or something, the little fields are still divided up with this, with the walls, and you can still see the pattern, you know, in the west of Ireland and they give you an idea of the tiny patches of land that people are living off.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. They really are just tiny. I mean, we’re talking about the size of maybe a bathroom, you know, and you’ll see these incredibly high stone walls everywhere because all the stones had been pulled out of the land to make the very most of these minuscule patches of farmland. The average Catholic farmer in the 1840s would have rented about five acres of land. That is the equivalent to about 0.02 km squared. Now, that’s only enough to feed an average family for some of the year. The poorest of these farmers were subsistence farmers, really farming less than one acre. So, about 40 percent of all these farmers lived in one -room huts. They were very often made only of mud or of peat, and they were roofed often with just bog grass.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. So it’s just, a poverty that’s almost difficult to imagine. And it shocked visitors as well, because just the sheer number of people who were living at the subsistence level in Ireland.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it really was an extraordinary situation. And it was unparalleled in most of Europe.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. And so then there’s the rent. So this system was actually quite profitable for some people, right? It was, there was actually a lot of money coming out of it for the landlords. So rather than having 10 families, you have like a hundred that are really poor, but are all scrimping and scraping to pay your rent out of these tiny portions of land.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, for sure. But this brings with it this big imbalance because there’s a limit to just how productive this land can get. The British economy was getting stronger and growing all the time. But the Irish land wasn’t getting any more efficient. Actually, the opposite. So to get more out of it, landlords keep hiking up the rent at this time further and further.
Naomi O’Leary:
God.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. And in the 1840s, this was getting even worse. So many of the landlords lived in England or in Dublin and so they hired middlemen to manage their estates and these estate agents needed to be paid as well. So, you know, who pays for these estate agents?
Naomi O’Leary:
So this is just another cost on top of the rent to the tenants.
Tim McInerney:
Exactly. And we all know how you know; how honest and sympathetic estate agents can be.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right.
Tim McInerney:
It was no different than it is today. But that’s not the end of it.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay, go on.
Tim McInerney:
The estate agents often outsourced their estates to other estate agents. And they often outsourced those estates to more estate agents again. So it actually wasn’t unusual for three tiers of estate agents to be profiting off the rents of the tenants.
Naomi O’Leary:
So you’re only just realizing what the actual meaning of estate agent is. This is just incredible.
Tim McInerney:
On top of all this, the tenants were required to pay what were called tithes or church taxes to the Protestant Church of Ireland, even though, of course, the vast majority of them weren’t Protestant. The outcome of this is that all the tenants were increasingly trying to survive on smaller and smaller areas of land all the time.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay, so this system just sounds really unsustainable, like it is going to crack at some stage, right? And this, the pressure on it, the population is growing at an incredible rate all the time, so how had it actually come to keep up for so long in this way?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, it’s incredible neglect that it was allowed to go on for so long. Everyone knew it was going to break at some point. But this is the fascinating thing. The reason it had got to this extent was that it was all reliant on this one peculiar little vegetable crop. Of course, the famous potato.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay, so the potato is actually a super crop, right?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. It was relatively new in Ireland, but it turns out that potatoes grow really, really well in the Irish climate. And you can grow them like anywhere. You know, you can grow them beside the sea. You can almost grow them in a beach, you know, up a mountain. If you’ve ever been to the west of Ireland, you’ll see potato beds imprinted all over the land and they’re everywhere. You know, they’re in the bog. They’re on the side of cliffs. They’re everywhere. Those ones that you see today, of course, were abandoned during the famine.
Naomi O’Leary:
The potato, I think it would have come from the South Americas. But it turned out to be this amazing crop in Ireland. It is actually just very versatile. Like recently, the UN was actually promoting it as a crop that could actually solve a lot of malnutrition in the world because they’re just so versatile they can grow very easily and there they have really high nutrition.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, sure. Interestingly, this wasn’t how they were seen at the time. In the 19th century, potatoes were mostly seen as primarily animal food, really. There weren’t really food for human beings, only for the poorest of the poor. You know, if you could at all as a peasant, you would be eating bread, not potatoes.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh ok. So even though it was actually healthier than a diet of mostly bread, it was considered animal food, so that’s kind of ironic. But I suppose this explains how the Irish even getting poorer and poorer and living on smaller areas of land, they were actually healthier and stronger than peasants in Britain, I’ve heard. And I suppose that explains the population growth.
Tim McInerney:
Of course, nobody understood why this was happening. They didn’t understand the nutritional value of the potato at the time. But like you say, potatoes allowed the tenants to survive on these tiny amounts of land. And this is one of the most important elements of this crop, because you can grow loads of potatoes in very small areas of land. One acre of potatoes, for instance, will produce the same quantity of food as four acres of grain or traditional crops. And on top of that, you can use it to feed your livestock as well.
Naomi O’Leary:
And we should all be growing them today, to be honest. OK. So, what was happening then? So farmers would sow those other crops, like grain and stuff, just to be sold, though, they weren’t actually eating them. They were reserving a small corner for this very efficient crop that they were eating themselves, the potatoes, and they were living off those and everything else was going to pay the rent.
Tim McInerney:
Right, exactly. So about a third of the Irish population in the 1840s were living exclusively off potatoes, as in, they didn’t need anything else, really. And if you’re just eating potatoes to survive exclusively, you actually have to eat quite a lot of them. So an average adult male would probably have consumed about six and a half kilos of potatoes every day.
Naomi O’Leary:
That’s how much, oh my god. So
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. There was a catch, though, to this miracle crop. If you live on potatoes alone, it means that you have to go through these mini starvation periods every year. So what you do is you harvest the potatoes in July. You eat some and you put some away for winter. And they would generally last you until about April. But then, of course, you have to make it through to the next harvest in July, right? So that’s a constant problem every year.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. This is something that actually still exists in the world. It’s called the hunger gap. So you have a population that’s constantly teetering on the brink of famine. And it’s all down to the vagaries of things like the weather and things that they can’t control whether this crop has a good harvest or not. And of course, disaster then strikes.
