The summer of 1845 marked the beginning of the Great Irish Famine (An Goria Mor) which would last for six years and cost the lives of a million Irish men, women, and children. Two million people would flee the country to resettle in distant lands. The government response to the crisis was guided by the social, economic, and religious doctrines of the day. Many of these doctrines are similar to the doctrines guiding American response to the recent Great Recession.
At the beginning of the Great Famine, a majority of the Irish people lived off the land in small rented holdings. The landowners, many of whom were absentees, cared only about the rents they received. They had little concern for the lives of their tenants or in re-investing the money they received in either the Irish economy or in the improvement of their estates.
With regard to economics, there were those who felt that the focus should be on land reform. The Irish economy, they argued, could only be efficient and successful if it were based on large-scale capitalistic farming similar to the English model. The greater productivity of this type of agriculture would provide more regular employment for labor. People should depend on wages rather than subsistence crops, such as potatoes.
There were those in the government who viewed the potato as an inferior food and dependence on it was seen as a form of moral failing. Solving this problem, they argued, would require radical surgery: the removal of smallholding families from the land. Part of the problem also stemmed from Ireland’s landowning class because they had tolerated the population explosion and the sub-division of the land into small leased parcels.
The collapse of the potato economy, many argued, provided an opportunity for agricultural reorganization. Surplus population could be removed and small land-holdings consolidated into more efficient capitalistic farms. This was accomplished through evictions—an estimated 500,000 during the famine. Eviction usually involved the destruction of homes. Dr. John O’Neill, who was involved in these evictions, wrote that it was
“absolutely necessary to have these miserable sheds in which most of these unfortunates dwell done away with, so as to remove so heavy a burthen from the lands and induce the more than half-starved inmates to seek an asylum in the poorhouse.”
There were, and still are, some Irish who view the clearances as a form of genocide.
Conversion to this model would require government intervention particularly with regard to building public infrastructure and providing public education. They felt that the priority should be on economic development rather than the relief of suffering. Even in the face of social catastrophe and starvation, they felt, government emphasis must be on economic development and the implementation of this model.
Providentialism is a doctrine that views human affairs regulated by a divine agency for human good. In general, the potato blight was seen as having been sent by God for an ascertainable purpose. The Irish famine was, therefore, God’s will, an inevitable event, and it should be allowed to take its course without government intervention. Historian James Donnelly, Jr. sums up providentialism this way:
“In its crudest form this ideology degenerated into the view that through the Famine God himself was punishing the Catholic Irish for their stubborn attachment to all the superstitions of popery.”
The Ultra-Protestants saw the blight as God’s vengeance against Irish Catholicism. They pointed to the fact that the British state had endowed the Catholic seminary at Maynooth as one of the national sins that had brought about God’s vengeance. They felt that Ireland could not be prosperous until Catholicism and all its influences were eradicated. They viewed the famine as an opportunity to help fulfill God’s plan by making Ireland a part of His Kingdom governed by the true religion of the Bible and rescuing Irish souls from the grasp of Rome, which they viewed as the Babylon described in the
Book of Revelation.
Evangelical Protestants urged the government to remove all restrictions on economic freedom. They were not concerned with economic development, but stressed the need for individuals to face the moral discipline of the natural economic laws instituted by God. Evangelical missionaries saw the famine as an opportunity to use hunger as an instrument to win converts to the Protestant faith. The phenomenon of soup kitchens—commonly called souperism—in which food was doled out in exchange for conversion was one method used.
One of the mechanisms for conversion was the Protestant Colonisation Society which established economically self-sufficient communities which would demonstrate the benefit of the traditional Protestant virtues of cleanliness, industry, and good management. Historian Irene Whelen has reported:
“Substantial material benefits rewarded those who joined the colonies and converts were said to enjoy comfortable homes, rent-free land, regular salaries if they were teachers, and career opportunities for their children.”
There were some Providentialists who felt that the famine could be blamed on the moral failings of the Irish people. They viewed the famine as a God-given opportunity to enforce policies to transform Irish behavior.
There were moralists who felt that relief measures should do more than simply provide starving people with a means of survival: relief should be done in such a way as to discourage a culture of dependency and to coerce the poor into undertaking their moral responsibilities. It was this moralistic approach that most frequently guided government action.
The moralistic approach was based on the idea that no one had a “right” to relief and there had to be ways to determine who was deserving of aid and who was not. Any relief provided had to be less attractive than work. Those who were able-bodied were required to work at least eight hours a day on a task “as repulsive as possible consistent with humanity.”
There was a dogmatic refusal to recognize that measures intended to encourage industry, to battle sloth, to instill reliance on God, were resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.