What made the Irish famine so deadly

This is a fascinating point:

> In 1837, two years after Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of “Democracy in America,” his lifelong collaborator, Gustave de Beaumont, went to Ireland, a country the two men had previously visited together. The book de Beaumont produced in 1839, “L’Irlande: Sociale, Politique et Religieuse,” was a grim companion piece to his friend’s largely optimistic vision of the future that was taking shape on the far side of the Atlantic. De Beaumont, a grandson by marriage of the Marquis de Lafayette, understood that, while the United States his ancestor had helped to create was a vigorous outgrowth of the British political traditions he and de Tocqueville so admired, Ireland was their poisoned fruit. America, he wrote, was “the land where destitution is the exception,” Ireland “the country where misery is the common rule.”

The Belgians, the Dutch, the Germans, the Portuguese, the Italians and the Spanish also did horrible things during their colonial periods. Are these taught a schools in these countries? Genuine question - I'm curious.

- Most land were controlled by large land owners. Most peasants had very small farm land, which couldn't feed the people if normal crops were planted so they had to plant the higher yield potato to have enough food. When the disease wiped out the potato crop, most people went without any food.

- The land controlled by the large land owners were planted with cash crops for export. They were unwilling to stop the export to help the locals.

- The ruling class consisted of large land owners and British transplants in the Northern Ireland after the conquering of Ireland by Britain could care less about the shortage of food. They actively hid the problem from the central government in Britain. The governor/duke/whoever tried to sweep the problem under the rug to avoid appearing as incompetent.

- When the central government in Britain learned of the famine, they acted too late and too little, unwilling to spend money to deal with the emergency. Britain at the time looked down on the Irish people in general.

This led to great animosity of the Irish people to Britain, driving the subsequent independent movements.

Fun fact, about 10% of the U.S. population are of Irish descent, due to massive immigration from Ireland in the following years after the famine.

Edit: Just looked up the Irish population in U.S., about 11%. https://uscanadainfo.com/irish-ancestry-in-america/

"The English".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_walls

[edit] I should point out that I am not commenting on the cause of that lack of diversity, just the result of it.

I am 50 and my understanding has changed over time. Like every teenager I wanted to be proud of who I was but fortunately being a mongrel creates a note of discord in one's head - who to be proud of?

The need to feel proud is a driver of all sorts of shit. We shouldn't feel ever more than a little proud or proud of what we personally have done but I'm not even sure of that. It's always a simplification. One should not have to call on history to respect oneself.

Irish people made use of the Empire too and went to the colonies to seek their fortunes. My dad was one. I was born in one and saw the recent Irish immigrants behaviour - they were a mixed bag like everyone else. Most were sort of ok and one or two were atrocious but not more or less than anyone else.

As a gross over-simplification, I think history is about people conquering other people and building larger and larger groups which become kingdoms then nations then empires or federations or unions. I get this feeling that it's mathematical. Whoever can organise on a large scale will absorb whoever is smaller.

So if we want to have a reasonable future, we must learn to organise on a large scale with negotiation and rules/laws so that someone can't absorb us by doing it the violent way.

Queen Victoria, upon learning of this, requested that he reduce his donation to a more modest £1,000, so as not to embarrass her own relatively meagre offering of £2,000. Reluctantly, the Sultan agreed, but bolstered his contribution by secretly sending five ships loaded with food.

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Britain-refuse-Ottomans-aid-to...

My conclusion is that the famine was as much political as it was environmental. (as they often are)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5onHLICxgc

This makes the struggle to keep the Irish language feel like such a vital urge today. Those of you who live in SF be sure to check out the Unite Irish Cultural Center by the zoo.

Reading about the export of so much food while people starve reminds me also of the Holodomor, a famine where farmers grain was stolen from them and exported from the country while children starved in the streets. I have never seen a precentage of the population represented as here, but the estimates are 3M to 7M died from famine in the Ukrainian SSR, and today the population is 40M. And it's not as if nobody knew what was going on, when Stalin's second wife confronted him on his actions causing so much death, she was met with such a verbal assault that she committed suicide [ https://archive.is/xsCpP ]. The greed and lust for power and money to cause the death of millions is not limited to capitalism. I know of many strong connections between Ukrainians and Irish people, and have no doubt that this rhyming history may play into it.

