How the British government responded to the Great Hunger in Ireland

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

By the end of 1846, there was a sharp increase in mortality. As in any famine, hunger-induced disease rather than starvation was the main source of mortality. For the victims, death was slow, painful and undignified. One of the main causes of death was dysentery, which caused aching in the legs, arms and head, a swelling of the limbs, and an inability to keep anything in the stomach. A doctor in Skibbereen in County Cork, which was to achieve notoriety for the suffering of its population, recorded that “all talk of exaggeration is at an end. The people are dying – not in twos or threes – but by dozens; the ordinary forms of burial are dispensed with.” In the winter of 1846-47 excess mortality increased throughout Ireland, from Skibbereen to Belfast. No part of Ireland escaped the horror. A member of the Society of Friends who visited Lurgan, near Belfast, in the spring of 1847, likened what he saw to the worst scenes that he had witnessed in County Cork.                        

The British Parliament was fully aware of the deathly situation unfolding in Ireland.  At the beginning of 1847, Lord George Bentinck, leader of the divided Tory Party, had led a sustained attack on the Whig Party, pointing to the deteriorating situation in Ireland. Bentinck, supported by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, condemned many aspects of the Whig government's relief policies, including the fact that they had reduced the size of rations to the Irish poor, they had left food importation to private traders and speculators, and they had exaggerated the quantity of foodstuffs imported into Ireland. Apart from censuring the government for allowing such high mortality, he criticized the fact that records of Famine deaths were not being kept. He repeatedly protested that it was within the capability of the British government to do so.

At the beginning of 1847, the British government decided to close the public works; not because they were failing to save lives, but because they were expensive and cumbersome to administer. At this stage, 15,978 people had been employed, at a cost of £410,000; meanwhile, the cost of providing relief for less than six months had reached four and a half million pounds, most of which was provided as a loan to the Irish taxpayers. Yet, despite this high expenditure, the public works had not only failed to save lives, but had exacerbated existing problems; the works had diverted people from their normal agricultural pursuits, while requiring vast amounts of energy from an exhausted and hungry population.

To replace the public works, a Temporary Relief Act, popularly known as “the soup kitchen act” was introduced. As its name suggested, it was to be an interim measure, until the Poor Law could be modified to enable it to provide for both ordinary and Famine relief. The soup kitchens marked a break from earlier relief provisions, which had viewed the giving of gratuitous relief to be both ideologically flawed and financially perilous. The soup kitchens, however, despite the paucity and lack of nutrition of some of the food provided, marked  a high point in Famine relief. By July 1847, over three million people (approximately forty percent of the population) were receiving free, daily rations from their local soup kitchen, at relatively little cost to the government. This short-term measure demonstrated that it was both logistically and financially possible to feed the Irish poor. Politically, however, such a solution was unacceptable. There was a general election in the United Kingdom in the summer of 1847, which was won by the Whigs. One of the first acts of the new government was to oversee the introduction of an amended Poor Law, which made the much-detested workhouse system the main provider of relief, and meant that  the Famine poor were now to be classified as “paupers.” More significantly, responsibility for financing relief was to pass to local Irish rate-payers through the mechanism of local Poor Law taxation.

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