What caused the Irish potato famine? The direct cause of the Irish potato famine was a potato fungus called Phytophtora infestans, which wiped out several years of potato crops. Other factors were the style of farming, the dependence on potatoes, continuing exports from Ireland, and the UK government’s unwillingness to help.
The Irish potato famine lasted from 1845 to 1852, although its effects were felt long after, and are still being felt in some cases. The first ruined harvest was in 1845. P. infestans spread throughout the potato fields and wiped out half of the potato crops. In the following years, it wiped out 75% of all the potato crops. By 1852, when the fungus finally disappeared and the potatoes started to grow again, 1 million people had starved to death and another 3 million had left Ireland. The potatoes were killed by the fungus P. infestans, which infects the leaves first and then spreads. It causes the cell walls to collapse and the plant to rot. In the case of potatoes, this rot spreads down all the way to the potatoes under the ground and they rot, too. Because it is a fungus, P. infestans releases spores which spread to other potatoes and the disease spreads. It is called potato blight and it is still a problem today. It can be controlled with pesticides, and scientists are trying to bread plants that are immune to it, but in 1845, there was no way of stopping it. The famine rapidly worsened and there was no help for the people who were starving.
A disease that infects and wipes out a particular crop is always a bad thing, but why did it lead to such an enormous famine? There are many reasons why, but let’s look at the four main reasons. The style of farming in Ireland at the time was a big problem. Ireland had been annexed by the UK in 1801 and all of the agricultural land had been parceled up and given to wealthy landowners. These landowners were all from the UK. Until 1829, Irish people were actually forbidden from owning land. The British landowners wanted money from their land, so they had middlemen find tenants to farm it. The middlemen knew they could make more money if they could find a lot of people to farm the land, so they divided the land up into the smallest possible strips and rented it out to tenant farmers. The farmers paid the middlemen a rent. The middlemen paid the landlord the rent, and kept the rest. This system meant that a lot of farmers and their families were dependent on a very small amount of land.
The second problem was the dependency on a single crop, the potato. People in Ireland had long eaten potatoes because they are very nutritious and you can get more nutrition per square meter of potato crop than you can from any other crop. The tenant farmers needed to be able to grow enough so that they could sell some to pay the rent and have enough left to feed their families. The only crop that would let them do that on such a small piece of land was the potato. That meant that all the tenant farmers only grew potatoes because they wouldn’t be able to survive on any other crop. Most of the country became dependent on one crop. When it failed, the tenant farmers couldn’t eat and they had nothing to sell to pay their rent. Many of them were evicted and the landlords grew other crops or reared cattle on the land. It might have been better if there was more than one variety of potato, but the only potato grown was the Irish Lumper, which was introduced to Ireland 100 years before the famine started.
The third problem was the continuing exports from Ireland to the UK. Millions of people were starving, and there was actually enough food for them. The problem was that the food was promised for export to the UK. During the famine, a huge quantity of food was exported out of Ireland. If the authorities had cared, they could have halted the exports and given the food to the people that needed it. This didn’t happen because too many people were getting rich from the exports. Too many people getting rich and too many people dying of starvation.
The last problem I’m going to look at is the lack of help from the British government. When the famine first started in 1845, the British Prime Minister Robert Peel did try to help. He bought £100,000 of maize from America, but there was no way of milling it in Ireland, and the maize needed to be cooked for a long time before it was edible. Peel tried to help in other ways, but he didn’t have enough support in the government. He lost power and his successor was Lord John Russel. Russel’s government believed in a policy of self-help, and they cancelled all of the aid programs. Some government officials even went as far as to say the famine was god’s punishment on the Irish for being amoral and that if more Irish people died, it would make room for more British people to move there. By 1846, when they saw the extent of the death, they realized they had made a mistake and moved, but it was too little too late. That is not to say that there was no help, it just did not come from the government. Many wealthy individuals donated money to help the situation.
The potatoes recovered in 1857, but it was too late. One million people had died. Another three million had left Ireland. They moved to Britain, Australia, Canada, and the US. Each of those countries have large Irish populations that started at this time. The famine also led to the movement that would end with the independence of Ireland from Britain in 1929. It is probably safe to say that had Britain acted swiftly and courageously to end the famine and help the people, there would have been fewer people that wanted independence. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://www.history.com/news/after-168-years-potato-famine-mystery-solved
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Relief_Association
https://dc.cod.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1579&context=essai
https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/irish-potato-famine
https://history.state.gov/countries/ireland
Image By No machine-readable author provided. Miossec assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1902011