Mad about Science: Great Famine of Ireland

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

The Great Famine, which took place in Ireland between 1845 and 1852, is something many of us learned about to some degree in school. It was a tale with all the makings of a great and terrible story rife with political intrigue, greed and the long-lasting effects of the abuses of power. It was an event that echoes many of the political fears people face globally today: food scarcity, overpopulation, and consolidation of wealth and power into the hands of an elite and careless few.

The roots of the Great Famine began with greed surrounding real estate amid a population boom in Ireland. As the population of Ireland grew, landlords began to subdivide their properties to cram more people into smaller spaces. In theory, this allowed the propertied classes to extract greater wealth from the same amount of acreage. In actuality, this greatly reduced the amount of space tenants had to grow food, which led to a unique problem. Tenants had to optimize their food sources, which meant a reduction in crop variety — essentially reducing the majority of tenants’ crops to a single variety of potato that grew well in the environment: the Irish Lumper.

The Famine Memorial sculptures in Dublin, Ireland. Courtesy photo.

A singular type of crop yield means all yields are predictable and uniform, something we see nationally in grocery stores today. Select breeds of vegetables are produced en masse for their reliability and optimization. This sounds great, until you realize there is very little genetic difference between beefsteak tomatoes sold in California and Maine. The problem emerges when a parasite or disease arises to exploit a specific genetic niche that carries the potential to wipe out an entire species over the course of a few years.

This is exactly what happened during the Great Famine. Potato blight, a water-based parasitic algae called Phytophthora infestans, had been ravaging potato crops through Europe since at least the 1840s. This had been problematic for agrarian countries, but it became devastating for a country whose sole source of food and income was a monocrop. 

It is believed that the initial infection of P. infestans originated from an American ship traveling to Ireland for trade.

The population of Ireland in 1845 was estimated to be just more than 8 million people, with the majority of the population being extremely poor and reliant on agriculture for their own survival. The crop yields from 1844 were projected to be around 15,000 tons of potatoes, dropping sharply to barely more than 2,000 tons in 1845. The country’s production wouldn’t recover from blight for at least another decade.

One may begin to wonder: Why wasn’t more food simply shipped in? Wouldn’t there be a sudden spike in demand with the sharp drop in supply?

A major obstacle prevented exactly this from occurring: the Corn Laws. The English Parliament had passed these laws, which were effectively steep tariffs against grains and other cereal-based products that made importing grain-based products virtually impossible. Foreign entities weren’t willing to enter the English market and the English government was more than happy to reap the rewards for their elite while their neighbors in Ireland suffered from starvation.

At the height of the famine, Irish farmers were faced with a conundrum: to keep and eat their harvests to avoid starvation, or sell their scant crops to pay rent and likely starve in the process to avoid eviction and homelessness. 

Unfortunately, the landlords had other ideas and were quick to evict tenants by the thousands, with as many as 30,000 people being evicted by a single landlord in one day. Landlords held immense power at this time and could evict tenants at a moment’s notice for no reason and with impunity. Many of these landlords were dubbed “absentee landlords,” as they often held their own lands in England and simply collected rents through middlemen in Ireland. They frequently made decisions to evict tenants, burn down the housing and convert the property into grazing fields for cattle that would return a higher monetary yield.

All of this was exacerbated by the way in which English media of the time disregarded Irish news, often calling Irish news outlets alarmist and largely dismissing the plight of the starving people.

By 1852, it was projected that more than 1 million people died from effects of the famine, whether from starvation or disease. A further 2.5 million were projected to have permanently left Ireland for other places in the British Empire, including Canada and Australia due to cheap sea-based travel. Many people came to America, setting up in dense urban areas where they could find work and send money back home to Ireland to support their families. 

Imagine living at a time when it would take anywhere from a month to three months to send a small amount of money across the sea to your family in the middle of a great famine.

It was easy to paint a picture of the crisis being solved by the spark of the “American dream” — this is how the famine was framed by textbooks while I was in school. In actuality, the Great Famine set the stage for generational animosity and a century and a half of turbulent violence. No singular act would lead to the creation of the Irish Republican Army, better known as the IRA, which would commit numerous violent acts against the English throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, but the Great Famine and everything that surrounded it helped stack a mountain of kindling for the inevitable blaze of violence.

Stay curious, 7B.