Tim McInerney:
Right. And this is the part that everyone knows. In 1845, European potatoes get hit with this disease. It’s actually a fungus. It was probably spread in fertilizer, but nobody knew what caused it at the time. They thought maybe it was the railways that caused it or electricity that was causing it. Nobody had any idea. But they called it The Blight.
Naomi O’Leary:
Right. And this was actually disastrous for farmers all over Europe, but there was only one country where the whole peasantry was actually just dependent on this crop for their food, and that was Ireland. So what would happen is the potatoes looked normal — there was no warning of anything wrong until you dug them up. And when you touch them, it turned out that the inside had just turned to black sludge.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. It’s a really horrible disease. And in 1845, this first year, it was pretty bad, but it wasn’t catastrophic because there were still some potatoes left over from the last harvest. And remember, people were used to dealing with periods of starvation. So you see people doing everything they can, spending all the little money they had just to survive that year.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. But then, of course, the problem is that the blight doesn’t go away.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. Even worse, in fact, the peasants were using the disease potatoes to plant the next crop the next year, so the blight was spreading all over the country like wildfire. And by the next harvest in 1846, the same thing was happening. The potatoes were rotting in the ground.
Naomi O’Leary:
I just can’t imagine the despair that people must have felt because this would have been for the subsistence farmers, all that they had in the world, their entire livelihood for themselves and their families.
Tim McInerney:
And this introduces this really difficult choice then. You know, what do you do? You have no harvest this year. Do you starve? Do you not eat anything, or do you look over to the left at the other field, the field that is sowing corn or grain that you use to pay the rent? Do you eat the food that is reserved to pay the rent?
Naomi O’Leary:
Well, I mean, the choice for me is pretty clear.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. Well, I mean, I suppose if you starve on one for long enough, the choice is the same for everyone. And here we see the disaster beginning to unfold. Some landlords were understanding; they put the rents down, but this could only go on for so long. On the other hand, some other landlords saw the whole thing as a golden opportunity for eviction because a lot of them were trying to clear the land of tenants in order to modernize it. You know, even before the famine and it had been a common practice for landlords to pay their tenants to emigrate and free up some of this living land for grazing stock.
Naomi O’Leary:
So they see this as an opportunity to evict people. And I suppose the middlemen weren’t particularly sympathetic?
Tim McInerney:
You know, we’ve seen what happens in rental markets today, and this is probably the worst aspect of it, really. There was profit to be made everywhere with all these starving people. Moneylenders were everywhere, for instance, the Gombeen man. Shopkeepers started to charge these extraordinary prices for simple food. And even some Protestant evangelical missionaries started offering food to starving Catholics if they would convert to Protestantism.
Naomi O’Leary:
I believe this was mentioned in our Catholic Church episode. It kind of started an arms race between the churches. This period is something that’s been passed down in language today. So in Ireland, it’s an insult to imply that somebody would be a “souper”, or someone who would have taken the soup, basically sold out for food, sold out their religion for food. But what’s the government response here, like you have next door this big wealthy industrial power. You know, this is a constituent part of United Kingdom in name, so, and it’s starving to death, so what actually happens?
Tim McInerney:
Well, here, of course, the story got a little bit more messy and it gets very controversial. In the beginning, the response was actually very quick and very effective. In 1845, the U.K. Prime Minister, Robert Peel, who had experience, past experience of Irish famines, actually, he sent 100,000 tons of maize to Ireland to help the starving straightaway. Now, this was just a drop in the ocean when you’re trying to replace the potato harvest of nine million people. But it was a start. The same old problems, however, kind of hampered this throughout. There was no infrastructure to get this food to people, even if you had the food. There weren’t proper mills to grind the maize, for instance, because it was very little industry in Ireland and there weren’t proper roads to get the food to the people.
Naomi O’Leary:
So it was just a disaster that had been set in motion and that would be extremely difficult to stop?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. And this just gets worse and worse until we come up to 1847 where the blight strikes for a third year in a row. And now things are getting really bad. So we’re talking about streets teeming with the starving and the dead and whole villages being abandoned and destroyed. Millions of people couldn’t pay their rent anymore and evictions were taking place all over the country. And, you know, this is the thing, this is the real killer, once you were evicted, you had no chance really.
Naomi O’Leary:
I guess you’re just wandering the roads, like, and you have no means of getting anything more. You can read about this, just absolute desperate scenes in newspaper reports at the time. These were the very early days of newspapers, but some were writing about what was happening. There were local Irish newspapers that were doing this, like The Cork Examiner, and these reports can be read online, so we’ll put up some links on the Web site. But what they describe is just roads thronged with people who were starving to death and just lying down and piles at the side of the road. And of course, you have disease killing off these weak people in droves. And then an interesting thing happened, at least interesting to me as a journalist, so Irish people and Irish reports weren’t considered very believable or trustworthy in Britain. This was a very widespread view at the time. And in order to verify the truth of what was really happening, British newspapers sent correspondents. It was to verify what was going on. This actually leads to a kind of an interesting moment in the development of modern journalism. So there was one newspaper in particular that was doing this, which is called the Illustrated London News. So it sent over correspondents who would report in two ways. They would have a written account and then they would have a sketched engraving on the scene to accompany that.
Tim McInerney:
Right. Lots of our listeners might have seen these images. They’re pretty haunting images of real victims of starvation and they were actually very modern for the time. We’ll put some of them up on the website.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. So this particular newspaper was quite unusual in the British press because it was actually quite sympathetic towards the Irish and their plight. You know, it’s quite a contrast to publications, which are kind of notorious, like Punch.
