The Great Famine

The shepherding demonstration we watched on a farm on Slea Head in County Kerry, just outside Dingle, was conducted by Gabriel Kavanagh, whose ancestors have lived in Kerry for centuries. The dirt-floored, “famine cottage” Gabriel’s forebears occupied in the 1800s still stands on Kavanagh’s farm. 

In addition to raising sheep, Gabriel and his brother Gordon are historians. They authored “Famine in Ireland and West Kerry,” a history of the famines in Ireland. It’s a sobering look at what led to Ireland becoming susceptible to food shortages, and how the most infamous famine, the Great Famine, caused by the failure of the country’s potato crop in 1845, forever changed Ireland and much of the world.

Other sources tell of Ireland’s earlier history, which is filled with centuries of political and religious subjugation, war, poverty, and policies that contributed to the conditions leading to the Great Famine.

Centuries of English occupation

England occupied and controlled Ireland after the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. (That’s the time of Shakespeare, baroque music, Rubens and gentlemen wearing those ridiculous giant white floufy collars.) King James I of England reigned through the first quarter of the 17^th Century and Charles through the second 25 years, each imposing and raising taxes on Ireland. Ireland’s chief executive, a British-appointed governor, was not beholden to the Irish.

Charles wanted an Anglican-only realm, and his anti-Catholic actions drove Catholic landowners in Ulster to revolt in 1641 against the English administration in Dublin. Protestant settlers were brutally attacked and slaughtered.

Charles’ oppression of Catholics also splintered England, leading to the seven-year English Civil War in the 1640s. Resolution of the war in 1649 left Charles without his head and Oliver Cromwell as de facto leader. Cromwell’s army promptly invaded Ireland to avenge the Ulster Protestant massacres of 1641. He soon controlled the eastern portion of Ireland and moved west to bring the entire island under his control by early 1652.

In the aftermath, Cromwell confiscated from Irish Catholics 11 million acres, re-distributing the land to soldiers and the investors who had financially supported his army. According to www.yourirish.com:

“The displaced Catholics escaped to the continent, were sold as slaves to the West Indies or were sent to the poor infertile lands in [the western part of Ireland]. By 1655 no Catholic landowners remained in the East of Ireland. This new Cromwellian plantation pattern for Irish landowners lasted right up until the 20th Century.” Over the ensuing decades, Catholics in Ireland faced increasing discrimination.

Penal laws

The Penal Laws, a series of laws enacted by British rule between the late 1600s and mid-1700s, restricted rights of Catholics, the dominant religion in Ireland, according to Wikipedia. These laws built on a 1607 law that barred Catholics from holding public office or serving in the military. A sampling of the additional discriminatory laws banned Catholics from:

•     Voting and practicing law;
•     Holding firearms, buying land under a lease of more than 31 years, and inheriting Protestant land; and
•     Teaching, attending Trinity College, and receiving foreign education.

One law that served to dissipate Irish Catholic wealth and pressure conversion to Anglicanism required inherited Catholic land to be equally subdivided between all an owner’s sons – unless the eldest son converted to Protestantism, in which case he would become the one and only tenant of estate.

Plantation economy

Under the plantation model, many of the investors who now owned large farms remained in England and retained local managers to operate them. The managers hired tenant farmers at very low wages and exported back to Britain the vast majority of the crops – potatoes, corn wheat, oats and barley – as well as Ireland’s livestock of pigs, sheep and cattle. The tenant farmers often lived in tiny hovels, paid rent to live on the land and were allowed to cultivate a small piece of land for their sustenance.

Two million acres in Ireland – one-third of all tilled land – was used to cultivate the lumper potato, which produced more food per acre than wheat and could be grown economically even on the tiny parcels of land the Irish Catholics were allowed to cultivate. The lumper usually thrived even in the rocky, damp earth of the poorer, western part of the island. Kavanagh estimates that five to six million people were heavily dependent on the crop, while some three million depended on it exclusively.

While the lumper was productive, it also was susceptible to fungus. A famine in 1740 took the lives of some 400,000 Irish, and according to Historyplace.com, between 1800 and 1845, sixteen food shortages had occurred in various parts of Ireland due to regional potato blights. But in the summer of 1845, the lumper potato crop failed nationwide.

The Great Famine of 1845-1849

Because of Ireland’s dependency on the potato, its feudal economy, and the mandated continual export of food to Britain (Ireland exported enough food to sustain twice the island’s population), the Great Famine of 1845-1849 was devastating to Ireland, especially Ireland’s Catholics. The Great Famine resulted in the death by starvation and disease of approximately one million people and the emigration of another million – this in a country of 8.5 million at the time. To put that in perspective, a crisis of the same magnitude in the U.S. today would result in nearly 77 million Americans dying or leaving the country as refugees.

Gabriel Kavanaugh shared with us harrowing stories of life during the Great Famine – poor houses that separated families, women and children racing to the beach at low tide to gather kelp for eating or for fertilizer (the more well-to-do having baskets to carry their seaweed, the less well-to-do able to carry only whatever they could clutch in their hands), the Anglican Church-run soup kitchens offering soup to anyone – so long as they disavowed Catholicism and swore allegiance to the Protestants. Those documented tales, and many other details of the Great Famine, its causes, and the efforts to pull Ireland out of the tragedy, are recorded in “Famine in Ireland and West Kerry.”

Despite the magnitude of the effect of The Great Famine on Ireland – its population continued to decline through the ensuing century – today Ireland’s economy is stable, diversified, and healthy.

What’s especially remarkable, given the island’s troubled past, is the kind, welcoming and friendly character of Ireland’s people.