The cause of these famines may be proximally blamed on a shortage of one type of crop, but when food is being exported from adjacent farms, as happened in both An Gorta Mor and the Holodomor, the true cause is not the lack of growing, the cause is the lack of control of the fruits on ones laber. People not being able to control their own land, not having a widespread group of smallholders of land that can benefit from their own work, from not having administrative control by the majority of people. There's a lesson for us who farm digital land; do we own the land or are we sharecropping?

We must fight autocracy in all its forms, lest many of us starve. Those who oppose democracy have killed millions and will do so again if given the chance.

They then take you out to tour the ship.

The British forced Ireland to rely on their overpriced grain, banned direct imports from the U.S. and Europe, and kept tariffs high with the Corn Laws — all while millions starved. That’s not laissez-faire. That’s imperial economic control designed to keep Ireland dependent on politically connected domestic producers.

O’Toole’s omission of this amounts to deception. He’s twisting history to fit a narrative, blaming capitalism while letting British trade restrictions, protectionism, and outright exploitation off the hook.

The Irish Famine was a disaster of Britain's mercantilist policies. Whitewashing that to score political points for his illiberal domestic agenda is an insult to history.

I personally believe most articles about the famine shy away from the horror of it, and also from a frank discussion.

Going to give some subjective opinion here: people generally downplay the role of the British government and ruling class in it.

Why? One personal theory - growing up in the 80s in Ireland there was a lot of violence in the north. (Most) Irish people who were educated or middle class were worried about basically their kids joining the IRA, and so kind of downplayed the historical beef with the British. That's come through in the culture.

There's also kind of a fight over the historical narrative with the British, maybe including the history establishment, who yes care a lot about historical accuracy, but, also, very subjectively, see the world through a different lens, and often come up through British institutions that view the British empire positively.

It's often easier to say the famine was the blight, rather than political. (They do teach the political angle in schools in Ireland; but I think it's fair to say it's contested or downplayed in the popular understanding, especially in Britain.)

However that article is written by a famous Irish journalist and doesn't shy away from going beyond that.

Perhaps a note of caution - even by Irish standards he'd be left leaning, so would be very politically left by American standards; he's maybe prone to emphasize the angle that the root cause was lassiez-faire economic and political policies. (I'm not saying it wasn't.)

I personally would emphasize more the fact that the government did not care much about the Irish people specifically. The Irish were looked down on as a people; and also viewed as troublesome in the empire.

Some government folks did sympathize, of course, and did try to help.

But I personally do not think the famine would have happened in England, no matter how lassiez-faire the economic policies of the government. A major dimension must be a lack of care for the Irish people, over whom they were governing; and there are instances of people in power being glad to see the Irish being brought low:

"Public works projects achieved little, while Sir Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the relief effort, limited government aid on the basis of laissez-faire principles and an evangelical belief that “the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson”." per the UK parliament website!

It's not an easy thing to come to terms with even today. I recently recorded a video talking about how fast the build out of rail infrastructure was, in the UK, as an analogy for how fast the AI infra build out could be; and I got a little quesy realizing that during the Irish potato famine the UK was spending double digit GDP percent on rail build out. Far sighted, yes, and powering the industrial revolution, but wow, doing that while mass exporting food from the starving country next door, yikes.

Ireland was the prototype for the British empire starving millions to death because they were poor.

>Militant Irish nationalism would follow Jane Wilde in seeing the famine as mass murder and thus as what would later be categorized as a genocide. Under pressure from Irish Americans, this even became an official doctrine in New York, where a state law signed in 1996 by then governor George Pataki required schools to portray the famine “as a human rights violation akin to genocide, slavery and the Holocaust.”

>Pataki announced that “history teaches us the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.” But this is not what history teaches us. A much more accurate conclusion is the one drawn by the Irish historian Peter Gray, who wrote that there was “not a policy of deliberate genocide” on the part of the British. Instead, Gray argued, the great failure of the British government was ideological—“a dogmatic refusal to recognise that measures intended to ‘encourage industry, [and] to do battle with sloth’ . . . were based on false premises.” The British did not cause the potatoes to rot in the ground. They did launch, by the standards of the mid-nineteenth century, very large-scale efforts to keep people alive, importing grain from America, setting up soup kitchens, and establishing programs of public works to employ those who were starving. But they were blinded by prejudice, ignorance, and a fanatical devotion to two orthodoxies that are very much alive in our own time: their belief that poverty arises from the moral failings of the poor and their faith in the so-called free market. The famine was so devastating because, while the mold was rotting the potatoes, mainstream British opinion was infected with a cognitive blight.

The British actively exported grains meats and other food leaving the local population to starve.

It was a famine only because they made it one.