Tim McInerney:
Ugh. Punch.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, Punch. Punch was a satirical magazine and it’s quite notorious for its caricatures of Irish people. So when the famine featured in Punch, it was generally in a cartoon that showed Irish people as these primitive drunken drains on the good, hard-working English people and, yeah, that Irish people were sort of scamming famine relief out of England. But the Illustrated London News was very different. So it showed sketches and wrote reports of things like people rioting for food and mothers who were carrying like dead babies through the streets begging for money for a coffin and things like that. And this actually, fascinatingly, gave rise to what is thought to be the first ever newspaper interview.
Tim McInerney:
Huh. I did not know that yet.
Naomi O’Leary:
Fascinatingly, the first ever, as far as we know, newspaper interview was with an Irish woman, possibly at my own age called Bridget O’Donnel. So she was spoken to by the Illustrated London News and they drew a picture of her, and they printed An interview with her. And this was a way of proving that she was a real person, and this was a disaster that was really happening to ordinary people.
Tim McInerney:
Wow.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. So her picture became quite iconic. So it shows this emaciated woman and she’s got two small children by her and all of them are just really thin and dressed in rags. And she told the newspaper about how her family fell behind on rent and were evicted and then they began to starve and fall sick and her children began to die. So here’s what Bridget said.
Annajoy O’Gorman as Bridget O’Donnel:
I lived on the lands of Gurranenatuoha. Our yearly rent was seven pounds, four shillings. I was at this time lying fever. I was at this time lying in fever. Dan Sheedey and five or six men came to tumble my house; they wanted me to give possession. I said that I would not. I had a fever and was within two months of my down-lying. They commenced knocking down the house and had half of it knocked down when two neighbours, women, Nell Spellesley and Kate How, carried me out. I was carried into a cabin, and lay there for eight days, when I had the creature born dead. I lay for three weeks after that Dan Sheedey and Blake took the corn into Kilrush, and sold it. I don’t know what they got for it. I had not a bit for my children to eat when they took it from me.
Tim McInerney:
The evictions, of course, were brutal. The houses were generally made uninhabitable, so that the families couldn’t come back and squat in them. So the roof was burned, one of the walls was usually demolished. You’ll often notice on these abandoned cottages actually in the Irish countryside that they only have three walls. And at the same time, you have these mass graves being dug outside all the main towns. You can see where they are today because the ground has sunk, you know, as the bodies rotted. So you have this sunken patch outside towns sometimes. And there wasn’t even enough money for coffins, of course, for all these dead people, so the same coffin was often used for everyone and it had a hinged bottom to drop the body into these grave pits. Oh, my God.
Naomi O’Leary:
So it’s just an appalling situation. You said at first that there was response from the U.K. government that came quite swiftly, although it wasn’t enough and there were problems. What happened then?
Tim McInerney:
Well, this is the amazing part. So let’s put ourselves in 1847, the third year of the blight and the worst year of the famine. The U.K. government suddenly decides to turn its back on the whole situation.
Naomi O’Leary:
Why?
Tim McInerney:
Well, in their mind, the situation had been going on for three years, right? They had put loads of money into it. They put loads of time and effort into it. And from their point of view, the Irish had done nothing to fix it. You know, they were still planting potatoes, for instance. They didn’t really look at the logic that the Irish had literally zero money, you know, most of the time.
Naomi O’Leary:
Or no other choice.
Tim McInerney:
That was all they had. They had no other choice. It was also that, like, you know, one of the only crops that they knew how to cultivate to get enough food that they needed. Really the British were basically tired of paying for the famine, a bit of a famine fatigue was setting in. And the policy favoured by the new Whig government had this pretty brutal logic that if the British kept feeding the Irish then the ruling elite, the Protestant Ascendancy, would never bother to fix the agricultural economy.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay, so this is the famous laissez faire policy. So it’s an ideology where you kind of let the market take care of itself and, of course, public aid goes against that idea.
Tim McInerney:
Exactly. So the new Prime Minister John Russell, he shuts down all the public works that have been put in place, leading to total chaos and instead all new Irish aid from this point on from 1847 on was to be paid for by the Irish themselves. So if you can believe it, at this point, taxes were actually raised for both landlords and the tenant farmers. This also, of course, led to landlords needing to raise the rents even higher to pay for their debts. Public aid was being swapped for the new workhouse system. Now in Victorian Britain, workhouses were, you know, almost like prisons. The whole thing was designed to discourage you from going in there at all. But in Ireland, of course, they were swamped. They were swamped immediately. People were clamouring to get into these workhouses. And this leads, of course, to massive outbreaks of diseases like cholera in and around the workhouses. And once you entered the workhouse, by the way, you had to give up any claim to land that was over a quarter acre, which is, of course, tiny. So when you came back out of the workhouse, you had nowhere to go.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK, so it’s a one way street and of course, there’s also, I understand, a religious dimension at play. A lot of people in the British government are quite notorious for believing that the famine had been a kind of a divine intervention, that God was stepping in to fix Britain’s problems in Ireland with this blight.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, and the most famous exponent of this, as lots people will know, is Charles Trevelyan. He was in charge of administering famine relief under this Russell government.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. And of course, this is the guy who features in that song that we played at the beginning, “The Fields of Athenry,” so the corn that Michael, the father in the story, steals is Trevelyan’s corn. So the lyrics go: “Michael, they have taken you away for you stole Trevelyan’s corn so the young might see the morn. Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay.” So this was the guy who was in charge of famine relief. The guy in charge of helping the famine victims. He actually believed that the disaster was God’s will to punish the Irish.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, I mean Trevelyan is an all-out monster, to be frank. You know, he’s very much representative of a certain middle-class mentality in Britain at this time. He believed in providentialism, that is that all of this was happening for a reason. And of course, providentialism fit very conveniently in with the laissez faire policy. And, like I have to mention that while there were people like Charles Trevelyan who had this, you know, providentialism view, there were other people who were very much against him. There was one Lord Bentinck, who declared never before was there an instance of a Christian government allowing so many people to perish without interfering. And then he says to the crowd in the House of Commons, “Yes, you will groan, but you will hear this.” In other words, I will make you listen, you know. He says, “The time will come when we shall know the amount of mortality; what it has been. And though you may groan and try and keep the truth down, it shall be known, and the time will come when the public and the world will be able to estimate, at its proper value, your management of the affairs in Ireland.” So, you know, the British government was being condemned from within on this as well.
