How the British government responded to the Great Hunger in Ireland

Relief and lack of response from the crown during the Irish Famine years.

In the first year of shortages, nobody died of Famine in Ireland. The lack of excess mortality was attributed to the quick and comprehensive response by the Conservative government of Sir Robert Peel. At the same time, however, from the outset relief policies were combined with attempts to bring about social change in Ireland, including ending the dependence of the poor on the potato, and getting rid of landowners who were judged to be unenterprising. Overall, potato cultivation and dependence were regarded as perpetuating the perceived backwardness of the Irish economy and its people. In the words of Sir Randolph Routh, who had overall responsibility for the relief operations:

“The little industry called for to rear the potato, and its prolific growth, lead the people to indolence and all kinds of vice, which habitual labour and a higher order of food would prevent. I think it very probable that we may derive much advantage from this present calamity. ”

Overall, therefore, the policies introduced in the first year of shortages reflected the government’s longer-term aspirations for Ireland. Peel also used the potato failure to repeal the Corn Laws, which had kept the price of grain products artificially high. However, Peel himself became a political casualty of the Famine as many landowners in his party abhorred his action in repealing the Corn Laws. As a consequence, a minority Whig government headed by Lord John Russell assumed power in the summer of 1846, just as news of the reappearance of the blight was emerging. The fact that the disease appeared earlier in the harvest season than in the previous year had ominous implications for the potato crop.

In 1846, almost the entire potato crop was destroyed; moreover, the corn harvest was smaller than usual. A second, and more extensive, year of food shortages was inevitable. Yet, regardless of this, the program of relief introduced by Russell’s administration was more restrictive than that of the previous year. Public works were the primary form of relief, but the ways in which the works were provided made them unsuitable to provide effective support to a hungry people. Numerous bureaucratic checks were imposed, which meant the works were slow to be established; wages were based on “piece work,” disadvantaging people already weakened by hunger; a wages ceiling was imposed despite spiraling food prices; furthermore, the works undertaken were to be of no value to the community but were simply intended to act as a test of genuine destitution.  Consequently, the people who did manage to get employment on the public works (and not everybody did) were occupied in hard physical labor, usually for twelve hours a day, engaged in useless projects – building roads that led nowhere and walls that surrounded nothing. The fact that the winter of 1846-1847 was one of the coldest on record, with snow falling as late as April, added to the misery and vulnerability of those so employed.

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