Naomi O’Leary:
And here’s a view from the press. So this is from the Illustrated Irish (London)News, which, as we said, was over reporting what was happening. This was published in 1848 after a reporting trip to Clare. “The present condition of the Irish, we have no hesitation in saying, has been mainly brought on by ignorant and vicious legislation. The destruction of the potato for one season, though a great calamity, would not have doomed them, but calmly and quietly from Westminster itself, which is the centre of civilisation, did the decree go forth which has made the temporary but terrible visitation of a potato rot the means of exterminating, through the slow process of disease and houseless starvation, nearly half of the Irish. So, I suppose this is where we begin to enter territory that’s still extremely politically sensitive today, and that’s the question of blame.
Tim McInerney:
Exactly. Figures vary wildly, but at the end of all this, we’re ending up with something like 1 million people dead. But of course, this is just the knock that gets the ball rolling. Millions more people after the first years of the farming start to flee from the country.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. Yeah. So you have something like two million people emigrating from Ireland during the famine and that trend just continues. The countryside just begins to empty out. And a lot of those villages that are abandoned in Ireland that you can see just dotting the countryside, they don’t, actually, don’t date from the famine itself, but from the decades afterwards, you know. There was just wave after wave of emigration and Ireland’s population went on an incredible downward spiral. So before the famine, it peaked at about 8, 9 million And then it dropped dramatically over the famine years to about six and a half million, but that fall just continues to plummet. So 50 or 60 years later, it went down to below four million people.
Tim McInerney:
And the majority of those fleeing the famine would have tried to get to America. So much so that by 1850, if you can imagine this, one in four people living on the island of Manhattan had actually been born in Ireland.
Naomi O’Leary:
That’s just staggering.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. The famine had a massive global impact, especially on that east coast of America. And if you go to Manhattan today, you’ll see quite an interesting memorial to the famine in Battery Park.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh, I didn’t know that.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. This is, it’s become quite famous. The artist actually brought over an entire cottage ruin from an abandoned clochán and he rebuilt as exactly as it was in the middle of Manhattan. The artist name is Brian Tolle and I got in touch with him during the week to ask him about where he got his inspiration.
Brian Tolle:
That was one of five people who had been chosen to develop proposals. And we were given a $10,000 stipend to develop the proposal and I had not been to Ireland at that point. And so my first instinct was to take the money and get on the plane and travel throughout the country. And that’s exactly what I did. Maureen Murphy was the historian for the project and when I told her that I was going over to Ireland, she identified places that she thought that I should I visit. But the place that resonated most with me was the deserted village of Slievemore. And, I don’t know if you’ve been there, but it’s a very, very haunting place where there are these cabins that are just dug into the hillside. It’s quite barren and there is a haunting resonance there; you feel the struggle of the people who toiled there, frankly. So I knew, having seen that, that the cabin was going to be part of the design.
Tim McInerney:
Brian Tolle had a vision. He wanted to bring one of these abandoned cabins to New York for it to make the journey across the Atlantic Ocean, just like the two million Irish refugees would have done during the years of hunger. But there was one major problem to this: where was he going to find a cabin?
Brian Tolle:
So once I decided that the house had to be part of it, it became a big problem for me because what you had to keep in mind is that this project, once I was selected, it was a one-year design build. And I was somebody who had made a lot of work about history by simulating history but it, didn’t that didn’t feel right to me in this case. The idea of me fabricating a cabin in a sort of a tradition of Walt Disney seemed to really flip to me, or very trivial, considering the weight of the history that I was being asked to engage. The other side of the coin was to try to get a cabin that we could use, but then that, of course, taps into this kind of colonial habit of going to places and taking things, like taking an obelisk from Egypt and bringing it to London. And I didn’t necessarily want to participate in that either. So what we did was we put our name on a list in the event that one of these cabin was slated for demolition. You know, Celtic Tiger was coming in and lots of these cabins were being demolished to make way for development. My partner Brian Clyne is Irish in every direction and we were going through a family photo album and we found a picture of his grandmother in front of her family cabin in a small parish called Attymass in Mayo. The family still had relatives living there. Tom Slack, Chris Slack and their families were still living in the parish. The house looked right to us in the photograph and I think the picture was taken in the 1960s, I mean she was on a haycart. And we phoned up Tom Slack — Tom was the last bachelor to live in the house. I think he got married in the 60s. The house, you know, these thatched roofs eventually, if they’re not maintained, they fell in and they were using it, frankly, as a cow pen on the farm. In the meantime, we had someone doing some research on the Slack family about the parcel and where it was and as it turns out, the house was built in 1820 by the Slacks and it was inhabited by them during and beyond the famine until the 1960s. So it had a certain kind of integrity that was very, very powerful. Not only that, but as it turns out, Attymass is in fact the place for the first official reported of death from starvation occurred. So here is this house that was in this place, which was effectively ground zero for the famine, and Tom Slack got back to us and he said, “I will not sell you the house. I will give you the house.” And what he did was very powerful. He wanted to give the house from the people who stay to the people who left.
Tim McInerney:
The result is truly breath-taking. With a team of landscapers and architects, Brian rebuilt the cabin and its land stone by stone to be as accurate as possible to its original. He even used 19th century lime mortar since, he told me, the stone simply wouldn’t hold together using modern materials. The whole structure is then elevated to stand several feet off the ground, defamiliarizing it even more in this quintessentially unfamiliar place. The monument has just undergone a massive and urgent renovation, and one of the reasons for this is that it was severely affected during the construction by the World Trade Centre attacks. The World Trade Centre site is just a block or two away. There are actually pieces of the Trade Centre lodged in the foundations of the sculpture. Ryan told me that Irish-American firemen and policemen came of their own accord to protect the construction site during those weeks of chaos to make sure its stones weren’t taken away. And I have to admit that seeing this sculpture really takes me aback. There’s something shockingly intimate about it. You know, it looks like thousands of others that are scattered all around the rocky terrain of Connacht and placing it here in downtown Manhattan seemed to transform it from something banal into something, I dunno, almost nightmarish. There are rocks from each county of Ireland, and they’re inscribed with their names, so Dublin and Longford and Kerry, and it does really make it head home that these were people I know. They had the same faces and stories and accents and personalities as people from those counties today. The contrast of the cabin and these towering skyscrapers almost seems to play out the trauma of those people, who I suppose in a large part built this city.
Brian Tolle:
Looking from the west, you’ll see this fallow, quarter acre patch of ground that’s been planted with 52 indigenous species, none of which have been hybridised, so they’re all native species. Most of my Irish friends who come and visit basically accused me of having planted a patch of weeds, but it was important to me that this was a fallow place. It was really about the fact that this was a place of abandon, that something had been lost to the people who were there; had gone, you know, it’s this very, very strange tension between this history of such tremendous, unnecessary loss being positioned in a place where there is so much wealth. And so the memorial became, in every aspect, a project that required long-term maintenance and care. So if that landscape is not nurtured, it will fail.
Naomi O’Leary:
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, another artwork has captured the attention of the world. This is an artwork that represents a hopeful moment of light in the middle of this famine. It’s a story of solidarity between very poor people that had suffered a lot on different ends of the earth. They called it Black 47, the worst year of the farmer. It was the year that the potato crop failed for the third time and the soup kitchens were shut, but far away on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, a group of strangers decided that they cared. March 23rd, 1847, the Native American Choctaw people gathered in Skullyville in Oklahoma to raise money to feed the starving Irish. They managed to get together $170, which they sent to Ireland as famine relief. It was a huge sum at the time and all the more touching because the Choctaw people were themselves living in great hardship. This was the wake of the Trail of Tears, when the Choctaw were forced to leave their ancestral lands, their lands were taken and they were marched hundreds of miles away to Oklahoma through a brutal winter with little food, and they died in their thousands along the way. The president who signed that order for their removal was Andrew Jackson. He was the son of Scots-Irish Presbyterians, who had emigrated to America from County Antrim. But it was the Choctaw who came to Ireland’s aid. To mark this historical act of kindness, in 2013, the County Council of Midleton in Cork commissioned a sculpture to stand in a local park. The work is seven enormous eagle feathers that stand facing each other to form an empty bowl. The sculpture is called Kindred Spirits, and it’s so visually striking that images of it and the story behind it have gone viral on the Internet. I spoke to Alex Pentek, who is the local artist who made it.
Alex Pentek:
Kindred Spirits was my response to the county council’s brief for creating an artwork to reflect on the 1847 donation, Choctaw donation, to Ireland during the famine. Choctaw, the first nation of American-Indians, made a donation, when they themselves have very little, of $170, which equates to 20,000 in today’s money, one of the first historical and international donations ever made.
Naomi O’Leary:
The story of the Choctaws’ gift has inspired people on both sides of the Atlantic through the generations. A group of Irish people travelled to the United States to walk the route of the Trail of Tears and raise money for famine relief in Somalia in 1992. In return, members of the Choctaw Nation have come to Ireland to take part in famine walks, which identify famine graveyards, and they raise funds for current day disasters.
Alex Pentek:
It’s very difficult to actually imagine yourself experiencing that sort of stuff, right? There are accounts of violence during the famine and one, “the graves are walking” was the description. And speaking of the Choctaw side of the story, being forced to march through harsh winters and to see your family member die in front of you on the side of the road, basically powerless to help them. I realize that, you know, some things are actually beyond our imagination. So I use symbolic imagery of feathers.
Naomi O’Leary:
The symbology is striking with its eagle feathers, which are a traditional feature of Choctaw ceremonies and the empty bowl, which refers to both aid and starvation. The feathers look delicate. The light shines right through them. But even though they look fragile, these feathers are made of steel. It’s a powerful symbol of resilience. It’s impossible not to draw parallels with the current day. In 1847, the countryside where Kindred Spirits stands was a scene of devastation. There are mass graves of those who died nearby. Boats were leaving Cork laden with desperate people. The journey was so treacherous, the boats were nicknamed coffin ships and newspapers in Cork would publish long lists of those who died on the way. Mary Kelleher, age 18. Pat Daley, age 7. John Taylor, 61. Elizabeth Hickey, 5. It’s impossible not to compare it to today when people are dying, hundreds at a time, in boats trying to reach the shores of Europe. Now, if we can take ourselves back to the time of the famine, from my understanding, a lot of the Irish people of the time contemporarily saw this as very much the fault of the British government in Westminster.
Tim McInerney:
Very much so. The most famous quote, of course, comes from the nationalist leader, John Mitchel, who declared that God may well have brought the blight, he said, but it was England who brought the famine.
Naomi O’Leary:
OK, so he’s kind of trolling Trevelyan there. Something that’s quite interesting is a sentencing in 1847 in Bantry in County Cork. So there was an inquest into a case of starvation and the judge decided that the guilty party was the British Prime Minister. So they found him guilty of wilful death since he had access to the food, and he withheld it from the starving.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. And this knowledge that there was food, you know, was a really enraging factor. Ironically, when the Irish landlords were charged with paying for the famine from 1847 on, they started exporting more food than ever because they had to try and make some money if they were going to fix this problem. Remember, this is an economy totally based on food export and you can imagine people’s reactions. Watching all these extra boats sailing out of the harbour is loaded with grain. You know, they were so enraged that food often had to be exported under armed guard. There was this very striking visual impression that made it seem like the British and the Protestant elite were starving the Irish to death quite deliberately.
Naomi O’Leary:
I suppose we can see here the seeds of this enduring passion that remains today, which is over how the famine is remembered and talked about and who was to blame. So you might remember our interview with Patrick Cooney, who’s the director who made that documentary about the remnants of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in Ireland. So we didn’t play this bit at the time because we didn’t have time to discuss it but when we spoke in our interview, I referred to the famine and he corrected me quite forcefully.
Patrick Cooney:
There was no famine. It’s an Gorta Mór. It’s the Great Hunger. You know, Ireland was exporting food and yet we were starving, so there wasn’t a famine. There was, it was genocide. It was planned. And don’t forget, the people were cleared off the land in the same way that you had the Highland clearances in Scotland.
Naomi O’Leary:
So, Tim, what is the truth? Is it correct what Patrick says? Should we be calling this famine a genocide?
Tim McInerney:
Well, it really depends on who you ask. And I can tell you right now that the vast majority of historians would firmly say no. And this is mostly because of the problems inherent in the word genocide, I suppose, which implies something perhaps more active and more planned.
Tim McInerney:
And I suppose what a lot of historians would worry is that using the word genocide would be misleading and that it would imply something really that just didn’t take place. Opinions have varied since the famine itself, and it’s very active on the Internet in particular. But you’ll have a harder time finding it in published print, for instance.
Naomi O’Leary:
Okay. Yes. So if you typed the words Irish famine into any search engine, it won’t take you long to fall on quite a bit of this genocide theory material.
Tim McInerney:
Of course, as with everything else on the Internet, we have to be wary of histories that seem to simplify things too much. However, in published print, this has been brought up too, most notably in the work of Tim Pat Coogan.
Naomi O’Leary:
So that guy is a journalist and an author, right?
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. He published a recent book called The Famine Plot in 2012 and that was an Irish bestseller, actually. And Coogan holds absolutely no punches about his view. He accuses Irish historians of a “colonial cringe” on this matter. He says that Irish academia has struggled to talk about, honestly, about the famine. And he even implies that the truth of the famine was underplayed during the 20th century so as to avoid exacerbating the conflict in Northern Ireland. And Tim Pat Coogan does make some very compelling arguments. In the early 20th century, revisionist historians did put a lot of effort into quenching the flames, as it were, of nationalist propaganda about the famine. You know, they were trying to separate history and facts from the passions of nationalism at the time. And a lot of later, historians, the so-called post-revisionists, did see this as a kind of downplaying of the seriousness of the famine. Now, he points out a few notable things. Firstly, that this actually wasn’t the first time that the British establishment had shown genocidal leanings towards the Irish. You know, if we go back to Cromwell in the 17th century, for instance, we have a much more cut and clear case. The Cromwellian invasion very much fits the bill, that’s a deliberate and active attempt at Irish genocide. And he did use crop burning and starvation as part of that. And even as far back as the Tudor conquest, even people like Edmund Spenser were suggesting that the Irish problem could be solved by mass starvation. Now, all this is centuries, of course, before the famine, but it doesn’t help Britain’s case in retrospect. Coogan also looks at the responsibility to be placed on anti-Irish propaganda from the media and the government. And he claims that if the Whig government at the time weren’t guilty of genocide, then there were at least complicit in a wider cumulative agenda against the Irish at the time. The title of his book, of course, The Famine Plot, does imply something active and planned. And most poignantly probably he puts the famine side by side with Articles 2 and 3 of the UN Convention on Genocide, that’s from 1948. And that’s a definition, which includes the idea of “public incitement to genocide,” which is what he’s really getting out, I suppose.
Tim McInerney:
I spoke to Dr. Frank Rynne, who is senior lecturer at the University of Cergy-Pointoise, and he recently published a book on the famine, The Great Famine in Ireland, and he had this to say about Coogan’s view.
Dr. Frank Rynne:
For a start, this idea of extermination and the fact that the British government was inflicting this on the Irish people is contemporary with the famine; this isn’t something dreamed up later. Gavin Duffy would have written about this. The problem with Tim Pat Coogan is, you know, he is a historian of sorts, but he’s also a journalist. And the book The Famine Plot screams journalism, not history. He is citing the UN definition of genocide in the book as part of the appendices and this is the sort of thesis, he’s trying to frame the Irish famine into a modern definition of genocide. Where he is completely wrong is to prove the thesis, he would have to prove that the British government deliberately set about to exterminate this number of Irish people. They didn’t. Christine Kinealy points out that there was nine million pounds expended on the famine. Now that was not an insignificant amount of money, however, she also points out that there was 69 million pounds spent on the Crimean war in the next decade. There were huge problems with the British administration. It was not equipped to deal with disaster on that scale. It must be remembered that the Great Famine was the largest civilian human disaster of the 19th century. Nothing else in European history in the 19th century caused such disruption and such death in peacetime. For an administration to have to come to terms with this, you have to look at what was Ireland at that time. The idea of getting food magically to people who were living 40 miles from the coast without any real roads was nigh on impossible. These problems didn’t just come about at the time of the famine, these were being talked about in the late 18th century. There were being talked about by Ricardo and Malthus and so it wasn’t that they weren’t warned. So, there is blame that can be put there. Where else can blame be put? A rigid administrative policy, which was backed by a religious philosophy. Racist attitude the Irish? Absolutely, that existed. A lack of planning and a lack of desire to make Ireland a sustainable country in itself. We can see that industrialization only really occurred in the north, long-term economic planning and then inability to make short-term decisions that went outside of the normal philosophy of government and the normal rules of government at the time. In other words, why not just give out money? Why not just dispense with this free market and solve the problem?
Naomi O’Leary:
So that’s interesting and I suppose it goes to show her even blame is a complicated thing, especially in retrospect.
Tim McInerney:
Sure. And like I mentioned, I suppose this genocide debate is to a large extent a problem of semantics, you know, and how different people interpret the word in a historical context. Cecil Woodham-Smith, who was an early major historian on the famine, preferred to describe Britain’s mismanagement as a “fatal ignorance.”
Naomi O’Leary:
It’s just amazing, like so relevant. But of course, the idea that the British attempted to exterminate the Irish not so long ago, that’s just hugely politically powerful. And you can imagine how powerful it would have been during the Northern Irish conflict.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah, definitely. And this link is definitely something that comes up a lot, actually. Frank Rynne, interestingly, suggested that there has been a profound link between how the famine has been remembered by the Irish diaspora in America and how it is remembered, particularly in Northern Ireland.
Dr. Frank Rynne:
The famine was in people’s minds in America. The people who went away, the famine festered with them greater. They’d lost their place. They’d lost their people. They had families split off, family members dying. They had witnessed those ships in isolation. Their farms didn’t get bigger. They were in a place 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 miles away. And in the diaspora, a new level of bitterness has emerged. In the last 50 years, during the Northern Irish struggle, the famine has developed in another way in North America, and it’s been used as a, what would you call, Donald Rumsfeld’s “known knowns” and the known know is that is that the famine is a genocide. And if you don’t respect people’s belief in the United States that it is a genocide, then you’re going to get into trouble and arguments. So, it is a huge narrative in the diaspora. So that level of injustice caused by this, as they would see it, deliberate wiping out of the people then feeds into the narrative funding for provisional IRA. And who has exploited that? Well, of course, people like Sinn Féin and the IRA exploit these things. If you look at the commemorations on houses in Northern Ireland, you will see the famine, 1.5 million dead. I’ve used these kind of murals in lectures and in other illustrations, 1.5 million dead. So even they use 1.9 million is another figure. There’s all these figures that they use that aren’t ones historians use and this is propaganda coming from Ireland back into the states, from the states into Ireland. And the Sinn Féin Irish nationalist perspective on the famine is very much the narratives of the American diaspora.
Tim McInerney:
Interestingly, Brian Tolle brought up the different memories of the famine in Ireland and in America as well. I asked him what people’s reaction to his hunger memorial had been, and this is what he said.
Brian Tolle:
Irish Americans and Irish people are not the same. And by that, I mean the people who stayed behind have a very different perspective, I think, about the famine then to the Irish American. The Irish have this sense, this profound sense of loss. There is this feeling of not being able to help themselves. You know, even though there were forces greater than themselves that were affecting the outcome. Let’s just put it that way. Whereas the Irish Americans have got a real sense of anger. They were looking at it from a distance. Their families may have emigrated during the famine or after the famine and they were they were told about the genocide. And they harbour a tremendous amount of some resentment towards the British government as is related to those events.
Tim McInerney:
Let’s take a look at how the famine has affected Ireland today.
Naomi O’Leary:
So one crucial thing, I suppose, is this very odd population pattern. So from 1800 to today, it’s normal in European countries to have very strong, consistent population growth. But Ireland’s population peaked before the famine at something like 8, 9 million and then fell dramatically in the famine and then it kept falling, as we mentioned, so it reached its lowest point in the early 20th century, when it was half what it had been before the famine. So it since began to recover, but it’s never recovered up till this day, there’s only roughly six million people on the whole island, so we’re still two million short. Tim, you grew up in an area where the landscape actually remains, you know, what it was. You can actually see the aftermath of the famine in the fields around your house. Can you describe what it’s like?
Tim McInerney:
Well, yeah, absolutely. I suppose it’s particularly evident in the West because that was the worst hit area. And it’s a very stark landscape. So these abandoned villages stand out quite distinctly. I suppose one aspect of this is very sparse development in general. You don’t really get towns and villages as much as you get ribbon development, for example, an island where there’s no centralisation. Where my parents’ house is right beside an abandoned village. There’s a little stream and a little well and, you know, something that fascinated me as a child was that if you go into the fields, there are actually paving stones underneath the grass.
Naomi O’Leary:
So it was a road?
Tim McInerney:
There was a paved road, which really, you know, surprises me. But all over the country, you have what are now called townlands. There’s nothing there. There’s certainly no town there. They’re just empty districts.
Naomi O’Leary:
But they all have names.
Tim McInerney
They all have names, yeah. And names that reference the towns that used to be there, like they might be called, I don’t know, Ballybeg like Baile Beag, which means little town, or Baile na hAbhann which means river town, and yeah, there’s just nothing there. There’s maybe a river. They’ve just vanished off the face of the earth. And if you look at aerial photographs, you can often still see the street patterns are under the grazing land.
[skipto time=01:01:26] Naomi O’Leary
:
Gosh. And what that actually means in human terms, the disappearance of those people and those communities, that was just an extreme blow to what Ireland had been before, because of course it was the communities on the west coast of Ireland, that isolation, they were the ones that had retained much of the Irish culture that had been before, like the language. And they were the very communities that were devastated the most. So this was the death of the Irish language as the language of the country really.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. The Irish speaking world, as it had been, you know, died forever there. And it was dispersed all over the world like we looked out in our Episode three, that ancient language, the oldest written language in Europe, you know, it never recovered again.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. And it, of course, in a language is contained a whole world, a whole culture, music history, an oral tradition and just things that we can’t even imagine are gone. And, you know, to this world came, waves of devastation one after another, over time. But the extent of this one, this final blow, it’s just it’s something we can’t really even imagine.
Tim McInerney:
In another way as well, that event, and especially the bitterness that it left, planted the seeds of rebellion in the 20th century.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yes, of course, because the fascinating thing is, it’s like Phoenix from the ashes, in the subsequent decades there was this really vibrant cultural revival. So there was this sudden rush to embrace, rescue and cherish the Irish language and culture. That meant a huge cultural movement in the arts and literature and everything which was accompanied and was part of a political movement. And those who survived the famine and their descendants, to them, the event, this was this was an unassailable proof that England had no business governing Ireland.
Tim McInerney:
And you do have to wonder, I suppose, would the Irish War of Independence have ever happened if it hadn’t been for the famine, especially since one of the driving forces of the Irish independence movement was, of course, the Irish diaspora, the huge diaspora in America and that diaspora has since totally shaped Ireland’s place in the world.
Naomi O’Leary:
Because on the one hand, you have this massive death and then the other enormous part of it was the dispersal, the sheer scale of the mass emigration since the famine. That’s the start of our enormous diaspora, which absolutely dwarfs the number of people who are actually in Ireland, so immigrants and their descendants are something in the region of 70 million people worldwide.
Tim McInerney:
Wow.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah, enormous compared to, you know, the roughly 6 million on the actual island. So that gives us a kind of a global reputation that’s totally outsized compared to the actual size of the country. And many other small countries can only envy, they can only wish they were as famous as us, Tim.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. Yeah, you know, I mean like we laugh but it is pretty unique that a country of, what, four and half million people has its national day celebrated all around the globe from you know, Tokyo to San Francisco.
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. And this period also explains a lot about Ireland, why Ireland is the way it is. You know, it’s quite rural still. Large areas with not very many people living there and an economy that matches that so we just never really industrialized. We skipped the 20th century economic phase, you know that the rest of Europe had and we went directly from this agricultural economy into a 21st century knowledge economy.
Tim McInerney:
And we should say Irish people have also retained their fondness for potatoes.
Naomi O’Leary:
Absolutely. And this is just objectively, a defensible position. It’s not like — we can laugh — but this is a foodstuff that is delicious. It is efficient. And it’s really good for you.
Tim McInerney:
Yeah. I mean, I love a good Irish potato, I have to admit.
Naomi O’Leary:
Like so do, like they’re just, they’re the best superfood and I don’t care who laughs.
Tim McInerney
Actually, what is your favourite potato meal?
[skipto time=01:05:09] Naomi O’Leary
:
It’s really hard to say. Like I would, my first instinct is to say roast, like roast potatoes. But, you know, they’re more of a special occasion thing. And there’s something that’s just, you know, perfect about the simplicity of a good baked potato.
Tim McInerney:
I’m going to take a wild card here and say that I like a good potato cake. You know, those things, you know, when you fry them up with flour and butter, like you don’t see them much anymore. But my mum used to make them on Pancake Tuesday when I really looked forward to them.
Naomi O’Leary:
Oh my god, I’m getting really hungry. Does your family have like strategies for getting the really good potatoes? Like a good crop, there’s certain like sorts of potatoes that are favourites in my house. And sometimes a new variety will come in and they’ll be kind of a craze. So like a particular good, I think Wexford Queens, they came in, a crop of Wexford Queens came to a shop near our house and people are actually driving down from Meath and like stocking up on them to get the good potatoes.
Tim McInerney:
Meath, I suppose what, that’s like 50 or 60 kilometres away?
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. Yeah.
Tim McInerney:
Oh, right. I mean like, yeah, sure. Like the way in France you have aisles in the supermarkets full of cheese. If you go to supermarkets in Ireland, you will see entire aisles dedicated to different varieties of potato, it’s true. Yeah, for sure, the conversations in our house about the flowery quality of Rooster is in the local shop this year, you know, are endless. But we’re in danger of becoming living clichés, Naomi. Long live this spud and all, but we’re all out of time and we’ll have to continue this conversation after the episode. The sean-nós music you heard in today’s episode was brought to you by Danny Doyle, who you might remember from our Irish language episode. So many thanks for him for letting us play that on the podcast. The song he was singing was called “Na Prátaí Dubha,” which means the Blackened Potatoes. And Danny explained to me that this is a song written from the point of view of a woman starving in a workhouse during the famine. So we thought it was particularly appropriate to use with Bridget O’Donnel’s story. Many thanks also to Annajoy O’Gorman for her voiceover of Bridget O’Donnell.
Naomi O’Leary:
So that’s it for this edition of The Irish Passport. And next time we have a fabulous episode coming up, we are looking at the political uses of Irish history.
Tim McInerney:
Yes, in particular, the way they’re playing out in the United States in the last few years. For example, Naomi, have you seen these Internet means that are going around about supposed Irish slaves?
Naomi O’Leary:
Yeah. If you have any interest in Irish history at all, the likelihood is you may have seen them coming up in Facebook or somewhere on the Internet. And if you’ve seen something about Irish slaves on the Internet, the likelihood is you have seen something incorrect, that’s actually serving a political purpose, so we’re going to dig into that. What is the truth, if any, to these memes? Where did they come from and what purpose are, they serving?
Tim McInerney:
And if you have any comment about this episode, or our previous episodes, we’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch with us at theirishpassport@gmail.com.
Naomi O’Leary:
Of course, we’re also on Facebook and we’re at Twitter at @passportirish.
Tim McInerney:
And I know we’re always harping on about this, and we won’t stop either, but please, please, please give us a share or a recommendation if you like the podcast. It’s super important to us so that we can spread the word. Loads of people have done it already and it’s made a world of difference to us.
Naomi O’Leary:
Absolutely. Please do like, share and subscribe. We really appreciate it. Or just recommend us to a friend.
Tim McInerney:
For now, thanks for being with us.
Naomi O’Leary:
Thank you so much, goodbye.